Erin ’s Reviews > Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era > Status Update

While the slave population of the United States doubled by natural reproduction every 26 years, slaves in other new world societies experienced a net decrease.

In the eyes of a growing number of Yankees, slavery degraded labor, inhibited economic development, discouraged education and engendered a domineering master class determined to rule the country in the interest of its backward institutions.

As parents lavished more love on their children, they had fewer of them and devoted more resources to their education by sending them to school in greater numbers for longer periods of time.

The one seventh of the population that was Black also bore much of the burden of progress while reaping few of its benefits.

The manifest destiny that represented hope for white Americans thus spelled doom for red Americans.

From 1800 to 1850 the American birth rate declined by 23%

In the 1850s a new institution "the department store" sprang up to market the wares of mass production to a mass public.

In the largest American cities by the 1840s the wealthiest 5% of the population owned about 70% of the taxable property, while the poorest half owned almost nothing.

To travel from Cincinnati to New York took a minimum of 3 weeks.

The Mexican War fulfilled for the United States its self proclaimed manifest destiny.