The Market Revolution Notes

The Market Revolution   Introduction o in the early years of the 19th century, Americans endless commercial ambition remade the nation o between the Revolution and the Civil War, an old substance world died, and a new more commercial nation was born o Americans integrated the technologies of the Industrial Revolution into a new commercial economy o Steam power, the technology that moved steamboats and railroads, fueled the rise of American industry by powering mills and sparkling new national transportation o The revolution reverberated across the country o More and more farmers grew crops for profit, not for self sufficiency o As northern textile `factories boomed, the demand for southern cotton swelled, and American slavery accelerated o Northern subsistence farmers became laborer’s bound to the whims of markets and bosses Early Republic Economic Development o The growth of the American economy reshaped American life in the decades before the Civil War o Americans increasingly produced goods for sale, not for consumption o Improved transportation enabled a larger network exchange o Class conflict, child labor, accelerated immigration and the expansion of slavery followed o American commerce had proceeded haltingly during the 18th century o American farmers increasingly exported foodstuffs to Europe as the French Revolutionary Wars devastated the continent between 1793-1815 o An 1816 Senate Committee Report lamented that “the price of land carriage is too great” to allow the profitable production of American manufacturers o In his 1815 annual message to Congress, President James Madison stressed, the great importance of establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under national authority o State legislatures pumped capital into the economy by chartering banks o European capital also helped build American infrastructure o Economic growth however, proceeded unevenly o Depressions devastated the economy in 1819,1837 and 1857 o Each followed rampant speculation in various commodities: land in 1891, land and slaves in 1837 and railroad bonds in 1857 o War of 1812  In the wake of the war of 1812, Americans rushed to build a new national infrastructure, new networks of roads, canals and railroads o The spread of paper currency untethered the economy from the physical signifiers of wealth familiar to the colonial generation, namely land o Counterfeit bills were endemic during this early period of banking o With so many fake bills circulating, Americans were constantly on the lookout for the “confidence man” and other deceptive characters I the urban landscape o Transportation Revolution  Opened the vast lands west of the Appalachian Mountains  In 1810 before the rapid explosion of American infrastructure  Margaret Dwight concluded that the reason, so few were willing to go west was not that the country was not good, but the journey is so bad  In 1829 English traveler Frances Trollope made the reverse journey across the Allegheny Mountains from Cincinnati to the East Coach  Her coach encountered the National Road, the first federally funded interstate infrastructure project  If the transportation revolution began with improved road networks, it soon incorporated even greater improvements in the wats people and goods moved across the landscape  Canals  New York State completed the Erie Canal in 1825  350-mile-long human made waterway linked the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean  The success of New York’s artificial river launched the canal-building boom  By 1840 Ohio created 2 navigable, all-water links from Lake Erie to the Ohio River  Robert Fulton established the first commercial steamboat service up and down the Hudson river in New York in 1807  Soon after steamboats filled the waters of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, downstream routes became watery 2-way high ways  Railways  First long-distance rail line launched from Maryland in 1827 o Baltimore’s city government and the state government of Maryland provided half the start-up funds for the new Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company o They founded the line as a means to funnel the agricultural products of the trans-Appalachian West to an outlet on the Chesapeake  Similar motivations led citizens in Philadelphia, Boston, New York City and Charleston to launch their own rail lines  Government supports continued throughout the century but decades later the public origins of railroads were all but forgotten and the railroad corporation because the most visible embodiment of corporate capitalism o Communications Revolution  The telegraph redefined the limits of human communication By 1843 Samuel Morse had persuaded congress to fund a 40-mile telegraph line stretching from Washington DC to Baltimore o The consequences of the transportation and communication revolutions reshaped the lives of Americans o Farmers who previously produced crops mostly for their own family now turned to the market o They earned cash for what they had previously consumed; they purchased the good they had previously made or went without o In the Northeast and Midwest, where farm labor was ever in short supply, ambitious famers invested in new technologies that promised to increase the productivity of the limited labor supply o Encouraged the growth of cities and reshaped the lives of urban workers o The Erie canal captured the bulk of the trade emerging from the Great Lakes region, securing New York City’s position as the nation’s largest and most economically important city o