Posted: May 13th, 2021

Expansion of the Market Economy and Social Change/The Market Revolution, 1800-1840

Expansion of the Market Economy and Social Change/The Market Revolution, 1800-1840/Homework help – Discussion: Pros and Cons of Economic Changes
CHAPTER 9

THE MARKET REVOLUTION

1800–1840
A painting from 1850 of the steamboat Reindeer, by the artist John Bard. Steamboats, able to travel against the current on rivers and across the Great Lakes, played an essential role in opening large parts of the nation’s interior to commercial agriculture, an essential component of the market revolution.

FOCUS QUESTIONS
•What were the main elements of the market revolution?
•How did the market revolution spark social change?
•How did the meanings of American freedom change in this period?
•How did the market revolution affect the lives of workers, women, and African-Americans?

In 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette visited the United States. Nearly fifty years had passed since, as a youth of twenty, the French nobleman fought at Washington’s side in the War of Independence. Since 1784, when he last journeyed to the United States, the nation’s population had tripled to nearly 12 million, its land area had more than doubled, and its political institutions had thrived. The thirteen states of 1784 had grown to twenty-four, and Lafayette visited everyone. He traveled up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers by steamboat, a recent invention that was helping to bring economic development to the trans-Appalachian West, and crossed upstate New York via the Erie Canal, the world’s longest man-made waterway, which linked the region around the Great Lakes with the Atlantic coast via the Hudson River.
Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century were fond of describing liberty as the defining quality of their new nation, the unique genius of its institutions. Likenesses of the goddess of liberty, a familiar figure in eighteenth-century British visual imagery, became even more common in the United States, appearing in paintings and sculpture and on folk art from weather vanes to quilts and tavern signs. In Democracy in America, the French historian and politician Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the “holy cult of freedom” he encountered on his own visit to the United States during the early 1830s. “For fifty years,” he wrote, “the inhabitants of the United States have been repeatedly and constantly told that they are the only religious, enlightened, and free people. They . . . have an immensely high opinion of themselves and are not far from believing that they form a species apart from the rest of the human race.”

Even as Lafayette, Tocqueville, and numerous other visitors from abroad toured the United States, however, Americans’ understandings of freedom were changing. Three historical processes unleashed by the Revolution accelerated after the War of 1812: the spread of market relations, the westward movement of the population, and the rise of a vigorous political democracy. (The first two will be discussed in this chapter, the third in Chapter 10.) All helped to reshape the idea of freedom, identifying it ever more closely with economic opportunity, physical mobility, and participation in a vibrantly democratic political system.

But American freedom also continued to be shaped by the presence of slavery. Lafayette, who had purchased a plantation in the West Indies and freed its slaves, once wrote, “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.” Yet slavery was moving westward with the young republic. Half a century after the winning of independence, the coexistence of liberty and slavery, and their simultaneous expansion, remained the central contradiction of American life.

TIMELINE

1793Eli Whitney’s cotton gin
1790s–1830sSecond Great Awakening
1806Congress approves funds for the National Road
1807Robert Fulton’s steamboat
1814Waltham textile factory
1819Dartmouth College v. Woodward
Adams-Onís Treaty with Spain
1825Erie Canal opens
1831Cyrus McCormick’s reaper
1837John Deere’s steel plow
Depression begins
1844Telegraph put into commercial operation
1845John O’Sullivan coins phrase “manifest destiny”
1845–1851Ireland’s Great Famine
1854Henry David Thoreau’s Walden

What were the main elements of the market revolution?

A NEW ECONOMY
The Market Revolution

An economic transformation
In the first half of the nineteenth century, an economic transformation known to historians as the market revolution swept over the United States. Its catalyst was a series of innovations in transportation and communication. The market revolution was an acceleration of developments already under way in the colonial era. As noted in previous chapters, southern planters were selling the products of slave labor in the international market as early as the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth, many colonists had been drawn into Britain’s commercial empire. Consumer goods like sugar and tea and market-oriented tactics like the boycott of British goods had been central to the political battles leading up to independence.

Nonetheless, as Americans moved across the Appalachian Mountains and into interior regions of the states along the Atlantic coast, they found themselves more and more isolated from markets. In 1800, American farm families produced at home most of what they needed, from clothing to farm implements. What they could not make themselves, they obtained by bartering with their neighbors or purchasing from local stores and from rural craftsmen like blacksmiths and shoemakers. Those farmers not located near cities or navigable waterways found it almost impossible to market their produce. Many Americans devoted their energies to solving the technological problems that inhibited commerce within the country.

Roads and Steamboats

The Market Revolution, Continued
A watercolor from 1829 depicts the Erie Canal five years after it opened. More information
A watercolor from 1829 depicts the Erie Canal five years after it opened. Boats carrying passengers and goods traverse the waterway, along whose banks farms and villages have sprung up.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, in rapid succession, the steamboat, canal, railroad, and telegraph wrenched America out of its economic past. These innovations opened new land to settlement, lowered transportation costs, and made it far easier for economic enterprises to sell their products. They linked farmers to national and world markets and made them major consumers of manufactured goods. Americans, wrote Tocqueville, had “annihilated space and time.”

In 1806, Congress authorized the construction of the paved National Road from Cumberland, Maryland, to the Old Northwest. It reached Wheeling, on the Ohio River, in 1818 and by 1838 extended to Illinois, where it ended. But it was improved water transportation that most dramatically increased the speed and lowered the expense of commerce.

View of NYC from the harbor with lots of different types of boats, Currier and Ives A view of New York City, in 1849, by the noted lithographer Nathaniel Currier. Steamships and sailing vessels of various sizes crowd the harbor of the nation’s largest city and busiest port.

Advantages of the steamboat
Robert Fulton, a Pennsylvania-born artist and engineer, had experimented with steamboat designs while living in France during the 1790s. But not until 1807, when Fulton’s ship the Clermont navigated the Hudson River from New York City to Albany, was the steamboat’s technological and commercial feasibility demonstrated. The invention made possible upstream commerce (that is, travel against the current) on the country’s major rivers as well as rapid transport across the Great Lakes and, eventually, the Atlantic Ocean. By 1811, the first steamboat had been introduced on the Mississippi River; twenty years later some 200 plied its waters.

The Erie Canal

Connecting New York City and, the Old Northwest
The completion in 1825 of the 363-mile Erie Canal across upstate New York (a remarkable feat of engineering at a time when America’s next-largest canal was only twenty-eight miles long) allowed goods to flow between the Great Lakes and New York City. Almost instantaneously, the canal attracted an influx of farmers migrating from New England, giving birth to cities like Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse along its path.

THE MARKET REVOLUTION: ROADS AND CANALS, 1840

The improvement of existing roads and building of new roads and canals sharply reduced transportation times and costs and stimulated the growth of the market economy.
New York governor DeWitt Clinton, who oversaw the construction of the state-financed canal, predicted that it would make New York City “the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations.” And, indeed, the canal gave New York City primacy over competing ports in access to trade with the Old Northwest. In its financing by the state government, the Erie Canal typified the developing transportation infrastructure.

A “diploma” issued in the 1850s by the Delaware County (Pennsylvania) Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Horticulture, Manufactures, and the Mechanic and Household Arts depicts scenes of an integrated diversified economy, including farming, manufacturing, and household labor. Farmers plow and reap the fields and transport produce; women work at sewing machines and a power loom; a ship is under construction; and a water-powered factory is also visible.

