Early Republic Economic Development

• The growth of the American economy reshaped American life in the decades before the Civil War

  • Americans increasingly produced goods for sale, not for consumption

  • Improved transportation enabled a larger exchange network

  • Labor-saving technology improved efficiency and enabled the separation of the public and domestic spheres

• The Market Revolution fulfilled the revolutionary generation’s expectations of progress but introduced troubling new trends

• Economic growth proceeded unevenly, marked by multiple depressions

• The so-called Transportation Revolution opened the vast lands west of the Appalachian Mountains via railway systems, followed by a Communications Revolution that redefined the limits of human communication via the telegraphHow

  • The consequences of the transportation and communication revolutions reshaped the lives of Americans

    • Farmers who previously produced crops mostly for their own families now turned to the market

• Most visibly, the market revolution encouraged the growth of cities and reshaped the lives of urban workers

  • Populations soared

  • Cash economy

The Decline of Northern Slavery and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom

• Slave labor helped fuel the market revolution

  • Textile mills, worked by free labor, nevertheless depended on southern cotton, and the vast new market economy spurred the expansion of the plantation South

• By the early nineteenth century, states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had taken steps to abolish slavery via gradual emancipation (abolishing slavery over a period of time)

  • Emancipation proceeded slowly but proceeded nonetheless

• Nationally, the enslaved population continued to grow as the growth of abolition in the North and acceleration of slavery in the South created growing divisions

  • Cotton drove the process more than any other crop

  • Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, a simple hand-cranked device designed to mechanically remove sticky green seeds from short-staple cotton, allowed southern planters to dramatically expand cotton production for the national and international markets

• While the United States ended its legal participation in the global slave trade in 1808, slave traders moved one million enslaved people from the tobacco-producing Upper South to cotton fields in the Lower South between 1790 and 1860

Changes in Labor Organization

• While industrialization bypassed most of the American South, southern cotton production nurtured industrialization in the Northeast and Midwest

• The drive to produce cloth transformed the American system of labor

  • The piecework system divided much of production into discrete steps performed by different workers

  • The modern American manufacturing system and factory were born

• As the northern United States rushed headlong toward commercialization and an early capitalist economy, many Americans grew uneasy with the growing gap between wealthy businessmen and impoverished wage laborers

  • Justified by the idea that any person could achieve the same success (the American dream)

• Wage workers—a population disproportionately composed of immigrants and poorer Americans—faced low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions → class conflict

Changes in Gender Roles

• In the first half of the nineteenth century, families in the northern United States increasingly participated in the cash economy created by the market revolution

  • Work shifted away from the home, which changed gender expectations

    • There were two spheres, the public sphere (for men) and the domestic sphere (for women)

  • The ability to remove women and children from work determined a family’s class status

    • If a woman could stay home and “not work”, then a family was wealthy

      • Ignored domestic work

    • Women and children worked to supplement the low wages of many male workers

      • The level and type of education a woman or child had also determined how wealthy a family was

  • Upon marriage, women were rendered legally dead by the legal notion of coverture (the custom that counted married couples as a single unit represented by the husband)

    • Women could not earn their own money, own their own property, sue, or be sued

The Rise of Industrial Labor in Antebellum America

• More than five million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1860 → Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants sought new lives and economic opportunities

  • Many factors drew immigrants to the US:

    • In England, an economic slump prompted Parliament to modernize British agriculture by revoking common land rights for Irish farmers, which pulled Irish immigrants to the US

    • Germans arrived in the US seeking steadier economic opportunities, transforming the regions they settled in

      • Jewish and Catholic Germans both came

• The sudden influx of immigration triggered a backlash among many native-born Anglo-Protestant Americans

  • They were especially fearful of Catholics and sought to limit European immigration and prevent Catholics from establishing churches and other institutions

  • They were able to decline immigration to some extent