The United States at Midcentury

	The hallmark of the United States has been growth.  Americans have typically defined this process in quantitative terms.  Never was that more true than in the first half of the nineteenth century, when an unparalleled rate of growth took place in three dimensions: population, territory, and economy.  In i850, Zachary Taylor-the last president born before the Constitution would look back on vast changes during his adult life.  The population of the United States had doubled and then doubled again.  Pushing relentlessly westward and southward, Americans had similarly quadrupled the size of their country by settling, conquering, annexing, or purchasing territory that had been occupied for millennia by Indians and claimed by France, Spain, Britain, and Mexico. During the same half-century the gross national product increased sevenfold.  No other nation in that era could match even a single component of this explosive growth.  The combination of all three made America the Wunderkind nation of the nineteenth century.
	Regarded as "progress" by most Americans, this unrestrained growth had negative as well as positive consequences.  For Indians it was a story of contraction rather than expansion, of decline from a vital culture toward dependence and apathy.  The one-seventh of the population that was black also bore much of tfe burden of progress while reaping few of its benefits.  Slave-grown crops sustained part of the era's economic growth and much of its territorial expansion.  The cascade of cotton from the American South dominated the world market, paced the industrial revolution in England and New England, and fastened the shackles of slavery more securely than ever on Afro-Americans.
	 Even for white Americans, economic growth did not necessarily mean unalloyed progress.  Although per capita income doubled during the halfcentury, not all sectors of society shared equally in this abundance. While both rich and poor enjoyed rising incomes, their inequality of wealth widened significantly.  As the population began to move from farm to city, farmers increasingly specialized in the production of crops for the market rather than for home consumption.  The manufacture of cloth, clothing, leather goods, tools, and other products shifted from home to shop and from shop to factory.  In the process many women experienced a change in roles from producers to consumers with a consequent transition in status.  Some craftsmen suffered debasement of their skills as the division of labor and power-driven machinery eroded the traditional handicraft methods of production and transfon-ned them from self-employed artisans to wage laborers.  The resulting potential for class conflict threatened the social fabric of this brave new republic.
	 More dangerous was the specter of ethnic conflict.  Except for a sprinkling of German farmers in Pennsylvania and in the valleys of the Appalachian piedmont, the American white population before 1830 was overwhelmingly British and Protestant in heritage.  Cheap, abundant land and the need for labor in a growing economy, coupled with the pressure of population against limited resources in northern Europe, impelled first a trickle and then a flood of German and Irish immigrants to the United States in the generation after i830.  Most of these new Americans worshipped in Roman Catholic churches.  Their growing presence filled some Protestant Americans with alarm.  Numerous nativist organizations sprang up as the first line of resistance in what became a long and painful retreat toward acceptance of cultural pluralism.
	 The greatest danger to American survival at midcentury, however, was neither class tension nor ethnic division.  Rather it was sectional conflict between North and South over the future of slavery.  To many Americans, human bondage seemed incompatible with the founding ideals of the republic.  If all men were created equal and endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights including liberty and the pursuit of happiness, what could justify the enslavement of several millions of these men (and women)?  The generation that fought the Revolution abolished slavery in states north of the Mason-Dixon line; the new states north of the Ohio River came into the Union without bondage.  South of those boundaries, however, slavery became essential to the region's economy and culture.
	 Meanwhile, a wave of Protestant revivals known as the Second Great Awakening swept the country during the first third of the nineteenth century.  In New England, upstate New York, and those portions of the Old Northwest above the 4'st parallel populated by the descendants of New England Yankees, this evangelical enthusiasm generated a host of moral and cultural reforms.  The most dynamic and divisive of them was abolitionism.  Heirs of the Puritan notion of collective accountability that made every man his brother's keeper, these Yankee reformers repudiated Calvinist predestination, preached the availability of redemption to anyone who truly sought it, urged converts to abjure sin, and worked for the elimination of sins from society.  The most heinous social sin was slavery.  All people were equal in God's sight; the souls of black folks were as valuable as those of whites; for one of God's children to enslave another was a violation of the Higher Law, even if it was sanctioned by the Constitution.
	  By midcentury this antislavery movement had gone into politics and had begun to polarize the country.  Slaveholders did not consider themselves egregious sinners.  And they managed to convince most nonslaveholding whites in the South (two-thirds of the white population there) that emancipation would produce economic ruin, social chaos, and racial war.  Slavery was not the evil that Yankee fanatics portrayed; it was a positive good, the basis of prosperity, peace, and white supremacy, a necessity to prevent blacks from degenerating into barbarism, crime, and poverty.
