6. Sectional Conflict

6.1 Slavery and Selectionalism
By the mid- 19th century, one issue exacerbated the regional and economic differences between North and South – slavery. Northerners supplied with southern cotton declared, that slavery is wholly responsible for South´s backwardness.By 1850, slavery was 200 years old and an integral part of the basic economy of the region. Southern publicists insisted, that the relationship between capital and labor was more humane and the slavery system than under the wage system of the North.

Slavery was inherently a system of brutality and coercion in which beatings and the breakup of families through the sale of individuals were commonplace. In the end, however, the most trenchant criticism of slavery was not the behavior of individual masters and oversees toward the slaves, but slavery’s fundamental violation of every human being’s inalienable right to be free.

6.2 The Compromise of 1850
Until 1845, it has seemed likely that slavery would be confined to the areas where it already existed.
The hopes of the nation were rested with Senator Henry Clay, whose compromise contained a number of key provisions - California = slavery prohibited, New Mexico + Utah = without slavery, more effective would be to catch the runaway slaves and returning them to their masters, than buying and selling new slaves. District of Colombia = selling of slaves is prohibited.

6.3 Lincoln, Douglas and Brown
Abraham Lincoln had long regrded slavery as an evil. Lincoln and Douglas, known as “little Giant”, debated for 7 times in 1858.

7.Growth and Transformation

7.1Itroduction
Between two great wars -- the Civil War and the First World War -- the United States of America came of age. In a period of less than 50 years it was transformed from a rural republic to an urban state. The frontier vanished. Great factories and steel mills, transcontinental railroad lines, flourishing cities and vast agricultural holdings marked the land. With this economic growth and affluence came corresponding problems. Nationwide, businesses came to dominate whole industries, either independently or in combination with others. Working conditions were often poor. Cities grew so quickly they could not properly house or govern their growing populations.

The United States Steel Corporation, which resulted from this merger in 1901, illustrated a process under way for 30 years: the combination of independent industrial enterprises into federated or centralized companies. Begun during the Civil War, the trend gathered momentum after the 1870s, as businessmen began to fear that overproduction would lead to declining prices and falling profits. They realized that if they could control both production and markets, they could bring competing firms into a single organization. The "corporation" and the "trust" were developed to achieve these ends.