Daniel DeWolfe

F Block

Age of Reform Essay

In the original 13 Colonies there was 4 million people, living in quiet little agricultural settlements, but once the Industrial Revolution hit the United States people started to move inward to cities and started going west. The nation’s rapid expansion had an enormous effect on American politics and the United States Government more than you’d think. A big issue of discussion was did settlers going west have the same rights as they did back in the original 13 Colonies. After that was solved the different regions were being to grow a strong animosity to each other, mostly the North and the South, because of sectionalism. Political leaders at the time were trying their best to avoid any type …show more content…
The United States had been divided up by a term called sectionalism, this meant that there was a lot of competition between each region. The North was industrial, the South was agricultural, and the West was the frontier. The people that lived in these different regions had very different lifestyles and different opinions on issues, which caused a great divide. The most notable difference in opinion and lifestyle was slavery, the North was anti-slavery and mostly made up of free states, on the contrary the South’s economy was based on slavery and predictably they were pro-slavery, and the West was made up of free states because each newly formed state had to outlaw slavery. In the South slaves would pick tobacco and cotton, they were essential to their way of life. The slavery debate eventually led to intense sectional hatred mainly between the North and the …show more content…
Prior to bursting point of the Civil War the North had been trying to avoid war at all costs, enough to even compromise about prohibiting slavery in territories turning into states. The Three-Fifths Compromise allowed slaves to count as three-fifths of a white person, this of course would increase the representation of the slave states. Before this was made a law in the US there was a lot controversy over the topic because the North didn’t think slaves should count toward the population and the South thought they should count toward the population. After long debate Congress finally had decided on three-fifths. At the time it would give the south enough power to control presidential elections. Obviously this hadn’t gone to plan because the North had gained population faster than the South had accounted for and soon the advantage was gone because of the North’s industrial based economy which attracted more people to its cities. To counter the political imbalance of the Missouri Compromise was put into place which did some to rebalance the political power, which had appeased the Southerns a bit. In 1850 another compromise was created which admitted statehood to California which had become a free state and had strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act which