Chapter 12 Industry and the North 1790s - 1840s Chapter 12 Industry and the North 1790s - 1840s OUT OF MANY A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE © 2009 Pearson

Chapter 12Industry and the North

1790s - 1840s

Chapter 12Industry and the North

1790s - 1840s

OUT OF MANY

A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

© 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.

Part One:

Introduction

2© 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.

Chapter Focus Questions

What were the effects of the transportation revolution?

What was the market revolution?

What did industrialization affect workers in early factories?

How did the market revolution change the lives of ordinary people?

What were the values of the new middle class?


Part Two:

American Communities: Women Factory Workers Form a

Community in Lowell, Massachusetts


American Communities: Women Factory Workers Form a Community in Lowell,

Massachusetts

Young women from New England farms worked in the Lowell textile mills.

Initially, the women found the work a welcome change from farm routine, but later conflict arose with their employers.

By the 1830s, mill owners cut wages and ended their paternalistic practices.

The result was strikes and the replacement of the young

women with more manageable Irish immigrants.


Part Three

The Transportation Revolution


The Transportation Revolution

Map: Commercial Links: Rivers, Canals, Roads, 1830, and Rail Lines, 1850Between 1800 and 1840, the building of roads and canals, and the steamboat stimulated the transportation revolution that:

encouraged growth;promoted the mobility of people and goods; and fostered the growing commercial spirit.

By 1840 it was easier for people to move from one locale to the other.


MAP 12.2 Commercial Links: Rivers, Canals, Roads, 1830, and Rail Lines, 1850 By 1830, the United States was tied together by a network of roads, canals, and rivers. This transportation revolution fostered a great burst of commercial activity and economic growth. Transportation improvements accelerated the commercialization of agriculture by getting farmers’ products to wider, nonlocal markets. Access to wider markets likewise encouraged new textile and other manufacturers to increase their scale of production. By 1850, another revolutionary mode of transportation, the railroad, had emerged as a vital link to the transportation infrastructure.


Roads

Federal Government funds the National Road in 1808—at the time the single greatest federal transportation expense

The National Road tied the East and West together providing strong evidence of the nation’s commitment to expansion and cohesion


Canals and SteamboatsCanals:

Water transport was quicker and less expensive than travel by land.The Erie Canal stimulated east-west travel and was built with New York state funds. The canal connected Buffalo on Lake Erie with Albany along the Hudson River. Constructing the canal was a vast engineering challenge and required a massive labor force, many of whom were contract laborers from Ireland. The canal helped farmers in the West became part of a national market.Towns along the canal grew rapidly. A canal boom followed.


One of the Erie Canal’s greatest engineering feats occurred at Lockport, where the famous “combined” locks—two sets of five locks—rose side by side for 60 feet. One observer boasted, “Here the great Erie Canal has defied nature.” SOURCE: Mary Keys, American (active 1832) “Lockport on the Erie Canal,” 1832. Watercolor on paper (15 ¼ x 20 ¼ in.) Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute of Art, Utica, New York, 55.45.


Canals and Steamboats

Steamboats:

made upstream travel viable;

helped to stimulate trade along western rivers; and

turned frontier outposts like Cincinnati into commercial centers.


Railroads

The most remarkable innovation was the railroad. Technical problems included the absence of a standard gauge. By the 1850s consolidation of rail lines facilitated standardization.


This Currier and Ives print of 1849, The Express Train, captures the popular awe at the speed and wonder of the new technology. This “express” probably traveled no more than 30 miles per hour.


Effects of the Transportation Revolution

Map: Travel Times, 1800 and 1857

The transportation revolution: provided Americans much greater mobility;

linked Americans beyond the local communities and;

fostered a risk-taking mentality that promoted invention and innovation.


MAP 12.1 Travel Times, 1800 and 1857 The transportation revolution dramatically reduced travel times and vastly expanded everyone’s horizons. Improved roads, canals, and the introduction of steamboats and railroads made it easier for Americans to move, and made even those who did not move less isolated. Better transportation linked the developing West to the eastern seaboard and fostered a sense of national identity and pride.


Part Four:

The Market Revolution


The Market Revolution

The market revolution was caused by rapid improvements in transportation, commercialization, and industrialization.


The Accumulation of Capital

Merchants comprised the business community of the northern seaboard accumulating great wealth. Early conflicts of the nineteenth century that disrupted United States trade with Europe led merchants to invest in local enterprises supplemented by banks and the government. Southern cotton produced by slaves bankrolled industrialization.


The Putting-Out System

In the early 19th century merchants “put out” raw goods in homes.

