Us History

The Early American Republic (1776 – 1870) In the year 1776, America broke out from Great Britain’s hold and started to serve itself. Almost a hundred years go by, and its political stand, economy, and society have changed so much. The Declaration of Independence was drafted by Thomas Jefferson and was approved in spring 1776. This document made America officially free from Great Britain’s rule. The document gave “natural rights,” something inspired by early Enlightenment. The plans for the government weren’t official until 1787 by something called The Great Compromise. It gave the government three branches of power: Executive Branch, Legislative Branch, and the Judiciary Branch.
The economy of America was divided by the South and the North. The South was more agricultural whereas the North was more industrial. Cotton was the crop of the South, everybody wanted it and everybody needed it. Eventually, the Cotton Gin was invented, a machine that separated the seeds from the valuable fiber and sped up production. Tobacco and indigo came later. The Constitution became supreme law of the land in 1789. Since the Bill of Rights, only 17 amendments have been added to the Constitution. The South used slaves for everything, and the North didn’t like that. That’s what eventually led to the Civil War.
Almost everybody had slaves in the South, the North not too interested in it anymore. Once the North realized slavery was wrong, they tried to tell the South but they wouldn’t listen to it. Eventually, the African Americans wanted representation too. So, they came to the Three Fifths Compromise, a compromise that counted each slave as three fifths of a person to be added to a state’s free population in allocating representatives to the House of Representatives and Electoral College votes. The North had about 50,000 slaves versus the South’s one million. The majority of the North wanted to abolish slavery, which divided the nation between wanting slaves and