Chapter 14 Quiz - Industrial Revolution

Why was the youthful American Republic, eventually to become an industrial giant, so slow to embrace the machine?

1.) 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 till their own acres in God's fresh air and sunlight. Labor was therefore generally scarce, and enough nimble hands to operate the machines were hard to find 2.) Money for capital investment, moreover, was not plentiful in pioneering America, whose Industrial Revolution, like that of many a developing country in later centuries, awaited an influx of foreign capital - which in turn awaited assurance of secure property rights, sufficient infrastructure, an adequate work force, and political stability. 3.) America had difficulty producing goods of high enough quality and cheap enough cost to compete with mass-produced European products. 4.) The British also enjoyed a monopoly of the textile machinery, whose secrets they were anxious to hide from foreign competitors. Parliament enacted laws forbidding the export of the machines or the emigration of mechanics able to reproduce them.

What started the Industrial Revolution?

A group of gifted British inventors, beginning about 1750, perfected a series of machines for the mass production of textiles. This harnessing of steam multiplied the power of human muscles some ten-thousandfold and ushered in the modern factory system - and with it, the so-called Industrial Revolution. It was accompanied by a no-less-spectacular transformation in agricultural production and in the methods of transportation and communication.

Transportation Revolution: What was the turnpike?

A promising improvement came in the 1790s, when a private company completed the Lancaster Turnpike in Pennsylvania. It was a broad, hard-surfaced highway that thrust sixty-two miles westward from Philadelphia to Lancaster. As drivers approached the tollgate, they were confronted with a barrier of sharp pikes, which were turned aside when they paid their toll.

Who was Samuel Slater and what did he do?

A skilled British mechanic of twenty-one, he was attracted by bounties being offered to British workers familiar with the textile machines. After memorizing the plans for the machinery, he escaped in disguise to America, where he won the backing of Moses Brown, a Quaker capitalist in Rhode Island. Laboriously reconstructing the essential apparatus with the aid of a blacksmith and a carpenter, he put into operation in 1791 the first efficient American machinery for spinning cotton thread.

Who was Eli Whitney and what did he do?

After graduating from Yale, he journeyed to Georgia to serve as a private tutor while preparing for the law. There he was told that the poverty of the South would be relieved if someone could only invent a workable device for separating the seed from the short-staple cotton fiber. Within ten days, in 1793, he built a crude machine called the cotton gin that was fifty times more effective than the handpicking process.

What effects did the cotton gin have?

Almost overnight the raising of cotton became highly profitable, and the South was tied hand and foot to the throne of King Cotton. Human bondage had been dying out, but the insatiable demand for cotton reriveted the institution of black slavery.

Who was Samuel F.B. Morse and what did he do?

Along with a spur in mechanical advances, new technical advances also came to light. This included the telegraph, which was invented by Samuel F.B. Morse. This creation heightened the strength of an extremely complex business world. He was able to appropriate $30,000 from Congress in order to support his experiment. In 1844, he suspended a wire forty miles from Washington to Baltimore. Fortune and fame soon accompanied Morse and his creation. This was because he put widely separated people in almost immediate communication with each other. By the time of the Civil War, various telegraphs spread across the country. This transfigured the way of news gatherings, diplomacy, and finance.

Why would women take jobs in factories?

Because factory jobs promised greater economic independence for women, as well as the means to buy the manufactured products of the new market economy.

One ugly outgrowth of the factory system was an increasingly acute labor problem. Why?

Because the factory system did not shower its benefits evenly at all. The mill owners made most of the money. Working hours were long, wages were low, and meals were not substantial. 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, for such cooperative activity was regarded as a criminal conspiracy.

What was the Transportation Revolution?

Cheap and efficient carriers were imperative if raw materials were to be transported to factories and if finished products were to be delivered to consumers. So, new methods of transportation were brought to light.

How did the role of women change during the Industrial Revolution?

