APUSH Lecture Ch. 10

America’s Economic Revolution

Ch. 10 Overview: The Market Economy

Era of Rapid Technological, Economic and Urban Growth, 1800s - 1860s

✤ Important changes:

✤ The Missouri Compromise

✤ Development of Commercial Farming

✤ Transportion revolution

✤ Early urbanization

✤ The Rise of manufacturing and early industry

✤ Growth and impact of immigration

✤ Drawbacks of the new market economy

Population Trends✤ Rapid Growth - largely because of

improved public health

✤ 1. Population Growth

✤ 1790 was 4 million

✤ 1820 was 10 million

✤ 1840 was 17 million

✤ 1808 importation of slaves banned; ratio of black to white changes

✤ Immigration becomes important after 1830

✤ 2. Westward Movement

✤ 3. Urbanization

Immigration in the 1840s and 50s✤ Nativism:

✤ 1830-1860 population increase from 12,866,000 to 31,443,000

✤ More than five million were immigrants

✤ America was sparsely settled with a big demand for workers.

✤ Push factors

✤ 1850s - 300,000 from Britain, Germany, Ireland and Scandinavia

✤ 1845-1860 Irish potato famine and Germans escaping political persecution brought poor and illiterate working population (northern factories)

✤ Irish Workers compete with free blacks for the jobs no one else wanted.

✤ Men - railroad building, mining, factory work

✤ Women - servants, washers, factory work

✤ Between 1800 and 1830, New York's population jumped from 60,489 to 202,589.

✤ Many city politicians also offered to assist immigrants in exchange for votes. The politicians set up organizations to help new arrivals find housing and work.

Immigration in the 1840s

Protestant vs. Catholics

✤ Nativist (1850s) feared pollution of Anglo-Saxon nation. America was a pure Protestant country.

✤ Feared the clannish adherence of old world customs, poverty and crime in slums, and burden on welfare.

✤ Also feared competition for jobs but primary reason was anti-Catholicism

✤ Fear that the papacy was trying to interfere in American politics

✤ Protestant vs. Catholic rivalry

Know-Nothings

✤ Know-Nothings: Secret anti-Catholic organizations sworn to secrecy. Nativists peaked between 1854 and 1856 capturing several state legislatures.

✤ Movement lost credibility when it divided over expansion, slavery and caused anti-foreign riots

✤ Members promised not to vote for any Catholics or immigrants running for political office.

Philadelphia Riots of 1844

Know-Nothings

✤ If asked about their secret group, they said, "I know nothing about it."

✤ In the 1850s, nativists started a political party. Because of the members' answers to questions about their party, it was called the Know- Nothing Party.

✤ It wanted to ban Catholics and the foreign-born from holding office. It also called for a cut in immigration and a 21-year wait to become an American citizen.

Transportation Revolution: Canals• With the mid-West growing into the breadbasket of the Northeast, the two regions grew physically closer.

• Originally, transport routes west of the Appalachians (waterways) ran west and south.

• However, agricultural produce was needed in the more densely settled, more urban Northeast.

✤ Transportation systems: changing from dominance of southern waterways to northern waterways like Erie Canal and Michigan Canal

✤ Erie Canal was a major financial success upon its completion.

✤ New York replaced New Orleans as main port of export.

Transportation Revolution: Rail•Starting in the 1830s and booming after 1850,

railroads provided efficient transport independent of waterways.

Railroads surpass water travel in the North.

✤ Increase in railroad track - 1840 (2,818 mi.) to (30,627 mi) by 1860.

✤ Mostly united East to West not North to South

•By 1859 US rails carried 2.6 Billion TONS of freight, and 1.5 billion passengers

•By 1869 the Transcontinental RR is completed •By 1840 both gauge and width of rails is

standardized at 4’4” •4 standard time zones created

The Rise of Manufacturing• With the war of 1812, Northeast shifts increasingly to manufacturing.

• Tariffs protected domestic manufacturing.

• Esp. ready-made clothes, shoes, but also many other things.

• Production techniques include: –  traditional workshops

–  the breaking down of one task into many small ones

–  Early water- and steam-powered industrialization.

