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FORGING THE NATIONAL ECONOMY
Theme 1: The
American population
expanded and
changed in character
as more people
moved to the West,
cities, and immigrant
groups such as the
Irish and Germans
arrived in great
numbers.
Theme 2: The
American economy
developed the
beginnings of
industrialization with
the greatest advances
coming in the area of
transportation -
canals and railroads
united the nation.
THE MARCH WESTWARD
“Europe stretches to the Alleghenies, America lies beyond” - Ralph
Waldo Emerson
The young America (half of all Americans were under the age of 30) was
expanding westward at a rapid pace.
The geographic center of population is the point at which half of the
population is east, half west, half north and half south. In 1790, this
point was in Maryland (near Baltimore). By 1820, it had moved to what
is today West Virginia (along 39°N). By 1840, the center of West
Virginia, and by 1860 it was in the center of southern Ohio.
POPULATION GROWTH 1790-1860
0
5,000,000
10,000,000
15,000,000
20,000,000
25,000,000
30,000,000
1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860
White
Non-White
GROWTH OF THE CITIES
In 1790, there were only 2 cities with populations over 20,000 - New York and Philadelphia. By 1860, there were forty-three and about 300 other cities had populations of at least 5,000 inhabitants.
Broadway, looking North, in New York City,
1834. These walk-up buildings held the
workshops and boarding houses for Irish
and German immigrants who provided
mostly semi-skilled labor.
CHANGING CITIES
At first the laborers in the textile, garment, and steel mills were of American birth, many of them agricultural laborers who moved into nearby towns looking for work as soil exhaustion and
a series of economic crises pushed them off the land. But in the two decades
after a serious blight destroyed Ireland's potato crop in 1845, two
million Irishmen left their island for jobs in England and the U.S.
IMMIGRATION BY DECADE
0
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
500,000
600,000
700,000
800,000
900,000
1,000,000
1831-
1840
1841-
1850
1851-
1860
1861-
1870
1871-
1880
Irish
German
“NATIVE” REACTION
Many of the immigrants of the 1840s and 1850s were Catholics. Irish Catholic immigrants flooded into coastal cities, accepting lower wages than native workingmen, creating economic grievances that were added to
suspicions against "Popery." One of the early large-scale public
outbreaks of anti-Catholicism occurred in the "City of Brotherly
Love" during the presidential election campaign of 1844.
KEY DIFFERENCES
Irish Immigrants
Fleeing crop failure and starvation
Young (under 35) and literate in English
Catholic
Poor (could not buy land in the west)
Concentrated in east coast cities, such as NY and Boston
German Immigrants
Fleeing crop failure and seeking political asylum
Spoke German (and preserved their language)
Protestant - but not Puritan
Modest wealth (“middle class”)
Scattered across the Midwest on purchased farms; sometimes created German communities
QUESTION FOR DISCUSSION:
Why did nativists think that the Irish and
German (but most especially the Irish)
immigrants pose a threat to American society
and democracy?
INDUSTRIALIZATION BEGINS
Britain had begun the march towards mechanization in the 1750s when
machines used to produce textiles were perfected. However they didn’t
share that information with their colonies in an effort to keep them
dependent.
Samuel Slater, a British machinist,
left England for America in the late
1780s and brought with him
memorized plans of how the British
machines were constructed.
He established the first American textile mill in 1790 at Pawtucket,
Massachusetts where the rivers could provide power to the mill.
The early mills only produced
cotton yarn but there was still a
huge problem - Cotton fiber was
tremendously expensive. It took a
full day to pick 1 pound of fiber
from 3 pounds of seed so cotton
cloth was relatively rare.
THE COTTON GIN
Eli Whitney, a Yale College
graduate who was tutoring in
the South, designed an
“engine” that would speed up
seed removal. This simple
machine was 50 times faster
than hand-picking the seeds
and soon spread throughout
the south, making cotton a
very profitable crop
By 1860, more than 400 million pounds of cotton poured into more than
1000 northern mills annually. But just who was working in these mills?
In 1820, half of the nation’s industrial workers (not just in the mills) were
UNDER 10 years of age.
There were few opportunities for women to be self-supporting (mostly
nursing, domestic service, and teaching) but eventually, significant
numbers of industrial workers were women. About 10 % of white women
worked for pay outside of the home in 1850 and about 20% of all women
had been employed at some point before they married.
THE LOWELL MILLS
The textile mills,
concentrated in New
England employed mostly
young farm girls who were
seeking to raise money
before they were married.
The Boston
Associates’ mill at Lowell, Massachusetts was a prime example. Girls
would work for a number of years in a rigidly controlled environment to
save up money for a dowry.
