CHAPTER 9 OUTLINE: the market revolution, 1800–1840

I. A New Economy

1. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the market revolution changed the United States.

2. The market revolution represented an acceleration of developments already started during colonial times.

3. Farm families living in the nation's interior were largely isolated from the markets and were mostly self-sufficient.

A. Roads and Steamboats

1. Improvements in transportation lowered costs and linked farmers to markets.

2. Toll roads did little to help the economy.

3. Improved water transportation most dramatically increased the speed and lowered the expense of commerce.

a. In 1807, Robert Fulton showed the steamboat’s technological and commercial feasibility.

b. In 1811, the first steamboat was used on the Mississippi River.

B. The Erie Canal

1. The canal was completed in 1825 and made New York City a major trade port.

2. The state-funded canal typified funding for internal improvements.

3. By 1837, 3,000 miles of canals had been built.

C. Railroads and the Telegraph

1. Railroads opened the frontier to settlement and linked markets.

2. The telegraph introduced a communication revolution.

a. Samuel F. B. Morse invented the telegraph in 1844.

b. By 1860, 50,000 miles of telegraph wire existed.

D. The Rise of the West

1. Improvements in transportation and communication made possible the rise of the West as a powerful, self-conscious region of the new nation.

2. People traveled in groups and cooperated with each other to clear land, build houses and barns, and establish communities.

3. Squatters set up farms on unoccupied land.

4. Many Americans settled without regard to national boundaries.

a. Florida fell into the hands of Americans despite Indian resistance and Spain’s initial refusal to sell.

b. Andrew Jackson led troops into East Florida in 1818; in 1819, the United States gained the territory with the Adams-Onis Treaty.

5. By 1840, 7 million Americans lived west of the Appalachian Mountains, with Ohio being the third most populous state.

E. An Internal Borderland

1. The Ohio River became a boundary between free and slave societies because the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the Old Northwest.

2. The region immediately northward from the Ohio River retained much of the cultural flavor of the Upper South.

3. The area had a large concentration of people of southern ancestry that would make Indiana and Illinois key political battlegrounds in the developing controversy over slavery.

F. The Cotton Kingdom

1. The market revolution and westward expansion heightened the nation’s sectional divisions.

2. The rise of cotton production came with Eli Whitney’s cotton gin.

3. The cotton gin revolutionized American slavery.

4. After 1812, southerners, many with enslaved people, poured into the territory west and south of the Appalachian Mountains.

G. The Unfree Westward Movement

1. Historians estimate that between 1800 and 1860, around 1 million enslaved people were shifted from the older slave states to the Lower South.

2. Slave trading became a well-organized business.

a. Slave coffles became a common sight.

3. Cotton became the nation’s most important export, with the country producing 170 million pounds in 1820.

II. Market Society

A. Commercial Farmers

1. The North became a region with an integrated economy of commercial farms and manufacturing cities.

2. Farmers increasingly grew crops and raised livestock for sale.

3. The East provided a source of credit and a market.

4. New agricultural machinery, particularly John Deere's steel plow and Cyrus McCormick's horse-drawn reaper, quickened and expanded production.

a. Between 1840 and 1860, America’s output of wheat nearly tripled.

B. The Growth of Cities

1. Cities formed part of the western frontier.

a. Cincinnati and St. Louis, located at the crossroads of trade, experienced tremendous growth.

b. The railroad transformed Chicago from a tiny settlement to the nation's fourth-largest city.

2. The nature of work shifted from that of the skilled artisan to that of the factory worker.

C. The Factory System

1. Samuel Slater established America’s first factory in 1790.

a. Production was based on an "outwork" system.

2. A group of merchants established the first large-scale American factory in 1814 at Waltham, Massachusetts.

a. They created the factory town of Lowell in the 1820s.

b. By 1850, Lowell had fifty-two mills with 10,000 workers.

3. The American System of manufactures relied on the mass production of interchangeable parts that could be rapidly assembled into standardized, finished products.

4. The South lagged in factory production.

D. The Industrial Worker

1. Americans became more aware of clock time.

2. Working for an hourly or daily wage seemed to violate the independence Americans considered an essential element of freedom.

a. Few native-born American men were interested in factory jobs.

E. The “Mill Girls”

1. Early New England textile mills largely relied on female and child labor.

2. "Mill girls" experienced not only strict supervision and many rules, but also the opportunity to earn money and engage in public life.

3. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature)

a. Sarah Bagley, untitled essay in Voices of Industry (1845)

b. Bagley calls attention to the poor working conditions of women workers in the Lowell factories.

F. The Growth of Immigration

1. Economic expansion fueled a demand for labor, which was met, in part, by increased immigration from abroad.

a. Most immigrants came from Ireland and Germany, and they settled in northern states.

2. Numerous factors, including European economic conditions and the introduction of the oceangoing steamship, inspired this massive flow of population across the Atlantic.

G. Irish and German Newcomers

1. American religious and political freedoms also attracted many Europeans fleeing the failed revolutions of 1848.

2. The Irish were refugees from disaster, fleeing the Irish potato famine.

a. They filled many low-wage unskilled jobs in America.

