• Early U.S. History Themes: The essay examines how religion and a new free market economy influenced early U.S. politics and culture, with impacts felt in today's public sphere.

• Technological and Social Changes: Technological advances like the cotton gin and telegraph, combined with religious pluralism, led to social and religious movements such as Evangelicalism in the early 19th century.

• Expansion of Slavery: The introduction of the cotton gin expanded chattel slavery in the Southern U.S., creating tensions between abolitionists and those who saw slavery as economically beneficial.

• Impact of the Civil War: The Civil War and the subsequent passage of the 14th amendment aimed to guarantee freedom and equal rights for Black citizens, though racial and political animus persisted.

• Economic Influence of Slavery: Slavery significantly boosted American capitalism, with the cotton market driving economic institutions and leaving a legacy of institutionalized racism.

• Women's Roles and Activism: Technological advancements and changing societal roles empowered women, influencing economic and political landscapes in the 19th century.

• Religious Influence: Religion played a crucial role in shaping socio-political aspirations, with movements like Quakerism emphasizing women's work and shared responsibility.

Introduction

A survey of early U.S. history from the late 17th century through the period of the antebellum South to the turn of the twentieth century reveals intertwining themes including religion and economics that had immediate and dramatic effects on the budding nations’ political history.  These themes and their vital importance to the development of the early American nation are the subject of this essay.  Here, an examination of the early American adoption of the precepts of a new free market economy and expressions of religious fervor worked together to influence the socio-political formations of U.S political history.  This essay will illuminate on how these themes shaped early U.S. politics and changes in U.S. culture from a historical perspective and how they reverberate in the contentious public sphere today.

At the beginning of the 19th century, a new nation burgeoned with white individual’s intent on exercising the new freedoms burnished through the War of Independence, activity propelled by advances in technology that drastically impacted production, such as the cotton gin and telegraph.  The outpouring of radical individualism that resulted, combined with a new religious pluralism made for an overwrought social and religious environment, giving rise to tent revivalism and a unique form of Christianity in Evangelicalism and other adjacent Christian groups.  Evangelicalism centers a relationship with God on the self, and in the early 19th century began professing against behaviors including alcoholism, atheism, prostitution and “popular politics” offering localized proselytizing centered definitively in Protestantism. ‘Post-millennialism’ “provided ‘a distinct philosophy of history’ with confidence in the scientific progress of the era to build the millennial kingdom,” demonstrating the intersection of religious, economic, and political life in early 19th century America.  A nascent Southern economy developed “in which “every individual is bound not only by his duties to others, but by his own interests, to extend and nourish this useful interchange of systems”.

Coincidentally, the introduction of the cotton gin allowed producers to prepare as much cotton as they could grow and harvest, helping to drastically expand chattel slavery throughout the Southern United States as growers imported more slaves.  Innovations in farming were shared among slavers, “because the world cotton market was an example of what economists call perfect competition.” A tension developed between partisan evangelicals who rejected human slavery and those who saw in slavery the future of their individual economic prosperity, and by the 1840’s a national abolition movement had come into its own at odds with the rest of American society.  Founded in pre-Revolutionary ideations of educated, ‘civilized’ Black men the pre-Civil War abolitionists had grown into a national organization intent on outlawing slavery nationwide.  “Early national abolitionism was designed to break apart American bondage through a progressive enlightenment for black and white Americans together.” Using technological innovations including the telegraph, abolitionists were able to effectively spread their message to communities all over the country, establishing for themselves a national network of local organizations advocating on behalf of Black slaves everywhere.

Mid-century this tension culminated in the American Civil War where, by the 1860’s, emancipated Black men had been conscripted by the Northern Army and fought for their freedoms.  The decimation and ignominious defeat of the Southern U.S. and its Confederate army left a lasting scar on citizens that manifested in racial, economic, and political animus toward Black citizens, immigrants, and other social groupings.  The passage of the 14th amendment in 1868 codified the Bill of Rights as applying to all citizens, guaranteeing freedom for Black people and “whose paramount goal was a united citizenry whose common and equal rights would be respected.” Local and state governments went to work assiduously enacting rules, laws, and codes to support a ‘separate but equal’ doctrine, and as the 20th century came into view Black citizens felt the effects of Jim Crow descend on their communities.

Economy

As demonstrated in The Half has Never Been Told the average productivity of enslaved workers increased from the onset of the 19th century through to the Civil War.  One estimate holds a 300% increase in productivity of slave output. This increase in productivity took its toll on the slave population itself, increasing infant mortality rates and the number of broken family units, compounded by an influx of slaves that by this time had been forcibly removed to the South, numbering in the hundreds of thousands.  Told through the voices of individual slaves via surviving narratives and 20th century memories of the previously enslaved, Baptist’s monograph describes a harrowing uptake in enslaved workers in the South coinciding with the advent of technological innovations that worked in favor of producers.  New innovations, claims Baptist, included torture and the slave plantation, propelling the economics of slavery into the relative stratosphere of 19th century avarice.

The cotton market arose because of European demands for fabrics and clothing.  At the turn of the century, most American farmers were managing individual plots of land dedicated to growing tobacco, rice, and sugar.  But by the 1860’s America was producing two-thirds of the world’s raw cotton market share.  Economic institutions such as banking and lending that developed into the world’s financial markets found their footing, stretching credit and borrowing behaviors to their limits.  Slavers were forced to develop larger plantations that required more slaves to meet ever-increasing production demand.  For some time, historians have cast the dynamics of capitalism and slavery as two distinct phenomena in early American history, but in fact they were tightly integrated, dispelling notions of State’s rights as a proximate cause of the Civil War. To wit, American capitalism benefited dramatically from slavery.  “Slave plantations, not railroads, were in fact America’s first ‘big business.’” “As profits accumulated in the cotton trade, in cotton manufacturing, in cotton growing, and in supplying Southern markets, many cultural, social, and educational institutions benefited: congregations, hospitals, universities,” and left a legacy of institutionalized racism that fueled national politics in the 19th century and beyond.

