History

Module 8 & 9 Industrial Transformation and Democracy

Early Industrialization

GUIDED READING QUESTIONS:

• 1. Explain how labor evolved from the “putting-out system” to unskilled wage labor during the early Industrial Revolution

• 2. Describe industrialization’s impact on the nature of work

Figure 1. Major milestones in industrialization (credit “1807 photo”: Project Gutenberg Archives).

Northern industrialization expanded rapidly following the War of 1812. Industrialized manufacturing began in New England, where wealthy merchants built water-powered textile mills (and centralized company towns to support them) along the rivers of the Northeast. These mills introduced new modes of production centralized in the confines of the mill itself. Production now relied on complex machinery powered by water, and later steam. In addition to the mechanization and concentration of work in the mills, specialized, repetitive tasks assigned to wage laborers replaced earlier modes of skilled handicraft production, which was done by artisans in their home. The operation of these mills irrevocably changed the nature of work by deskilling tasks and breaking down the process of production to its most basic elements. In return for their labor, the workers received hourly wages and sometimes a place to live in one of the mill town boarding houses. Many of these original unskilled laborers were young women from rural New England farming families. From its origin in New England, industrial manufacturing soon spread to other regions of the United States.

From Artisans to Wage Workers

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, artisans—skilled, experienced craft workers— produced goods by hand. The production of shoes provides a good example. In colonial times, people bought their shoes from master shoemakers, who achieved their status by living and working as apprentices under the rule of an older master artisan. After completing an apprenticeship, a young artisan would work as a journeyman (a skilled worker without his own shop). After sufficient time as a journeyman, a shoemaker could at last set up his own shop as a master artisan. People came to the shop, usually attached to the back of the master artisan’s house, and there the shoemaker measured their feet in order to cut and stitch together an individualized product for each customer.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, merchants in the Northeast and elsewhere turned their attention as never before to the benefits of using unskilled wage labor to make a greater profit by reducing labor costs. They used the putting-out system, which the British had employed at the beginning of their own Industrial Revolution, whereby they hired farming families to perform specific tasks in the production process for a set wage. This system of “piece work” divided much of production into discrete steps performed by different workers. In this new system, merchants or investors sent or “put-out” raw materials for goods, which individuals or families would then begin to make at home. These independent laborers then turned over the partially finished goods to another laborer to finish. In the case of shoes, for instance, American merchants hired one group of workers to cut soles into standardized sizes. A different group of families cut pieces of leather for the uppers, while still another was employed to stitch the standardized parts together.

This process proved attractive because it reduced production costs. The families who participated in the putting-out system were not skilled artisans. They had not spent years learning and perfecting their craft and did not have ambitious journeymen to pay. Therefore, they could not demand—and did not receive—high wages. Most of the year they tended fields and orchards, ate the food that they produced, and sold the surplus. Putting-out work provided a welcome source of extra income for New England farm families, who were beginning to see their profits dwindle due to competition from new Midwestern farms with higher-yield land.

Much of this part-time production was done under contract to merchants. Some farming families engaged in shoemaking (or shoe assemblage), as noted above. Many made brooms, plaited hats from straw or palm leaves (which merchants imported from Cuba and the West Indies), crafted furniture, made pottery, or wove baskets. Some, especially those who lived in Connecticut, made parts for clocks. The most common part-time occupation, however, was the manufacture of textiles. Farm women spun woolen thread and wove fabric. They also wove blankets, made rugs, and knit stockings. All this manufacturing took place in their homes, giving families control over the pace of their labor. Their domestic productivity increased the quantity of goods available for sale in country towns and nearby cities and drove further advances in manufacturing.

American Manufacturing and Changes in Labor

Figure 2. Authentic power looms at the Boott Cotton Mill and Museum in Lowell, MA.

As early as the 1790s, merchants in New England began experimenting with machines to replace the “putting-out system.” To effect this transition, merchants and factory owners relied on British technological knowledge to build the machines they needed. In 1789, a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island contracted twenty-one-year-old British immigrant Samuel Slater to build a yarn-spinning machine and carding machine. Slater had apprenticed in an English mill and was familiar with the design of their machinery. American “industrial espionage” began to pay off in 1813 when Francis Cabot Lowell, a merchant from Boston, returned from a two-year trip to Britain. Lowell was desperate to find a way to allow the U.S. to keep up with England’s textile production, but British law prohibited the sale of manufacturing equipment to Americans. He had committed the design of the British power loom to memory during his trip so that he could smuggle England’s industrial know-how into Massachusetts. Lowell hired a machinist named Paul Moody to recreate the powered looms and in 1814 he opened the Boston Manufacturing Company, which used the Charles River to power the first integrated textile mill, a setup where all production steps from handling raw materials to presenting finished goods was combined under one roof.

Lowell’s contribution to American industrialism was not only technological but also organizational, helping to streamline and centralize the American manufacturing process. His new approach, the Waltham-Lowell System, created the textile mill that defined antebellum New England and American industrialism. This modern manufacturing process was fully realized in the planned mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts in 1821, four years after Francis Lowell died. Powered by the Merrimack River and operated by local farm girls, the mills of Lowell centralized the process of textile manufacturing under one roof. The modern American factory was born. Soon, ten thousand employees worked in Lowell alone. Sarah Rice, who worked at the nearby Millbury factory, found it “a noisy place” that was “more confined than I like to be.” Working conditions were harsh for the “mill girls” who operated the factories from sun-up to sun-down. One worker complained that “a large class of females are, and have been, destined to a state of servitude.” These women organized strikes and lobbied for better hours, but the appeal of wage labor was high. 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 workers, Lowell’s vision brought a rush of capital and entrepreneurs into New England, resulting in the first manufacturing boom in the new republic.

Figure 3. Winslow Homer, “Bell-Time,” Harper’s Weekly vol. XII (July 1868): p. 472.

The Changing Nature of Work

The market revolution shook other industries as well. Craftsmen began to understand that new markets increased the demand for their products. Some shoemakers, for instance, abandoned the traditional method of producing custom-built shoes at their home workshop and instead began producing larger quantities of shoes in ready-made sizes to be shipped to urban centers. Manufacturers who wanted increased production abandoned the old personal approach of relying upon a single live-in apprentice for labor and instead hired unskilled wage laborers. These workers did not have to be trained in all aspects 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 flexible labor system in which unskilled laborers could be hired and fired as the market dictated. A writer in the New York Observer in 1826 complained that “The master no longer lives among his apprentices [and] watches over their moral as well as mechanical improvement.” Such sentiments were an early indicator that the new labor arrangements were transforming both social relations and more impersonal economic hierarchies.

Masters-turned-employers now not only had fewer obligations to their workers but also less personal attachment. They no longer shared the bonds of their trade but were categorized into new class- based relationships: employers and employees, bosses and workers, capitalists and laborers. On the other hand, workers were freed from the long-term obligations of apprenticeship and 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 by the captains of industry as “free labor,” it was simultaneously lamented by the growing class of powerless laborers who had no recourse against their employers to improve their conditions or their wages.

As the northern United States rushed headlong toward commercialization and an early capitalist economy, many Americans grew uneasy about the growing gap between wealthy businessmen and impoverished wage laborers. Elites like Daniel Webster defended their wealth and privilege by insisting 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 extraction 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 upon their industrial revolution with the expectation that all men could start their careers as humble wage workers but eventually participate in property ownership and financial stability if they only worked hard enough. Wage work had traditionally been looked down upon as a state of dependence, suitable only as a temporary waypoint for young men without resources on their path toward the economic success necessary to comfortably support a middle-class family. Children’s magazines – such as Juvenile Miscellany and Parley’s Magazine – glorified the prospect of moving up the economic ladder. This “free labor ideology,” where hard work, thrift and a suitably aspirational orientation meant personal advancement, had a darker side too, as mobile workers seeking opportunities would move to the same cities only to face reduced prospects and unenployment due to the sudden oversupply of labor.

The new commercial economy often failed in its promise of social mobility. Depressions and downturns might destroy businesses and reduce their owners to wage work, but even in times of prosperity, unskilled workers perpetually lacked economic security and therefore had to depend upon

supplemental income from their wives and young children. This combination of low wages, job competition, deskilling, economic uncertainty, and a lack of workers’ rights led to such atrocities as widespread child labor and crowded urban centers with poor sanitation and unsafe living conditions. With the rise of industrialization and cramped living quarters also came a rise in diseases like cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis. Workers poured into cities looking for jobs and were often housed in crowded tenement buildings with no running water and entire families living in a single room. In New York City, the death rate rose from 21 in 1000 to 37 in 1000 between 1810 and 1837, an increase of almost 80% in less than 50 years.

The Rise of Manufacturing

GUIDED READING QUESTION:

• 3. Describe the rise of industrial manufacturing in the early-mid 19th century and the nature of factory labor

In the late 1790s and early 1800s, Great Britain boasted the most advanced textile mills and machines in the world, and the United States continued to rely on Great Britain for finished goods. Great Britain hoped to maintain its economic advantage over its former colonies in North America. In an effort to prevent the knowledge of advanced manufacturing from leaving England, the British banned the emigration of mechanics and skilled workers who knew how to build and repair the latest textile machines.

Despite their best efforts, some British mechanics, including Samuel Slater, managed to travel to the United States in the hopes of profiting from their experience with advanced textile machinery. Slater understood the workings of the latest water-powered textile mills, which British industrialist Richard Arkwright had pioneered. In the 1790s in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Slater convinced several American merchants, including the wealthy industrialist Moses Brown, to finance and build a water- powered cotton mill based on the British models. Slater’s knowledge of both technology and mill organization made him the founder of the first truly successful cotton mill in the United States.

Figure 1. Samuel Slater (a) was a British migrant who brought plans for English textile mills to the United States and built the

nation’s first successful water-powered mill in Pawtucket, Massachusetts (b).

The success of Slater and his partners, Smith Brown and William Almy (relatives of Moses Brown), inspired others to build additional mills in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. By 1807, thirteen more

water-powered mills had been established. President Thomas Jefferson’s embargo on British manufactured goods from late 1807 to early 1809 spurred more New England merchants to invest in industrial enterprises because Americans were desperate for domestic goods. By 1812, seventy-eight new textile mills had been built in rural New England towns. More than half turned out woolen goods, while the rest produced cotton cloth.

