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I. Introduction | II. Early Republic Economic Development | III. The Decline of Northern Slavery

and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom | IV. Changes in Labor Organization | V. Changes in Gender

Roles and Family Life | VI. The Rise of Industrial Labor in Antebellum America | VII. Conclusion |

VIII. Primary Sources | IX. Reference Material

THE AMERICAN YAWP

8. The Market Revolution

William James Bennett, View of South Street, from Maiden Lane, New York City, c. 1827, via Metropolitan Museum of New York

*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click here to improve this chapter.*

I. Introduction

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In the early years of the nineteenth century, Americans’ endless commercial ambition—what one

Baltimore paper in 1815 called an “almost universal ambition to get forward”—remade the nation.

Between the Revolution and the Civil War, an old subsistence world died and a new more-commer-

cial nation was born. Americans integrated the technologies of the Industrial Revolution into a new

commercial economy. Steam power, the technology that moved steamboats and railroads, fueled the

rise of American industry by powering mills and sparking new national transportation networks. A

“market revolution” remade the nation.

The revolution reverberated across the country. More and more farmers grew crops for pro�t, not

self-su�ciency. Vast factories and cities arose in the North. Enormous fortunes materialized. A new

middle class ballooned. And as more men and women worked in the cash economy, they were freed

from the bound dependence of servitude. But there were costs to this revolution. As northern textile

factories boomed, the demand for southern cotton swelled, and American slavery accelerated.

Northern subsistence farmers became laborers bound to the whims of markets and bosses. The mar-

ket revolution sparked explosive economic growth and new personal wealth, but it also created a

growing lower class of property-less workers and a series of devastating depressions, called “panics.”

Many Americans labored for low wages and became trapped in endless cycles of poverty. Some work-

ers, often immigrant women, worked thirteen hours a day, six days a week. Others labored in slavery.

Massive northern textile mills turned southern cotton into cheap cloth. And although northern

states washed their hands of slavery, their factories fueled the demand for slave-grown southern cot-

ton and their banks provided the �nancing that ensured the pro�tability and continued existence of

the American slave system. And so, as the economy advanced, the market revolution wrenched the

United States in new directions as it became a nation of free labor and slavery, of wealth and inequal-

ity, and of endless promise and untold perils.

II. Early Republic Economic Development

The growth of the American economy reshaped American life in the decades before the Civil War.

Americans increasingly produced goods for sale, not for consumption. Improved transportation en-

abled a larger exchange network. Labor-saving technology improved e�ciency and enabled the sepa-

ration of the public and domestic spheres. The market revolution ful�lled the revolutionary

generation’s expectations of progress but introduced troubling new trends. Class con�ict, child la-

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bor, accelerated immigration, and the expansion of slavery followed. These strains required new fam-

ily arrangements and transformed American cities.

American commerce had proceeded haltingly during the eighteenth century. American farmers in-

creasingly exported foodstu�s to Europe as the French Revolutionary Wars devastated the continent

between 1793 and 1815. America’s exports rose in value from $20.2 million in 1790 to $108.3 mil-

lion by 1807. But while exports rose, exorbitant internal transportation costs hindered substantial

economic development within the United States. In 1816, for instance, $9 could move one ton of

goods across the Atlantic Ocean, but only thirty miles across land. An 1816 Senate Committee Re-

port lamented that “the price of land carriage is too great” to allow the pro�table production of

American manufactures. But in the wake of the War of 1812, Americans rushed to build a new na-

tional infrastructure, new networks of roads, canals, and railroads. 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.” State govern-

ments continued to sponsor the greatest improvements in American transportation, but the federal

government’s annual expenditures on internal improvements climbed to a yearly average of

$1,323,000 by Andrew Jackson’s presidency. .

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Clyde Osmer DeLand, “The First Locomotive. Aug. 8th, 1829. Trial Trip of the “Stourbridge Lion,” 1916. Library of Congress.

State legislatures meanwhile pumped capital into the economy by chartering banks. The number of

state-chartered banks skyrocketed from 1 in 1783, 266 in 1820, and 702 in 1840 to 1,371 in 1860.

European capital also helped build American infrastructure. By 1844, one British traveler declared

that “the prosperity of America, her railroads, canals, steam navigation, and banks, are the fruit of

English capital.”

Economic growth, however, proceeded unevenly. Depressions devastated the economy in 1819,

1837, and 1857. Each followed rampant speculation in various commodities: land in 1819, land and

enslaved laborers in 1837, and railroad bonds in 1857. Eventually the bubbles all burst. The spread

of paper currency untethered the economy from the physical signi�ers of wealth familiar to the colo-

nial generation, namely land. Counterfeit bills were endemic during this early period of banking.

With so many fake bills circulating, Americans were constantly on the lookout for the “con�dence

man” and other deceptive characters in the urban landscape. Prostitutes and con men could look like

regular honest Americans. Advice literature o�ered young men and women strategies for avoiding

hypocrisy in an attempt to restore the social �ber. Intimacy in the domestic sphere became more im-

portant as duplicity proliferated in the public sphere. Fear of the con�dence man, counterfeit bills,

and a pending bust created anxiety in the new capitalist economy. But Americans refused to blame

the logic of their new commercial system for these depressions. Instead, they kept pushing “to get

forward.”

The so-called Transportation Revolution opened the vast lands west of the Appalachian Mountains.