Farm women and girls had an important place in the preindustrial economy. New factories such as the textile mills of New England undermined these activities, cranking out manufactured goods much faster than they could be made by hand at home. Yet these same factories offered employment to the very young women whose work they were displacing.

What was the Boston Associates?

Fifteen Boston families formed one of the earliest investment capital companies, the Boston Associates. They eventually dominated the textile, rail-road, insurance, and banking business of Massachusetts.

How did the lot of most adult wage workers improve markedly in the 1820s and 1830s?

In the full flush of Jacksonian democracy, many of the states granted the laboring man the vote. Brandishing the ballot, he first strove to lighten his burden through workingmen's parties. Eventually, many workers gave their loyalty to the Democratic party of Andrew Jackson, whose attack on the Bank of the United States and against all forms of "privilege" reflected their anxieties about the emerging capitalist economy.

What was the cult of domesticity?

In the home, women were enshrined in a cult of domesticity, which was a widespread cultural creed that glorified the customary functions of the homemaker. From their pedestal, married women commanded immense moral power, and they increasingly made decisions that altered the character of the family itself.

Western farmers were as hungry for profits as southern slaves and planters were for food. These tillers, spurred on by the easy availability of seemingly boundless acres, sought ways to bring more and more land into cultivation. How was this achieved?

Ingenious inventors came to their aid. John Deere of Illinois - steel plow that broke the stubborn soil. Cyrus McCormick of Virginia - mechanical mower-reaper

Transportation Revolution: What did such an economy reflect?

It coincided with the American System, Henry Clay's desire fulfilled.

Transportation Revolution: At first, why did the railroad face strong opposition?

It faced strong opposition from vested interests, especially canal backers. Anxious to protect its investment in the Erie Canal, the New York legislature in 1833 prohibited the railroads from carrying freight. Early railroads were also considered a dangerous public menace, for flying sparks could set fire to nearby haystacks and houses. Overall, they were dangerous.

What effects did the McCormick reaper have?

It made ambitious capitalists out of humble plowmen, who now scrambled for more acres on which to plant more fields of billowing wheat. Eventually, subsistence farming gave way to food production for both domestic and foreign markets, as large-scale, specialized, cash-crop agriculture came to dominate the trans-Allegheny West.

What was the market revolution?

It transformed a subsistence economy of scattered farms and tiny workshops into a national network of industry and commerce. As more and more Americans linked their economic fate to the burgeoning market economy, the self-sufficient households of colonial days were transformed.

What was the Pony Express?

It was established in 1860 to carry mail speedily the two thousand lonely miles from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. Daring, lightweight riders, leaping onto wiry ponies saddled at stations approximately ten miles apart, could make the trip in an amazing ten days. These unarmed horsemen galloped on, summer or winter, day or night, through dust or snow, past Indians and bandits. The speeding postmen missed only one trip, though the whole enterprise lost money heavily and folded after only eighteen legend-leaving months.

Transportation Revolution: Why was the railroad such a significant contribution?

It was fast, reliable, cheaper than canals to construct, and not frozen over in winter. Able to go almost anywhere, even through the Allegheny barrier, it defied terrain and weather.

Transportation Revolution: How was the steamboat craze touched off?

It was touched off by an ambitious painter-engineer named Robert Fulton. He installed a powerful steam engine in a vessel that came to be known as the Clermont.

Why was New England singularly favored as an industrial center?

Its narrow belt of stony soil made farming difficult and hence made manufacturing attractive. A relatively dense population provided labor and accessible markets, shipping brought in capital, and snug seaports made easy the import of raw materials and the export of the finished products. Finally, the rapid rivers provided abundant water power to turn the cogs of the machines.

How did women's changing roles and the spreading Industrial Revolution bring some important changes in the life of the nineteenth-century home?

Love, not parental "arrangement," more and more frequently determined the choice of a spouse. 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. Families also grew smaller. The average household had nearly six members at the end of the eighteenth century but fewer than five members a century later. Overall, the domestic birthrate went down by the end of the century. Good citizens were raised not to be meekly obedient to authority, but to be independent individuals who could make their own decisions on the basis of internalized moral standards.

