Go Lions

1. Chapter 14
Forging the National
Economy, 1790–1860

2. Theme 1:
Antebellum society in
American culture was strongly
influenced by Irish and German
immigration, which led to the rise
of a powerful nativism movement.

3. I. The Westward Movement
– The rise of Andrew Jackson, the first president
from beyond the Appalachian Mountains,
exemplified the inexorable westward march.
• The Republic late 1850s:
– Half of Americans were under the age of 30
– By 1840 the “demographic center” of the
American population map had crossed the
Alleghenies (see Map 14.1).
• By the eve of the Civil War, it had marched across
the Ohio River.

4. I. The Westward Movement
(cont.)
• Life across the Ohio River:
– Life was downright grim for most pioneer
families
• Perpetual victims of diseases, depression, and
premature death
• Unbearable loneliness, especially for the women
• Breakdowns and madness were all too frequent
• Frontier life could be tough and crude for men as well

5. I. The Westward Movement
(cont.)
– Pioneering Americans, marooned by geography,
were often ill-informed, superstitious, provincial,
and fiercely individualistic.
– Popular literature abounded with portraits of
unique, isolated figures.
– Even in the days of “rugged individualism” there
were exceptions.
– Pioneers called upon their neighbors for help
and upon the government for internal
improvements.

6. Map 14-1 p277

7. II. Shaping the Western
Landscape
• The westward movement also molded the
physical environment:
– The American West felt the pressure of
civilization:
• By the 1820s American trappers were trapping in the
vast Rocky Mountain region
• The fur-trapping empire was based on the
rendezvous (French for “meeting” system
– Trappers and Indians would come together to trade beaver
pelts for manufactured goods from the East.

8. II. Shaping the Western
Landscape
(cont.)
– The beaver had all but disappeared from the region
– The buffalo eventually were totally annihilated
– On the California coast, other traders brought sea-otter
pelts, driving to the point of near-extinction.
• Some historians called this aggressive and heedless
exploitation of the West’s natural bounty ecological
imperialism.
• Yet Americans in this period revered nature and
admired its beauty.
– Many found the wild, unspoiled character of the land,
especially the West, to be among the young nation’s
defining attributes.

9. II. Shaping the Western
Landscape
(cont.)
• America had the pristine, natural beauty,
unspoiled by human hands
– This national mystique inspired literature and
painting and a powerful conservation
movement.
• George Catlin, a painter and student of Native
American life, was among the first to advocate the
preservation of nature as a deliberate national policy.
• He proposed the creation of a national park,
beginning with Yellowstone Park in 1872.

10. p278

11. III. The March of the Millions
• As the American people moved West, they
also multiplied at an amazing rate:
– By midcentury the population was doubling
every twenty-five years (see Figure 14:1)
– By 1860 the thirteen colonies had more than
doubled in numbers; 33 stars graced the flag
– The United States was the fourth most populous
nation in the western world:
• Exceeded only by Russia, France, and Austria.

12. III. The March of the Millions
(cont.)
• Urban growth continued explosively:
– 1790 only two American cities that could boast
populations of 20,000—Philadelphia, New York
– 1860 there were 43 and 300 claimed over 5,000
– New York was the metropolis; New Orleans, the
“Queen of the South;” and Chicago, the
swaggering lord of the Midwest—destined to be
“hog butcher for the world.”

13. III. The March of the Millions
(cont.)
• Over-rapid urbanization brought undesirable
by-products:
– It intensified the problems of smelly slums,
feeble street lighting, inadequate policing,
impure water, foul sewage, ravenous rats, and
improper garbage disposal
• Boston (1823) pioneered a sewer system
• New York (1842) abandoned wells and cisterns for a
piped-in water supply, thus eliminating the breeding
place for many disease-carrying mosquitoes

14. III. The March of the Millions
(cont.)
• A continuing high birthrate accounted for
the increase in population:
– By the 1830s the rate of increase was 60,000 a
year
– The influx tripled in the 1840s and then
quadrupled in the 1850s
– During the 1840s and 1850s a million and half
Irish, and nearly as many Germans came (see
Table 14.1)