In 1810, before the rapid explosion of American infrastructure, Margaret Dwight left New Haven,

Connecticut, in a wagon headed for Ohio Territory. Her trip was less than �ve hundred miles but

took six weeks to complete. The journey was a terrible ordeal, she said. The roads were “so rocky &

so gullied as to be almost impassable.” Ten days into the journey, at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,

Dwight said “it appeared to me that we had come to the end of the habitable part of the globe.” She

�nally concluded that “the reason so few are willing to return from the Western country, is not that

the country is so good, but because the journey is so bad.” Nineteen years later, in 1829, English

traveler Frances Trollope made the reverse journey across the Allegheny Mountains from Cincinnati

to the East Coast. At Wheeling, Virginia, her coach encountered the National Road, the �rst feder-

ally funded interstate infrastructure project. The road was smooth and her journey across the Al-

leghenies was a scenic delight. “I really can hardly conceive a higher enjoyment than a botanical tour

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among the Alleghany Mountains,” she declared. The ninety miles of the National Road was to her

“a garden.”

Engraving based on W.H. Bartlett, “Lockport, Erie Canal,” 1839. Wikimedia.

If the two decades between Margaret Dwight’s and Frances Trollope’s journeys transformed the

young nation, the pace of change only accelerated in the following years. If a transportation revolu-

tion began with improved road networks, it soon incorporated even greater improvements in the

ways people and goods moved across the landscape.

New York State completed the Erie Canal in 1825. The 350-mile-long human-made waterway linked

the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean. Soon crops grown in the Great

Lakes region were carried by water to eastern cities, and goods from emerging eastern factories made

the reverse journey to midwestern farmers. The success of New York’s “arti�cial river” launched a

canal-building boom. By 1840 Ohio created two navigable, all-water links from Lake Erie to the

Ohio River.

Robert Fulton established the �rst commercial steamboat service up and down the Hudson River in

New York in 1807. Soon thereafter steamboats �lled the waters of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

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Downstream-only routes became watery two-way highways. By 1830, more than two hundred

steamboats moved up and down western rivers.

The United States’ �rst long-distance rail line launched from Maryland in 1827. Baltimore’s city

government and the state government of Maryland provided half the start-up funds for the new Bal-

timore & Ohio (B&O) Rail Road Company. The B&O’s founders imagined the line as a means to

funnel the agricultural products of the trans-Appalachian West to an outlet on the Chesapeake Bay.

Similar motivations led citizens in Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, and Charleston, South Car-

olina to launch their own rail lines. State and local governments provided the means for the bulk of

this initial wave of railroad construction, but economic collapse following the Panic of 1837 made

governments wary of such investments. Government supports continued throughout the century,

but decades later the public origins of railroads were all but forgotten, and the railroad corporation

became the most visible embodiment of corporate capitalism.

By 1860 Americans had laid more than thirty thousand miles of railroads. The ensuing web of rail,

roads, and canals meant that few farmers in the Northeast or Midwest had trouble getting goods to

urban markets. Railroad development was slower in the South, but there a combination of rail lines

and navigable rivers meant that few cotton planters struggled to transport their products to textile

mills in the Northeast and in England.

Such internal improvements not only spread goods, they spread information. The transportation

revolution was followed by a communications revolution. The telegraph rede�ned the limits of hu-

man communication. By 1843 Samuel Morse had persuaded Congress to fund a forty-mile telegraph

line stretching from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Within a few short years, during the Mexican-

American War, telegraph lines carried news of battle�eld events to eastern newspapers within days.

This contrasts starkly with the War of 1812, when the Battle of New Orleans took place nearly two

full weeks after Britain and the United States had signed a peace treaty.

The consequences of the transportation and communication revolutions reshaped the lives of Amer-

icans. Farmers who previously produced crops mostly for their own family now turned to the mar-

ket. They earned cash for what they had previously consumed; they purchased the goods they had

previously made or went without. Market-based farmers soon accessed credit through eastern banks,

which provided them with the opportunity to expand their enterprise but left also them prone be-

fore the risk of catastrophic failure wrought by distant market forces. In the Northeast and Midwest,

where farm labor was ever in short supply, ambitious farmers invested in new technologies that

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promised to increase the productivity of the limited labor supply. The years between 1815 and 1850

witnessed an explosion of patents on agricultural technologies. The most famous of these, perhaps,

was Cyrus McCormick’s horse-drawn mechanical reaper, which partially mechanized wheat harvest-

ing, and John Deere’s steel-bladed plow, which more easily allowed for the conversion of unbroken

ground into fertile farmland.

A. Janicke & Co., “Our City, (St. Louis, Mo.),” 1859. Library of Congress.

Most visibly, the market revolution encouraged the growth of cities and reshaped the lives of urban

workers. In 1820, only New York had over one hundred thousand inhabitants. By 1850, six Ameri-

can cities met that threshold, including Chicago, which had been founded fewer than two decades

earlier. New technology and infrastructure paved the way for such growth. The Erie Canal cap-

tured the bulk of the trade emerging from the Great Lakes region, securing New York City’s posi-

tion as the nation’s largest and most economically important city. The steamboat turned St. Louis

and Cincinnati into centers of trade, and Chicago rose as it became the railroad hub of the western

Great Lakes and Great Plains regions. The geographic center of the nation shifted westward. The

development of steam power and the exploitation of Pennsylvania coal�elds shifted the locus of

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American manufacturing. By the 1830s, for instance, New England was losing its competitive ad-

vantage to the West.

Meanwhile, the cash economy eclipsed the old, local, informal systems of barter and trade. Income

became the measure of economic worth. Productivity and e�ciencies paled before the measure of

income. Cash facilitated new impersonal economic relationships and formalized new means of pro-

duction. Young workers might simply earn wages, for instance, rather than receiving room and

board and training as part of apprenticeships. Moreover, a new form of economic organization ap-

peared: the business corporation.

