Chapter ten American History

What was the economic advantage of canals that became obvious in the 1820s?

A team of four horses could haul one and a half tons of goods eighteen miles a day on the turnpikes. But the same four horses, walking along the "towpaths" next to canals while yoked to barges, could draw a boatload of a hundred tons twenty-four miles a day.

What organizations were formed by skilled workers in the 1850s?

Among the new organizations skilled workers created were the National Typographical Union, founded in 1852, the Stone Cutters in 1853, the Hat Finishers in 1854, and the Molders and the Machinists, both in 1859.

What were some unsuccessful attempts by other states that tried to catch up to New York's Erie Canal?

Boston, its way to the Hudson River blocked by the Berkshire Mountains, did not even try to connect itself to the West by canal; its hinterland would remain confined largely to New England. Philadelphia and Baltimore had the still more formidable Allegheny Mountains to contend with. They made a serious effort at canal building, nevertheless, but with discouraging results. Pennsylvania's effort ended in an expensive failure. Maryland constructed part of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal beginning in 1828, but completed only the stretch between Washington, D.C., and Cumberland, Maryland, and thus never crossed the mountains. In the South, Richmond and Charleston also aspired to build water routes to the Ohio Valley, but never completed them.

What made New York the biggest city in the U.S. by the early nineteenth century?

By 1810, it was the largest city in the U.S. That was partly a result of its superior natural harbor. It was also a result of the Erie Canal (completed in 1825), which gave the city unrivaled access to the interior, and of liberal state laws that made the city attractive for both foreign and domestic commerce.

What was happening to the population in the U.S. by 1860?

By 1860, 26 percent of the population of the free states was living in towns(places of 2,500 or more) or cities (8,000 people or more), up from 14 percent in 1840. That percentage was even higher for the industrializing states of the Northeast. In the South, by contrast, the increase of urban residents was only from 6 percent in 1840 to 10 percent in 1860.

What were the benefits and costs of the new roles of women that came about?

By the standards of a later era, the increasing isolation of women from the public world seems to be a form of oppression and discrimination. And it is true that few men considered women fit for business, politics, or the professions. On the other hand, most middle-class men--and many middle-class women as well--considered the new female sphere a vehicle for expressing special qualities that made women in some ways superior to men. Women were to be the custodians of morality and benevolence, just as the home--shaped by the influence of women--was to be a refuge from the harsh, competitive world of the marketplace. It was women's responsibility to provide religious and moral instruction to their children and to counterbalance the acquisitive, secular impulses of their husbands. thus the "cult of domesticity," as some scholars have called it, brought both benefits and costs to middle-class women. It allowed them to live lives of greater material comfort than in the past, and it placed a higher value on their "female virtues" and on their roles as wife and mother. At the same time, it left women increasingly detached from the public world, with fewer outlets for their interests and energies.

How were railroads financed?

Capital to finance the railroad boom came from many sources. Private American investors provided path of the necessary funding, and railroad companies borrowed large sums from abroad. But local governments--states, counties, cities, towns--also often contributed capital, because they were eager to have railroads serve them. This support came in the form of loans, stock subscriptions, subsidies, and donations of land for rights-of-way. The railroads obtained substantial additional assistance from the federal government in the form of public land grants. In 1850, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and other railroad-minded politicians persuaded Congress to grant federal lands to aid the Illinois Central, which was building from Chicago toward the Gulf of Mexico. Other states and their railroad promoters demanded the same privileges, and by 1860, Congress had allotted over 30 million acres to eleven states to assist railroad construction.

How did politics help keep the working class content to an extent in the mid-19th century?

Economic opportunity may not have greatly expanded in the nineteenth century, but opportunities to participate in politics did. And to many white, male working people, access to the ballot seemed to offer a way to help guide their society and to feel like a significant part of their communities.

What did competition between canals and railroads look like?

For a time, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company blocked the advance of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad through the narrow gorge of the upper Potomac, which it controlled; and the state of New York prohibited railroads from hauling freight in competition with the Erie Canal and its branches. But railroads had so many advantages that when they were able to compete freely with other forms of transportation they almost always prevailed.

