Chapter 8: The Market Revolution

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

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

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

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

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