States o�ered the privileges of incorporation to protect the fortunes and liabilities of entrepreneurs

who invested in early industrial endeavors. A corporate charter allowed investors and directors to

avoid personal liability for company debts. The legal status of incorporation had been designed to

confer privileges to organizations embarking on expensive projects explicitly designed for the public

good, such as universities, municipalities, and major public works projects. The business corpora-

tion was something new. Many Americans distrusted these new, impersonal business organizations

whose o�cers lacked personal responsibility while nevertheless carrying legal rights. Many wanted

limits. Thomas Je�erson himself wrote in 1816 that “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy

of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength,

and bid de�ance to the laws of our country.” But in 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. Still, suspicions

remained. A group of journeymen cordwainers in New Jersey publically declared in 1835 that they

“entirely disapprov[ed] of the incorporation of Companies, for carrying on manual mechanical busi-

ness, inasmuch as we believe their tendency is to eventuate and produce monopolies, thereby crip-

pling the energies of individual enterprise.”

III. The Decline of Northern Slavery and the Rise of the Cotton

Kingdom

Slave labor helped fuel the market revolution. By 1832, textile companies made up 88 out of 106

American corporations valued at over $100,000. These textile mills, worked by free labor, never-

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theless depended on southern cotton, and the vast new market economy spurred the expansion of

the plantation South.

By the early nineteenth century, states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had taken steps to abolish

slavery. Vermont included abolition as a provision of its 1777 state constitution. Pennsylvania’s

emancipation act of 1780 stipulated that freed children must serve an indenture term of twenty-

eight years. Gradualism brought emancipation while also defending the interests of northern en-

slavers and controlling still another generation of Black Americans. In 1804 New Jersey became the

last of the northern states to adopt gradual emancipation plans. There was no immediate moment of

jubilee, as many northern states only promised to liberate future children born to enslaved mothers.

Such laws also stipulated that such children remain in indentured servitude to their mother’s en-

slaver in order to compensate the enslaver’s loss. James Mars, a young man indentured under this sys-

tem in Connecticut, risked being thrown in jail when he protested the arrangement that kept him

bound to his mother’s enslaver until age twenty-�ve.

Quicker routes to freedom included escape or direct emancipation by enslavers. But escape was dan-

gerous and voluntary manumission rare. Congress, for instance, made the harboring of a freedom-

seeking enslaved person a federal crime as early as 1793. Hopes for manumission were even slimmer,

as few northern enslavers emancipated their own enslaved laborers. Roughly one �fth of the white

families in New York City owned enslaved laborers, and fewer than eighty enslavers in the city volun-

tarily manumitted their enslaved laborers between 1783 and 1800. By 1830, census data suggests

that at least 3,500 people were still enslaved in the North. Elderly enslaved people in Connecticut

remained in bondage as late as 1848, and in New Jersey slavery endured until after the Civil War.

Emancipation proceeded slowly, but proceeded nonetheless. A free Black population of fewer than

60,000 in 1790 increased to more than 186,000 by 1810. Growing free Black communities fought

for their civil rights. In a number of New England locales, free African Americans could vote and

send their children to public schools. Most northern states granted Black citizens property rights and

trial by jury. African Americans owned land and businesses, founded mutual aid societies, estab-

lished churches, promoted education, developed print culture, and voted.

Nationally, however, the enslaved population continued to grow, from less than 700,000 in 1790 to

more than 1.5 million by 1820. The growth of abolition in the North and the acceleration of slav-

ery in the South created growing divisions. Cotton drove the process more than any other crop. Eli

Whitney’s cotton gin, a simple hand-cranked device designed to mechanically remove sticky green

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seeds from short staple cotton, allowed southern planters to dramatically expand cotton production

for the national and international markets. Water-powered textile factories in England and the

American Northeast rapidly turned raw cotton into cloth. Technology increased both the supply of

and demand for cotton. White southerners responded by expanding cultivation farther west, to the

Mississippi River and beyond. Slavery had been growing less pro�table in tobacco-planting regions

like Virginia, but the growth of cotton farther south and west increased the demand for human

bondage. Eager cotton planters invested their new pro�ts in more enslaved laborers.

The cotton boom fueled speculation in slavery. Many enslavers leveraged potential pro�ts into loans

used to purchase ever increasing numbers of enslaved laborers. For example, one 1840 Louisiana

Courier ad warned, “it is very di�cult now to �nd persons willing to buy slaves from Mississippi or

Alabama on account of the fears entertained that such property may be already mortgaged to the

banks of the above named states.”

Sidney & Ne�, Detail from Plan of the City of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1850. Wikimedia Commons.

New national and international markets fueled the plantation boom. American cotton exports rose

from 150,000 bales in 1815 to 4,541,000 bales in 1859. The Census Bureau’s 1860 Census of Manu-

factures stated that “the manufacture of cotton constitutes the most striking feature of the industrial

history of the last �fty years.” Enslavers shipped their cotton north to textile manufacturers and to

northern �nancers for overseas shipments. Northern insurance brokers and exporters in the North-

east pro�ted greatly.

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While the United States ended its legal participation in the global slave trade in 1808, slave traders

moved one million enslaved people from the tobacco-producing Upper South to cotton �elds in the

Lower South between 1790 and 1860. This harrowing trade in human �esh supported middle-

class occupations in the North and South: bankers, doctors, lawyers, insurance brokers, and ship-

ping agents all pro�ted. And of course it facilitated the expansion of northeastern textile mills.

IV. Changes in Labor Organization

While industrialization bypassed most of the American South, southern cotton production never-

theless nurtured industrialization in the Northeast and Midwest. The drive to produce cloth trans-

formed the American system of labor. In the early republic, laborers in manufacturing might typi-

cally have been expected to work at every stage of production. But a new system, piecework, divided

much of production into discrete steps performed by di�erent workers. In this new system, mer-

chants or investors sent or “put out” materials to individuals and families to complete at home.

