AP U.S. History 4.14: Causation in Period 4

From 1800 to 1848 the United States moved toward a more participatory democracy. Suffrage, the right to vote, shifted from a system based on owning property to one based on being an adult white man. Alabama's 1819 constitution shows the new rule. It made a voter of "Every white male person of the age of twenty-one years, or upwards, who shall be a citizen of the United States, and shall have resided in this State one year next preceding an election," with no property test. Women and Black men stayed outside it.

Political parties grew with the vote. The course framework names Andrew Jackson as the leader of the new Democrats. Vetoing a bill to continue the Bank of the United States in July 1832, Jackson attacked laws that work "to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful."

Americans came to define their nation by its democracy and celebrated a new national culture (4.9 The Development of an American Culture). At the same time, groups such as enslaved and free African Americans built distinctive cultures of their own (4.12 African Americans in the Early Republic). And many Americans, inspired by the Second Great Awakening (4.10 The Second Great Awakening) and other religious and intellectual movements, worked mostly outside government to make society match the nation's ideals (4.11 An Age of Reform), in temperance societies, antislavery groups and the women's rights convention at Seneca Falls.

Sources: Constitution of Alabama, 1819 (Avalon Project); Jackson's Bank veto, 1832 (Avalon Project).

New technology, farm methods and ways of doing business sped up the American economy in what is called the market revolution. Steamboats, canals and railroads carried goods farther and faster, and factories and farms produced far more. More Americans, especially women and men working in factories, stopped farming mainly for their own needs and made goods for distant markets instead. A larger middle class grew, and so did a population of laboring poor. New domestic ideals cast the home as a private sphere apart from public life.

The new economy linked the regions. By mid-century, a National Archives summary notes, most American cotton was shipped to England or New England to be made into cloth. It also gave the regions different interests, as the course framework notes of the tariff debates. A protective tariff helped Northern mills but raised what Southern planters paid for imported goods. In November 1832 South Carolina's convention called the tariff laws "intended for the protection of domestic manufactures" and passed "at the expense and to the injury and oppression of other classes and individuals." The same economic growth that helped unify the nation encouraged the regions to grow in different directions.

Sources: Patent for Cotton Gin (National Archives); South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification (Avalon Project).

Seeking an independent place in the world, the United States set out to claim territory across North America and to expand its trade. It bought the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803. A treaty with Algiers in 1815 said Algiers would require no tribute from the United States and set trade on most-favored-nation terms. Monroe's message to Congress of December 1823 opened on talks with Russia over the two nations' rights on the northwest coast of North America, and it declared that the American continents "are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers."

New land also raised the question of whether slavery would go into it. When Missouri, part of the Louisiana lands, asked to become a state, Congress split, because adding it would change the balance between slave and free states. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 let Missouri enter as a slave state, paired with Maine as a free state, and banned slavery in the rest of the Louisiana lands north of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes north latitude.

The question did not stay settled. In March 1845, as Texas asked to join the Union, President Polk warned that "sectional jealousies and heartburnings must be discountenanced" and insisted that as the nation grew, "the bonds of our Union, so far from being weakened, will become stronger."

Sources: Monroe Doctrine (Avalon Project); Missouri Compromise (National Archives); Treaty with Algiers (Avalon Project); Polk's inaugural (Avalon Project).

Causation is reasoning about how one development led to another. A causation question often hands you two pieces of evidence and asks how they relate. Three questions help.

Which came first, and could the first have produced the second? Monroe's message of 1823 came after the Missouri Compromise of 1820, so it cannot have caused the compromise.

Is the link immediate or long-term? An immediate cause sets an event off. A long-term cause builds the conditions over years. Missouri's request for statehood set off the crisis of 1820. The spread of slavery into the new western lands after 1800 was a long-term cause, because it made slavery's future in those lands worth fighting over. The compromise that ended the crisis was an effect.

Do two pieces of evidence share a cause? Monroe's message and the Missouri Compromise come from different sides of the same growth: claims across the continent fed confidence abroad and conflict at home.

To judge how much a cause mattered, ask what else had to be true. Expansion by itself did not divide the country. The question of slavery in the new lands did.