A major force in this evolution of these political, religious, and economic strands that define the 19th century is the diverse activism and constellation of changes that women citizens experienced during this time.  Women’s modern politics, societal roles, and adoption of modern technologies helped define the changing socio-economic and political times of this era.  Technology brought new goods to increasingly centralized city markets, with “furnaces, heating stoves, pumps, iceboxes, oil lamps, cast iron cooking stoves, and sewing machines” serving as examples of complex technologies that accelerated the transformation in women’s household work and economic empowerment.  “Against the notion that early industrialization had created a fully cash-based economy to which both women and women’s work were peripheral, women posed their own experience: that antebellum life continued to rely upon a combination of labors, some paid and some unpaid, and that ‘economy’ was still a process that required the saving and conserving, as well as the getting, of resources.” While holding to traditional, colonial roles, women also expanded their work efforts into an increasingly industrialized economy post-Civil War, wearing non-traditional clothing and sporting bold new political aspirations as budding factory workers and as homemakers.  Naturally, this changed the way men worked, too, with increasing ‘white-collar’ workloads becoming available in Northern states.  This precipitated new patterns of behavior in home workloads, and with the shock of emancipation put additional pressure on women to be both providers and caretakers. 

Religion

Religious ideations of women changed to match socio-political aspirations at this time.  Many women turned to Quakerism, which emphasized the importance of women’s household work, shared wealth, and division of labor by sex.  This religious philosophy located women’s power in shared responsibility, reflected in the Quaker’s founding document that “Woman was no longer a slave in bonds…she became a co-worker with her brother man in every department of life,” restructuring social, work, and economic life around the “importance of women’s domestic work.”

Religion was a powerful force in this alchemy of political and cultural exchange in the U.S. during the 19th century.  ‘Progressive’ visions of a Christian utopia in the new United States were stylized to influence behavior and mixed with political advocacy and economic improvement, to help in the development of a unique brand of capitalism that gave birth to the frenzied consumerism of the 20th century.  Liberal politics expert and political philosopher John Rawls asks the question noted in The Blackwell Companion, “How is it possible for those affirming a religious doctrine that is based on religious authority, for example, the Church or the Bible, to also hold a reasonable political conception that supports a just democratic regime?” As political operatives pressed the religious and socio-economic revival of the 19th century, an idea of the collective as movers in politics was transposed by individual action, giving American Christianity it’s uniquely situated operating theater to interweave the uplifting of society for societies benefit and upholding the precepts of individual freedom, a crux of continuing religious animus and impacts on American political and economic life today.

Conclusion

Concurrently, the economic needs of Americans coalesced and transformed during the 19th century, with the advent of technology in areas of farming and communications, but also with the advent of industrialization during the post-Civil War reconstruction period.  Obliquely referring to these events author and scholar Lewis Moore in Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood 1880-1915 describes pugilists and their struggles with local laws and regulations on the ladder to championship boxing matches at the turn of the century.  White men enjoying this sporting activity expressed clear racial and political resentment tinged with awe at the physique and fitness of Black boxers during this time.  As underscored, “black boxers displayed what white men thought whites had inherited: violent, yet controlled, aggression,” displaying the characteristics of a white male population whose economic aspirations were tied together with masculine and competitive avarice, a vestige of chattel slavery’s effect on the population at large and evidence of clear and long-lasting discrimination.  This discrimination manifested itself in the Jim Crow-era of 20th century politics but has its origins in 19th century economic fantasies that revolve around slave labor and white supremacy.

These considerations constitute a new history of the 19th century that is more inclusive, broader, and more critical than ‘founders chic’ historiography that emphasizes important, usually white, men and notable events.  Students of history enjoy the functions of the technological advances and the myriad new inputs that have become features in an inter-connected world.  Indeed, ‘founders chic’ or traditional historiography is part of the larger experience that students of the social sciences including cultural anthropology and history itself have available to them. Learning online, in a new fast-paced life, and with the entirety of documented history, creative and educated historiography must compete for engagement, and offer up new hypotheses and evidence as they become available through the academic process to help this new generation of scholars reimagine all of history with stories such as those of 19th century slaves, the people that enslaved them, their economic well-being, and religious sentiments.  The emergence of individualized Evangelicalism portended the rise of the religious right in American politics, and evidence of its restrictive tenants are everywhere to be found in 19th century American political history, from the rise of Lost Cause narratives that rewrite the history of the Civil War to chattel slavery and racism are today marrying “church denominations and political parties and transforming the relationship between religion and politics in the United States.”

References

Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York. Basic Books. 2014.

Beckert, Sven. “Slavery and Capitalism.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 61, no. 16. 2014.

Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York. Oxford University Press. 1990.

McGraw, Barbara A. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Politics in the U.S. Wiley-Blackwell. 2016.

Moore, Louis. I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood. 1880-1915. Urbana. University of Illinois Press. 2017.

Pasley, Jeffrey L, Andrew W Robertson, and David Waldstreicher. Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic. Chapel Hil. The University of North Carolina Press. 2004.

Polgar, Paul J. “‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation’: Early National Abolitionism, Gradual Emancipation, and the Promise of African American Citizenship.” Journal of the early Republic. Vol. 31, no. 2. 2011.

Stewart, James Brewer, and Eric Foner. Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, Rev. ed. New York. Hill and Wang. 1996.