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AMERICA’S ECONOMIC REVOLUTION
· THE CHANGING AMERICAN POPULATION
· TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTIONS
LOOKING AHEAD
1. What were the factors sparking the U.S. economic revolution of the mid-nineteenth century?
2. How did the U.S. population change between 1820 and 1840, and how did the population change affect the nation’s economy, society, and politics?
3. Why did America’s Industrial Revolution affect the northern economy and society differently than it did the southern economy and society?
WHEN THE UNITED STATES ENTERED the War of 1812, it was still an essentially agrarian nation. There were, to be sure, some substantial cities in America and also modest but growing manufacturing centers, mainly in the Northeast. But the overwhelming majority of Americans were farmers and tradespeople.
By the time the Civil War began in 1861, however, the United States had transformed itself. Most Americans were still rural people. But even most farmers were now part of a national, and even international, market economy. Equally important, the United States was starting to challenge the industrial nations of Europe for supremacy in manufacturing. The nation had experienced the beginning of its own Industrial Revolution.
THE CHANGING AMERICAN POPULATION
The American Industrial Revolution was a result of many factors: advances in transportation and communications, the growth of manufacturing technology, the development of new systems of business organization, and perhaps above all, surging population growth.
Population Trends
Three trends characterized the American population during the antebellum period: rapid increase, movement westward, and the growth of towns and cities where demand for work was expanding.
The American population, 4 million in 1790, had reached 10 million by 1820 and 17 million by 1840. Improvements in public health played a role in this growth. Epidemics declined in both frequency and intensity, and the death rate as a whole dipped. But the population increase was also a result of a high birthrate. In 1840, white women bore an average of 6.14 children each.
The African American population increased more slowly than the white population. After 1808, when the importation of slaves became illegal, the proportion of blacks to whites in the nation as a whole steadily declined. The slower increase of the black population was also a result of its comparatively high death rate. Slave mothers had large families, but life was shorter for both slaves and free blacks than for whites—a result of the enforced poverty and harsh working conditions in which virtually all African Americans lived.
Immigration, choked off by wars in Europe and economic crises in America, contributed little to the American population in the first three decades of the Page 229nineteenth century. Of the total 1830 population of nearly 13 million, the foreign-born numbered fewer than 500,000. Soon, however, immigration began to grow once again. Famine and political unrest in European countries fueled people’s desire to emigrate, while the transatlantic voyage became quicker and more affordable as steamships replaced older ships powered by wind alone.
Much of this new European immigration flowed into the rapidly growing cities of the Northeast. But urban growth was a result of substantial internal migration as well. As agriculture in New England and other areas grew less profitable, more and more people picked up stakes and moved—some to promising agricultural regions in the West, but many to eastern cities.
Immigration and Urban Growth, 1840–1860
The growth of cities accelerated dramatically between 1840 and 1860. The population of New York, for example, rose from 312,000 to 805,000, making it the nation’s largest and most commercially important city. Philadelphia’s population grew over the same twenty-year period from 220,000 to 565,000; Boston’s, from 93,000 to 177,000. By 1860, 26 percent of the population of the free states was living in towns (places of 2,500 people or more) or cities, up from 14 percent in 1840. The urban population of the South, by contrast, increased from 6 percent in 1840 to only 10 percent in 1860.
The booming agricultural economy of the West produced significant urban growth as well. Between 1820 and 1840, communities that had once been small villages or trading posts became major cities: St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville. All became centers of the growing carrying trade that connected the farmers of the Midwest with New Orleans and, through it, the cities of the Northeast. After 1830, however, an increasing proportion of this trade moved from the Mississippi River to the Great Lakes, creating such important new port cities as Buffalo, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago, which gradually overtook the river ports.
Immigration from Europe swelled. Between 1840 and 1850, more than 1.5 million Europeans moved to America. In the 1850s, the number rose to 2.5 million. Almost half the residents of New York City in the 1850s were recent immigrants. In St. Louis, Chicago, and Milwaukee, the foreign-born outnumbered those of native birth. Comparatively few immigrants settled in the South.
The newcomers came from many different countries, but the overwhelming majority were from Ireland and Germany. By 1860, there were more than 1.5 million Irish-born and approximately 1 million German-born people in the United States. Many of the Irish were rural farmers escaping brutal poverty, British rule, and especially the Potato Famine that, from 1845 to 1852, rotted crops, caused widespread starvation, and helped spread disease. It killed nearly one million Irish. Most Irish immigrants abandoned their agricultural roots and stayed in the very eastern cities where they landed, becoming part of the unskilled labor force. The largest group of Irish immigrants comprised young, single women, who typically worked in factories or as domestics. Like the Irish, many German-speaking immigrants hungered for improved agricultural conditions, especially when wheat prices plummeted. But others came for explicitly political reasons. Many fled Europe in search of democracy after the failed revolutions of 1848. And those who were Jewish hoped to leave behind increasing anti-Semitism. Germans tended to arrive in America with more money and often came in family groups. They generally moved on to the Northwest, where they established farms or opened businesses.Page 230
The Rise of Nativism
Many politicians, particularly Democrats, eagerly courted the support of the new arrivals. Other citizens, however, viewed the growing foreign population with alarm. Some people argued that the immigrants were racially inferior or that they corrupted politics by selling their votes. Others complained that they were stealing jobs from the native workforce. Protestants worried that the growing Irish population would increase the power of the Catholic Church in America. Older-stock Americans feared that immigrants would become a radical force in politics. Out of these fears and prejudices emerged a number of secret societies to combat the “alien menace.”
The first was the Native American Association, founded in 1837, which in 1845 became the Native American Party. In 1850, it joined with other groups supporting nativism to form the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, whose demands included banning Catholics or aliens from holding public office, enacting more restrictive naturalization laws, and establishing literacy tests for voting. The order adopted a strict code of secrecy, which included a secret password: “I know nothing.” Ultimately, members of the movement came to be known as the “ Know-Nothings .”
After the 1852 elections, the Know-Nothings created a new political organization that they called the American Party. It scored an immediate and astonishing success in the elections of 1854. The Know-Nothings did well in Pennsylvania and New York and actually won control of the state government in Massachusetts. Outside the Northeast, however, their progress was more modest. After 1854, the strength of the Know-Nothings declined, and the party soon disappeared.
TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTIONS
Page 231Just as the Industrial Revolution required an expanding population, it also required an efficient system of transportation and communications. The first half of the nineteenth century saw dramatic changes in both.
The Canal Age
From 1790 until the 1820s, the so-called turnpike era, the United States had relied largely on roads for internal transportation. But roads alone were not adequate for the nation’s expanding needs. And so, in the 1820s and 1830s, Americans began to turn to other means of transportation as well.
Larger rivers like the Mississippi became increasingly important as steamboats replaced the slow barges that had previously dominated water traffic. The new riverboats carried the corn and wheat of northwestern farmers and the cotton and tobacco of southwestern planters to New Orleans, where oceangoing ships took the cargoes on to eastern ports or abroad.
But this roundabout river–sea route satisfied neither western farmers nor eastern merchants, who wanted a new way to ship goods cheaper and more directly to the urban markets and ports of the Atlantic Coast. New highways across the mountains provided a partial solution to the problem. But the costs of hauling goods overland, although lower than before, were still too Page 232high for anything except the most compact and valuable merchandise. And so interest grew in building canals—human-made waterways that connected bodies of water and were wide and deep enough for commercial vessels.
The job of financing canals fell largely to the states. New York was the first to act. It had the natural advantage of a good land route between the Hudson River and Lake Erie through the only break in the Appalachian chain. But the engineering tasks were still imposing. The more than 350-mile-long route was interrupted by high ridges and thick woods. After a long public debate, canal advocates prevailed, and digging began on July 4, 1817.
The Erie Canal was the greatest construction project Americans had ever undertaken. The canal itself was basically a simple ditch forty feet wide and four feet deep, with towpaths along the banks for the horses or mules that were to draw the canal boats. But its construction involved hundreds of difficult cuts and fills to enable the canal to pass through hills and over valleys, stone aqueducts to carry it across streams, and eighty-eight locks of heavy masonry with great wooden gates to permit ascents and descents. Still, the Erie Canal opened in October 1825 amid elaborate ceremonies and celebrations, and traffic was soon so heavy that within about seven years, tolls had repaid the entire cost of construction. By providing a route to the Great Lakes, the canal gave New York access to Chicago and the growing markets of the West. The Erie Canal also contributed to the decline of agriculture in New England. Now that it was so much cheaper for western farmers to ship their crops east, people farming marginal land in the Northeast found themselves unable to compete.
The system of water transportation extended farther when Ohio and Indiana, inspired by the success of the Erie Canal, provided water connections between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. These canals made it possible to ship goods by inland waterways all the way from New York to New Orleans.
CANALS IN THE NORTH, 1823–1860 Note how the East and West are being connected through a growing transportation network. The great success of the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, inspired decades of energetic canal building in many areas of the United States, as this map illustrates. But none of the new canals had anything like the impact of the original Erie Canal, and thus none of New York’s competitors—among them Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston—were able to displace it as the nation’s leading commercial center.
How did the emergence of canals change the distribution of goods in America?
One of the immediate results of these new transportation routes was increased white settlement in the Northwest, because it was now easier for migrants to make the westward journey and to ship their goods back to eastern markets. Much of the western produce continued to go downriver to New Orleans, but an increasing proportion went east to New York. And manufactured goods from throughout the East now moved in growing volume through New York and then to the West via the new water routes.
Rival cities along the Atlantic seaboard took alarm at New York’s access to (and control over) so vast a market, largely at their expense. But they had limited success in catching up. Boston, its way to the Hudson River blocked by the Berkshire Mountains, did not even try to connect itself to the West by canal. Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, and Charleston all aspired to build water routes to the Ohio Valley but never completed them. Some cities, however, saw opportunities in a different and newer means of transportation. Even before the canal age had reached its height, the era of the railroad was beginning.
The Early Railroads
Railroads played a relatively small role in the nation’s transportation system in the 1820s and 1830s, but railroad pioneers laid the groundwork in those years for the great surge of railroad building in the midcentury. Eventually, railroads became the primary transportation system for the United States, as well as critical sites of development for innovations in technology and corporate organization.
Railroads emerged from a combination of technological and entrepreneurial innovations: the invention of tracks, the creation of steam-powered locomotives, and the development of trains as public carriers of passengers and freight. By 1804, both English and American inventors had experimented with steam engines for propelling land vehicles. In 1820, John Stevens Page 233ran a locomotive and cars around a circular track on his New Jersey estate. And in 1825, the Stockton and Darlington Railroad in England became the first line to carry general traffic.
American entrepreneurs quickly grew interested in the English experiment. The first company to begin actual operations was the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad , which opened a thirteen-mile stretch of track in 1830. In New York, the Mohawk and Hudson began running trains along the sixteen miles between Schenectady and Albany in 1831. By 1836, more than a thousand miles of track had been laid in eleven states.
RACING ON THE RAILROAD Peter Cooper designed and built the first steam-powered locomotives in America in 1830 for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. On August 28 of that year, he raced his locomotive (the “Tom Thumb”) against a horse-drawn railroad car. This sketch depicts the moment when Cooper’s engine overtook the horse-drawn railroad car.
(©Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
The Triumph of the Rails
Railroads gradually supplanted canals and all other forms of transport. In 1840, the total railroad trackage of the country was under 3,000 miles. By 1860, it was over 27,000 miles, mostly in the Northeast. Railroads even crossed the Mississippi at several points by great iron bridges. Chicago eventually became the rail center of the West, securing its place as the dominant city of that region.
The emergence of the great train lines diverted traffic from the main water routes—the Erie Canal and the Mississippi River. By lessening the dependence of the West on the Mississippi, the railroads also helped weaken further the connection between the Northwest and the South.
Railroad construction required massive amounts of capital. Some came from private sources, but much of it came from government funding. State and local governments invested in railroads, but even greater assistance came from the federal government in the form of public land grants. By 1860, Congress had allotted over 30 million acres to eleven states to assist railroad construction.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the impact of the rails on the American economy, on American society, even on American culture. Where railroads went, towns, ranches, and farms grew up rapidly along their routes. Areas once cut off from markets during winter found that the railroad could transport goods to and from them year-round. Most of all, the railroads cut the time of shipment and travel. In the 1830s, traveling from New York to Chicago by lake and canal took roughly three weeks. By railroad in the 1850s, the same trip took less than two days.