This “diploma” issued in the 1850s by the Delaware County (Pennsylvania) Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Horticulture, Manufactures, and the Mechanic and Household Arts depicts scenes of an integrated diversified economy, including farming, manufacturing, and household labor. Farmers plow and reap the fields and transport produce; women work at sewing machines and a power loom; a ship is under construction; and a water-powered factory is also visible.

The completion of the Erie Canal set off a scramble among other states to match New York’s success. Several borrowed so much money to finance elaborate programs of canal construction that they went bankrupt during the economic depression that began in 1837. By then, however, more than 3,000 miles of canals had been built, creating a network linking the Atlantic states with the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys and drastically reducing the cost of transportation.

Railroads and the Telegraph

Canals connected existing waterways. The railroad opened vast new areas of the American interior to settlement, while stimulating the mining of coal for fuel and the manufacture of iron for locomotives and rails. Work on the Baltimore and Ohio, the nation’s first commercial railroad, began in 1828. By 1860, the railroad network had grown to 30,000 miles, more than the total in the rest of the world combined.

At the same time, the telegraph made possible instantaneous communication throughout the nation. The device was invented during the 1830s by Samuel F. B. Morse, an artist and amateur scientist living in New York City, and was put into commercial operation in 1844. Within sixteen years, some 50,000 miles of telegraph wire had been strung. Initially, the telegraph was a service for businesses, and especially newspapers, rather than individuals. It helped speed the flow of information and brought uniformity to prices throughout the country.

The Rise of the West
Westward Expansion in the Nineteenth Century

Migration west
Improvements in transportation and communication made possible the rise of the West as a powerful, self-conscious region of the new nation. Between 1790 and 1840, some 4.5 million people crossed the Appalachian Mountains—more than the entire U.S. population at the time of Washington’s first inauguration. Most of this migration took place after the War of 1812, which unleashed a flood of land-hungry settlers moving from eastern states. In the six years following the end of the war in 1815, six new states entered the Union (Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, and Maine—the last an eastern frontier for New England).

“Locomotive ‘DeWitt Clinton’ Engine at the Bloodgood Farm, New York, 1832,” black ink and watercolor on paper, David Matthew, 1884.

An 1884 watercolor, Locomotive DeWitt Clinton, recalls the early days of rail travel. The train is driven by a steam-powered locomotive and the cars strongly resemble horse-drawn stagecoaches.

Few Americans moved west as lone pioneers. More frequently, people traveled in groups and, once they arrived in the West, cooperated with each other to clear land, build houses and barns, and establish communities. One stream of migration, including both small farmers and planters with their slaves, flowed out of the South to create the new Cotton Kingdom of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Many farm families from the Upper South crossed into southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. A third population stream moved from New England across New York to the Upper Northwest—northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and Michigan and Wisconsin.
Some western migrants became “squatters,” setting up farms on unoccupied land without a clear legal title. Those who purchased land acquired it either from the federal government, at the price, after 1820, of $1.25 per acre payable in cash or from land speculators on long-term credit. The West became the home of regional cultures very much like those the migrants had left behind. Upstate New York and the Upper Northwest resembled New England, with its small towns, churches, and schools, while the Lower South replicated the plantation-based society of the southern Atlantic states.

Expansion across national boundaries

Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819
National boundaries made little difference to territorial expansion—in Florida, and later in Texas and Oregon, American settlers rushed in to claim land under the jurisdiction of foreign countries (Spain, Mexico, and Britain) or Indian tribes, confident that American sovereignty would soon follow in their wake. In 1810, American residents of West Florida rebelled and seized Baton Rouge, and the United States soon annexed the area. The drive for the acquisition of East Florida was spurred by Georgia and Alabama planters who wished to eliminate a refuge for fugitive slaves and hostile Seminole Indians. Andrew Jackson led troops into the area in 1818. While on foreign soil, he created an international crisis by executing two British traders and a number of Indian chiefs. Although Jackson withdrew, Spain, aware that it could not defend the territory, sold it to the United States in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 negotiated by John Quincy Adams.
Successive censuses told the remarkable story of western growth. In 1840, by which time the government had sold to settlers and land companies nearly 43 million acres of land, 7 million Americans—two-fifths of the total population—lived beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Between 1810 and 1830, Ohio’s population grew from 231,000 to more than 900,000. It reached nearly 2 million in 1850, when it ranked third among all the states. The careers of the era’s leading public figures reflected the westward movement. Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and many other statesmen were born in states along the Atlantic coast but made their mark in politics after moving west.

TRAVEL TIMES FROM NEW YORK CITY IN 1800 AND 1830
The Market Revolution: Roads and Canals, 1840

These maps illustrate how the transportation revolution of the early nineteenth century made possible much more rapid travel within the United States.

An Internal Borderland

The Internal Borderland Separating Slavery and Freedom
Before the War of 1812, the Old Northwest was a prime example of a borderland, a meeting-ground of Native Americans and various people of English, French, and American descent, where cultural boundaries remained unstable and political authority uncertain. The American victory over the British and Indians erased any doubt over who would control the region. But a new, internal borderland region quickly developed.

Ohio River as boundary
Because the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the Old Northwest, the Ohio River came to mark a boundary between free and slave societies. But for many years it was easier for people and goods to travel between the slave state Kentucky and the southern counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois than to the northern parts of those states. The region stretching northward from the Ohio River retained much of the cultural flavor of the Upper South. Its food, speech, settlement patterns, family ties, and economic relations had more in common with Kentucky and Tennessee than with the northern counties of their own states, soon to be settled by New Englanders. Until the 1850s, farmers in the southern counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were far more likely to ship their produce southward via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers than northward or to the East. The large concentration of people of southern ancestry would make Indiana and Illinois key political battlegrounds as the slavery controversy developed.

TABLE 9.1 Population Growth of Selected Western States, 1810–1850 (Excluding Indians)

STATE
1810
1830
1850
Alabama
9,000
310,000
772,000
Illinois
12,000
157,000
851,000
Indiana
25,000
343,000
988,000
Louisiana
77,000
216,000
518,000
Mississippi
31,000
137,000
607,000
Missouri
20,000
140,000
682,000
Ohio
231,000
938,000
1,980,000

The Cotton Kingdom
The Cotton Kingdom
Cotton and industry

Whitney’s cotton gin
Although the market revolution and westward expansion occurred simultaneously in the North and the South, their combined effects heightened the nation’s sectional divisions. In some ways, the most dynamic feature of the American economy in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century was the rise of the Cotton Kingdom. The early industrial revolution, which began in England and soon spread to parts of the North, centered on factories producing cotton textiles with water-powered spinning and weaving machinery. These factories generated an immense demand for cotton, a crop the Lower South was particularly suited to growing because of its climate and soil fertility. Until 1793, the marketing of cotton had been slowed by the laborious task of removing seeds from the plant itself. But in that year, Eli Whitney, a Yale graduate working in Georgia as a private tutor, invented the cotton gin. A fairly simple device consisting of rollers and brushes, the gin quickly separated the seed from the cotton. Coupled with rising demand for cotton and the opening of new lands in the West, Whitney’s invention revolutionized American slavery, an institution that many Americans had expected to die out because its major crop, tobacco, exhausted the soil.

THE MARKET REVOLUTION: THE SPREAD OF COTTON CULTIVATION, 1820–1840

Travel Times from New York City in 1800 and 1830

Maps of cotton production graphically illustrate the rise of the Cotton Kingdom stretching from South Carolina to Louisiana.

