C121 Task2 - Task 2 WGU C121 PDF

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Task 2 WGU C121...

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C121 Task 2 Part A: The United States of America did not have an easy start after the Revolution. The political parties of the 1790s developed because of disagreements over three main issues: the nature of government, the economy and foreign policy. By understanding these disagreements, we can begin to understand the conditions that allowed for the origin of the two-party system in the United States. As George Washington was retiring from being president in 1796, two of his closest advisors, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, were assisting in forming the factions that led to the dual party system even though Washington warned the people that the creation of political factions would lead to formal and permanent despotism. Especially for the factions that were made sharp by the spirit of revenge. John Adams and James Madison were just some of the other men would help in forming the political parties, but it was Jefferson and Hamilton who would represent the divisions that would shape the landscape of early national politics. The politics of the 1790s were influenced by the arguments of two distinct political groups: The Federalists who were led my Alexander Hamilton and supported the Constitution and those opposed to the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists, who were led by Thomas Jefferson and thought the federal government was given too much power, thus making tyranny inevitable and they didn’t like that there wasn’t a bill or rights. Despite the addition of the Bill of Rights, friction surfacing over how the United States should be governed after the Revolution and the escalation of them in the 1790s can be better understood by looking at the arguments between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. The first major disagreement between Jefferson and Hamilton surfaced over the nature of Government. Alexander Hamilton concluded that for the United States to be successful it would have to be formed in a similar way to the British imperial model that had been so successful. In

C121 Task 2 order to complete the model America would need a strong central Government, a treasury and financial sector, a national army, and a strong political executive who would represent each of the states as well as all of their interests. Jefferson who was Southern Plantation owner from Virginia saw himself as a Virginian first and an American second. He maintained that a central treasury and national army would bestow the central government with too much power while an economy driven by finance would lead to negligent gambling. In addition to being opposed to having a president, Jefferson preferred for political power to lie with the individual states and their legislatures, not in a central government as Hamilton proposed. Jefferson was also profoundly skeptical of the British and saw Hamilton’s preference for a British style system as a threat to the freedoms of the American Revolution that were hard won (Fellows, 2018). Hamilton and Jefferson along with their allies squabbled about more imperative economic matters. Hamilton was elected as the first Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington and had a difficult job to do. Hamilton created an economic plan for the nation that was comprised of instituting a national bank similar to the one in England that would manage public credit, consolidate the states’ debts under federal government, and enact tariffs and subsidies to encourage American manufactures all the while giving strength to the power of the federal government over the states. Under the earlier Articles of Confederacy, the Government could seek money from states but did not have formal tax raising powers. This meant that it was exceedingly difficult for the newly formed United States to pay its international loans or raise an army. Hamilton’s financial plans would give the central Government those formal tax raising powers, allow them to form a national bank, and give them the ability to print paper money to be used across all the states. Opposing this plan, Jefferson and his Anti-Federalist allies, worried that the Bank of the United States displayed too much English influence while asserting that the

C121 Task 2 Constitution did not give Congress the power to establish a bank. Jefferson also did not believe that promoting manufactures was important and instead wanted support to be given to the agrarian base that was already established as this was a way for the Federalists to work in the interests of the financial sector that’s primary base was mostly in the North at the expense of the agricultural sector that was based primarily in the South. The Federalist and Anti-Federalists’ divisions were also because of deep-seated disagreements about foreign policy. Jefferson had spent a lot of time in France and saw the French revolution as an extension of the American Revolution. He was unnerved by the equivocation shown by Hamilton and George Washington towards France. Jefferson and his Federalist allies presumed that this was more evidence of Hamilton’s aspiration to drive the United States back into the arms of Britain. Hamilton on the other hand saw the French Revolution as unstable and was certain that only refined relationships with Britain would lead to economic prosperity in the United States. By the time Jefferson and John Adams vied for the presidency in 1796, there were two major parties: The Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. The Federalists still held the belief that a strong government was best for the country while the Democratic-Republicans were wary of a government that was too powerful much like the Anti-Federalists they were formed from. States were given the control to decide who could vote. In New Jersey single women that owned property were allowed to vote for several years until that ruling was reversed. In most states free black men were given the right to legally vote. Views of the parties were mostly spread through newspapers that were quickly growing in numbers. With the number of newspapers available to the people and access to them growing America also saw a growing interest in American politics (Norton, 2015). This was an profoundly difficult decade for the United States that was marked by mistrust, the rise of factional newspapers and deep-seated

