forging the national economy...14 forging the national economy!"! 1790–1860 the progress of...

14

Forging the NationalEconomy

!"!

1790–1860

The progress of invention is really a threat [to monarchy]. Whenever I see a railroad I look for a republic.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1866

The new nation wen t bounding in to the n ine-teen th cen tury in a burst of m ovem ent. New

England Yankees, Pennsylvan ia farm ers, and south-ern yeom en all pushed west in search of cheap landand prodigious opportun ity, soon to be joined byvast num bers of im m igran ts from Europe, who alsom ade their way to the coun try’s fast-growing cities.But not on ly people were in m otion . Newly inven tedm achinery quickened the cultivation of crops andthe m anufacturing of goods, while workers foundthem selves laboring under new, m ore dem andingexpectations for their pace of work. Better roads,faster steam boats, farther-reaching canals, and ten -tacle-stretching railroads all helped m ove people,raw m aterials, and m anufactured goods from coastto coast and Gulf to Great Lakes by the m id-n ineteen th cen tury. The m om entum gave rise to am ore dynam ic, m arket-orien ted, national econom y.

The Westward Movement

The rise of Andrew Jackson , the first presiden t frombeyond the Appalachian Mountains, exem plifiedthe inexorable westward m arch of the Am ericanpeople. The West, with its raw fron tier, was the m osttypically Am erican part of Am erica. As Ralph WaldoEm erson wrote in 1844, “Europe stretches to theAlleghen ies; Am erica lies beyond.’’

The Republic was young, and so were the people —as late as 1850, half of Am ericans were under theage of thirty. They were also restless and energetic,seem ingly always on the m ove, and always westward.One “tall tale’’ of the frontier described chickens thatvoluntarily crossed their legs every spring, waiting tobe tied for the annual m ove west. By 1840 the “dem o-graphic center’’ of the Am erican population m ap had

287

crossed the Alleghenies. By the eve of the Civil War, ithad m arched across the Ohio River.

Legend portrays an arm y of m uscular axm entrium phan tly carving civilization out of the westernwoods. But in reality life was downright grim form ost p ioneer fam ilies. Poorly fed, ill-clad, housed inhastily erected shan ties (Abraham Lincoln’s fam ilylived for a year in a three-sided lean -to m ade ofbrush and sticks), they were perpetual victim s ofdisease, depression , and prem ature death . Aboveall, unbearable loneliness haun ted them , especiallythe wom en , who were often cut off from hum ancon tact, even their neighbors, for days or evenweeks, while confined to the cram ped orbit of a darkcabin in a secluded clearing. Breakdowns and evenm adness were all too frequen tly the “opportun ities’’that the fron tier offered to p ioneer wom en .

Fron tier life could be tough and crude for m enas well. No-holds-barred wrestling, which perm ittedsuch n iceties as the biting off of noses and the goug-ing out of eyes, was a popular en tertainm en t. Pio-neering Am ericans, m arooned by geography, wereoften ill in form ed, superstitious, provincial, andfiercely individualistic. Ralph Waldo Em erson’s pop-ular lecture-essay “Self-Reliance’’ struck a deeplyresponsive chord. Popular literature of the period

abounded with portraits of un ique, isolated figureslike Jam es Fen im ore Cooper’s heroic Natty Bum ppoand Herm an Melville’s restless Captain Ahab—justas Jackson ian politics aim ed to em ancipate thelone-wolf, en terprising businessperson . Yet even inth is heyday of “rugged individualism ,’’ there wereim portan t exceptions. Pioneers, in tasks clearlybeyond their own individual resources, would callupon their neighbors for logrolling and barn raisingand upon their governm ents for help in buildingin ternal im provem ents.

Shaping the Western Landscape

The westward m ovem ent also m olded the physicalenvironm ent. Pioneers in a hurry often exhaustedthe land in the tobacco regions and then pushed on ,leaving behind barren and rain -gutted fields. In theKen tucky bottom lands, cane as h igh as fifteen feetposed a seem ingly insurm oun table barrier to theplow. But settlers soon discovered that when thecane was burned off, European bluegrass thrived inthe charred canefields. “Ken tucky bluegrass,’’ as itwas som ewhat inaccurately called, m ade ideal pas-

288 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Econom y, 1790–1860

ture for livestock—and lured thousands m ore Am er-ican hom esteaders in to Ken tucky.

The Am erican West felt the pressure of civiliza-tion in additional ways. By the 1820s Am erican fur-trappers were setting their traplines all over the vastRocky Mountain region . The fur-trapping em pire wasbased on the “rendezvous’’ system . Each sum m er,traders ventured from St. Louis to a verdant RockyMountain valley, m ade cam p, and waited for thetrappers and Indians to arrive with beaver pelts toswap for m anufactured goods from the East. Thistrade thrived for som e two decades; by the tim ebeaver hats had gone out of fashion , the haplessbeaver had all but disappeared from the region . Tradein buffalo robes also flourished, leading eventually tothe virtually total annihilation of the m assive bisonherds that once blanketed the western prairies. Stillfarther west, on the Californ ia coast, other tradersbought up prodigious quantities of sea-otter pelts,driving the once-bountiful otters to the poin t of near-extinction . Som e historians have called this aggres-sive and often heedless exploitation of the West’snatural bounty “ecological im perialism .’’

Yet Am ericans in th is period also revered natureand adm ired its beauty. Indeed the sp irit of nation -

alism fed the growing appreciation of the un ique-ness of the Am erican wilderness. Searching for theUnited States’ distinctive characteristics in th isnation -conscious age, m any observers found thewild, unspoiled character of the land, especially inthe West, to be am ong the young nation’s defin ingattributes. Other coun tries m ight have im pressivem oun tains or sparkling rivers, but none had thepristine, natural beauty of Am erica, unspoiled byhum an hands and rem in iscen t of a tim e before thedawn of civilization . This attitude toward wildernessbecam e in tim e a kind of national m ystique, in spir-ing literature and pain ting, and even tually kindlinga powerful conservation m ovem ent.

George Catlin , a pain ter and student of NativeAm erican life, was am ong the first Am ericans toadvocate the preservation of nature as a deliberatenational policy. In 1832 he observed Sioux Indians inSouth Dakota recklessly slaughtering buffalo in orderto trade the an im als’ tongues for the white m an’swhiskey. Appalled at this spectacle and fearing forthe preservation of Indians and buffalo alike, Catlinproposed the creation of a national park. His idealater bore fruit with the creation of a national parksystem , beginning with Yellowstone Park in 1872.

Opening the West 289

The March of the Millions

As the Am erican people m oved west, they also m ultip lied at an am azing rate. By m idcen tury thepopulation was still doubling approxim ately everytwen ty-five years, as in fertile colon ial days.

By 1860 the original th irteen states had m orethan doubled in num ber: th irty-three stars gracedthe Am erican flag. The United States was the fourthm ost populous nation in the western world,exceeded on ly by three European coun tries—Rus-sia, France, and Austria.

Urban growth con tinued explosively. In 1790there had been on ly two Am erican cities that couldboast populations of twen ty thousand or m oresouls: Philadelphia and New York. By 1860 therewere forty-three, and about three hundred otherplaces claim ed over five thousand inhabitan tsapiece. New York was the m etropolis; New Orleans,the “Queen of the South’’; and Chicago, the swagger-ing lord of the Midwest, destined to be “hog butcherfor the world.’’

Such overrapid urban ization unfortunatelybrought undesirable by-products. It in tensified theproblem s of sm elly slum s, feeble street lighting,


1790

1800

1810

1820

1830

1840

1850

1860

Year

19

19

19

18

18

17

16

14

PercentNonwhite

3,172,000

4,306,000

5,862,000

7,867,000

10,537,000

14,196,000

19,553,000

26,922,000

White

757,000

1,002,000

1,378,000

1,772,000

2,329,000

2,874,000

3,639,000

4,521,000

Nonwhite

3,929,000

5,308,000

7,240,000

9,639,000

12,866,000

17,070,000

23,192,000

31,443,000

TotalPopulation

10M 20M 30M 40M

Populat ion Increase, Including Slaves and Indians, 1790–1860 Increasing European immigration and the closing of the slave trade gradually “whitened’’ the populationbeginning in 1820. This trend continued into the early twentieth century.

ME.VT.

N.H.MASS.

CONN.

IND.

MO.

R.I.

N.Y.

PA.Pittsburgh

Boston

N.J.

DEL.

New York

Washington MD.

VA.

N.C.

S.C.GA.ALA.

TENN.

MISS.

ARK.

MINN.

IOWA MICH.

ILL. ClevelandIndianapolis

CincinnatiLouisville W. VA.

KY.

WIS.

OHIO

ATLANTICOCEAN

39°

39°

1940196019801990

18601880

1900

1920

1790180018201840St. Louis

1970

Chicago

Westward Movement of Center of Populat ion,1790–1990 The triangles indicate the points atwhich a map of the United States weighted for thepopulation of the country in a given year wouldbalance. Note the remarkable equilibrium of thenorth-south pull from 1790 to about 1940, andthe strong spurt west and south thereafter. The1980 census revealed that the nation’s center ofpopulation had at last moved west of the MississippiRiver. The map also shows the slowing of thewestward movement between 1890 and 1940—the period of heaviest immigration from Europe,which ended up mainly in East Coast cities.

inadequate policing, im pure water, foul sewage,ravenous rats, and im proper garbage disposal. Hogspoked their scavenging snouts about m any citystreets as late as the 1840s. Boston in 1823 p ioneered a sewer system , and New York in 1842abandoned wells and cisterns for a p iped-in watersupply. The city thus unknowingly elim inated the breeding p laces of m any disease-carrying m osquitoes.

A con tinuing h igh birthrate accoun ted for m ostof the increase in population , but by the 1840s thetides of im m igration were adding hundreds of thou-sands m ore. Before th is decade im m igran ts hadbeen flowing in at a rate of sixty thousand a year, butsudden ly the in flux trip led in the 1840s and thenquadrupled in the 1850s. During these two feverish

decades, over a m illion and a half Irish , and nearlyas m any Germ ans, swarm ed down the gangplanks.Why did they com e?