The geographic center of the nation shifted westward o Cash facilitated new impersonal economic relationships and formalized new means of production. Young workers might simply earn wages, instead of receiving room and board and training as part of an apprenticeship o A corporate charter allowed investors and directors to avoid personal liability for company debts o The legal status of incorporation had been designed to confer privileges to organizations embarking on expensive projects explicitly designed for the public good o Dartmouth v Woodward  1819  The supreme court upheld the rights of private corporations when it denied the attempt of the government of New Hampshire to reorganize Dartmouth College on behalf of the common good The Decline of Northern Slavery and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom o Slave labor helped fuel the market revolution o Textile mills, worked by free labor, nevertheless depended on southern cotton, and the vast market economy spurred the expansion of the plantation south o By the early 19th century, states north of the Mason-Dixon line had taken steps to abolish slavery o Vermont included abolition as a provision of its 1777 state constitution o Pennsylvania’s emancipation act of 1780 stipulated that free children must serve an indenture term od 28 years o Gradualism brought emancipation while also defending the interests of northern masters and controlling still another generation of black Americans o In 1804 New Jersey became the last of the northern states to adopt gradual emancipation plans    o There was no immediate moment of jubilee, as many northern states only promised to liberate future children born to enslaved mothers o Such laws also stipulated that such children remain in indentured servitude until their mother’s master in order to compensate the slaveholder’s loss o Quicker routes to freedom included escape or direct emancipation by masters o Congress made the harboring of a fugitive slave a federal crime as early as 1793 o At least 3500 people were still enslaved in the north by 1830. Elderly Connecticut slaves remained in bondage as later as 1848 and New Jersey endured slavery until after the Civil War o The growth of abolition in the north and the acceleration of slavery in the South created growing divisions o Cotton drove the process more than any other crop o Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, a simple hand-cranked device designed to mechanically remove sticky green seeds from short staple cotton, allowed southern planters to dramatically expand cotton production for the national and international markers o Slavery had been growing far less profitable in tobacco planning regions like Virginia, but the growth of cotton farther south and west increased the demand for human bondage o Eager cotton planters invested their new profits in new slaves o New national and international markets field the plantation boom o Slave owners shipped their cotton north to textile manufactures and to norther financers for overseas shipments o Northern insurance brokers and exporters in the Northeast profited greatly o The united states ended its legal participation in the global slave trade in 1808, slave traders moved 1 million saves from the tobacco-producing Uppers South to cotton fields in the Lower South between 1790-1860 Changes in Labor Organization o While industrialization bypassed most of the American south, southern cotton production nevertheless nurtured industrialization in the Northeast and Midwest o The drive to produce cloth transformed the American system of labor o In the early republic, laborers in manufacturing might typically have been expected to work at every stage of production o As early as the 1790’s merchants in New England began experimenting with machines to replace the putting-out system o To effect this transition, merchants and factory owners relied on the theft of British technological knowledge to build the machines they needed o The fruits of American industrial espionage peaked in 1813 when Francis Cabor Lowell and Paul Moody re-created the powered loom used in the mills of Manchester, England o Lowell’s contribution to American industrialism was not only technological, it was organizational o He helped reorganize and centralize the American manufacturing process o The modern American textile mill was fully realized in the planned mill town of Lowell in 1821, 4 years after Lowell himself died. o Powered by the Merrimack River in northern Massachusetts and operated by local farm girls, the mills of Lowell centralized the process of textile manufacturing under one roof o This began the first American manufacturing boom, many women rushed to mills and even were able to lobby for better wages and hours after working sunup to sundown for very low wages o Craftsmen began to understand that new markers increased the demand for their products o Manufactures wanting increased production abandoned the old personal approach of relying on a single live in apprentice for labor and instead hired unskilled wage laborer’s who did not have to be trained in all aspects of making shoes but could simply be assigned to a single respectable aspect of the task o Masters- turned – employers now not only have fewer obligations to their workers, they had lesser attachment o As the northern united states rushed headlong toward commercialization and an early capitalist economy, many American grew uneasy with the growing gap between wealthy businessmen and impoverished wage laborers o Americans embarked on their industrial