Monopolization of fertile land
After the War of 1812, the federal government moved to consolidate American control over the Deep South, forcing defeated Indians to cede land, encouraging white settlement, and acquiring Florida. Settlers from the older southern states flooded into the region. Planters monopolized the most fertile land, whereas poorer farmers were generally confined to less productive and less accessible areas in the “hill country” and piney woods. After Congress prohibited the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, a massive trade in slaves developed within the United States, supplying the labor force required by the new Cotton Kingdom.

Slave trading became a well-organized business, with firms gathering slaves in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina and shipping them to markets in Mobile, Natchez, and New Orleans. Slave coffles—groups chained to one another on forced marches to the Lower South—became a common sight. Indeed, historians estimate that around 1 million slaves were shifted from the older slave states to the Lower South between 1800 and 1860. A source of greater freedom for many whites, the westward movement meant to African-Americans the destruction of family ties, the breakup of long-standing communities, and receding opportunities for liberty.
In 1793, when Whitney designed his invention, the United States produced 5 million pounds of cotton. By 1820, the crop had grown to nearly 170 million pounds.

Glossary
* Steamboats Paddle-wheelers that could travel both up- and down-river in deep or shallow waters; they became commercially viable early in the nineteenth century and soon developed into America’s first inland freight and passenger service network.
* Erie Can almost important and profitable of the canals of the 1820s and 1830s; stretched from Buffalo to Albany, New York, connecting the Great Lakes to the East Coast and making New York City the nation’s largest port.
* Cotton Kingdom Cotton-producing region, relying predominantly on slave labor, that spanned from North Carolina west to Louisiana and reached as far north as southern Illinois.
* cotton Gini vented by Eli Whitney in 1793, the machine that separated cotton seed from cotton fiber, speeding cotton processing and making profitable the cultivation of the hardier, but difficult to clean, short-staple cotton; led directly to the dramatic nineteenth-century expansion of slavery in the South.

How did the market revolution spark social change?

MARKET SOCIETY

Since cotton was produced solely for sale in national and international markets, the South was in some ways the most commercially oriented region of the United States. Yet rather than spurring economic change, the South’s expansion westward simply reproduced the agrarian, slave-based social order of the older states. The region remained overwhelmingly rural. In 1860, roughly 80 percent of southerners worked the land—the same proportion as in 1800.

Commercial Farmers
In the North, however, the market revolution and westward expansion set in motion changes that transformed the region into an integrated economy of commercial farms and manufacturing cities. As the Old Northwest became a more settled society, bound by a web of transportation and credit to eastern centers of commerce and banking, farmers found themselves drawn into the new market economy. They increasingly concentrated on growing crops and raising livestock for sale, while purchasing at stores goods previously produced at home.

Technology and western farming
Western farmers found in the growing cities of the East a market for their produce and a source of credit. Loans originating with eastern banks and insurance companies financed the acquisition of land and supplies and, in the 1840s and 1850s, the purchase of fertilizer and new agricultural machinery to expand production. The steel plow, invented by John Deere in 1837 and mass-produced by the 1850s, made possible the rapid subduing of the western prairies. The reaper, a horse-drawn machine that greatly increased the amount of wheat a farmer could harvest, was invented by Cyrus McCormick in 1831 and produced in large quantities soon afterward. Eastern farmers, unable to grow wheat and corn as cheaply as their western counterparts, increasingly concentrated on producing dairy products, fruits, and vegetables for nearby urban centers.

The Growth of Cities

Western cities
From the beginning, cities formed part of the western frontier. Cincinnati was known as Porkopolis, after its slaughterhouses, where hundreds of thousands of pigs were butchered each year and processed for shipment to eastern consumers of meat. The greatest of all the western cities was Chicago. In the early 1830s, it was a tiny settlement on the shore of Lake Michigan. By 1860, thanks to the railroad, Chicago had become the nation’s fourth-largest city, where farm products from throughout the Northwest were gathered to be sent east.

Slave trader, watercolor sketch by Lewis Miller
A trade card depicts the interior of a chair-manufacturing workshop in New York City. The owner stands at the center, dressed quite differently from his employees. The men are using traditional hand tools; furniture manufacturing had not yet been mechanized.

Like rural areas, urban centers witnessed dramatic changes due to the market revolution. Urban merchants, bankers, and master craftsmen took advantage of the economic opportunities created by the expanding market among commercial farmers. The drive among these businessmen to increase production and reduce labor costs fundamentally altered the nature of work. Traditionally, skilled artisans had manufactured goods at home, where they controlled the pace and intensity of their own labor. Now, entrepreneurs gathered artisans into large workshops in order to oversee their work and subdivide their tasks. Craftsmen who traditionally produced an entire pair of shoes or piece of furniture saw the labor process broken down into numerous steps requiring far less skill and training. They found themselves subjected to constant supervision by their employers and relentless pressure for greater output and lower wages.

The Factory System
In some industries, most notably textiles, the factory superseded traditional craft production altogether. Factories gathered large groups of workers under central supervision and replaced hand tools with power-driven machinery. Samuel Slater, an immigrant from England, established America’s first factory in 1790 at Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Since British law made it illegal to export the plans for industrial machinery, Slater, a skilled mechanic, built from memory a power-driven spinning jenny, one of the key inventions of the early industrial revolution.
A painting of Cincinnati, self-styled Queen City of the West, for 1835. More information
A painting of Cincinnati, self-styled Queen City of the West, from 1835. Steamboats line the Ohio River waterfront.

Spinning factories such as Slater’s produced yarn, which was then sent to traditional hand-loom weavers and farm families to be woven into cloth. This “outwork” system, in which rural men and women earned money by taking in jobs from factories, typified early industrialization. Eventually, however, the entire manufacturing process in textiles, shoes, and many other products was brought under a single factory roof.

The cutoff of British imports because of the Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812 stimulated the establishment of the first large-scale American factory utilizing power looms for weaving cotton cloth. This was constructed in 1814 at Waltham, Massachusetts, by a group of merchants who came to be called the Boston Associates. In the 1820s, they expanded their enterprise by creating an entirely new factory town (incorporated as the city of Lowell in 1836) on the Merrimack River, twenty-seven miles from Boston. Here they built a group of modern textile factories that brought together all phases of production from the spinning of thread to the weaving and finishing of cloth.

Time Table of the Holyoke Mills More information
A broadside from 1853 illustrates the long hours of work (from 5 AM to 6:30 PM with brief breaks for meals) in the textile mills of Holyoke, Massachusetts. Factory labor was strictly regulated by the clock.

The earliest factories, including those at Pawtucket, Waltham, and Lowell, were located along the “fall line,” where waterfalls and river rapids could be harnessed to provide power for spinning and weaving machinery. By the 1840s, steam power made it possible for factory owners to locate in towns like New Bedford that were nearer to the coast, and in large cities like Philadelphia and Chicago with their immense local markets. In 1850, manufacturers produced in factories not only textiles but also a wide variety of other goods, including tools, firearms, shoes, clocks, ironware, and agricultural machinery. What came to be called the American system of manufactures relied on the mass production of interchangeable parts that could be rapidly assembled into standardized finished products. More impressive, in a way, than factory production was the wide dispersion of mechanical skills throughout northern society. Every town, it seemed, had its sawmill, paper mill, iron works, shoemaker, hatmaker, tailor, and a host of other such small enterprises.

