33.8 America: a.d. 1801 to 1900  (Page 14/31)

There was little literary, scientific or artistic production from the prewar south, with the exception of some outstanding "firsts" in medicine. Ephraim McDowell (trained at the University of Edinburgh) developed an international reputation in abdominal surgery, while J. Marion Sims, practicing in Alabama, laid the basis for the specialty of gynecology. As noted previously, Dr. Crawford Long of Georgia used ether for anesthesia in 1842, but he did not publicize his discovery for several years. The first dental school in the world was established in Baltimore in 1839. (Ref. 125 ) The south's one scientific achievement was Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury's Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), which marked him as the world's greatest oceanographer. Most of the south's energy, however, seemed to be devoted to backing up John Calhoun's ridiculous pro-slavery doctrines. Even in religion the southerners were different. Both the southern divisions of the Methodist and Baptist churches defended slavery. There were many reasons for the great resistance to the emancipation of the slaves. We have already noted that the invention of the cotton gin, which made cultivation of upland cotton by slaves profitable, was one factor. Jacksonian Democracy was another great influence, because of the rise of provincial, ill-educated politicians, who catered to the prejudices of the middle class and poor whites. Instead of preparing the south for the inevitable emancipation, those men flattered people into the fatal belief in the righteousness of slavery.

The middle west and the louisiana purchase region

In this section we shall be concerned primarily with the territory gained through the "Louisiana Purchase" and what we currently consider the Middle West. We have infringed somewhat on this by discussing pre-war features in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, but in this 1 9th century it seemed that those regions were more closely linked with the traditional EAST.

There were many reasons for Napoleon's sale of the Louisiana Territory - his need for money, his fear that Britain would otherwise soon take it from him, and his General Leclerc's recent loss of 24,000 men over a 9 month period to disease and the arms of 500,000 black Haitians, who would not be enslaved. The legality of the sale was questionable, however, as the area was still in the hands of Spain, even though the French claimed that Spain had ceded the area to Napoleon in a secret treaty of 1801. At the time the contested region was an unmanned, undefended empire with the whole watershed of the Mississippi and comprising the present states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, both the Dakotas. Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, - that is, one-third of North America. The sale price of $16,000,000 actually amounted to 4 cents an acre. After the purchase, President Jefferson then appointed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, along with a 16 year old Shoshone Indian girl and her French-Canadian husband as guides and interpreters, to survey the new purchase. They left St. Louis in May of 1804. (Ref. 151 , 123 , 39 )