Author: osborne

As slaves revolted in Virginia and American settlers rebelled against Mexico in Texas, the decade saw the further consolidation of settlement. This was especially true in the Midwest, where Michigan became a state and Wisconsin and Iowa were organized as territories, and along the banks of the Mississippi, where Arkansas was admitted to the Union in 1837.  The Census of 1830 was the first to use a uniform printed schedule for counting and tallied 12,858,670 Americans, of whom 2,009,050 were slaves.

Railroads Booming
There was thirty miles of track in the United States in 1830.  Within twenty years there would be 9,000.  Nine railroads were chartered in 1831, sixteen in 1831, and twenty-six in 1832 alone.  No longer dependent on imported British locomotives, rolling stock, and expertise, Americans began developing their own equipment, like the DeWitt Clinton, pictured here, built for the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad Company in 1831.

Slave Education
Following Nat Turner’s Revolt in Virginia, that state and several others passed draconian laws forbidding slaves the right to learn how to read.  Louisiana had banned slave education the year before the uprising but after 1831 the ban spread across the South. Virginia’s law included free blacks and provided for twenty lashes in punishment, while Alabama threatened its citizens with a $500 fine for teaching any black person to “spell, read, or write.”  Widespread black illiteracy would prove a significant hurdle when emancipation came in 1865.

The Latter Day Saints
In April 1830, Joseph Smith, Jr. founded the Church of Christ in western New York based on his revelations he published as the Book of Mormon the month before.  He moved his congregation to Missouri, where he fought a running battle with the people and state government before being expelled in 1839.  By then called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the denomination reconstituted in Nauvoo, Illinois where it grew in power and again faced resistance.  Smith was murdered by a mob in 1844 in Carthage, Illinois and many of his followers moved once again, this time to the Utah Territory.

The Panic of 1837
A lengthy period of prosperity came to an end in April 1837 when a combination of questionable bank practices, inflation, and land speculation brought a devastating series of failures to hundreds of banks and brokerage houses in New York City.  Within weeks, the entire country was involved in a deep recession that last for around five years.  While unemployment everywhere reached record levels, the South was particularly hard hit, with cotton prices reaching a low of five cents a pound, down from nearly twenty cents earlier in the decade.

Periodical Reading
For most Americans besides southern slaves (see above) literacy was on the increase and the decade saw a significant increase in available literature, particularly less expensive periodicals.  Louis Godey founded his Lady’s Book in 1830 and it became the preeminent women’s magazine of the age. William Lloyd Garrison’s fiery and influential abolitionist newspaper The Liberator began in 1831.  James Gordon Bennett founded the New York Herald in 1835 and it became the center of his newspaper empire.  Most periodicals, however, concentrated on religious topics.

As the bloodshed in Kansas and during John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry in Virginia set an awful precedent on the road to civil war, the nation grew at a remarkable rate. By the end of the decade there had been a 34% increase in population to more than 31 million, of which almost four million were slaves. Minnesota, California, and Oregon had become states, while Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, and Washington were organized as territories. By 1860, many more Americans were living in cities. In the twenty years since 1840 the number of towns with more than 8000 people had more than tripled, to 141.

Bleeding Kansas
Immigrants from the north-east, the north-west, and the neighboring slave state of Missouri competed with terror and violence to insure that the Territory of Kansas would enter the Union either as a free or a slave state.  After four years of atrocity, Kansas entered the Union as a free state in 1861 with the nation on the verge of Civil War. 

Fugitive Slave Law
The Compromise of 1850 included a federal law to force the return of fugitive slaves from the North.  This led to sometimes violent and litigious incidents, as at Christiana in Pennsylvania in September 1851, where a slaveholder was killed and several Pennsylvanians were tried for treason under the new law.

Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Abraham Lincoln of Illinois sprang to prominence as a leader of the Republican Party with an unsuccessful contest against the sitting Democratic senator Stephen Douglas.  A series of public debates between the two in late summer 1858 grasped the attention of the entire country.  A major topic in the conversations was the future of slavery, especially in newly settled territories.

John Brown’s Raid
In mid-October 1859, veteran Kansas radical John Brown and a group of fighters attempted to occupy the Harpers Ferry Arsenal in western Virginia and thereby arm slaves for a massive slave insurrection.  The raid failed, many of his men were killed, and John Brown was executed in December 1859.

New Dome for the United States Capitol
In September 1855 work began on dismantling the old wooden dome on the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. in preparation for the erection of a new structure that would tower 288 feet over Capitol Hill.  The new stone dome, the design of Thomas Walter, would be largely in place in 1863 and was completed in 1866.  In all, the new structure cost more than a million dollars.

Isaac Singer and his practical home sewing machine
I.M. Singer, a forty year-old German immigrant living in Boston was granted Patent Number 8294 on August 12, 1851 for his new compact and practical sewing machine.  Though designed at first for factory use, the Singer Sewing Machine would soon come into the home and change the sewing habits of millions of Americans.

Half a million New Yorkers, and growing
The U.S. Census counted 515,547 people in New York City in 1850.  Far outstripping Baltimore in second place and Boston in third, New York’s numbers continued to grow with thousands of new immigrants, particularly poor Irish fleeing the lingering effects of the famines of recent years. By 1860, there would be 805,658 New Yorkers, 383,717 of them foreign-born.

“Dixie”
Daniel Emmett wrote “Dixie” in New York City where he was singing with Bryant’s Minstrels, white singers performing in blackface, a popular genre at the time.  The group gave a debut to the song during the finale of their show at the Mechanics’ Hall in the city on April 4, 1859.  It became an instant hit and Emmett sold the rights for $500.

Stowe and Darwin
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in 1852 and Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species By Means of Natural Selection in London in November 1859.  Stowe’s novel became the best-selling fiction of the century in America and Darwin’s book sold out on the morning of its first day of publication in London.