15. III. The March of the Millions
(cont.)
• Why did they come?
• Partly because Europe seemed to be running out of
room; had “surplus people”
• Majority headed for the “land of freedom and
opportunity”
• The introduction of transoceanic steamships meant
that immigrants could come speedily and cheaply
• The United States received a far more diverse array
of immigrants than other countries
• The United States beckoned them from dozens of
different nations

16. Figure 14-1 p279

17. Table 14-1 p279

18. p280

19. IV. The Emerald Isle Moves West
• Ireland was prostrated in the mid-1840s:
– 2 million perished as a result of the potato
famine
– 10,000s fled the Land of Famine for the Land of
Plenty in the “Black Forties”
– Ireland’s great export has been population, they
took their place beside the Jews and the Africans
as a dispersed people: (see “Makers of America:
The Irish,” pp. 282-283)
– Many swarmed into the larger seaboard cities.

20. B. Irish immigrants (part of the “Old
Immigration”)
1. Irish Potato
Famine
(1840s)
-- 2 million
deaths

21. p282

22. IV. The Emerald Isle Moves West
(cont.)
• Boston and particularly New York became the largest
Irish city in the world
• The Irish did not receive red-carpet treatment
• The friendless “famine Irish” were forced to fend for
themselves
– The Ancient Order of Hibernians, a semisecret society
founded in Ireland to fight rapacious landlords, served in
America as a benevolent society, ailing the downtrodden
– It also helped to spawn the Molly Maguires, a shadowy
Irish miner’s union that rocked the Pennsylvania coal
districts in the 1860s and 1870s

23. IV. The Emerald Isle Moves West
(cont.)
• Irish conditions in America:
• They tended to remain in low-skill occupations
• Gradually improved their lot, usually by acquiring
modest amounts of property
• The education of children was cut short
• Property ownership counted as a grand “success”
• Politics attracted these Gaelic newcomers
• They gained control of powerful city machines,
notably New York’s Tammany Hall, and reaped the
patronage rewards

24. Irish eventually climbed up the social
ladder by buying property
Came to control political machines in
large cities
-- Tammany Hall in NYC

25. Iv. The Emerald Isle Moves West
(cont.)
• American politicians made haste to cultivate
the Irish vote:
• Especially in the politically potent state of New York
• Irish hatred of the British lost nothing in the
transatlantic transplanting
• Nearly 2 million arrived between 1830 and 1860—
and Washington glimpsed political gold in those
emerald green hills

26. Population
Density of
People
Born in
Ireland,
1872

28. V. The German Forty-Eighters
• The influx of refugees from Germany
between 1830 and 1860 was hardly less
spectacular than that from Ireland
– Over a million and a half Germans stepped onto
American soil (see “Makers of America: The
Germans,” pp. 286-287)
• The bulk were uprooted farmers
• Some were liberal political refugees
• Germany’s loss was America’s gain

29. p286

30. V. The German Forty-Eighters
(cont.)
• Germans:
• Carl Schurz was a relentless foe of slavery and public
corruption
• They possessed a modest amount of materials goods
• Most pushed to the lush lands of the Middle West,
notably Wisconsin for farming
• They formed an influential body of voters whom
American politicians wooed
• They were less potent politically since they were
more widely scattered

31. V. The German Forty-Eighters
(cont.)
– The hand of the Germans in shaping American
life was widely felt:
• The Conestoga wagon, the Kentucky rifle, and the
Christmas tree were all German contributions
• They warmly supported public schools, including their
Kindergarten (children's garden)
• They did much to stimulate music and the arts
• They were relentless enemies of slavery

32. V. The German Forty-Eighters
(cont.)
• They were sometimes dubbed “damned
Dutchmen”:
• Were regarded with suspicion
• Seeking to preserve their language and customs, they
sometimes settled in compact “colonies”
• Keeping aloof from the surrounding communities
• Accustomed to “Continental Sunday” and uncurbed
by Puritan tradition, they made merry on Sunday
• Their Old World drinking habits spurred advocates of
temperance to redouble their efforts

33. Distribution of German Immigrants, 1890

34. p283

35. Uncle Sam’s Lodging House
Uncle Sam: "Look here, you, everybody else is quiet and peaceable, and you're all the time akicking up a row!“

36. VI. Flare-ups of Antiforeignism
• The invasion of the immigrants in the 1840s
and 1850s inflamed the prejudices of
American “nativists”
• They feared they would outbreed, outvote, and
overwhelm the old “native” stock
• They took jobs from “native” Americans
• They were Roman Catholics
– The Church of Rome was regarded as out of line
by many old-line Americans as a “foreign”
church.

