Sectionalism and Industrialization
By: Katrina Michelle Pilson
American System
Henry Clay: Clay argued that the West, which opposed the tariff, should support it since urban factory workers would be consumers of western foods.
Portions of the American System were enacted by Congress. The second bank of the United States was rechartered in 1816 for 20 years. High tariffs were maintained from the days of Hamilton until 1832.
That system has had a wonderful success. It has more than realized all the hopes of its founders. It has completely falsified all the predictions of its opponents. It has increased the wealth, and power, and the population of the nation.
Cotton Gin
- the implement or machine used to pull the cotton fibers from the seed. Each fiber grows from the seed like hairs from the head.
- But in the ever increasing inland acreage, only green-seed cotton could be grown, and this had to be ginned by hand.
- In 1792 Eli Whitney, a Yale graduate then tutoring at an estate near Savannah, Georgia, found that many planters were interested in increasing their cotton production but were frustrated By the inefficiency of having to manually remove the seeds before the fiber could be baled for shipment.
- Whitney and his partner, Phineas Miller, kept the cotton gin under their immediate control by selling ginning services, not machines. When a fire in their New Haven manufacturing shop delayed a shipment of gins, southern blacksmiths began making their own versions of the easily copied machine.
Missouri Compromise
- Earlier in 1819, when Missouri was being organized as a territory, Representative James Tallmadge of New York had proposed an amendment that would ultimately have ended slavery there; this effort was defeated, as was a similar effort by Representative John Taylor of New York regarding Arkansas Territory.
- The extraordinarily bitter debate over Missouri’s application for admission ran from December 1819 to March 1820.
except for Missouri, slavery was to be excluded from the Louisiana Purchase lands north of latitude 36°30′.