These independent laborers then turned over the partially �nished goods to the owner to be given to

another laborer to �nish.

As early as the 1790s, however, merchants in New England began experimenting with machines to

replace the putting-out system. To e�ect this transition, merchants and factory owners relied on the

theft of British technological knowledge to build the machines they needed. In 1789, for instance, a

textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, contracted twenty-one-year-old British immigrant Samuel

Slater to build a yarn-spinning machine and then a carding machine. Slater had apprenticed in an

English mill and succeeded in mimicking the English machinery. The fruits of American industrial

espionage peaked in 1813 when Francis Cabot Lowell and Paul Moody re-created the powered loom

used in the mills of Manchester, England. Lowell had spent two years in Britain observing and tour-

ing mills in England. He committed the design of the powered loom to memory so that, no matter

how many times British customs o�cials searched his luggage, he could smuggle England’s indus-

trial know-how into New England.

Lowell’s contribution to American industrialism was not only technological, it was organizational.

He helped reorganize and centralize the American manufacturing process. A new approach, the

Waltham-Lowell System, created the textile mill that de�ned antebellum New England and Ameri-

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can industrialism before the Civil War. The modern American textile mill was fully realized in the

planned mill town of Lowell in 1821, four years after Lowell himself died. Powered by the Merri-

mack River in northern Massachusetts and operated by local farm girls, the mills of Lowell central-

ized the process of textile manufacturing under one roof. The modern American factory was born.

Soon ten thousand workers labored in Lowell alone. Sarah Rice, who worked at the nearby Millbury

factory, found it “a noisy place” that was “more con�ned than I like to be.” Working conditions

were harsh for the many desperate “mill girls” who operated the factories relentlessly from sunup to

sundown. One worker complained that “a large class of females are, and have been, destined to a

state of servitude.” Female workers went on strike. They lobbied for better working hours. But the

lure of wages was too much. As another worker noted, “very many Ladies . . . have given up

millinery, dressmaking & school keeping for work in the mill.” With a large supply of eager work-

ers, Lowell’s vision brought a rush of capital and entrepreneurs into New England. The �rst Ameri-

can manufacturing boom was under way.

Winslow Homer, “Bell-Time,” Harper’s Weekly vol. 12 (July 1868): 472. Wikimedia.

The market revolution shook other industries as well. Craftsmen began to understand that new mar-

kets increased the demand for their products. Some shoemakers, for instance, abandoned the tradi-

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tional method of producing custom-built shoes at their home workshops and instead began produc-

ing larger quantities of shoes in ready-made sizes to be shipped to urban centers. Manufacturers

wanting increased production abandoned the old personal approach of relying on a single live-in ap-

prentice for labor and instead hired unskilled wage laborers who did not have to be trained in all as-

pects of making shoes but could simply be assigned a single repeatable aspect of the task. Factories

slowly replaced shops. The old paternalistic apprentice system, which involved long-term obligations

between apprentice and master, gave way to a more impersonal and more �exible labor system in

which unskilled laborers could be hired and �red as the market dictated. A writer in the New York

Observer in 1826 complained, “The master no longer lives among his apprentices [and] watches over

their moral as well as mechanical improvement.” Masters-turned-employers now not only had

fewer obligations to their workers, they had a lesser attachment. They no longer shared the bonds of

their trade but were subsumed under new class-based relationships: employers and employees, bosses

and workers, capitalists and laborers. On the other hand, workers were freed from the long-term, pa-

ternalistic obligations of apprenticeship or the legal subjugation of indentured servitude. They could

theoretically work when and where they wanted. When men or women made an agreement with an

employer to work for wages, they were “left free to apportion among themselves their respective

shares, untrammeled . . . by unwise laws,” as Reverend Alonzo Potter rosily proclaimed in 1840.

But while the new labor system was celebrated throughout the northern United States as “free la-

bor,” it was simultaneously lamented by a growing powerless class of laborers.

As the northern United States rushed headlong toward commercialization and an early capitalist

economy, many Americans grew uneasy with the growing gap between wealthy businessmen and im-

poverished wage laborers. Elites like Daniel Webster might defend their wealth and privilege by in-

sisting that all workers could achieve “a career of usefulness and enterprise” if they were “industrious

and sober,” but labor activist Seth Luther countered that capitalism created “a cruel system of ex-

traction on the bodies and minds of the producing classes . . . for no other object than to enable the

‘rich’ to ‘take care of themselves’ while the poor must work or starve.”

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. 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.

Children’s magazines—such as Juvenile Miscellany and Parley’s Magazine—glori�ed the prospect of

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moving up the economic ladder. This “free labor ideology” provided many northerners with a keen

sense of superiority over the slave economy of the southern states.

But the commercial economy often failed in its promise of social mobility. Depressions and down-

turns might destroy businesses and reduce owners to wage work. Even in times of prosperity un-

skilled workers might perpetually lack good wages and economic security and therefore had to for-

ever depend on supplemental income from their wives and young children.

Wage workers—a population disproportionately composed of immigrants and poorer Americans—

faced low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. Class con�ict developed. Instead of

the formal inequality of a master-servant contract, employer and employee entered a contract pre-

sumably as equals. But hierarchy was evident: employers had �nancial security and political power;

employees faced uncertainty and powerlessness in the workplace. Dependent on the whims of their

employers, some workers turned to strikes and unions to pool their resources. In 1825 a group of

journeymen in Boston formed a Carpenters’ Union to protest their inability “to maintain a family at

the present time, with the wages which are now usually given.” Working men organized unions to

assert themselves and win both the respect and the resources due to a breadwinner and a citizen.