The im m igran ts cam e partly because Europeseem ed to be runn ing out of room . The populationof the Old World m ore than doubled in the n ine-teen th cen tury, and Europe began to generate a

An In flux of Im m igran ts 291

A Germ an im m igran t living in Cincinnatiwrote to h is relatives in Germ any in 1847:“A lot of people come over here who were welloff in Germany but were ent iced to leavetheir fatherland by boast ful and imprudentlet ters from their friends or children andthought they could become rich in America.This deceives a lot of people, since what canthey do here? If they stay in the city they can only earn their bread at hard andunaccustomed labor. If they want to live inthe count ry and don’t have enough money tobuy a piece of land that is cleared and has ahouse then they have to set t le in the wildbush and have to work very hard to clear thet rees out of the way so they can sow andplant . But people who are healthy, st rong,and hard-working do pret ty well.’’

Irish and German Immigration by Decade,1830–1900

Years Irish Germans

1831–1840 207,381 152,4541841–1850 780,719 434,6261851–1860 914,119 951,6671861–1870 435,778 787,4681871–1880 436,871 718,1821881–1890 655,482 1,452,9701891–1900 388,416 505,152

TOTAL 3,818,766 5,000,519

seeth ing pool of apparen tly “surplus’’ people. Theywere disp laced and footloose in their hom elandsbefore they felt the tug of the Am erican m agnet.Indeed at least as m any people m oved about withinEurope as crossed the Atlan tic. Am erica benefitedfrom these people-churn ing changes but did not setthem all in m otion . Nor was the United States thesole beneficiary of the process: of the nearly 60 m il-lion people who abandoned Europe in the cen turyafter 1840, about 25 m illion wen t som ewhere otherthan the United States.

Yet Am erica still beckoned m ost strongly to thestruggling m asses of Europe, and the m ajority ofm igran ts headed for the “land of freedom andopportun ity.’’ There was freedom from aristocraticcaste and state church; there was abundan t oppor-tun ity to secure broad acres and better one’s condi-tion . Much-read letters sen t hom e by im m igran ts—“Am erica letters’’—often described in glowing term sthe richer life: low taxes, no com pulsory m ilitaryservice, and “three m eat m eals a day.’’ The in troduc-tion of transocean ic steam ships also m ean t that the im m igran ts could com e speedily, in a m atter often or twelve days instead of ten or twelve weeks. Onboard, they were still jam m ed in to unsan itary quar-ters, thus suffering an appalling death rate frominfectious diseases, but the n ightm are was m oreendurable because it was shorter.

The Emerald Isle Moves West

Ireland, already groan ing under the heavy hand ofBritish overlords, was prostrated in the m id-1840s. Aterrible rot attacked the potato crop, on which thepeople had becom e dangerously dependen t, andabout one-fourth of them were swept away by dis-ease and hunger. Starved bodies were found deadby the roadsides with grass in their m ouths. All told,about 2 m illion perished.

Tens of thousands of destitu te souls, fleeing theLand of Fam ine for the Land of Plen ty, flocked toAm erica in the “Black Forties.’’ Ireland’s great exporthas been population , and the Irish take their p lacebeside the Jews and the Africans as a dispersed people (see “Makers of Am erica: The Irish ,’’ pp. 294–295).

These uprooted newcom ers—too poor to m ovewest and buy the necessary land, livestock, andequipm en t—swarm ed in to the larger seaboard cit-

ies. Noteworthy were Boston and particularly NewYork, which rapidly becam e the largest Irish city inthe world. Before m any decades had passed, m orepeople of Hibern ian blood lived in Am erica than onthe “ould sod’’ of Erin’s Isle.

The luckless Irish im m igran ts received no red-carpet treatm en t. Forced to live in squalor, theywere rudely cram m ed in to the already-vile slum s.They were scorned by the older Am erican stock,especially “proper’’ Protestan t Boston ians, whoregarded the scruffy Catholic arrivals as a socialm enace. Barely literate “Biddies’’ (Bridgets) tookjobs as kitchen m aids. Broad-shouldered “Paddies’’(Patricks) were pushed in to p ick-and-shovel drud-gery on canals and railroads, where thousands lefttheir bones as victim s of disease and acciden talexplosions. It was said that an Irishm an lay buriedunder every railroad tie. As wage-depressing com -petitors for jobs, the Irish were hated by nativeworkers. “No Irish Need Apply’’ was a sign com -


Margaret McCarthy, a recen t arrival inAm erica, captured m uch of the com plexity ofthe im m igran t experience in a letter shewrote from New York to her fam ily in Irelandin 1850:“This is a good place and a good count ry, butthere is one thing that ’s ruining this place.The emigrants have not money enough totake them to the interior of the count ry,which obliges them to remain here in NewYork and the like places, which causes theless demand for labor and also the greatreduct ion in wages. For this reason I wouldadvise no one to come to America that wouldnot have some money after landing here thatwould enable them to go west in case theywould get no work to do here. But any manor woman without a family are fools thatwould not venture and come to this plent ifulcount ry where no man or woman everhungered or ever will. I can assure you thereare dangers upon dangers, but my friends,have courage and come all togethercourageously and bid adieu to that lovelyplace, the land of our birth.’’

m only posted at factory gates and was often abbre-viated to NINA. The Irish , for sim ilar reasons,fiercely resen ted the blacks, with whom they sharedsociety’s basem en t. Race riots between black andIrish dockworkers flared up in several port cities,and the Irish were generally cool to the abolition istcause.

The friendless “fam ine Irish’’ were forced tofend for them selves. The Ancien t Order of Hibern i-ans, a sem isecret society founded in Ireland to fightrapacious landlords, served in Am erica as a benevo-len t society, aiding the downtrodden . It also helpedto spawn the “Molly Maguires,’’ a shadowy Irishm iners’ un ion that rocked the Pennsylvan ia coaldistricts in the 1860s and 1870s.

The Irish tended to rem ain in low-skill occupa-tions but gradually im proved their lot, usually byacquiring m odest am oun ts of property. The educa-tion of children was cut short as fam ilies struggledto save m oney to purchase a hom e. But for hum bleIrish peasan ts, cruelly cast out of their hom eland,property ownership coun ted as a grand “success.’’

Politics quickly attracted these gregariousGaelic newcom ers. They soon began to gain con trolof powerful city m achines, notably New York’s Tam -m any Hall, and reaped the patronage rewards.Before long, beguilingly brogued Irishm en dom i-nated police departm en ts in m any big cities, wherethey now drove the “Paddy wagons’’ that had oncecarted their brawling forebears to jail.

Am erican politicians m ade haste to cultivatethe Irish vote, especially in the politically poten tstate of New York. Irish hatred of the British lostnoth ing in the transatlan tic transplan ting. As theIrish-Am ericans increased in num ber—nearly 2 m il-

lion arrived between 1830 and 1860—officials inWashington glim psed political gold in those em er-ald green h ills. Politicians often found it politicallyprofitable to fire verbal volleys at London—a proc-ess vulgarly known as “twisting the British lion’stail.’’

The German Forty-Eighters

The in flux of refugees from Germ any between 1830and 1860 was hardly less spectacular than that from Ireland. During these troubled years, over am illion and a half Germ ans stepped on to Am eri-can soil (see “Makers of Am erica: The Germ ans,’’ pp. 298–299). The bulk of them were uprooted farm -ers, disp laced by crop failures and other hardships.But a strong sprinkling were liberal political refu-gees. Saddened by the collapse of the dem ocra-tic revolutions of 1848, they had decided to leave the autocratic fatherland and flee to Am erica—thebrightest hope of dem ocracy.

Germ any’s loss was Am erica’s gain . ZealousGerm an liberals like the lanky and public-sp iritedCarl Schurz, a relen tless foe of slavery and publiccorruption , con tributed richly to the elevation ofAm erican political life.

Un like the Irish , m any of the Germ an ic new-com ers possessed a m odest am oun t of m aterialgoods. Most of them pushed out to the lush lands ofthe Middle West, notably Wisconsin , where they set-tled and established m odel farm s. Like the Irish ,they form ed an in fluen tial body of voters whomAm erican politicians sham elessly wooed. But theGerm ans were less poten t politically because theirstrength was m ore widely scattered.

The hand of Germ ans in shaping Am erican lifewas widely felt in still other ways. The Conestogawagon , the Ken tucky rifle, and the Christm as treewere all Germ an con tributions to Am erican culture.Germ ans had fled from the m ilitarism and wars ofEurope and consequen tly cam e to be a bulwark ofisolation ist sen tim en t in the upper Mississippi Val-ley. Better educated on the whole than the stum p-grubbing Am ericans, they warm ly supported publicschools, including their Kindergarten (children’sgarden). They likewise did m uch to stim ulate artand m usic. As outspoken cham pions of freedom ,they becam e relen tless enem ies of slavery duringthe fevered years before the Civil War.

Irish and Germ an Im m igration 293

An early-n ineteen th-cen tury French travelerrecorded h is im pressions of Am erica andIreland:“I have seen the Indian in his forest s and theNegro in his chains, and thought , as Icontemplated their pit iable condit ion, that Isaw the very ext reme of humanwretchedness; but I did not then know thecondit ion of unfortunate Ireland.’’

The Irish

For a generation , from 1793 to 1815, war ragedacross Europe. Ruinous as it was on the Con ti-

nen t, the fighting brought unpreceden ted pros-perity to the long-suffering landsm en of Ireland,groan ing since the twelfth cen tury under the yoke ofEnglish ru le. For as Europe’s fields lay fallow, irri-gated on ly by the blood of its farm ers, Ireland fedthe hungry arm ies that ravened for food as well asterritory. Irish farm ers p lan ted every available acre,in terspersing the lowly potato am ongst their fieldsof grain . With prices for food products ever m oun t-ing, tenan t farm ers reaped a tem porary respite fromtheir perpetual struggle to rem ain on the land. Mostlandlords were satisfied by the prosperity and sorelaxed their pressure on tenan ts; others, stym ied bythe absence of British police forces that had beenstripped of m anpower to fight in Europe, had littlem eans to en force eviction notices.