Slater’s mills and those built in imitation of his were fairly small, employing only seventy people on average. Workers were organized in family units, the way that they had been in English factories. Under the Rhode Island system families were hired together, with the father being placed in charge of the family unit and directing the labor of his wife and children. Instead of being paid in cash, the workers were given credit equal to the value of the family’s labor, which could be redeemed towards rent for company-owned housing or goods from the company-owned store.

The Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812 played a pivotal role in spurring industrial development in the United States. Jefferson’s embargo prevented American merchants from engaging in the Atlantic trade, severely cutting into their profits. The War of 1812 further compounded the financial woes of American merchants. The acute economic problems led some New England merchants, including Francis Cabot Lowell, to cast their gaze on manufacturing. Lowell, having memorized the designs for the advanced textile machines he had seen in his travels to England, convinced other merchant families to invest in the creation of new mill towns. In 1813, Lowell and these wealthy investors, known as the Boston Associates, created the Boston Manufacturing Company. Together they raised $400,000 and, in 1814, established two water-powered textile mills in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Figure 2. The Boston Manufacturing Company, shown in this engraving made in 1813–1816, was headquartered in Waltham,

Massachusetts. The company started the northeastern textile industry by building water-powered textile mills along suitable rivers

and developing mill towns around them.

At Waltham, cotton was carded and drawn into coarse strands of fibers called rovings. The rovings were then spun into yarn, and the yarn woven into cotton cloth. Yarn no longer had to be put out to farm families for further processing. All the work was now performed at a central location—the factory.

The work in Lowell’s mills was both mechanized and specialized. Specialization meant the work was broken down into specific tasks, and workers steadily repeatedly the one task assigned to them. As

machines took over labor from humans and people increasingly found themselves confined to the same repetitive jobs, the process of deskilling began, wherein there was no longer a need to hire trained, professional laborers. Any worker could perform any job with minimal instruction or training, making now interchangeable employees less valuable and more easily replaceable.

The Boston Associates’ mills, which each employed hundreds of workers, were located in company towns, where the factories and worker housing were owned by the employer. This gave the owners and their agents more direct control over their workers. The most famous of these company towns was Lowell, Massachusetts. The new town was built on land the Boston Associates purchased in 1821 from the village of East Chelmsford at the falls of the Merrimack River, north of Boston. The mill buildings themselves were constructed of red brick with large windows to let in light. Company-owned boarding houses to shelter employees were constructed near the mills. The mill owners planted flowers and trees to maintain the appearance of a rural New England town and to forestall arguments, made by many, that factory work was unnatural and unwholesome.

In contrast to many smaller mills, the Boston Associates’ enterprises avoided the Rhode Island system, preferring individual workers to families. These employees were not difficult to find. The competition New England farmers faced from farmers now settling in the Midwest, and the growing scarcity of land in population-dense New England, had implications for farmers’ children. Realizing their chances of inheriting a profitable farm or receiving a substantial dowry were remote, these teenagers sought other employment opportunities, often at the urging of their parents. While young men could work in a variety of occupations, young women had more limited options. The textile mills provided suitable employment for the daughters of New England farm families.

Anxious parents were concerned about their daughters’ moral upkeep while they worked away from home. Families hoped to avoid what they viewed as common problems of industrialization—filth and vice, so the Boston Associates established strict rules governing the lives of these young female workers. The women lived in company-owned boarding houses to which they paid a portion of their wages. They woke early at the sound of a bell and worked twelve-hour shifts during which talking was forbidden. They could not swear or drink alcohol, and they were required to attend church on Sunday. Overseers at the mills and boarding-house keepers kept a close eye on the young women’s behavior; workers who associated themselves with people of questionable reputation or behaved immorally lost their jobs and were evicted.

MICHEL CHEVALIER ON MILL WORKER RULES AND WAGES

In the 1830s, the French government sent engineer and economist Michel Chevalier to study industrial and

financial affairs in Mexico and the United States. In 1839, he published Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States, in which he recorded his impressions of the Lowell textile mills. In the excerpt below, Chevalier describes the rules and wages of the Lawrence Company in 1833.

All persons employed by the Company must devote themselves assiduously to their duty during working- hours. They must be capable of doing the work which they undertake, or use all their efforts to this effect. They must on all occasions, both in their words and in their actions, show that they are penetrated by a laudable love of temperance and virtue, and animated by a sense of their moral and social obligations. The Agent of the Company shall endeavour to set to all a good example in this respect. Every individual who shall be notoriously dissolute, idle, dishonest, or intemperate, who shall be in the practice of absenting himself from divine service, or shall violate the Sabbath, or shall be addicted to gaming, shall be dismissed from the service of the Company. . . . All ardent spirits are banished from the Company’s grounds, except when prescribed by a physician. All games of hazard and cards are prohibited within their limits and in the boarding-houses.

Weekly wages were as follows: For picking and carding, $2.78 to $3.10

For spinning, $3.00 For weaving, $3.10 to $3.12 For warping and sizing, $3.45 to $4.00 For measuring and folding, $3.12

The mechanization of formerly handcrafted goods and the movement of production from the home to the factory dramatically increased the output of goods. For example, in one nine-month period, the numerous Rhode Island women who spun yarn into cloth on handlooms in their homes produced a total of thirty-four thousand yards of fabrics of different types. In 1855, the women working in just one of Lowell’s mechanized mills produced more than forty-three thousand yards.

Figure 3. A plan of the hopper boy and bucket elevator used in Evans-style flour mills, from the Young Mill-wright and Miller’s

Guide, 1834 edition.

The Boston Associates’ cotton mills quickly gained a competitive edge over the smaller mills established by Samuel Slater and those who had imitated him. Their success prompted the Boston Associates to expand. In Massachusetts, in addition to Lowell, new mill towns were built in Chicopee, Lawrence, and Holyoke. In New Hampshire, Lowell-style mills popped up in Manchester, Dover, and Nashua. In Maine, a large mill was built on the Saco River. Other entrepreneurs copied the Boston Associates’ business plan. By the time of the Civil War, 878 new textile factories had been built in New England. Altogether, these factories employed more than 100,000 people and produced more than 940 million yards of cloth per year.

Figure 4. Oliver Evans was an American engineer and inventor, best known for developing ways to automate the flour milling

process, which is illustrated here in a drawing from a 1785 instructional book called The Young Mill-Wright & Miller’s Guide.

Industrial success in New England was replicated elsewhere. Small mills, more like those in Rhode Island, were built in New York, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. By the mid-19th century, 300 textile mills were located in and around Philadelphia. Many produced specialty goods, such as silks and printed fabrics, and employed skilled workers, including those who worked in their own homes. In the South, the region that otherwise relied on slave labor to produce the cotton that fed the northern factories, more than 200 textile mills were built. Most textiles, however, continued to be produced in New England in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

Alongside the production of cotton and woolen cloth, which formed the backbone of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, production of other goods increasingly became mechanized and centralized in factories in the first half of the nineteenth century. The production of shoes, leather, paper, hats, clocks, and firearms had all become mechanized to one degree or another by the time of the Civil War. Flour milling had also become almost completely automated by the early decades of the nineteenth century, thanks to the inventions of Oliver Evans, such as the gravity-assisted bucket elevator and the flour processing hopper boy. So efficient were Evans-style mills that two employees were able to do work that had originally required five, and mills using Evans’s system spread throughout the mid-Atlantic states.

The Decline of Northern Slavery and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom

GUIDED READING QUESTION:

• 4. Discuss the critical role slavery played in the early Southern economy

The market revolution economy depended upon both free-market labor factories in the North and slave-labor plantations in the South. By 1832, textile companies made up more than 80% of American corporations valued at over $100,000. These textile mills, worked by free-market laborers, depended upon southern cotton and the vast new market economy spurred the expansion of Southern

plantation operations, including an increase in the number of enslaved people being sold to cotton- producing plantations.

Abolitionism

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. In 1804 New Jersey became the last of the northern states to adopt gradual emancipation plans. There was no immediate moment of jubilee for northern enslaved persons, however, as many states only promised to liberate future children born to enslaved mothers. Such laws also stipulated that children remain in indentured servitude to their mother’s master in order to compensate the enslaver’s loss. James Mars, a young man indentured under this system in Connecticut, risked being thrown in jail when he protested the arrangement that kept him bound to his mother’s master until age twenty-five. Pennsylvania’s Emancipation Act of 1780 stipulated that freed children serve an indenture term of twenty-eight years. Gradual emancipation still defended the interests of Northern slave-holders and kept another generation of Black Americans under the control of White citizens.

Manumission

Quicker routes to freedom included escape or direct emancipation by masters. But escape was dangerous and the voluntary liberation of enslaved persons by slave-holders, known as manumission, was rare. Congress, for instance, made the harboring of a fugitive enslaved person a federal crime by 1793. Hopes for manumission were even slimmer, as few Northern enslavers emancipated their own enslaved workers. For example, roughly one-fifth of the White families in New York City owned enslaved persons and yet fewer than 80 enslavers in the city voluntarily manumitted enslaved workers between 1783 and 1800. By 1830, census data suggests that at least 3,500 people were still enslaved in the North. Elderly Connecticut enslaved people remained in bondage as late as 1848 and in New Jersey until after the Civil War.

Emancipation proceeded slowly, but proceeded nonetheless. A free Black population of fewer than 10,000 at the time of the Revolution increased to 200,000 by 1810. Growing communities of free Black Americans fought for their civil rights. In a number of New England cities, free Black Americans could vote and send their children to public schools. Most northern states granted Black citizens property rights and trial by jury. Black Americans in the North also owned land and businesses, founded mutual aid societies, established churches, promoted education, developed print culture, and voted.

The Cotton Boom

Nationally, however, the enslaved population continued to grow to a total of 700,000 in the early years of the nineteenth century. The growth of abolitionism in the North and the acceleration of slavery in the South created deep divisions between the two regions. Slavery declined in the North but became more deeply entrenched in the South, owing in part to the development of a profitable new staple crop: cotton. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, a simple hand-cranked device designed to mechanically remove sticky green seeds from raw cotton, allowed southern planters to dramatically expand cotton production for the national and international markets. Technological innovations elsewhere—water-powered textile factories in England and the American northeast, which could rapidly turn raw cotton into cloth—increased demand for southern cotton and encouraged White Southerners to expand cultivation farther west, to the Mississippi River and beyond. Slavery’s

profitability had lagged in the tobacco economy, but cotton gave it new life. Eager cotton planters invested their new profits in more slaves.