3. German immigrants included a considerably larger number of skilled craftsmen as compared to Irish immigrants.

4. Whereas most Irish immigrants remained in the Northeast, many Germans established themselves in the West, including in the cities of Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee.

5. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature)

a. Letter of Margaret McCarthy to her family (1850)

b. McCarthy advises her family about the opportunities and challenges of immigrating to America.

H. The Rise of Nativism

1. The influx of Irish elevated the presence of the Catholic Church in America, which many native-born Americans viewed with great suspicion.

2. Those who feared the impact of immigration on American political and social life were called nativists.

a. Nativists blamed immigrants for urban crime, political corruption, alcohol abuses, and the undercutting of wages.

3. In the 1840s, nativism found expression both in the streets and at the ballot box.

a. New York City and Philadelphia witnessed violent anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic riots.

I. The Transformation of Law

1. The corporate form of business organization became central to the new market economy.

a. It enjoyed special privileges and powers granted in a charter.

2. Many Americans distrusted corporate charters as a form of government-granted special privilege.

3. American courts upheld the validity of corporations, opposed efforts to limit competition, and strengthened the authority of employers over workers.

III. The Free Individual

1. Westward migration and urban development created a mobile population.

A. The West and Freedom

1. American freedom had long been linked to the availability of land in the West.

a. John O'Sullivan wrote of "Manifest Destiny," the idea that Americans had a right to spread their civilization across the continent.

2. In national myth and ideology, the West would long remain “the last home of the freeborn American.”

a. The West was vital to economic independence, the social condition of freedom.

B. The Transcendentalists

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that freedom was an open-ended process of self-realization by which individuals could remake themselves and their own lives.

2. Henry David Thoreau echoed his call for individual self-reliance.

C. Individualism

1. Americans came to understand that no one person or government had the right to interfere with the realm of the self.

2. Thoreau worried that the market revolution stifled individual judgment; genuine freedom lay within the individual.

a. Thoreau retreated to Walden Pond for two years.

b. He turned his experiences into Walden, a critique of the market revolution.

D. The Second Great Awakening

1. The Second Great Awakening added a religious underpinning to the celebration of personal self-improvement, self-reliance, and self-determination.

2. The Reverend Charles Grandison Finney became a national celebrity for his preaching in upstate New York.

3. The Second Great Awakening democratized American Christianity.

a. The movement brought about a proliferation of Christian ministers.

b. Evangelical denominations (e.g., Methodists and Baptists) grew tremendously.

c. Americans of different social ranks worshipped together at large camp meetings.

E. The Awakening’s Impact

1. The movement promoted the doctrine of human free will.

2. Revivalist ministers criticized greed, but seized the opportunities offered by the market revolution to spread their message.

F. The Emergence of Mormonism

1. Competition among religious groups kept religion vibrant and promoted the emergence of new denominations.

2. Joseph Smith founded the Mormons in the 1820s.

a. Smith claimed to have been led by an angel to golden plates that had writing on them.

. b. Smith translated and published the plates as The Book of Mormon.

3. Mormonism was self-consciously democratic.

a. Anyone could join, although Black men could not enter the priesthood.

4. Smith developed a series of controversial doctrines, including polygamy.

5. The Mormons were expelled from several states before settling in present-day Utah.

IV. The Limits of Prosperity

A. Liberty and Prosperity

1. Official imagery linked the goddess of liberty ever more closely to emblems of material wealth.

2. Opportunities for the self-made man abounded.

a. John Jacob Astor accrued great wealth from the fur trade.

3. The market revolution produced a new middle class.

B. Race and Opportunity

1. Free Blacks were excluded from the new economic opportunities.

2. Barred from schools and other public facilities, free Blacks laboriously constructed their own institutional life.

a. Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church is the most notable Black institution of the era.

3. Free Blacks were confined to the lowest ranks of the labor market.

4. Free Blacks were not allowed access to public land in the West.

C. The Cult of Domesticity

1. Women were closed off from most market revolution opportunities.

2. A new definition of femininity emerged based on values like love, friendship, and mutual obligation.

3. Virtue came to be redefined as a personal moral quality associated more and more closely with women.

4. Women were to find freedom in fulfilling their duties within the private sphere of home.

D. Women and Work

1. Only low-paying jobs were available to women.

a. They could be domestic servants, factory workers, or seamstresses.

2. Not working outside the home became a badge of respectability for women.

a. Freedom was freedom from labor.

3. Although middle-class women did not work outside the home, they did much work as wives and mothers.

4. Men wanted a “family wage,” which was seen as a form of social justice.

E. The Early Labor Movement

1. Some felt the market revolution reduced their freedom.

a. Economic swings widened the gap between classes.

2. The first Workingman’s Parties were established in the 1820s.

a. By the 1830s, strikes had become commonplace.

F. The “Liberty of Living”

1. Wage workers evoked “liberty” when calling for improvements in the workplace.

2. Some described wage labor as the very essence of slavery.

a. Economic security formed an essential part of American freedom.

3. “Wealth and labor” were at war, according to Orestes Brownson.

4. The market revolution provided new economic opportunities for many Americans and expanded definitions of freedom, but it also threatened traditional economic independence.