History Note for Final

1C        In the early nineteenth century, after the election of 1860 when Lincoln was elected as the new president, there existed a strong tension between the opponents of slavery in the North and the slaveholders in South. As the author of the textbook “American Horizons”, Schaller notes that the tangled problems can be summarized as slavery, territories and economic system, and the stress reached a critical point in 1850 which caused the compromise of 1850. Even though in the same country, there are many differences such as economics between the south and the north.

        When to contrast these two regions, both of them are favorable by the weather and some natural resources. For the northern region, it was endowed with more natural resources as compared to the south region. Many positive factors lead the norther having a large population with many cities. Additionally, the natural resources like soils, water, and climate are so important to the southern region because the main support for them is agriculture. As learned in class, southerner is the representative of plantations which farmed cotton and tobacco. As the machine called cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney in the end of eighteenth century, it revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber. This kind of invention made the cotton become the most important export of America. In this case, the northern region and the southern region are all influenced by the natural resources.

        However, there are more conflicts between the south and the north. The conflicts about economics vary in many aspects. Before emancipation of slavery, the southern region is the representative of slavery-plantation which means they owned the slaves to produce industrial raw materials and primary industrial products for the other countries like the United Kingdom. In other words, they produced the raw materials and sold them to Britain in a higher price instead of the northern region, so the southern region had a close relationship with the northern’s enemy United Kingdom. The friendly cooperation between the south and Britain deepened the conflicts of the south and the north. At that time, the economics of northern region was so strong because its solid foundation by capitalist society. Thus, Britain created a threaten to the northern region, and it was totally against the cooperation between the southern region. Furthermore, because Lincoln won the election and he as a abolitionist strongly against slavery, so it angered the southern and cause the secession later. The conflicts between the northern and the southern in economics has the power splitting them up.

2T        Andrew Jackson was born on March 1767 and was a statesman and a United States soldier. He was born in poverty and rose to fame and served as the seventh president of United States between 1829 and 1837. Many consider him as the founder of the Democratic Party, and he played a significant role during the American Revolutionary War together with his family at the age of 13. Andrew Jackson portrait has featured on the United States twenty dollar bill currency since 1928. The move to place Andrew’s portrait on the 20 dollar bill by the department of the treasury was in honor of him for the part he played to save America in one of the desperate times. He was an icon during the battle of New Orleans which was the last time a foreign army invaded the country. No one worshiped Alexander Hamilton like they worshiped Andrew and regarded him as the first American Idol (Michael Schaller, 345).

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