Term Paper on "Westward Expansion and the Growth of Sectionalism"

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Westward Expansion and the Growth of Sectionalism

Westward Expansion and Reform in America (1820-1850)

From 1820-1850, America grew -- geographically, it sprawled out into the Western territories, and economically, industrialism and immigration in the North created a more prosperous, but also a more diverse and divided society. In the wake of these changes, political reform movements tried to shape the evolving nation into a more compassionate society. Concerns about increasing the number of representative slave states in the legislature, questions about who would be politically influential in the America of the future (immigrants, women, or African-Americans), and concerns about the most helpless members of society, such as the mentally ill and the imprisoned, became thrust to the forefront of the American political consciousness. America began to define its value system, and this self-definition did not come easily, as the Southern half of the nation had a very different vision than the Northern part of the nation as to what constituted American morality and justice.

The rise of evangelicalism, or popular religious Protestantism gave birth to two of the most influential reform movements of antebellum America, that of the temperance movement and the anti-slavery crusade. Although America is technically a secular nation, the legal wall between church and state has never prevented ideology from affecting political life. The temperance movement began in the North, partly as a result of the industrialization that had created a tavern culture in the region. People who had been displaced from their rural towns or immigrants such as the Irish seeking a form of connection in the new, lonely urban landscape found solace in pubs. The temperance movement was dominated by women who stressed the ungodly influence of drink, which the alleged kept fathers from their wives and children and encouraged cruelty and spousal abuse.

Although these charges certainly had factual basis, there may also have been a strong anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant current to the movement, as many of the new immigrants that came to the city were predominantly Catholic, a new ethnic 'mix' that was foreign to America at the time. For many immigrants alcohol was a positive aspect of their culture, and not everyone indulged to excess. Still, "the first chapter of the American Temperance Society formed in 1826 and grew into thousands of chapters nationwide over the following ten years. The society distributed propaganda and paraded abuse victims and reformed alcoholics through towns to preach against consumption" ("The Pre-Civil War Era 1820-1850," 2007, Sparknotes).

Another crusading moral movement at the time dominated by evangelical women was the attempt to stem the rise in prostitution in the cities, which many women 'fell into' when jobs proved scarce in cities, and in the Western towns where morals were more lax. "The Female Moral Reform Society, founded in New York in 1834, expanded to hundreds of other cities and towns by 1840. These societies also strove to end prostitution by decreasing demand: many newspapers began to publish customers' names, while many states enacted laws to punish clients as well as the prostitutes themselves" ("The Pre-Civil War Era 1820-1850," 2007, Sparknotes).

However, not all crusading movements were censoriously moralistic in their emphasis. Industrialization gave rise to concerns about exploitation of workers who were forced to labor for long hours, child labor, and dangerous conditions in factories (one of the more practical concerns of the Temperance Movement was that workers who drank on the job often got in accidents). The growing institutionalization of American life and the expansion of the penal system and homes for the mentally ill sparked a call for these institutions to treat their inhabitants humanely. Especially in the North there was a growing a recognition that, in contrast to the spread-out communities that characterized America in the previous… READ MORE

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