Reform Movements & Industrialization

Temperance Movement

America always has had and always will have a drinking problem. Revival preachers of the Second Great Awakening joined forces in the 1820s to form the American Temperance Society. While their initial goal was to encourage drinkers simply to limit their alcohol intake, the movement soon evolved to demand absolute abstinence, as reformers began to see the negative effects that any alcohol consumption had on people’s lives. The movement quickly earned the support of state leaders as decreased alcohol use resulted in fewer on-the-job accidents and more overall productivity. The most active members of temperance societies tended to be middle-class women. This movement led to the later overall movement of Prohibition.

Abolitionist Movements

Advocates for ending slavery. Aside from the influence of Enlightenment ideas about freedom, many abolitionists believed that slavery was sinful and, therefore, must be eliminated. Most of these abolitionists were people who lived in the North. Some very famous abolitionists were: Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison founded the American Anti-slavery Society which opposed slave traders and owners. Garrison’s radicalism soon alienated many moderates within the movement when he claimed that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. Garrison’s insistence on the participation of women in the movement led to division among his supporters and the formation of the Liberty Party, which accepted women, and the American and Foreign Anti-slavery Society, which did not.

Irish Immigration

From the 1820s to the 1840s, approximately 90 percent of immigrants to the United States came from Ireland, England, or Germany. Among these groups, the Irish were by far the largest. In the 1820s, nearly 60,000 Irish immigrated to the United States. In the 1830s, the number grew to 235,000, and in the 1840s—due to a potato famine in Ireland—the number of immigrants skyrocketed to 845,000. They lived in both rural and urban areas, settling the western frontier, working the land as farmers, and establishing a major presence in cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. They built powerful political machines in major metropolitan areas, the most famous of which was undoubtedly Tammany Hall in New York City. These political machines, typically run by the Democratic Party, helped recent immigrants assimilate into American society by providing them with training, employment opportunities, and sometimes even cash handouts, in exchange for their votes at election time.

German Immigration

From the 1820s to the 1840s, Germans were the second largest group of immigrants to the United States after the Irish. They came to the United States seeking political and religious freedom and greater economic opportunities than could be found in Europe. In 1848, when revolutions erupted in the German states of Europe, Germans became the largest immigrant group to the United States. Although Germans created settlements in nearly every state of the Union, the so-called German belt stretches from Pennsylvania to Oregon, all along the North and Midwest. Many of the Germans who settled these areas were farmers who developed innovative techniques such as crop rotation and soil conservation.

Slavery Booms

Because of the invention of the cotton gin, slavery became a much more prominent industry in the United States. There was a high need for cotton while the amount of cotton being produced also increased. There was more cotton being processed which mean there was a need for more slaves to produce that cotton. Specifically in the southern states, slavery took on a whole new level and growth to make it one of the most lucrative aspects of United States history. The first federal census of 1790 counted 697,897 slaves; by 1810, there were 1.2 million slaves, a 70 percent increase.

Women in the Workforce

Industrialization in the early 1800s began drawing white Northeastern women out of the home and into the factory and schoolhouse. Particularly notable were the women who worked at the Lowell Mills in Massachusetts. While many women worked for wages, others remained at home and professionalized the job of homemaker as part of the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity. Most factory employees toiled 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week. Work was not only tiresome, but also dangerous. The presence of cotton bales alongside the oil used to lubricate machines made fire a common problem in textile factories. Workers’ hands and fingers were maimed or severed when they were caught in machines; in some cases, their limbs or entire bodies were crushed. Workers who didn’t die from such injuries almost certainly lost their jobs, and no compensation was provided. In the 1830s, the female workers in Lowell formed the Lowell Factory Girls Association to organize strike activities in the face of wage cuts; they later established the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association to protest the 12-hour workday. The organization also put out a regular newspaper detailing their negative work experiences. Even though strikes were rarely successful, women initiated work stoppages as a form of labor protest, taking groundbreaking political action in the public sphere. While industrialization led to radical changes in female American life, many white women elected to stay at home and began to glorify the profession of a housewife. This became known as the cult of domesticity—the philosophy that women retained serious power by controlling the household.