Chapter in Perspective

The religious changes of the Second Great Awakening, the romantic movement, the development of a democratic political culture, and the creation of a domestic national market fundamentally transformed the United States in the years after 1815. These changes were not limited to the North but affected the South as well, in different and dramatic ways. Indeed, as we have seen, it was the rapid expansion of cotton production in the South that propelled the country's explosive economic growth in the 1820s and the 1830s, and slaveholders and slaves had been tied to the international market well before the nineteenth century. The abolition of slavery in the northern states after the Revolution defined southern distinctiveness, as southern values and culture increasingly diverged from the rest of the country. The eclipse of nationalism by southern sectionalism was thus one momentous consequence of the transformations in American life.