For the middle-class managers and civic leaders caught between workers and owners, unions en-

�amed a dangerous antagonism between employers and employees. They countered any claims of

inherent class con�ict with the ideology of social mobility. Middle-class owners and managers justi-

�ed their economic privilege as the natural product of superior character traits, including decision

making and hard work. One group of master carpenters denounced their striking journeymen in

1825 with the claim that workers of “industrious and temperate habits, have, in their turn, become

thriving and respectable Masters, and the great body of our Mechanics have been enabled to acquire

property and respectability, with a just weight and in�uence in society.” In an 1856 speech in Kala-

mazoo, Michigan, Abraham Lincoln had to assure his audience that the country’s commercial trans-

formation had not reduced American laborers to slavery. Southerners, he said, “insist that their slaves

are far better o� than Northern freemen. What a mistaken view do these men have of Northern

labourers! They think that men are always to remain labourers here—but there is no such class. The

man who laboured for another last year, this year labours for himself. And next year he will hire oth-

ers to labour for him.” This essential belief undergirded the northern commitment to “free labor”

and won the market revolution much widespread acceptance.

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V. Changes in Gender Roles and Family Life

In the �rst half of the nineteenth century, families in the northern United States increasingly partici-

pated in the cash economy created by the market revolution. The �rst stirrings of industrialization

shifted work away from the home. These changes transformed Americans’ notions of what consti-

tuted work and therefore shifted what it meant to be an American woman and an American man.

As Americans encountered more goods in stores and produced fewer at home, the ability to remove

women and children from work determined a family’s class status. This ideal, of course, ignored the

reality of women’s work at home and was possible for only the wealthy. The market revolution there-

fore not only transformed the economy, it changed the nature of the American family. As the market

revolution thrust workers into new systems of production, it rede�ned gender roles. The market in-

tegrated families into a new cash economy. As Americans purchased more goods in stores and pro-

duced fewer at home, the purity of the domestic sphere—the idealized realm of women and children

—increasingly signi�ed a family’s class status.

Women and children worked to supplement the low wages of many male workers. Around age

eleven or twelve, boys could take jobs as o�ce runners or waiters, earning perhaps a dollar a week to

support their parents’ incomes. The ideal of an innocent and protected childhood was a privilege for

middle- and upper-class families, who might look down upon poor families. Joseph Tuckerman, a

Unitarian minister who served poor Bostonians, lamented the lack of discipline and regularity

among poor children: “At one hour they are kept at work to procure fuel, or perform some other ser-

vice; in the next are allowed to go where they will, and to do what they will.” Prevented from at-

tending school, poor children served instead as economic assets for their destitute families.

Meanwhile, the education received by middle-class children provided a foundation for future eco-

nomic privilege. As artisans lost control over their trades, young men had a greater incentive to invest

time in education to �nd skilled positions later in life. Formal schooling was especially important for

young men who desired apprenticeships in retail or commercial work. Enterprising instructors es-

tablished schools to assist “young gentlemen preparing for mercantile and other pursuits, who may

wish for an education superior to that usually obtained in the common schools, but di�erent from a

college education, and better adapted to their particular business,” such as that organized in 1820 by

Warren Colburn of Boston. In response to this need, the Boston School Committee created the

English High School (as opposed to the Latin School) that could “give a child an education that shall

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“The Sphere of Woman,” Godey’s Lady’s Book vol. 40 (March 1850): 209. University of Virginia.

�t him for active life, and shall serve as a foundation for eminence in his profession, whether Mercan-

tile or Mechanical” beyond that “which our public schools can now furnish.”

Edu-

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with

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so-

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After

six-

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Eliza-

beth Davis left home in 1816 to attend school, her father explained that the experience would “lay a

foundation for your future character & respectability.” After touring the United States in the

1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville praised the independence granted to the young American woman, who

had “the great scene of the world . . . open to her” and whose education prepared her to exercise both

reason and moral sense. Middling young women also used their education to take positions as

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schoolteachers in the expanding common school system. Bristol Academy in Tauten, Maine, for in-

stance, advertised “instruction . . . in the art of teaching” for female pupils. In 1825, Nancy Deni-

son left Concord Academy with references indicating that she was “quali�ed to teach with success

and pro�t” and “very cheerfully recommend[ed]” for “that very responsible employment.”

Middle-class youths found opportunities for respectable employment through formal education,

but poor youths remained in marginalized positions. Their families’ desperate �nancial state kept

them from enjoying the fruits of education. When pauper children did receive teaching through in-

stitutions such the House of Refuge in New York City, they were often simultaneously indentured

to successful families to serve as �eld hands or domestic laborers. The Society for the Reformation of

Juvenile Delinquents in New York City sent its wards to places like Sylvester Lusk’s farm in En�eld,

Connecticut. Lusk took boys to learn “the trade and mystery of farming” and girls to learn “the

trade and mystery of housewifery.” In exchange for “su�cient Meat, Drink, Apparel, Lodging, and

Washing, �tting for an Apprentice,” and a rudimentary education, the apprentices promised obedi-

ence, morality, and loyalty. Poor children also found work in factories such as Samuel Slater’s tex-

tile mills in southern New England. Slater published a newspaper advertisement for “four or �ve ac-

tive Lads, about 15 Years of Age to serve as Apprentices in the Cotton Factory.”

And so, during the early nineteenth century, opportunities for education and employment often de-

pended on a given family’s class. In colonial America, nearly all children worked within their parent’s

chosen profession, whether it be agricultural or artisanal. During the market revolution, however,

more children were able to postpone employment. Americans aspired to provide a “Romantic

Childhood”—a period in which boys and girls were sheltered within the home and nurtured

through primary schooling. This ideal was available to families that could survive without their

children’s labor. As these children matured, their early experiences often determined whether they

entered respectable, well-paying positions or became dependent workers with little prospects for so-

cial mobility.

