Industry The North 1790 s1840 s Chapter 12

Industry & The North 1790 s-1840 s Chapter 12, Out of Many pp. 380 -415

Lowell, Massachusetts • • • 1820 s & 1830 s Young farm girls flock to Lowell, Mass. $3/week 12 hrs/day “Manufacturing College” Escape from rural isolation and parental supervision. --Learn “city ways. ” • Paternalistic control at factories. • By 1850 – are replaced by poor Irish immigrants.

Key Topics • Preindustrial ways of working and living. • The nature of the market revolution. • The effects of industrialization on workers in early factories. • Ways the market revolution changed the lives of ordinary people. • The emergence of the middle class.

Preindustrial Ways of Working • 97% of Americans still lived on farms. • Community based and dependent on local networks of mutual obligation.

Rural Production • Farm families/communities used a barter system. • Money rarely changed hands. –Payment in form of home-crafted item or labor. • “Just Price” was set by neighbors. • No fixed production schedule. – Did jobs when they needed to be done. • “Home & Work” were not separate locations – intermixed.

Urban Production • Skilled craftsmen controlled production. • Apprenticeships were common. • Apprentice became a “Journeyman” -worked for wages and then est. their own shop. • For men only. --Assumed that women would marry. – Needed to learn domestic skills.

Patriarchy in Family, Work, & Society • Seen in both rural and urban societies. • Fathers had authority to direct lives of family members and chose husband for daughters. • Reflected in society as a whole. • Men had all of the power. – women nor children had property or legal rights. • When a man died, his son inherited his property.

The Social Order • Fixed social hierarchy. • Great importance placed on rank and status. --Distinguished by dress and manner. • Artisans gained increased wealth, but did not directly challenge the elite.

The Transportation Revolution • Between 1800 -1840, the US saw revolutionary improvements in transportation. • Encouraged Americans to “look beyond” their communities. • Led to increased urbanization.

Roads • Mud and snow made travel by horseback difficult – slow and dangerous. • Localities contract private turnpike companies to maintain roads – but still remained poor.

The National Road • Was built in 1808. • Single greatest transportation expense (7 million). • Built of gravel on a stone foundation it crossed the Appalachian Mtns. at Cumberland, Maryland – opening up the West! • Built in stages – reached almost to the Miss. River. • Tied the East and West together -- strong evidence of the nations commitment to both expansion and cohesion. -- National community!

Canals & Steamboats • Roads did not work well in the commercial sense. • Canals were the answer to improve East to West cargo transportation.

The Erie Canal • Most famous canal of the era. • Brainchild of NY governor, De. Witt Clinton – who envisioned a “link between NYC and the Great Lakes” through the Hudson River. • 364 miles long – stretches from Albany to Buffalo • Originally coined as “Clinton’s Ditch”

• 27 miles long • Took 9 years to build. • 83 locks • 300 bridges • Farmers worked for $8/month • Replaced by Irish contract workers – cents/day plus room and board. • Other heavy construction work performed by immigrants. 50

• October 26 th, 1825 the Erie Canal was declared “Open for business. ” • The first boat to travel was named The Seneca. --Incredible speed of 4 mph. • …. Ironically, the Seneca Indians, for whom the boat was named, had been removed from the path of the canal and confined to a small reservation.

• The canal provided passage for people and goods. • Farm families now purchased goods previously crafted in their homes. • Rapid decline of homespun cloth because of the canal.

• Utica, Rochester, Buffalo – became instant cities. • Greatest beneficiary was New York City. • NY merchants turned away from Europe and now looked to America’s heartland.

As a famous song put it: “You’ll always know your neighbor, You’ll always know your pal, If you’ve ever navigated On the Erie Canal. ”

“Copy Cats” • Other states follow suit and build canals of their own. • Between 1820 and 1840, $200 million was invested in canal building. • The Erie Canal collected $8. 5 million in tolls in its first 9 years of operation. • Canal building ended the geographical isolation of most of the country.

Railroads • “Railroad Mania” quickly surpassed canal mania. • The south (least industrialized) had fewer railroads – the North laid a dense network of rail lines that reached west beyond the Mississippi.

Glitches • Locomotives had to be heavy. • Required iron rather than wooden rails. • At first, railroad iron was imported from England. • Required solid gravel roadbed and strong wooden ties. • Arranging steady supplies and construction itself, remained an engineering challenge.

Effects of the Transportation Revolution • Fueled economic growth by making distant market accessible. • $500 million of foreign investments between 1790 and 1861. • Increased risk-taking, invention and innovation. • Allowed people to MOVE… rather easily.

• • Americans began moving farther away. Disease moved with them. Localized epidemics, spread as travel did. St. Louis and Cincinnati lost 10% of their population to disease. • Cholera killed gold-rushers before they reached California.

The Market Revolution • The most fundamental change American communities ever experienced, was the outcome of 3 interrelated developments: 1. Improvements in transportation 2. Commercialization 3. Industrialization

• Commercialization = replacement of household self-sufficiency and barter with the production of goods for a cash market. • Industrialization = the use of powerdriven machinery to produce goods once made by hand.