37. VI. Flare-ups of Antiforeignism
(cont.)
• Roman Catholics were on the move:
• To avoid Protestant indoctrination in public schools,
they began in the 1840s to construct an entirely
separate Catholic educational system:
• Very expensive undertaking, but revealed the
strength of their commitment
• With the Irish and German influx, the Catholics
became a powerful religious group
• In 1840 they ranked fifth behind the Baptists,
Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists

38. A Know Nothing Flag

39. VI. Flare-ups of Antiforeignism
(cont.)
• Know-Nothing Party—organized by
American “nativists” for political action:
– Agitated for rigid restriction on immigration and
naturalization
– Agitated for laws authorizing the deportation of
alien paupers
– Promoted a lurid literature of exposure, much of
pure fiction
– Example: Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures

40. VI. Flare-ups of Antiforeignism
(cont.)
• There was even occasional mass violence
against Catholics:
– Burning their churches and schools
– Some killed and wounded in days of fighting
• Immigrants were undeniably making
America a more pluralistic society:
– One of the most ethnically and racially diverse
– Thus the wonder that cultural clashes occurred

41. VI. Flare-ups of Antiforeignism
(cont.)
• The American economy:
– Attracted immigrants and ensured them of the
share of American wealth without jeopardizing
the wealth of others
– They helped fuel economic expansion
– Immigrants and the American economy needed
each other
– Together they help bring the Industrial
Revolution

42. A Soap
Advertisement
seeks to seize on
the popularity of
the Know Nothings
in the early 1850s

43. p284

44. Theme 2:
In the early nineteenth century,
the American economy developed
the beginnings of industrialization.
The greatest advances occurred in
transportation, as canals and
railroads bound the Union together
into a continental economy with
strong regional specialization.

45. VII. Creeping Mechanization
• Gifted British inventors in 1750s perfected a
series of machines for mass production of
textiles:
• They harnessed steam to usher in the modern factory
system—the Industrial Revolution
• Resulting in a spectacular transformation in
agriculture
• As well as in methods of transportation and
communication

46. VII. Creeping Mechanization
(cont.)
• The factory system spread from Britain—
“the world’s workshop”.
– Why was America to become an industrial
giant?
• Land was cheap in America
• Labor was scarce
• Money for capital investment was not plentiful
– The future of industrialization had to wait until
the middle of the nineteenth century in America

47. VIII. Whitney Ends the Fiber Famine
• Samuel Slater— “Father of the Factory
System”
– After memorizing the plans for the machinery,
he escaped to America
– He won the backing of Moses Brown, a Quaker
capitalist in Rhode Island:
• Laboriously reconstructing the essential apparatus in
1791 he put together the first efficient American
machinery for spinning cotton thread

48. p289

49. VIII. Whitney Ends the Fiber
Famine (cont.)
• Where was the cotton fiber:
– Insatiable demand for cotton riveted the chains
of the downtrodden southern blacks
– Slave-driving planters cleared more land for
cotton
– Cotton Kingdom pushed westward
– Yankee machines put out avalanches of cotton
– The American phase of the Industrial Revolution,
first blossomed in cotton textiles, was well on its
way.

50. VIII. Whitney Ends the Fiber
Famine (cont.)
• Factories first flourished in New England:
– Then branched out to New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania
– The South:
•
•
•
•
Increasingly was wedded to the production of cotton
Had little manufacturing
Its capital was bound up in slaves
Its local consumers for the most part were
desperately poor

51. VIII. Whitney Ends the Fiber
Famine (cont.)
• New England was singularly favored as an
industrial center because:
– Its narrow belt of stony soil made farming
difficult and manufacturing attractive
• a relatively dense population provided labor and
accessible markets
• shipping brought in capital
• seaports made easy the import of raw materials and
the export of the finish product

52. VIII. Whitney Ends the Fiber
Famine (cont.)
– The rivers, notably the Merrimack in Mass.,
provided abundant water power.
– By 1860 more than 400 million pounds of
southern cotton poured into the mills, mostly in
New England.

