Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan ... - Bakumatsu Films

INTRODUCTION • 3
THE UNITED STATES AND JAPAN, CIRCA 1850
During the 19th century, individual Japanese and Americans encountered
one another for the first time, and the mid-1850s, the two governments
began formal diplomatic relations. The first individual contacts and start
of diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States were conditioned
by their respective societies and worldviews of the era. What kind
of countries were the United States and Japan during the 1850s?
The United States was not really “united” by 1850. The northern
states of the mid-Atlantic and New England regions were industrializing.
They were building factories powered by steam and coal, and improving
the roads, bridges, and canals to create the infrastructure of a
modernizing, industrializing society. Meanwhile, most of the southern
states remained in a semi-feudal social and economic system largely dependent
on the forced labor of African American slaves who produced
agricultural commodities of cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rice. The northern
states had a mixed, industrializing economy while the southern
states were not industrializing and remained almost exclusively dependent
on agriculture, which in turn depended on slave labor.
At the conclusion of the Mexican–American War in 1848, the United
States militarily and diplomatically conquered the vast southwestern and
western territories of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California at the
expense of Mexico and Native American tribes. Slavery became an even
more divisive political issue with regards to whether these new territories—soon
to become states—would allow slaves and slave owners.
From the late 18th century, many northerners despised the existence
of slavery for both political and moral reasons. They did not necessarily
believe in the equality of all races; but they did believe that human
slavery was both immoral and unlawful. By the early 19th century, all
New England states and most mid-Atlantic states outlawed slavery
within their borders. The Compromise of 1850 called for an equal number
of slave states and non-slave states among the newly conquered territories,
but ultimately failed to resolve the issue. In 1852, Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, shocked northerners and
infuriated southerners with its depiction of the cruelty of slavery in the
southern United States. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in
1857, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, and the election of
Abraham Lincoln as President in 1860 also significantly contributed to
the “impending crisis” that erupted into the American Civil War.