The Accumulation of Capital • Eastern seaboard cities made huge profit gains through international shipping. • Success stories of the “American Dream” became more commonplace.

John Jacob Astor • Arrived penniless from Germany in 1784. • Made his fortune in the Pacific NW fur trade with China – Est. the “American Fur Co. ” • Made a second fortune in NY real estate. • Retired in 1834 with $25 million • “Wealthiest Man in America”

Banks & Wealth • Banks provided much of the capital for new investments. • A significant amount though, was raised through family connections. • Wealthy families started to consolidate wealth through marriages. • Most northern development was paid for by southern cotton produced by enslaved African American labor.

I HEART ‘MERICA • The willingness of Americans to “think big, ” take risks, and invest large sums of money was caused by American nationalism.

The Putting-Out System • People still produced goods at home, but under the direction of a merchant, who “put out” the raw materials to them. • Paid them a certain sum per finished piece. • Sold the completed item to a distant market.

“ten-footers”

• The putting-out system moved the control of production from the individual artisan to the merchant capitalists. • A national market was being born.

The Spread of Commercial Markets • Because of the putting-out system – farmers move away from barter system and into a larger market economy. • Commercialization was born! • The existence of a cash market was an important spur to westward expansion.

Commercial Agriculture in the Old Northwest • New transportation methods allowed farmers to get their produce to market faster. • Improvements in farm technology allowed farmers to grow more food. • Inexpensive land in America’s Heartland allowed for farmers to grow huge surpluses.

Government Policy • Strongly encouraged western settlement. • $2. 00/acre for a min. of 320 acres in 1800. • $1. 25/acre for 80 acres in 1820.

• The need for cash pushed people into commercial agriculture. • Commercial farming aided by transportation revolution. • Some farmers only farmed out of speculation – hoped their land would increase in value and could sell quickly.

New Technology for Farming • John Deere’s steel plow (invented in 1837) • Cyrus Mc. Cormick’s reaper (patented in 1834). • Farmers were richer, but more economically vulnerable than they had been before.

British Technology & American Industry • Industrialization began in Britain in the 18 th. C. • Was a result of technological changes in the textile industry. • Industrialization required workers to work in factories and “pace themselves to the rhythms of power driven machinery. ”

• The Americans had to copy the British to industrialize quickly. • Samuel Slater - spy? Brought British Machinery plans and ideas to America and built Slater’s Mill – 1 st water powered cotton textile mill. (Rhode Island) • Workforce came primarily from young children (ages 7 -12) and women.

The Lowell Mills (Map pg. 397) • Francis Cabot Lowell stole machine ideas from the British. (industrial spy) • Began building machinery for spinning cotton – and invented a power loom. • Built first LARGE Mill in Waltham, Mass. • Lowell, Mass. Was soon born thereafter.

“The American System of Manufactures” • Interchangeable Parts – first realized in gun manufacturing – revolutionized industrialization. • Huge source of national pride. • America now mass-produced high quality goods much earlier than Britain or any other European country.

From Artisan to Worker • Wage laborers rose from 12% in 1800 to 40% by 1860 • Most of these workers were employed in the North. • ½ were women performing outwork in their homes. • ALL were participating in fundamental person and social changes!

Personal Relationships • Apprentice system eventually replaced by child labor. • Breakdown of the family work-system. • Working at Lowell provided women new options. • Patriarchal control was challenged.

• Southern slave owners compare themselves to northern employers and their use of “wage slaves. ” • Southerners were right…this was a heartless system. • But – Northerners were right… industrialization was certainly freer than the slave system.

Time, Work, & Leisure • Factory work did not allow flexibility. • Work and leisure time used to be blended, now it was seen as separate. • Local taverns become hot-spots for Sunday leisure. • Community-wide celebrations became common in rural areas. • Spectator sports become popular.

Early Strikes • Rural women led early labor strikes. • 1824 women workers at a Pawtucket, Rhode Island textile mill led their coworkers (female and male) out on strike to protest wage cuts and longer hours. • 1834 – Strikes at Lowell Factory – 800 women participated. • Most strikes were unsuccessful.

A New Social Order • Emergence of the American Middle-Class • Second Great Awakening takes root on the East Coast. – Revival meetings take place. • Prayer meetings take place in schools and businesses. -- Reach all classes of society. • Catherine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy is published in 1841.

Sentimentalism • Sprang from nostalgia for the imagined trust and security of the familiar, face-tface life of the preindustrial age. *Thomas Hardy: The Ruined Maid* • Women begin reading sentimental novels. • Women begin writing for other women. • New “female” social codes were formed.

Transcendentalism and Self-Reliance • Ralph Waldo Emerson. (writer, secular minister) • Transcendentalism – a romantic philosophical theory claiming that there was an ideal, intuitive reality transcending ordinary life. • “Nature” (1836)

• “Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent Eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God. ”

• Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854) • Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

• Sentimentalism, transcendentalism, and evangelical religion all helped the new middle-class to forge values and beliefs that were appropriate to their social roles.

SO WHAT? • 3 -6 sentence summary of notes.