ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN SOCIETY

Forging a National Economy

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.

INSTEAD OF…

TEXTILE MILLS USED

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

COTTON GIN

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.

EARLY PLOWS

PRAIRIE BREAKERS

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