The cotton boom fueled speculation in slavery. Many slave owners leveraged potential profits into loans used to purchase ever-increasing numbers of slaves. For example, one 1840 Louisiana Courier ad warned “it is very difficult now to find 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.”

Figure 1. Sidney & Neff, Detail from “Plan of the City of Lowell, Massachusetts,” 1850.

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 Manufactures stated that “the manufacture of cotton constitutes the most striking feature of the industrial history of the last fifty years.” Enslavers shipped their cotton to textile manufacturers in the North as well as overseas. Northern insurance brokers, merchants, and exporters profited greatly from this new market trend.

While the United States ended its legal participation in the global slave trade in 1808, slave traders moved 1,000,000 enslaved laborers from the tobacco-producing Upper South to cotton fields in the Lower South between 1790 and 1860, generating upwards of $12,000,000 annually. This harrowing trade in human flesh supported middle-class occupations such as bankers, doctors, lawyers, insurance brokers, and shipping agents, and it facilitated the expansion of northeastern textile mills.

Speculation and Expansion

GUIDED READING QUESTION:

• 5. Explain incentives and motives for moving westward during the early 1800s

By the 1840s, the United States economy bore little resemblance to the import-and-export economy of colonial days. It was now a market economy, one in which the production of goods, and their prices, were unregulated by the government. Commercial centers, to which job seekers flocked,

mushroomed. New York City’s population skyrocketed. In 1790, it was 33,000; by 1820, it had reached 200,000; and by 1825, it had swelled to 270,000. New avenues to prosperity appeared to be available to anyone. However, while opportunities abounded in America’s burgeoning cities, overcrowding and the uncertainties of the new economy also made settlement in the rural Northwest Territories look attractive.

With aspiration comes risk, and the expansion of the American economy made it prone to boom-and- bust cycles. Market economies involve fluctuating prices for labor, raw materials, and consumer goods and depend on credit and financial instruments—any one of which can be the source of an imbalance and an economic downturn in which businesses and farmers default, wage workers lose their employment, and investors lose their assets. This happened for the first time in the United States in 1819, when waves of enthusiastic speculation in land and commodities gave way to drops in prices.

UNDERSTANDING SPECULATION

Speculation is an economic concept that can be difficult to grasp. When investors or consumers speculate, it

means that they make financial decisions based on the idea that a particular asset might become much more valuable in the future and they will be able to sell it for a profit. Remember the Beanie Baby Craze of the late-1990’s? If not, congrats, you are not old yet and you can read about it here. People bought up hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars worth of Beanie Babies because they believed that they would be worth thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of dollars after 20-30 years. Eventually, the “Beanie Baby Bubble” burst and people realized that their little stuffed animals were not worth as much as they had thought they would be. In fact, most of them ended up on Goodwill shelves and you can get one now for around 25 cents. Anyone who invested a lot of money in the toys lost their investment.

Speculation is essentially the same with the stock market, real estate, and other commodities. When the bubble bursts, investors and regular people can lose everything and the entire economy can sink into a period of depression.

The Land Office Business

Figure 1. Cartographer John Cary drew this map “exhibiting The Western Territory, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia

&c” for his 1808 atlas; it depicted the huge western territory that fascinated settlers in the early nineteenth century.

In the early nineteenth century, people poured into the territories west of the long-settled eastern seaboard. Among them were speculators seeking to buy cheap parcels from the federal government in anticipation of a rise in prices. The Ohio Country in the Northwest Territory appeared to offer the best prospects for many in the East, especially New Englanders. The result was “Ohio fever,” as thousands traveled there to reap the benefits of settling in this newly available territory.

The federal government oversaw the orderly transfer of public land to citizens at public auctions. The Land Law of 1796 applied to the territory of Ohio after it had been wrested from the Northwestern Confederacy of Native American tribes during the Northwest Indian War (1785–1795). Under this law, the United States would sell a minimum parcel of 640 acres for $2 an acre. The later Land Law of 1800 further encouraged land sales in the Northwest Territory by reducing the minimum parcel size by half and enabling sales on credit, with the goal of stimulating settlement by ordinary farmers. The government created land offices to handle these sales and established them in the West within easy reach of prospective landowners, who could now purchase land directly from the government a set price. Buyers were given low interest rates, with payments that could be spread over four years. Surveyors marked off the parcels in straight lines, creating a landscape of checkerboard squares.

The future looked bright for those who turned their gaze on the land in the West. Surveying, settling, farming, and turning the wilderness into a profitable commodity gave settlers a sense of progress, purpose, and dignity. A uniquely American story of settling the land developed: hardy individuals wielding an axe cleared it, built a log cabin, and turned the frontier into farmland which paved the way for towns, mills, and eventually cities.

Figure 2. Thomas Cole, who painted Home in the Woods in 1847, was an American artist. Cole founded the Hudson River School,

a style renowned for portrayals of landscapes and wilderness influenced by the emotional aesthetic known as romanticism. In

what ways is this image realistic, and how is it idealized or romanticized?

A NEW ENGLANDER HEADS WEST

A native of Vermont, Gershom Flagg was one of thousands of New Englanders who caught “Ohio fever.” In this letter to his brother, Azariah Flagg, dated August 3, 1817, he describes the hustle and bustle of the emerging commercial town of Cincinnati.

DEAR BROTHER,

Cincinnati is an incorporated City. It contained in 1815, 1,100 buildings of different descriptions among which are above 20 of Stone 250 of brick & 800 of Wood. The population in 1815 was 6,500. There are about 60 Mercantile stores several of which are wholesale. Here are a great share of Mechanics of all kinds.

Here is one Woolen Factory four Cotton factories but not now in operation. A most stupendously large building of Stone is likewise erected immediately on the bank of the River for a steam Mill. It is nine stories high at the Waters edge & is 87 by 62 feet. It drives four pair of Stones besides various other Machinery as Wool carding &c &c. There is also a valuable Steam Saw Mill driving four saws also an inclined Wheel ox Saw Mill with two saws, one Glass Factory. The town is Rapidly increasing in Wealth & population. Here is a Branch of the United States Bank and three other banks & two Printing offices. The country around is rich. . . .

That you may all be prospered in the world is the anxious wish of your affectionate Brother

GERSHOM FLAGG

Figure 3. This engraving from A Topographical Description of the State of Ohio, Indiana Territory, and Louisiana (1812), by Jervis Cutler,

presents a view of Cincinnati as it may have looked to Gershom Flagg.

American Innovators and Inventors

GUIDED READING QUESTION:

• 6. Identify key American innovators and inventors and their specific contributions to the growth of industrialization

Entrepreneurs and Inventors

Figure 1. The First Cotton-Gin, an 1869 drawing by William L. Sheppard, shows the first use of a cotton gin “at the close of the

last century.” African American slaves handle the gin while White men conduct business in the background.

The volatility of the U.S. economy did nothing to dampen the creative energies of its citizens in the years before the Civil War. In the 1800s, a frenzy of entrepreneurship and invention yielded many new products and machines. The republic seemed to be a laboratory of innovation, and technological advances appeared unlimited.

One of the most influential advancements of the early nineteenth century was the cotton engine or gin, invented by Eli Whitney and patented in 1794. Whitney, who was born in Massachusetts, had spent time in the South and knew that a device to speed up the production of cotton was desperately needed so cotton farmers could meet the growing demand for their crop. He hoped the cotton gin would render slavery obsolete. Whitney’s seemingly simple invention cleaned the seeds from the raw cotton far more quickly and efficiently than could slaves working by hand. The raw cotton with seeds was placed in the cotton gin, and with the use of a hand crank, the seeds were extracted through a carding device that aligned the cotton fibers in strands for spinning. This innovation led to greater efficiency, and the textile industry greatly benefited.

Whitney also worked on machine tools, devices that cut and shaped metal to make standardized, interchangeable parts for other mechanical devices like clocks and guns. Whitney’s machine tools to manufacture parts for muskets enabled guns to be manufactured and repaired by people other than skilled gunsmiths. His creative genius served as a source of inspiration for many other American inventors.

Figure 2. Fulton’s steamboat the Clermont transformed the speed, cost, and dependability of water transportation in the United

States.

Another influential new technology of the early 1800s was the steamship engine, invented by Robert Fulton in 1807. Fulton’s first steamship, the Clermont, used paddle wheels to travel the 150 miles from New York City to Albany in a record time of only thirty-two hours. Soon, a fleet of steamboats was traversing the Hudson River and New York Harbor, later expanding to travel every major American river including the mighty Mississippi. By the 1830s there were over one thousand of these vessels, radically changing water transportation by ending its dependence on the wind. Steamboats could travel faster and more cheaply than sailing vessels or keelboats, which floated downriver and had to be poled or towed upriver on the return voyage. Steamboats also arrived with much greater dependability. The steamboat facilitated the rapid economic development of the massive Mississippi River Valley and the settlement of the West.

Figure 3. This sketch is from the 1845 patent for an improved grain reaper invented by Cyrus Hall McCormick. The reaper

mechanized the labor-intensive use of scythes to harvest wheat.

Virginia-born Cyrus McCormick wanted to replace the laborious process of using a scythe to cut and gather wheat for harvest. In 1831, he and the enslaved persons on his family’s plantation tested a

horse-drawn mechanical reaper, and over the next several decades, he made constant improvements to it. More farmers began using it in the 1840s, and greater demand for the McCormick reaper led McCormick and his brother to establish the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago, where labor was more readily available. By the 1850s, McCormick’s mechanical reaper had enabled farmers to vastly increase their output. McCormick—and also John Deere, who improved on the design of plows—opened the prairies to agriculture. McCormick’s bigger machine could harvest grain faster, and Deere’s plow could cut through the thick prairie sod. Agriculture north of the Ohio River became the pantry that would lower food prices and feed the major cities in the East. In short order, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois all become major agricultural states.

Samuel Morse added the telegraph to the list of American innovations introduced in the years before the Civil War. Born in Massachusetts in 1791, Morse first gained renown as a painter before turning his attention to the development of a method of rapid communication in the 1830s. In 1838, he gave the first public demonstration of his method of conveying electric pulses over a wire, using the basis of what became known as Morse code. In 1843, Congress agreed to help fund the new technology by allocating $30,000 for a telegraph line to connect Washington, DC, and Baltimore along the route of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In 1844, Morse sent the first telegraph message on the new link. Improved communication systems fostered the development of business, economics, and politics by allowing for the dissemination of news at a speed previously unknown.