53. p287

54. p287

55. p288

56. p288

57. IX. Marvels in Manufacturing
• As the factory system flourished it embraced
numerous other industries:
– The manufacturing of firearms and the
contribution of Eli Whitney:
• Interchangeable parts adopted in 1850
• Became the basis of modern mass-production,
assembly-line methods
• It gave the North the vast industrial plant that
ensured military preponderance over the South

58. IX. Marvels in Manufacturing
(cont.)
– Ironically Whitney, by perfecting the cotton gin,
gave slavery a renewed lease on life
– By popularizing the principle of interchangeable
parts, Whitney helped factories to flourish in the
North, giving the Union a decided advantage.
– The sewing machine:
•
•
•
•
Invented by Elias Howe in 1846
Perfected by Isaac Singer
Gave strong boost to northern industrialization
Became the foundation of the ready-made clothing

59. b.Interchangeable parts
(widely adopted in 1850’s)
i. Basis of modern mass-production
assembly line methods
ii. Mass-produced muskets for the U.S. Army
Whitney’s Gun
Factory near New
Haven, Connecticut

60. 3. Sewing machine
a. Elias Howe, 1846
b. Isaac Singer, 1851
c. Significance:
Isaac Singer

61. 4. Telegraph -- Samuel F.B. Morse
-- Significance:
“What Hath God
Wrought?”

62. IX. Marvels in Manufacturing
(cont.)
• Drove many seamstresses from the shelter of the
private home to the factory—human robot—tended
the clattering mechanisms
– Each new invention stimulated still more
imaginative inventions:
• Decade ending in 1800: only 306 patents were
registered in Washington
• Decade ending in 1860: there were 28,000
• In 1838 the clerk of the Patent Office resigned in
despair, complaining that all worthwhile inventions
had been discovered

63. IX. Marvels in Manufacturing
(cont.)
• Technical advances:
– Changes in the form and legal status of business
organizations:
• The principle of limited liability aided the
concentration of capital
• The Boston Associates was created by 15 Boston
families
• Laws of “free incorporation” meant that businessmen
could create corporation without applying for
individual charters from the legislature

64. IX. Marvels in Manufacturing
(cont.)
• Samuel F. B. Morse:
– Inventor of the telegraph
– Secured from Congress an appropriation of
$30,000 to support his experiment with “talking
wires”
– In 1844 he strung a wire 40 miles from
Washington to Baltimore and tapped out the
historic message, “What hath God wrought?”

65. IX. Marvels in Manufacturing
(cont.)
• By the time of the London World’s Fair in
1851, known as the Great Exhibition:
– American products were prominent among the
world’s commercial wonders
– Fairgoers crowded into the Crystal Palace to see:
• McCormick’s reaper, Morse’s telegraph, Colt’s
firearms, and Charles Goodyear’s vulcanized rubber
goods.

66. p289

67. X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”
• The factory system created an increasingly
acute labor problem:
– Manufacturing had been done in the home:
• Master craftsman and his apprentice worked
together
• The Industrial Revolution submerged this personal
association into impersonal ownership of stuffy
factories in “spindle cities”
• Around these the slumlike hovels of the “wage
slaves” tended to cluster

68. X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”
(cont.)
• Workers’ conditions:
– Working people wasted away at their benches
– Hours were long, wages were low, meals skimpy
and hastily gulped
– Workers forced to toil in unsanitary buildings,
poorly ventilated, lighted, and heated
– They were forbidden to form unions to raise
wages
Thus there were only 24 recorded strikes before 1835

69. X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”
(cont.)
• Exploitation of child labor:
– In 1820 a significant number of the nation’s
industrial toilers were children under ten
– Victims of factory labor, many children were
mentally blighted, emotionally starved,
physically stunted, and brutally whipped in
special “whipping rooms”
– Samuel Slater’s mill of 1791: the first machine
tenders were 7 boys and 2 girls, all under 12.