What were most people who settled in the Northwest in the mid-19 century?

For the white (and occasionally black) settlers who populated the lands farther south, the Northwest was primarily an agricultural region. Its rich and plentiful lands made farming a lucrative and expanding activity there, in contrast to the declining agrarian Northeast. Thus the typical citizen of the Northwest was not an industrial worker or poor, marginal farmer, but the owner of a reasonably prosperous family farm. The average size of western farms was 200 acres, the great majority of them owned by the people who worked them.

What lead to the high level of immigration of Germans and Irish?

In Germany, the economic dislocations of the industrial revolution had caused widespread poverty, and the collapse of the liberal revolution there in 1848 also persuaded many Germans to emigrate. In Ireland, the oppressiveness and unpopularity of English rule drove many people out. But these political forces were dwarfed in the mid-nineteenth century by the greatest disaster in Ireland's history: a catastrophic failure of the potato crop (and other food crops) that caused the devastating "potato famine" of 1845-1849. Nearly a million people died of starvation and disease. Well over a million more emigrated to the U.S.

How did the work force in industry change in the beginning of the 19th century?

In the 1820s and 1830s, factory labor came primarily from the native-born population. After 1840, the growing immigrant population became the most important new source of workers.

How had industry grown by the 1830s?

It came first in the New England textile industry. There, entrepreneurs were beginning to make use of new and larger machines driven by water power that allowed them to bring textile operations together under a single roof. This factory system, as it came to be known, spread rapidly in the 1820s and began to make serious inroads into the old home-based system of spinning thread and weaving cloth. Factories also penetrated the shoe industry, concentrated in eastern Massachusetts. Shoes were still largely handmade, but manufacturers were beginning to employ workers who specialized in one or another of various tasks involved in production. Some factories began producing large numbers of identical shoes in ungraded sizes and without distinction as to rights and lefts. By the 1830s, factory production was spreading from textiles and shoes into other industries and from New England to other areas of the Northeast.

How much leisure time did people have in the mid-19th century?

Leisure time was scarce for all but the wealthiest Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. Most people worked long hours. Saturday was a normal working day. Vacations--paid or unpaid--were rare. For most people, Sunday was the only respite from work and was generally reserved for religion and rest. Almost no commercial establishments did any business at all on Sunday, and even within the home most families frowned upon playing games or engaging in other kinds of entertainment on the Sabbath. For many working-class and middle-class people, therefore, holidays took on a special importance. That was one reason for the strikingly elaborate Fourth of July celebrations throughout the country. The celebrations were not just expressions of patriotism. They were a way of enjoying one of the holidays available to most Americans.

What was the life of middle-class women like in the mid-19th century?

Middle-class women tended to remain in the home and care for the children and the household, although increasingly they were also able to hire servants--usually young, unmarried immigrant women who put in long hours of arduous work for very little money. One of the aspirations of middle-class women in an age when doing the family's laundry could take an entire day was to escape from some of the drudgery of housework.

What did PT Barnum do?

People going to the theater or the circus or the museum wanted to see things that amazed them and even frightened them. Perhaps the most celebrated provider of such experiences was the famous and unscrupulous showman P.T. Barnum, who opened the American Museum in New York in 1842--not a showcase fpr art or nature, but a great freak show populated by midgets, Siamese twins, magicians, and ventriloquists. Barnum was a genius in publicizing his ventures with garish posters and elaborate newspaper announcements. Only later, in the 1870s, did he launch the famous circus for which he is still best remembered. But he was always a pioneer in exploiting public tastes for the wild and exotic. One of the ways Barnum tried to draw visitors to his museum was by engaging lecturers. He did so because he understood that the lecture was one of the most popular forms of entertainment in 19th century America. Men and women flocked in enormous numbers to lyceums, churches, schools, and auditoriums to hear lecturers explain the latest advances in science, to describe their visits to exotic places, to provide vivid historical narratives, or to rail against the evils of alcohol or slavery. Messages of social uplift and reform attracted rapt audiences, particularly among women eager for guidance as they adjusted to the jarring changes in the character of family life in the industrializing world.