The railroads were much more than a fast and economically attractive form of transportation. They were also a breeding ground for technological advances, a key to the nation’s economic growth, and the birthplace of the modern corporate form of organization. They became a symbol of the nation’s technological prowess. To many people, railroads were the most visible sign of American advancement and greatness.Page 234
RAILROAD GROWTH, 1850–1860 These two maps illustrate the dramatic growth of American railroads in the 1850s. Note the particularly extensive increase in mileage in the upper Midwest (known at the time as the Old Northwest). Note, too, the relatively smaller increase in railroad mileage in the South. Railroads forged a close economic relationship between the upper Midwest and the Northeast and weakened the Midwest’s relationship with the South.
How did this contribute to the South’s growing sense of insecurity within the Union?
The Telegraph
What the railroad was to transportation, the telegraph was to communication—a dramatic advance over traditional methods and a symbol of national progress and technological expertise.
Before the telegraph, communication over great distances could be achieved only by direct, physical contact. That meant that virtually all long-distance communication relied Page 235on the mail, which traveled first on horseback and coach and later by railroad. There were obvious disadvantages to this system, not the least of which was the difficulty in coordinating the railroad schedules. By the 1830s, experiments with many methods of improving long-distance communication had been conducted, among them a procedure for using the sun and reflective devices to send light signals as far as 187 miles.
In 1832, Samuel F. B. Morse—a professor of art with an interest in science—began experimenting with a different system. Fascinated with the possibilities of electricity, Morse set out to find a way to send signals along an electric cable. Technology did not yet permit the use of electric wiring to send reproductions of the human voice or any complex information. But Morse realized that electricity itself could serve as a communication device—that pulses of electricity could themselves become a kind of language. He experimented at first with a numerical code, in which each number would represent a word on a list available to recipients. Gradually, however, he became convinced of the need to find a more universal telegraphic “language,” and he developed what became the Morse code , in which alternating long and short bursts of electric current would represent individual letters.
THE TELEGRAPH The telegraph provided rapid communication across the country—and eventually across oceans—for the first time. Samuel F. B. Morse was one of a number of inventors who helped create the telegraph, but he was the most commercially successful of the rivals.
(©villorejo/Alamy)
In 1843, Congress appropriated $30,000 for the construction of an experimental telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington; in May 1844 it was complete, and Morse succeeded in transmitting the news of James K. Polk’s nomination for the presidency over the wires. By 1860, more than 50,000 miles of wire connected most parts of the country; a year later, the Pacific Telegraph, with 3,595 miles of wire, opened between New York and San Francisco. By then, nearly all the independent lines had joined in one organization, the Western Union Telegraph Company . The telegraph spread rapidly across Europe as well, and in 1866, the first transatlantic cable was laid, allowing telegraphic communication between America and Europe.
Page 236One of the first beneficiaries of the telegraph was the growing system of rails. Wires often ran alongside railroad tracks, and telegraph offices were often located in railroad stations. The telegraph allowed railroad operators to communicate directly with stations in cities, small towns, and even rural hamlets—to alert them to schedule changes and warn them about delays and breakdowns. Among other things, this new form of communication helped prevent accidents by alerting stations to problems that engineers in the past had to discover for themselves.
New Technology and Journalism
Another beneficiary of the telegraph was American journalism. The wires delivered news in a matter of hours—not days, weeks, or months, as in the past—across the country and the world. Where once the exchange of national and international news relied on the cumbersome exchange of newspapers by mail, now it was possible for papers to share their reporting. In 1846, newspaper publishers from around the nation formed the Associated Press to promote cooperative news gathering by wire.
Other technological advances spurred the development of the American press. In 1846, Richard Hoe invented the steam-powered cylinder rotary press, making it possible to print newspapers much more rapidly and cheaply than had been possible in the past. Among other things, the rotary press spurred the dramatic growth of mass-circulation newspapers. The New York Sun, the most widely circulated paper in the nation, had 8,000 readers in 1834. By 1860, its successful rival the New York Herald—benefiting from the speed and economies of production the rotary press made possible—had a circulation of 77,000.
COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY
By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States had developed the beginnings of a modern capitalist economy and an advanced industrial capacity. But the economy had developed along highly unequal lines—benefiting some classes and some regions far more than others.
The Expansion of Business, 1820–1840
American business grew rapidly in the 1820s and 1830s in part because of important innovations in management. Individuals or limited partnerships continued to operate most businesses, and the dominant figures were still the great merchant capitalists, who generally had sole ownership of their enterprises. In some larger businesses, however, the individual merchant capitalist was giving way to the corporation. Corporations, which had the advantage of combining the resources of a large number of shareholders, began to develop particularly rapidly in the 1830s, when some legal obstacles to their formation were removed. Previously, a corporation could obtain a charter only by a special act of a state legislature; by the 1830s, states began passing general incorporation laws, under which a group could secure a charter merely by paying a fee. The laws also permitted a system of limited liability, in which individual stockholders risked losing only the value of their own investment—and not the corporation’s larger losses as in the past—if the enterprise failed. These changes made possible much larger manufacturing and business enterprises.Page 237
The Emergence of the Factory
The most profound economic development in mid-nineteenth-century America was the rise of the factory. Before the War of 1812, most manufacturing took place within households or in small workshops. Later in the nineteenth century, however, New England textile manufacturers began using new water-powered machines that allowed them to bring their operations together under a single roof. This factory system , as it came to be known, soon penetrated the shoe industry and other industries as well.
Between 1840 and 1860, American industry experienced particularly dramatic growth. For the first time, the value of manufactured goods was roughly equal to that of agricultural products. More than half of the approximately 140,000 manufacturing establishments in the country in 1860, including most of the larger enterprises, were located in the Northeast. The Northeast thus produced more than two-thirds of the manufactured goods and employed nearly three-quarters of the men and women working in manufacturing.
Advances in Technology
Even the most highly developed industries were still relatively immature. American cotton manufacturers, for example, produced goods of coarse grade; fine items continued to come from England. But by the 1840s, significant advances were occurring.
Among the most important was in the manufacturing of machine tools—the tools used to make machinery parts. The government supported much of the research and development of machine tools, often in connection with supplying the military. For example, a government armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, developed two important tools—the turret lathe (used for cutting screws and other metal parts) and the universal milling machine (which replaced the hand chiseling of complicated parts and dies)—early in the nineteenth century. The precision grinder (which became critical to, among other things, the construction of sewing machines) was designed in the 1850s to help the army produce standardized rifle parts. By the 1840s, the machine tools used in the factories of the Northeast were already better than those in most European factories.
