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