The “Mill Girls”
Progress of Cotton, Reeding or Drawing In, No. 9; Women at work tending machines in the Lowell textile mills

Women at work tending machines in the Lowell textile mills.
Although some factories employed entire families, the early New England textile mills relied largely on female and child labor. At Lowell, the most famous center of early textile manufacturing, young unmarried women from Yankee farm families dominated the workforce that tended the spinning machines. To persuade parents to allow their daughters to leave home to work in the mills, Lowell owners set up boarding houses with strict rules regulating personal behavior. They also established lecture halls and churches to occupy the women’s free time.
This was the first time in history that large numbers of women left their homes to participate in the public world. Many mill girls complained about low wages and long hours. Others valued the opportunity to earn money independently at a time when few other jobs were open to women. But these women did not become a permanent class of factory workers. They typically remained in the factories for only a few years, after which they left to return home, marry, or move west.

The Growth of Immigration
Economic expansion fueled a demand for labor, which was met, in part, by increased immigration from abroad. Between 1790 and 1830, immigrants contributed only marginally to American population growth. But between 1840 and 1860, over 4 million people (more than the entire population in 1790) entered the United States, the majority from Ireland and Germany. About 90 percent headed for the northern states, where job opportunities were most abundant and the new arrivals would not have to compete with slave labor. In 1860, the 814,000 residents of New York City, the major port of entry, included more than 384,000 immigrants, and one-third of the population of Wisconsin was foreign-born.

TABLE 9.2 Total Number of Immigrants by Five-Year Period

YEARS
NUMBER OF IMMIGRANTS
1841–1845
430,000
1846–1850
1,283,000
1851–1855
1,748,000
1856–1860
850,000

Numerous factors inspired this massive flow of population across the Atlantic. In Europe, the modernization of agriculture and the industrial revolution disrupted centuries-old patterns of life, pushing peasants off the land and eliminating the jobs of traditional craft workers. The introduction of the oceangoing steamship and the railroad made long-distance travel more practical. Moreover, America’s political and religious freedoms attracted Europeans, including political refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848, who chafed under the continent’s repressive governments and rigid social hierarchies.

The largest number of immigrants, however, were refugees from disaster—Irish men and women fleeing the Great Famine of 1845–1851, when a blight destroyed the potato crop on which the island’s diet relied. An estimated 1 million persons starved to death and another million emigrated in those years, most of them to the United States. Lacking industrial skills and capital, these impoverished agricultural laborers and small farmers ended up filling the low-wage unskilled jobs native-born Americans sought to avoid. Male Irish immigrants-built America’s railroads, dug canals, and worked as common laborers, servants, longshoremen, and factory operatives. Irish women frequently went to work as servants in the homes of native-born Americans, although some preferred factory work to domestic service. By the end of the 1850s, the Lowell textile mills had largely replaced Yankee farm women with immigrant Irish families. Four-fifths of Irish immigrants remained in the Northeast.

COTTON MILLS, 1820s
The Market Revolution: The Spread of Cotton Cultivation, 1820–1840

The early industrial revolution was concentrated in New England, where factories producing textiles from raw cotton sprang up along the region’s many rivers, taking advantage of water power to drive their machinery.

VOICES OF FREEDOM
From Sarah Bagley, untitled essay in Voice of Industry (1845)

Born to a New Hampshire farm family in 1806, Sarah Bagley came to Lowell in 1837 after her father suffered financial reverses. She soon became one of the most outspoken leaders of the labor movement among the city’s “mill girls.” In 1845 she became the editor of the Voice of Industry, which spoke for the male and female labor movement of New England. Her critique of the northern labor system was similar to arguments advanced by proslavery thinkers such as George Fitzhugh (discussed in Chapter 11).
Whenever I raise the point that it is immoral to shut us up in a close room twelve hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious of employment, I am told that we have come to the mills voluntarily and we can leave when we will. Voluntary! Let us look a little at this remarkable form of human freedom. Do we from mere choice leave our fathers’ dwellings, the firesides where all of our friends, where too our earliest and fondest recollections cluster, for the factory and the corporation’s boarding house? . . . A slave too goes voluntarily to his task, but his will is in some manner quickened by the whip of the overseer.

The whip which brings us to Lowell is NECESSITY. We must have money; a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be supported, a brother’s ambition to be aided, and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will? . . . Is anyone such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand factory girls of Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it? Everybody knows that it is necessity alone, in some form or other, that takes us to Lowell and keeps us there. Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery quite as really as any in Turkey or Carolina. It matters little as to the fact of slavery, whether the slave be compelled to his task by the whip of the over-seer or the wages of the Lowell Corporation. In either case it is not free will, leading the laborer to work, but an outward necessity that puts free will out of the question.

From Letter of Margaret McCarthy to Her Family (1850)

Between 1840 and 1860, over 4 million people (more than the entire population of 1790) entered the United States, the majority from Ireland and Germany. Many sent money home to help family members join them, a process today sometimes called chain migration. In this letter, Margaret McCarthy, a young immigrant writing from New York City, offers advice to her family in Ireland.
My dear father I must only say that this is a good place and a good country for if one place does not suit a man he can go to another and can very easy please himself. . . . [But] I would advise no one to come to America that would not have some money after landing here that [will] enable them to go west in case they would get no work to do here. But any man or woman without a family are fools that would not venture and come to this plentiful country where no man or woman ever hungered or ever will. . . .
Come you all together courageously and bid adieu to that lovely place the land of our birth. . . . But alas I am now told it’s the gulf of misery, oppression, degradation and ruin. . . . This, my dear father induces me to remit to you in this letter 20 dollars. . . . Dan Keliher tells me that you knew more of house carpentry than he did himself and he can earn from twelve to fourteen shilling a day and he also tells me that Florence will do very well and that Michael can get a place right off. . . . It is not for slavery I want you to come here no its for affording my brothers and sisters and I an opportunity of showing our kindness and gratitude and coming on your senior days . . . [so] that you my dear father and mother could walk about leisurely and independently . . . .
Oh how happy I feel [that] the Lord had not it destined for me to get married . . . at home [and] after a few months he and I may be an encumbrance on you or perhaps in the poor house.

QUESTIONS
1.Why does Sarah Bagley compare the situation of female factory workers with slavery?
2.What aspirations seem to be uppermost in Margaret McCarthy’s mind?
3.What do these documents suggest about how Americans of different backgrounds experienced and responded to economic conditions during the first half of the nineteenth century?

PIE CHART
A lithograph by an anonymous artist depicts the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, an early center of textile manufacturing, around 1850. Factories line the banks of the Merrimack River, which provided power for spinning machines and power looms. By this time, the original workforce of young New England women was being replaced by Irish immigrant families.

The second-largest group of immigrants, Germans, included a considerably larger number of skilled craftsmen than the Irish. Germans also settled in tightly knit neighborhoods in eastern cities, but many were able to move to the West, where they established themselves as craftsmen, shopkeepers, and farmers. The “German triangle,” as the cities of Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee were sometimes called, attracted large German populations.