One important result of better machine tools was that the principle of interchangeable parts spread into many industries. Eventually, interchangeability would revolutionize watch and clock making, the manufacturing of locomotives, the creation of steam engines, and the making of many farm tools and guns. It would also help make possible bicycles, sewing machines, typewriters, cash registers, and eventually the automobile.
Industrialization was also profiting from new sources of energy. The production of coal, most of it mined around Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania, leaped from 50,000 tons in 1820 to 14 million tons in 1860. The new power source, which replaced wood and water power, made it possible to locate mills away from running streams and thus permitted the wider expansion of the industry.
The great industrial advances owed much to American inventors. In 1830, the number of inventions patented was 544; in 1860, it stood at 4,778. Several industries provide particularly vivid examples of how a technological innovation could produce major economic change. In 1839, Charles Goodyear, a New England hardware merchant, discovered a method of vulcanizing rubber (treating it to give it greater strength and elasticity); by 1860, his process had found over 500 uses and had helped create a major American rubber industry. In 1846, Elias Howe of Massachusetts constructed a sewing machine; Isaac Singer made improvements on it, and the Howe-Singer machine was soon being used in the manufacture of ready-to-wear clothing.Page 238
Industrialization was not without environmental costs, however. It brought unprecedented levels of water and air pollution that eventually triggered early efforts at reform and contributed to growing public awareness about the need to protect the environment and citizens. To stop toxic runoff from cattle processing plants, for example, Wisconsin passed the Slaughterhouse Offal Act of 1862 that prohibited dumping slaughter wastes in surface water. By 1861 Chicago and Cincinnati had both implemented smoke laws aimed at decreasing the soot, ash, and heavy smog produced by coal and iron factories, railroads, and ships.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION Nineteenth-century factories like this print works in Manchester contributed to unprecedented levels of air pollution.
(Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-69112])
Rise of the Industrial Ruling Class
The merchant capitalists remained figures of importance in the 1840s. In such cities as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, influential mercantile groups operated shipping lines to southern ports or dispatched fleets of trading vessels to Europe and Asia. But merchant capitalism was declining by the middle of the century. This was partly because British competitors were stealing much of America’s export trade, but mostly because there were greater opportunities for profit in manufacturing than in trade. That was one reason why industries developed first in the Northeast: an affluent merchant class with the money and the will to finance them already existed there. They supported the emerging industrial capitalists and soon became the new aristocrats of the Northeast, with far-reaching economic and political influence.
MEN AND WOMEN AT WORK
In the 1820s and 1830s, factory labor came primarily from the native-born population. After 1840, the growing immigrant population became the most important new source of workers.
Recruiting a Native Workforce
Recruiting a labor force was not an easy task in the early years of the factory system. Ninety percent of the American people in the 1820s still lived and worked on farms. Many urban residents were skilled artisans who owned and managed their own shops, and the available unskilled workers were not numerous enough to meet industry’s needs. But dramatic Page 239improvements in agricultural production, particularly in the Midwest, meant that each region no longer had to feed itself; it could import the food it needed. As a result, rural people from relatively unprofitable farming areas of the East began leaving the land to work in the factories.
Two systems of recruitment emerged to bring this new labor supply to the expanding textile mills. One, common in the mid-Atlantic states, brought whole families from the farm to work together in the mill. The second system, common in Massachusetts and New England in general, enlisted young women, mostly farmers’ daughters in their late teens and early twenties. It was known as the Lowell or Waltham system , after the towns in which it first emerged. Many of these women worked for several years, saved their wages, and then returned home to marry and raise children. Others married men they met in the factories or in town. Most eventually stopped working in the mills and took up domestic roles instead.
Labor conditions in these early years of the factory system, hard as they often were, remained significantly better than they would later become. The Lowell workers, for example, were generally well fed, carefully supervised, and housed in clean boardinghouses and dormitories, which the factory owners maintained. (See “ Consider the Source: Handbook to Lowell .”) Wages for the Lowell workers were relatively generous by the standards of the time. The women even published a monthly magazine, the Lowell Offering.
CONSIDER THE SOURCE
HANDBOOK TO LOWELL (1848)
Strict rules governed the working life of the young women who worked in the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Equally strict rules regulated their time away from work (what little leisure time they enjoyed) in the company-supervised boardinghouses in which they lived. The excerpts from the Handbook to Lowell from 1848 that follow suggest the tight supervision under which the Lowell mill girls worked and lived.
FACTORY RULES
REGULATIONS TO BE OBSERVED by all persons employed in the factories of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company. The overseers are to be always in their rooms at the starting of the mill, and not absent unnecessarily during working hours. They are to see that all those employed in their rooms are in their places in due season, and keep a correct account of their time and work. They may grant leave of absence to those employed under them, when they have spare hands to supply their places and not otherwise, except in cases of absolute necessity.
All persons in the employ of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company are to observe the regulations of the room where they are employed. They are not to be absent from their work without the consent of the overseer, except in cases of sickness, and then they are to send him word of the cause of their absence. They are to board in one of the houses of the company and give information at the counting room, where they board, when they begin, or, whenever they change their boarding place; and are to observe the regulations of their boarding-house.
Those intending to leave the employment of the company are to give at least two weeks’ notice thereof to their overseer.
All persons entering into the employment of the company are considered as engaged for twelve months, and those who leave sooner, or do not comply with all these regulations, will not be entitled to a regular discharge.
The company will not employ anyone who is habitually absent from public worship on the Sabbath, or known to be guilty of immorality.
A physician will attend once in every month at the counting-room, to vaccinate all who may need it, free of expense.
Anyone who shall take from the mills or the yard, any yarn, cloth or other article belonging to the company will be considered guilty of stealing and be liable to prosecution.
Payment will be made monthly, including board and wages. The accounts will be made up to the last Saturday but one in every month, and paid in the course of the following week.
These regulations are considered part of the contract, with which all persons entering into the employment of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company, engage to comply.
BOARDING-HOUSE RULES
REGULATIONS FOR THE BOARDING-HOUSES of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company. The tenants of the boarding-houses are not to board, or permit any part of their houses to be occupied by any person, except those in the employ of the company, without special permission.