In the case of shoe-making artisans:journeymen cut the leather

wives and daughters bound the upper parts together

the men stitched the shoe together


This carved and painted figure, designed as a whirligig and trade sign, shows a woman at a spinning wheel. Until the transportation revolution made commercial cloth widely available, spinning was one of the most time-consuming tasks that women and young girls did at home.


The Putting-Out System

As demand grew, merchants like Micajah Pratt built central workshops and brought workers into Lynn, Massachusetts. Pratt modified the putting-out system providing greater control over the workforce and the flexibility to respond to changing economic conditions. The putting-out system and the central workshops caused the decline of the artisan shop.


The Spread of Commercial Markets

As more workers became part of the putting-out system

wages for piecework replaced bartering.families bought mass-produced goods rather than making them at home.

Commercialization did not happen immediately or in the same way across the nation.


Part Five:

The Yankee West


New Routes West

Between 1830 and 1850 the population of the Old Northwest almost quadrupled.

Migrants of New England origin accounted for 40% of that population.


© 2009 Pearson Education, Inc. 26

Seeing History Industrialization and Rural Life.

SOURCE: George Inness, The Lackawanna Valley Painting, 1825. © 1856. Oil on canvas, 86 x 127.5 cm (33 7/8 x 50 3/18 in.) Gift of Mrs. Huttleson Rogers. Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Commercial Agriculture in the Old Northwest

The transportation revolution helped farmers sell in previously unreachable markets. Government policy encouraged commercial agriculture by keeping land cheap. Regional specialization enabled farmers to concentrate on growing a single crop, but made them dependent on distant markets and credit.

Innovations in farm tools greatly increased productivity.


Cyrus McCormick is shown demonstrating his reaper to skeptical farmers. When they saw that the machine cut four times as much wheat a day as a hand held scythe, farmers flocked to buy McCormick’s invention. Agricultural practices, little changed for centuries, were revolutionized by machines such as this.


Transportation Changes Affect the Cities

Railroads and the Erie Canal dramatically changed the local economies.

The transportation changes linked the Northwest with the Northeast.

Map: Commercial Links: The Old Northwest, 1850

The loser in the economic redistribution was New Orleans.



Map 12.3 Commercial Links: The Old Northwest, 1850 After 1825, the Erie Canal brought streams of migrants to the upper part of the Old Northwest, where they quickly built the roads, canals and railroads that made their commercial agriculture possible.

Part Six :

Industrialization Begins


British Technology and American Industrialization

The Industrial Revolution began in the British textile industry and created deplorable conditions. Samuel Slater slipped out of England bringing plans for a cotton-spinning factory.He built a mill that followed British custom by hiring women and children. New England was soon dotted with factories along its rivers.



This photograph shows the much restored Slater Mill, the first cotton textile factory in the United States, and the falls that powered its machinery. Built in 1793, the mill—now a National Historic Landmark—is an example of the way early entrepreneurs used the power potential of New England’s swiftly flowing streams.

The Lowell Mills

Francis C. Lowell studied the British spinning machine.Lowell helped invent a power loom and built the first integrated cotton mill near Boston in 1814. The mill drove smaller competitors out of business. Lowell’s successors soon built an entire town to house the new enterprise.


Lowell, Massachusetts

Map: Lowell Massachusetts, 1832


MAP 12.4 Lowell, Massachusetts, 1832 This town plan of Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1832, illustrates the comprehensive relationship the owners envisaged between the factories and the workforce. The mills are located on the Merrimack River, while nearby are the boardinghouses for the single young female workers, row houses for the male mechanics and their families, and houses for the overseers. Somewhat farther away is the mansion of the company agent.


Family Mills

Factories developed elaborate divisions of labor that set up a hierarchy of value and pay.

Relations between the small mill communities and the local farmers were often difficult.

Slater’s mills provided a substantial amount of work for local people.

Industrial work led to new social distinctions.


“The American System of Manufactures”

The American system of manufacturing was based on interchangeable parts in the manufacturing of rifles developed by Eli Whitney, Simeon North, and John Hall. Standardization spread into other areas like sewing machines.

The availability of these goods affected American thinking about democracy and equality.

Americans could have mass-produced copies, indistinguishable from the originals.


In 1816, Connecticut gunsmith Simeon North did what Eli Whitney had only hoped to do. North produced the first gun with interchangeable parts. North’s invention, taken up and improved by the national armories at Springfield and Harpers Ferry, formed the basis of the American system of manufactures.


Part Seven:

From Artisan to Worker


Pre-industrial Ways of Working

Before Lowell, 97% of Americans still lived on farms and most work was done near or in the home.