Some 40,000 Scandinavians also emigrated to the United States in these years, most of whom settled on farms in the Old Northwest.
The Rise of Nativism

FIGURE 9.1 Sources of Immigration, 1850
The idea of the United States as a refuge for those seeking economic opportunity or as an escape from oppression has always coexisted with suspicion of and hostility to foreign newcomers. American history has witnessed periods of intense anxiety over immigration. The Alien Act of 1798 reflected fear of immigrants with radical political views. During the early twentieth century, as will be discussed below, there was widespread hostility to the “new immigration” from southern and eastern Europe. In the early twenty-first century, the question of how many persons should be allowed to enter the United States, and under what circumstances, remains a volatile political issue.

Archbishop John Hughes of New York City made the Catholic Church a more assertive institution. He condemned the use of the Protestant King James Bible in the city’s public schools, pressed Catholic parents to send their children to an expanding network of parochial schools, and sought government funding to pay for them. He aggressively sought to win converts from Protestantism.

Lithograph of the July 7, 1844 Southwark “Bible Riot,” Philadelphia County, PA, 1844

Riot in Philadelphia, an 1844 lithograph, depicts street battles between nativists and Irish Catholics that left fifteen persons dead. The violence originated in a dispute over the use of the Protestant King James Bible in the city’s public schools.

In the eyes of many Protestants, the newly assertive activities of the Catholic Church raised anew the question of national identity—the question, who is an American, and its close relative, what kinds of immigrants should the country welcome. Catholicism, they feared, threatened American institutions and American freedom. In 1834, Lyman Beecher, a prominent Presbyterian minister (and father of the religious leader Henry Ward Beecher and the writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Beecher), delivered a sermon in Boston, soon published as “A Plea for the West.” Beecher warned that Catholics were seeking to dominate the American West, where the future of Christianity in the world would be worked out. His sermon inspired a mob to burn a Catholic convent in the city.

Nativist stereotypes
The Irish influx of the 1840s and 1850s thoroughly alarmed many native-born Americans. Those who feared the impact of immigration on American political and social life were called “nativists.” They blamed immigrants for urban crime, political corruption, and a fondness for intoxicating liquor, and accused them of undercutting native-born skilled laborers by working for starvation wages. Stereotypes similar to those directed at blacks flourished regarding the Irish as well—seen as childlike, lazy, and slaves of their passions, they were said to be unsuited for republican freedom.

Nativism would not become a national political movement until the 1850s, as we will see in Chapter 13. But in the 1840s, nativism found expression both in the streets and at the ballot box. New York City and Philadelphia witnessed violent anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic riots.

The Transformation of Law

Corporations
American law increasingly supported the efforts of entrepreneurs to participate in the market revolution, while shielding them from interference by local governments and liability for some of the less desirable results of economic growth. The corporate form of business organization became central to the new market economy. A corporate firm enjoys special privileges and powers granted in a charter from the government, among them that investors and directors are not personally liable for the company’s debts. Unlike companies owned by an individual, family, or limited partnership, in other words, a corporation can fail without ruining its directors and stockholders.

Image of song sheet for “To the West!” published by H. De Marsan.

A song written in 1845 offers a satire of the widely held image of the West as “the land of the free,” a place where the “humblest” American can achieve economic success. The pictures surrounding the text offer a somewhat different image of westerners, and the verses go on to complain about illness and hardship. But the opening words reflect the ways in which Americans have always viewed the West.

Many Americans distrusted corporate charters as a form of government-granted special privilege. But the courts upheld their validity, while opposing efforts by established firms to limit competition from newcomers. In Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), John Marshall’s Supreme Court defined corporate charters issued by state legislatures as contracts, which future lawmakers could not alter or rescind. Five years later, in Gibbons v. Ogden, the Court struck down a monopoly the New York legislature had granted for steamboat navigation. And in 1837, with Roger B. Taney now the chief justice, the Court ruled that the Massachusetts legislature did not infringe the charter of an existing company that had constructed a bridge over the Charles River when it empowered a second company to build a competing bridge. The community, Taney declared, had a legitimate interest in promoting transportation and prosperity.

Glossary
* Porkopolis Nickname of Cincinnati, coined in the mid-nineteenth century, after its numerous slaughter houses.
* American system of manufactures system of production that relied on the mass production of interchangeable parts that could be rapidly assembled into standardized finished products. First perfected in Connecticut by clockmaker Eli Terry and by small-arms producer Eli Whitney in the 1840s and 1850s.mill girls Women who worked at textile mills during the Industrial Revolution who enjoyed new freedoms and independence not seen before.
* nativism-immigrant and anti-Catholic feeling especially prominent from the 1830s through the 1850s; the largest group of its proponents was New York’s Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which expanded into the American (Know-Nothing) Party in 1854.Dartmouth College v. Woodward1819 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the original charter of the college against New Hampshire’s attempt to alter the board of trustees; set the precedent of support of contracts against state interference.
* Gibbons v. Ogden1824 U.S. Supreme Court decision reinforcing the “commerce clause” (the federal government’s right to regulate interstate commerce) of the Constitution; Chief Justice John Marshall ruled against the State of New York’s granting of steamboat monopolies.

How did the meanings of American freedom change in this period?

THE FREE INDIVIDUAL

By the 1830s, the market revolution and westward expansion had produced a society that amazed European visitors: energetic, materialistic, and seemingly in constant motion. Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by Americans’ restless energy and apparent lack of attachment to place. “No sooner do you set foot on American soil,” he observed, “than you find yourself in a sort of tumult. All around you, everything is on the move.”

The West and Freedom

Westward expansion and the market revolution reinforced some older ideas of freedom and helped to create new ones. American freedom, for example, had long been linked with the availability of land in the West. A New York journalist, John L. O’Sullivan, first employed the phrase “manifest destiny,” meaning that the United States had a divinely appointed mission, so obvious as to be beyond dispute, to occupy all of North America. Americans, he proclaimed, had a far better title to western lands than could be provided by any international treaty, right of discovery, or long-term settlement.

Westward expansion and freedom
O’Sullivan wrote these words in 1845, but the essential idea was familiar much earlier. Many Americans believed that the settlement and economic exploitation of the West would prevent the United States from following the path of Europe and becoming a society with fixed social classes and a large group of wage-earning poor. In the West, where land was more readily available and oppressive factory labor far less common than in the East, there continued to be the chance to achieve economic independence, the social condition of freedom. In national myth and ideology, the West would long remain, as the writer Wallace Stegner later put it, “the last home of the freeborn American.”

The Transcendentalists
The restless, competitive world of the market revolution strongly encouraged the identification of American freedom with the absence of restraints on self-directed individuals seeking economic advancement and personal development. The “one important revolution” of the day, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in the 1830s, was “the new value of the private man.” In Emerson’s definition, rather than a preexisting set of rights or privileges, freedom was an open-ended process of self-realization by which individuals could remake themselves and their own lives.

A cover of the book “Life in the Woods” by Henry David Thoreau.

The daguerreotype, an early form of photography, required the sitter to remain perfectly still for twenty seconds or longer, meaning that the subject usually looked rather stiff. Nonetheless, Henry David Thoreau, pictured here in 1856, wrote, “my friends think it is pretty good though better looking than I.”

Emerson was perhaps the most prominent member of a group of New England intellectuals known as the transcendentalists, who insisted on the primacy of individual judgment over existing social traditions and institutions. Emerson’s Concord, Massachusetts, neighbor, the writer Henry David Thoreau, echoed his call for individual self-reliance. “Any man righter than his neighbors,” Thoreau wrote, “is a majority of one.”