What groups of people immigrated to the U.S. between 1820-1840?

The migrations introduced new groups to the U.S. In particular, the number of immigrants arriving from the southern counties of Ireland began to grow marking the beginning of a tremendous influx of Irish Catholics that was to continue through the three decades before the Civil War.

What became of the early craft unions?

This early craft union movement fared poorly. Labor leaders struggled against the handicap of hostile laws and hostile courts. The common law, as interpreted by the courts in the industrial states, viewed a combination among workers as, in itself, an illegal conspiracy. The Panic of 1837, a dramatic financial collapse that produced a severe recession, weakened the movement further. Still, the failure of these first organizations did not end the efforts by workers--artisans and factory operatives alike--to gain some control over their productive lives.

How did farmers meet the rising demand for their products?

To meet the increasing demand for its farm products, residents of the Northwest worked strenuously, and often frantically, to increase their productive capacities. Most tried to take advantage of the large areas of still uncultivated land and to enlarge the area of white settlement during the 1840s. By 1850, the growing western population was moving into the prairie regions both east and west of the Mississippi: into areas of Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. They cleared forest lands or made use of fields the Indians had cleared many years earlier. And they began to develop timber industry to make use of the forests that remained. Wheat was the staple crop of the region, but other crops--corn, potatoes, and oats--and livestock were also important.

What two machines revolutionized farming in the mid-19th century?

Two new machines heralded a coming revolution in grain production. The most important was the automatic reaper, the invention of Cyrus H. McCormick of Virginia. The reaper enabled a crew of six or seven men to harvest in a day as much wheat (or any other small grain) as fifteen men could harvest using older methods. McCormick, who had patented his device in 1834, established a factory at Chicago in the heart of the grain belt, in 1847. By 1860, more than 100,00 reapers were in use on western farms. Almost as important to the grain grower was the thresher--a machine that separated the grain from the wheat stalks. Threshers appeared in large numbers after 1840. Before that, farmers generally flailed grain by hand (seven bushels a day was a good average for a farm) or used farm animals to tread it (twenty bushels a day on the average). A threshing machine, such as those manufactured by the Jerome I. Case factory in Racine, Wisconsin, could thresh twenty-five bushels or more in an hour.

What two systems were used to bring labor to factories?

Two systems of recruitment emerged to bring this new labor supply to the expanding textile mills. One, common in the mid-Atlantic states (especially in such major manufacturing centers as New York and Philadelphia), brought whole families from the farm to the mill. Parents tended looms alongside their children, some of whom were no more than four or five years old. The second system, common in Massachusetts, enlisted young women, mostly farmers' daughters in their late teens and early twenties. It was known as the Lowell or Waltham system, after the factory towns in which it first emerged. Many of these women worked for several years in the factories, saved their wages, and returned home to marry and raise children. Others married men they met in the factories or in town and remained part of the industrial world. But they often stopped working in the mills and took up domestic roles instead.

How was wealth distributed in the U.S.?

Wealth had always been unequally distributed in the U.S., to be sure. Even in the era of the Revolution, according to some estimates, 45 percent of the wealth was concentrated in the hands of about 10 percent of the population. But by the mid-nineteenth century, that concentration had become far more pronounced. In Boston in 1845, for example, 4 percent of the citizens are estimated to have owned more than 65 percent of the wealth; in Philadelphia in 1860, 1 percent of the population possessed more than half the wealth. Among the American people overall in 1860, according to scholarly estimates, 5 percent of the families possessed more than 50 percent of the wealth.

What did women do in an effort to secure better working conditions for themselves?

Women began establishing their own protective unions by the 1850s, often with the support of middle-class female reformers. Like the male craft unions, the female protective unions had little power in dealing with employer. They did, however, serve an important role as mutual aid societies for women workers.

What was done to increase workers' hours despite attempts to shorten them?

