AP® United States History review sheet from Aim for Five (aimforfive.com/us-history/units/5/5-5)
Unit 5 · Topic 5.5
5.5 Sectional Conflict: Regional Differences
By the 1850s the North and South had very different economies and ideas. Northerners increasingly embraced free labor and free soil, abolitionists spread moral arguments against slavery, and books like Uncle Tom's Cabin stirred Northern opinion, while Southern leaders defended slavery more aggressively. Rising immigration also produced a nativist backlash.
Key terms
- free labor
- free soil
- Uncle Tom's Cabin
- Underground Railroad
- nativism
- Know-Nothing Party
See it on a map: 1850: The Compromise of 1850
Two economies
| Feature | North | South |
|---|---|---|
| Labor | Free wage labor; family farms | Enslaved labor; about 4 million enslaved people by 1860 |
| Economy | Manufacturing, commerce, commercial farming | Cotton and other staple crops for export |
| Railroads (1860) | About 70 percent of the nation's track | About 30 percent |
| Immigration | Most immigrants settled here | Few immigrants |
| Cities | Rapidly growing cities | Mostly rural; few large cities except New Orleans |
Free labor and free soil
Free labor ideology was the Northern belief that wage work was a temporary stage on the way to owning a farm or shop, and that hard work let any free man rise. Slavery, in this view, degraded all labor and blocked opportunity for white workers.
Free soil meant keeping slavery out of the western territories. Many free-soilers were not abolitionists. They wanted the West reserved for free white farmers and workers, and some held racist views, wanting to keep Black people out of the territories altogether. Free soil was a broader, more popular position than abolition, and it became the core of the Republican Party.
Abolitionists and Uncle Tom's Cabin
Abolitionists made moral and religious arguments that slavery was a sin. Some, like William Lloyd Garrison, refused to work within a political system that protected slavery; Garrison publicly burned a copy of the Constitution in 1854. Others, like Frederick Douglass, came to see the Constitution as an antislavery tool.
The Underground Railroad was a loose network of free Black people, white allies and formerly enslaved people who helped others escape. Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in 1849 and returned to Maryland about thirteen times, guiding around seventy people to freedom.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) showed the cruelty of slavery, especially the breakup of families, through characters readers cared about. It sold about 300,000 copies in the United States in its first year and was turned into popular plays. It persuaded many Northerners, especially women, that slavery was a moral evil. Southerners denounced it as lies.
Southern defenses of slavery
Southern leaders defended slavery as a 'positive good' (4.13). George Fitzhugh's Cannibals All! (1857) claimed that enslaved people were better cared for than Northern 'wage slaves'. In 1858 South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond declared that 'Cotton is king', arguing the North and Britain depended on Southern cotton too much to make war on the South. Southerners also relied on states' rights arguments and claimed that the Constitution protected slaveholders' property everywhere. Not all white Southerners agreed; Hinton Rowan Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South (1857) argued that slavery hurt non-slaveholding whites, and Southern states banned the book.
Immigration and the Know-Nothings
About 2.6 million immigrants arrived in the 1850s, mostly Irish and German, and many of them Catholic. Nativists, people hostile to immigrants, formed a secret society whose members, when asked about it, said 'I know nothing'. It became the American Party, called the Know-Nothings, which demanded long waiting periods for citizenship and limits on Catholic and immigrant office-holding.
In 1854 the Know-Nothings won control of the Massachusetts government, and their 1856 presidential candidate, former president Millard Fillmore, won about a fifth of the popular vote. The party soon split over slavery, and many of its Northern members joined the Republicans.
Worked examples
Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.
- Example 1
Distinguishing similar ideas
Short-answer practice: Briefly explain ONE difference between abolitionists and free-soilers in the 1850s.
Show the solutionHide the solution
- Step 1: Define each group's goal.
- Step 2: State the difference precisely.
- Step 3: Add a reason or example.
Answer: Model answer: Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison wanted to end slavery everywhere, usually on moral and religious grounds, while free-soilers wanted only to stop slavery from spreading into the western territories. Many free-soilers were motivated less by concern for enslaved people than by a desire to save western land for free white farmers and workers, so free soil attracted much broader support and became the basis of the Republican Party.
Common mistakes
- Treating all Northerners as abolitionists. Most opposed slavery's spread, not slavery itself, and many were openly racist.
- Forgetting nativism in Period 5. The Know-Nothing Party was a major force in the mid-1850s and helped break up the Whig Party.
- Overstating the Underground Railroad's numbers or organization. It was a loose, mostly local network, and most escapes were from border states.
On the exam
- Comparison questions on Northern and Southern economies and ideologies are common. A data table on railroads or factories may be the source.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin is a classic example of culture shaping politics. Explain how it changed Northern opinion.
Connected topics
Videos
Check yourself
4 questions on 5.5 Sectional Conflict: Regional Differences. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was significant mainly because it
The Know-Nothing (American) Party of the 1850s drew its support mainly from
"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity . . . ."
"By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason and Dixon's line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. . . . An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so."
Source: Frederick Douglass, abolitionist speaker and editor who had escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838, speech to the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society, Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852.
Douglass's main argument in the first paragraph is that
Douglass's point of view in this speech was most shaped by
0 of 4 answered