APUSH Unit 10: The Restless North

What was the North like post War of 1812?

- During and after the War of 1812, the North became more solidly a market society, one in which participation in long-distance commerce fundamentally altered individuals' aspirations and activities. -More men, women, and children began working for others in exchange for wages—rather than for themselves on a family farm—making the domestic demand for foodstuffs soar. - Farming became commercialized, with individual farmers abandoning self-sufficiency and specializing instead in crops that would yield cash on the market. With the cash that farmers earned when things went well, they now bought goods they had once made for themselves, such as cloth, candles, and soap as well as some luxuries - Unlike the typical southern yeoman, they were not self-reliant, and isolation was rare.

Who was Mary Ann and James Archbald?

- They bought a farm in central New York - Twenty-one years after leaving Scotland, Mary Ann, in anticipation of making their last payment, declared herself wealthy: "being out of debt is, in my estimation, being rich." - 10 years earlier on April 17, 1817 the New York State legislature authorized construction of a canal that would connect Lake Erie to the Hudson River, and surveyors mapped a route that ran through the Archbalds' farm. The sons (one in his early twenties, the other a teenager) helped dig the canal, while Mary Ann and her daughters cooked and cleaned for the twenty Irish laborers whom the sons hired.

In 1820, how many places did the US have more than ten thousand or more in the population? How did this change in 1860.

13 places. In 1860 is grew to 93. New York City, already the nation's largest city in 1820, saw its population grow from 123,706 people in that year to 813,669 in 1860- a growth factor of six and a half times. Philadelphia, the nation's second-largest city in both 1820 and 1860, saw the size of its population multiply ninefold during that same forty-year period. In 1815, Rochester, New York, had a population of just 300 persons. By 1830, the Erie Canal had turned the sleepy agricultural town into a bustling manufacturing center; now the nation's twenty-fifth-largest city, its population was just over 9,000 and continued to multiply at fantastic rates. By 1860, it had more than 48,000 residents.

What is the Erie Canal?

A canal that linked the Great Lakes to New York City, opening the upper Midwest to wider development.

What were natural waterways like pre War of 1812?

Before the War of 1812, natural waterways provided the most readily available and cheapest transportation routes for people and goods, but with many limitations. Boatmen poled bateaux on portions of a few rivers, including the Mississippi and the Hudson, sailing ships could tack upstream under certain wind conditions, but upstream commerce was very limited.

Who laid in the middle between the poor and the wealthy?

Between the two extremes of wealth sat a distinct middle class, larger than the wealthy elite but substantially smaller than the working classes. They were businessmen, traders, and professionals, and the rapid turn toward industrialization and commercial specialization made them a much larger presence in northern cities than in southern ones. Middle-class families enjoyed new consumer items: wool carpeting, fine wallpaper, and rooms full of furniture replaced the bare floors, whitewashed walls, and relative sparseness of eighteenth-century homes. Houses were large, from four to six rooms. Middle-class children slept one to a bed, and by the 1840s and 1850s, middle-class families used indoor toilets that were mechanical, though not yet flushing. Middle- class families formed the backbone of urban clubs and societies, filled the family pews in church, and sent their sons to college.

How did immigrants arrive and then disperse when they first reached America?

By 1860, most immigrants settled in cities, often the port at which they arrived. The most destitute could not afford the fare to places farther inland. Others arrived with resources but fell victim to swindlers who preyed on newly arrived immigrants. Some liked the cities' ethnic flair. In 1855, 52 percent of New York's 623,000 inhabitants were immigrants, with 28 percent of the city's population from Ireland and 16 percent from the German states. Boston, another major entry port, took on a European tone; throughout the 1850s, the city was about 35 percent foreign born, of whom more than two-thirds were Irish.

How did lowering transportation costs and efforts affect manufacture and commercial expansion?

By dramatically lowering transportation costs, internal improvements made possible the Northeast's rapid manufacturing and commercial expansion. After canals and railroads opened the trans-Appalachian West for wide-scale settlement, western farmers supplied raw materials and foodstuffs for northeastern factories and their workers. They also created a larger domestic market for goods manufactured in the Northeast. With most of their time devoted to cultivating their land, western settlers preferred to buy rather than make cloth, shoes, and other goods.

What was the situation of commercialization like in the 1820s and 1830s?

By the 1820s and 1830s, much clothing was mass-produced for sale in retail clothing stores. The process often involved little more than the reorganization of work; tailors no longer performed every task involved in making an article of clothing, from measuring to finishing work. Standard sizes replaced measuring, and a division of labor took hold: one worker cut patterns all day, another sewed hems, another affixed buttons, still another attached collars. The sewing machine, invented in 1846 and widely available in the 1850s, accelerated the process. Although many farm families still made their own clothing, they bought clothes when they could afford to do so, freeing time for raising both crops and children

What other tensions arose?

Closely related to racial stereotyping was anti-Catholicism, which became strident in the 1830s. In Boston, anti-Catholic riots occurred frequently. Nearby Charlestown, Massachusetts, saw a mob burn a convent in 1834. In Philadelphia, a crowd attacked priests and nuns and vandalized churches in 1844, and in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a mob leveled the Irish neighborhood in 1854. Anti-Catholic violence spread beyond urban areas—riots between native-born and Irish workers erupted along the nation's canals and railroads—but urban riots usually attracted more newspaper attention, fueling fears that cities were violent, depraved places.

What was the "Specialization of Commerce" like?

Commerce expanded with manufacturing. Commercial specialization transformed some traders in big cities, especially New York, into virtual merchant princes. After the Erie Canal opened, New York City became a stop on every major trade route from Europe, southern ports, and the West. New York traders were the intermediaries for southern cotton and western grain. Merchants in other cities played a similar role.