C121 Task 2 arguments about the future of the United States that contributed the beginning of the two-party system that is still used in the United States today. Part B-1: The Whig and Democratic parties opposed each other throughout their periods of power in the United States government. While the Democratic Party was formed around Jackson his opponents were coming together against him. This group of Democratic opposers was known as the Whig Party, which obtained their name from the Whigs of the Revolution and of eighteenthcentury Britain that were against the strong monarchy. A large portion of the differences within the policies of the two parties was determined by the people that the political parties favored. The Democrats represented the common man, lower-class people who made their living off the land while also promoting the idea that anyone had the right to hold a government position which glorified the individual and as well as their mind. The Whig party consisted of industrialists and nationalists who ensured those people reaped the benefits in the shaping of their policies. These benefits included a tariff that gave assistance to manufacturing and big business while hurting the smaller individuals like farmers the Democrats supported by forcing them to pay more for the things they needed. Even though the Whigs favored big business and its constituents they did make attempts to help the economy and social productivity within the United States with their introductions of things like internal transportation and public schools while making other improvements like building roadways and canals that assisted the wealthy as well as the poor. Another opposing factor between the Democrats and the Whigs involved the idea of expansion. The Democrats pushed for quick expansion to the West because it would provide more farming land which led to the potential of more profits while the Whigs viewed expansion as unnecessary because they believed there was plenty of room for expansion within the boundaries that were

C121 Task 2 already in place. Lastly, the Whigs wanted to have an active government and supported having a national bank and paper currency while the Democrats held the preference for a government that had limited powers and opposed a national bank and paper currency because they thought they were bad ideas (Norton, 2015). Part B-2: The conflict in these parties occurred due to the differences in who the party supported. William Henry Harrison and Henry Clay were the two of the leaders of the Whig party. The Whigs promoted moral reform which led to many of their constituents being African Americans or Protestant. The Whigs caused alienation of other faiths within their party by supporting the Protestants which gave the Democratic party constituents from the Catholic and Mormon faiths, non-evangelical Protestants, and religious freethinkers. With leaders such as Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson as members of the Democratic party their promises to open additional lands to be settled won over yeoman farmers, wage earners, frontier slave owners, and immigrants. While the Whigs held a preference for a slower, more controlled settlement of western lands gained the attraction of a diverse group of black New Englanders and slave owners in the Upper South with the New Englanders hoping to undercut slavery itself and the slave owners wanting to protect their investments from cheap western competition. With such a broad voter coalition there was room in each of the parties for a wide range of beliefs, especially regarding slavery. (Norton, 2015) Part B-3: The Second Party System sparked a new and healthy interest in the government and politics amid the American people. With the nation beginning democratization Americans began to participate in the political process that played a main role in their lives for the first time since the

C121 Task 2 Revolutionary War. Before the Second Par ty System, almost all voters were satisfied to defer to the feigned wisdom of the upper-class elite which allowed them to select their leaders for them. People rarely voted or became engaged because politics seemed unimportant to them. However, the public’s indifference to voting or becoming engaged in politics because they seemed unimportant to them ended after the 1828 presidential election. By the time of the 1840 elections all levels of American government featured appeals to the “common man” including large rallies, parades, celebrations, great enthusiasm, and the most important one high voter turnout. The legacy of the Second Party System in addition to its rejuvenation of public interest in political participation can be noticed in the enactment of sweeping social policy like women’s suffrage, voting rights laws, and civil rights legislation. Part C-1: After the American Revolution, the Enlightenment ideas of natural rights and equality led to the Upper South having an arousal in antislavery sentiment that formed a short-lived outbreak of liberation that encouraged hope for progressive emancipation with southerners being quick to defend slavery that caused the confidence in the new nation to begin dwindling. With the use of the Bible’s various mentions of slaveholding as well as the age of slavery a historical argument for enslavement was fostered while the rationalization of slavery being a “positive good” not just a “necessary evil” was created (Norton, 2015). Really the center of the rationale for the proslavery argument was deep-seated racism where whites claimed to be more intellectual while blacks were considered to be more physical, so labor was considered to be the blacks’ destiny. James Henry Hammond from South Carolina contended that slave holding was an element of property rights that were protected by the Constitution while a few other southerners argued that bondsmen were economic requirements. As the cotton industry began to flourish the South began

C121 Task 2 to see a wave of westward expansion as southern seaboard planters migrated west to in hopes of finding wealth in the industry by buying more land and slaves to help supply the growing world markets for cotton. With the growth of the cotton kingdom in the South the political leaders there were seeing their dream of national and world domination coming into existence with the westward migration that was originally fed by optimistic nationalism that eventually fashioned the migrant planters into being more sectional and southern. A fear of the slave-based economy being under attack the capitalist planters looked for ways they could protect as well as expand their system as they began to see themselves more and more as “slaveholders who happened to own land” instead of “landowners who happened to own slaves” (Norton, 2015). While most of the southern slave owners sought to keep slavery intact, abolitionists wanted to see the end of slavery in America. As with the pro-slavery supporters there were moral as well economic arguments for the abolitionist movement. The Quakers were the first group to identify the Biblical statements such as everyone is equal in the eyes of the Lord God and according to Jesus and his warnings to do unto others as you’d have them do unto you to support their arguments against slavery. Carrying a lot of influence during the 1800s’ abolitionist movement, Evangelicals, had an argument that differed slightly from the Quakers. The Evangelists believed that slavery kept the enslaved men and women from being free moral agents thus keeping them from being in a position to choose good over evil or to act as “moral free agents” which slowed down the time that all of humanity would choose good and the millennium would come. This was believed by the Evangelists to be necessary for Jesus’ second coming. Looking at the economic argument that was commonly placed in free-labor ideology that said those that those who lived a virtuous life and did hard work would have the opportunity to improve their status within a competitive marketplace. Although a multitude of northerners rejected free-labor