What was the idea of "social mobility"?

Mobility did exist in industrializing America - but not in the proportions that legend often portrays.

Transportation Revolution: What effects did the steamboat have?

People could now in large degree defy wind, wave, tide, and downstream current. Within a few years, Fulton had changed all of America's navigable streams into two-way arteries, thereby doubling their carrying capacity.

What else did the working people demand?

President Martin Van Buren wanted to help the workers, so he made a 10 hour work day for all federal employees. He wanted to set a precedent, but didn't have the power to give a 10 hour work day to the common workers. They also demanded higher wages, tolerable working conditions, and public education for their children and an end to the inhuman practice of imprisonment for debt.

As the factory system flourished, it embraced numerous other industries in addition to textiles. Which other industry was prominent among them?

Prominent among them was the manufacturing of firearms, and here the wizardly Eli Whitney again appeared with an extraordinary contribution. Up to this time, each part of a firearm had been hand-tooled, and if the trigger of one broke, the trigger of another might or might not fit. About 1798 Whitney seized upon the idea of having machines make each part, so that all the triggers, for example, would be as much alike as the successive imprints of a copperplate engraving. The principle of interchangeable parts was widely adopted by 1850. It gave rise to a host of other innovations, including Samuel Colt's fabled revolver, and it ultimately became the basis of modern mass-production, assembly-line methods that set the northern states on the path to thoroughgoing industrialization.

Transportation Revolution: What was the Erie Canal?

Resourceful New Yorkers, cut off from federal aid by states' righters, themselves dug the Erie Canal, linking the Great Lakes with the Hudson River. They were blessed with the driving leadership of Governor DeWitt Clinton.

Who has been acclaimed as the "Father of the Factory System" in America?

Samuel Slater.

How did the South and North both prosper from the cotton gin?

Slave-driving planters cleared more acres for cotton, pushing the Cotton Kingdom westward off the depleted tidewater plains and onto the lands of Alabama and Mississippi. Humming gins poured out avalanches of snowy fiber for the spindles of the Yankee machines.

What spurred equally important changes in the form and legal status of business organization?

Technical advances.

Transportation Revolution: What were the effects of the turnpike?

The Lancaster Turnpike proved to be a highly successful venture, returning as high as 15 percent annual dividends to its stockholders. It attracted a rich trade to Philadelphia and touched off a turn-pike-building boom that lasted about twenty years. It also stimulated western development.

Each region now specialized in a particular type of economic activity. What were the different economic activities of each region?

The South raised cotton for export to New England and Britain, the West grew grain and livestock to feed factory workers in the East and in Europe, and the East made machines and textiles for the South and West.

Transportation Revolution: What were the effects of the Erie Canal?

The cost of shipping a ton of grain from Buffalo to New York City fell from $100 to $5, and the time of transit from about twenty days to six. Ever-widening economic ripples followed the completion of the Erie Canal. The value of land along the route skyrocketed, and new cities—such as Rochester and Syracuse—blossomed. Industry in the state boomed. The new profitability of farming in the Old Northwest attracted thousands of European immigrants to the unaxed and untaxed lands now available. The price of potatoes in New York City was cut in half, and many dispirited New England farmers, no longer able to face the ruinous competition, abandoned their rocky holdings and went elsewhere. Some became mill hands, thus speed-ing the industrialization of America.

More than anything else, what stimulated the transportation revolution?

The desire of the East to trade with the West.

What was Commonwealth v. Hunt?

The supreme court of Massachusetts ruled in the case of Commonwealth v. Hunt that labor unions were not illegal conspiracies, provided that their methods were "honorable and peaceful." This enlightened decision did not legalize the strike overnight throughout the country, but it was a significant signpost of the times.

As smoke-belching factories altered the eastern skyline, how were flourishing farms changing the face of the West?