Workers at all levels of the emerging industrial economy made continuous efforts to improve their lots. They tried, with little success, to persuade state legislatures to pass laws setting a maximum workday. Two states--New Hampshire in 1847 and Pennsylvania in 1848--actually passed ten-hour laws, limiting the workday unless the workers agreed to an "express contract' calling for more time on the job. Such measures were virtually without impact, however, because employers could simply require prospective employees to sign the "express contract" as a condition of hiring. Three states--Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania--passed laws regulating child labor. But again, the results were minimal. The laws simply limited the workday to ten hours for children unless their parents agreed to something longer; employers had little difficulty persuading parents to consent to additional hours.

What happened to the birth rates in the mid-19th century?

Accompanying (and perhaps in part caused by) the changing economic function of the family was a decline in the birth rate. In 1800, the average American woman could be expected to give birth to approximately seven children during her childbearing years. By 1860, the average woman bore five children. The birth rate fell most quickly in urban areas and among middle-class women. Mid-nineteenth-century Americans had access to some birth control devices, which undoubtedly contributed in part to the change. There was also a significant rise in abortions, which remained legal in some states until after the Civil War and which, according to some estimates, may have terminated as many as 20 percent of all pregnancies in the 1850s. But the most important cause of the declining birth rate was almost certainly changes in sexual behavior--including increased abstinence.

How did railroads grow in the mid-nineteenth century?

After 1840, railroads gradually supplanted canals and all other modes of transport. In 1840, there were 2,818 miles of railroad tracks in the U.S.; by 1850, there were 9,021. An unparalleled burst of railroad construction followed in the 1850s, tripling the amount of trackage in just ten years. The most comprehensive and efficient system was in the Northeast, which had twice as much trackage per square mile as the Northwest and four times as much as the South. But the expansion of the rails left no region untouched. Railroads were even reaching west of the Mississippi, which was spanned at several points by great iron bridges. One line ran from Hannibal to St. Joseph on the Missouri River, and another was under construction between St. Louis and Kansas City.

What was the importance of consolidations of railroads?

An important change in railroad development--one that would profoundly affect the nature of sectional alignments--was the trend toward the consolidation of short lines into longer lines (known as "trunk lines"). By 1853, four major railroad trunk lines had crossed the Appalachian barrier to connect the Northeast with the Northwest. Two, the New York Central and the New York and Erie, gave New York City access to the Lake Erie ports. The Pennsylvania railroad linked Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and the Baltimore and Ohio connected Baltimore with the Ohio River at Wheeling. From the terminals of these lines, other railroads into the interior touched the Mississippi River at eight points. Chicago became the rail center of the West, served by fifteen lines and more than a hundred daily trains. The appearance of the great trunk lines tended to divert traffic from the main water routes--the Erie Canal and the Mississippi River. By lessening the dependence of the West on the Mississippi River. By lessening the dependence of the West on the Mississippi, the railroads helped weaken further the connection between the Northwest and the South.

What did artisans do to try to protect themselves from industrial production?

As early as the 1790s, printers and cordwainers (makers of high-quality boots and shoes) took the lead. The development of mass production methods threatened their livelihoods; it also threatened their independence and their status in their communities. Members of other skilled trades--carpenters, joiners, masons, plasterers, hatters, and shipbuilders--felt similarly vulnerable. In such cities as Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and New York, the skilled workers of each craft formed societies for mutual aid. During the 1820s and 1830s, the craft societies began to combine on a citywide basis and set up central organizations known as trade unions. With the widening of markets, the economies of cities were interconnected, so workers soon realized there were advantages in joining forces and established national unions or federations of local ones. In 1834, delegates from six cities founded the National Trades' Union; and in 1836, the printers and the cordwainers set up their own national craft unions.

How did the economic role of the family unit decline in the mid-19th century?