In the 1840s, Edward Hicks painted his childhood home, rendering an idealized image of rural harmony that owes more to faith in republican agrarianism than to the artist’s accurate memory. The prosperous preindustrial farm had a mixed yield—sheep, cattle, dairy products, and field crops—and had an African American farm worker (perhaps a slave), shown plowing.SOURCE: “Residence of David Twinning,” 1787. Oil on canvas. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, VA.


Mechanization and Gender

Chart: Occupations of Women Wage Earner in Massachusetts, 1837Industrialization posed a major threat to the status and independence of skilled male workers.The breakdown of the family work system harmed independent urban artisans.The rise of the garment industry led many women to work, sewing ready-made clothing for piece rates. So poorly paid were these tasks that women might work fifteen to eighteen hours a day.


FIGURE 12.1 Occupations of Women Wage Earners in Massachusetts, 1837 This chart shows how important piecework was for women workers. Textile work in factories occupied less than 20 percent of women, while piecework in palm-leaf hats, straw bonnets, and boots and shoes accounted for over half of the total workforce. Teaching was a new occupation for women in 1837; the small percentage of 3.6 would grow in the future.

SOURCE: Based on Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), Table 1.1, p. 20.


This illustration of seamstresses at work, from Sartain’s Union Magazine, January 1851, shows an early abuse created by the market revolution. Women workers were crowded into just a few occupations, thereby allowing owners to offer very low wages for very long hours of work. The women in this illustration appear to be gathered together in a central workshop, where they had each other for company. Many other women sewed alone at home, often for even lower wages.


Time, Work, Pay and Leisure

Workers did not readily adjust to the demands of the factory. Though used to long hours, they were not acclimated to the strict regimen. Absenteeism was common among workers whose interests differed from their employers. A much more rigid separation between work and leisure developed. Leisure spots like taverns emerged, as did leisure activities like spectator sports.


This timetable from the Lowell Mills illustrates the elaborate time schedules that the cotton textile mills expected their employees to meet. For workers, it was difficult to adjust to the regimentation imposed by clock time, in contrast to the approximate times common to preindustrial work.


Free Labor

The introduction of the cash economy led to the decline of the barter system.

Worker contact with employers came through the pay envelope.

Workers took advantage of the lack of ties to move about in search of better jobs.

Laborers saw themselves as “free”—able to move about to new jobs and possessing the individualistic characteristics needed for success.


Early Strikes

Most early strikes were unsuccessful. Owners were able to find new workers.Women played significant roles in these early labor protests.


Part Eight:

The New Middle Class


Wealth and Rank

The market revolution ended the natural fixed social order that previously existed. The market revolution created a social order with class mobility.

The upper class stayed about the same, while the “middling sorts” grew rapidly.

The middle class also changed their attitudes by:emphasizing sobriety and steadiness and responsibility.


Religion and Personal Life

Religion helped shape the new attitudes.

The Second Great Awakening moved from the frontier to the new market towns stressing salvation through personal faith.

Preachers such as Charles G. Finney urged businessmen to convert and accept the self-discipline and individualism that religion brought.

Evangelism became the religion of the new middle class.


The New Middle-Class Family Middle-class women managed their homes and provided a safe haven for their husbands. Attitudes about appropriate male and female roles and qualities hardened. Men were seen as steady, industrious, and responsible; women as nurturing, gentle, and moral. The popularity of housekeeping guides underscored the radical changes occurring in middle-class families. Middle-class couples limited their family size through birth control, abstinence, and abortion. Physicians urged that sexual impulses be controlled, particularly among women whom they presumed to possess superior morality.


This middle-class family group, painted in 1840, illustrates the new importance of children, and at the mother-child bond. SOURCE: Frederick Spencer, “Family group,” 1840.© Francis G..Mayer/CORBIS.


Middle-Class Children

New views of motherhood emerged as women were seen as primarily responsible for training their children in self-discipline.

Women formed networks and read advice magazines to help them in these tasks.

Mothers made contacts that would contribute to their children’s latter development. Children also prolonged their education and professional training.

A man’s success was very much the result of his family’s efforts.


Sentimentalism and Transcendentalism

The competitive spirit led many Americans to turn to sentimentalism and nostalgia.Publishers found a lucrative market for novels of this genre, especially those written by women. Sentimentalism became more concerned with maintaining social codes. The intellectual reassurance for middle-class morality came from writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller emphasized individualism and communion with nature.


Emerson’s romantic glorification of nature included the notion of himself as a “transparent eyeball,” as he wrote in “Nature” in 1836. This caricature of Emerson is from “Illustrations of the New Philosophy” by Christopher Pearce Cranch.


Part Nine:

Conclusion



Documents

Chapter 12 Industry and the North 1790s - 1840s Chapter 12 Industry and the North 1790s - 1840s OUT OF MANY A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE © 2009 Pearson