On the Move: The Transportation Revolution

GUIDED READING QUESTIONS:

• 7. Describe the development of improved methods of nineteenth-century domestic transportation

• 8. Identify the ways in which roads, canals, and railroads impacted Americans’ everyday lives in the nineteenth century

American Commerce

The growth of the American economy reshaped daily life in the decades before the Civil War. Americans increasingly produced goods for sale, not for consumption. With a larger exchange network connected by improved transportation, the introduction of labor-saving technology, and the separation of the public and domestic spheres, the market revolution fulfilled expectations of progress but introduced troubling new trends. Class conflict, child labor, accelerated immigration, and the expansion of slavery followed. These strains required new family arrangements and forged new urban cultures.

American commerce had proceeded haltingly during the eighteenth century. American farmers increasingly exported foodstuffs to Europe as the French Revolutionary Wars (also called the Napoleonic Wars) devastated the continent between 1793 and 1815. America’s exports rose in value from $20.2 million in 1790 to $108.3 million 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 30 miles across land. An 1816 Senate Committee Report lamented that “the price of land carriage is too great” to allow the profitable production of American manufactures. But in the wake of the War of 1812, Americans rushed to build a new national infrastructure, including 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 governments 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.

Figure 1. Clyde Osmer DeLand, “The First Locomotive. Aug. 8th, 1829. Trial Trip of the “Stourbridge Lion,” 1916.

State legislatures meanwhile pumped capital into the economy by chartering banks and the number of state-chartered banks skyrocketed from 1 in 1783, 266 in 1820, 702 in 1840, to 1,371 in 1860. European capital also helped to 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—bubbles—in various commodities: land in 1819, land and enslaved persons in 1837, and railroad bonds in 1857. But Americans refused to blame the logic of their new commercial system for these depressions. Instead, they kept pushing “to get forward.”

The Transportation Revolution

The so-called Transportation Revolution opened up the vast lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. In 1810, for instance, before the rapid expansion of American infrastructure, a traveler named Margaret Dwight left New Haven, Connecticut, in a wagon headed for the Ohio Territory. Her trip was less than 500 miles but took six full 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 finally 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 first federally funded interstate infrastructure project. The road was smooth and her journey across the Alleghenies was a scenic delight. “I really can hardly conceive a higher enjoyment than a botanical tour among the Alleghany Mountains,” she declared. The ninety miles of National Road was to her “a garden.”

Figure 2. Engraving based on W.H. Bartlett, “Lockport, Erie Canal,” 1839.

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 revolution began with improved road networks, it soon incorporated even greater improvements in the ways people and goods moved across the landscape, including canals, steamboats, and railroads.

Roads and Canals

Figure 3. Although the Erie Canal was primarily used for commerce and trade, in Pittsford on the Erie Canal (1837), George

Harvey portrays it in a pastoral, natural setting. Why do you think the painter chose to portray the canal this way?

One key part of the transportation revolution was the widespread building of roads and turnpikes. In 1811, construction began on the Cumberland Road, a national highway that provided thousands with a route from Maryland to Illinois. The federal government funded this important artery to the West, beginning the creation of transportation infrastructure for the benefit of settlers and farmers. Other entities built turnpikes, which (as today) charged fees for use. New York State, for instance, chartered turnpike companies that dramatically increased the miles of state roads from one thousand in 1810 to four thousand by 1820. New York led the way in building turnpikes.

Canal mania swept the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Promoters knew these artificial rivers could save travelers immense amounts of time and money. Even short waterways, such as the two-and-a-half-mile canal going around the rapids of the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky, proved a huge leap forward, in this case by opening a water route from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. The preeminent example was the Erie Canal, which linked the Hudson River, and thus New York City and the Atlantic seaboard, to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Valley.

With its central location, large harbor, and access to inland markets via the Hudson River, New York City already commanded the lion’s share of commerce. Still, the city’s merchants worried about losing ground to their competitors in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Their search for commercial advantage led to the dream of creating a water highway connecting the city’s Hudson River to Lake Erie and markets in the West, resulting in the Erie Canal. Chartered in 1817 by the state of New York, the canal took seven years to complete. When it opened in 1825, it dramatically decreased the cost of shipping while reducing the time to travel to the West. Soon $15 million worth of goods (more than $200 million in today’s money) was being transported on the 363-mile waterway every year.

The success of the Erie Canal led to other similar projects. The Wabash and Erie Canal, which opened in the early 1840s, stretched over 450 miles, making it the longest canal in North America. Canals added immensely to the country’s sense of progress. Indeed, they appeared to be the logical next step in the process of transforming wilderness into civilization.

Figure 4. This map (a) shows the route taken by the Wabash and Erie Canal through the state of Indiana. The canal began

operation in 1843 and boats operated on it until the 1870s. Sections have since been restored, as shown in this 2007 photo (b)

from Delphi, Indiana. Visit Southern Indiana Trails to see historic photographs of the Wabash and Erie Canal:

As with highway projects such as the Cumberland Road, many canals were federally sponsored, especially during the presidency of John Quincy Adams in the late 1820s. Adams, along with Secretary of State Henry Clay, championed what was known as the American System, part of which included plans for a broad range of internal transportation improvements. Adams endorsed the creation of roads and canals to facilitate commerce and develop markets for agriculture as well as to advance settlement in the West. Along with these commerce-enabling infrastructural investments, the American System also featured a national bank and a program of tariffs to protect domestic manufacturing.

Steamboats

Robert Fulton established the first commercial steam boat service up and down the Hudson River in New York in 1807. Soon thereafter steamboats filled the waters of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Downstream-only routes became watery two-way highways. By 1830, more than 200 steamboats moved up and down western rivers.

Railroads

Starting in the late 1820s, steam locomotives began to compete with horse-drawn locomotives. The railroads with steam locomotives offered a new mode of transportation that fascinated citizens, buoying their optimistic view of the possibilities of technological progress. The Mohawk and Hudson Railroad was the first to begin service with a steam locomotive. Its inaugural train ran in 1831 on a track outside Albany and covered twelve miles in twenty-five minutes. Soon it was traveling regularly between Albany and Schenectady.

The United States’ first 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 Baltimore & 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 Carolina 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.

Toward the middle of the century, railroad construction kicked into high gear, and eager investors quickly formed a number of railroad companies. As a railroad grid began to take shape, it stimulated a greater demand for coal, iron, and steel. Soon, both railroads and canals crisscrossed the states, providing a transportation infrastructure that fueled the growth of American commerce. Indeed, the transportation revolution led to the development of major coal, iron, and steel industries, which provided many Americans with new job opportunities.

Figure 5. This 1853 map of the “Empire State” shows the extent of New York’s canal and railroad networks. The entire country’s

transportation infrastructure grew dramatically during the first half of the nineteenth century.

By 1860 Americans laid more than 30,000 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 abroad in England.

Americans on the Move

The expansion of roads, canals, and railroads changed people’s lives. In 1786, it had taken a minimum of four days to travel from Boston, Massachusetts, to Providence, Rhode Island. By 1840, the trip took half a day on a train. In the twenty-first century, this may seem intolerably slow, but people at the time were amazed by the railroad’s speed. Its average of twenty miles per hour was twice as fast as other available modes of transportation.

By 1840, more than three thousand miles of canals had been dug in the United States, and thirty thousand miles of railroad track had been laid by the beginning of the Civil War. Together with the hundreds of steamboats that plied American rivers, these advances in transportation made it easier and less expensive to ship agricultural products from the West to feed people in eastern cities, and to send manufactured goods from the East to people in the West. Without this ability to transport goods, the market revolution would not have been possible. Rural families also became less isolated as a result of the transportation revolution. Traveling circuses, menageries, peddlers, and itinerant painters could now more easily make their way into rural districts, and people in search of work found cities and mill towns within their reach.

The Communication Revolution

Such internal improvements not only spread goods, they spread information. The transportation revolution was followed by a communications revolution. The telegraph redefined the limits of human communication. By 1843 Samuel Morse 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 battlefield events to eastern newspapers within days, in stark contrast to 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 Americans. Farmers who previously produced crops mostly for their own families now turned to the market. 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 them vulnerable to distant and impersonal market forces. In the Northeast and Midwest, where farm labor was ever in short supply, ambitious farmers invested in new technologies that 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 harvesting, and John Deere’s steel-bladed plow, which more easily allowed for the conversion of unbroken ground into fertile farmland.

The Rise of Industrial Labor in Antebellum America

GUIDED READING QUESTION:

• 9. Describe immigration to the United States during the early-to-mid 19th century and its connection to social and economic changes

Immigration to the United States

More than five million immigrants, mostly Irish, German, and Jewish, arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1860 seeking new lives and economic opportunities. By the Civil War, nearly one out of every eight Americans had been born outside of the United States. A series of push and pull factors, so called because they drive individuals from their native lands and to places of ostensible opportunity, 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 (a push factor). These policies generally targeted Catholics in the southern counties of Ireland and motivated many to seek greater opportunities in the booming American economy, attracting many Irish immigrants to ports along the east coast of the United States (a pull factor). 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 possible, practiced what became known as chain migration. Chain migration allowed Irish men to send portions of their wages home, which would then be used to either support their families in Ireland or to purchase tickets for relatives to come to the United States. Irish immigration followed this pattern into the 1840s and 1850s, when the widespread Irish Potato Famine sparked a massive exodus out of Ireland. Between 1840 and 1860, 1.7 million Irish fled 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 Black Americans and nativist newspapers portrayed them with ape-like features. Despite the hostility, Irish immigrants retained their social, cultural, and religious beliefs and left an indelible mark on American culture.

IMMIGRATION AND PREJUDICES

The Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865 primarily to target newly-freed slaves, also targeted Catholic immigrants, as its members believed that Catholic allegiance to the Pope and the Vatican was anti-American and anti- Christian. Anti-Catholic paranoia was rampant in nineteenth-century America, extending even to President Ulysses S. Grant, who obliquely referred to Catholicism as “superstition, ambition, and ignorance” and believed that the establishment of the Catholic Church within the US would lead to another Civil War.[1]

Figure 1. John Tenniel, “Mr. G’Orilla,” c. 1845-52. In this anti-Irish illustration, the Irish independence movement is mocked.

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 fled declining agricultural conditions and repercussions of the failed revolutions 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 middle-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.