They will be considered answerable for any improper conduct in their houses, and are not to permit their boarders to have company at unseasonable hours.
The doors must be closed at ten o’clock in the evening, and no person admitted after that time, without some reasonable excuse.
The keepers of the boarding-houses must give an account of the number, names and employment of their boarders, when required, and report the names of such as are guilty of any improper conduct, or are not in the regular habit of attending public worship.
The buildings, and yards about them, must be kept clean and in good order; and if they are injured, otherwise than from ordinary use, all necessary repairs will be made, and charged to the occupant.
The sidewalks, also, in front of the houses, must be kept clean, and free from snow, which must be removed from them immediately after it has ceased falling; if neglected, it will be removed by the company at the expense of the tenant.
It is desirable that the families of those who live in the houses, as well as the boarders, who have not had the kine pox, should be vaccinated, which will be done at the expense of the company, for such as wish it.
Some suitable chamber in the house must be reserved, and appropriated for the use of the sick, so that others may not be under the necessity of sleeping in the same room.
JOHN AVERY, Agent.
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. What do these rules suggest about the everyday lives of the mill workers?
2. What do the rules suggest about the company’s attitude toward the workers? Do the rules offer any protections to the employees, or are they all geared toward benefiting the employer?
3. Why would the company enforce such strict rules? Why would the mill workers accept them?
Source: Handbook to Lowell, 1848.
Yet even these relatively well-treated workers found the transition from farm life to factory work difficult. Forced to live among strangers in a regimented environment, many women had trouble adjusting to the nature of factory work. However uncomfortable women may have found factory work, they had few other options. Work in the mills was in many cases virtually the only alternative to returning to farms that could no longer support them.
The factory system of Lowell did not, in any case, survive for long. In the competitive textile market of the 1830s and 1840s, manufacturers found it difficult to maintain the high living standards and reasonably attractive working conditions of before. Wages declined; the hours of work lengthened; the conditions of the boardinghouses deteriorated. In 1834, mill workers in Lowell organized a union—the Factory Girls Association —which staged a strike to protest a 25 percent wage cut. Two years later, the association struck again—against a rent increase in the boardinghouses. Both strikes failed, and a recession in 1837 virtually destroyed the organization. Eight years later, the Lowell women, led by the militant Sarah Bagley , created the Female Labor Reform Association, which grew to around 500 members in five months. It was one of the first American labor organizations created by women. Members published the Voice of Industry to air their grievances and political goals, which included a ten-hour day and improvements in conditions in the mills. The new association also asked state governments for legislative investigation of conditions in the mills. Although mill owners reduced the workday by 30 minutes, larger labor reforms would have to wait. The association dissolved in 1848 because the character of the factory workforce was changing again, lessening the urgency of their demands. Many mill girls were gradually moving into other occupations: teaching, domestic service, or homemaking. And textile manufacturers were turning to a less demanding labor supply: immigrants.
The Immigrant Workforce
The increasing supply of immigrant workers after 1840 was a boon to manufacturers and other entrepreneurs. These new workers, because of their growing numbers and their unfamiliarity with their new country, had even less leverage than the women they displaced, Page 241and thus they often experienced far worse working conditions. Poorly paid construction gangs, made up increasingly of Irish immigrants, performed the heavy, unskilled work on turnpikes, canals, and railroads. Many of them lived in flimsy shanties, in grim conditions that endangered the health of their families (and reinforced native prejudices toward the “shanty Irish”). Irish workers began to predominate in the New England textile mills as well in the 1840s. Employers began paying piece rates rather than a daily wage and used other devices to speed up production and exploit the labor force more efficiently. The factories themselves were becoming large, noisy, unsanitary, and often dangerous places to work; the average workday was extending to twelve, often fourteen hours; and wages were declining. Women and children, whatever their skills, earned less than most men.
The Factory System and the Artisan Tradition
Factories were also displacing the trades of skilled artisans. Artisans were as much a part of the older, republican vision of America as sturdy yeoman farmers. Independent craftspeople clung to a vision of economic life that was very different from that promoted by the new capitalist class. The artisans embraced not just the idea of individual, acquisitive success but also a sense of a “moral community.” Skilled artisans valued their independence, their stability, and their relative equality within their economic world.
Some artisans made successful transitions into small-scale industry. But others found themselves unable to compete with the new factory-made goods. In the face of this competition, skilled workers in cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and New York formed Page 242societies for mutual aid. During the 1820s and 1830s, these craft societies began to combine on a citywide basis and set up central organizations known as trade unions. In 1834, delegates from six cities founded the National Trades’ Union, and in 1836, printers and cordwainers (makers of high-quality shoes and boots) set up their own national craft unions.
Hostile laws and hostile courts handicapped the unions, as did the Panic of 1837 and the depression that followed. But some artisans managed to retain control over their productive lives.
Fighting for Control
Industrial workers made continuous efforts to improve their lots. They tried, with little success, to persuade state legislatures to pass laws setting a maximum workday and regulating child labor. Their greatest legal victory came in Massachusetts in 1842, when the state supreme court, in Commonwealth v. Hunt , declared that unions were lawful organizations and that the strike was a lawful weapon. Other state courts gradually accepted the principles of the Massachusetts decision, but employers continued to resist.
Virtually all the early craft unions excluded women. As a result, women began establishing their own, new protective unions in the 1850s. Like the male craft unions, the female unions had little power in dealing with employers. They did, however, serve an important role as mutual aid societies for women workers.
Many factors combined to inhibit the growth of better working standards. Among the most important obstacles was the flood into the country of immigrant laborers, who were usually willing to work for lower wages than native workers. Because they were so numerous, manufacturers had little difficulty replacing disgruntled or striking workers with eager immigrants. Ethnic divisions often led workers to channel their resentments into internal bickering among one another rather than into their shared grievances. Another obstacle was the sheer strength of the industrial capitalists, who possessed not only economic but also political and social power.
PATTERNS OF SOCIETY
The Industrial Revolution was making the United States both dramatically wealthier and increasingly unequal. It was transforming social relationships at almost every level.
The Rich and the Poor
The commercial and industrial growth of the United States greatly elevated the average income of the American people. But this increasing wealth was being distributed highly unequally. Substantial groups of the population—slaves, Indians, landless farmers, and many of the unskilled workers on the fringes of the manufacturing system—shared hardly at all in the economic growth. But even among the rest of the population, disparities of income were growing. Merchants and industrialists were accumulating enormous fortunes; and in the cities, a distinctive culture of wealth began to emerge.