What happened in regards to the natural world?

Deprived of waterpower, mills no longer ran. Without forests to sustain them, wild animals—on which many rural people (Native American and European American) had relied for protein—sought homes elsewhere. Fishermen, too, found their sources of protein (and cash) dried up when natural waterways were dammed or rerouted to feed canals. If many northerners embraced progress, they also regretted its costs.

What did the Waltham or Lowell plan offer?

Despite its restrictions, the Waltham system offered farm girls opportunities to socialize and to earn wages, which they used to help their families buy land or send a brother to college, to save for their own dowries or education, or to spend on personal items, such as fashionable clothing. Workers wrote literary pieces for the owner-subsidized Lowell Offering and attended educational lectures in the evenings. Still, most women imagined factory work as temporary, and factory conditions—the power looms' deafening roar, the long hours, the regimentation—made few change their minds. The average girl arrived at sixteen and stayed five years, usually leaving to get married, often to men they met in town rather than to farm boys at home.

How did European awareness of the US grow?

Europeans' awareness of the United States grew as employers, states, and shipping companies promoted opportunities across the Atlantic. Often the message was stark: work and prosper in America, where everyone could aspire to be an independent farmer, or starve in Europe. Although boosters promised immigrants a land of milk and honey, many soon became disillusioned; hundreds of thousands returned home.

What still occurred after the War of 1812?

Even after War of 1812, When Europeans suffered hard times, so, too, did American merchants, manufacturers, farmers, workers—and their families. Particularly for those Americans who relied on wages for their livelihood, economic downturns often meant unemployment and destitution. Economic downswings could shake even the most commercially committed northerners

What did the transportation revolution and market expansion do in the north?

Even amid the manufacturing and commercial booms, agriculture remained the northern economy's backbone. But the transportation revolution and market expansion trans- formed formerly semi subsistence farms into commercial enterprises, with families abandoning mixed agriculture for specialization in cash crops. By the 1820s, eastern farmers had cultivated nearly all the available land, and their small farms, often with uneven terrains, were ill suited for the labor-saving farm implements introduced in the 1830s, such as mechanical sowers, reapers, and threshers. Many northern farmers thus either moved west or quit farming for jobs in merchants' houses and factories.

How did the way farmers manage their money change?

Even as they continued to swap labor and socialize with neighbors, farmers became more likely to reckon debts in dollars. They kept tighter accounts and watched national and international markets more closely. When financial panics hit, cash shortages almost halted business activity, casting many farmers further into debt, sometimes to the point of bankruptcy. Faced with the possibility of losing their land, farmers did what many would have considered unthinkable before: they called in debts with their neighbors, sometimes causing fissures in long-established relationships.

What was it like for Germans compared to the Irish?

German immigrants, at least the majority who were Protestants, mostly fared better. In part because Germans generally arrived with some resources and skills, Americans stereotyped them as hardworking, self-reliant, and intelligent. But non-Protestant Germans—Catholics and Jews (whom white Americans considered a separate race) frequently encountered hostility fed by racial and religious prejudice

What was the situation with "Women's Paid Labor"?

In working-class families, girls left home as early as age twelve to begin a lifetime of wage earning, with only short respites for bearing and rearing children. Unmarried girls and women worked primarily as domestic servants or in factories; married and widowed women worked as laundresses, seamstresses, and cooks. Some hawked food and wares on city streets; others did piecework at home, earning wages in the putting-out system; and some became prostitutes. Few such occupations enabled women to support themselves or a family comfortably.

How did internal improvements affect westward migration?

Internal improvements hastened the population's westward migration. They eased the journey itself while also making western settlement more appealing by providing easy access to eastern markets and familiar comforts. News, visitors, and luxuries now traveled regularly to previously remote areas of the Northeast and Midwest. Delighted that the Erie Canal brought fresh seafood to central New York, hundreds of miles from the sea, Mary Archbald explained that "distance . . . is reduced to nothing here."

How was the city viewed?

Like Jefferson, who also acknowledged that cities nourished the arts, commercially minded Americans could see cities as both exemplars of civilization and breeding grounds of depravity and conflict.

How did machinery affect mass production?

Machinery made mass production possible. Although initially Americans imported or copied British machines, they soon built their own.

What was employment like for immigrants?

Many early immigrants lived or worked in rural areas. Like the Archbalds, a few settled immediately on farms and eventually bought land. Others, unable to afford even a modest down payment, worked as hired farmhands, canal diggers, or railroad track layers—often hoping to buy land later.

What were the numbers like for immigrants at this time?

Many of the urban poor were immigrants. The 5 million immigrants who came to the United States between 1830 and 1860 outnumbered the country's entire population in 1790. The vast majority came from Europe, primarily Ireland and the German states. During the peak period of pre-Civil War immigration 3.3 million immigrants entered the United States, including 1.3 million Irish and 1.1 million Germans. By 1860, 15 percent of the white population was foreign born, with 90 percent of immigrants living in northern states. Not all planned to stay permanently, and many, like the Irish, saw themselves as exiles.

What did market expansion do for mass production of clothing?

Market expansion created a demand for mass- produced clothing. Girls who left farms for factories no longer had time to sew clothes. Young immigrant men— often separated by thousands of miles from mothers and sisters—bought the crudely made, loose-fitting clothing. But the biggest market for ready-made clothes, at least initially, was in the cotton South. With the textile industry's success driving up the demand and price for raw cotton, planters bought ready-made shoes and clothes for slaves, in whose hands they would rather place a hoe than a needle and thread. Doing so made good economic sense.