But the peace that brought solace to battle-scarred Europe changed all th is. After 1815 war-in flated wheat prices p lum m eted by half. Hard-pressed landlords resolved to leave vast fieldsunplan ted. Assisted now by a strengthened Britishconstabulary, they vowed to sweep the pesky peas-an ts from the retired acreage. Many of those forcedto leave sought work in England; som e wen t toAm erica. Then in 1845 a blight that ravaged thepotato crop sounded the final knell for the Irishpeasan try. The resultan t fam ine spread desolationthroughout the island. In five years, m ore than am illion people died. Another m illion sailed forAm erica.

Of the em igran ts, m ost were young and literatein English , the m ajority under th irty-five years old.Fam ilies typically pooled m oney to send strongyoung sons to the New World, where they wouldearn wages to pay the fares for those who waited at hom e. These “fam ine Irish’’ m ostly rem ained inthe port cities of the Northeast, abandon ing the

farm er’s life for the dingy congestion of the urbanm etropolis.

The disem barking Irish were poorly prepared forurban life. They found progress up the econom icladder painfully slow. Their work as dom estic ser-

294

vants or construction laborers was dull and arduous,and m ortality rates were astoundingly high. Escapefrom the potato fam ine hardly guaran teed a long lifeto an Irish-Am erican ; a gray-bearded Irishm an was arare sight in n ineteen th-cen tury Am erica. Most ofthe new arrivals toiled as day laborers. A fortunatefew owned boardinghouses or saloons, where theirdispirited countrym en sought solace in the bottle.For Irish-born wom en, opportun ities were still scar-cer; they worked m ain ly as dom estic servan ts.

But it was their Rom an Catholicism , m ore eventhan their penury or their perceived fondness foralcohol, that earned the Irish the distrust and resen t-m ent of their native-born , Protestan t Am ericanneighbors. The cornerstone of social and religiouslife for Irish im m igran ts was the parish. Worriesabout safeguarding their children’s faith inspired theconstruction of parish schools, financed by the pen-n ies of struggling working-class Irish paren ts.

If Ireland’s green fields scarcely equipped hersons and daughters for the scrap and scram ble of

econom ic life in Am erica’s cities, life in the OldCoun try nevertheless had instilled in them an apti-tude for politics. Irish-Catholic resistance againstcen turies of English-Anglican dom ination hadinstructed m any Old Coun try Irish in the ways ofm ass politics. That political experience readiedthem for the boss system of the political “m achines’’in Am erica’s northeastern cities. The boss’s localrepresen tatives m et each newcom er soon after he landed in Am erica. Asking on ly for votes, them achine supplied coal in win tertim e, food, andhelp with the law. Irish voters soon becam e a bul-wark of the Dem ocratic party, reliably supportingthe party of Jefferson and Jackson in cities like NewYork and Boston . As Irish-Am ericans like New York’s“Honest John’’ Kelly them selves becam e bosses,white-collar jobs in governm ent service opened upto the Irish . They becam e building inspectors, alder-m en , and even policem en—an aston ishing irony fora people driven from their hom eland by the n ight-sticks and bayonets of the British police.

295

Yet the Germ ans—often dubbed “dam nedDutchm en’’—were occasionally regarded with sus-p icion by their old-stock Am erican neighbors. Seek-ing to preserve their language and culture, theysom etim es settled in com pact “colon ies’’ and keptaloof from the surrounding com m unity. Accus-tom ed to the “Con tinen tal Sunday’’ and uncurbedby Puritan tradition , they m ade m erry on the Sab-bath and drank huge quan tities of an am ber bever-age called bier (beer), which dates its real popularityin Am erica to their com ing. Their Old World drink-ing habits, like those of the Irish , spurred advocatesof tem perance in the use of alcohol to redoubletheir reform efforts.

Flare-ups of Antiforeignism

The invasion by th is so-called im m igran t “rabble’’ inthe 1840s and 1850s in flam ed the prejudices ofAm erican “nativists.’’ They feared that these foreignhordes would outbreed, outvote, and overwhelmthe old “native’’ stock. Not on ly did the newcom erstake jobs from “native’’ Am ericans, but the bulk ofthe disp laced Irish were Rom an Catholics, as were asubstan tial m inority of the Germ ans. The Church ofRom e was still widely regarded by m any old-lineAm ericans as a “foreign’’ church; conven ts werecom m only referred to as “popish brothels.’’

Rom an Catholics were now on the m ove. Seek-ing to protect their children from Protestan t indoc-

trination in the public schools, they began in the1840s to construct an en tirely separate Catholic edu-cational system —an enorm ously expensive under-taking for a poor im m igran t com m unity, but onethat revealed the strength of its religious com m it-m ent. They had form ed a negligible m inority duringcolon ial days, and their num bers had increasedgradually. But with the enorm ous in flux of the Irishand Germ ans in the 1840s and 1850s, the Catholicsbecam e a powerful religious group. In 1840 they hadranked fifth , behind the Baptists, Methodists, Pres-byterians, and Congregationalists. By 1850, withsom e 1.8 m illion com m unican ts, they had boundedin to first p lace—a position they have never lost.

Older-stock Am ericans were alarm ed by thesem oun ting figures. They professed to believe that indue tim e the “alien riffraff’’ would “establish’’ theCatholic Church at the expense of Protestan tismand would in troduce “popish idols.’’ The noisierAm erican “nativists’’ rallied for political action . In1849 they form ed the Order of the Star-SpangledBanner, which soon developed in to the form idableAm erican , or “Know-Nothing,’’ party—a nam ederived from its secretiveness. “Nativists’’ agitatedfor rigid restrictions on im m igration and naturaliza-tion and for laws authorizing the deportation ofalien paupers. They also prom oted a lurid literatureof exposure, m uch of it pure fiction . The authors,som etim es posing as escaped nuns, described theshocking sins they im agined the cloisters con-cealed, including the secret burial of babies. One ofthese sensational books—Maria Monk’s Awfu l Dis-closures (1836)—sold over 300,000 copies.

Even uglier was occasional m ass violence. Asearly as 1834, a Catholic conven t near Boston wasburned by a howling m ob, and in ensuing years afew scattered attacks fell upon Catholic schools and


Strong an tiforeign ism was reflected in theplatform of the Am erican (Know-Nothing)party in 1856:“Americans must rule America; and to thisend, nat ive-born cit izens should be selectedfor all state, federal, or municipal offices ofgovernment employment , in preference tonaturalized cit izens.’’

churches. The m ost frightfu l flare-up occurred dur-ing 1844 in Philadelphia, where the Irish Catholicsfought back against the threats of the “nativists.’’The City of Brotherly Love did not quiet down un tiltwo Catholic churches had been burned and som ethirteen citizens had been killed and fifty woundedin several days of fighting. These outbursts of in tol-erance, though in frequen t and generally localized inthe larger cities, rem ain an unfortunate blot on therecord of Am erica’s treatm en t of m inority groups.

Im m igran ts were unden iably m aking Am erica am ore p luralistic society—one of the m ost ethn icallyand racially varied in the h istory of the world—andperhaps it was sm all wonder that cultural clasheswould occur. Why, in fact, were such episodes noteven m ore frequen t and m ore violen t? Part of theanswer lies in the robustness of the Am erican econ-om y. The vigorous growth of the econom y in theseyears both attracted im m igran ts in the first p laceand ensured that, once arrived, they could claimtheir share of Am erican wealth without jeopardizing

the wealth of others. Their hands and brains, in fact,helped fuel econom ic expansion . Im m igran ts andthe Am erican econom y, in short, needed oneanother. Without the newcom ers, a preponderan tlyagricultural Un ited States m ight well have beencondem ned to watch in envy as the Industrial Revo-lu tion swept through n ineteen th-cen tury Europe.

The March of Mechanization

A group of gifted British inven tors, beginn ing about1750, perfected a series of m achines for the m assproduction of textiles. This enslavem en t of steamm ultip lied the power of hum an m uscles som e ten -thousandfold and ushered in the m odern factorysystem —and with it, the so-called Industrial Revo-lu tion . It was accom pan ied by a no-less-spectaculartransform ation in agricultural production and inthe m ethods of transportation and com m unication .

Dawn of the Industrial Revolu tion 297

The Germans

Between 1820 and 1920, a sea of Germ ans lappedat Am erica’s shores and seeped in to its very

heartland. Their num bers surpassed those of anyother im m igran t group, even the prolific and often -detested Irish . Yet th is Germ an ic flood, un like itsGaelic equivalen t, stirred little pan ic in the hearts of native-born Am ericans because the Germ anslargely stayed to them selves, far from the m addingcrowds and nativist fears of northeastern cities.They prospered with aston ishing ease, buildingtowns in Wisconsin , agricultural colon ies in Texas,and religious com m unities in Pennsylvan ia. Theyadded a decidedly Germ an ic flavor to the headybrew of reform and com m unity building that so an i-m ated an tebellum Am erica.

These “Germ ans’’ actually hailed from m anydifferen t Old World lands, because there was no un i-fied nation of Germ any un til 1871, when the ru th-less and crafty Prussian Otto von Bism arckassem bled the Germ an state out of a m osaic ofindependen t principalities, kingdom s, and duchies.Un til that tim e, “Germ ans’’ cam e to Am erica as Prussians, Bavarians, Hessians, Rhinelanders,Pom eran ians, and Westphalians. They arrived at differen t tim es and for m any differen t reasons. Som e, particularly the so-called Forty-Eighters—therefugees from the abortive dem ocratic revolution of1848—hungered for the dem ocracy they had failedto win in Germ any. Others, particularly Jews,Pietists, and Anabaptist groups like the Am ish andthe Mennon ites, coveted religious freedom . Andthey cam e not on ly to Am erica. Like the Italianslater, m any Germ ans sought a new life in Brazil,Argen tina, and Chile. But the largest num ber ven-tured in to the United States.

Typical Germ an im m igran ts arrived with fatterpurses than their Irish coun terparts. Sm all land-owners or independen t artisans in their nativecoun tries, they did not have to settle for bottom -rung industrial em ploym ent in the grim y factoriesof the Northeast and instead could afford to push onto the open spaces of the Am erican West.