In large cities, people of great wealth gathered together in neighborhoods of astonishing opulence. They founded clubs and developed elaborate social rituals. They looked increasingly for ways to display their wealth—in great mansions, showy carriages, lavish household goods, and the elegant social establishments they patronized. New York developed a Page 243particularly elaborate high society. The construction of Central Park, which began in the 1850s, was in part a result of pressure from the members of high society, who wanted an elegant setting for their daily carriage rides.
CENTRAL PARK Daily carriage rides allowed the wealthy to take in fresh air while showing off their finery to their neighbors.
(©Everett Historical/Shutterstock)
A significant population of genuinely destitute people also emerged in the growing urban centers. These people were almost entirely without resources, often homeless, and dependent on charity or crime, or both, for survival. Substantial numbers of people actually starved to death or died of exposure. Some of these “paupers,” as contemporaries called them, were recent immigrants. Some were widows and orphans, stripped of the family structures that allowed most working-class Americans to survive. Some were people suffering from alcoholism or mental illness, unable to work. Others were victims of native prejudice—barred from all but the most menial employment because of race or ethnicity. The Irish were particular victims of such prejudice.
The worst victims in the North were free blacks. Most major urban areas had significant black populations. Some of these African Americans were descendants of families who had lived in the North for generations. Others were former slaves who had escaped or been released by their masters. In material terms, at least, life was not always much better for them in the North than it had been in slavery. Most had access to very menial jobs at best. In most parts of the North, blacks could not vote, attend public schools, or use any of the public services available to white residents. Even so, most African Americans preferred life in the North, however arduous, to life in the South.
Social and Geographical Mobility
Despite the contrasts between conspicuous wealth and poverty in antebellum America, there was relatively little overt class conflict at this time. For one thing, life, in material Page 244terms at least, was better for most factory workers than it had been on the farms or in Europe. Laborers also found that it was possible to move up the economic ladder, especially when compared to opportunities in much of Europe. A significant amount of mobility within the working class also helped limit discontent. A few workers—a very small number, but enough to support the dreams of others—managed to move from poverty to riches by dint of work, ingenuity, and luck. And a much larger number of workers managed to move at least one notch up the ladder—for example, becoming in the course of a lifetime a skilled, rather than an unskilled, laborer.
More important than social mobility was geographical mobility. Some workers saved money, bought land, and moved west to farm it. But few urban workers, and even fewer poor ones, could afford to make such a move. Much more common was the movement of laborers from one industrial town to another. These migrants, often the victims of layoffs, looked for better opportunities elsewhere. Their search seldom led to marked improvement in their circumstances. The rootlessness of this large and distressed segment of the workforce made effective organization and protest difficult.
Middle-Class Life
Despite the visibility of the very rich and the very poor in antebellum society, the fastest-growing group in America was the middle class. Economic development opened many more opportunities for people to own or work in shops or businesses, to engage in trade, to enter professions, and to administer organizations. In earlier times, when landownership had been the only real basis of wealth, society had been divided between those with little or no land (people Europeans generally called peasants) and a landed gentry (which in Europe usually became an inherited aristocracy). Once commerce and industry became a source of wealth, these rigid distinctions broke down; many people could become prosperous without owning land, but by providing valuable services.
Middle-class life in the antebellum years rapidly established itself as the most influential cultural form of urban America. Solid, substantial middle-class houses lined city streets, larger in size and more elaborate in design than the cramped, functional rowhouses in working-class neighborhoods—but also far less lavish than the great houses of the very rich. Middle-class people tended to own their homes, often for the first time. Workers and artisans remained mostly renters.
Middle-class women usually remained in the household, although increasingly they were also able to hire servants—usually young, unmarried immigrant women. In an age when doing the family’s laundry could take an entire day, one of the aspirations of middle-class women was to escape from some of the drudgery of housework.
New household inventions altered, and greatly improved, the character of life in middle-class homes. Perhaps the most important was the invention of the cast-iron stove, which began to replace fireplaces as the principal vehicle for cooking in the 1840s. These wood- or coal-burning devices were hot, clumsy, and dirty by later standards, but compared to the inconvenience and danger of cooking on an open hearth, they seemed a great luxury. Stoves gave cooks greater control over food preparation and allowed them to cook several things at once.
Middle-class diets were changing rapidly, and not just because of the wider range of cooking that the stove made possible. The expansion and diversification of American agriculture and the ability of distant farmers to ship goods to urban markets by rail greatly increased the variety of food available in cities. Fruits and vegetables were difficult to ship over long distances in an age with little refrigeration, but families had access to a greater Page 245variety of meats, grains, and dairy products than in the past. A few wealthy households acquired iceboxes, which allowed them to keep meat and dairy products fresh for several days. Most families, however, did not yet have any refrigeration. For them, preserving food meant curing meat with salt and preserving fruits in sugar. Diets were generally much heavier and starchier than they are today, and middle-class people tended to be considerably stouter than would be considered healthy or fashionable now.
Middle-class homes came to differentiate themselves from those of workers and artisans in other ways as well. The spare, simple styles of eighteenth-century homes gave way to the much more elaborate, even baroque household styles of the Victorian era—styles increasingly characterized by crowded, even cluttered rooms, dark colors, lush fabrics, and heavy furniture and draperies. Middle-class homes also became larger. It became less common for children to share beds and for all members of a family to sleep in the same room. Parlors and dining rooms separate from the kitchen—once a luxury—became the norm among the middle class. Some urban middle-class homes had indoor plumbing and indoor toilets by the 1850s—a significant advance over outdoor wells and privies.
The Changing Family
The new industrializing society produced profound changes in the nature of the family. Among them was the movement of families from farms to urban areas. Sons and daughters in urban households were much more likely to leave the family in search of work than they had been in the rural world. This was largely because of the shift of income-earning work out of the home. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the family itself had been the principal unit of economic activity. Now most income earners left home each day to work in a shop, mill, or factory. A sharp distinction began to emerge between the public Page 246world of the workplace and the private world of the family. The world of the family was now dominated not by production but by housekeeping, child rearing, and other primarily domestic concerns.