What was the worry with Market Expansion?

Market expansion, some worried, threatened the nation's moral fiber if not properly controlled. It upset traditional patterns of family organization, and it relied heavily on unskilled workers—many of whom were immigrants and free African Americans—who at best seemed unfit for republican citizen- ship and at worst seemed threatening.

What did Mary Ann believe? What did others decry?

Mary Ann Archbald savored her fresh sea- food dinners but regretted that her sons turned to speculation. Others decried the enormous numbers of Irish canal diggers and railroad track layers, whom they deemed depraved and inherently inferior. The degradation of the natural world proved worrisome, too. When streams were rerouted, swamps drained, and forests felled, natural habitats were disturbed, even ruined

What were the roles within complex commercial transactions?

Merchants who engaged in complex commercial transactions required large office staffs, mostly all male. At the bottom of the hierarchy were messenger boys, often preteens, who delivered documents. Above them were copyists, who hand- copied documents. Clerks processed documents and shipping papers and did translations. Above them were the bookkeeper and the confidential chief clerk. Those seeking employment in such an office, called a counting house, often studied under a writing master to acquire a "good hand." Most hoped to become partners, but their chances of success grew increasingly slim.

What are separate spheres?

Middle- class ideology that emerged with the market revolution and divided men's and women's roles into distinct and separate categories based on their perceived gender differences, abilities, and social functions. Men were assigned the public realm of business and politics, while women were assigned to the private world of home and family. In practice, however, few families adhered strictly, if at all, to this ideology.

What was expected of unmarried young girls vs unmarried older women? How did this reflect their pay?

Middle-class Americans sought to keep daughters closer to home, except for brief stints as mill girls or, especially, as teachers. In the 1830s, Catharine Beecher successfully campaigned for teacher-training schools for women. She argued in part for women's moral superiority and in part for their economic value; because these women would be single, she contended, they need not earn as much as their male counterparts, whom she presumed to be married, though not all were. Unmarried women earned about half the salary of male teachers. By 1850, school- teaching had become a woman's profession. Many women worked as teachers, usually for two to five years.

What caused labor protests?

Mill life grew more difficult, especially during the depression of 1837 to 1843, when demand for cloth declined, causing most mills to run part time. To increase productivity, managers sped up machines and required each worker to operate more machines. In the race for profits, owners lengthened hours, cut wages, tightened discipline, and packed the boardinghouses.

What was more common than the Waltham or Lowell plan?

More common was the Rhode Island (or Fall River) plan employed by Samuel Slater, among others. Mills hired entire families, lodging them in boardinghouses. Men often worked farm plots near the factories while their wives and children worked in the mills, though as the system developed, men increasingly worked in the factories full time, directly supervising the labor of their wives and children in small, family-based work units.

What were the demographic personally like?

Most of the new immigrants from Ireland were young, poor, rural, and Roman Catholic. Women worked as domestic servants or mill hands, while men labored in construction or transportation. Very few Germans settled in New England; most came with enough resources to head to the upper Mississippi and Ohio valleys, to states such as Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri. Although some southern cities like Charleston and Savannah had significant numbers of Irish immigrants, the vast majority of European immigrants, many of whom arrived with aversions to slavery and to semitropical heat, settled in the Northeast or Midwest.

Where did most of the rapid urbanization take place?

Most took place in the Northeast and the Midwest. Although most northerners continued to live on farms or in small villages, the population of individual cities boomed. Many of those residents were temporary-moving to another city or the countryside- and many came from foreign shores.

How were the Irish viewed and how did they view others?

Native-born Americans often associated the Irish with another group whom they deemed morally inferior: African Americans. White northerners often portrayed Irish immigrants as nonwhite, as African in appearance. But Irish and African Americans did not develop a sense of solidarity. Instead, some of the era's most virulent riots erupted between Irish immigrants and African Americans.

Why did "the future belong to railroads"?

Trains moved faster than canal boats and operated year-round. Railroads did not need to be built near natural sources of water, allowing them to connect remote locations to national and international markets. By 1860, the United States had 60,000 miles of track, most of it in the North. Railroads dramatically reduced the cost and the time involved in shipping goods, and excited the popular imagination

True or false: No period in American history saw more rapid urbanization than the years between 1820 and 1860?

True, the percentage of people living in urban areas grew from just over 7 percent in 1820 to nearly 20 percent in 1860.

True or false: Commerce specialized more quickly in cities than in small towns?

True: Commerce specialized more quickly in cities than in small towns, where merchants continued to exchange goods with local farm women—trading flour or pots and pans for eggs and other produce. Local craftsmen continued to sell their own finished goods, such as shoes and clothing. In some rural areas, particularly newly settled ones, peddlers acted as general merchants. But as transportation improved and towns grew, small-town merchants increasingly specialized.

True or false: American industrialization soon resembled European ones?

True: Despite the optimistic forecasts of early textile manufacturers that American industrialization need not engender the poverty and degradation associated with European industrialization, America's industrial cities soon resembled European ones. A number of factors contributed to widespread poverty: poor wages, the inability of many workers to secure full-time employment, and the increasingly widespread employment of women and children, which drove down wages for everyone.

True or false: Cities expanded geographically as well?

True: In 1825, Fourteenth Street was New York City's northern boundary. By 1860, 400,000 people lived above that divide, and Forty-second Street was the city's northern limit. Gone were the cow pastures, kitchen gardens, and orchards. Horse-drawn omnibuses appeared in New York in 1827, and the Harlem Railroad, completed in 1832, ran the length of Manhattan. By the 1850s, all big cities had horse-drawn streetcars, allowing wealthier residents who could afford the fare to settle on larger plots of land in the cities' outskirts.