Most German immigrants were Catholics, but many were Jewish. Although records are sparse, New York’s Jewish population rose from approximately 500 in 1825 to 40,000 in 1860. Similar gains were seen in other American cities. Jewish immigrants, hailing from southwestern 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 established, Jewish immigrants found work in retail, commerce, and artisanal occupations such as tailoring. 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.

Nativist Movements

The sudden influx 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 institutions. Popular in northern cities such as Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities with large Catholic populations, nativism even spawned its own political party in the 1850s. The American Party, more commonly referred to 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, reflecting widespread anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment, succeeded in slowing 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.

Labor Activism

In industrial northern cities, Irish immigrants swelled the ranks of the working class and quickly encountered the politics of industrial labor. Many workers formed trade unions during the early republic. Organizations such as the Philadelphia Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers or the Carpenters’ Union of Boston operated within specific industries in American cities and 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, conspiratorial organizations that promoted 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—and then only haltingly—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.”

Figure 2. N. Currier, “The Propagation Society, More Free than Welcome,” 1855, an illustration expressing anti-Catholic “Know

Nothing” sentiments.

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 establish a ten-hour day 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 improvement.” After a city-wide 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 effort 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 off) their jobs in 1834 and 1836. During the Ten-Hour Movement of the 1840s, female workers provided crucial support. Under the leadership of Sarah Bagley, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association organized petition drives that drew thousands of signatures from “mill girls.” Like male activists, 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 Van Buren established a ten-hour-day policy for laborers on federal public works projects. New Hampshire passed a state-wide law in 1847 and Pennsylvania following 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, especially in New England, 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 manufacturing 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 the age of twelve from working more than ten hours a day. By the mid-nineteenth century, every state in New England had followed Massachusetts’ lead. Between the 1840s and 1860s, these statutes slowly extended the age of protection and the assurance of schooling. Throughout the region, public officials agreed that young children (between nine and twelve years) should be prevented from working in dangerous occupations, and older children (between twelve and fifteen years) should balance their labor with education and time for leisure.

Male workers, sought to improve their income and working conditions in order to support a household that kept women and children protected within the domestic sphere. But gains were limited and the organized labor movement remained moderate. Despite its challenge to industrial working conditions, labor activism in antebellum America remained largely wedded to the free-market labor ideal. The labor movement supported the northern Free Soil movement of the 1840s, which sought to curtail the spread of slavery to new states and territories. The goal of the organized labor movement was to simultaneously promote the superiority of the northern system of commerce and to reform capitalism, though it was much less successful in regard to the second goal.

Figure 6. A. Janicke & Co., “Our City, (St. Louis, Mo.),” 1859.

Most visibly, the market revolution encouraged the growth of cities reshaped the lives of urban workers. In 1820, only two cities in the United States—New York and Philadelphia—had over 100,000 inhabitants. By 1850, six American 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 captured the bulk of the trade emerging from the Great Lakes region, securing New York City’s position as the nation’s largest and most economically important city. 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 stream power and the exploitation of Pennsylvania coalfields shifted the locus of American manufacturing. By the 1830s, for instance, New England was losing its competitive advantage as new sources and locations of power opened up in other regions.

Meanwhile, the cash economy eclipsed the old, local, informal systems of barter and trade. Income became the measure of economic worth. Productivity and efficiencies paled before the measure of income. Cash facilitated new impersonal economic relationships and formalized new means of production. 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 appeared: the business corporation.

To protect the fortunes and liabilities of entrepreneurs who invested in early industrial endeavors, states offered the privileges of incorporation. A corporate charter allowed investors and directors to avoid personal liability for company debts. The legal status of incorporation had originally been designed to offer protection to organizations undertaking expensive projects designed for the public good, such as universities, municipalities, and major public works projects. The business corporation was something new. Many Americans distrusted these new, impersonal business organizations whose officers lacked personal responsibility while nevertheless carrying legal rights. Many wanted

limits. Thomas Jefferson 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 defiance 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 government of New Hampshire’s attempt to reorganize Dartmouth College on behalf of the common good. Still, suspicions remained. A group of journeymen leatherworkers in New Jersey publicly declared in 1835 that they “entirely disapprov[ed] of the incorporation of Companies, for carrying on manual mechanical business, inasmuch as we believe their tendency is to eventuate and produce monopolies, thereby crippling the energies of individual enterprise.”

The Missouri Crisis

GUIDED READING QUESTION:

• 10. Explain the controversies and eventual compromise related to the Missouri Crisis of 1820

Sectionalism

Even as electoral influence was being constrained among different categories of potential voters, another troubling pattern was also emerging in national politics and culture. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, American politics shifted toward “sectional” conflict among the states of the North, South, and West.

Since the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, the state of Virginia had wielded more influence on the federal government than any other state. Four of the first five presidents, for example, were from Virginia. Immigration caused by the market revolution, however, caused the country’s population to grow fastest in northern states like New York. Northern political leaders were becoming wary of what they perceived to be a disproportionate influence in federal politics by Virginia and other southern states.

Furthermore, many northerners feared that the southern states’ common interest in protecting slavery was creating a congressional voting bloc that would be difficult for “free states” to overcome. The North and South began to clash over federal policy as northern states gradually ended slavery but southern states came to depend even more on enslaved labor.

The Missouri Crisis

The most important instance of these rising tensions erupted in the Missouri Crisis. When White settlers in Missouri, a new territory carved out of the Louisiana Purchase, applied for statehood in 1819, the balance of political power between northern and southern states became the focus of public debate. Missouri already had more than ten thousand enslaved laborers and was poised to join the southern slave states in Congress.

The Missouri territory was gained through the Louisiana Purchase, and was the first part of that vast acquisition to apply for statehood. By 1818, tens of thousands of settlers had flocked to Missouri, including enslavers who brought with them some ten thousand enslaved persons. Politicians had

sought to avoid the issue of slavery ever since the 1787 Constitutional Convention arrived at an uneasy compromise in the form of the “three-fifths clause.” This provision stated that the entirety of a state’s free population and 60 percent of its enslaved population would be counted in establishing the number of that state’s members in the House of Representatives and the size of its federal tax bill. Although slavery existed in several northern states at the time, the compromise had angered many northern politicians because, they argued, the “extra” population of slaves would give southern states more votes than they deserved in both the House and the Electoral College. Admitting Missouri as a slave state also threatened the tenuous balance between free and slave states in the Senate by giving slave states a two-vote advantage.

The Tallmadge Amendment

Accordingly, Congressman James Tallmadge of New York proposed an amendment to Missouri’s application for statehood. Tallmadge claimed that the institution of slavery mocked the Declaration of Independence and the liberty it promised to “all men.” He proposed that Congress should admit Missouri as a state only if bringing more enslaved people to Missouri were prohibited and children born to those enslaved there were freed at age twenty-five.

Congressmen like Tallmadge opposed slavery for moral reasons, but they also wanted to maintain a sectional balance of power. Unsurprisingly, the Tallmadge Amendment met with firm resistance from southern politicians. It passed in the House of Representatives because of the support of nearly all the northern congressmen, who had a majority there, but it was quickly defeated in the Senate.

Southerners in Congress rejected the amendment as an attempt to gradually abolish slavery—not just in Missouri but throughout the Union—by violating the property rights of enslavers and their freedom to take their property wherever they wished. Slavery’s apologists, who had long argued that slavery was a necessary evil, now began to perpetuate the idea that slavery was a positive good for the United States. They asserted that it generated wealth and left White men free to exercise their true talents instead of toiling in the soil, as the descendants of Africans were allegedly better suited to do. Enslaved people were cared for, supporters argued, and were better off for being exposed to the teachings of Christianity as enslaved persons than living as free heathens in uncivilized Africa. Above all, the United States had a destiny, they argued, to create an empire of slavery throughout the Americas. These proslavery arguments were to be made repeatedly and forcefully as expansion to the West proceeded and would become increasingly problematic.

The Missouri Compromise

When Congress reconvened in 1820, a senator from Illinois, another new western state, proposed a compromise. Jesse Thomas hoped his offer would not only end the Missouri Crisis but also prevent any future sectional disputes over slavery and statehood. Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky joined in promoting the deal, earning himself the nickname “the Great Compromiser.”

Figure 1. The Missouri Compromise resulted in the District of Maine, which had originally been settled in 1607 by the Plymouth

Company and was a part of Massachusetts, being admitted to the Union as a free state and Missouri being admitted as a slave

state.

Their bargain, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, contained three parts.

1. First, Congress would admit Missouri as a slave state.

2. Second, Congress would admit Maine (which until now had been a territory of Massachusetts) as a free state, maintaining the balance between the number of free and slave states.

3. Third, the rest of the Louisiana Purchase territory would be divided along the 36°30’ line of latitude—or in other words, along the southern border of Missouri. Slavery would be prohibited in other new states north of this line, but it would be permitted in new states to the south.

The compromise passed both houses of Congress, and the Missouri Crisis ended peacefully. Not everyone, however, felt relieved. The Missouri Crisis made the sectional nature of American politics impossible to ignore. The Missouri Crisis split the Democratic-Republican party entirely along sectional lines, revealing the different levels of regional economic dependency on the system of slavery that now existed and suggesting trouble to come.

The Missouri Crisis demonstrated the emerging volatility of the slavery debate. Many Americans, including seventy-seven-year-old Thomas Jefferson, were alarmed at how readily some Americans spoke of disunion and even civil war over the issue. “This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror,” Jefferson wrote. “I considered it at once as the [death] knell of the Union.”[1]

For now, the Missouri Crisis did not result in disunion and civil war as Jefferson and others feared. But it also failed to settle the issue of slavery’s expansion into new western territories. The issue would cause worse trouble in the years ahead.

The Tyranny of the Majority

GUIDED READING QUESTION:

• 11. What was Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of American democracy

To some observers, the emergence of democracy in the United States raised troubling questions about the new power of the majority to silence minority opinion. As the will of the majority became the rule of the day, everyone outside of mainstream, White American opinion, especially Native Americans and Blacks, were vulnerable to the wrath of the majority. Some worried that the rights of those who opposed the will of the majority would never be safe. Mass democracy also shaped political campaigns as never before. The 1840 presidential election marked a significant turning point in the evolving style of American democratic politics.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Perhaps the most insightful commentator on American democracy was the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, whom the French government sent to the United States to report on American prison reforms. He undertook a nine-month, seven-thousand–mile tour of the United States east of the Mississippi. Tocqueville marveled at the spirit of democracy that pervaded American life. Given his place in French society, however, much of what he saw of American democracy caused him concern.