C121 Task 2 ideology in the beginning due to it being seen as a veiled attempt to rationalize poor wages, denigrate Catholicism, and quell worker protest with slavery expanding into the West in the 1850s more northerners began to accept free-labor ideology while seeing that slavery was antithetical to it. With this way of thinking, the North became distinctive (Norton, 2015). Part C-2: Westward expansion in the United States increased sectional tension because each side, the North and the majority of the abolitionists and the South and the majority of pro-slavery individuals, wanted to see their ideals extended into the West. In the early 1800s, more and more western territories were being organized into states with the North as well as the South beginning to worry about the balance of free states and slave states within the Senate because each section feared the other would attain the majority and attempt to dominate the Senate. When Missouri petitioned to join the Union as a slave state in 1819 the balance was already uneven in the Senate that Missouri would upset in favor of slave states. With Missouri being next to Illinois, a free state, Northerners were worries that slavery would begin the expand northward while the U.S. was expanding westward. The Missouri Compromise was the first set of major laws designed by Congress especially for dealing with the heightened sectional tensions that Westward expansion within America was causing in order for the country to remain growing without splitting in half (WGU, 2016). With these fears in mind Henry Clay recommended that Maine should be admitted as a free state concurrently with Missouri being admitted as a slave state so that an even balance in the Senate would be maintained. Although that would rectify the immediate crisis, Clay, also wanted to ensure that they would not face the same problem each time a new western territory was organized into a state. Clay went on to propose that any future western states to be admitted would either be a free state or a slave state which would depend on whether they were

C121 Task 2 located to the north or the south of the Missouri border allowing the Missouri Compromise to determine how new western states would be added to the Union from between 1820 to the 1850s. The Missouri Compromise would govern congressional policy toward admitting new slave states for more than three decades while masking instead of suppressing the heated political conflict over the westward expansion of slavery (Norton, 2015). The idea of popular sovereignty which basically means “the rule of the people” (WGU, 2016) was one of the ways suggested to answer one of the important questions of the 1850s which was if territories like Kansas would be able to petition to join the Union as a slave states or not. The principle meaning of popular sovereignty was that the people would have the right to vote whether their state would allow slavery or not as they moved there. Although, many abolitionists suspected that popular sovereignty was a way for slaveholders to expand their territory further into the North illegally, it was very democratic sounding initially except when it applied to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 where it generated a few major problems. The first problem being that it was in violation of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that stated if Missouri was permitted to join the Union as a slave state then any new state west of the Mississippi River that was north of Missouri’s southern border had to join as a free state. With the passing of the KansasNebraska Act abolitionists started paying other abolitionists to move to Kansas while slaveholders were paying proslavery settlers to do the same with each group attempting to create a majority vote in a way their financial backers wanted. This also led to individuals crossing the border into Missouri which was a slave state just so they could illegally vote in the slavery referendum leading to violence as each side was claiming they won the election. This argument led Kansas to the verge of civil war that the U.S. Army was called to go in and stop. The KansasNebraska Act caused devastation among the political parties by weakening the Whig Party

C121 Task 2 breaking into northern and southern wings. The Democratic party managed to survive albeit their northern support plummeted during the elections in 1854 causing Northern Democrats to lose sixty-six of their ninety-one congressional seats as well as control of all but two free-state legislatures. Part C-3: One of the historical events that led to the Civil War was the violence generated by the Kansas-Nebraska Act mentioned above. As the land-hungry partisans battled in Kansas territory the abolitionists and religious groups sent armed Free-Soil settlers while southerners sent in aid to set-up slavery and keep “northern hordes” from robbing them of Kansas. The conflicts led to bloodshed that rapidly had the nation talking about “Bleeding Kansas”. Politics in the territory mirrored war instead of democracy (Norton, 2015). The 1855 elections for a territorial legislature lead thousands of proslavery Missourians who were known as Border Ruffians to invade the polls to run up a fraudulent majority for the proslavery candidates. These ruffians intimidated and murdered the free state settlers that resulted in legislature legalized slavery. The Free-Soilers to answer with an unauthorized convention where they organized their own government and constitution. A proslavery posse sent to arrest Free-Soil leaders in Kansas devastated the town of Lawrence killing many people and wrecking a hotel. Radical abolitionist John Brown and his followers sought revenge for this act by murdering five proslavery settlers along the Pottawatomie Creek where their heads and limbs were lacerated by heavy broadswords. Although, Brown did not wield a sword he did fire a fatal shot into the head of one of...