revolution with the expectation that all men could start their careers as humble wage workers but later achieve positions of ownership and stability with hard work o Wage work had traditionally been looked down on as a state of dependence, suitable only as a temporary waypoint for young men without resources on their path toward the middle class and the economic success necessary to support a wife and children ensconced within the domestic sphere o The commercial economy often failed in its promise of social mobility o Depressions and downturns might destroy businesses and reduce owners to wage work o Even in times of prosperity unskilled workers might perpetually lack good wages and economic security and therefore had to forever depend on supplemental income from their wives and young children o Wage workers – a population disproportionally composed of immigrants and porter Americans – faced low wages, long hours and dangerous working conditions. Class conflict developed o Dependent on the whims of their employers, some worked turned to strikes and unions to pool their resources o Working men organized unions to assert themselves and win both the respect and the resources due to a breadwinner and a citizen o For the middle-class managers and civic leaders caught between workers and owners, unions enflamed a dangerous antagonism between employers and employees  o the essential belied undergirded the northern commitment to “free labor” and won the market revolution much widespread acceptance Changes in Gender Roles and Family Life o In the first half of the 19th century, families in the northern united states increasingly participated in the cash economy created by the market revolution o The first stirrings of industrializing shifted work away from the home o These changes transformed Americans notions of what constituted work and therefore what it meant to be an American man and woman o As Americans encountered better in stores and produced fewer at home, the ability to removed women and children from work determined a family’s class status o This ideal, of course, ignored the reality of women’s work at home and was possible for only the wealthy o The market integrated families into a new cash economy o Women and children worked to supplement the low wages of many male workers o The ideal of an innocent and protected childhood was a privilege for middle- and upper-class families who might look down upon poor families o Meanwhile, the education received by middle-class children provided a foundation for future economic privilege o Education equipped young women with the tools to live sophisticated, genteel lives o Middle class youths found opportunities for respectable employment through formal education, but poor youths remained in marginalized positions o Their families desperate financial state kept them from enjoying fruits of education o Opportunities for education and employment often depended on a given family’s class o American culture expected men and women to assume distinct gender roles as they prepared for marriage and family o When reality muddied the ideal the divide between a private, female world of home and a public, male world of business defined American gender hierarchy o Middling young women also used their education to take positions as schoolteachers in the expanding the common school system o Middle class youths found opportunities for respectable employment through formal education, but poor youths remained in marginalized positions o Their families desperate financial state kept them from enjoying the fruits of education o This ideal was available to families that could survive without their children’s labor o As these children matured, their early experiences often determined whether they entered respectable, well -paying positions or became dependent workers with little prospects for social mobility o Just as children were expected to be sheltered from the adult world or work, American culture expected men and women to assume distinct gender roles as they prepared for marriage and family life o Middle and upper class reinforced their status by shielding “their” women from the harsh realities of wage labor  o Women were to be mothers and educators, not partners in production o In poorer households, women engaged in wage labor o Domestic expectations constantly changed, and the market revolution transformed many women’s traditional domestic tasks o In cities, where women could buy cheap imported cloth to turn into clothing, they became skilled consumers. They stewarded money earned by their husbands by comparing values and haggling over prices o Enslaved women labored in fields, whites argued that African American women were less delicate and womanly than white women and therefore perfectly suited for agricultural labor o White southerners continued to produce large portions of their food and clothing at home. Even when they were market-oriented producers of cash crops, white southerners still insisted that their adherence to plantation slavery and racial hierarchy made them morally superior to greedy northerners and their callous, cutthroat commerce o While the market revolution remade many women’s economic roles, their legal status remained essentially unchanged o Upon marriage, women were rendered legally dead by the notion of coverture, the custom that counted married couples as a single unit represented by the husband. o This period marked the beginning of the shift from “institutional” to companionate” marriage o Institutional marriages were primarily labor arrangements