National and Regional Growth

  • 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