Forging the National Economy and The Ferment of Reform and Culture

1. Forging the National Economy and The Ferment of Reform and Culture

2. Introduction • The new nation bounded into the 19th century in a burst of movement. Not only were people in motion, but invented machinery boomed the cultivation of crops and the manufacture of goods, while workers labored ever longer, harder, and faster. The prodigious momentum of burgeoning American capitalism gave rise to an economy that was remarkably dynamic, market driven, continentally scaled, and internationally consequential.

3. The Westward Movement • The rise of Andrew Jackson, the first president from beyond the Appalachian Mountains, exemplified the westward march of the American people. • The Republic was young, and so were the people as late as 1850, half of Americans were under the age of thirty. They were also restless and energetic, always on the move.   In reality life was downright grim for most pioneer families. Poorly fed, ill-clad, housed in hastily built shanties. Above all they were victims of disease, depression, and premature death. Above all, unbearable loneliness haunted them, especially women. Breakdowns and even madness were all too frequently to frontier women. • Frontier life was tough for men as well. No-holds bar wrestling, which permitted such niceties as the biting off of noses and gouging out of eyes, was a popular form of entertainment.

4. Shaping the Western Landscape • The westward movement also molded the physical environment. Pioneers in a hurry often exhausted the land in the tobacco regions and then pushed on, leaving behind barren and rain-gutted fields. • The American west felt the pressure of civilization in additional ways. By the 1820s American fur trappers were setting their trap lines all over the Rockies.

5. The March of the Millions • As the American people moved west, they also multiplied at an amazing rate. By midcentury the population was still doubling every 25 years, as in the colonial days.   • By 1860 the original 13 states had more than doubled in number: 33 stars graced the American flag. The united States were the fourth most populous nation in the western world, exceeded only by 3 European countries-Russia, France, and Austria. • Over paid urbanization intensified the problems of smelly slums, feeble street lighting, inadequate policing, impure water, foul sewage, ravenous rats, and improper garbage disposal. Boston will be the first sewer system in 1823. • A conditioning high birthrate accounted for most of the increase in population, but by the 1840’s the tides of immigration were adding hundreds of thousands more. Before this decade immigrants had been flowing in at a rate of 60 thousand a year, suddenly the influx in the 1840s tripled and in 1850 it quadrupled. Many of the groups were half-Irish, and Germans. Most of these immigrants came because Europe was running out of room. America was also a land for the free and much opportunity for everyone.

6. The Emerald Isle Moves West • Ireland, already groaning under the heavy hand of British overlords, was a problem in the mid 1840’s. A terrible rot attacked the potato crop, on whit the people had become dependent on. Starved bodies were found dead by the roadside with grass in their mouths. All told, about 2 million will die. • Tens of thousands of people fled to the America’s. The Irish were forced to live in squalor; they were rudely crammed into the already vile slums. Molly Maguire’s and Tammany Hall’s help these immigrants form into society. • The invasion by these immigrants inflamed the prejudices of Americans. They feared that these foreign hordes would outbreed, outvote, and overwhelm the old native stock. Not only did the newcomers take jobs from Americans. This actually developed into a political party: Which was called the Know Nothing Party. This party’s stance was for rigid restrictions on immigration and naturalization and for laws authorizing the deportation of illegal immigrants. • Immigrants were undeniably making America a more pluralistic society-one of the most ethnically and racially varied in the history of the world. • Without the newcomers, an agricultural United States might well have been condemned to watch in envy as the Industrial Revolution swept through the 19th century.

7. Creeping Mechanization • A group of gifted British inventors, beginning about 1750 perfected a series of machines for the mass production of textiles. The factory system gradually spread from Britain to other lands. It took a generation or so to reach Western Europe, and then the United States. • For one thing, land was cheap in America. Land starved descendants of land starved peasants were not going to coop themselves up in smelly factories when they might get their own land. Money for capital investment was not plentiful in pioneering America, whose Industrial Revolution awaiting an influx for foreign capital. Without such capital, raw materials lay undeveloped, undiscovered, or unsuspected. • The young country also had difficultly producing goods of high enough quality and cheap enough cost to compete with mass-produced European products. The British also enjoyed a monopoly of the textile machinery, whose secrets they were anxious to hide from competitors. • Although a number of small manufacturing enterprises existed in the early Republic, the future industrial colossus was still snoring. Not until well past the middle 19th century did the value of the output of the factories exceed that of the farms.

8. Whitney Ends the Fiber Famine • Samuel Slater had been acclaimed the Father of the Factory System in America, and seldom can the paternity of a movement more properly be ascribed to one person. • A mechanical genius, Massachusetts born Eli Whitney, now made his mark; He graduated from Yale, and journeyed to Georgia to serve as a private tutor while preparing for the law. He was told that in order to eliminate poverty in the South someone had to invent a workable device for separating the seed from the short cotton fiber. The cotton gin was a machine that was fifty times more efficient. • The South and North both prospered. Slave driving planters cleared more acres for cotton, pushing the Cotton Kingdom westward off. Factories at first flourished most actively in New England, though they branched out into more populous areas of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. • The South increasingly wedded to the production of cotton, could boast of little manufacturing. Its capital was bound up in slaves: its local consumers for the most part were desperately poor.