70. X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”
(cont.)
• Lot of adult wage workers in 1820s-1830s:
– Many states granted the laboring man the vote
– He first strove to lightened his burden through
workingmen’s parties
– Many workers gave their loyalty to the
Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson:
– In addition to goals of ten-hour day, higher wages, and
tolerable working conditions, they demanded public
education for their children and an end to inhuman practice
of imprisonment for debt

71. X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”
(cont.)
• Employers:
– Fought the ten-hour day
• Argued reduced hours would lessen production
• Increase costs, and demoralize the workers
• Laborers would have so much leisure time that the
Devil would lead them to mischief
– In 1840 President Van Buren established the tenhour day for federal employees on public works.
• In ensuing years many states began reducing the
hours of working people.

72. X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”
(cont.)
• Day laborers tried to improve their lot:
– Their strongest weapon was to lay down their
tools
– Dozens of strikes erupted in the 1830s and
1840s:
• For higher wages, ten-hour days and goals such as
the right to smoke on the job
• Workers usually lost most strikes than they won
• Employers imported strike-breakers
• Labor raised its voice against these immigrants

73. X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”
(cont.)
• Labor’s effort to organize:
– Netted some 300,000 trade unionists by 1830
– Suffered as a result of the severe depression,
1837
– Toilers won a promising legal victory in 1842
• Commonwealth v. Hunt—Mass. Supreme Court—
labor unions were not illegal conspiracies, provided
that their methods were “honorable and peaceful.”
– This case did not legalize the strike overnight
– Trade unions had a long road to go

74. p291

75. p291

76. p292

77. p293

78. XI. Women and the Economy
• Women became part of the clanging
mechanism of factory production:
– New factories undermined the work of women
in their homes
– Some factories offered work to those displayed
– Factory jobs promised greater economic
independence for women
– And the means to buy the manufactured
products of the new market economy

79. XI. Women and the Economy
(cont.)
• “Factory girls”
– Toiled six days a week, twelve to thirteen hours
“from dark to dark”
– Textile mill at Lowell, Mass. as a showplace:
– Workers were virtually all New England farm girls
– Carefully supervised on and off the job by watchful matrons
– Escorted regularly to church from their company
boardinghouses
– Forbidden to form unions
– Few opportunities to share their grueling working condition

80. Middlesex Company Woolen Mills, Lowell, MA,
on the Merrimack River c. 1830s

81. 6. Irish and German immigrants later
replaced the Lowell Girls

82. XI. Women and the Economy
(cont.)
• Factory jobs wee unusual for women:
– Opportunities to be economically self-supporting
were scarce
– Consisted mainly of nursing, domestic services,
and teaching
– Catherine Beecher urged women to enter the
teaching profession—became “feminized”
– Other “opportunities” beckoned in household
services

83. XI. Women and the Economy
(cont.)
• Statistics:
– One white family in ten employed poor white,
immigrant, or black women
– 10 % white women worked outside their homes
– 20% of all women had been employed at some
time before marriage
– The vast majority of working women were single
– Upon marriage they left their job to become
wives and mothers, without wages.

84. XI. Women and the Economy
(cont.)
• Cult of domesticity:
– A widespread cultural creed that glorified the
customary functions of the homemaker
– From their pedestal:
• Married women commanded immense moral power
– They increasingly made decisions that altered the character
of the family itself
– Women’s changing roles:
• The Industrial Revolution changed life in the home of
nineteenth-century: traditional “women’s sphere.”

85. XI. Women and the Economy
(cont.)
• Love, not parental “arrangement” determined the
choice of a spouse—yet parents retained the power
of veto
• Families became more closely knit and affectionate,
providing the emotional refuge against the
threatening impersonality of big-city industrialism
• Families grew smaller
• The “fertility rate” dropped for women between 14
and 45
• Birth control was still a taboo topic

86. IX. Women and the Economy
(cont.)
• Women played a large part in having fewer children
• This newly assertive role has been called “domestic
feminism”
• Smaller families meant child-centered families
• What Europeans saw in the American families as
permissiveness was in reality the consequence of an
emerging new idea of child-rearing:
– The child’s will was not simply broken, but rather shaped
• Good citizens were raised not to be meekly obedient
to authority, but to be independent individuals,
making their own decisions on internalized morals

87. IX. Women and the Economy
(cont.)
• The outlines of the “modern” family:
– It was small, affectionate and child-centered
– It provided a special area for the talents of
women
– It was a big step upward from the conditions of
grinding toil—often alongside men in the fields.

