equilibrium of the early years of the Republic. That growth and expansion led to a series of protective tariffs after 1816 which were designed to protect the infant industries in the North and to preserve their markets in the South from English competition, large public expenditures for internal improvements which primarily benefited the North and other measures which the South resisted. Thus developed what Owsley called "the eternal struggle between the agrarian South and the commercial and industrial North to control the government either in its own interest or, negatively, to prevent the other section from controlling it" (125).
The first major conflict, the Nullification Crisis of 1832, came about over an attempt of the South Carolina legislature to nullify a tariff enacted by Congress. It was resolved through a combination of President Andrew Jackson's firmness and a compromise worked out between the sections. A much more serious series of crises developed in the late 1840s and 1850s over the attempts of the South to extend slavery to the new Western territories and the determination of the North to contain slavery
within the northern border set by the Compromise of 1820 and to bar slavery from the territories acquired by the United States as a result of the Mexican War of 1848 and later. In Beard's view, the war was a "social cataclysm in which the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from the power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South" (118). Tariffs, which were reduced after 1840, were no longer the main issue which after 1844 was the extension of slavery to the territories. As newly elected President Abraham Lincoln put it in a letter
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