Just as children were expected to be sheltered from the adult world of work, American culture ex-

pected men and women to assume distinct gender roles as they prepared for marriage and family life.

An ideology of “separate spheres” set the public realm—the world of economic production and po-

litical life—apart as a male domain, and the world of consumers and domestic life as a female one.

(Even nonworking women labored by shopping for the household, producing food and clothing,

cleaning, educating children, and performing similar activities. But these were considered “domes-

tic” because they did not bring money into the household, although they too were essential to the

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household’s economic viability.) While reality muddied the ideal, the divide between a private, fe-

male world of home and a public, male world of business de�ned American gender hierarchy.

The idea of separate spheres also displayed a distinct class bias. Middle and upper classes reinforced

their status by shielding “their” women from the harsh realities of wage labor. Women were to be

mothers and educators, not partners in production. But lower-class women continued to contribute

directly to the household economy. The middle- and upper-class ideal was feasible only in house-

holds where women did not need to engage in paid labor. In poorer households, women engaged in

wage labor as factory workers, pieceworkers producing items for market consumption, tavern- and

innkeepers, and domestic servants. While many of the fundamental tasks women performed re-

mained the same—producing clothing, cultivating vegetables, overseeing dairy production, and per-

forming any number of other domestic labors—the key di�erence was whether and when they per-

formed these tasks for cash in a market economy.

Domestic expectations constantly changed and the market revolution transformed many women’s

traditional domestic tasks. Cloth production, for instance, advanced throughout the market revolu-

tion as new mechanized production increased the volume and variety of fabrics available to ordinary

people. This relieved many better-o� women of a traditional labor obligation. As cloth production

became commercialized, women’s home-based cloth production became less important to house-

hold economies. Purchasing cloth and, later, ready-made clothes began to transform women from

producers to consumers. One woman from Maine, Martha Ballard, regularly referenced spinning,

weaving, and knitting in the diary she kept from 1785 to 1812. Martha, her daughters, and her fe-

male neighbors spun and plied linen and woolen yarns and used them to produce a variety of fabrics

to make clothing for her family. The production of cloth and clothing was a year-round, labor-inten-

sive process, but it was for home consumption, not commercial markets.

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. In one typical experience, Mrs. Peter Simon, a captain’s wife, inspected twenty-six yards of

Holland cloth to ensure that it was worth the £130 price. Even wealthy women shopped for high-

value goods. While servants or enslaved people routinely made low-value purchases, the mistress of

the household trusted her discriminating eye alone for expensive or speci�c purchases.

Women might also parlay their skills into businesses. In addition to working as seamstresses,

milliners, or laundresses, women might undertake paid work for neighbors or acquaintances or com-

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bine clothing production with management of a boardinghouse. Even enslaved laborers with partic-

ular skill at producing clothing could be hired out for a higher price or might even negotiate to work

part-time for themselves. Most enslaved people, however, continued to produce domestic items, in-

cluding simpler cloths and clothing, for home consumption.

Thomas Horner, “Broadway, New York,” 1836. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Similar domestic expectations played out in the slave states. Enslaved women labored in the �elds.

Whites argued that African American women were less delicate and womanly than white women

and therefore perfectly suited for agricultural labor. The southern ideal meanwhile established that

white plantation mistresses were shielded from manual labor because of their very whiteness.

Throughout the slave states, however, aside from the minority of plantations with dozens of slates,

most white women by necessity continued to assist with planting, harvesting, and processing agricul-

tural projects despite the cultural stigma attached to it. 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 hi-

erarchy made them morally superior to greedy northerners and their callous, cutthroat commerce.

Southerners and northerners increasingly saw their ways of life as incompatible.

While the market revolution remade many women’s economic roles, their legal status remained es-

sentially unchanged. 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. Without spe-

cial precautions or interventions, women could not earn their own money, own their own property,

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sue, or be sued. Any money earned or spent belonged by law to their husbands. Women shopped on

their husbands’ credit and at any time husbands could terminate their wives’ access to their credit.

Although a handful of states made divorce available—divorce had before only been legal in Congre-

gationalist states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut, where marriage was strictly a civil contract

rather than a religious one—it remained extremely expensive, di�cult, and rare. Marriage was typi-

cally a permanently binding legal contract.

Ideas of marriage, if not the legal realities, began to change. This period marked the beginning of the

shift from “institutional” to “companionate” marriage. Institutional marriages were primarily la-

bor arrangements that maximized the couple’s and their children’s chances of surviving and thriving.

Men and women assessed each other’s skills as they related to household production, although looks

and personality certainly entered into the equation. But in the late eighteenth century, under the in-

�uence of Enlightenment thought, young people began to privilege character and compatibility in

their potential partners. Money was still essential: marriages prompted the largest redistributions of

property prior to the settling of estates at death. But the means of this redistribution was changing.

Especially in the North, land became a less important foundation for matchmaking as wealthy

young men became not only farmers and merchants but bankers, clerks, or professionals. The in-

creased emphasis on a�ection and attraction that young people embraced was facilitated by an in-

creasingly complex economy that o�ered new ways to store, move, and create wealth, which liberal-

ized the criteria by which families evaluated potential in-laws.