88. Why was New England the center of
American industrialism?
1. Poor land for cash crop farming
2. Large pool of available labor
3. Strong shipping industry
4. Rapid rivers provided water power
for textile factories.

89. D. Why did the South not industrialize?
1. Capital tied up in slaves
2. Smaller consumer market: Large
poor white population could
not afford finished products
E. By 1850, industrial output eclipsed
agricultural output

90. p294

91. XII. Western Farmers Reap a
Revolution in the Fields
• Flourishing farms were changing the face of
the West:
– The trans-Allegheny region—especially the OhioIndiana-Illinois tier—was fast becoming the
nation’s breadbasket
• Before long it would become a granary to the world.
– Pioneer families hacked a clearing out of the
forest and then planted corn fields:
• The yellow grain was amazingly versatile.

92. XII. Western Farmers Reap a
Revolution in the Fields (cont.)
– Most western products were first floated down
the Ohio-Mississippi River system
– Inventions came to the aid of the farmers:
• John Deere of Illinois in 1837 produced a steel plow
that broke the stubborn soil:
– Sharp and effective, it was light enough to be pulled by
horses, rather than oxen.
• 1830 Cyrus McCormick invented the mechanical
mower-reaper
– It was to the western farmers what the cotton gin was to
the South.

93. John Deere’s Steel Plow

94. "The People's Favorite! The World-Renowned McCormick
Twine Binder! Victorious in over 100 Field Trials! New and
Valuable Improvements for 1884!“
-- The Abilene reflector, Kansas, May 29, 1884

95. XII. Western Farmers Reap a
Revolution in the Fields (cont.)
– It could do the work of five men with sickles and scythes.
• The McCormick reaper:
– It made ambitious capitalists out of humble plowmen, who
now scramble for more acres
– Subsistence farming gave way to food production on a
large-scale (“extensive”); specialized, cash-crop agriculture
came to dominate the trans-Allegheny West
– With it followed mounting indebtedness
– Wanted more land and more machinery to work it
– They dreamed of market elsewhere—in the mushrooming
factory towns of the East or across the faraway Atlantic
– However, they were still landlocked—a need for a
transportation revolution

96. p295

97. p296

98. XIII. Highways and Steamboats
– In 1789, when the Constitution was launched,
primitive methods of travel were still in use:
• Waterborne commerce was slow, uncertain, and
often dangerous
• Stagecoaches and wagons lurched over bone-shaking
roads
• Cheap and efficient carriers were imperative
• In 1790s a private company completed the Lancaster
Turnpike in Pennsylvania, running 60 miles from
Philadelphia to Lancaster

99. Transportation prior to the
transportation revolution was
very poor

100. D.
Turnpikes
1. Lancaster, Penn. (1790)
-- Significance:

101. XIII. Highways and Steamboats
(cont.)
• As driver approached the tollgate, they were
confronted with a barrier of sharp pikes, which were
turned aside when they paid their toll—turnpike.
• Western road building, always expensive,
encountered many obstacles:
– Noisy states’ righters, who opposed federal aid to local
projects
– Eastern states protested against being bled of their
populations by the westward-reaching arteries
– Westerners scored a notable triumph in 1811 when the
federal government started the construction of the
National Road—known as the Cumberland Road.

102. Building the first macadam road in the U.S., Maryland.
It later grew to become the Cumberland Road

103. 2. National Road (Cumberland Road), 1811
-- Impact

104. 3.
Conestogas
There were numerous inns on the
National Road where travelers could rest
awhile and get a good meal for 25 cents.

105. XIII. Highways and Steamboats
(cont.)
• Robert Fulton started the steamboat craze:
– Installed a powerful steam engine, the Clermont:
• It ran in 1807 from New York City up the Hudson
River toward Albany—150 miles in 32 hours
• The success of the steamboat was sensational
• Fulton had changed all of America’s navigable
streams into two-way arteries, doubling carrying
capacity
• By 1820 there were 60 steamboats on the Mississippi
and its tributaries
• By 1860 there were one thousand.