that maximized the couple’s and their children’s changes of surviving and thriving o Money was essential: marriages prompted the largest redistributions of property prior to settling of estates at death The Rise of Industrial Labor in Antebellum America o More than 5 million immigrants arrived in the united states between 1820-1860. o Irish, German and Jewish immigrants sought new lives and economic opportunities o By the civil war, nearly 1/8 Americans had been born outside the United States o Ireland  An economic slump prompted parliament to modernize British agriculture by revoking common land rights for Irish Farmers  These policies generally targeted Catholics in the southern countries of Ireland and motivated many to seek greater opportunity elsewhere  Without capital and skills required to purchase and operate farms, Irish immigrants settled primarily in the northeastern cities and towns and performed unskilled work  Men usually emigrated alone and when possible, practiced what became known as chain migration  Chain migration allowed Irish men to send portions of their wages home, which would then be used either to support their families in Ireland or to purchase tickets for relatives to come to the United States Many retained their social, cultural, and religious beliefs and left to indelible mark on American culture  Many settles in coastal cities Germany  Many immigrants used American ports and cities as temporary waypoints before settling in the rural countryside  Some southern Germans fled declining agricultural conditions and repercussions of the failed revolutions of 1848; many Germans simply sought steadier economic opportunity  Tended to travel as families and carried with them skills and capital that enable them to enter middle-class trades  Germans migrated to the old Northwest farm in rural areas and practiced trades in growing communities such as St. Louis, Cincinnati and Milwaukee, 3 cities that formed what came to be called the German Triangle.  Jewish immigrants hailing from southwestern Germany and parts of occupied Poland moved to the United States through chain migration and as family units  They quickly found their footing and established themselves as an intrinsic part of the American market economy Anglo-Protestant  The sudden influx of immigration triggered a backlash among many nativeborn Anglo-Protestant Americans  This nativist movement, especially fearful of the growing Catholic presence, sought to limit European immigration and prevent Catholics from establishing churches and other institutions  Popular in northern cities such as. Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities with large Catholic populations, nativism even spawned its own political party in the 1850’s The American Party, more commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party, found success in local and state elections throughout the North The rapid rise of the Know-Nothings reflecting widespread anti-Catholic and antiimmigrant sentiment, slowed European immigration Immigration declined precipitously after 1855 as nativism, the Crimean War, and improving economic conditions in Europe discouraged potential migrants from traveling to the United States Only after the American Civil War would immigration levels match and eventually surpass the levels seen in the 1840s and 1850s In industrial northern cities, Irish immigrants swelled the ranks of the working class and quickly encountered the politics of industrial labor Boston operated within specific industries in American cities These unions worked to protect the economic power of their members by creating close shops staiking to improve working conditions  o o o o o o o o o  o Unions did not become legally acceptable until 1842 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of a union organized among Boston bootmakers, arguing that the workers were capable of acting “in such a manner as best to sub serve their own interests” o Women, a dominant labor source for factories since the early 1800s, launched some of the earliest strikes for better conditions o In 1842, child labor became a dominant issue in the American labor movement o The protection of child laborers gained more middle-class support than the protection of adult workers o Massachusetts quickly passed a law prohibiting children under the age of 12 from working more than 10 hours a day o By the mid 19th century had followed Massachusetts lead o Throughout the region, public officials agreed that young children should be prevented from working in dangerous occupations, and older children should balance their labor with education and time for leisure o Male workers sought to improve their income and working conditions to create a household that kept women and children protected within the domestic sphere o But labor gains were limited, and the movement remained moderate Conclusion o During the early 19th century, southern agriculture produced by slaves fueled northern industry produced by wage workers and managed by the new middle class o New transportation, new machinery and new organizations of labor integrated the previously isolated pockets of the colonial economy into a national industrial operation o Industrialization and the cash economy tied diverse regions together at the same time that ideology drove Americans apart o By celebrating the freedom of contract that distinguished the wage worker from the indentured servant of previous generations or the slave in the southern cotton field, political leaders claimed the American revolution’s legacy for the north