Tocqueville, himself an aristocrat, looked upon American democracy with a combination of awe and wariness. He was impressed by Americans’ industriousness and resourcefulness, and by their ability to improvise voluntary associations to solve problems in the absence of a powerful, centralized state authority, particularly in rural places. Attempting to understand not just the American system of government, but also what made the country culturally unique, Tocqueville concluded that democracy was about more than just the right to vote or any particular set of laws or regulations, but rather was about a certain disposition or state of mind in the people, one that valued personal initiative, social equality (at least in theory), and a commitment to the public sphere.

Figure 1. Alexis de Tocqueville is best known for his insightful commentary on American democracy found in De la démocratie en

Amérique. The first volume of Tocqueville’s two-volume work was immediately popular throughout Europe. The first English

translation, by Henry Reeve and titled Democracy in America (a), was published in New York in 1838. Théodore Chassériau

painted this portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville in 1850 (b).

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE ON DEMOCRACY AND TYRANNY

Tocqueville’s experience led him to believe that democracy was an unstoppable force that would one day overthrow monarchy around the world. He wrote and published his findings in 1835 and 1840 in a two-part

work entitled Democracy in America. In analyzing the democratic revolution in the United States, he wrote that the major benefit of democracy came in the form of equality before the law. A great deal of the social revolution of democracy, however, carried negative consequences. Indeed, Tocqueville described a new type

of tyranny, the tyranny of the majority, which overpowers the will of minorities and individuals and was, in his view, unleashed by democracy in the United States.

In this excerpt from Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville warns of the dangers of democracy when the majority will can turn to tyranny:

In my opinion, the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny. When an individual or a party is wronged in the United States, to whom can he apply for redress? If to public opinion, public opinion constitutes the majority; if to the legislature, it represents the majority, and implicitly obeys its injunctions; if to the executive power, it is appointed by the majority, and remains a passive tool in its hands; the public troops consist of the majority under arms; the jury is the majority invested with the right of hearing judicial cases; and in certain States even the judges are elected by the majority. However iniquitous or absurd the evil of which you complain may be, you must submit to it as well as you can.

The authority of a king is purely physical, and it controls the actions of the subject without subduing his private will; but the majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy. I know no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America.

Native American Life

GUIDED READING QUESTION:

• 12. Describe the contrast between common historical perceptions of Native Americans and their actual practices and achievements

Pro-Jackson newspapers touted the president as a champion of opening land for White settlement and moving Indigenous inhabitants beyond the boundaries of “American civilization.” In this effort, Jackson reflected majority opinion: most Americans believed Native Americans had no place in the White republic. Jackson’s animosity toward Native peoples ran deep. He had fought against the Creek in 1813 and against the Seminole in 1817, and his reputation and popularity rested in large measure on his firm commitment to remove Indigenous peoples from states in the South. The 1830 Indian Removal Act and subsequent displacement of the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee tribes of the Southeast fulfilled the vision of a White nation and became one of the identifying characteristics of the Age of Jackson.

Native Americans in Popular Culture

Popular culture in the first half of the nineteenth century reflected the discrimination and prejudices towards Native Americans that was pervasive during the Age of Jackson. Jackson skillfully played upon this racial hatred to engage the United States in a policy of ethnic cleansing, eradicating the Native presence from the land to make way for White civilization.

In an age of mass democracy, powerful anti-Native sentiments found expression in mass culture, shaping common perceptions. James Fenimore Cooper’s very popular historical novel, The Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826 as part of his Leatherstocking series, told the tale of Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo (aka Hawkeye), who lived among Indigenous people but had been born to White parents. Cooper provides a romantic version of the French and Indian War in which Natty helps the British against the French and the feral, bloodthirsty Huron. Natty endures even as his Native friends die, including the noble Uncas, the last Mohican, in a narrative that dovetailed with most people’s approval of Native American removal.

Native Americans also made frequent appearances in art. George Catlin produced many paintings of Native peoples, which he offered as true representations despite routinely emphasizing their supposed savage nature. The Cutting Scene, Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony is one example. Scholars have long questioned the accuracy of this portrayal of a rite of passage among the Mandan people. Accuracy aside, the painting captured the imaginations of White viewers, reinforcing their disgust at the presumed savagery of Native peoples.

Figure 1. The Cutting Scene, Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony, an 1832 painting by George Catlin, depicts a rite-of-passage

ceremony that Catlin said he witnessed. It featured wooden splints inserted into the chest and back muscles of young men. Such

paintings increased Natives’ reputation as savages.

THE PAINTINGS OF GEORGE CATLIN

George Catlin seized upon the public fascination with the supposedly exotic and savage Indian, seeing an opportunity to make money by painting them in a way that conformed to popular White stereotypes. In the late 1830s, he toured major cities with his Indian Gallery, a collection of paintings of Native peoples. Though he hoped his exhibition would be profitable, it did not bring him financial security.

Figure 2. In Attacking the Grizzly Bear (a), painted in 1844, Catlin focused on the Native Americans’ own vanishing culture, while in Wi-jún-

jon, Pigeon’s Egg Head (The Light) Going To and Returning From Washington (b), painted in 1837–1839, he contrasted their ways with those

of Whites by showing an Assiniboine chief transformed by a visit to Washington, DC.

Catlin routinely painted Native peoples in a supposedly primitive state. In Attacking the Grizzly Bear, the hunters do not have rifles and instead rely on spears. Such a portrayal stretches credibility as Native peoples

had long been exposed to and adopted European weapons. Indeed, the painting’s depiction of Native Americans riding horses, which were introduced by the Spanish, makes clear that, as much as Catlin and White viewers wanted to believe in this caricature of an uncivilized and uncivilizable people, the reality was otherwise.

In Wi-jún-jon, Pigeon’s Egg Head (The Light) Going To and Returning From Washington, the viewer is shown a before and after portrait of Wi-jún-jon, who tried to emulate white dress and manners after going to Washington, DC. What differences do you see between these two representations of Wi-jún-jon?

Perhaps you noticed the map, the bold colors, or the disorienting feeling conveyed by the dripping paint. This piece was created by artist Jaune Quick-To-See Smith. Smith is a member of the Confederated Salish and

Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation in Montana. In 2004, the artist said this about State Names, “We are the original owners of this country. Our land was stolen from us by the Euro-American invaders . . . I can’t say strongly enough that my maps are about stolen lands, our very heritage, our cultures, our worldview, our being . . . Every map is a political map and tells a story—that we are alive everywhere across this nation . . .” Now take a look at the map again, how does this new knowledge change your interpretation of the painting? Note that the map only includes state names that come from Indigenous sources—and over half of state names come from Native American words or tribal names. States named after tribal names include the Dakotas, Utah, Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, and many other states come from Native terms and descriptions, such as the name Wyoming, which comes from a Delaware Indian word that means “mountains and valleys alternating.”

Native American Life

At the time of European contact in eastern North America, Native peoples comprised a diverse society within which hundreds of languages were spoken and a range of beliefs prevailed regarding property, kinship and labor. Despite regional and historical differences, the Indigenous peoples of North America did have some common characteristics. Most shared a religious perspective that did

not clearly differentiate between the natural and supernatural worlds, or between secular and sacred acts. While European arrivals to the continent would eventually judge Native religiosity as primitive, alien, and perhaps diabolical, it was not so unlike their own Christianity in that most Native groups believed in a single Creator who presided over a hierarchical spiritual domain.

Perhaps a sharper difference existed between Native and European conceptions of land ownership. Tribal leaders would allot land to families for seasonal use, and any land which was not under cultivation was considered available for anyone to use. While a family had the right to work the land, they did not have a permanent right to the land itself. Land, the foundation of a hunting and farming society, was considered a resource to be held in common, and not a salable commodity. Villages moved every few years when game became scarce or the soil unyielding, which made the accumulation of extraneous material possessions impractical. This did not mean that status was not important in Native culture, though high status was more likely to come from a reputation for generosity than from a show of ostentatious personal wealth. While the Indigenous people of North America would not have recognized the type of affluence on display at the pinnacle of European society, in typical circumstances no member of the community would be allowed to go hungry, a civilizational achievement that led English colonist Roger Williams to observe “there are no beggars among them.”

Women occupied an egalitarian position in Native society as compared to contemporary Europe. While membership in a family was fundamental to everyday life, women were free to select their own romantic partners and could initiate a divorce if desired. Most Indigenous groups viewed family ties as matrilineal, which is to say that children automatically became members of their mother’s family, not their fathers. Female elders often helped select village leaders and took part in tribal meetings, granting them a high degree of influence in their communities. Native women owned dwellings and tools, and performed crucial agricultural labor. In contrast, under English law a married woman had no independent legal standing and did not control her household’s property in any substantial way.

These different cultural understandings of property rights and gender roles help to explain the incomprehension that would establish the groundwork for the Jacksonian era’s Indian Removal policies. European colonists and the later citizens of the United States would argue that Native people had not truly used the land and thus had no defensible claim to it. Overlooking the highly developed and regionally grounded Native societies in their midst, White settler authorities insisted that the disputed lands were a vacant expanse, an open wilderness ready to be cultivated for profit. [1] In the words of Andrew Jackson, “speedy removal [will] place a dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters.” [2]

If the degree to which a culture is “civilized” can be seen in the achievements and behaviors of a people, then the example of Cherokee culture in the 19th century is instructive. Along with the other members of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, the Cherokee had adopted many elements of White society, de-emphasizing hunting in favor of establishing farms, building roads, multi-level schools, Christian churches, commercial marketplaces, and community-based newspapers. Cultural adaptation aside, many Cherokees, Creeks, and Choctaws had also intermarried with Whites. Native people in these acculturated locales adopted White dress, foods, and leisure activities.[3]

Despite having adopted these conventions and having established a highly developed capital of the Cherokee nation, called New Echota, the Cherokee, along with their neighboring southeastern tribes, were targeted for removal and their ancestral lands were appropriated. Ironically, by demonstrating a high level of civilization, the Five Tribes had made the product of their labor that much more attractive to acquisitive White interests.

The Indian Removal Act

GUIDED READING QUESTION:

• 13. Explain the legal doings, opposition, and changes that surrounded the Indian Removal Act

The Cherokee

Figure 1. This image depicts the front page of the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper from May 21, 1828. The paper was published in

both English and the Cherokee language.

