Free Enterprise and Factories

• During Industrial Revolution factory machines replace hand tools

• Manufacturing replaces farming as main form of work

• Factory system brings workers and machines together under one roof

• People leave farms, move to cities where factories are located

• Work for wages, have set schedules, way of life changes

• War of 1812 leads U.S. towards industrialization

• British blockade causes U.S. to manufacture goods previously imported

Factories Come to New England

• New England is a good place to set up successful factories because:

  • Fast-moving rivers

  • Ships and access to the ocean

  • Willing labor force

• Samuel Slater builds first spinning mill and hires entire families

• Family system of employment spreads throughout New England

Lowell Mills Hire Women

• Francis Cabot Lowell builds factory in Waltham, MA in 1813

• Uses power looms

• Factory is successful and build a factory town

• Lowell mills

  • Textile mills in Lowell

  • Employ farm girls

  • High wages

• Girls follow strict rules, read books, and publish literary magazines

• Later factories run by powerful steam engines instead of water power

  • Allow factories to be built away from rivers and beyond New England

A New Way to Manufacture

• U.S. government hire Eli Whitney to make 10,000 muskets for the army

• Guns are made one at a time by gunsmiths, Whitney changed this method

  • Uses interchangeable parts to make guns

    • Speeds up production

    • Makes repairs easy

    • Uses less skilled workers

    • Requires close supervision

    • Gives workers less independence

Moving People, Goods, and Messages

• Robert Fulton invents steamboat, put Clermont on the Hudson River in 1807

  • Clermont makes 300-mile trip from New York to Albany and back in record time of 62 hours

• Henry Miller Shreve design a more powerful steam engine

• Enables steamboats to travel upriver, against the current

• Samuel F.B. Morse first demonstrates the telegraph in 1837

  • Enables people to communicate in seconds between cities

• By 1861, telegraph lines span the U.S., brings people closer as a nation

Technology Improves Farming

• John Deere invents steel plow in 1836

  • Makes plowing Midwestern soil easier

  • More farmers move to the Midwest

• Mechanical reaper, threshing machine improves agriculture

• Farmers feed factory worker, become market for factory goods

• Growth of Northeastern textile mills increases Southern cotton demand