Chapter 9: Transforming the Economy (1800-1860) Vocab/People to Know

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.

Division of labor

A system of manufacture that divides production into a series of distinct and repetitive tasks performed by machines or workers.

Mineral-based economy

An economy based on coal and metal that began to emerge in the 1830s, as manufacturers increasingly ran machinery fashioned from metal with coal-burning stationary steam engines rather than with water power.

Mechanics

A term used in the nineteenth century to refer to skilled craftsmen and inventors who built and improved machinery and machine tools for industry.

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 boarding houses with strict rules and curfews and were often required to attend church.

Machine tools

Cutting, boring, and drilling machines used to pro-duce standardized metal parts, which were then assembled into products such as textile looms and sewing machines. The rapid development of machine tools by American inventors in the early nineteenth century was a factor in the rapid spread of industrialization.

Artisan republicanism

An ideology that celebrated small-scale producers, men and women who owned their own shops (or farms). It defined the ideal republican society as one constituted by, and dedicated to the welfare of, independent workers and citizens.

Unions

Organizations of workers that began during the Industrial Revolution to bargain with employers over wages, hours, benefits, and control of the workplace.

Labor theory or 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.

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 and factories, the entrepreneurial activities of traders and merchants, and the creation of a transportation network of roads, canals, and railroads.

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.

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.

Benevolent Empire

A broad-ranging campaign of moral and institutional reforms inspired by evangelical Christian ideals and endorsed by upper-middle-class men and women in the 1820s and 1830s.

Sabbatarian movement

A movement to preserve the Sabbath as a holy day. These reformers believed that declining observance by Christians of the Sabbath (Sunday) was the greatest threat to religion in the United States.

Moral free agency

The doctrine of free will that was the central message of Presbyterian minister Charles Grandison Finney. It was particularly attractive to members of the new middle class, who had accepted personal responsibility for their lives, improved their material condition, and welcomed Finney's assurance that heaven was also within their grasp.

American Temperance Society

Nativist movements

Antiforeign sentiment in the United States that fueled anti-immigrant and immigration-restriction policies against the Irish and Germans in the 1840s and the 1850s and against other ethnic immigrants in subsequent decades.

Samuel Slater

- He was a British mechanic that moved to America and in 1791

- Introduced British textile technology to the U.S.

- Invented the first American machine for spinning cotton.

- Built early water powered mills

- He is known as "the Father of the Factory System"

- Started the idea of child labor in America's factories.

Francis Cabot Lowell

American industrialist who developed the Lowell system, a mill system that included looms that could both weave thread and spin cloth. He hired young women to live and work in his mill

Sellars Family

Developed machine tools and promoted interchangeable parts in manufacturing.

Eli Whitney

Invented the cotton gin and helped popularize interchangeable parts.

Cyrus McCormick

Irish-American inventor that developed the mechanical reaper. The reaper replaced scythes as the preferred method of cutting crops for harvest, and it was much more efficient and much quicker. The invention helped the agricultural growth of America.

Lyman Beecher

Presbyterian clergyman, temperance movement leader and a leader of the Second Great Awakening of the United States.

Charles Grandison Finney and Lydia Finney

Revivalist leader emphasized moral free agency (individual choice) and supported reform movements.