5.1 Contextualizing Period 5

By 1844 the market revolution had linked the Northeast and the Northwest through canals and railroads, while the South had bound itself ever more tightly to cotton and slavery. Abolitionists had become a loud, if small, movement in the North, and Southern leaders defended slavery as a 'positive good'.

The two national parties, Democrats and Whigs, both had Northern and Southern wings, which helped hold the country together by keeping slavery out of national debate as much as possible. The Missouri Compromise line of 36°30′ had settled slavery in the Louisiana Purchase since 1820.

Every time the country gained new land, Americans had to answer the question: would slavery be allowed there? Expansion in the 1840s, through the annexation of Texas and the Mexican Cession, reopened that question in the most explosive way.

Through the 1850s, Congress tried compromise after compromise. Each one failed or made things worse, while the party system broke apart along sectional lines. Lincoln's election in 1860 led seven Deep South states to secede, and four more left after the war began in 1861.

• 1844–1848: Manifest Destiny, Texas, Oregon and the Mexican–American War (5.2, 5.3).
• 1848–1860: failed compromises, growing sectional differences and the collapse of the party system (5.4–5.6).
• 1860–1865: secession, the Civil War and emancipation (5.7–5.9).
• 1865–1877: Reconstruction, its achievements and its failure (5.10, 5.11).

By 1877 slavery was gone, the Constitution promised citizenship and equal protection to all people born in the United States, and the federal government was far stronger than in 1844. But white Democrats had regained control of the South, and most Black Southerners were trapped in sharecropping and soon faced segregation and the loss of their voting rights (6.4).

Wartime laws such as the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act also set up the rapid settlement of the West and the industrial boom of Period 6. So Period 5 is both the end of the long fight over slavery and the start of a new national economy.

For context on Civil War or Reconstruction prompts, the most useful developments are the growth of sectional differences (free labor versus slave labor economies), the rise of abolitionism, and westward expansion that forced the slavery question into national politics.

Period 5 is weighted at about 10–17 percent of the exam, and it is a frequent source of essay prompts because it is full of cause-and-effect and continuity-and-change questions: why did compromise fail, and how much did Reconstruction change the South?