In Wisconsin these im m igran ts found a hom eaway from hom e, a p lace with a clim ate, soil, andgeography m uch like cen tral Europe’s. Milwaukee, acrude fron tier town before the Germ ans’ arrival,becam e the “Germ an Athens.’’ It boasted a Germ antheater, Germ an beer gardens, a Germ an volun teerfire com pany, and a Germ an-English academ y. Indistan t Texas, Germ an settlem en ts like New Braun-fels and Friedrichsburg flourished. When thefam ous landscape architect and writer FrederickLaw Olm sted stum bled upon these prairie outpostsof Teuton ic culture in 1857, he was shocked to be

298

“welcom ed by a figure in a blue flannel sh irt andpendan t beard, quoting Tacitus.’’ These Germ ancolon ies in the fron tier Southwest m ixed h igh Euro-pean elegance with Texas ruggedness. Olm steddescribed a visit to a Germ an household where thesettlers drank “coffee in tin cups upon Dresdensaucers’’ and sat upon “barrels for seats, to hear aBeethoven sym phony on the grand p iano.’’

These Germ an ic colon izers of Am erica’s heart-land also form ed religious com m unities, none m oredistinctive or durable than the Am ish settlem en ts ofPennsylvan ia, Indiana, and Ohio. The Am ish tooktheir nam e from their founder and leader, the SwissAnabaptist Jacob Am m an . Like other Anabaptistgroups, they shunned extravagance and reservedbaptism for adults, repudiating the tradition ofin fan t baptism practiced by m ost Europeans. Forth is they were persecuted, even im prisoned, inEurope. Seeking escape from their oppression ,som e five hundred Am ish ven tured to Pennsylvan iain the 1700s, followed by three thousand in the yearsfrom 1815 to 1865.

In Am erica they form ed enduring religiouscom m unities—isolated enclaves where they couldshield them selves from the corruption and the con-ven iences of the m odern world. To th is day the Germ an-speaking Am ish still travel in horse-drawncarriages and farm without heavy m achinery. Noelectric lights brighten the darkness that n ightlyenvelops their tidy farm houses; no ringing tele-phones punctuate the reveren t tranquility of theirm ealtim e prayer; no ornam en ts relieve the austeresim plicity of their black garm en ts. The Am ishrem ain a stalwart, traditional com m unity in a root-less, turbulen t society, a living testam en t to the religious ferm en t and social experim en ts of thean tebellum era.

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The factory system gradually spread fromBritain—“the world’s workshop’’—to other lands. Ittook a generation or so to reach western Europe,and then the United States. Why was the youthfulAm erican Republic, destined to be an industrialgian t, so slow to em brace the m achine?

For one th ing, virgin soil in Am erica was cheap.Land-starved descendan ts of land-starved peasan tswere not going to coop them selves up in sm elly fac-tories when they m ight till their own acres in God’sfresh air and sun light. Labor was therefore generallyscarce, and enough n im ble hands to operate them achines were hard to find—until im m igran tsbegan to pour ashore in the 1840s. Money for capitalinvestm en t, m oreover, was not p len tifu l in p ioneer-ing Am erica. Raw m aterials lay undeveloped, undis-covered, or unsuspected. The Republic was one dayto becom e the world’s leading coal producer, butm uch of the coal burned in colon ial tim es wasim ported all the way from Britain .

Just as labor was scarce, so were consum ers.The young coun try at first lacked a dom estic m arketlarge enough to m ake factory-scale m anufacturingprofitable.

Long-established British factories, which pro-vided cutthroat com petition , posed another prob-

lem . Their superiority was attested by the fact that afew unscrupulous Yankee m anufacturers, out tom ake a dishonest dollar, stam ped their own prod-ucts with fake English tradem arks.

The British also en joyed a m onopoly of the tex-tile m achinery, whose secrets they were anxious tohide from foreign com petitors. Parliam en t enactedlaws, in harm ony with the m ercan tile system , for-bidding the export of the m achines or the em igra-tion of m echan ics able to reproduce them .

Although a num ber of sm all m anufacturingen terprises existed in the early Republic, the fu tureindustrial colossus was still snoring. Not un til wellpast the m iddle of the n ineteen th cen tury did thevalue of the output of the factories exceed that ofthe farm s.

Whitney Ends the Fiber Famine

Sam uel Slater has been acclaim ed the “Father of theFactory System’’ in Am erica, and seldom can thepatern ity of a m ovem ent m ore properly be ascribedto one person . A skilled British m echan ic of twen ty-one, he was attracted by boun ties being offered toBritish workers fam iliar with the textile m achines.After m em orizing the p lans for the m achinery, heescaped in disguise to Am erica, where he won thebacking of Moses Brown, a Quaker capitalist inRhode Island. Laboriously reconstructing the essen -tial apparatus with the aid of a blacksm ith and a car-pen ter, he put in to operation in 1791 the firstefficien t Am erican m achinery for sp inn ing cottonthread.

The ravenous m echan ism was now ready, butwhere was the cotton fiber? Handpicking onepound of lin t from three pounds of seed was a fu llday’s work for one slave, and th is process was soexpensive that cotton cloth was relatively rare.

Another m echan ical gen ius, Massachusetts-born Eli Whitney, now m ade h is m ark. After gradu-


Exam ing the Evidence 301

The Invention of the Sewing Machine Histori-ans of technology exam ine not on ly the docum en-tary evidence of p lans and paten ts left behind byinven tors, but surviving m achines them selves. In1845, Elias Howe, a twen ty-six-year-old appren ticeto a Boston watchm aker inven ted a sewingm achine that could m ake two hundred and fiftystitches a m inute, five tim es what the swiftest handsewer could do. A year later Howe received apaten t for h is inven tion , but because the hand-cranked m achine could on ly stitch straight seam sfor a short distance before requiring resetting, ithad lim ited com m ercial appeal. Howe took h issewing m achine abroad where he worked withBritish m anufacturers to im prove it, and thenreturned to Am erica and com bined h is paten t withthose of other inven tors, including Isaac M. Singer.

Hundreds of thousands of sewing m achines wereproduced beginn ing in the 1850s for com m er-cial m anufacturing of cloth ing, books, shoes, andm any other products and also for hom e use. Thesewing m achine becam e the first widely adver-tised consum er product. Due to its h igh cost, theSinger com pany in troduced an installm en t buyingplan , which helped to p lace a sewing m achine in m ost m iddle-class households. Why was thesewing m achine able to find eager custom ers incom m ercial workshops and hom e sewing room salike? How m ight the sewing m achine havechanged other aspects of Am erican life, such aswork patterns, cloth ing styles, and retail selling?What other advances in technology m ight havebeen necessary for the inven tion of the sewingm achine?

ating from Yale, he journeyed to Georgia to serve asa private tu tor while preparing for the law. There hewas told that the poverty of the South would berelieved if som eone could on ly inven t a workabledevice for separating the seed from the short-stap lecotton fiber. With in ten days, in 1793, he built acrude m achine called the cotton gin (short forengine) that was fifty tim es m ore effective than thehandpicking process.

Few m achines have ever wrought so wondrous achange. The gin affected not only the history ofAm erica but that of the world. Alm ost overnight the raising of cotton becam e highly profitable,

and the South was tied hand and foot to the throne of King Cotton . Hum an bondage had been dying out, but the insatiable dem and for cotton rerivetedthe chains on the lim bs of the downtrodden southernblacks.

South and North both prospered. Slave-drivingplan ters cleared m ore acres for cotton , pushing theCotton Kingdom westward off the depleted tide-water plains, over the Piedm ont, and on to the blackloam bottom lands of Alabam a and Mississippi.Hum m ing gins poured out avalanches of snowy fiberfor the spindles of the Yankee m achines, though fordecades to com e the m ills of Britain bought the lion’sshare of southern cotton . The Am erican phase of theIndustrial Revolution , which first blossom ed in cot-ton textiles, was well on its way.

Factories at first flourished m ost actively in NewEngland, though they branched out in to the m orepopulous areas of New York, New Jersey, and Penn-sylvan ia. The South , increasingly wedded to the production of cotton , could boast of com parativelylittle m anufacturing. Its capital was bound up inslaves; its local consum ers for the m ost part weredesperately poor.

New England was singularly favored as anindustrial cen ter for several reasons. Its narrow beltof stony soil discouraged farm ing and hence m adem anufacturing m ore attractive than elsewhere. Arelatively dense population provided labor andaccessible m arkets; sh ipping brought in capital; andsnug seaports m ade easy the im port of raw m ateri-als and the export of the fin ished products. Finally,the rapid rivers—notably the Merrim ack in Massa-chusetts—provided abundan t water power to turnthe cogs of the m achines. By 1860 m ore than 400m illion pounds of southern cotton poured annuallyin to the gaping m aws of over a thousand m ills,m ostly in New England.

Marvels in Manufacturing

Am erica’s factories spread slowly un til about 1807,when there began the fateful sequence of theem bargo, non in tercourse, and the War of 1812.Stern necessity dictated the m anufacture of substi-tu tes for norm al im ports, while the stoppage ofEuropean com m erce was tem porarily ru inous toYankee shipping. Both capital and labor were drivenfrom the waves on to the factory floor, as New Eng-


land, in the striking phrase of John Randolph,exchanged the triden t for the distaff. Generousboun ties were offered by local authorities for hom e-grown goods, “Buy Am erican’’ and “Wear Am erican’’becam e popular slogans, and patriotism prom ptedthe wearing of baggy hom espun garm en ts. Presi-den t Madison donned som e at h is inauguration ,where he was said to have been a walking argum entfor the better processing of native wool.

But the m anufacturing boom let broke abruptlywith the peace of Ghen t in 1815. British com petitorsun loaded their dam m ed-up surpluses at ru inouslylow prices, and Am erican newspapers were so fu ll ofBritish advertisem en ts for goods on credit that littlespace was left for news. In one Rhode Island district,all 150 m ills were forced to close their doors, exceptthe original Slater p lan t. Responding to pained out-cries, Congress provided som e relief when it passedthe m ildly protective Tariff of 1816—am ong the ear-

liest political con tests to con trol the shape of theeconom y.

