Market Revolution

Lecture 1

• Before any kind of system of capital as we know it, what people got to get their goods was regular trade - if you had an excess of eggs, you could trade some to get some different food.

• Before 1800 - the US started to become less rural and people began to think about selling their goods in larger scaled markets, like into larger cities. Actual currency began to be used, so the need to carry cash became more important.

• People also started to consume more - peddlers would come throughu small towns in the past. Now, there was a rise of dry good stores.

  • In short, before 1800, the US economy moved at a slower pace. You made everything or you knew someone that could help you make what you coudn’t. Now, there is a transition to buying things over wider markets.

• Since farming started to not be able to support people anymore, especially during slow months, people took on second or different jobs.

  • A lot of farmers became teachers in these slow months.

  • By 1820, most people were in agriculture. By 1850, less than half.

• Because of these growing needs for better ways to reach these markets, the Transportation Revolution started.

• Because consumers and producers needed a way to reach each other, in 1806, The National Road Project was started.

  • The Fed. Gov. created it to make a reliable road for foot and carriage so people can get goods to market.

  • The first road linked the city of Baltimore to Wheeling, Virginia.

  • Some private roads were also created, in which you’d have to pay a toll to cross.

  • Stagecoaches were on the rise, and while they were considered a worse way to travel, it beat going on horseback and walking.

  • In effect, travel had generally improved by the 19th century, as people were able to get to city to city a little easier.

• Steamboats had also started on the rise - By 1830, so many steamboats were on the Miss. River that it changed the environment there - people were chopping down wood to fuel the steamboats there.

• When trying to expand out west, canals are developed. These canals were operated by having animals pull boats of your good. Canals also began to be developed back in the east, like the Erie Canal. It strecthed from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, letting goods get out of New York very easily.

• Railroads were the most important mark of the Transportation Revolution. They first started in England and caught on in the Americas.

  • Ny 1828, Baltimore had a railroad to Ohio. Boston had a railroad to Albany.

  • While there were huge expansions in the northeast, there wasn’t was much in the South. Railroads before Nashville were mainly only to get cotten to the Atlantic Ocean.

  • When railroads started to come into the South, the cities they came to became powerhouses. Nashville and Atlanta are big deals for this reason.

• Why were there more railroads in the North compared to the South?

  • Simply put, they are more industrialized. Southern industry wouldn’t take off until after the Civil War.

• Railroads became the meat market of the west since you could have refrigerated trains.

Lecture 2

• With trade coming into the west and Cities continuing to grow, new states began to be carved out into statehood.

  • Ohio, Indiana, Illinois all enter into statehood by 1820.

  • Since slavery was outlawed by the Northwest Ordinance, industrialization is what characterized their economies.

• First factories

  • Located near rivers so threy could use hydropower - steam engines would eeventually take over.

• Meat would become the main way people would get protein thanks to meat packing plants in Chicago and Cincinnati

• Wool girls

  • Women came out of the family home to go work in the factories, earning and spending their own money without male companymen. This is why people say cities were liberating as it stopped people from getting caught in patriarchal systems.

  • Pockets were social status indicators, as women who spent their own money needed pockets.

  • However, the industrial revolution was still quite hard for women. THey were paid much less and don’t have full political rights, so they don’t have a lot of say.

• The clock became important in life, as you had to work a shift at a certain time.

• The middle class would begin to emerge

• Diseases also began to rise in these cities due to how crowded they became.

  • Cities were places of liberation and disease.

• Loco Parentis - Means in the place of a prent. Factories would tell women’s families they would be put into a loco parentis situation. The women would have to go to chapel, have a curfew, and the people who visited them were screened.

  • These women worked six days a week, and while the money they earned was greater than farmwork, it wasn’t enoguh to live on their own.

• How did the government respond to the market revolution?

  • Jeffersonians didn’t like it (at least on the surface). Jefferson wanted everyone to be a farmer and thought industrialization would lead to the problems of the old world - loss of liberty.

  • However, thepredominantly Republican Congress allowed for a national bank to be charted, which helped create a lot of the new industrial systems and the new ways to travel.

  • They passed tariffs to protect domestic industry - Tariff 1816. It was about 25%, and had a lot of continued restrictions on foreign trade.

  • The Supreme Court said a contract would hold up despite governmental interfeernce.

• Gibbons versus Ogdon.

  • The federal government has the right to regulate commerce between states.

• Cotton would begin to become a large frontier starting in the 19th century.

  • One thing that really helped it was E.Y. Whitney’s cottong gin

    • Cotton is hard to cultivate - they only way to harvest cotton was to take the seeds out of the cotton, and there are a lot of seeds.

    • The cotton gin pulled the seeds of out the fiber very easily, which allowed all strands of cotton to become a staple crop, especially in the south.

  • Cotton was in high demand because textiles were in high demand. Textiles industries needed raw materials to jumpstart them, and cotton became that crop.

  • Cotton would exapnd further west, into alabama, mississippi, and texas.

  • Some scholars speculate that if cotton didn’t flourish that slavery might’ve died out and wage labor and industrialization might’ve taken over the entire US.

  • In 1817, Mississippi would be divded into two areas that were fertile for cotton, and slave owners wanted to move their slaves into this territroy. The other area would become Alabama

• The Master Class - The large slaveholding elites of the east that wnated to spread slavery.

  • They wanted the system to continue because it makes them money, and having two states gives them more power in congress to protect slavery.

• New Southern states were being expanded at this time too.

  • Tennessee in 1796, Mississppi and alabama in 1817 and 1819, and Louisisnaa in 1812.

  • These states were slave states. No new slave states were being created in the North because it wasn’t profitable there.

• Cotton Plantations were different from other plantations - They were based on the gang system.

  • Groups of slaves are brought to work and work all day long to maximize the amount of cotton production.

• Plntation districts - The wealthy plantations of the west. Some of them had hundreeds of slaves, and they sold their cotton to textile factories in the northeast and England.

• Yeomen farmers - poor whites who traveled to the cotton frontier. They’d leave notes on their door that said GTT - gone to Texas.

  • They would flee to Texas (The cotton frontier) with the few (or no) slaves that they had.

  • How did the master class convince the Yeomens to support leaving the union?

  • They were people who had small farms, and worked away from the plantation belts.

    • They worked together, had religious meetings, and asserted their demands for political rights.

  • The whole family would work the farm, as opposed to slaves.

  • Sometimes, they would take their excess money and invest it into slaves, as some aspired to become part of the master class.

  • About three quarters of the yeomen had no slaves - about 17% had between one and nine slaves.

• Middle class males would get the right to vote around 1820