In his own life, Thoreau illustrated Emerson’s point about the primacy of individual conscience in matters political, social, and personal, and the need to find one’s own way rather than following the crowd. Thoreau became persuaded that modern society stifled individual judgment by making men “tools of their tools,” trapped in stultifying jobs by their obsession with acquiring wealth. Even in “this comparatively free country,” he wrote, most persons were so preoccupied with material things that they had no time to contemplate the beauties of nature.

To escape this fate, Thoreau retreated for two years to a cabin on Walden Pond near Concord, where he could enjoy the freedom of isolation from the “economical and moral tyranny” he believed ruled American society. He subsequently published Walden (1854), an account of his experiences and a critique of how the market revolution was, in his opinion, de~ Hire our professional writers now and experience the best assignment help online with our custom paper writing service. We ensure your essays and assignments are expertly researched, written and delivered on time. ~ Grading both Americans’ values and the natural environment. An area that had been covered with dense forest in his youth, he observed, had been so transformed by woodcutters and farmers that it was almost completely devoid of trees and wild animals. Thoreau appealed to Americans to “simplify” their lives rather than become obsessed with the accumulation of wealth. Genuine freedom, he insisted, lay within.

The Second Great Awakening

Religious revivals
The popular religious revivals that swept the country during the Second Great Awakening added a religious underpinning to the celebration of personal self-improvement, self-reliance, and self-determination. These revivals, which began at the turn of the century, were originally organized by established religious leaders alarmed by low levels of church attendance in the young republic (perhaps as few as 10 percent of white Americans regularly attended church during the 1790s). But they quickly expanded far beyond existing churches. They peaked in the 1820s and early 1830s, when the Reverend Charles Grandison Finney held months-long revival meetings in upstate New York and New York City. Like the evangelists (traveling preachers) of the first Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century discussed in Chapter 4, Finney warned of hell in vivid language while offering the promise of salvation to converts who abandoned their sinful ways.
Das neue Jerusalem, watercolor

Das neue Jerusalem (The New Jerusalem), an early nineteenth-century watercolor, in German, illustrates the narrow gateway to heaven and the fate awaiting sinners in hell. These were common themes of preachers in the Second Great Awakening.

The Second Great Awakening democratized American Christianity, making it a truly mass enterprise. At the time of independence, fewer than 2,000 Christian ministers preached in the United States. In 1845, they numbered 40,000. Evangelical denominations such as the Methodists and Baptists enjoyed explosive growth in membership, and smaller sects proliferated. By the 1840s, Methodism, with more than 1 million members, had become the country’s largest denomination. At large camp meetings, especially prominent on the frontier, fiery revivalist preachers rejected the idea that man is a sinful creature with a preordained fate, promoting instead the doctrine of human free will. At these gatherings, rich and poor, male and female, and in some instances whites and blacks worshiped alongside one another and pledged to abandon worldly sins in favor of the godly life.

The Awakening’s Impact
Even more than its predecessor of several decades earlier, the Second Great Awakening stressed the right of private judgment in spiritual matters and the possibility of universal salvation through faith and good works. Every person, Finney insisted, was a “moral free agent”—that is, a person free to choose between a Christian life and sin.

Mass religion
Revivalist ministers seized the opportunities offered by the market revolution to spread their message. They raised funds, embarked on lengthy preaching tours by canal, steamboat, and railroad, and flooded the country with mass-produced, inexpensive religious tracts. The revivals’ opening of religion to mass participation and their message that ordinary Americans could shape their own spiritual destinies resonated with the spread of market values.

The Awakening and market society
To be sure, evangelical preachers can hardly be described as cheerleaders for a market society. They regularly railed against greed and indifference to the welfare of others as sins. Yet the revivals thrived in areas caught up in the rapid expansion of the market economy, such as the region of upstate New York along the path of the Erie Canal. Most of Finney’s converts here came from the commercial and professional classes. Evangelical ministers promoted what might be called a controlled individualism as the essence of freedom. In stressing the importance of industry, sobriety, and self-discipline as examples of freely chosen moral behavior, evangelical preachers promoted the very qualities necessary for success in a market culture.

The Emergence of Mormonism
The end of governmental support for established churches promoted competition among religious groups that kept religion vibrant and promoted the emergence of new denominations. Among the most successful of the religions that sprang up was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons, which hoped to create a Kingdom of God on earth. The Mormons were founded in the 1820s by Joseph Smith, a farmer in upstate New York who as a youth began to experience religious visions. He claimed to have been led by an angel to a set of golden plates covered with strange writing. Smith translated and published them as The Book of Mormon, after a fourth-century prophet.

The Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon tells the story of three families who traveled from the ancient Middle East to the Americas, where they eventually evolved into Native American tribes. Jesus Christ plays a prominent role in the book, appearing to one of the family groups in the Western Hemisphere after his death and resurrection. The second coming of Christ would take place in the New World, where Smith was God’s prophet.

Nauvoo temple in Nauvoo, IL, 1846, unknown photographer More information
In this 1846 photograph, the massive Mormon temple in Nauvoo, Illinois, towers over the ramshackle wooden buildings of this town along the Mississippi River.

Brigham Young
Mormonism emerged in a center of the Second Great Awakening, upstate New York. The church founded by Smith shared some features with other Christian denominations including a focus on the family and community as the basis of social order and a rejection of alcohol. Gradually, however, Smith began to receive visions that led to more controversial doctrines, notably polygamy, which allows one man to have more than one wife. By the end of his life, Smith had married no fewer than thirty women. Along with the absolute authority Smith exercised over his followers, this doctrine outraged the Mormons’ neighbors. Mobs drove Smith and his followers out of New York, Ohio, and Missouri before they settled in 1839 in Nauvoo, Illinois. There, five years later, Smith was arrested on the charge of inciting a riot that destroyed an anti-Mormon newspaper. While in jail awaiting trial, Smith was murdered by a group of intruders. In 1847, his successor as Mormon leader, Brigham Young, led more than 2,000 followers across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains to the shores of the Great Salt Lake in present-day Utah. By 1852, the number of Mormons in various settlements in Utah reached 16,000. The Mormons’ experience revealed the limits of religious toleration in nineteenth-century America but also the opportunities offered by religious pluralism. Today, Mormons constitute the fourth largest church in the United States, and The Book of Mormon has been translated into over 100 languages.

Glossary

* manifest destiny Phrase first used in 1845 to urge annexation of Texas; used thereafter to encourage American settlement of European colonial and Indian lands in the Great Plains and the West and, more generally, as a justification for American empire.
* transcendentalists Philosophy of a small group of mid-nineteenth-century New England writers and thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller; they stressed personal and intellectual self-reliance.
* Second Great Awakening Religious revival movement of the early decades of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the growth of secularism and rationalist religion; began the predominance of the Baptist and Methodist Churches.
* individualism Term that entered the language in the 1820s to describe the increasing emphasis on the pursuit of personal advancement and private fulfillment free of outside interference.
* Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Religious sect founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith; it was a product of the intense revivalism of the “burned-over district” of New York. Smith’s successor Brigham Young led 15,000 followers to Utah in 1847 to escape persecution.

CHAPTER REVIEW AND ONLINE RESOURCES
REVIEW QUESTIONS

1.Identify the major transportation improvements in this period, and explain how they influenced the market economy.
2.How did state and local governments promote the national economy in this period?
3.How did the market economy and westward expansion entrench the institution of slavery?
4.How did westward expansion and the market revolution drive each other?
5.What role did immigrants play in the new market society?
6.How did changes in the law promote development in the economic system?
7.As it democratized American Christianity, the Second Great Awakening both took advantage of the market revolution and criticized its excesses. Write my Essay Online Writing Service with Professional Essay Writers – Explain.
8.How did the market revolution change women’s work and family roles?
9.Give some examples of the rise of individualism in these years.
10.How did immigration and nativism address the question of who is an American?

