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

\