106. Steamboat -- Robert Fulton
-- Significance:

107. The Champions of the Mississippi by Mrs. Frances
Flora Bond Palmer, 1865

108. XIII. Highways and Steamboats
(cont.)
– In April 1865 the steamer Sultana blew up,
killing seventeen hundred passengers, including
many Union prisoners of war.
– The chugging steamboats played a vital role in
the opening of the West and South.

109. p297

110. XIV. “Clinton’s Big Ditch” in New York
• A canal-cutting craze paralleled the boom in
turnpikes and steamboats (see Map 14.2):
– New Yorkers, cut off from federal aid by states’
righters, themselves dug the Erie Canal, linking
the Great Lakes with the Hudson River
• Blessed by the driving leadership of Governor DeWitt
Clinton, the project was called “Clinton’s Big Ditch” or
“the Governor’s Gutter.”

111. XIV. “Clinton’s Big Ditch” in New
York (cont.)
• Begun in 1817, the canal was 363 mi long
• Went from Buffalo, on Lake Erie, to the Hudson River,
on to New York harbor
• The water from Clinton’s keg baptized the Empire
State
• Shipping was sped up as the cost/time dropped
– Other economic ripples
• The value of land along the route skyrocketed and
new cities, Rochester and Syracuse, blossomed
• The new profitability of farming in the Old
Northwest- Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois—
attracted European immigrants.

113. Original northern five
step lock structure
crossing the Niagara
Escarpment at
Lockport, now without
gates and used as a
cascade for excess
water.

114. XIV. “Clinton’s Big Ditch” in New
York (cont.)
– Many dispirited New England farmers abandoned their
rocky holdings and went elsewhere:
– Finding it easier to go west over the Erie Canal, some took
new farmland south of the Great Lakes
– The transformation in the Northeast—canal consequences
—showed how long-established local market structures:
» Could be swamped by the emerging behemoth of a
continental economy
– American goods on the international market; far-off
Europeans began to feel the effects of America’s economic
vitality

115. The 5 double locks at Lockport, originally constructed 18241825, enlarged in 1842 (north tier) and 1849 (south tier)

116. Map 14-2 p298

117. XV. The Iron Horse
– The development of the railroad
• It was fast, reliable, cheaper than canals to construct,
and not frozen over in winter
• Able to go anywhere—it defied terrain and weather
• First railroad appeared in 1828 and new lines spread
with amazing swiftness
– Faced strong opposition from canal builders
– They were prohibited, at first, to carry freight
– Considered a dangerous public menace
• Other obstacles:
– Brakes were so feeble that engineers might miss the station
– Arrivals and departures were conjectural

118. “Tom Thumb”

119. XV. The Iron Horse
(cont.)
– Numerous differences in gauge—required passengers to
make frequent changes of trains
• Improvements came:
– Gauges gradually became standard
– Safety devices wee adopted
– The Pullman “sleeping palace” was introduced in 1859.
• America at long last was being bound together with
braces of iron, later to be made of steel.

120. August 28, 1830, Peter Cooper’s “Tom Thumb” and a horse race along
two railroad tracks.

121. Map 14-3 p299

122. XVI. Cables, Clippers, and Pony Riders
– Other forms of transportation and communication were binding the United States and the
world:
• Cyrus Field in 1858:
– What he called “the greatest wire-puller in history”
– The stretching of a cable from Newfoundland to Ireland
– Later a heavier cable (1866) permanently linked the
American and European continents
• Donald McKay:
– The development of the new craft called clipper ships
– They sacrificed cargo space for speed
– Their hour of glory was relatively brief.

123. XVI. Cables, Clippers, and Pony
Riders (cont.)
• Eve of the Civil War the British won the world race for
maritime ascendancy with their iron tramp steamers
– They were steadier, roomier, more reliable and more
profitable.
• Stagecoaches:
– Immortalized by Mark Twain’s Roughing It
– Their dusty tracks stretched from the banks of the muddy
Missouri River clear to California (see Map 14.4).
• Pony Express (1860):
– to carry mail speedily the 2,000 lonely miles from St.
Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California; ten day trip
– Lasted only 18 months

124. XVI. Cables, Clippers, and Pony
Riders (cont.)
• The express riders were unhorsed by Samuel Morse’s
clacking keys
– Which began to tap messages to California in 1861
• The swift ships and the fleet ponies ushered out a
dying technology of wind and muscle
• In the future, machines would be in the saddle

125. p300

126. p300

127. Map 14-4 p301

128. XVII. The Transport Web Binds the
Union
– The transportation revolution:
• Was stimulated by the desire of the East to tap the
West
– Western region drained southward to the cotton belt
– Steamboats reversed the flow of finished goods to the
western arteries and helped bind the West and South
together
– Three decades after the Civil War, canals and railroads out
from the East, over the Alleghenies and into the blossoming
heartland
– An impressive grid of “internal improvements” was laid
• By the eve of the Civil War, a truly continental
economy had emerged.