The mills were a model of
efficiency. The great water
wheels located in the
basements powered machinery
that processed raw cotton on the
first floor, spun it into thread on
the second, wove it
into cloth on the third, and finished and printed it on the fourth. These cotton
mills were the height of American inventive creativity: filled with machinery
built for the specific type of cloth being woven, and therefore relatively simple
to operate, the mill was itself a kind of giant machine.
CHANGES ON THE FARM
The growth of farms changed the look of America. Initially, farms were
self-sufficient for families but as transportation improved, northern trans-
Allegheny farms began to produce large amounts of corn. As they moved
westward in search of more land to cultivate, their wooden plows failed to
cut through the prairie sod.
In 1837, John Deere (IL) produced a steel plow that could handle the
tough sod. It was doubly effective because it could be pulled by horses
instead of oxen.
In the 1830s, Cyrus McCormick (VA) created the “cotton gin of the west” -
the mechanical mower-reaper.
The mower-reaper was a horse-drawn machine that cut wheat that was
ready to be harvested. It’s major advantage was it’s speed. It allowed one
man to do the work of five men working with sickles and scythes.
Farmers rushed to cultivate more land so that more product could be
brought to market. Essentially, wheat became a “cash crop” of the trans-
Allegheny west.
There was still one major disadvantage the farmers in the west had to face
- how to get their crops to market. They were still dependent on the North-
South river systems to get their goods to the eastern cities.
A transportation revolution was necessary...
THE TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTION
Three Stages:
Canals - man made waterways where horses could
tow flat-bottomed barges
Steamboats - ships that relied on the steam engine
for power and could be used on rivers, canals or
even on ocean-going ships
Railroads - first using horse power then shifting
toward steam powered propulsion
CANALS
DeWitt Clinton, governor of New
York, used state money to build
the first canal in America. It would
allow western farmers direct
access to bustling New York City
via both rivers and canals.
The Erie Canal promoted the development of routes for commercial
trade with, and rapid settlement of, the newly-opened regions of the old
Northwest, and the territories beyond the Mississippi.
The Appalachian mountain
chain presented a barrier
to continental
transportation: rivers east
of the mountains flowed
toward the Atlantic, and
those to the west flowed toward the Mississippi. The best location for a water
link was through the Mohawk river valley gap in upstate New
York, where a relatively short canal could link the port of New
York with the vast water system of the Great Lakes. Clinton
convinced the NY legislature to issue bonds for the
construction of the Erie Canal in 1818; by 1825 the 364-mile-
long canal was finished. Here at Lockport, a deep gorge
required a series of locks to move barges to the higher water
level.
This system of locks and canals that connected to navigable rivers allowed
farm produce from the west to reach consumers in NY by traveling only a few
hundred miles rather that a few thousand miles down the Mississippi River
and around Florida.
5 of the Erie Canal’s 84
locks were here at
Lockport, NY.
But the Erie Canal was not
the only one built.
Pennsylvania built a 395-
mile canal between
Philadelphia and
Pittsburgh; Ohio
developed a series of canals which linked the Ohio river to Lake Erie; in the
1840s, Illinois funded a canal to link Chicago and the Great Lakes with the
Illinois and Mississippi rivers. Although not as profitable as investors
wished, all of these canals played important roles in moving manufactured
goods and raw materials, and in linking regional economies within the
nation.
INTRODUCING STEAM POWER
The age of steam-powered travel
began in 1807 with the successful
voyage up the Hudson River of the
Clermont, built by Robert Fulton.
Commercially operated steamboat lines soon made round-trip shipping on
the nation’s rivers both faster and cheaper. The ship above, the “Walk-in-
the-Water,” operated on the Great Lakes in the 1820s and was typical of
early steam ships.
the Ohio and
Mississippi Rivers;
in St. Louis, 3,184
steamboat arrivals
were recorded in
1852
The number of steamboats in service continued to grow throughout
the 1830s and 1840s. Between 1811 and 1880, nearly 6,000
steamboats were built on
STEAM POWER ON RAILS
The need for more efficient systems to move goods over
land led to experiments with rails laid on a road bed. The
earliest rail cars were pulled by horses. But as others
experimented with steam power for boats, others worked to
harness steam to land transportation.
In 1830 the Tom Thumb
took part in a famous
race with a horse-drawn
rail car. Within a year the
Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad Company,
founded in 1827, had
switched from horse to
steam power.
The Dewitt
Clinton, built for
the Mohawk &
Hudson Railroad
by the West Point
Foundry, made
the 17-
mile trip from Albany to Schenectady on August 9, 1831 in the then-
unheard-of time of less than an hour.
KEY NOTES
Transportation improvements concentrated in the
North - roads, canals, and railroads
Factories concentrated in New England with textile
mills dominating Massachusetts
Western farms produced cash crops for the
commercial markets in the East
Cotton production transformed the South, increasing
the need for slaves to work the fields to harvest the
crop for overseas sale
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