True or false: Northern governments and investors spent substantially more on internal improvements than did southerners.

True: Pennsylvania and New York together accounted for half of all state monies invested. Southern states did invest in railroads, but—with smaller free populations—they collected fewer taxes, leaving them with less to spend. The North and South laid roughly the same amount of railroad track per person before the Civil War, but when measured in terms of overall mileage, the more populous North had a web of tracks that stretched considerably farther, forming an integrated system of local lines branching off major trunk lines. In the South, railroads remained local in nature, leaving southern travelers to patch together trips on railroads, stagecoaches, and boats. Neither people nor goods moved easily across the South, unless they traveled via steamboat or flatboat along the Mississippi River system—and even then, flooded banks disrupted passage for weeks at a time.

True or false: The North urbanized more than the South?

True: With only a few exceptions, southern cities were seaports, whereas the period between 1820 and 1860 saw the creation of many inland cities in the North-usually places that sprang to life with the creation of transportation lines or manufacturing establishments.

True or false: Science was embraced as much as religion? What did other reformers do?

True; Some embraced science as fervently as religion. Other reformers, instead of trying to fix society, established separate experimental communities that might model a new form of social relations. Opponents of slavery, meanwhile, worked within the existing system but sought to radically alter Americans' premises about the practical implications of the revolutionary declaration that "all men are created equal."

What was the difference between the South and North when it came to regional connections?

Unlike southern investments in river improvements and steamboats, which disproportionately benefited planters whose lands bordered the region's riverbanks, the North's frenzy of canal and railroad building expanded transportation networks far into the hinterlands, proving not only more democratic but also more unifying

How was wealth concentrated?

Wealth was concentrating with a relatively small number of people. wealth was concentrating with a relatively small number of people. By 1860, the top 5 percent of American families owned more than half of the nation's wealth, and the top 10 percent owned nearly three- quarters. In the South, the extremes of wealth were most apparent on rural plantations, but in the North, cities provided the starkest evidence of economic inequities.

What were the Waltham or Lowell plan?

With labor scarce near the mills, managers recruited New England farm daughters, whom they paid wages and housed in dormitories and boardinghouses in what became known as the Waltham or Lowell plan of industrialization. People who made their living from farming often harbored suspicions of those who did not—particularly in the young United States, where an agrarian lifestyle was often associated with virtue itself—so some rural parents resisted sending their daughters to textile mills to ease such concerns, mill managers offered paternalistic oversight; they enforced curfews, prohibited alcohol, and required church attendance.

How did the New England textile mills affect women and children?

With the New England textile mills producing more and more finished cloth, farm women and children often abandoned time-consuming spinning and weaving, bought factory-produced cloth, and dedicated the saved time to producing larger quantities of marketable products, such as butter and cheese. Some mixed-agriculture farms converted entirely to dairy production, with men taking over formerly female tasks. Canals and railroads carried cheese to eastern ports, where wholesalers sold it around the world, shipping it to California, England, and China. In 1844, Britain imported more than 5 million pounds of cheese from the United States.

How did women air their complaints?

Women aired their complaints in worker-run newspapers: in 1842, the Factory Girl appeared in New Hampshire, the Wampanoag, and Operatives' Journal in Massachusetts.Two years later, mill workers founded the Factory Girl's Garland and the Voice of Industry, nicknamed "the factory girl's voice." Even the Lowell Offering, the owner-sponsored paper that was the pride of mill workers and managers alike, became embroiled in controversy when workers charged its editors with suppressing articles criticizing working conditions.

Why did women and children not need a living wage as believed by employers?

Women and children, employers rationalized, did not need a living wage because they were—in the employers' way of thinking—dependent by nature and did not require a wage that allowed self-sufficiency. In reality, though, not all women or children had men to support them, nor were men's wages always adequate to support a family comfortably.

What ended up happening with the labor protests?

Worker turnover weakened organizational efforts. Few militant native-born mill workers stayed to fight the managers and owners, and gradually, fewer New England daughters entered the mills. In the 1850s, Irish immigrant women replaced them. Technological improvements made the work less skilled, enabling mills to hire inexperienced, lower-paid laborers. Male workers, too, protested changes wrought by the market economy and factories. But, unlike women, they could vote. Labor political parties first formed in Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts in the 1820s, and then spread elsewhere; they advocated free public education and an end to imprisonment for debt, and opposed banks and monopolies. Some advocated free homesteads, a reminder that most early industrial workers still aspired to land ownership

What did protestors do?

Workers organized, accusing their bosses of treating them like wage slaves. In 1834, in reaction to a 25 percent wage cut, they unsuccessfully "turned out" (struck) against the Lowell mills. Two years later, when boardinghouse fees increased, they again turned out, unsuccessfully. With conditions worsen- ing and strikes failing, workers resisted in new ways. In 1844, Massachusetts mill women formed the Lowell Female Reform Association and joined other workers in pressing, unsuccessfully, for state legislation mandating a ten-hour day—as opposed to the fourteen-hour days that some workers endured.

What happened to roads after the American Revolution?

After the American Revolution, some northern states chartered private stock companies to build turnpikes. These toll roads expanded commercial possibilities in southern New England and the Middle Atlantic, but during the War of 1812 the nation's paucity of roads in its more northerly and southerly reaches impeded the movement of troops and supplies, prompting renewed interest—in the name of defense—in building roads

True or false: all farmers abandoned the old practices of gatherings at market, general stores, taverns, and church?