129. XVII. The Transportation Web
Binds the Union (cont.)
– The principle of division of labor was applied on a national
level
– Each region specialized in a particular type of economic
activity
» The South raised cotton
» The West grew grain and livestock
» The East made machines
• The economic pattern had fateful political and
military implications:
– Many southerners regarded the Mississippi as a chain
linking the upper valley states to the southern Cotton
Kingdom
– They believed that some or all of these states would secede
with them or be strangled

130. XVII. The Transportation Web
Binds the Union (cont.)
– They overlooked the man-made links that bound the upper
Mississippi Valley to the East; intimate commercial union
– Southern rebels would not only have
» to fight Northern armies,
» but the tight bonds of an interdependent continental
economy
– Economically, the two northerly sections were conjoined
twins

131. VII. Regional Specialization
A. East: Industrial
B. South: Cotton/slavery
C. West: Grain & Livestock to feed
East & Europe
D. Political implications:
sectionalism!

132. VIII. Social results of industrialization
A. Division of labor
-- Reduction of craft workers
B. Growth of cities
C. Increased social stratification
1. Major gap in wealth
2. U.S. relatively well off to Europe
D. Immigration due to the high demand
for labor

133. XVIII. The Market Revolution
– The Market Revolution:
• Transformed a subsistence economy of scattered
farms and tiny workshops:
– Into a national network of industry and commerce (see
Map 14.5)
• Greater mechanization and robust market-oriented
economy raised new legal questions:
– How tightly should patents protect inventions?
– Should the government regulate monopolies?
– Who should own the technologies and networks?
• Chief Justice John Marshall:
– The U.S. Supreme Court protected contract rights by
requiring state governments to grant irrevocable charters.

134. XVIII. The Market Revolution
(cont.)
• Monopolies easily developed, as new companies found
it difficult to break into markets
• Chief justice Roger B. Taney argued that “the rights of
the community” outweighed any exclusive corporate
rights (Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837))
– His decision opened new entrepreneurial channels
– And encouraged greater competition
– So did the passage of more liberal state incorporation laws.
• The self-sufficient households of colonial days were
transformed:
– Now families scattered to work for wages in the mills
– Or they planted just a few crops for sale at market
– Used the money to buy goods made by strangers in far-off
factories.

135. XVIII. The Market Revolution
(cont.)
– Store-bought products replaced homemade products
– Caused a division of labor and status in the households
– Traditional women’s work was rendered superfluous and
devalued
– The home grew into a place of refuge from the world of
work that increasingly became the special and separate
sphere of woman.
• Revolutionary advance in manufacturing and transportation brought increased prosperity:
– They widened the gulf between the rich and the poor
– Several specimens of colossal financial success were
strutting across the national stage.
– John Jacob Astor left an estate of $30 million in 1848.

136. XVIII. The Market Revolution
(cont.)
• Cities bred the greatest extremes of economic
inequality:
– Unskilled workers fared worst
– Became floating mass of “drifters.”
– These wandering workers accounted for up to ½ the
population of the brawling industrial centers
– They are the forgotten men and women of American
history
• Many myths about “social mobility:”
–
–
–
–
Mobility did exist in industrializing America
Rags-to riches success stories were relatively few
American did provide more “opportunity” then elsewhere
Millions of immigrants packed their bags and headed for
New World shores.

137. In Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge,
the Court ruled that the charter of the
Charles River Bridge Company did not
exclude the state of Massachusetts from
chartering another bridge nearby. To the
Left is a rendition of the Charles River
Bridge from the early 19th century.
Reproduction courtesy of the Library of
Congress

138. Map 14-5 p303

139. p304

140. p305