KEY TERMS

steamboat (p. 252)
Erie Canal (p. 252)
Cotton Kingdom (p. 257)
cotton gin (p. 257)
Porkopolis (p. 260)
American system of manufactures (p. 261)
mill girls (p. 262)
nativism (p. 267)
Dartmouth College v. Woodward (p. 268)
Gibbons v. Ogden (p. 268)
manifest destiny (p. 268)
transcendentalists (p. 269)
Second Great Awakening (p. 270)
individualism (p. 271)
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (p. 271)
cult of domesticity (p. 274)
family wage (p. 275)

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Glossary

* Steamboats Paddle-wheelers that could travel both up- and down-river in deep or shallow waters; they became commercially viable early in the nineteenth century and soon developed into America’s first inland freight and passenger service network.
* Erie Canal Most important and profitable of the canals of the 1820s and 1830s; stretched from Buffalo to Albany, New York, connecting the Great Lakes to the East Coast and making New York City the nation’s largest port.
* Cotton Kingdom Cotton-producing region, relying predominantly on slave labor, that spanned from North Carolina west to Louisiana and reached as far north as southern Illinois.
* cotton Gini vented by Eli Whitney in 1793, the machine that separated cotton seed from cotton fiber, speeding cotton processing and making profitable the cultivation of the hardier, but difficult to clean, short-staple cotton; led directly to the dramatic nineteenth-century expansion of slavery in the South.
* Porkopolis Nickname of Cincinnati, coined in the mid-nineteenth century, after its numerous slaughter houses.
* mill girls Women who worked at textile mills during the Industrial Revolution who enjoyed new freedoms and independence not seen before.
* Nativism Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic feeling especially prominent from the 1830s through the 1850s; the largest group of its proponents was New York’s Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which expanded into the American (Know-Nothing) Party in 1854.Dartmouth College v. Woodward1819 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the original charter of the college against New Hampshire’s attempt to alter the board of trustees; set the precedent of support of contracts against state interference.
* Gibbons v. Ogden1824 U.S. Supreme Court decision reinforcing the “commerce clause” (the federal government’s right to regulate interstate commerce) of the Constitution; Chief Justice John Marshall ruled against the State of New York’s granting of steamboat monopolies.
* manifest destiny Phrase first used in 1845 to urge annexation of Texas; used thereafter to encourage American settlement of European colonial and Indian lands in the Great Plains and the West and, more generally, as a justification for American empire.
* transcendentalists Philosophy of a small group of mid-nineteenth-century New England writers and thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller; they stressed personal and intellectual self-reliance.
* Second Great Awakening Religious revival movement of the early decades of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the growth of secularism and rationalist religion; began the predominance of the Baptist and Methodist Churches.
* individualism Term that entered the language in the 1820s to describe the increasing emphasis on the pursuit of personal advancement and private fulfillment free of outside interference.
* cult of domesticity the nineteenth-century ideology of “virtue” and “modesty” as the qualities that were essential to proper womanhood.
* family wage Idea that male workers should earn a wage sufficient to enable them to support their entire family without their wives having to work outside the home.
* American system of manufactures system of production that relied on the mass production of interchangeable parts that could be rapidly assembled into standardized finished products. First perfected in Connecticut by clockmaker Eli Terry and by small-arms producer Eli Whitney in the 1840s and 1850s.Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Religious sect founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith; it was a product of the intense revivalism of the “burned-over district” of New York. Smith’s successor Brigham Young led 15,000 followers to Utah in 1847 to escape persecution.

How did the market revolution affect the lives of workers, women, and African-Americans?

THE LIMITS OF PROSPERITY
The Abolitionist Movement

Liberty and Prosperity

“Pat Lyon at the Forge”
Pat Lyon at the Forge, an 1826–1827 painting of a prosperous blacksmith. Proud of his accomplishments as a self-made man who had achieved success through hard work and skill rather than inheritance, Lyon asked the artist to paint him in his shop wearing his work clothes.

As the market revolution progressed, the right to compete for economic advancement became a touchstone of American freedom. Americans celebrated the opportunities open to the “self-made man,” a term that came into use at this time. According to this idea, those who achieved success in America did so not as a result of hereditary privilege or government favoritism as in Europe, but through their own intelligence and hard work. The market revolution enriched numerous bankers, merchants, industrialists, and planters. It produced a new middle class—an army of clerks, accountants, and other office employees who staffed businesses in Boston, New York, and elsewhere. It created new opportunities for farmers who profited from the growing demand at home and abroad for American agricultural products, and for skilled craftsmen such as Thomas Rodgers, a machine builder who established a successful locomotive factory in Paterson, New Jersey. New opportunities for talented men opened in professions such as law, medicine, and teaching. By the early 1820s, there were an estimated 10,000 physicians in the United States.

Race and Opportunity
The market revolution affected the lives of all Americans. But not all were positioned to take advantage of its benefits. Most blacks, of course, were slaves, but even free blacks found themselves excluded from the new economic opportunities. The 220,000 blacks living in the free states on the eve of the Civil War (less than 2 percent of the North’s population) suffered discrimination in every phase of their lives. The majority of blacks lived in the poorest, unhealthiest sections of cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. And even these neighborhoods were subject to occasional violent assault by white mobs, like the armed bands that attacked blacks and destroyed their homes and businesses in Cincinnati in 1829.

Black institutions
Barred from schools and other public facilities, free blacks laboriously constructed their own institutional life, centered on mutual-aid and educational societies, as well as independent churches, most notably the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Richard Allen of Philadelphia, a Methodist preacher, had been spurred to found it after being forcibly removed from his former church for praying at the altar rail, a place reserved for whites.

Downward mobility of free blacks
Whereas many white Americans could look forward to a life of economic accumulation and individual advancement, large numbers of free blacks experienced downward mobility. At the time of abolition in the North, because of widespread slave ownership among eighteenth-century artisans, a considerable number of northern blacks possessed craft skills. But it became more and more difficult for blacks to utilize these skills once they became free. Although many white artisans criticized slavery, most viewed the freed slaves as low-wage competitors and sought to bar them from skilled employment.

Hostility from white craftsmen, however, was only one of many obstacles that kept blacks confined to the lowest ranks of the labor market. White employers refused to hire them in anything but menial positions, and white customers did not wish to be served by them. The result was a rapid decline in economic status until by mid-century, the vast majority of northern blacks labored for wages in unskilled jobs and as domestic servants. The state census of 1855 revealed 122 black barbers and 808 black servants in New York City, but only 1 lawyer and 6 doctors. Nor could free blacks take advantage of the opening of the West to improve their economic status, a central component of American freedom. Federal law barred them from access to public land, and by 1860 four states—Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Oregon—prohibited them from entering their territory altogether.

The Cult of Domesticity
Women, too, found many of the opportunities opened by the market revolution closed to them. As the household declined as a center of economic production, many women saw their traditional roles undermined by the availability of mass-produced goods previously made at home. Some women, as noted above, followed work as it moved from household to factory. Others embraced a new definition of femininity, which glorified not a woman’s contribution to the family’s economic well-being, but her ability to create a private environment shielded from the competitive tensions of the market economy. Woman’s “place” was in the home, a site increasingly emptied of economically productive functions as work moved from the household to workshops and factories. Her role was to sustain nonmarket values like love, friendship, and mutual obligation, providing men with a shelter from the competitive marketplace.