To be considered a success in family life, a middle-class American man typically aspired to own a

comfortable home and to marry a woman of strong morals and religious conviction who would take

responsibility for raising virtuous, well-behaved children. The duties of the middle-class husband

and wife would be clearly delineated into separate spheres. The husband alone was responsible for

creating wealth and engaging in the commerce and politics—the public sphere. The wife was respon-

sible for the private—keeping a good home, being careful with household expenses, and raising chil-

dren, inculcating them with the middle-class virtues that would ensure their future success. But for

poor families, sacri�cing the potential economic contributions of wives and children was an

impossibility.

VI. The Rise of Industrial Labor in Antebellum America

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More than �ve million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1860. Irish, Ger-

man, and Jewish immigrants sought new lives and economic opportunities. By the Civil War, nearly

one out of every eight Americans had been born outside the United States. A series of push and pull

factors drew immigrants to the United States.

In England, 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

counties of Ireland and motivated many to seek greater opportunity elsewhere. The booming Amer-

ican economy pulled Irish immigrants toward ports along the eastern United States. Between 1820

and 1840, over 250,000 Irish immigrants arrived in the United States. Without the capital and

skills required to purchase and operate farms, Irish immigrants settled primarily in northeastern

cities and towns and performed unskilled work. Irish men usually emigrated alone and, when possi-

ble, 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. Irish immigration followed this pat-

tern into the 1840s and 1850s, when the infamous Irish Famine sparked a massive exodus out of Ire-

land. Between 1840 and 1860, 1.7 million Irish �ed starvation and the oppressive English policies

that accompanied it. As they entered manual, unskilled labor positions in urban America’s dirtiest

and most dangerous occupations, Irish workers in northern cities were compared to African Ameri-

cans, and anti-immigrant newspapers portrayed them with apelike features. Despite hostility, Irish

immigrants retained their social, cultural, and religious beliefs and left an indelible mark on Ameri-

can culture.

While the Irish settled mostly in coastal cities, most German immigrants used American ports and

cities as temporary waypoints before settling in the rural countryside. Over 1.5 million immigrants

from the various German states arrived in the United States during the antebellum era. Although

some southern Germans �ed declining agricultural conditions and repercussions of the failed revolu-

tions of 1848, many Germans simply sought steadier economic opportunity. German immigrants

tended to travel as families and carried with them skills and capital that enabled them to enter mid-

dle-class trades. Germans migrated to the Old Northwest to farm in rural areas and practiced trades

in growing communities such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee, three cities that formed what

came to be called the German Triangle.

Catholic and Jewish Germans transformed regions of the republic. Although records are sparse,

New York’s Jewish population rose from approximately �ve hundred in 1825 to forty thousand in

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1860. Similar gains were seen in other American cities. Jewish immigrants hailing from southwest-

ern Germany and parts of occupied Poland moved to the United States through chain migration and

as family units. Unlike other Germans, Jewish immigrants rarely settled in rural areas. Once estab-

lished, Jewish immigrants found work in retail, commerce, and artisanal occupations such as tailor-

ing. They quickly found their footing and established themselves as an intrinsic part of the American

market economy. Just as Irish immigrants shaped the urban landscape through the construction of

churches and Catholic schools, Jewish immigrants erected synagogues and made their mark on

American culture.

The sudden in�ux of immigration triggered a backlash among many native-born 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 institu-

tions. 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 1850s. The American

Party, more commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party, found success in local and state elections

throughout the North. The party even nominated candidates for president in 1852 and 1856. The

rapid rise of the Know-Nothings, re�ecting widespread anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant 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 en-

countered the politics of industrial labor. Many workers formed trade unions during the early re-

public. Organizations such as Philadelphia’s Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers or the Car-

penters’ Union of Boston operated within speci�c industries in major American cities. These unions

worked to protect the economic power of their members by creating closed shops—workplaces

wherein employers could only hire union members—and striking to improve working conditions.

Political leaders denounced these organizations as unlawful combinations and conspiracies to pro-

mote the narrow self-interest of workers above the rights of property holders and the interests of the

common good. 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 subserve their own interests.” Even

after the case, unions remained in a precarious legal position.

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N. Currier, “The Propagation Society, More Free than Welcome,” 1855. Library of Congress.

In the 1840s, labor activists organized to limit working hours and protect children in factories. The

New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workingmen (NEA) mobilized to es-

tablish a ten-hour workday across industries. They argued that the ten-hour day would improve the

immediate conditions of laborers by allowing “time and opportunities for intellectual and moral im-

provement.” After a citywide strike in Boston in 1835, the Ten-Hour Movement quickly spread to

other major cities such as Philadelphia. The campaign for leisure time was part of the male working-

class e�ort to expose the hollowness of the paternalistic claims of employers and their rhetoric of

moral superiority.

Women, a dominant labor source for factories since the early 1800s, launched some of the earliest

strikes for better conditions. Textile operatives in Lowell, Massachusetts, “turned out” (walked o�)

their jobs in 1834 and 1836. During the Ten-Hour Movement of the 1840s, female operatives pro-

vided crucial support. Under the leadership of Sarah Bagley, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Asso-

ciation organized petition drives that drew thousands of signatures from “mill girls.” Like male ac-

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tivists, Bagley and her associates used the desire for mental improvement as a central argument for

reform. An 1847 editorial in the Voice of Industry, a labor newspaper published by Bagley, asked,

“who, after thirteen hours of steady application to monotonous work, can sit down and apply her

mind to deep and long continued thought?” Despite the widespread support for a ten-hour day,

the movement achieved only partial success. President Martin Van Buren established a ten-hour-day

policy for laborers on federal public works projects. New Hampshire passed a statewide law in 1847,

and Pennsylvania followed a year later. Both states, however, allowed workers to voluntarily consent

to work more than ten hours per day.