• The Am. System of Manufacturing revolutionized production.

• Developed by Eli Whitney in 1798.

• Precision-crafted, interchangeable parts made the production of guns, but also locks, watches, etc. much easier and faster.

• Before, parts were hand-crafted for one individual product only, now they were machine-tooled and could easily be assembled.

• The Am. System allowed for the mass production of quality consumer goods.

New England Textile Industry•Textile production was the most

industrialized segment of the economy before the Civil War.

•Concentrated in New England, massive looms were at first powered by water, later by steam.

•Textile mills concentrated all production steps under one roof.

•Production was efficient, the resulting clothing was cheap.

•The most important example of early NE textile mills were the mills in Waltham and Lowell, Mass.

•Typical hours: 12 hours per day/ 6 days a week (309 days per year)

•40 cents per day but had to pay for rent and food•Forced to go to church on Sundays. No drinking allowed. No

sex allowed. 80% female 15-29 yrs old.

Contrast between North and South

✤ Growth of cities -

✤ North 26% lived in cities over 2500

✤ South fewer than 10%

✤ Rise of Industry - cheap raw materials, spread of factory system and use of machinery

✤ Industry begins to merge with farming - no longer plowing on your own - instead use a John Deere plow or a Cyrus McCormick reaper.

✤ By 1850s US surpassed nearly all other countries in the manufacturing of goods produced with precision machines.

✤ Machine factories needed only unskilled workers (immigrants) and the relationship between the workers and employer became very impersonal.

✤ Wages of $6 per week for 15 hour days. Unions were called conspiracies and received unfavorable public opinion. “landless proletariat” (Commonwealth v. Hunt)

Contrast between South and North

✤ North specialized in farming shipped on rails. (Economy of Scale)

✤ Southern tobacco, sugar and cotton based on slave labor in the deep South. Southern, non-slaveholding, farmers remained outside the market economy.

✤ Rumors of a Northern conspiracy made up of bankers, merchants, manufacturers who kept the South as a colony.

✤ Robert Toombs of Georgia thought that the North had become powerful because the government had given the North monopolistic favors. Government subsidies had made it “a perpetual fertilizing stream to them and their industry, and a suction-pump to drain away our substance and parch up our lands.”

Farmers Become Dependent on the East

• Commercial farming was directly tied to technological innovations, such as steel plows or the McCormick reaper.

• Farmers invested money in advanced tools. • As the orientation towards a cash income increased, farmers also bought ready-

made clothes, shoes and other goods. • Therefore, commercial farming was tied to the other key factor of the market

economy: manufacture. • Between 1820-60, the area now known as the mid-West saw rapid settlement. • In accordance to the Jeffersonian ideal, most settlers engaged in farming. • However, farmers increasingly shifted from subsistence farming to cash crops,

most importantly wheat. • As farmers worked towards a cash income, they became part of of the growing

market economy.

International Trade✤ Following the economic depression after the

Panic of 1837, cotton production fueled the recovery of American trade

✤ Exports and imports went from $222 million in 1840 to $687 million in 1860.

✤ By 1860, the global economy was built around the American cotton industry.

✤ International trade with China: Open Door trade. Post Opium War Treaty of Wanghia (1854)

✤ Trade with Japan: Open via Commodore Perry, 1852

The Communication Revolution

✤ May 24th, 1844

✤ First telegraph message sent

✤ Symbolic of the technological revolution that the United States had undergone over the past several decades

✤ Growth of technology was particularly notable in transportation and communication.

“What hath God wrought”✤ The choice of words is perhaps a perfect reflection of

the time period in general

✤ Convergence of conservatism (small town, religious) and liberal thought (urban, industrial, innovative)

✤ Consider that Andrew Jackson rode into Washington DC by horse and carriage but left office by railroad.

✤ Also, more immediate access to news and information increased the influence of large markets over small ones. This created a national identify but led to aggressive resistance in the South.

✤ Historians argue that the rapid communications and transportation changes further propelled the nation towards division and ultimately war.

✤ Considering our current communications revolution - can we predict something similar within our own time?