In his first message to Congress, Jackson had proclaimed that Native American groups living independently within states, as sovereign entities, presented a major problem for state sovereignty. This message referred directly to the situation in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, where the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee peoples stood as obstacles to White settlement. These groups were known as the Five Civilized Tribes, because they had largely adopted Anglo-American culture, speaking English and practicing Christianity. Some held slaves like their White counterparts.

The Cherokee provide an excellent example of the ways in which the nations acculturated in the interests of survival. In 1827, the Cherokee adopted a government modeled on the American system. They adopted a written constitution that outlined a three-branch system of government including a principal chief, a two-house legislature, and an independent judiciary with a Supreme Court. Most Cherokee lived and dressed like the average American, and some converted to Christianity. Most Cherokee, moreover, became literate after the development of a written Cherokee syllabary; the

nation published their own newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix (ᏣᎳᎩ ᏧᎴᎯᏌᏅᎯ). The wealthiest

Cherokee owned plantations and slaves and grew cotton. Like their American counterparts, the group developed and improved the land, building grist mills, saw mills, blacksmith shops, and tanning yards. By most standards and measures, the Cherokee had acculturated to an American way of life; instead

of ensuring the survival of the group, however, it intensified the desire of White settlers for this improved Indian land.

Whites especially resented the Cherokee in Georgia, coveting the tribe’s rich agricultural lands in the northern part of the state. The impulse to remove the Cherokee only increased when gold was discovered on their lands. Paradoxically, Whites insisted the Cherokee and other Native peoples could never be good citizens and harmoniously integrated neighbors because of their savage ways, even as the Cherokee and other tribes adopted the practices and appearances of White culture.

Jackson’s anti-Indian stance struck a chord with a majority of White citizens, many of whom shared a hatred of nonwhites that spurred Congress to pass the 1830 Indian Removal Act. The act called for the removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from their home in the southeastern United States to land in the West, in present-day Oklahoma. Jackson declared in December 1830, “It gives me pleasure to announce to Congress that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the White settlements is approaching to a happy consummation. Two important tribes have accepted the provision made for their removal at the last session of Congress, and it is believed that their example will induce the remaining tribes also to seek the same obvious advantages.”

The Choctaw

The Choctaw were the first of the Five Civilized Tribes to agree to move. For decades, the Choctaw had been pressured to give up lands to White settlers; in the period between 1801 and 1825, the nation signed seven treaties with the U.S. government, ceding some 15,000,000 acres. On September 15, 1830, the nation met with Secretary of War John Eaton and General John Coffee to negotiate the terms for removal west of the Mississippi. The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was the result. It guaranteed that in exchange for Choctaw lands east of the Mississippi (about 11 million acres), the nation would receive 15 million acres in what is now the state of Oklahoma, then known as Indian Territory. It also established the boundaries of the relationship between the U.S. government and the government of the Choctaw nation. It also agreed to continue to pay annuities established in previous treaties the Choctaw had made with the United States; for instance, Choctaw who had fought in the American Revolution would continue to receive annuities. After the signing of the treaty, many reluctantly prepared to leave the Choctaw homeland. In his “Farewell Letter to the American People,” George Harkins voiced this frustration, saying, “We as Choctaws choose to suffer and be free, than live under the degrading influence of laws, where our voice could not be heard in the formation…Much as the state of Mississippi has wronged us, I cannot find in my heart any other sentiment than an ardent wish for her prosperity and happiness.”[1] Removal began in the fall of 1831 and was scheduled to end in 1833. Since this was the first, Jackson was anxious to make this the model for his policy of “Indian removal.” Nearly 15,000 Choctaw made the trip; some 2,500 died on the journey. The Choctaw removal came to be called “the trail of tears and death,” a phrase later used to describe the removal of other nations as well.

Worcester v. Georgia

The Cherokee decided to fight the federal law, however, and took their case to the Supreme Court. Their legal fight had the support of anti-Jackson members of Congress, including Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and they retained the legal services of former attorney general William Wirt. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Wirt argued that the Cherokee constituted an independent foreign nation, and that an injunction (a stop) should be placed on Georgia laws aimed at eradicating them. In 1831, the Supreme Court found the Cherokee did not meet the criteria for being a foreign nation.

Another case involving the Cherokee also found its way to the highest court in the land. This legal struggle—Worcester v. Georgia—asserted the rights of non-Natives to live on Native American lands. Samuel Worcester was a Christian missionary and federal postmaster of New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee nation. A Congregationalist, he had gone to live among the Cherokee in Georgia to further the spread of Christianity, and he strongly opposed Native removal.

By living among the Cherokee, Worcester had violated a Georgia law forbidding Whites, unless they were agents of the federal government, to live in Native American territory. Worcester was arrested, but because his federal job as postmaster gave him the right to live there, he was released. Jackson supporters then succeeded in taking away Worcester’s job, and he was re-arrested. This time, a court sentenced him and nine others for violating the Georgia state law banning Whites from living on Native American land. Worcester was sentenced to four years of hard labor. When the case of Worcester v. Georgia came before the Supreme Court in 1832, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in favor of Worcester, finding that the Cherokee constituted “distinct political communities” with sovereign rights to their own territory.

CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN MARSHALL’S RULING IN WORCESTER V. GEORGIA In 1832, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall ruled in favor of Samuel Worcester in Worcester v. Georgia. In doing so, he established the principle of tribal sovereignty. Although this judgment

contradicted Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, it failed to halt the Indian Removal Act. In his opinion, Marshall wrote the following:

From the commencement of our government Congress has passed acts to regulate trade and intercourse with the Indians; which treat them as nations, respect their rights, and manifest a firm purpose to afford that protection which treaties stipulate. All these acts, and especially that of 1802, which is still in force, manifestly consider the several Indian nations as distinct political communities, having territorial boundaries, within which their authority is exclusive, and having a right to all the lands within those boundaries, which is not only acknowledged, but guaranteed by the United States. . . .

The Cherokee Nation, then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves or in conformity with treaties and with the acts of Congress. The whole intercourse between the United States and this nation is, by our Constitution and laws, vested in the government of the United States.

The act of the State of Georgia under which the plaintiff in error was prosecuted is consequently void, and the judgment a nullity. . . . The Acts of Georgia are repugnant to the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States.

Treaty with the Cherokee

Figure 2. (a) John Ridge along with his father Major, believed the Cherokee had no choice but to accept removal and concluded

the Treaty of New Echota with the United States in 1835. (b) As principal chief, John Ross led the fight against removal after 1835.

The Supreme Court did not have the power to enforce its ruling in Worcester v. Georgia, however, and it became clear that the Cherokee would be compelled to move. Those who understood that the only option was removal traveled west, but the majority stayed on their land.

Jackson wanted a solution that might preserve peace and his reputation. He sent Secretary of War Lewis Cass to offer title to western lands and the promise of tribal governance in exchange for relinquishing the Cherokee’s eastern lands. These negotiations opened a rift within the Cherokee Nation. Cherokee leader John Ridge believed removal was inevitable and pushed for a treaty that would give the best terms. Others, called nationalists and led by John Ross, refused to consider removal in negotiations. The Jackson administration refused any deal that fell short of large-scale removal of the Cherokee from Georgia, thereby fueling a devastating and violent intratribal battle between the two factions. Eventually, tensions grew to the point that several treaty advocates were assassinated by members of the national faction.

The Trail of Tears

In 1835, a portion of the Cherokee Nation led by John Ridge, hoping to prevent further tribal bloodshed, signed the Treaty of New Echota. This group came to be called the Treaty Party. The Treaty of New Echota ceded lands in Georgia for $5 million and, the signatories hoped, a compromise that would limit future conflicts between the Cherokee and White settlers. However, most of the tribe, now organized as the National Party, refused to adhere to the terms, viewing the treaty as illegitimately negotiated. In response, John Ross pointed out the U.S. government’s hypocrisy. “You asked us to throw off the hunter and warrior state: We did so—you asked us to form a republican government: We did so. Adopting your own as our model. You asked us to cultivate the earth, and learn the mechanic arts. We did so. You asked us to learn to read. We did so. You asked us to cast away our idols and worship your god. We did so. Now you demand we cede to you our lands. That we will not do.”[2]

President Martin van Buren, in 1838, decided to press the issue beyond negotiation and court rulings and used the New Echota Treaty provisions to order the army to forcibly remove those Cherokee not obeying the treaty’s cession of territory. Harsh weather, poor planning, and difficult travel compounded the tragedy of what became known as the Trail of Tears. Sixteen thousand Cherokee embarked on the journey; only ten thousand completed it. Not every instance was of removal was as treacherous or demographically disastrous as the Cherokee example. Regardless, over sixty

thousand Native Americans were forced west prior to the Civil War. The Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole peoples were also compelled to go. The removal of the Five Civilized Tribes provides an example of the power of majority opinion in a democracy.

Figure 3. After the passage of the Indian Removal Act, the U.S. military forced the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and

Seminole to relocate from the Southeast to an area in the western territory (now Oklahoma), marching them along the routes

shown here.

WATCH IT

Watch this video to learn more about the Trail of Tears.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SosZ2ZRJymU&t=3s

Black Hawk’s War

The policy of removal led some Native Americans to actively resist. In 1832, the Fox and the Sauk, led by Sauk chief Black Hawk (Makataimeshekiakiah), moved back across the Mississippi River to reclaim their ancestral home in northern Illinois. A brief war in 1832, Black Hawk’s War, ensued. White settlers panicked at the return of the Native peoples, and militias and federal troops quickly mobilized. At the Battle of Bad Axe (also known as the Bad Axe Massacre), they killed over two hundred men, women, and children. Some seventy White settlers and soldiers also lost their lives in the conflict. The war, which lasted only a matter of weeks, illustrates how much Whites on the frontier hated and feared Natives during the Age of Jackson.

