YAWP Chapter 8: The Market Revolution

What enabled a larger exchange network?

 Improved transportation (roads, railroads, and canals)

Why did American food exports rise in value from 1790 to 1807?

The French Revolutionary Wars devastated Europe

The expansion of the infrastructure led to more federal control, due to which power of Congress?

Regulate interstate commerce

state legislatures pumped capital by chartering what?

State-sponsored banks

There were three depressions between 1800-1860: followed by rampant speculation. Which markets were most speculated by which depression?

Land (1819); land and enslaved laborers (1837); railroad bonds (1857)

What was a common issue with the early banks?

Counterfeit currency circulating, which led to more anxiety of “confidence men.”

New York state completed this 350-mile-long human-made waterway in 1825, connecting the Great Lakes to the Hudson River and Atlantic Ocean.

Erie Canal (1825)

who established the first commercial steamboat service up and down the Hudson river in 1807?

Robert Fulton

The first long distance rail line launched from where in 1827, by what company?

Maryland; Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road Company

That railroad led to more rails out of the major US cities to funnel agricultural products trans-Appalachians to an outlet in the Chesapeake Bay, which were invested in by many state and local governments. What event made many of these governments wary of these investments just ten years later?

 Panic of 1837

Which region of the nation had the least railroad development?

South (eventually lead to a cause of their Civil War loss)

This transportation revolution then spread into a communication revolution, when this man persuaded Congress to fund a forty-mile telegraph line stretching from Washington D.C. to Baltimore in 1843

Samuel Morse

Due to this agricultural shift to market-farming, farmers accessed credit through eastern banks. What is the risk/reward of this?

Risk: left farmers prone to catastrophe with bad harvest. Reward: opportunity to expand their enterprise

In the Northeast and Midwest, ambitious farmers invested in new technologies to increase productivity of the limited labor supply. There are two famous inventions in the textbook; name one of them

Cyrus McCormick’s horse-drawn mechanical reaper; John Deere’s steel-bladed plow

What form of transportation led to these four cities’ population growth? St. Louis, New York City, Cincinnati, Chicago.

St. Louis, steamboat; New York City, canal; Cincinnati, steamboat; Chicago, railroads

States north of WHAT line adopted gradual emancipation plans by 1804?

Mason-Dixon Line

What is gradual emancipation?

Future children of enslaved mothers would be liberated following a period of indentured servitude

What invention allowed southern cotton planters to dramatically expand cotton production for the national and international markets?

Eli Whitney’s cotton gin

How did the free Black population shift from 1790-1810? Enslaved population?

Grew 3x (60,000 to 186,000); Grew 2x (700,000 to 1.5 million)

How did the Southern economy grow from slave labor? Northern economy?

Cotton production; textile mills

How did New England spur on technological innovation and the growth of factories?

Stole technological knowledge from Britain

who remastered a yard-spinning machine and carding machine in 1789?

Samuel Slater

Who recreated the powered loom used in the mills of Manchester, England?

Francis Cabot Lowell and Paul Moody

What else did Lowell contribute to the New England industrial boom?

Reorganized and centralized the American manufacturing process, the Waltham-Lowell System

Mill girls worked in Lowell’s textile mills, but in very harsh conditions. They went on strike, lobbied for better hours, but why were they unsuccessful?

The lure of wages was too much

As a whole, how did manufacturing change, across industries?

Left the personal approach of manufacturing for ready-made products to be sold en masse in urban centers.

Masters, replaced by employers, apprentices replaced by ____.

Unskilled workers

This rush towards early capitalism and commercialization led to a growing what?

Wealth gap between rich and poor

How did the Industrial Revolution provide northerners with a superiority complex over the southern slave economy?

“Social mobility”; a lowly worker could work their way up the economic ladder from wage worker to positions of ownership through hard work, while that was not a possibility in the plantation south

What was once shared by master-apprentice, but is now the defining difference between employer and employee?

Class

The lack of social mobility led to the early beginnings of wage workers organizing into what kind of organization?

Unions

As the market revolution took work away from the home, what did the family roles of women and children shift to?

Work in factories for supplemental income

A family’s status was determined by _______.

The ability to take women and children out of the factories

Education was centered around…

providing a foundation for future economic privilege

Education for women was centered around…

the tools to live a sophisticated life; character, respectability

What job was specifically female in the early 1820s?

Teachers

What kind of education was received by poor youths, if they attended at all?

Simultaneously indentured to well off families as field hands or domestic laborers

Americans strived to provide a period of life in which boys and girls were sheltered within the home and nurtured through primary schooling, known as…

Romantic Childhood

What “spheres” were a part of the male domain?

Economic production and political life

What “spheres” were a part of the female domain?

Consumerism and domestic life

How did this life differ in the South?

Southern women still mostly had to work in the fields, no matter the attached stigma

Were women able to have their own money when shopping?

No, had to use husband’s credit

In a marriage, the goal was for the husband to be in charge of which sphere? Wife?

Public; private

Define chain migration

Men would emigrate alone, send money back home to support their families or purchase tickets for relatives to come to the US

Between 1820 and 1840, how many Irish immigrants arrived in the US?

250,000

Between 1840 and 1860, how many Irish immigrants arrived in the US?

1.7 million

Why so many in the second wave?

Escape British oppression and the Irish Famine

How were they viewed by nativists?

Compared to African Americans, portrayed with ape-like features

How did Irish immigrants leave their imprint on American culture?

Construction of catholic churches and catholic schools

How many German immigrants arrived during the antebellum era?

1.5 million

Where did German immigrants settle, in comparison to their Irish counterparts?

Rural countryside, rather than Irish in coastal cities

Irish mainly traveled as single men, while Germans emigrated as…

family units

Germans headed towards the Old Northwest to farm rural areas and practice trades in growing communities such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee, which formed the …

German Triangle

Which Germans were unlike the others, and settled in the cities?

Jewish Germans

How did Jewish immigrants leave their imprint on American culture?

Built synagogues

What political party was spawned by nativist Anglo-Protestants who wanted to limit European immigration and prevent Catholics from building churches and other institutions?

The American Party, aka the Know-Nothing Party

What was one advantage that unions could support their members with?

By creating closed shops (workplaces wherein employers could only hire union members)

Explain the Ten-Hour Movement.

Unions and protestors, including the Lowell mill girls lead by Sarah Bagley, fought for a ten hour workday, granted partially by President Martin Van Buren on federal works projects and two states passed laws in 1847 and 1848

In 1842, which state was the first to limit the hours a child could work in a day?

Massachusetts