As the factory system flourished, it em bracednum erous other industries in addition to textiles.Prom inen t am ong them was the m anufacturing offirearm s, and here the wizardly Eli Whitney againappeared with an extraordinary con tribution . Frus-trated in h is earlier efforts to m onopolize the cottongin , he turned to the m ass production of m usketsfor the U.S. Arm y. Up to th is tim e, each part of afirearm had been hand-tooled, and if the trigger ofone broke, the trigger of another m ight or m ight notfit. About 1798 Whitney seized upon the idea of hav-ing m achines m ake each part, so that all the trig-gers, for exam ple, would be as m uch alike as thesuccessive im prin ts of a copperplate engraving.Journeying to Washington , he reportedly dism an-tled ten of h is new m uskets in the presence of skep-tical officials, scram bled the parts together, andthen quickly reassem bled ten differen t m uskets.

The princip le of in terchangeable parts waswidely adopted by 1850, and it u ltim ately becam ethe basis of m odern m ass-production , assem bly-line m ethods. It gave to the North the vast industrialp lan t that ensured m ilitary preponderance over theSouth . Iron ically, the Yankee Eli Whitney, by perfect-ing the cotton gin , gave slavery a renewed lease onlife, and perhaps m ade inevitable the Civil War. Atthe sam e tim e, by popularizing the princip le ofin terchangeable parts, Whitney helped factories toflourish in the North , giving the Union a decidedadvan tage when that showdown cam e.

The Upsurge of Manufacturing 303

One observer in 1836 published a newspaperaccoun t of conditions in som e of the NewEngland factories:“The operat ives work thirteen hours a day inthe summer t ime, and from daylight to darkin the winter. At half past four in themorning the factory bell rings, and at fivethe girls must be in the mills. . . . So fat igued. . . are numbers of girls that they go to bedsoon after receiving their evening meal, andendeavor by a comparat ively long sleep toresuscitate their weakened frames for thetoil of the coming day.’’

The sewing m achine, inven ted by Elias Howe in1846 and perfected by Isaac Singer, gave anotherstrong boost to northern industrialization . Thesewing m achine becam e the foundation of theready-m ade cloth ing industry, which took rootabout the tim e of the Civil War. It drove m any aseam stress from the shelter of the private hom e tothe factory, where, like a hum an robot, she tendedthe clattering m echan ism s.

Each m om entous new invention seem ed to stim -ulate still m ore im aginative inven tions. For thedecade ending in 1800, on ly 306 paten ts were regis-tered in Washington ; but the decade ending in 1860saw the am azing total of 28,000. Yet in 1838 the clerkof the Paten t Office had resigned in despair, com -plain ing that all worthwhile inven tions had beendiscovered.

Techn ical advances spurred equally im portan tchanges in the form and legal status of businessorgan izations. The princip le of lim ited liabilityaided the concen tration of capital by perm itting theindividual investor, in cases of legal claim s or bank-ruptcy, to risk no m ore than h is own share of thecorporation’s stock. Fifteen Boston fam ilies form edone of the earliest investm en t capital com pan ies,the Boston Associates. They even tually dom inatedthe textile, railroad, in surance, and banking busi-ness of Massachusetts. Laws of “free incorporation ,’’first passed in New York in 1848, m ean t that busi-nessm en could create corporations without apply-ing for individual charters from the legislature.

Sam uel F. B. Morse’s telegraph was am ong theinven tions that tightened the sinews of an increas-

ingly com plex business world. A distinguished butpoverty-stricken portrait pain ter, Morse finallysecured from Congress, to the accom pan im en t ofthe usual jeers, an appropriation of $30,000 to sup-port h is experim en t with “talking wires.’’ In 1844Morse strung a wire forty m iles from Washington toBaltim ore and tapped out the h istoric m essage,“What hath God wrought?’’ The inven tion broughtfam e and fortune to Morse, as he put distan tly sepa-rated people in alm ost in stan t com m unication withone another. By the eve of the Civil War, a web ofsinging wires spanned the con tinen t, revolution iz-ing news gathering, dip lom acy, and finance.

Workers and “Wage Slaves’’

One ugly outgrowth of the factory system was anincreasingly acute labor problem . Hitherto m anu-facturing had been done in the hom e, or in thesm all shop, where the m aster craftsm an and h isappren tice, rubbing elbows at the sam e bench,could m ain tain an in tim ate and friendly relation -ship. The industrial revolution subm erged th is per-sonal association in the im personal ownership ofstuffy factories in “spindle cities.’’ Around these, liketum ors, the slum like hovels of the “wage slaves’’tended to cluster.

Clearly the early factory system did not showerits benefits even ly on all. While m any owners waxedfat, workingpeople often wasted away at their work-benches. Hours were long, wages were low, andm eals were skim py and hastily gulped. Workerswere forced to toil in unsan itary buildings that werepoorly ven tilated, lighted, and heated. They wereforbidden by law to form labor un ions to raisewages, for such cooperative activity was regarded asa crim inal conspiracy. Not surprisingly, on ly twen ty-four recorded strikes occurred before 1835.

Especially vulnerable to exploitation were childworkers. In 1820 half the nation’s industrial toilerswere children under ten years of age. Victim s of fac-tory labor, m any children were m en tally blighted,em otionally starved, physically stun ted, and evenbrutally whipped in special “whipping room s.’’ InSam uel Slater’s m ill of 1791, the first m achine ten -ders were seven boys and two girls, all under twelveyears of age.

By con trast, the lot of m ost adult wage workersim proved m arkedly in the 1820s and 1830s. In the


Said Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) in alecture in 1859,“The patent system secured to the inventorfor a limited t ime exclusive use of hisinvent ion, and thereby added the fuel ofinterest to the fire of genius in the discoveryand product ion of new and useful things.’’

Ten years earlier Lincoln had received paten tno. 6469 for a schem e to buoy steam boatsover shoals. It was never practically applied,bu t he rem ains the on ly presiden t ever tohave secured a paten t.

fu ll flush of Jackson ian dem ocracy, m any of thestates gran ted the laboring m an the vote. Brandish-ing the ballot, he first strove to lighten h is burdenthrough workingm en’s parties. Even tually m anyworkers gave their loyalty to the Dem ocratic party ofAndrew Jackson , whose attack on the Bank of theUnited States and against all form s of “privilege”reflected their anxieties about the em erging capital-ist econom y. In addition to such goals as the ten -hour day, h igher wages, and tolerable workingconditions, they dem anded public education fortheir children and an end to the inhum an practiceof im prisonm ent for debt.

Em ployers, abhorring the rise of the “rabble’’ inpolitics, fought the ten -hour day to the last ditch .They argued that reduced hours would lessen pro-duction , increase costs, and dem oralize the work-ers. Laborers would have so m uch leisure tim e thatthe Devil would lead them in to m ischief. A red-letter gain was at length registered for labor in 1840,when Presiden t Van Buren established the ten -hourday for federal em ployees on public works. In ensu-ing years a num ber of states gradually fell in to lineby reducing the hours of workingpeople.

Day laborers at last learned that their strongestweapon was to lay down their tools, even at the riskof prosecution under the law. Dozens of strikeserupted in the 1830s and 1840s, m ost of them forhigher wages, som e for the ten -hour day, and a fewfor such unusual goals as the right to sm oke on thejob. The workers usually lost m ore strikes than theywon , for the em ployer could resort to such tactics asthe im porting of strikebreakers—often derisivelycalled “scabs’’ or “rats,’’ and often fresh off the boatfrom the Old World. Labor long raised its voiceagainst the un restricted inpouring of wage-depressing and un ion-busting im m igran t workers.

Labor’s early and pain ful efforts at organ izationhad netted som e 300,000 trade un ion ists by 1830.But such encouraging gains were dashed on therocks of hard tim es following the severe depressionof 1837. As unem ploym ent spread, un ion m em ber-ship shriveled. Yet toilers won a prom ising legal vic-tory in 1842. The suprem e court of Massachusettsru led in the case of Com m onwealth v. Hunt thatlabor un ions were not illegal conspiracies, providedthat their m ethods were “honorable and peaceful.’’This en lightened decision did not legalize the strike

Industrial Laborers 305

overn ight throughout the coun try, but it was a sig-n ifican t signpost of the tim es. Trade un ions still hada rocky row to hoe, stretching ahead for about a cen -tury, before they could m eet m anagem ent on rela-tively even term s.

Women and the Economy

Wom en were also sucked in to the clanging m echa-n ism of factory production . Farm wom en and girlshad an im portan t p lace in the preindustrial econ-om y, sp inn ing yarn , weaving cloth , and m aking can-dles, soap, butter, and cheese. New factories such asthe textile m ills of New England underm ined theseactivities, cranking out m anufactured goods m uchfaster than they could be m ade by hand at hom e. Yetthese sam e factories offered em ploym ent to thevery young wom en whose work they were disp lac-ing. Factory jobs prom ised greater econom ic inde-pendence for wom en , as well as the m eans to buythe m anufactured products of the new m arketeconom y.

“Factory girls” typically toiled six days a week,earn ing a p ittance for dreary, lim b-num bing, ear-sp litting stin ts of twelve or th irteen hours—“fromdark to dark.’’ The Boston Associates, nonetheless,proudly poin ted to their textile m ill at Lowell, Mass-achusetts, as a showplace factory. The workers were

virtually all New England farm girls, carefully super-vised on and off the job by watchful m atrons.Escorted regularly to church from their com panyboardinghouses and forbidden to form un ions, theyhad few opportun ities to share dissatisfactions overtheir grueling working conditions.