Figure 4. Charles Bird King’s 1837 portrait Sauk Chief Makataimeshekiakiah, or Black Hawk (a), depicts the Sauk chief who led

the Fox and Sauk peoples in an ill-fated effort to return to their Native lands in northern Illinois. This engraving depicting the Battle

of Bad Axe (b) shows U.S. soldiers on a steamer firing on Natives aboard a raft. (credit b: modification of work by Library of

Congress)

Manifest Destiny

GUIDED READING QUESTIONS:

• 13. Describe how 19th century American culture led to the idea of Manifest Destiny

• 14. Describe how Manifest Destiny influenced Westward Expansion

The American expansionist movement did not begin with Manifest Destiny and the push westward in the 1840s. Americans had been pushing boundaries since the colonial era, most notably across the Appalachian Mountains and into the Ohio River Valley. President Thomas Jefferson set the stage for expansionism with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the movement grew in the 1830s with President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, which “freed” land east of the Mississippi for the expanding population. The Louisiana Purchase and the journey of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery captured the imagination of many Americans, who dedicated themselves to the economic exploitation of the western lands and the expansion of American influence and power. In the South, the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 legally secured Florida for the United States, though it did nothing to end the resistance of the Seminole tribe against American pioneers and settlers. At the same time, the treaty frustrated those Americans who considered Texas a part of the Louisiana Purchase.

Rapid Growth

At the turn of the century, the overwhelming majority of American citizens lived east of the Appalachian Mountains; just fifty years later, about half of all Americans lived west of the mountains, a tremendous demographic shift. The rapid western expansion of the 1840s was largely a result of demographic, economic, and political pressures on the east coast. The population of the United States grew rapidly in the period from 1800-1850, rocketing from about five million to over twenty million in a fifty-year period. Americans were increasingly land-hungry as populations in cities and towns grew. On many of the overworked farms of the East, soil fertility was declining, making the cheap land of the West more and more attractive. Politically, many feared that if the United States did

not occupy the West, then the British would. Some reasoned that westward expansion would counterbalance the increasingly industrialized and urbanized northeast, assuring that the republic of the United States would continue to be rooted in the ideals and values of Jefferson’s yeoman farmer (non-slaveholding, small landowning, family farmers). After the War of 1812, Americans settled the Great Lakes region rapidly thanks in part to aggressive land sales by the federal government. Selling federal lands, mostly taken from Native Americans through treaties or conflict, was a major source of revenue for the government and officials were eager to survey and sell large parcels to new settlers.

Questions of Slavery

Missouri’s admission to the Union as a slave state in 1821 following the Missouri Compromise presented the first major crisis over westward migration and American expansion in the antebellum period. Under the Missouri Compromise, Missouri and Maine entered the Union at the same time, Maine as a free state, Missouri as a slave state, and a line was drawn across the remainder of the Louisiana Territory north of which slavery was forbidden. Farther north, lead and iron ore mining spurred development in Wisconsin. By the 1830s and 1840s, increasing numbers of German and Scandinavian immigrants joined easterners in settling the Upper Mississippi watershed. Little settlement occurred west of Missouri as migrants viewed the Great Plains as a barrier to farming, the Rocky Mountains as undesirable to all but fur traders, and local Native Americans as too powerful to allow White expansion.

Territorial ambitions deeply influenced U.S. foreign policy; to the South, tensions arose with Mexico as thousands of Americans immigrated into the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, hereafter referred to as Texas. Expansion was also deeply economically motivated. For example, Eastern merchants wanted control of west coast ports to trade with Asia. Overall, many Americans envisioned the same end, even though they favored expansion for different reasons; many, however, came to equate the idea of “spreading freedom” with spreading the United States.

Manifest Destiny

Figure 1. Artistic propaganda like this promoted the national project of Manifest Destiny. Columbia, the female figure of America,

leads Americans into the West and into the future by carrying the values of republicanism (as seen through her Roman-style toga)

and progress (shown through the inclusion of technological innovations like the telegraph) and clearing Native peoples and

animals, seen being pushed into the darkness. Also note how close the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are depicted, indicating how

the pioneers pictured their mission: to connect the two coasts with American ideals of Democracy and technology.

The concept of Manifest Destiny gave a religious and cultural justification to American expansion across the continental United States. Millions of Americans professed the belief that the destiny of the United States was fto spread democratic institutions and the ideals of Western civilization “from sea to shining sea.” Manifest Destiny asserted that Americans would expand to the limits of North America, taking political and economic control of the continent. In the process, the inhabitants of North America, including Native Americans and Native Mexicans, would be colonized and assimilated into Western culture. Any attempt to resist would be forcibly extinguished. Some Americans even argued that, in effect, God had chosen them to control the entire Western Hemisphere. These viewpoints are evident in the speech of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, one of the leading proponents of Manifest Destiny:

I know of no human event, past or present, which promised a greater, and more beneficent change upon the earth than the arrival of…the Caucasian race…It would seem that the white race alone received the divine command, to subdue and replenish the earth! for it is the only race that has obeyed it—the only one that hunts out new and distant lands, and even a New World, to subdue and replenish…the Caucasian race now top[s] the Rocky Mountains, and spread[s] down the shores of the Pacific. In a few years a great population will grow up there, luminous with the accumulated lights of the European and American civilization…The Red race has disappeared from the Atlantic coast: the tribes that resisted civilization met extinction… For my part, I cannot murmur at what seems to be the effect of divine law… Civilization, or extinction, has been the fate of all people who have found themselves in the track of advancing Whites, and civilization, always the preference of the Whites, has been pressed as an object, while extinction has followed as a consequence of its resistance.

The Expansion of Slavery

However, the issue of expansion was certainly not that simple. The idea and effects of Manifest Destiny raised challenging and hotly-debated questions that were taken up by both the American government and its people. Was expansionism morally justifiable? And moreover, could a government accept and even promote expansion through moral action, or were the two mutually exclusive? Would the nation fundamentally change with the incorporation of distant lands and new populations (perceived by many as “unable to assimilate” into the U.S. population)? Would unchecked expansionism threaten American military and economic security? Was the expansion of the United States synonymous with the expansion of freedom? Finally, how was the growing nation to expand without upsetting the precarious balance between free and slaveholding states?

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Southwest Ordinance of 1790 mandated the Ohio River as a dividing line between slave states and free states, with states to the south of the river being open to slavery. Consequently, the states north of the river were largely characterized by family farms and free-market labor, and to the south, they were largely characterized by enslaved labor. As the expansionist movement grew in the 1840s, the nation struggled to maintain the de facto “stalemate” between slave and free states as territories were incorporated into the nation as new states.

By 1850, seven states (California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Wisconsin) had entered the union as free states, and six as slave states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas). As the concept of Manifest Destiny developed, it became increasingly apparent that it applied to White Americans only, not only because of the maintenance and spread of slavery as a part of westward expansion but also because of White Americans’ attitudes and policies towards the Native populations of areas such as Texas and California.

Manifest Destiny also became a justification for the aggressively expansionist policies of President James Polk (1845-1849), who oversaw the annexation of Texas, the acquisition of the Oregon Territory from Great Britain, and the Mexican Cession of much of the Southwestern U.S. after the Mexican-American War.

ORIGINS OF ‘MANIFEST DESTINY’

Figure 2. John O’Sullivan, shown here in a 1874 Harper’s Weekly sketch, coined the phrase “manifest destiny” in an 1845 newspaper

article.

John Louis O’Sullivan, a popular editor and columnist, coined the famous term for the long-standing American belief in the God-given mission of the United States to lead the world in the peaceful transition to democracy.

In a little-read essay printed in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, O’Sullivan outlined the importance of annexing Texas to the United States:

Why, were other reasoning wanting, in favor of now elevating this question of the reception of Texas into the Union, out of the lower region of our past party dissensions, up to its proper level of a high and broad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, in the manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.1

O’Sullivan and many others viewed expansion as necessary to achieve America’s destiny and to protect American interests. The quasi-religious call to spread democracy coupled with the reality of thousands of settlers pressing westward due to urban overcrowding, manifest destiny was grounded in the belief that a democratic, agrarian republic would save the world.

The ‘Religion’ of American Democracy

Although coined in 1845, Manifest Destiny was a widely held but vaguely defined belief that dated back to the founding of the nation and comprised three main facets. First, many Americans believed that the strength of American values and institutions justified moral claims to hemispheric leadership. They also felt that the lands on the North American continent west of the Mississippi River (and later into the Caribbean) were destined for American-led political and agricultural improvement. Last, there was the notion that God had ordained an irrepressible American mission to accomplish redemption and democratization throughout the world. These claims pushed many Americans, whether they uttered the words manifest destiny or not, to actively seek the expansion of democracy and American culture. These beliefs and the resulting actions were often disastrous to anyone in the way of that mission, as the new religion of American democracy spread on the feet and in the wagons of those who moved west, imbued with the hope that their success would be the nation’s success.

The Young America movement, strongest among members of the Democratic Party but spanning the political spectrum, downplayed divisions over slavery and ethnicity by embracing national unity and emphasizing American exceptionalism, territorial expansion, democratic participation, and economic interdependence. Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson captured the political outlook of this new generation in a speech he delivered in 1844 titled “The Young American”:

In every age of the world, there has been a leading nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of being called, by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantastic. Which should be that nation but these States? Which should lead that movement, if not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American?[1]

Opposition to Expansion

However, many Americans, including Emerson, disapproved of aggressive expansion. For opponents of Manifest Destiny, the lofty rhetoric of the Young Americans was nothing other than a kind of imperialism that the American Revolution was supposed to have repudiated. Many members of the Whig Party (and later the Republican Party) argued that the United States’ mission was to lead by example, not by conquest. Abraham Lincoln summed up this criticism with a fair amount of sarcasm during a speech in 1859:

He [the Young American] owns a large part of the world, by right of possessing it; and all the rest by right of wanting it, and intending to have it. . . . Young America had “a pleasing hope— a fond desire—a longing after” territory. He has a great passion—a perfect rage—for the “new”; particularly new men for office, and the new earth mentioned in the revelations, in which, being no more sea, there must be about three times as much land as in the present. He is a great friend of humanity; and his desire for land is not selfish, but merely an impulse to extend the area of freedom. He is very anxious to fight for the liberation of enslaved nations and colonies, provided, always, they have land. . . . As to those who have no land, and would be glad of help from any quarter, he considers they can afford to wait a few hundred years longer. In knowledge he is particularly rich. He knows all that can possibly be known; inclines to believe in spiritual trappings, and is the unquestioned inventor of “Manifest Destiny.”[2]

But Lincoln and other anti-expansionists would struggle to win popular opinion. The nation, fueled by the principles of Manifest Destiny, would continue westward. Along the way, Americans battled both Native peoples and foreign nations, claiming territory to the very edges of the continent. But westward expansion did not come without a cost. It pushed the question of slavery to the forefront of American

thought, inching the country toward civil war, and, ultimately, threatened the very mission of American democracy it was designed to aid.