Patterns of Political Conflict, 1816–1852

Patterns of Political Conflict, 1816–1852
The extent of federal power and influence inevitably aroused contest and opposition that might prove fatal to the continuance of the Union. Such conflicts at times expressed regional tensions which, as President Washington had feared, could threaten the territorial integrity and unity of the republic.
Yet, ironically, the party system that dominated American politics between and 1853 operated, like that of 1796–1816, to reduce sectional antagonisms and further national integration. Like the major churches, the parties created among amass electorate loyalties and commitments that transcended state boundaries and provincial loyalties.
When party hostilities between Federalist and Democratic Republican faded after 1815 amid the postwar glow of nationalist consensus, the weakening of the national partisan allegiances that had undercut particularism in the previous twenty years made the onset of heightened sectional feeling in 1819–20 difficult to overcome. Certainly Martin Van Buren believed that the alarming crisis over the admission of Missouri arose because of the weakening of national party differences in the preceding years. As a consequence he determined to revive the old party of Jefferson, putting together a coalition of the planters of the South and the plain republicans of the
North” that would mitigate the strong sectional antagonisms deriving from the crisis of the early s. He was able to do so largely because, as in the
1790s, the ethnic and social divisions within the Middle states produced political allies and gave hope to the Southern minority. Thus in his first administration (1829–33) Andrew Jackson was able to lead a national coalition that brought Northern support for measures which were essentially designed to appease the South, and so ensured that South Carolina’s challenge to the Union over the protective tariff in 1832–33 would receive little support in the rest of the South.
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Between 1827 and 1833 Jackson’s Democrats and their National
Republican opponents embraced strong regional feelings at their core, and it is questionable how far such a sectionally based system of national partisanship could have encouraged effective compromises of sectional issues.
After 1833, however, the pattern of party conflict changed significantly.
As in the early s, the Southern-centered party extended its support into New England, exploiting old political allegiances and new industrial grievances. More significantly, the South—for the first time in its history—
divided within itself in federal politics. An opposition party appeared that by 1836 had created powerful bases in Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina,
and Tennessee, and by 1839 had joined hands with the anti-Jacksonians in the North to form the new Whig Party. As a consequence through the s this so-called second party system contradicted sectionalism Southern politicians and voters preferred to cooperate with their party colleagues
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Donald Ratcliffe

in other sections and struggled against party opponents in their own states and regions. Even state politics reflected national party divisions, and voting in Congress demonstrated that, on all issues except those relating to slavery,
national issues found supporters and opponents in all sections of the
Union.
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Party politics ceased to reflect sectional tensions by the late s because sectional differences were being overwhelmed by the common experience of economic change. Many groups in both North and South were benefiting from the growing commercialization of American life that the Whig Party wished to sponsor further. Not just Northern businessmen but Southern planters recognized the role that banks were playing in making possible the extension of commercial agriculture and the servicing of internal and transatlantic trade. Farmers who saw canals and roads under construction that could take their produce to distant markets, allowing them to concentrate on growing cash crops and relieving their families of the manifold labors and deprivations of self-sufficiency, favored the use of taxpayers’
money to make such improvements possible. Others, in both North and
South, perceived the consequences of this so-called market revolution as unacceptable, and preferred the cautious and restraining approach of the
Democratic Party. Artisans who found their economic autonomy undermined and their skills devalued objected to the growth and competition of larger-scale industrial activity. Laborers who were paid in rapidly depreciating banknotes complained of cheating capitalists. Farmers who suffered from the competition of newly opening areas or who were distant from the benefits of the extending market system became strongly aware of the harmful social and moral effects of other people’s material progress. And the residual conservatism of isolated small farmers was as powerful in
Northern hills and Western prairies as in the piney woods of the South.
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Underlying the party division therefore lay the simple fact that economic change gave the various regions common experiences and made them more interdependent. The Northwest became a food exporter and supplied the cities of the East as well as those parts of the South that were not self- sufficient in food. The extension of cotton cultivation may have extended the peculiar world of the slave plantation across the Deep South, but it also created commercial needs that were serviced by northerners. As a result,
leading Northern businessmen endeavored to prevent political conflict over slavery, recognizing the extent to which their business interests were involved in the provision of financial and marketing services to the cotton South.
In return, the larger planters appreciated that the extension of cotton manufacturing in New England would extend the market for their ever-expanding staple production, and Southern Whigs in Congress accordingly opposed the reduction of tariff protection for manufacturers in 1846. Equally, Northern
Whigs appreciated the interest many southerners, especially in Appalachian
The State of the Union
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areas, had in the distribution of the proceeds of federal land sales to help finance state internal improvement projects.
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Even as the sectional crisis rose to a peak in the s, economic developments served to underwrite the Union. The rapid extension of railroads after bound East and West more closely. In the Northeast industry grew without significant tariff protection, and the textile industry became well enough established to have little need for protection against foreign manufactures and, in the case of woolens, more concerned for keeping duties on their imported raw materials as low as possible. Similarly, the extension of commercial agriculture in the West gave the Old Northwest the same outlook as most of the Southern states—an interest in encouraging transatlantic trade and keeping trade barriers as low as possible.
Heightening regional specialization created mutual bonds that served to promote compromise as the crisis between North and South reached its height.
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