“The Industrious Man,” a plate from the book Picture Lessons published in Philadelphia in 1847.

The Industrious Man, a lithograph from a book produced for children by the American Sunday School Union in the 1840s, depicts an ideal family scene. The father, a laborer, returns home carrying his lunch pail to find his wife and children awaiting him in a comfortable although hardly extravagant home. The scene exemplifies the idea of separate spheres according to which men worked outside the home and women’s role was to fulfill their family responsibilities.
The earlier ideology of “republican motherhood,” which allowed women a kind of public role as mothers of future citizens, subtly evolved into the mid-nineteenth-century cult of domesticity. “In whatever situation of life, a woman is placed from her cradle to her grave,” declared The Young Lady’s Book, one of numerous popular magazines addressed to female audiences of the 1820s and 1830s, “a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind, are required from her.”

With more and more men leaving the home for work, women did exercise considerable power over personal affairs within the family. The rapid decline in the American birthrate during the nineteenth century (from an average of seven children per woman in 1800 to four in 1900) cannot be explained except by the conscious decision of millions of women to limit the number of children they bore. But the idea of domesticity minimized women’s even indirect participation in the outside world. Men moved freely between the public and private “spheres”; women were supposed to remain cloistered in the private realm of the family.

Women and Work
A nineteenth-century wood sculpture of a woman at a spinning wheel.

This nineteenth-century wood sculpture of a woman at a spinning wheel depicts a form of labor practiced by millions of American women in their homes—despite the advent of machines that did the same work—producing thread or yarn from fibers such as wool and cotton.

Prevailing ideas concerning gender bore little relation to the experience of those women who worked for wages at least some time in their lives. They did so despite severe disadvantages. Women could not compete freely for employment, since only low-paying jobs were available to them. Married women still could not sign independent contracts or sue in their own names, and not until after the Civil War did, they, not their husbands, control the wages they earned. Nonetheless, for poor city dwellers and farm families, the labor of all family members was essential to economic survival. Thousands of poor women found jobs as domestic servants, factory workers, and seamstresses.
For the expanding middle class, however, it became a badge of respectability for wives to remain at home, outside the disorderly new market economy, while husbands conducted business in their offices, shops, and factories. In larger cities, where families of different social classes had previously lived alongside one another, fashionable middle-class neighborhoods populated by merchants, factory owners, and professionals like lawyers and doctors began to develop. Work in middle-class homes was done by domestic servants, the largest employment category for women in nineteenth-century America. The freedom of the middle-class woman—defined in part as freedom from labor—rested on the employment of other women within her household.

Homework help – Discussions of labor excluding women
Even though most women were anything but idle, in a market economy where labor increasingly meant work that created monetary value, it became more and more difficult to think of labor as encompassing anyone but men. Homework help – Discussions of labor rarely mentioned housewives, domestic servants, and female outworkers, except as an indication of how the spread of capitalism was de~ Hire our professional writers now and experience the best assignment help online with our custom paper writing service. We ensure your essays and assignments are expertly researched, written and delivered on time. ~ Grading men. The idea that the male head of household should command a family wage that enabled him to support his wife and children became a popular definition of social justice. It sank deep roots not only among middle-class Americans but among working-class men as well.

The Early Labor Movement
Although many Americans welcomed the market revolution, others felt threatened by its consequences. Surviving members of the revolutionary generation feared that the obsession with personal economic gain was undermining devotion to the public good.
“The Intelligence Office,” an 1849 painting by the artist William Henry Burr, depicting a female employment office.

“The Intelligence Office,” an 1849 painting by the artist William Henry Burr, depicts a female employment office. The two women at the left are responding to an ad for a domestic worker printed in a New York City newspaper, which lies crumpled on the ground. The seated woman is the prospective employer, and in the middle is the agent who runs the office. Domestic work was the largest category of female employment throughout the nineteenth century.

Many Americans experienced the market revolution not as an enhancement of the power to shape their own lives, but as a loss of freedom. The period between the War of 1812 and 1840 witnessed a sharp economic downturn in 1819, a full-fledged depression starting in 1837, and numerous ups and downs in between, during which employment was irregular and numerous businesses failed. The economic transformation significantly widened the gap between wealthy merchants and industrialists on the one hand and impoverished factory workers, unskilled dockworkers, and seamstresses laboring at home on the other. In Massachusetts, the most industrialized state in the country, the richest 5 percent of the population owned more than half the wealth.

Alarmed at the erosion of traditional skills and the threat of being reduced to the status of dependent wage earners, skilled craftsmen in the late 1820s created the world’s first Workingmen’s Parties, short-lived political organizations that sought to mobilize lower-class support for candidates who would press for free public education, an end to imprisonment for debt, and legislation limiting work to ten hours per day. In the 1830s, a time of rapidly rising prices, union organization spread and strikes became commonplace. Along with demands for higher wages and shorter hours, the early labor movement called for free homesteads for settlers on public land and an end to the imprisonment of union leaders for conspiracy.

The “Liberty of Living”

Labor actions
But over and above these specific issues, workers’ language of protest drew on older ideas of freedom linked to economic autonomy, public-spirited virtue, and social equality. The conviction of twenty New York tailors in 1835 under the common law of conspiracy for combining to seek higher wages inspired a public procession marking the “burial of liberty.” Such actions and language were not confined to male workers. The young mill women of Lowell walked off their jobs in 1834 to protest a reduction in wages and again two years later when employers raised rents at their boardinghouses. They carried banners affirming their rights as “daughters of free men,” and, addressing the factory owners, charged that “the oppressive hand of avarice [greed] would enslave us.”
“Shoemaker’s Strike in Lynn,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 17 Mar 1860
The Shoemakers’ Strike in Lynn—Procession in the Midst of a Snow-Storm, of Eight Hundred Women Operatives, an engraving from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 17, 1860. The striking women workers carry a banner comparing their condition to that of slaves.

Rooted in the traditions of the small producer and the identification of freedom with economic independence, labor’s critique of the market economy directly challenged the idea that individual improvement—Emerson’s “self-trust, self-reliance, self-control, self-culture”—offered an adequate response to social inequality. Orestes Brownson, in his influential essay “The Laboring Classes” (1840), argued that the solution to workers’ problems did not require a more complete individualism. What was needed instead, he believed, was a “radical change [in] existing social arrangements” so as to produce “equality between man and man.” Here lay the origins of the idea, which would become far more prominent in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that economic security—a standard of life below which no person would fall—formed an essential part of American freedom.

Thus, the market revolution transformed and divided American society and its conceptions of freedom. It encouraged a new emphasis on individualism and physical mobility among white men while severely limiting the options available to women and African-Americans. It opened new opportunities for economic freedom for many Americans while leading others to fear that their traditional economic independence was being eroded. In a democratic society, it was inevitable that the debate over the market revolution and its consequences for freedom would be reflected in American politics.

Glossary
* cult of domesticity the nineteenth-century ideology of “virtue” and “modesty” as the qualities that were essential to proper womanhood.
* family wage Idea that male workers should earn a wage sufficient to enable them to support their entire family without their wives having to work outside the home.

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