North, South, and West of America: 1865 to 1900 A.D - Essay Example

North, South, and West of America: 1865 to 1900 A.D. This is a comparative essay on major events in America’s North, South, and West regions in the last thirty-five years of the 19th century. After a violent Civil War from 1861 to 1865 that saw millions killed or wounded and vast tracts of properties mostly in the South heavily damaged, America went from tragedy to triumph, ending the century as a budding world superpower. Those 35 years have been characterized as America’s Golden Age, a moment that defined what America would become in the next century: a beacon of freedom and democracy that showed the world how a nation’s destiny is shaped by its dreams in the face of overwhelming adversity (PBS 1). At the end of the Civil War in 1865, America was not yet the 50-state nation it is now. It was but an adolescent alliance of 35 tension-filled states of 24 victorious and predominantly northern Union States and 11 Southern states that failed to secede as the Confederate States of America. After the war, a combination of events fuelled an economic boom that pushed the population of the country from the North-South axis on the Eastern end towards the West. The Civil War had been a battle that pitted the rich industrial North allied to the seat of government in the East, against the agricultural South. The expansion to the West, however, helped temper the nation’s simmering post-War energies. Specific events in these regions during the period shaped the U.S. geographically, socially, economically, and politically and prepared the ground for our ascent to worldwide supremacy (Sobel 188-89). The powerful North grew on the backs of tough, hard-working European immigrants who industrialized and enriched their way to economic dominance. Perhaps the harsh climate helped, but it was really geography that made the region the seat of U.S. industrial production and wealth by the late 19th century: Pennsylvania oil, steel mills in Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, manufacturing and mining in Wisconsin and Minnesota – all bonded with the financial might of New York under the expert, at times misguided and corrupt, governance by elected officials in D.C., the nation’s capital (Carnegie 653-657). Civil War victory and Reconstruction made an already strong region even stronger as industrialists, bankers, and businessmen took advantage of opportunities to reconstruct a devastated South. Victory also entrenched the north-based Republican Party as a political power that dominated American politics, producing two-thirds of post-Civil War Presidents (Sobel 201-7). The rural South saw its ambitions to secede and retain a slave class cotton-growing society crumble after its Civil War loss, but it bounced back to a semblance of its former glory as a region that had a laid-back, quasi-feudal atmosphere. The War liberated the African-Americans, who took advantage of their new-found freedom to move to other regions of the country, got educated and began their accumulation of wealth (Sedgwick 157). In the last decades of the 19th century, the South evolved into a region of contradictions: wild carnivals and spirituality, rich estates and poverty, overwhelming ambition and humility, Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola (Sobel 210-13). After the war devastated the cotton farms, and as the abolition of slavery freed the labor force to work in other occupations, the South diversified into other agricultural and industrial products. When the North-South conflict was settled with the end of the Civil War, Native Americans continued to resist in the West, lying in wait across the Indian and Oregon territories west of the Rocky Mountains all the way to California and the Pacific Ocean. The Wild West’s economy and population boomed, driven by gold discoveries and the inflow of refugees, farmers who fled the desolate South and laborers who fled the harsh conditions and poverty in the North. The West was a land of opportunity until the end of the 19th century, and those who survived banditry and domestic terrorism, diseases, and immigrants from foreign lands turned the vast unexplored land into a mirror image of the major cities on the Atlantic. It was also during this period that the West became the main beneficiary of America’s industrial, economic, and political ambitions, driven by technological discoveries like the transcontinental railroad system, efficient transport, and telegraph and telephone communications that linked the two ends of America. Its most profound effect is that of uniting the previously warring States and strengthening the union. Ten new States joined the Union, from Nebraska in 1867 to Utah in 1896, resulting in a Western region that combined the South’s warmth and ambition and the North’s ruthless drive for wealth and excitement (Beatty 111-112). The victory of the North in the Civil War preserved the Union and opened up opportunities in the West that was rich in metal resources. Gold in California and silver at the Comstock Lode in Nevada in the 1850s gave the country the means to trade with the rich nations of Europe, which was also dependent on America for their foodstuffs. By the end of the 19th century, America was the new land of opportunity, attracting shiploads of immigrants from a Europe that was suffering from an economic crisis brought about by endless wars among and within the nations. These immigrants spread through the interior, converting vast tracts of land into mines and farms. The country’s rail system extended from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific to the west. The railway system was not much developed from north to south because the Southerners found their rivers and canal systems and inland sea transport more efficient (Sobel 165). America at the turn of the century was a melting pot of the world as immigrants from Asia and Europe, freedmen from the South and laborers from the North all moved to the West to discover fortune and fame. Their collective hard work in the last thirty-five years of the 19th century led to the economic and social miracles that fed the country’s ambitions, slowly transforming it into a global political power. The interactions of America’s industrial and rich north, agricultural and laid back south, and the wild frontier-like west in those golden years taught the world a very important lesson of how to forge unity from diversity: E pluribus, unum. Works Cited Beatty, Jack (Ed.). Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America. New York: Broadway Books, 2001. Carnegie, Andrew. “Wealth.” North American Review 148.391 (June 1889): 653-657. PBS/Public Broadcasting System. “Gilded Age.” PBS Online. Updated 1999. 30 September 2007. Sedgwick, Ellery. A History of the Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1909. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Sobel, Robert. The Pursuit of Wealth: The Incredible Story of Money throughout the Ages. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. Read More