	  The slavery issue would probably have caused an eventual showdown between North and South in any circumstances.  But it was the country's sprawling growth that made the issue so explosive.  Was the manifest destiny of those two million square miles west of the Mississippi River to be free or slave?  Like King Solomon, Congress had tried in 182o to solve that problem for the Louisiana Purchase by splitting it at the latitude Of 36' 30' (with slavery allowed in Missouri as an exception north of that line).  But this only postponed the crisis.  In 1850 Congress postponed it again with another compromise.  By i86o it could no longer be deferred.  The country's territorial growth might have created a danger of dismemberment by centrifugal force in any event.  But slavery brought this danger to a head at midcentury.
	At the time of the Louisiana Purchase in i8O3 the United States was an insignificant nation on the European periphery.  Its population was about the same as Ireland's.  Thomas Jefferson thought that the empire for liberty he had bought from Napoleon was sufficient to absorb a hundred generations of America's population growth.  By 1850, two generations later, Americans were not only filling up this empire but were spilling over into a new one on the Pacific coast.  A few years after 1850 the United States surpassed Britain to become the most populous nation in the Western world save Russia and France.  By i86o the country contained nearly thirty-two million people, four million of them slaves.  During the previous half-century the American population had grown four times faster than Europe's and six times the world average.
	Three factors explained this phenomenon: a birth rate half again as high as Europe's; a death rate slightly lower; and immigration.  All three were linked to the relative abundance of the American economy.  The ratio of land to people was much greater than in Europe, making food supply more plentiful and enabling couples to marry earlier and to have more children.  Though epidemics frequently ravaged North America, they took a lesser toll in its largely rural environment than among Europe's denser population.  The land/people ratio in the United States raised wages and offered opportunities that attracted five million immigrants during that half-century.
	  Although the United States remained predominantly rural in this period, the urban population (defined as those living in towns or cities with 2,500 or more people) grew three times faster than the rural population from 1810 to 186o, going from 6 percent to 20 percent of the total.  This was the highest rate of urbanization in American history.  During those same decades the percentage of the labor force engaged in non-agricultural pursuits grew from 21 to 45 percent.' Meanwhile the rate of natural increase of the American population, while remaining higher than Europe's, began to slow as parents, desiring to provide their children with more nurture and education, decided to have fewer of them.  From i8oo to 1850 the American birth rate declined by 23 percent.  The death rate also declined slightly-but probably no more than  5 percent.' Yet the population continued to I at the same pace through     grow  the whole period-about 35 percent each decade-because rising im migration offset the decline of the birth rate.  For the half-century as a  whole, the margin of births over deaths caused three-quarters of the  population increase while immigration accounted for the rest. 4  Economic growth fueled these demographic changes.  The population  doubled every twenty-three years; the gross national product doubled  every fifteen.  Economic historians do not agree when this "intensive"  rate of growth began, for the data to measure it are fragmentary before  1840.  What remains clear is that until the early nineteenth century  economic growth was "extensive"-virtually the same as population  growth.  At some point after the War of 18 improbably following re covery from the depression of 1819-23-the economy began to grow  faster than the population, producing an estimated per capita increase  of national output and income averaging 1.7 percent annually from  1820 to 186o.  5 The fastest rates of growth occurred in the 183os and  1850s, interrupted by a major depression from i837 to 1843 and a lesser  one in 1857-58.
	  Although most Americans benefited from this rise of income, those  at the top benefited more than those at the bottom.  While average in come rose 102 percent, real wages for workers increased by somewhere  between 4o and 65 percent.' This widening disparity between rich and poor appears to have characterized most capitalist economies during their early decades of intensive growth and industrialization.  American workers probably fared better in this respect than those of most European countries.  Indeed, a debate still rages over whether British workers suffered an absolute decline of real wages during the first half-century of the industrial revolution.7  
	Improved transportation was a prerequisite of economic development in a country as large as the United States.  Before i8l5 the only cost efficient means of carrying freight long distances were sailing ships and downriver flatboats.  Most American roads were rutted dirt paths all but impassable in wet weather.  The cost of transporting a ton of goods thirty miles inland from an American port equalled the cost of carrying the same goods across the Atlantic.  To travel from Cincinnati to New York took a minimum of three weeks; the only feasible way to ship freight between the same two cities was down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans and then by salt water along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts-a trip of at least seven weeks.  It is not surprising, therefore, that America's transatlantic trade exceeded internal commerce, that most manufactured goods purchased in the United States came from Britain, that artisans sold mainly custom goods in local markets, that farmers living more than a short distance from navigable water consumed most of what they raised-and that the economy grew little if any faster than population.
	 All this changed after i8l5 as a result of what historians, without exaggeration, have called a transportation revolution.  Private companies, states, even the national government financed the construction of all-weather macadamized roads.  More important, New York state pioneered the canal era by building the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo, linking New York City to the Northwest by water and setting off a frenzy of construction that produced 3,700 miles of canals by 1850.