Wage Labor In The South Analysis

The antebellum was the period prior to the American Civil War. During this era, political disputes were instrumental towards the build up that ultimately ended in the break out of the Civil War. In addition, the experimentation of the government, which created different ideologies, led to the dividing of the government into two groups, democrats and republicans. There were economic/political problems such as the nullification crisis, which resulted in the seceding of the slave states from the union. This gave way to disputes on the lifestyle of work labor in the North and in the South. In “Free Labor and Wage Labor in the North”, John Ashworth and many northerners discuss the misconceptions of wage labor that southern Democrats had. Southerners …show more content…
because of famines due to crop failures, interest in economic opportunity due to the Industrial Revolution and vast land after the Louisiana Purchase. Fear of Immigrants changing the American System with there radial ideas of the old world became a threat in society. Many feared that with uneducated immigrants a certain digression was part of Foreign Conspiracy was against the Liberties of the United States. In 1835, Samuel F. B. Morse, an inventor of the single cable telegraph, was also an activist that was anti-immigrant. Morse believed that equality was the idea of social mobility where any man can rise in the ranks or social classes of rich and poor. Social Mobility was achievable through employment and education that was available in the land of the free, the United States. He believed that equality put no “artifical barrier” of the social mobility unlike that of old world country that still created barriers in social mobility through hereditary right. Hereditary right prevented the enlightenment ideas of equality and liberty through employment and education. Many of the laboring class served under their ruler blindly. Morse says, “the vicious and voluntarily ignorant” are the ones excluded from this equality. Morse warned the laboring class that the liberty and equality was in endanger because of immigrants who blindly followed the policing priest that kept there people in the dark of the freedom of the U.S. through foreign despotism. Since, arbitrary governments like that of Austria know that there power comes from the “ignorance and superstition of the lower class” they continue to keep them in the dark with policing priest even in the United States. Instead of letting the immigrants assimilate to the new institution of social mobility in the U.S. provided by Wage system and Education, priests encourage riots, violence and anarchy among immigrants, which compromises the freedoms and the