Unit 4, Chapter 8: Economic Transformations 1800-1848

neomercantilism

A system of government-assisted economic development embraced by republican state legislatures throughout the nation, especially in the Northeast. This system of activist government encouraged private entrepreneurs to seek individual opportunity and the public welfare through market exchange.

Panic of 1819

First major economic crisis of the United States. Farmers and planters faced an abrupt 30 percent drop in world agricultural prices, and as farmers' income declined, they could not pay debts owed to stores and banks, many of which went bankrupt.

Commonwealth System

The republican system of political economy created by state governments by 1820, whereby states funneled aid to private businesses whose projects would improve the general welfare.

Erie Canal

A 364-mile waterway connecting the Hudson River and Lake Erie. The Erie Canal brought prosperity to the entire Great Lakes region, and its benefits prompted civic and business leaders in Philadelphia and Baltimore to propose canals to link their cities to the Midwest.

Market Revolution

The dramatic increase between 1820 and 1850 in the exchange of goods and services in market transactions. The Market Revolution reflected the increased output of farms (including cotton plantations) and factories, the entrepreneurial activities of traders and merchants, and the creation of a transportation network of roads, canals, and railroads.

Industrial Revolution

A burst of major inventions and economic expansion based on water and steam power and the use of machine technology that transformed certain industries, such as cotton textiles and iron, between 1790 and 1860.

Cotton complex

The economic system that developed in the first half of the nineteenth century binding together southern cotton production with northern clothmaking, shipping, and capital.

Waltham-Lowell System

A system of labor using young women recruited from farm families to work in factories in Lowell, Chicopee, and other sites in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The women lived in company boardinghouses with strict rules and curfews and were often required to attend church.

Gradual emancipation

The practice of ending slavery in the distant future while recognizing white property rights to the slaves they owned. Generally, living slaves were not freed by gradual emancipation statutes; they applied only to slaves born after the passage of the statute, and only after they had first labored for their owners for a term of years.

manumission

The legal act of relinquishing property rights in slaves. Worried that a large free black population would threaten the institution of slavery, the Virginia assembly repealed Virginia's 1782 manumission law in 1792

Chattel principle

A system of bondage in which a slave has the legal status of property and so can be bought and sold.

"Positive good"

In 1837, South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun argued on the floor of the Senate that slavery was not a necessary evil, but a positive good, "indispensable to the peace and happiness" of blacks and whites alike.

unionism

The policies and practices of labor unions, particularly concerned with protecting and furthering the rights of workers.

Labor theory of value

The belief that human labor produces economic value. Adherents argued that the price of a product should be determined not by the market (supply and demand) but by the amount of work required to make it, and that most of the price should be paid to the person who produced it.

Gang-labor system

A system of work discipline used on southern cotton plantations in the mid-nineteenth century, in which white overseers or black drivers supervised gangs of enslaved laborers to achieve greater productivity.

Middle class

An economic group of prosperous farmers, artisans, and traders that emerged in the early nineteenth century. Its rise reflected a dramatic increase in prosperity. This surge in income, along with an abundance of inexpensive mass-produced goods, fostered a distinct middle-class urban culture.

Self-made man

A nineteenth-century ideal that celebrated men who rose to wealth or social prominence from humble origins through self-discipline, hard work, and temperate habits.

Samuel F.B. Morse

A Massachusetts painter-turned-inventor who devised the telegraph capable of sending signals through miles of wire.

Samuel Slater

"Father of the Factory System", the most important émigré mechanic in America, escaped Britain with the memorized plans for the textile machinery; he put into operation the first spinning cotton thread in 1791.

Francis Cabot Lowell

A wealthy Boston merchant who made the first factory town and was one of the first to hire women to work in the factories

Eli Whitney

In 1793, Massachusetts native Eli Whitney devised a machine, called a cotton engine (or cotton "gin" for short), that could quickly separate the seeds of a short-staple cotton boll from their delicate fibers. This innovation increased the speed of cotton processing.

Cyrus McCormick

Invented the mechanical reaper, patented in 1834, that revolutionized the harvesting process.