Although agricultural journals and societies exhorted farm- ers to manage their farms like time-efficient businesses, not all farmers abandoned the old practices of gathering at market, general stores, taverns, and church. They did not forgo barn raisings and husking bees, but by the 1830s there were fewer young people at such events to dance and flirt. Many young women had left for textile mills, and young men often worked as clerks or factory hands. Those who stayed behind were more likely to come dressed in store-bought clothing and to consume pies made with store-bought flour.

Why did Germans come?

Although economic conditions pushed most Germans as well, some were political refugees—liberals, freethinkers, socialists, communists, and anarchists—who fled after the abortive revolutions of 1848.

Commonwealth v. Hunt

An 1842 court case in which the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that labor unions were not illegal monopolies that restrained trade.

What did Americans do as they worried about the future of the nation's rapid changes?

Anxious about the era's rapid changes, many Americans turned to evangelical religion, which in turn launched many of the era's myriad reform movements. Believing in the notion of human perfectibility, reformers worked to free individuals and society from sin. In the Northeast and Midwest, in particular, women and men organized to end the abuses of prostitution and alcohol, to improve conditions in prisons and asylums, and to establish public schools.

What did the Archbald sons do?

Archbald sons soon tried their hands at commercial speculation, borrowing money to buy wheat and lumber in western New York with the idea of reselling it at substantial profits to merchants in Albany and New York City. This was not the life Mary Ann visioned for her sons. She made an unpleasant conclusion that, "We are a nation of traders in spite of all Mr. Jefferson can say or do."

How did commercial economy affect women?

As the commercial economy expanded, rural women assumed additional responsibilities, increasing their already substantial farm and domestic work. Some did outwork. Many increased their production of eggs, dairy products, and garden produce for sale; others raised bees or silkworms.

True or false: the North and South had much in common at the birth of the republic?

At the republic's birth, the North and South had much in common, with some similarities persisting for decades: slavery, religious heritage, an overwhelming proportion of the population engaged in agricultural pursuits, a small urban population.

What the situation of cotton mills in the mid 1840s?

In the mid-1840s, the cotton mills employed approximately eighty thousand "operatives," more than half of them women. Mill owners employed a resident manager, thus separating ownership from management.

What was the result of the Lake Erie canal?

Horse-drawn boats, stacked with bushels of wheat, barrels of oats, and piles of logs, streamed eastward from Lake Erie and western New York. Tens of thousands of passengers—forty thousand in 1825 alone—traveled the waterway each year. The canal shortened the journey between Buffalo and New York City from twenty days to six and reduced freight charges by nearly 95 percent—thus securing New York City's position as the nation's preeminent port. Other states rushed to construct canals, and by 1840 canals crisscrossed the Northeast and Midwest, with mileage totaling 3,300. Southern states, with many easily navigable rivers, dug fewer canals. None of the new canals, North or South, enjoyed the Erie's financial success. As the high cost of construction combined with an economic contraction, investment slumped in the 1830s. Several midwestern states could not repay their canal loans, leading them to bankruptcy or near- bankruptcy. By midcentury, more miles were abandoned than built. The canal era had ended, though the Erie Canal (by then twice enlarged and rerouted) continued to prosper, remaining in commercial operation until the late twentieth century and even undergoing a minor resurgence today

How did the different ethnic groups diverge?

Immigrants often lived in ethnic enclaves. Intolerance between Protestants and Catholics ran both ways, and Irish Catholics tended to live in their own neighborhoods, where they established Catholic churches and schools. In larger cities, immigrants from the same German states clustered together. Immigrants set up social clubs and mutual-aid societies, such as the Hibernian Society and Sons of Erin (Irish), and B'nai B'rith ( Jewish).

How did the family change in the new industrial era?

In the preindustrial era, the family had been primarily an economic unit; now it became a moral and cultural institution, though in reality few families could live up to the new ideal.

How did childbearing change?

In 1800, American women bore seven or eight children; by 1860, five or six. This decline occurred even though many immigrants with large-family traditions were settling in the United States; thus, the birth rate among native-born women declined even more sharply. Although rural families remained larger than urban ones, birth rates among both groups declined comparably. Yet even as birth rates fell, few northern women could fulfill the middle-class ideal of separate spheres. Most wage- earning women provided essential income for their families and could not stay home. They often saw domestic ideals as oppressive, as middle-class reformers mistook poverty for immorality, condemning working mothers for letting their children work or scavenge rather than attend school. Although most middle-class women stayed home, new standards of cleanliness and comfort proved time-consuming. These women's contributions to their families were generally assessed in moral terms, even though their economic contributions were significant. When they worked inside their homes, they provided, without remuneration, the labor for which wealthier women paid when they hired domestic servants to perform daily chores. Without servants, moreover, women could not devote themselves primarily to their children's upbringing, placing the ideals of the cult of domesticity beyond the reach of many middle-class families.

What did an 1800 report commissioned by the federal government find?

In 1800, according to a report commissioned by the federal government, it cost as much to ship a ton of goods thirty miles into the country's interior as to ship the same goods from New York to England. The lack of cheap, quick transportation impeded westward expansion as well as industrial growth. When the Archbald family decided against moving to Ohio in 1810, Mary Ann Archbald explained, "It is at a great distance from markets."

Who was Robert Fulton?

In 1807, Robert Fulton's Clermont traveled between New York and Albany on the Hudson River in thirty-two hours, demonstrating the feasibility of using steam engines to power boats. After the Supreme Court's ruling against steamboat monopolies in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), steamboat companies flourished on eastern rivers and, to a lesser extent, on the Great Lakes. These boats carried more passengers than freight, transporting settlers to the Midwest, where they would grow grain and raise pigs that fed northeastern factory workers. Along western rivers like the Mississippi and the Ohio, steamboats played a more direct commercial role, carrying midwestern timber and grain and southern cotton to New Orleans, where they were transferred to oceangoing vessels destined for northern and international ports. In the 1850s, steamboats began plying rivers as far west as California and Washington Territory. Privately owned and operated, steamboats became subject to federal regulations after frequent and deadly accidents in which boilers exploded, fires ignited, and boats collided.