But factory jobs of any kind were still unusual for wom en. Opportun ities for wom en to be eco-nom ically self-supporting were scarce and consistedm ain ly of nursing, dom estic service, and especiallyteaching. The dedicated Catharine Beecher, unm ar-ried daughter of a fam ous preacher and sister of Har-riet Beecher Stowe, tirelessly urged wom en to en terthe teaching profession . She even tually succeededbeyond her dream s, as m en left teaching for otherlines of work and schoolteaching becam e a thor-oughly “fem in ized’’ occupation . Other work “oppor-tun ities’’ for wom en beckoned in household service.Perhaps one white fam ily in ten em ployed servan tsat m idcen tury, m ost of whom were poor white,im m igran t, or black wom en. About 10 percen t ofwhite wom en were working for pay outside their


Violence broke ou t along the New Yorkwaterfron t in 1836 when laborers strik ing forhigher wages attacked “scabs.’’Philip Hone’sdiary records:“The Mayor, who acts with vigour andfirmness, ordered out the t roops, who arenow on duty with loaded arms. . . . Thesemeasures have restored order for thepresent , but I fear the elements of disorderare at work; the bands of Irish and otherforeigners, inst igated by the mischievouscouncils of the t rades-union and othercombinat ions of discontented men, areacquiring st rength and importance which will ere long be difficult to quell.’’

A wom an worker in the Lowell m ills wrote afriend in 1844:“You wish to know minutely of our hours oflabor. We go in [to the mill] at five o’clock; atseven we come out to breakfast ; at half-pastseven we return to our work, and stay unt ilhalf-past twelve. At one, or quarter-past onefour months in the year, we return to ourwork, and stay unt il seven at night . Then theevening is all our own, which is more thansome laboring girls can say, who thinknothing is more tedious than a factory life.’’

Another worker wrote in 1845:“I am here, among st rangers—a factory girl—yes, a factory girl; that name which isthought so degrading by many, though, int ruth, I neither see nor feel it s degradat ion.But here I am. I toil day after day in the noisymill. When the bell calls I must go: and mustI always stay here, and spend my days withinthese pent -up walls, with this ceaseless dinmy only music?’’

own hom es in 1850, and estim ates are that about 20percen t of all wom en had been em ployed at som etim e prior to m arriage.

The vast m ajority of workingwom en were single.Upon m arriage, they left their paying jobs and tookup their new work (without wages) as wives andm others. In the hom e they were enshrined in a “cultof dom esticity,’’ a widespread cultural creed that glo-rified the custom ary functions of the hom em aker.From their pedestal, m arried wom en com m andedim m ense m oral power, and they increasingly m adedecisions that altered the character of the fam ilyitself.

Wom en’s changing roles and the spreading Industrial Revolution brought som e im portan tchanges in the life of the n ineteen th-cen turyhom e—the traditional “wom en’s sphere.’’ Love, notparen tal “arrangem ent,’’ m ore and m ore frequen tlydeterm ined the choice of a spouse—yet paren tsoften retained the power of veto. Fam ilies thus

becam e m ore closely kn it and affectionate, provid-ing the em otional refuge that m ade the threaten ingim personality of big-city industrialism tolerable tom any people.

Most striking, fam ilies grew sm aller. The aver-age household had nearly six m em bers at the end ofthe eighteen th cen tury but fewer than five m em bersa cen tury later. The “fertility rate,’’ or num ber ofbirths am ong wom en age fourteen to forty-five,dropped sharply am ong white wom en in the yearsafter the Revolution and, in the course of the n ine-teen th cen tury as a whole, fell by half. Birth con trolwas still a taboo topic for polite conversation , andcon traceptive technology was prim itive, but clearlysom e form of fam ily lim itation was being practicedquietly and effectively in coun tless fam ilies, ruraland urban alike. Wom en undoubtedly p layed a largepart—perhaps the leading part—in decisions tohave fewer children . This newly assertive role forwom en has been called “dom estic fem in ism ,’’

Working Wom en 307

because it sign ified the growing power and inde-pendence of wom en , even while they rem ainedwrapped in the “cult of dom esticity.’’

Sm aller fam ilies, in turn , m ean t child-cen teredfam ilies, since where children are fewer, paren ts canlavish m ore care on them individually. Europeanvisitors to the Un ited States in the n ineteen th cen -tury often com plained about the un ruly behavior ofAm erican “brats.’’ But though Am erican paren tsm ay have increasingly spared the rod, they did notspoil their children . Lessons were en forced by pun ishm en ts other than the h ickory stick. When the daughter of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe

neglected to do her hom ework, her m other sen t herfrom the dinner table and gave her “on ly bread andwater in her own apartm en t.’’ What Europeans sawas perm issiveness was in reality the consequence ofan em erging new idea of child-rearing, in which thechild’s will was not to be sim ply broken , but rathershaped.

In the little republic of the fam ily, as in theRepublic at large, good citizens were raised not to bem eekly obedien t to authority, but to be independ-en t individuals who could m ake their own decisionson the basis of in ternalized m oral standards. Thusthe outlines of the “m odern’’ fam ily were clear bym idcen tury: it was sm all, affectionate, and child-cen tered, and it provided a special arena for the tal-en ts of wom en . Fem in ists of a later day m ight decrythe stifling atm osphere of the n ineteen th-cen turyhom e, but to m any wom en of the tim e, it seem ed abig step upward from the conditions of grindingtoil—often alongside m en in the fields—in whichtheir m others had lived.

Western Farmers Reap a Revolution in the Fields

As sm oke-belching factories altered the eastern sky-line, flourish ing farm s were changing the face of the West. The trans-Allegheny region—especially theOhio-Indiana-Illinois tier—was fast becom ing thenation’s breadbasket. Before long it would becom e agranary to the world.

Pioneer fam ilies first hacked a clearing out of theforest and then plan ted their painfully furrowedfields to corn . The yellow grain was am azingly versa-tile. It could be fed to hogs (“corn on the hoof’’) ordistilled in to liquor (“corn in the bottle’’). Both theseproducts could be transported m ore easily than thebulky grain itself, and they becam e the early westernfarm er’s staple m arket item s. So m any hogs werebutchered, traded, or shipped at Cincinnati that thecity was known as the “Porkopolis’’ of the West.

Most western produce was at first floated downthe Ohio-Mississippi River system , to feed the lustyappetite of the boom ing Cotton Kingdom . But west-ern farm ers were as hungry for profits as southernslaves and p lan ters were for food. These tillers,spurred on by the easy availability of seem inglyboundless acres, sought ways to bring m ore andm ore land in to cultivation .


Ingen ious inven tors cam e to their aid. One ofthe first obstacles that frustrated the farm ers was thethickly m atted soil of the West, which snagged andsnapped fragile wooden plows. John Deere of Illinoisin 1837 finally produced a steel p low that broke thevirgin soil. Sharp and effective, it was also lightenough to be pulled by horses, rather than oxen .

In the 1830s Virgin ia-born Cyrus McCorm ickcon tributed the m ost wondrous con traption of all: am echan ical m ower-reaper. The clattering cogs ofMcCorm ick’s horse-drawn m achine were to thewestern farm ers what the cotton gin was to thesouthern p lan ters. Seated on h is red-chariot reaper,a single husbandm an could do the work of five m enwith sickles and scythes.

No other Am erican inven tion cut so wide aswath . It m ade am bitious capitalists out of hum bleplowm en , who now scram bled for m ore acres onwhich to p lan t m ore fields of billowing wheat. Sub-sistence farm ing gave way to production for them arket, as large-scale (“extensive’’), specialized,cash-crop agriculture cam e to dom inate the trans-Allegheny West. With it followed m oun ting indebt-edness, as farm ers bought m ore land and m orem achinery to work it. Soon hustling farm er-businesspeople were annually harvesting a largercrop than the South—which was becom ing self-

sufficien t in food production—could devour. Theybegan to dream of m arkets elsewhere—in them ushroom ing factory towns of the East or acrossthe faraway Atlan tic. But they were still largely land-locked. Com m erce m oved north and south on theriver system s. Before it could begin to m ove east-west in bulk, a transportation revolution wouldhave to occur.

Highways and Steamboats

In 1789, when the Constitu tion was launched, prim -itive m ethods of travel were still in use. Waterbornecom m erce, whether along the coast or on the rivers,was slow, uncertain , and often dangerous. Stage-coaches and wagons lurched over bone-shakingroads. Passengers would be routed out to lay nearbyfence rails across m uddy stretches, and occasionallyhorses would drown in m uddy p its while wagonssank slowly out of sight.

Cheap and efficien t carriers were im perative ifraw m aterials were to be transported to factoriesand if fin ished products were to be delivered to con-sum ers. On Decem ber 3, 1803, a firm in Providence,Rhode Island, sen t a sh ipm en t of yarn to a poin t

Advances in Agricu lture 309

sixty m iles away, notifying the purchaser that theconsignm ent could be expected to arrive in “thecourse of the win ter.’’

A prom ising im provem ent cam e in the 1790s,when a private com pany com pleted the LancasterTurnpike in Pennsylvan ia. It was a broad, hard-surfaced h ighway that thrust sixty-two m iles west-ward from Philadelphia to Lancaster. As driversapproached the tollgate, they were confron ted witha barrier of sharp p ikes, which were turned asidewhen they paid their toll. Hence the term tu rnpike.

The Lancaster Turnpike proved to be a h ighlysuccessful ven ture, return ing as h igh as 15 percen tannual dividends to its stockholders. It attracted a rich trade to Philadelphia and touched off a turnpike-building boom that lasted about twen tyyears. It also stim ulated western developm ent. Theturnpikes beckoned to the canvas-covered Con-estoga wagons, whose creakings heralded a west-ward advance that would know no real retreat.

Western road building, always expensive,encoun tered m any obstacles. One pesky roadblockwas the noisy states’ righters, who opposed federalaid to local projects. Eastern states also protestedagainst being bled of their populations by the westward-reaching arteries.

Westerners scored a notable trium ph in 1811when the federal governm ent began to construct

the elongated National Road, or Cum berland Road.This h ighway ultim ately stretched from Cum ber-land, in western Maryland, to Vandalia, in Illinois, adistance of 591 m iles. The War of 1812 in terruptedconstruction , and states’ rights shackles on in ternalim provem ents ham pered federal gran ts. But thethoroughfare was belatedly brought to its destina-tion in 1852 by a com bination of aid from the statesand the federal governm ent.