FAMILY TIME, 1842 This illustration for Godey’s Lady’s Book, a magazine whose audience was better-off white women, offers an idealized image of family life. The father reads to his family from a devotional text; two servants off to the side listen attentively as well. What does this image communicate about the roles of the household members?
(©Fotosearch/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
There was a significant decline in the birthrate, particularly in urban areas and in middle-class families. In 1800, the average American woman could be expected to give birth to approximately seven children. By 1860, the average woman bore five children.
The “Cult of Domesticity”
The growing separation between the workplace and the home sharpened distinctions between the social roles of men and women. Those distinctions affected not only factory workers and farmers but also members of the growing middle class.
With fewer legal and political rights than men, most women remained under the virtually absolute authority of their husbands. They were seldom encouraged to pursue education above the primary level. Women students were not accepted in any college or university until 1837. For a considerable time after that, only Oberlin in Ohio offered education to both men and women, and Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts was founded by Mary Lyon as an academy for women.
However unequal the positions of men and women in the preindustrial era, those positions had generally been defined within the context of a household in which all members played important economic roles. In the middle-class family of the new industrial society, by contrast, the husband was assumed to be the principal, usually the only, income producer. The image of women changed from one of contributors to the family economy to one of guardians of the “domestic virtues.” Middle-class women learned to place a higher value on keeping a clean, comfortable, and well-appointed home; on entertaining; and on dressing elegantly and stylishly.
Within their own separate sphere, middle-class women began to develop a distinctive female culture. A “lady’s” literature began to emerge. Romantic novels written for female readers focused on the private sphere that middle-class women now inhabited, as did women’s magazines that focused on fashions, shopping, homemaking, and other purely domestic concerns.
This cult of domesticity , as some scholars have called it, provided many women greater material comfort than they had enjoyed in the past and placed a higher value on their “female virtues.” At the same time, it left women increasingly detached from the public world, with fewer outlets for their interests and energies. Except for teaching and nursing, work by women outside the household gradually came to be seen as a lower-class preserve.
Working-class women continued to work in factories and mills, but under conditions far worse than those that the original, more “respectable” women workers of Lowell and Waltham had experienced. Domestic service became another frequent source of female employment.
Leisure Activities
Leisure time was scarce for all but the wealthiest Americans. Most people worked long hours every day without any vacation. For the lucky, Sunday was a day off, set aside for rest and religion. Not surprising, then, holidays took on a special importance, as suggested by the strikingly elaborate celebrations of the Fourth of July in the nineteenth century. The celebrations were not just expressions of patriotism, but a way of enjoying one of the few nonreligious holidays from work available to most Americans.
For urban people, leisure was something to be seized in what few free moments they had. Men gravitated to taverns for drinking, talking, and game-playing after work. Women Page 247gathered in one another’s homes for conversation and card games. For educated people, reading became one of the principal leisure activities. Newspapers and magazines proliferated rapidly, and books became staples of affluent homes. In contrast, rural Americans, because of the seasonal nature of farm work, enjoyed more free time in the late fall and winter. They pursued similar past times as urbanites, but within the home.
A public culture of leisure emerged too, especially in larger cities. Theaters became popular and attracted audiences that crossed class lines. Much of the popular theater of the time consisted of melodrama based on novels or American myths. Also popular were Shakespeare’s plays, reworked to appeal to American audiences. Tragedies were given happy endings; comedies were interlaced with regional humor; lines were rewritten with American dialect; and scenes were abbreviated or cut so that the play could be one of several in an evening’s program. So familiar were many Shakespearean plots that audiences took delight in seeing them parodied in productions such as Julius Sneezer and Hamlet and Egglet.
Page 248Minstrel shows—in which white actors wearing blackface mimicked (and ridiculed) African American culture—became staples among white audiences. Public sporting events—boxing, horse racing, cockfighting (already becoming controversial), and others—often attracted considerable audiences. Baseball, not yet organized into professional leagues, was beginning to attract large crowds when played in city parks or fields. A particularly exciting event in many communities was the arrival of the circus.
Popular tastes in public spectacle tended toward the bizarre and the fantastic. Relatively few people traveled; and in the absence of film, radio, television, or even much photography, Americans hungered for visions of unusual phenomena. People going to the theater or the circus or the museum wanted to see things that amazed and even frightened them. The most celebrated provider of such experiences was the famous and unscrupulous showman P. T. Barnum, who opened the American Museum in New York in 1842—not a showcase for art or nature, but as an exhibit of “human curiosities” that included people with dwarfism, Siamese twins, magicians, and ventriloquists. Barnum was a genius in publicizing his ventures with garish posters and elaborate newspaper announcements. Later, in the 1870s, he launched the famous circus for which he is still best remembered.
P. T. BARNUM AND TOM THUMB P. T. Barnum stands next to his star Charles Stratton, whose stage name was General Tom Thumb after the fairy-tale character. Stratton joined Barnum’s touring company as a child, singing, dancing, and playing roles such as Cupid and Napoleon Bonaparte. The adult Stratton and Barnum became business partners.
(©Bettmann/Corbis)
Lectures were one of the most popular forms of entertainment in nineteenth-century America. Men and women flocked in enormous numbers to lyceums, churches, schools, and auditoriums to hear lecturers explain the latest advances in science, describe their visits to exotic places, provide vivid historical narratives, or rail against the evils of alcohol or slavery. Messages of social uplift and reform attracted rapt audiences, particularly among women.
THE AGRICULTURAL NORTH
Even in the rapidly urbanizing and industrializing Northeast, and more so in what nineteenth-century Americans called the Northwest, most people remained tied to the agricultural world. But agriculture, like industry and commerce, was becoming increasingly a part of the new capitalist economy.
Northeastern Agriculture
The story of agriculture in the Northeast after 1840 is one of decline and transformation. Farmers of this section of the country could no longer compete with the new and richer soil of the Northwest. In 1840, the leading wheat-growing states were New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia. In 1860, they were Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri also supplanted New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia as growers of corn. In 1840, the most important cattle-raising areas in the country were New York, Pennsylvania, and New England. By the 1850s, the leading cattle states were Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Iowa in the Northwest and Texas in the Southwest.