Why did the Irish come to America?

In Ireland, the potato famine (1845-1850)—a period of wide- spread starvation caused by a diseased potato crop—drove millions from their homeland.

What was the importance of Catherine Beecher?

In her widely read Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), Catharine Beecher approached housekeeping as a science even as she trumpeted mothers' role as their family's moral guardian.Although Beecher advocated the employment of young, single women as teachers, she believed that, once married, women belonged at home. She maintained that women's natural superiority as moral, nurturing caregivers made them especially suited for teaching (when single) and parenting (once married). Although Beecher saw the public sphere as a male domain, she insisted that the private sphere be elevated to the same status as the public.

What was the new "Ideal Family"? How did it come about?

In the North, the market economy increasingly separated the home from the workplace, leading to a new middle-class ideal in which men functioned in the public sphere while women oversaw the private or domestic sphere. The home became, in theory, an emotional retreat from the competitive, selfish world of business, where men increasingly focused on their work, eager to prosper yet fearful of failure in the unpredictable market economy. At the home's center was a couple that married for love rather than for economic considerations. Men provided and protected, while women nurtured and guarded the family's morality, making sure that capitalism's excesses did not invade the private sphere. Childhood focused more on education than on work, and the definition of childhood itself expanded: children were to remain at home until their late teens or early twenties. This ideal became known as separate-sphere ideology, or sometimes the cult of domesticity or the cult of true womanhood. Although it rigidly separated the male and female spheres, this ideology gave new standing to domestic responsibilities

What was the North like in colonial era?

In the colonial era, settlers lived in a society with markets, one in which they engaged in long-distance trade—selling their surpluses to merchants, who in turn sent raw materials to Europe, using the proceeds to purchase finished goods for resale—but in which most settlers remained self-sufficient

What was the situation like with canals in the late 18th and early 19th centuries?

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, private companies (sometimes with state subsidies) built small canals to transport goods and produce to and from interior locations previously accessible only by difficult-to-navigate rivers or by poorly maintained roads. These projects rarely reaped sub- stantial profits, discouraging investment in other projects. In 1815, only three canals in the United States measured more than 2 miles long; the longest was 27 miles. After Madison's veto of the Bonus Bill dashed commercially minded New Yorkers' hopes for a canal connecting Lake Erie to the port of New York, Governor DeWitt Clinton pushed for a state-sponsored initiative. What later became known as the Erie Canal was to run 363 miles between Buffalo and Albany, and was to be four feet deep. Skeptics derided it as "Clinton's Big Ditch."

What is an example of the extremes of wealth accompanying industrialization?

New York provided an example of this. Where workers lived, conditions were crowded, unhealthy, and dangerous. Houses built for two families often held four; tenements built for six families held twelve. Some of those families took in lodgers to pay the rent, adding to the unbearably crowded conditions that encouraged poorer New Yorkers to spend as much time as possible outdoors. But streets in poor neighborhoods were filthy. Excess sewage from outhouses drained into ditches, carrying urine and fecal matter into the streets. People piled garbage into gutters or dumped it in backyards or alleys. Pigs, geese, dogs, and vultures scavenged the streets, while enormous rats roamed under wooden sidewalks and through large buildings. Typhoid, dysentery, malaria, and tuberculosis thrived in such conditions, and epidemics of cholera struck in 1832, 1849, and again in 1866, claiming thousands of victims. But within walking distance of poverty-stricken neighborhoods were lavish mansions, whose residents could escape to country estates during the summer's brutal heat or during epidemics. Much of this wealth was inherited. For every John Jacob Astor, who became a millionaire in the western fur trade after beginning life in humble circumstances, ten others had inherited or married money. These rich New Yorkers were not idle, though; they worked at increasing their fortunes and power by investing in commerce and manufacturing.

Did this continue?

No, that all started to change with postwar economic development. Such development was undertaken mostly by state and local governments as well as private entrepreneurs, and it took place much more extensively and rapidly in the North. As the North embraced economic progress, it diverged from the international form.

What did Northerners proclaim in regards to progress?

Northerners proclaimed that, by building canals and railroads, they had completed God's design for the North American continent. On a more practical level, canals and railroads allowed them to seek opportunities in the West

Explain the process of building the Erie Canal....

Over the next eight years, nearly nine thousand labor- ers felled forests, shoveled and piled dirt, picked at tree roots, blasted rock, heaved and hauled boulders, rechanneled streams, and molded the canal bed. Stonemasons and carpenters built aqueducts and locks. The work was dangerous, sometimes fatal, with workers succumbing to malaria, rattlesnake bites, gunpowder explosions, falls, and asphyxiation from collapsed canal beds.

Who was Padraig Cundun?

Pádraig Cúndún was among the lucky. The Irishman used his earnings as a canal laborer to buy land in western New York

Why were permanent labor protests hard?

Permanent labor organizations were difficult to sustain. Skilled craftsmen disdained less-skilled workers. Moreover, workers divided along ethnic, religious, racial, and gender lines.

What was the increasement of commercialization like?

Retailers often bought goods wholesale, though many manufactured shirts and trousers in their own factories. Lewis and Hanford of New York City boasted of cutting more than 100,000 garments in the winter of 1848-1849. The New York firm did business mostly in the South and owned a retail outlet in New Orleans. Paul Tulane, a New Orleans competitor, owned a New York factory that made goods for his Louisiana store. In the Midwest, Cincinnati became the center of the men's clothing industry. Nationally, though, New York remained the garment industry's capital.

