Unit 10

During Unit 10

In Sectionalism, we will explain the economic, social, and political factors that led to the Civil War between the North and South.

We will identify significant individuals and the role they played during the time period; revisit how Henry Clay’s  Missouri Compromise and its 36, 30 parallel line started sectionalism by balancing and separating free and slave states. 

We analyze how the Nullification Crisis during Andrew Jackson's presidency was an example of growing sectionalism. 

How different economies between factories of the north and southern plantation agriculture of the south led to the nation's “Era of Bad Feelings”. 

We will explain how Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850 tried to keep the peace between the North and South by North getting the majority of free states in Congress but the South getting a strengthened Fugitive Slave Law which angered northern abolitionists. 

In 1852 the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was published by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which heightened the tensions of the northern abolitionist movement. 

In 1854 blood was shed from The Kansas Nebraska Act which allowed for popular sovereignty (voting) to choose to be slave or free. Many traveled to the territories to champion their cause of pro or anti slavery resulting in many murdered and injured giving the title “Bleeding Kansas”. 

In 1854 the Republican political party was established to oppose the spread of slavery.

In 1857 the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision that slaves were property and not U.S. citizens so they couldn't sue in U.S. courts showed examples of sectionalism by Chief Justice Taney, angering abolitionists. 

In 1859 John Brown led an unsuccessful attempt to start a slave rebellion by seizing an arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He is captured, tried and hanged and thus becoming a martyr to the North and a terrorist to the South. 

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected as President of The United States on a platform to preserve the Union but that slavery should not be spread further. 

The election prompted southern states to secede (separate) from the Union and form its own Confederate States of America or Confederacy. 

In 1861 Jefferson Davis was elected as president of The Confederate States of America. 

Sectionalism had now completely split the country in two parts and war was imminent.