10. Marvels in Manufacturing • America’s factories spread slowly until about 1807 until embargos and the war of 1812. Eli Whitney’s invention turned up the mass production of muskets for the US army. Then in 1798 Whitney had an idea of having machines make each part, so that all the triggers, for example, would be as much alike as the successive imprints of engraving. • The principle of interchangeable parts was widely adopted by 1850. It gave rise to a host of other innovations including the revolver. Even though Whitney did invented the cotton gin and gave slavery a renewed lease on life, and perhaps made the civil war. At the same time, Whitney helped factories of interchangeable parts; Whitney helped factories flourish in the North. • The sewing machine also invented and perfected by Isaac Singer, gave another strong boost in the North. Each momentous new invention seemed to make people invent more inventions. For the decade in 1800, only 306 patents were registered in Washington; but the decade ending in 1860 saw the amazing total of 28,000. • In the end, American’s products were prominent among the world’s commercial wonders.

11. Workers and Wage Slaves • One ugly outgrowth of the factory system was an increasingly acute labor problem. Clearly the early factory system did not shower its benefits evenly on all. • While many owners grew fat, working people often wasted away at their work benches. Hours were long, wages were low, and meals were skimpy and hastily gulped. Workers were forced to toil in unsanitary buildings that were poorly ventilated, lighted, and heated. • They were forbidden by law to form labor unions to raise wages, and such actions would cause criminal action. Child workers under the age of 10 were victims of factory labor, and many children were mentally blighted, emotionally starved, physically stunted, and brutally whipped. • Labor’s early and painful efforts at organization had netted some 300,000 trade unionists by 1830. Severe depression of 1837 and as a result mass unemployment spread and union membership shriveled. • Commonwealth vs. Hunt made labor unions were not legal conspiracies provided that their methods were honorable and peaceful. It did not legalize the strike overnight, but they could meet management on relatively evens terms.

12. Women and the Economy • Women were also sucked into clanging mechanisms of factory production. Farm women and girls had an important place in the preindustrial economy, spinning yarn, weaving cloth, and making candles, soap, butter and cheese. • Factory girls typically toiled six days a week, earning a dreary limb-numbing, earsplitting stints of 12 or 13 hours. The workers were virtually all New England farm girls, carefully supervised on and off the job by watchful matrons. • Factory jobs of any kind were still unusual for women. Opportunities for women to be economically self-supporting were scare and consisted mainly of nursing, domestic service, and especially teaching. • The vast majority of workingwomen were single. Upon marriage they left their paying jobs and took up their new work as wives and mothers. Cult of domesticity was a widespread cultural creed that glorified the customary functions of the homemaker.

14. Women and the Economy • Women’s changing roles and the spreading Industrial Revolution brought some important changes in the life at home in the 19th century. Families thus became more closely knit and affectionate, providing the emotional refuge that made the threatening impersonality of big city industrialism tolerable to many people. • Most strikingly families grew smaller. The average household had nearly six members at the end of the 18th century but fewer than 5 members a century later. Smaller families in turn meant child centered families, since where children are fewer, parents can lavish more care on themselves. • Children: Lessons were enforced by punishments other than the hickory stick. When the daughter neglected to do her homework, her mother sent her from the dinner table and gave her only bread and water. The child’s will was not simply broken but rather shaped.

15. Highways and Steamboats • An improvement came in the 1790’s when a private company completed the Lancaster Turnpike. It was broad, hard surfaced highway that thrust 62 miles westward from Philadelphia. This turnpike proved to be highly successful venture, returning as high as 15 percent annual dividends to its stockholders. This sparked a 20 year building boom. • Western road building, always expensive, encountered many obstacles. One was state’s rights who opposed federal aid to local projects. Then an answer came, which was the steamboat. • The success of the steamboat was sensational. People could now in large degree defy wind, wave, tide, and downstream current. Within a few years, this invention changed all of America’s navigable streams into 2 way arteries, thereby doubling their carrying capacity. • By 1820 there were 60 steamboats on the Mississippi and its tributaries; by 1860 about 1000, some of them luxurious river palaces. • Chugging steamboats played a vital role in the opening of the West and South, both of which were richly endowed with navigable rivers.

17. Clinton’s Big Ditch in New York • A few canals had been built around falls and elsewhere in colonial days, but ambitious projects lay in the future. New Yorkers were cut off by state righters, and they dug themselves the Erie Canal, which linked the Great Lakes with the Hudson River. They were blessed with Governor Clinton who devised this plan. • Ever-widening economic ripples followed the completion of the Erie Canal. The value of land along the new cities such as Rochester and Syracuse blossomed. The price of most shipped products prices were able to be cut in half.

18. The Iron Horse • The most significant contribution to the development proved to be the railroad. It was fast, reliable, cheaper than canals to construct, and not frozen over by winter. • At the first railroad faced strong opposition from vested interests, especially canal backers. They tried to prevent freights carrying railroad tracks. They were also considered public menace for flying sparks that could set fire to haystacks. • Railroad pioneers had to overcome other obstacles as well. Brakes were so feeble that the engineer might miss that station twice, both arriving and backing up.

