ABSTRACT
Between 1830 and 1850 the two great obvious changes in the country were the industrialization of the North and the expansion of the West, the South continuing but little altered. The men of the North, who had risen from nothing, without traditions, to wealth and prominence as bankers, merchants, manufacturers, or stockjobbers, could be duplicated in the Cotton Kingdom among owners of great plantations. The negro slave had at least one great advantage over the Northern factory worker. What the Northern manufacturer considered his property was the mill with its machinery, and he came to care no more for the worker than for the bale of cotton. “The rich, the wise, and the good” of the old Federalist formula had broken down in their leadership, and a class of wage earners new to American society was beginning to look for leadership in its own ranks.