In 1842, child labor became a dominant issue in the American labor movement. The protection of

child laborers gained more middle-class support than the protection of adult workers. A petition

from parents in Fall River, a southern Massachusetts mill town that employed a high portion of

child workers, asked the legislature for a law “prohibiting the employment of children in manufac-

turing establishments at an age and for a number of hours which must be permanently injurious to

their health and inconsistent with the education which is essential to their welfare.” Massachusetts

quickly passed a law prohibiting children under age twelve from working more than ten hours a day.

By the midnineteenth century, every state in New England had followed Massachusetts’s lead. Be-

tween the 1840s and 1860s, these statutes slowly extended the age of protection of labor and the as-

surance of schooling. Throughout the region, public o�cials agreed that young children (between

ages nine and twelve) should be prevented from working in dangerous occupations, and older chil-

dren (between ages twelve and �fteen) should balance their labor with education and time for

leisure.

Male workers sought to improve their income and working conditions to create a household that

kept women and children protected within the domestic sphere. But labor gains were limited, and

the movement remained moderate. Despite its challenge to industrial working conditions, labor ac-

tivism in antebellum America remained largely wedded to the free labor ideal. The labor movement

later supported the northern free soil movement, which challenged the spread of slavery in the

1840s, simultaneously promoting the superiority of the northern system of commerce over the

southern institution of slavery while trying, much less successfully, to reform capitalism.

VII. Conclusion

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During the early nineteenth century, southern agriculture produced by enslaved labor fueled north-

ern industry produced by wage workers and managed by the new middle class. New transportation,

new machinery, and new organizations of labor integrated the previously isolated pockets of the

colonial economy into a national industrial operation. Industrialization and the cash economy tied

diverse regions together at the same time that ideology drove Americans apart. By celebrating the

freedom of contract that distinguished the wage worker from the indentured servant of previous

generations or the enslaved laborer in the southern cotton �eld, political leaders claimed the Ameri-

can Revolution’s legacy for the North. But the rise of industrial child labor, the demands of workers

to unionize, the economic vulnerability of women, and the in�ux of non-Anglo immigrants left

many Americans questioning the meaning of liberty after the market revolution.

VIII. Primary Sources

1. James Madison asks Congress to support internal improvements, 1815

After the War of 1812, Americans looked to strengthen their nation through government

spending on infrastructure, or what were then called internal improvements. In his seventh an-

nual address to congress, Madison called for public investment to create national roads, canals,

and even a national seminary. He also called for a tari�, or tax on certain imports, designed to

make foreign goods more expensive, giving American producers an advantage in domestic

markets.

2. A traveler describes life along the Erie Canal, 1829

Basil Hall, a British visitor traveled along the Erie Canal and took careful notes on what he

found. In this excerpt, he described life in Rochester, New York. Rochester, and other small

towns in upstate New York, grew rapidly as a result of the Erie Canal.

3. Blacksmith apprentice contract, 1836

The factories and production of the Market Revolution eroded the wealth and power of skilled

small business owners called artisans. This indenture contract illustrated the former way of do-

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ing things, where a young person would agree to serve for a number of years as an apprentice to

a skilled artisan before venturing out on his own.

4. Maria Stewart bemoans the consequences of racism, 1832

Maria Stewart electri�ed audiences in Boston with a number of powerful speeches. Her most

common theme was the evil of slavery. However, here she attacks the soul-crushing conse-

quences of racism in American capitalism, claiming that the lack of social and economic equal-

ity doomed Black Americans to a life of su�ering and spiritual death.

5. Rebecca Burlend recalls her emigration from England to Illinois, 1848

Rebecca Burlend, her husband, and children emigrated to Illinois from England in 1831. These

re�ections describe her reaction to landing in New Orleans, sailing up the Mississippi to St.

Louis, and �nally arriving at her new home in Illinois. This was her �rst experience encounter-

ing American slavery, the American landscape, and the rugged living conditions of her new

home.

6. Harriet H. Robinson remembers a mill workers’ strike, 1836

The social upheavals of the Market Revolution created new tensions between rich and poor,

particularly between the new class of workers and the new class of managers. Lowell, Massachu-

setts was the location of the �rst American factory. In this document, a woman reminisces about

a strike that she participated in at a Lowell textile mill.

7. Alexis de Toqueville, “How Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes,” 1840

The French political thinker Alexis de Toqueville travelled extensively through the United States

in gathering research for his book Democracy In America. In this excerpt, he described the belief

that American men and women lived in “separate spheres:” men in public, women in the home.

This expectation justi�ed the denial of rights to women. All women were denied political rights

in nineteenth century America, but only a small number of wealthy families could a�ord to re-

move women from economic production, like de Toqueville claimed.

8. Abolitionist sheet music cover page, 1844

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The “transportation revolution” shaped economic change in the early 1800s, but the massive

construction of railroads also had a profound impact on American politics and culture. This

sheet music title page shows how abolitionists used railroad imagery to advocate for the immedi-

ate emancipation of enslaved people and to promote their political platform before the 1844

presidential election.

9. Anti-Catholic cartoon, 1855

Irish immigration transformed American cities. Yet many Americans greeted the new arrivals

with suspicion or hostility. Nathanial Currier’s anti-Catholic cartoon re�ected the popular

American perception that Irish Catholic immigrants posed a threat to the United States.

IX. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Jane Fiegen Green, with content contributions by Kelly Arehart, Myles

Beaurpre, Kristin Condotta, Jane Fiegen Green, Nathan Jeremie-Brink, Lindsay Keiter, Brenden

Kennedy, William Kerrigan, Christopher Sawula, David Schley, and Evgenia Shayder Shoop.

Recommended citation: Kelly Arehart et al., “Market Revolution,” Jane Fiegen Green, ed., in The

American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).