How did American culture and religion become sectionalized in the antebellum era?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answer: The ideal answer should include:
1. Methodist and Baptist churches split into northern and southern denominations because of
differing attitudes toward slaveholding, while Presbyterians and Episcopalians remained formally united but had informal northern and southern factions.
2. Notable southern authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms wrote proslavery polemics while northern authors such as Herman Melville and Henry David Thoreau expressed antislavery sentiments in prose and poetry.
3. Popular southern novelists wrote “plantation romances” that glorified southern civilization and sneered at that of the North.
4. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year and fixed in the northern mind the image of the slaveholder as brutal.
5. Southern schools banished northern textbooks in favor of those with a prosouthern slant.
6. Young men of the planter class were induced to stay in the South for higher education rather than go north to universities as had been the custom. A movement developed to encourage southern industry and commerce to reduce dependence on the North.