The trans-Allegheny region was fast becoming the nation's breadbasket. Pioneer families first hacked a clearing out of the forest and then planted their painfully furrowed fields to corn. Most western produce was at first floated down the Ohio-Mississippi River system, to feed the lusty appetite of the booming Cotton Kingdom.

How did the employers fight against what the workers wanted?

They argued that reduced hours would lessen production, increase costs, and demoralize the workers.

What were the working conditions like for these "factory girls"?

They typically toiled six days a week, earning low wages, and they worked for twelve or thirteen hours a day. The Boston Associates, nonetheless, proudly pointed to their textile mill at Lowell, Massachusetts, as a showplace factory. The workers were virtually all New England farm girls, carefully supervised on and off the job by watchful matrons.

By the eve of the Civil War, what emerged?

a truly continental economy.

How were the encouraging gains of labor unions shattered?

by the hard times following the severe depression of 1837. As unemployment spread, union membership shriveled.

Who was especially vulnerable to the exploitation of the factory system?

child workers. In 1820 a significant portion of the nation's industrial toilers were children under ten years of age. Victims of factory labor, many children were mentally blighted, emotionally starved, physically stunted, and even brutally whipped.

What were the other "work opportunities" for women?

household service.

What did the transformations in the Northeast show?

how long-established local market structures could be swamped by the emerging behemoth of a continental economy.

What did revolutionary advances in manufacturing and transportation bring?

increased prosperity to all Americans, but they also widened the gulf between the rich and the poor.

What was the principle of limited liability?

it aided the concentration of capital by permitting the individual investor, in cases of legal claims or bankruptcy, to risk no more than his own share of the corporation's stock.

America rose about 1 percent a year from 1820 to 1860. What did this general prosperity do?

it helped defuse the potential class conflict that might otherwise have exploded - and that did explode in many European countries.

What did laws of "free corporation" do?

it meant that businessmen could create corporations without applying for individual charters from the legislature.

However, factory jobs of the kind were still unusual for women. Opportunities for women to be economically self-supporting were scarce and consisted mainly of...?

nursing, domestic service, and especially teaching. The dedicated Catharine Beecher, unmarried daughter of a famous preacher and sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, tirelessly urged women to enter the teaching profession.

How did patriotism play a role in the Industrial Revolution?

patriotism prompted the wearing of baggy homespun garments.

Labor's early and painful efforts at organization had netted...?

some 300,000 trade unionists by 1830.

Overall, what was the transportation revolution?

steamboat - vastly aided the reverse flow of finished goods up the watery western arteries and helped bind West and South together. canals and railroads - went across the Alleghenies and into the blossoming heartland.

What did day laborers at last learn?

that their strongest weapon was to lay down their tools, even at the risk of prosecution under the law. Dozens of strikes erupted in the 1830s and 1840s, most of them for higher wages, some for the ten-hour day, and a few for such unusual goals as the right to smoke on the job. The workers usually lost more strikes than they won.

Transportation Revolution: Although western road building encountered many obstacles, how did westerners score a notable triumph in 1811?

the federal government started construction of the National Road, also known as the Cumberland Road, in honor of its starting point in Cumberland, Maryland. Although construction was interrupted by the War of 1812 and by states' righters' complaints about federal grants for internal improvements, the road reached Illinois 1839.

Transportation Revolution: Chugging steamboats played a vital role in...?

the opening of the West and South, both of which were richly endowed with navigable rivers. Population clustered along the banks of the broad-flowing streams. Cotton growers and other farmers made haste to take up and turn over the now-profitable soil. Not only could they float their produce out to market, but hardly less important, they could ship in at low cost their shoes, hardware, and other manufactured necessities.

The manufacturing boomlet broke abruptly when...?

the peace of Ghent took place in 1815. British competitors unloaded their dammed-up surpluses at ruinously low prices. Various mills were forced to close their doors.

Transportation Revolution: What was the most significant contribution to the development of such an economy?

the railroad.

The vast majority of working women...?

were single. Upon marriage they left their paying jobs and took up their new work as wives and mothers.