The steam boat craze, which overlapped theturnpike craze, was touched off by an am bitiouspain ter-engineer nam ed Robert Fulton . He installeda powerful steam engine in a vessel that posteritycam e to know as the Clerm ont but that a dubiouspublic dubbed “Fulton’s Folly.’’ On a h istoric day in1807, the quain t little sh ip, belching sparks from itssingle sm okestack, churned steadily from New YorkCity up the Hudson River toward Albany. It m adethe run of 150 m iles in 32 hours.

The success of the steam boat was sensational.People could now in large degree defy wind, wave,tide, and downstream curren t. With in a few years,Fulton had changed all of Am erica’s navigablestream s in to two-way arteries, thereby doublingtheir carrying capacity. Hitherto keelboats had beenpushed up the Mississippi, with quivering poles andraucous profan ity, at less than one m ile an hour—aprocess that was prohibitively expensive. Now the


steam boats could churn rapidly against the curren t,u ltim ately attain ing speeds in excess of ten m iles anhour. The m ighty Mississippi had m et its m aster.

By 1820 there were som e sixty steam boats on theMississippi and its tributaries; by 1860 about onethousand, som e of them luxurious river palaces.Keen rivalry am ong the swift and gaudy steam ers ledto m em orable races. Excited passengers would urgethe captain to pile on wood at the risk of bursting theboilers, which all too often exploded, with tragicresults for the floating firetraps.

Chugging steam boats p layed a vital role in theopen ing of the West and South , both of which wererichly endowed with navigable rivers. Like bunchesof grapes on a vine, population clustered along thebanks of the broad-flowing stream s. Cotton growersand other farm ers m ade haste to take up and turnover the now-profitable virgin soil. Not on ly couldthey float their produce out to m arket, but, hardlyless im portan t, they could sh ip in at low cost their shoes, hardware, and other m anufacturednecessities.

The Transportation Revolu tion 311

St. Louis

Indianapolis Springfield

Baltimore

LancasterWheeling

Terre HauteColumbus

PhiladelphiaCumberland

Vandalia

IOWA

WIS.

MO.

ILL.IND.

MICH.

OHIO

KY.

VA.MD.

N.J.

DEL.

N.Y.

PA.

Miss

issippi

R.

OhioR.

Susquehanna R.

Delaware R.

Cumberland RoadMain connectionsLancaster Turnpike

Cumberland (Nat ional) Roadand Main Connect ionsNote also the Lancaster Turnpike.

“Clinton’s Big Ditch’’in New York

A canal-cutting craze paralleled the boom in turn -pikes and steam boats. A few canals had been builtaround falls and elsewhere in colon ial days, butam bitious projects lay in the fu ture. ResourcefulNew Yorkers, cut off from federal aid by states’righters, them selves dug the Erie Canal, linking theGreat Lakes with the Hudson River. They wereblessed with the driving leadership of GovernorDeWitt Clin ton , whose grandiose project was scoff-ingly called “Clin ton’s Big Ditch’’ or “the Governor’sGutter.’’

Begun in 1817, the canal even tually ribboned363 m iles. On its com pletion in 1825, a garlandedcanal boat glided from Buffalo, on Lake Erie, to theHudson River and on to New York harbor. There,with colorful cerem ony, Governor Clin ton em ptieda cask of water from the lake to sym bolize “the m ar-riage of the waters.’’

The water from Clin ton’s keg baptized theEm pire State. Mule-drawn passengers and bulkyfreight could now be handled with thrift and dis-patch , at the dizzy speed of five m iles an hour. Thecost of sh ipping a ton of grain from Buffalo to NewYork City fell from $100 to $5, and the tim e of transitfrom about twen ty days to six.

Ever-widen ing econom ic ripples followed thecom pletion of the Erie Canal. The value of landalong the route skyrocketed, and new cities—suchas Rochester and Syracuse—blossom ed. Industry inthe state boom ed. The new profitability of farm ingin the Old Northwest—notably in Ohio, Michigan ,Indiana, and Illinois—attracted thousands of Euro-pean im m igran ts to the unaxed and un taxed landsnow available. Flotillas of steam ships soon p lied the Great Lakes, connecting with canal barges atBuffalo. In terior waterside villages like Cleveland,Detroit, and Chicago exploded in to m ighty cities.

Other profound econom ic and political changesfollowed the canal’s com pletion . The price of pota-toes in New York City was cut in half, and m anydispirited New England farm ers, no longer able toface the ru inous com petition , abandoned theirrocky holdings and wen t elsewhere. Som e becam em ill hands, thus speeding the industrialization ofAm erica. Others, finding it easy to go west over theErie Canal, took up new farm land south of the GreatLakes, where they were joined by thousands of NewYorkers and other northerners. Still others sh ifted tofru it, vegetable, and dairy farm ing. The transfor-m ations in the Northeast—canal consequences—showed how long-established local m arket struc-tures could be swam ped by the em erging behem othof a con tinen tal econom y.


Erie Canal and Main Branches The Erie Canal system, and others like it, tapped thefabulous agricultural potential of the Midwest, whilecanal construction and maintenance providedemployment for displaced eastern farmers squeezedoff the land by competition from their moreproductive midwestern cousins. The transportationrevolution thus simultaneously expanded the nation’sacreage under cultivation and speeded the shift of thework force from agricultural to manufacturing and“service’’ occupations. In 1820 more than three-quarters of American workers labored on farms; by1850 only a little more than half of them were soemployed. (Also see the map on the top of page 313.)

1. Genesee Valley Canal2. Oswego Canal3. Black River Canal4. Chenango Canal5. Champlain Canal

C A N A D A

Erie Canal

Lake Ontario

Lake Champlain

Niagara Falls Mohawk R.

Hud

son

R.

Lake ErieSchenectady Troy

Albany

UticaRome

Syracuse

Carthage

LockportBuffalo

Olean

Oswego

Binghamton

Rochester

New York

1

2

3

4

5

N.J.

CONN.

MASS.

VT.

NEW YORK

PENNSYLVANIA

The Iron Horse

The m ost sign ifican t con tribution to the develop-m en t of such an econom y proved to be the railroad.It was fast, reliable, cheaper than canals to con-struct, and not frozen over in win ter. Able to goalm ost anywhere, even through the Allegheny bar-rier, it defied terrain and weather. The first railroadappeared in the Un ited States in 1828. By 1860, on lyth irty-two years later, the Un ited States boastedth irty thousand m iles of railroad track, three-fourths of it in the rapidly industrializing North .

At first the railroad faced strong oppositionfrom vested in terests, especially canal backers. Anx-ious to protect its investm en t in the Erie Canal, theNew York legislature in 1833 prohibited the railroadsfrom carrying freight—at least tem porarily. Earlyrailroads were also considered a dangerous publicm enace, for flying sparks could set fire to nearbyhaystacks and houses, and appalling railway acci-den ts could turn the wooden “m in iature hells’’ in toflam ing funeral pyres for their riders.

Railroad p ioneers had to overcom e other obsta-cles as well. Brakes were so feeble that the engineerm ight m iss the station twice, both arriving andbacking up. Arrivals and departures were con jec-tural, and num erous differences in gauge (the dis-tance between the rails) m ean t frequen t changes of

Canals and Railroads 313

Erie CanalDelaware and Raritan CanalPennsylvania CanalOhio and Erie Canal

(Under construction)Chesapeake and Ohio CanalWabash and Erie CanalMiami and Erie Canal

Lake Huron

Lake

Mich

igan

Lake Erie

Lake Ontario

Toledo

Evansville

Portsmouth

Cincinnati

New YorkNew Brunswick

Baltimore

Washington

Trenton

AlbanyTroy

Buffalo

PittsburghCumberland

Cleveland

Columbia Philadelphia

ATLANTICOCEANOhi

o R.

MASS.

R.I.

MAINEVT.

NEW YORK

N.J.

CONN.

DEL.

PENNSYLVANIA

VIRGINIA

MD.

WIS.

ILL.OHIO

INDIANA

MICHIGAN

N.H.

Principal Canals in 1840 Note that the canals mainly facilitatedeast-west traffic, especially along thegreat Lake Erie artery. No comparablenetwork of canals existed in the South—a disparity that helps to explain northernsuperiority in the Civil War that cametwo decades later.

Railroads, 1850

Houston New Orleans

Jacksonville

SavannahCharleston

Jackson

Memphis

Nashville

Louisville

Cincinnati

St. Louis

St. Joseph

Chicago

Detroit

Pittsburgh

Richmond

Washington,D.C.

PhiladelphiaNew York

Boston

BRITISH NORTH AMERICA (CANADA)

Railroads built 1850 – 1860

The Railroad Revolut ion Note the explosion of new railroad construction in the 1850sand its heavy concentration in the North.

trains for passengers. In 1840 there were seventransfers between Philadelphia and Charleston . But gauges gradually becam e standardized, betterbrakes did brake, safety devices were adopted, andthe Pullm an “sleeping palace’’ was in troduced in1859. Am erica at long last was being bound togetherwith braces of iron , later to be m ade of steel.

Cables, Clippers, and Pony Riders

Other form s of transportation and com m unicationwere binding together the Un ited States and theworld. A crucial developm ent cam e in 1858 whenCyrus Field, called “the greatest wire puller in h is-tory,’’ finally stretched a cable under the deep NorthAtlan tic waters from Newfoundland to Ireland.

Although th is in itial cable wen t dead after threeweeks of public rejoicing, a heavier cable laid in1866 perm anen tly linked the Am erican and Euro-pean con tinen ts.

The United States m erchan t m arine encoun-tered rough sailing during m uch of the early n ine-teen th cen tury. Am erican vessels had beenrepeatedly laid up by the em bargo, the War of 1812,and the pan ics of 1819 and 1837. Am erican navaldesigners m ade few con tributions to m aritim eprogress. A p ioneer Am erican steam er, the Savan-nah, had crept across the Atlan tic in 1819, but itused sail m ost of the tim e and was pursued for a dayby a British captain who thought it afire.

In the 1840s and 1850s, a golden age dawned for Am erican shipping. Yankee naval yards, notablyDonald McKay’s at Boston , began to send down theways sleek new craft called clipper sh ips. Long, nar-


row, and m ajestic, they glided across the sea undertowering m asts and clouds of canvas. In a fairbreeze, they could outrun any steam er.

