antebellum America
Before the Confederacy
Antebellum America refers to the United States in the period before the Civil War, particularly the decades from 1820 to 1861.
The term carries strong associations with the slaveholding South—its plantation economy, social hierarchy, and the political tensions over slavery that eventually led to war: antebellum Southern architecture, the antebellum way of life.
- Old SouthPre-Civil War Southern states
- TranscendentalismIntuition-based American idealist movement
- cotton economyAgriculture system based on fiber crop
- cotton ginFiber-seed separating machine
- slaveryOwnership of people
fugitive slaves · Underground Railroad · Louisiana Purchase · states' rights · temperance movement · utopian communities · textile mills · manifest destiny · plantation system · Romanticism · abolitionism · Oregon Trail · wagon trains · sectionalism · railroads · Missouri Compromise · indentured servitude · canals
antebellum AmericaReconstruction
Post-1865 national reunification period
ante, bellum, America, American, Americans, antebellum, postbellum, belligerent, belligerence