19. The Ferment of Reform and Culture

20. Introduction • A third revolution accompanied the reformation of American politics and the transformation of the American economy in the mid-19th century. It consisted of a diffuse yet deeply felt commitment to improve the character of ordinary Americans, to make them more upstanding, god-fearing, and literate. • Reform campaigns of all types flourished in sometimes in abundance. There was not a man that didn’t have the book Utopia in their pocket. Reformers promoted better public schools and rights for women, as well as miracle medicines, polygamy, celibacy, rule by prophets, and guidance by spirits. • The Second Great Awakening began in 1790’s and boiled over into the 19th century. It swept through America’s protestant churches, transforming the place of religion in American life and sending a generation of believers out on their missions to perfect the world.

21. Reviving Religion • Church attendance was still a regular ritual for about 3/4ths of the 23 million Americans in 1850. The second great awakening was sweeping even more people than the first; this was one of the most momentous episodes in the history of American religion. This tidal wave of spiritual fervor left in its wake countless converted souls, many shattered and reorganized churches and numerous new sects. • The Second Great Awakening was spread to the masses on the frontier by huge camp meetings. As many as 25 thousand people would gather for encampment for several days. •  Methodists and Baptists reaped the most abundant harvest of souls from the fields fertilized by revivalism. Both sects stressed personal conversion.

22. A Desert Zion in Utah • In 1830 Joseph Smith a rugged visionary, reported that he had received golden plates from an angel. When deciphered it constituted as the Book of Mormon, and the church of Jesus Christ of Ladder Day Saints. • Smith ran into problems in Ohio and then in Illinois and Missouri. Accusations of polygamy, and individualistic and dedicated to free enterprise also plagued them as well. For Joseph Smith he was reputed to have several wives. These measures drove people to murder and mangle Joseph Smith and his brother. After Smith murder, Brigham Young then took over. Young proved to be an aggressive leader. • Young in 1846-1847 led his oppressed and despoiled Latter-Day Saints to Utah. Overcoming many hardships, the saints made their desert bloom. • Semiarid Utah grew remarkably. By the end of 1848, some 5,000 settlers had arrived, and other large bands were to follow them. This community became prosperous frontier theocracy and a cooperative commonwealth.

23. Free Schools for a Free People • Tax supported primary schools were scare in the early years of the republic. They had an odor of pauperism about them. Many learned that they didn’t want their children to grow up ignorant with a vote. Taxation for education was an insurance policy that the wealthy paid for stability and democracy.

24. Higher Goals for Higher Learning • Higher education was likewise stirring. The religious zeal of the Second Great Awakening led to the planting of many small, denominational, liberal arts colleges. • The first state university sprang up in North Carolina, and Virginia. • Women’s higher education was frowned upon in the early decade of the 19th century. A women’s place was believed to be in the home, and training in needlecraft and not algebra. • Women’s schools at the secondary level began to attain some respectability in the 1820’s, thanks to impart of dedicated women who fought for women’s rights.

25. Women in Revolt • Women in the 19th century opened, it was still a man’s world, both in America and in Europe. A wife was supposed to immerse herself in her home a subordinate herself to her lord and master, her husband. She couldn’t vote, she could be beaten, and when she married could hold property. • As the decades unfolded, women increasingly surfaced to breathe the air of freedom and self-determination. Now women were avoiding marriage and about 10 percent of adult women remained spinsters. • Unflinching feminists met in 1848 in a Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. This convention launched the modern women’s right movement. This crusade was put on hold because of the Civil War and slavery.

26. Scientific Achievements • Smallpox and yellow fever, malaria, and rheumatic epidemics were a problem. Victims of surgical operations were ordinarily tied down and told to drink whiskey. By the 1840’s doctors and dentists working independently employed laughing gas and ether as anesthetics.

27. Artistic Achievements • Architecturally, America contributed little of note in the first half of the century. The rustic Republic, still under pressure to put up shelters in haste, was continuing to imitate European models. Public buildings and other important structures followed Greek and Roman lines, which seemed curiously out of place in the wilderness. • Music was slowly shaking off the restraints of colonial days, when the prim Puritans had frowned upon nonreligious singing. Rhythmic and nostalgic darky tunes that were popularized by whites became hits by midcentury.

28. Blossoming of National Literature • Much of the reading matter was imported or plagiarized from Britain. Washington Irving- wrote Knickerbocker’s history of New York, and the Sketch Book. James Fennimore Cooper was the first American novelist. He wrote: The Spy, Leather stocking tales, and the last of the Mohicans.

29. Trumpeters of Transcendentalism • A golden age of American literature dawned in the second quarter of the 19th century, when an amazing outlook shook New England. One of the main springs of this literary flowering was transcendentalism especially around Boston, which preened itself as the Athens of America. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman, were some of these writers during this time. Not all writers in these years believed so keenly in human goodness and social progress.