Some eastern farmers responded to these changes by moving west themselves and establishing new farms. Still others moved to mill towns and became laborers. Some farmers, however, remained on the land and turned to what was known as “truck farming”—supplying food to the growing cities. They raised vegetables or fruit and sold their produce in nearby towns. Supplying milk, butter, and cheese to local urban markets also attracted many farmers in central New York, southeastern Pennsylvania, and various parts of New England.Page 249
The Old Northwest
Life was different in the states of the Old Northwest (now known as the Midwest). In the two decades before the Civil War, this section of the country experienced steady industrial growth, particularly in and around Cleveland (on Lake Erie) and Cincinnati, the center of meatpacking in the Ohio Valley. Farther west, Chicago was emerging as the national center of the agricultural machinery and meatpacking industries. Most of the major industrial activities of the Old Northwest either served agriculture (as in the case of farm machinery) or relied on agricultural products (as in flour milling, meatpacking, whiskey distilling, and the making of leather goods).
Some areas of the Old Northwest were not yet dominated by whites. Indians remained the most numerous inhabitants of large portions of the upper third of the Great Lakes states until after the Civil War. In those areas, hunting and fishing, along with some sedentary agriculture, remained the principal economic activities.
For the settlers who populated the lands farther south, the Old Northwest was primarily an agricultural region. Its rich lands made farming highly lucrative. Thus the typical citizen of the Old Northwest was not the industrial worker or poor, marginal farmer, but the owner of a reasonably prosperous family farm.
Industrialization, in both the United States and Europe, provided the greatest boost to agriculture. With the growth of factories and cities in the Northeast, the domestic market for farm goods increased dramatically. The growing national and worldwide demand for farm products resulted in steadily rising farm prices. For most farmers, the 1840s and early 1850s were years of increasing prosperity.
The expansion of agricultural markets also had profound effects on sectional alignments in the United States. The Old Northwest sold most of its products to the Northeast and became an important market for the products of eastern industry. A strong economic relationship was emerging between the two sections that was profitable to both—and that was increasing the isolation of the South within the Union.
By 1850, the growing western white population was moving into the prairie regions on both sides of the Mississippi. These farmers cleared forest lands or made use of fields the Indians had cleared many years earlier. And they developed a timber industry to make use of the remaining forests. Although wheat was the staple crop of the region, other crops—corn, potatoes, and oats—and livestock were also important.
The Old Northwest also increased production by adopting new agricultural techniques. Farmers began to cultivate new varieties of seed, notably Mediterranean wheat, which was hardier than the native type; and they imported better breeds of animals, such as hogs and sheep from England and Spain. Most important were improved tools and farm machines. The cast-iron plow, invented in 1814, had the advantage of being more durable than older wooden plows, more capable of breaking up hard and stony fields, and eventually having replaceable parts. But it was still ineffective at churning up the thick sod and clay soils found throughout the Midwest. It was replaced in 1847 by the steel plow, manufactured by the John Deere company in Moline, Illinois, and the steel plow quickly became a farming staple.
Two new machines heralded a coming revolution in grain production. The automatic reaper, the invention of Cyrus H. McCormick of Virginia, took the place of sickle, cradle, and hand labor. Pulled by a team of horses, it had a row of horizontal knives on one side for cutting wheat; the wheels drove a paddle that bent the stalks over the knives, which then fell onto a moving belt and into the back of the vehicle. The reaper enabled a crew of six or seven men to harvest in a day as much wheat as fifteen men could harvest using the older methods. McCormick, who had patented his device in 1834, established a factory Page 250at Chicago in 1847. By 1860, more than 100,000 reapers were in use. Almost as important to the grain grower was the thresher—a machine that separated the grain from the wheat stalks—which appeared in large numbers after 1840. (Before that, farmers generally flailed grain by hand or used farm animals to tread it.) The Jerome I. Case factory in Racine, Wisconsin, manufactured most of the threshers. (Modern “harvesters” later combined the functions of the reaper and the thresher.)
CYRUS MCCORMICK’S AUTOMATIC REAPER
(©Oxford Science Archive/Print Collector/Getty Images)
The Old Northwest was the most self-consciously democratic section of the country. But its democracy was of a relatively conservative type—capitalistic, property-conscious, middle-class. Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois Whig, voiced the optimistic economic opinions of many of the people of his section. “I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can,” said Lincoln. “When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor for his whole life.”
Rural Life
Life for farming people varied greatly from one region to another. In the more densely populated areas east of the Appalachians and in the easternmost areas of the Old Northwest, farmers made extensive use of the institutions of communities—churches, schools, stores, and taverns. As white settlement moved farther west, farmers became more isolated and had to struggle to find any occasions for contact with people outside their own families.
Religion drew farm communities together more than any other force in remote communities. Town or village churches were popular meeting places, both for services and for social events—most of them dominated by women. Even in areas with no organized churches, farm families—and women in particular—gathered in one another’s homes for prayer meetings, Bible readings, and other religious activities. Weddings, baptisms, and funerals also united communities.Page 251
But religion was only one of many reasons for interaction. Farm people joined together frequently to share tasks such as barn raising. Large numbers of families gathered at harvesttime to help bring in crops, husk corn, or thresh wheat. Women came together to share domestic tasks, holding “bees” in which groups of women made quilts, baked goods, preserves, and other products.
Despite the many social gatherings farm families managed to create, they had much less contact with popular culture and public life than people who lived in towns and cities. Most rural people treasured their links to the outside world—letters from relatives and friends in distant places, newspapers and magazines from cities they had never seen, catalogs advertising merchandise that their local stores never had. Yet many also valued the relative autonomy that a farm life gave them. One reason many rural Americans looked back nostalgically on country life once they moved to the city was that they sensed that in the urban world they had lost some control over the patterns of their daily lives.
CONCLUSION
Between the 1820s and the 1850s, the American economy experienced the beginnings of an industrial revolution—a change that transformed almost every area of life in fundamental ways.
The American Industrial Revolution was a result of many things: population growth, advances in transportation and communication, new technologies that spurred the development of factories and mass production, the recruiting of a large industrial labor force, and the creation of corporate bodies capable of managing large enterprises. The new economy expanded the ranks of the wealthy, helped create a large new middle class, and introduced high levels of inequality.
Culture in the industrializing areas of the North changed, too, as did the structure and behavior of the family, the role of women, and the way people used their leisure time and encountered popular culture. The changes helped widen the gap in experience and understanding between the generation of the Revolution and the generation of the mid-nineteenth century. They also helped widen the gap between North and South.