The stately clippers sacrificed cargo space forspeed, and their captains m ade killings by haulinghigh-value cargoes in record tim es. They wrestedm uch of the tea-carrying trade between the Far Eastand Britain from their slower-sailing British com -petitors, and they sped thousands of im patien tadven turers to the goldfields of Californ ia and Australia.

But the hour of glory for the clipper was rela-tively brief. On the eve of the Civil War, the Britishhad clearly won the world race for m aritim e ascen-dancy with their iron tram p steam ers (“teakettles’’).Although slower and less rom an tic than the clipper,these vessels were steadier, room ier, m ore reliable,and hence m ore profitable.

No story of rap id Am erican com m unicationwould be com plete without including the Far West. By 1858 horse-drawn overland stagecoaches,im m ortalized by Mark Twain’s Roughing It, were

a fam iliar sight. Their dusty tracks stretched fromthe bank of the m uddy Missouri River clear to Californ ia.

Even m ore dram atic was the Pony Express,established in 1860 to carry m ail speedily the twothousand lonely m iles from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacram en to, Californ ia. Daring, lightweight rid-ers, leaping on to wiry pon ies saddled at stations

Com m unication and Trade 315

As late as 1877, stagecoach passengers wereadvised in prin t,“Never shoot on the road as the noise mightfrighten the horses. . . . Don’t point outwhere murders have been commit ted,especially if there are women passengers. . . .Expect annoyances, discomfort , and somehardships.’’

approxim ately ten m iles apart, could m ake the tripin an am azing ten days. These unarm ed horsem engalloped on , sum m er or win ter, day or n ight,through dust or snow, past Indians and bandits. Thespeeding postm en m issed on ly one trip, though thewhole en terprise lost m oney heavily and foldedafter on ly eighteen legend-leaving m onths.

Just as the clippers had succum bed to steam , sowere the express riders unhorsed by Sam uel Morse’sclacking keys, which began tapping m essages toCaliforn ia in 1861. The swift sh ips and the fleetpon ies ushered out a dying technology of wind andm uscle. In the fu ture, m achines would be in thesaddle.

The Transport Web Binds the Union

More than anything else, the desire of the East to tapthe West stim ulated the “transportation revolution .’’Un til about 1830 the produce of the western regiondrained southward to the cotton belt or to theheaped-up wharves of New Orleans. The steam boatvastly aided the reverse flow of fin ished goods upthe watery western arteries and helped bind West

and South together. But the tru ly revolutionarychanges in com m erce and com m unication cam e inthe three decades before the Civil War, as canals andrailroad tracks radiated out from the East, across theAlleghen ies and in to the blossom ing heartland. Theditch-diggers and tie-layers were attem pting noth-ing less than a conquest of nature itself. They wouldoffset the “natural’’ flow of trade on the in teriorrivers by laying down an im pressive grid of “in ternalim provem ents.’’

The builders succeeded beyond their wildestdream s. The Mississippi was increasingly robbed ofits traffic, as goods m oved eastward on chuggingtrains, puffing lake boats, and m ule-tugged canalbarges. Governor Clin ton had in effect p icked up them ighty Father of Waters and flung it over theAlleghen ies, forcing it to em pty in to the sea at NewYork City. By the 1840s the city of Buffalo handledm ore western produce than New Orleans. Between1836 and 1860, grain sh ipm en ts through Buffaloincreased a staggering sixtyfold. New York Citybecam e the seaboard queen of the nation , a gigan ticport through which a vast h in terland poured itswealth and to which it daily paid econom ic tribute.

By the eve of the Civil War, a tru ly con tinen taleconom y had em erged. The princip le of division of


Main Routes West Before theCivil War Mark Twain describedhis stagecoach trip to California inthe 1860s: “We began to get intocountry, now, threaded here andthere with little streams. These hadhigh, steep banks on each side, andevery time we flew down one bankand scrambled up the other, ourparty inside got mixed somewhat.First we would all be down in a pileat the forward end of the stage, . . . and in a second we would shootto the other end, and stand on ourheads. And . . . as the dust rosefrom the tumult, we would allsneeze in chorus, and the majorityof us would grumble, and probablysay some hasty thing, like: ‘Takeyour elbow out of my ribs!—can’tyou quit crowding?’”

Colu mbia R.

ColoradoR.

Miss

issip

piR.

Snak e R.

Missouri

R.

Platte R.

Mississippi R.

Arkansa s R.

PACIFICOCEAN

Gulf of Mexico

GreatSalt Lake

Omaha

St. JosephSt. LouisSalt Lake City

Portland

San Diego

FortKearny

Santa Fe

Independence

FortLaramie

Sacramento(Sutter's Fort)

San Francisco

Los AngelesFortSmith

Cut-off

SouthPass

Oregon TrailCalifornia TrailPony Express overland mailMormon TrailSanta Fe TrailSpanish Trail

labor, which spelled productivity and profits in thefactory, applied on a national scale as well. Eachregion now specialized in a particular type of eco-nom ic activity. The South raised cotton for export toNew England and Britain ; the West grew grain andlivestock to feed factory workers in the East and inEurope; the East m ade m achines and textiles for theSouth and the West.

The econom ic pattern thus woven had fatefulpolitical and m ilitary im plications. Many southern -ers regarded the Mississippi as a silver chain thatnaturally linked together the upper valley states andthe Cotton Kingdom . They were convinced, assecession approached, that som e or all of thesestates would have to secede with them or be stran -gled. But they overlooked the m an-m ade links thatnow bound the upper Mississippi Valley to the Eastin in tim ate com m ercial un ion . Southern rebelswould have to fight not on ly Northern arm ies butthe tight bonds of an in terdependen t con tinen taleconom y. Econom ically, the two northerly sectionswere Siam ese twins.

The Market Revolution

No less revolutionary than the political upheavals ofthe an tebellum era was the “m arket revolution” thattransform ed a subsistence econom y of scatteredfarm s and tiny workshops in to a national network ofindustry and com m erce. As m ore and m ore Am eri-cans—m ill workers as well as farm hands, wom en aswell as m en—linked their econom ic fate to the bur-geon ing m arket econom y, the self-sufficien t house-holds of colon ial days were transform ed. Mostfam ilies had once raised all their own food, spuntheir own wool, and bartered with their neighborsfor the few necessities they could not m ake them -selves. In growing num bers they now scattered towork for wages in the m ills, or they p lan ted just afew crops for sale at m arket and used the m oney tobuy goods m ade by strangers in far-off factories. Asstore-bought fabrics, candles, and soap replacedhom em ade products, a quiet revolution occurred in the household division of labor and status.

Forging a Con tinen tal Econom y 317

Traditional wom en’s work was rendered superfluousand devalued. The hom e itself, once a cen ter of eco-nom ic production in which all fam ily m em berscooperated, grew in to a p lace of refuge from theworld of work, a refuge that becam e increasingly thespecial and separate sphere of wom en .

Revolutionary advances in m anufacturing andtransportation brought increased prosperity to allAm ericans, but they also widened the gulf betweenthe rich and the poor. Millionaires had been rare inthe early days of the Republic, but by the eve of theCivil War, several specim ens of colossal financialsuccess were stru tting across the national stage.Spectacular was the case of fur-trader and realestate speculator John Jacob Astor, who left anestate of $30 m illion on h is death in 1848.

Cities bred the greatest extrem es of econom icinequality. Unskilled workers, then as always, faredworst. Many of them cam e to m ake up a floatingm ass of “drifters,’’ buffeted from town to town by theshifting prospects for m en ial jobs. These wanderingworkers accoun ted at various tim es for up to halfthe population of the brawling industrial cen ters.

Although their num bers were large, they left littlebehind them but the hom ely fru its of their transien tlabor. Largely unstoried and unsung, they aream ong the forgotten m en and wom en of Am ericanhistory.

Many m yths about “social m obility’’ grew upover the buried m em ories of these un fortunate daylaborers. Mobility did exist in industrializing Am er-ica—but not in the proportions that legend oftenportrays. Rags-to-riches success stories were rela-tively few.

Yet Am erica, with its dynam ic society and wide-open spaces, undoubtedly provided m ore “opportu-n ity’’ than did the con tem porary countries of the OldWorld—which is why m illions of im m igran ts packedtheir bags and headed for New World shores. More-over, a rising tide lifts all boats, and the im provem entin overall standards of living was real. Wages forunskilled workers in a labor-hungry Am erica roseabout 1 percen t a year from 1820 to 1860. This gen-eral prosperity helped defuse the poten tial classconflict that m ight otherwise have exploded—andthat did explode in m any European countries.


Indust ry and Agriculture, 1860 Still a nation of farmers on the eve of the Civil War, Americans hadnevertheless made an impressive start on their own Industrial Revolution, especially in the Northeast.

Chronology 319

Chronology

c. 1750 Industrial Revolution begins in Britain

1791 Sam uel Slater builds first U.S. textile factory

1793 Eli Whitney inven ts the cotton gin

1798 Whitney develops in terchangeable parts for m uskets

1807 Robert Fulton’s first steam boatEm bargo spurs Am erican m anufacturing

1811 Cum berland Road construction begins

1817 Erie Canal construction begins

1825 Erie Canal com pleted

1828 First railroad in Un ited States

1830s Cyrus McCorm ick inven ts m echan ical m ower-reaper

1834 Anti-Catholic riot in Boston

1837 John Deere develops steel p low

1840 Presiden t Van Buren establishes ten -hour day for federal em ployees

1842 Massachusetts declares labor un ions legal in Com m onwealth v. Hunt

c. 1843-1868 Era of clipper sh ips

1844 Sam uel Morse inven ts telegraphAnti-Catholic riot in Philadelphia

1845-1849 Potato fam ine in Ireland

1846 Elias Howe inven ts sewing m achine

1848 First general incorporation laws in New YorkDem ocratic revolutions collapse in Germ any

1849 Order of the Star-Spangled Banner (Know-Nothing party) form ed

1852 Cum berland Road com pleted

1858 Cyrus Field lays first transatlan tic cable

1860 Pony Express established

1861 First transcon tinen tal telegraph

1866 Perm anen t transatlan tic cable established

For further reading, see page A10 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.

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