The Market Revolution

Vocabulary flashcards covering the economic innovations, social shifts, legal decisions, and geographic expansion of the American Market Revolution.

Market revolution

A period characterized by new innovations and advancements in transportation, westward expansion, religious pluralism, and economic and market growth that altered American society.

Canals

Waterway transportation networks for Atlantic states and Ohio/Mississippi valleys that reduced the price for transportation.

Railroad

A transportation innovation that opened up new areas for Americans to settle into.

Telegraph

An innovation used to spread information faster to newspapers and businesses, helping to create uniform prices or undercut prices across different towns and cities.

Toll roads/turnpikes

Paths created by private companies, state, and localities that charged a fee for passing, shortening travel time in a fast-paced economy.

Shunpikes

Short detours established by travelers to avoid paying tolls on turnpikes.

Erie Canal

The most important and profitable canal that connected large ports to more urban and agrarian areas.

Westward expansion

The movement of people west fueled by improvements in transportation, offering more job opportunities and access to Western Indian land.

Cotton Kingdom

A cotton-producing region spanning areas such as North Carolina, Louisiana, and Southern Illinois that arose from the market revolution and westward expansion and relied heavily on slave labor.

Cotton gin

An invention that reduced the labor and time required to pick seeds out of thick fiber, leading to the rapid expansion of slavery and the large-scale growing and selling of cotton.

African slave trade (1803-1808)

The importation of enslaved people that was reopened between 1803 and 1808 largely due to cotton plantations spreading into South Carolina, ending in 1808.

Steel plow and reaper

New agricultural inventions that aided farming work and increased productivity.

Porkopolis

A nickname given to Cincinnati due to its numerous slaughterhouses.

Out-work system

A system in which men and women earned money by accepting jobs from factories to work on products at home before sending them back to the factory to be finished.

Steam power

A power source that allowed factory owners to locate in coastal towns and large cities with immense local markets.

American system

The mass production of interchangeable parts designed so that products could be rapidly assembled.

Great famine (1845-1851)

A period of starvation in Ireland that drove many Irish immigrants to head to northern American cities in search of jobs and political and religious freedom.

German triangle

The Midwestern cities of Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee where large numbers of German immigrants settled.

Nativists

People who disliked immigrants and feared that immigration would negatively impact political and social life, viewing immigrants as corrupt, criminal, alcoholic, and undercutting American laborers.

Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819)

A Supreme Court decision that upheld corporate charters, ruling that future lawmakers could not alter past charters.

Gibbons v. Ogden

A Supreme Court decision reinforcing the commerce clause, affirming the government's authority to regulate interstate commerce against private business monopolies.

Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842)

An 1842 judicial decision establishing that labor strikes and trade unions were legal.

Wages

An hourly or daily rate of payment established as workers shifted to fixed amounts of working time per day.

Northwest Ordinance of 1787

Legislation that banned slavery in the Old Northwest, establishing the Ohio River as a boundary between free and slave societies.

Slave cofflers

Groups of enslaved individuals chained to one another and forced to march to the Lower South.

Mill girls

Young female textile factory workers who lived in boarding houses with strict rules and gained access to lecture halls and churches.

Cult of domesticity

A nineteenth-century ideology emphasizing women's roles within the home characterized by sexual innocence, beauty, frailty, and dependence on men.

Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819

An agreement in which Spain sold the Florida territory to the United States following Andrew Jackson's military campaign.