What were roads like pre War of 1812?

Roads, constructed during the colonial and revolutionary eras, often became obstructed by fallen trees, soaked by mud, or clouded in dust. To reduce mud and dust, turnpike companies built "corduroy" roads, whose tightly lined-up logs resembled ribbed cotton fabric. But the continual jolts caused nausea among passengers and discouraged merchants from shipping fragile wares.

What was the effect Samuel Morse had?

Samuel F. B. Morse's invention of the telegraph in 1844 made the compression of distance and time even starker. News traveled almost instantaneously along telegraph wires. By 1852, the nation had more than 23,000 miles of telegraph lines, which enabled the birth of modern business practices involving the coordination of market conditions, production, and supply across great distances. Together, internal improvements and the telegraph allowed people in previously isolated areas to proclaim themselves—as did one western New Yorker—a "citizen of the world."

What were ethnic tensions like?

Tension—often resulting from anxieties over the era's economic changes—characterized the relationship between native-born Americans and immigrants, particularly Irish Catholics. Native- born workers blamed immigrants for scarce job opportunities and low wages. Middle-class whites blamed them for poverty and crime. As they saw it, immigrants' moral depravity—not poor wages—led to poverty.

What was the American System of Manufacturing?

The American System of Manufacturing, as the British called it, produced interchangeable parts that did not require individual adjustment to fit. Eli Whitney, the cotton gin's inventor, promoted the idea of interchangeable parts in 1798, when he contracted with the federal government to make ten thousand rifles in twenty-eight months. In the 1820s, the United States Ordnance Department contracted with private firms to introduce machine-made interchangeable parts for firearms.The American System quickly produced the machine- tool industry—the manufacture of machines for the purpose of mass production. The new system permitted large-scale production at low costs, with items such as Waltham watches becoming inexpensive but high-quality household items.

How did people view the Erie Canal? Why did few canal workers perceive their construction work as fulfilling Jefferson's notions of republican freedom?

The canal's promoters celebrated the waterway as the work of "republican free men," but few canal workers would have perceived their construction work as fulfilling Jefferson's notion of republican freedom. Unskilled laborers—including many immigrants and some convicts—greatly outnumbered artisans. Once completed, the Erie Canal relied on child labor: Boys led the horses who pulled the canal boats between the canal's eighty-three locks, while girls cooked and cleaned on the boats. When the canal froze shut in winter, many canal workers found themselves destitute, with neither employment nor shelter.

What would the canal help fulfill?

The canal, its promoters emphasized, would help fulfill the nation's revolutionary promise by demonstrating how American ingenuity and hard work could overcome any obstacle, including imposing natural ones, such as the combined ascent and descent of 680 feet between Buffalo and Albany. By so doing, it would help unify the nation and secure its commercial independence from Europe.

What did the court provide to labor protests?

The courts provided organized labor's greatest victory: protection from conspiracy laws. When journeyman shoemakers organized during the century's first decade, their employers accused them of criminal conspiracy. The cordwainers' (shoemakers') cases between 1806 and 1815 left labor organizations in an uncertain position. Although the courts acknowledged the journeymen's right to organize, judges viewed strikes as illegal until a Massachusetts case, Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), ruled that Boston journeyman bootmakers could strike "in such man- ner as best to subserve their own interests," in the words of the state's chief justice Lemuel Shaw. Although the ruling applied to Massachusetts only, Shaw's national eminence extended the ruling's influence beyond the state's boundaries.

What populations did the protests encompass?

The first unions represented journeymen in printing, woodworking, shoemaking, and tailoring. Locally organized, they resembled medieval guilds, with members seeking protection against competition from inferior workmen by regulating apprenticeships and establishing minimum wages. Umbrella organizations composed of individual craft unions, like the National Trades' Union (1834), arose in several cities in the 1820s and 1830s. But the movement disintegrated amid wage reductions and unemployment in the hard times of 1839-1843.

What was metropolitan industrialization?

The garment industry often took the form of what some historians call metropolitan industrialization, a form relying not on mechanization but on reorganization of labor, similar to the earlier putting-out system. Much production of ready-made clothing, for example, took place in tenements throughout New York City, where women spent hour after hour sewing on buttons for a piece of ready-made clothing, while others sewed hem after hem. In 1860, more than 16,000 women worked in New York's garment industry.

What was the result of the Panic of 1837?

The hungry formed lines in front of soup societies, and beg- gars crowded the sidewalks. Some workers looted. Crowds of laborers demanding their deposits gathered at closed banks. Sheriffs sold seized property at one-quarter of its former value. In smaller cities like Lynn, Massachusetts, shoemakers weathered hard times by fishing and tending gardens, while laborers became scavengers, digging for clams and harvesting dandelions. Once-prosperous businessmen—some victims of the market, others of their own recklessness—lost nearly everything, prompting Congress to pass the Federal Bankruptcy Law of 1841; by the time the law was repealed two years later, 41,000 bankrupts had sought protection under its provisions.

What was investment like?

The market economy's expansion led to cycles of boom and bust. Prosperity stimulated demand for finished goods, such as clothing and furniture. Increased demand in turn led not only to higher prices and still higher production, but also, because of business optimism and expectations of higher prices, to land speculation. Investment money was plentiful as Americans saved and foreign, mostly British, investors bought U.S. bonds and securities. Then production surpassed demand, causing prices and wages to fall; in response, land and stock values col- lapsed, and investment money flowed out of the United States. This boom-and-bust cycle influenced the entire country, but particularly the Northeast, where even the smallest localities became enmeshed in regional and national markets.

How did the demographic of unmarried women change?

The proportion of single women in the population increased significantly in the nineteenth century. In the East, some single women would have preferred to marry but market and geographic expansion worked against them: more and more young men headed west in search of opportunity, leaving some eastern communities disproportionately female in makeup. Other women chose to remain independent, seeking opportunities opened by the market economy and urban expansion. Because women's work generally paid poorly, those who forswore marriage faced serious challenges, leaving many single women dependent on charitable or family assistance.

What is the history of the beginning of railroads?

The railroad era in the United States began in 1830 when Peter Cooper's locomotive, Tom Thumb, first steamed along 13 miles of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad track. In 1833, the nation's second railroad ran 136 miles from Charleston to Hamburg in South Carolina. Not until the 1850s, though, did railroads offer long-distance service at reasonable rates. Even then, the lack of a common standard for the width of track thwarted development of a national system. Only at Bowling Green, Kentucky, did northern and southern railroads connect to one another

What did the new domestic ideals depend on?

These new domestic ideals depended on smaller families in which parents, particularly mothers, could offer children greater attention, education, and financial help. With the market economy, parents could afford to have fewer children because children no longer played a vital economic role. Urban families produced fewer household goods, and commercial farmers, unlike self-sufficient ones, did not need large numbers of workers year-round, turning instead to hired laborers during peak work periods. Although smaller families resulted in part from first marriages' taking place at a later age—shortening the period of potential childbearing—they also resulted from planning, made easier when cheap rubber condoms became available in the 1850s. Some women chose, too, to end accidental pregnancies with abortion.

Did Northern cities develop taxing power?

They developed elaborate systems of municipal services but lacked adequate taxing power to provide services for all. At best, they could tax property adjoining new sewers, paved streets, and water mains. New services and basic sanitation depended on the resident's ability to pay. Another solution was to charter private companies to sell basic services, such as providing gas for lights. Baltimore first chartered a private gas company in 1816. By midcentury, every major city had done so. Private firms lacked the capital to build adequate water systems, though, and they laid pipe only in commercial and well-to-do residential areas, bypassing the poor. The task of supplying water ultimately fell on city governments.

What decision did the the Boston Manufacturing Company make?

They selected the site for Lowell, Massachusetts, because of its proximity to the Merrimack River, whose rapidly flowing waters could power its textile mill. Incorporated in 1826, by the 1850s Lowell was the second largest city in New England.

What was it like for different populations in the north?

Those farmers who remained,however,proved as adaptable on the farm as were their children working at water-powered looms or in countinghouses. In 1820, about one-third of all northern produce was intended for the market, but by 1850 the amount surpassed 50 percent. As farmers shifted toward specialization and market-oriented production, they often invested in additional land (buying the farms of neighbors who moved west), new farming equipment (such as improved iron and steel plows), and new sources of labor (hired hands). Many New England and Middle Atlantic farm families faced steep competition from midwestern farmers after the opening of the Erie Canal, and began abandoning wheat and corn production. Instead, they raised livestock, especially cattle, and specialized in vegetable and fruit production. Much of what they produced ended up in the stomachs of the North's rapidly growing urban and manufacturing populations. Farmers financed innovations through land sales and debts. Indeed, increasing land values, not the sale of agricultural products, promised the greatest profit. Farm families who owned their own land flourished, but it became harder to take up farming in the first place. The number of tenant farmers and hired hands increased, providing labor to drive commercial expansion. Farmers who had previously employed unpaid family members and enslaved workers now leased portions of their farms or hired paid labor to raise their livestock and crops.

Example of difficulty with flatboats....

To travel between Ohio and New Orleans by flatboat in 1815 took several months; in 1840, the same trip by steamboat took just ten days. But the steamboat did not supplant the flatboat. Rather, the number of flatboats traveling down- stream to New Orleans more than doubled between 1816 and 1846. Now that flatboat crews could return upstream by steamboat rather than by foot, the greatest investment in flat- boat travel—time—had been greatly reduced.

What's an example of how factory traditions worked? What became more modern about it?

Traditionally, each butcher carved an entire pig. Under the new industrial organization, each worker performed a particular task—such as cutting off the right front leg or scooping out the entrails—as the pig traveled down a "disassembly line." Factory work, with its impersonal and regimented nature, contrasted sharply with the informal atmosphere of artisan shops and farm households. The bell, the steam whistle, or the clock governed work. In large factories, laborers never saw owners, working instead under paid supervisors, nor did they see the final product of their labor. Factory workers lost their sense of autonomy in the face of impersonal market forces. Competition from cheaper, less-skilled workers created job insecurity and few opportunities for advancement

What happened to the US economy following the War of 1812 in a general overview?

in the years after the War of 1812, the market economy took off in ways few could have anticipated when the Archbald family decided to seek its independence in America. In the North, steamboats, canals, and then railroads remapped the young republic's geography and economy, setting off booms in westward migration, industry, commerce, and urban growth, and fueling optimism among commercially minded Americans.

What happened in the 1840s and 50s when "the steady system of immigration turned into a flood"?

the prospects of buying land became more remote

What was the Panic of 1837 caused by?

too much speculation. Although the 1820s and 1830s were boom times, financial panic triggered a bust cycle in 1837, the year after the Second Bank of the United States closed. Economic contraction remained severe through 1843. Internal savings and foreign investments declined sharply. Many banks could not repay their depositors, and states, facing deficits because of the economy's decline, defaulted on their bonds. Because of the Panic of 1837, European, especially British, investors became suspicious of all U.S. loans and withdrew money from the United States.