At the heart of the transformation was the movement of families from farms to urban areas, where jobs, not land, were the most valued commodities. The patriarchal system of the countryside, where fathers controlled their children's futures by controlling the distribution of land to them, could not survive the move to a city or town. Sons and daughters were much more likely to leave the family in search of work than they had been in the rural world. Another important change was the shift of income-earning work out of the home and into the shop, mill, or factory. In the early decades of the nineteenth century (and for many years before that), the family itself had been the principal unit of economic activity. Family farms, family shops, and family industries were the norm throughout most of the U.S. Men, women, and children worked together, sharing tasks and jointly earning the income that sustained the family. But as farming spread to the fertile lands of the Northwest and as the size and profitability of farms expanded, agricultural work became more commercialized. Farm owners in need of labor began to rely less on their families (which often were not large enough to satisfy the demand) and more on hired male workers. These farmhands performed many of the tasks that on smaller farms had once been the jobs of the women and children of the family. As a result, farm women tended to work increasingly at domestic tasks--cooking, sewing, gardening, and dairying--a development that spared them from some heavy labor but that also removed them from the principal income-producing activities of the farm. Farm women in the new agricultural regions of the Northwest tended, therefore, to have a lower economic status within the family (and within the community) than their earlier counterparts in the East, who had been more crucial to the family economy.

What factors allowed the American industrial revolution?

Before it could occur, the U.S. need a population large enough both to grow its own food and to provide a work force for the industrial economy. It needed a transportation and communications system capable of sustaining commerce over a large geographical area. It needed the technology to permit manufacturing on a large scale. And it needed systems of business organization capable of managing large industrial enterprises. By 1860, the northern regions of the nation had acquired at least the beginnings of all those things.

What opinion was held about working class women by the mid-19th century?

By the 1840s, the ideology of domesticity had grown so powerful that few genteel women would any longer consider working (as many had in the past) in shops or mills, and few employers would consider hiring them. But unmarried women nevertheless required some income-producing activity. They had few choices. Some could become teachers or nurses, professions that seemed to call for the same female qualities that made women important within the home; and both those professions began in the 1840s and 1850s to attract significant numbers of women, although not until the Civil War did females begin to dominate them. Otherwise, unmarried females were largely dependent on the generosity of relatives. Middle-class people gradually came to consider work by women outside the household to be unseemly, something characteristic of the lower classes--as indeed it was. Working-class women could not afford to stay home and cultivate the "domestic virtues." They had to produce income for their families. They continued to work in factories and mills, but under conditions far worse than those that the original, more "respectable" women workers had enjoyed. They also frequently found employment in middle-class homes. Domestic service became one of the most frequent sources of female employment. In other words, now that production had moved outside the household, women who needed to earn money had to move outside their own households to do so.

What was the significance of fuel being used to power factories?

Coal was replacing wood and water power as fuel for many factories. The production of coal most of it mined around Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania, leaped from 50,000 tons in 1820 to 14 million tons in 1860. The new power source made it possible to locate mills away from running steams and thus permitted industry to expand still more widely. In the 1820s and 1830s, water power remained the most important source of power for manufacturing. The first important source of power for manufacturing. The first important factory towns in New England--Lawrence, Lowell, and others--emerged where they did because of the natural waterfalls that could be channeled to provide power for the mills built along their banks. This sometimes required factories to along their banks. This sometimes required factories to close for periods in the winter when rivers were frozen. That was one reason why factory owners began to look for alternative forms of energy that could be used throughout the year, which led them by the late 1830s to rely more and more heavily on steam and other transportable forms of energy that could be fueled by wood, coal, or (later) petroleum.

What happened to what were small western villages or trading posts between 1820 and 1840?

Communities that had once been small western villages or trading posts became major cities: St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville. All of them benefited from strategic positions on the Mississippi River or one of its major tributaries. All of them became centers of the growing carrying trade that connected the farmers of the Midwest with New Orleans and, through it, the cities of the Northeast. After 1830, however, substantial shipping began from the Mississippi River to the Great Lakes, creating major new urban centers that gradually superseded the river ports. Among them were Buffalo, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and--most important in the end--Chicago.

How did immigration surge during the early part of the mid-19th century?

Immigration from abroad continued to increase as well. The number of foreigners arriving in the U.S. in 1840--84,000--was the highest for any one year to that point in the nineteenth century. But in later years, even that number would come to seem insignificant. Between 1840 and 1850, more than 1.5 million Europeans moved to America, three times the number of arrivals in the 1830s; in the last years of that decade, average annual immigration was almost 300,000. Of the 23 million people in the U.S. in 1850, 2.2 million (almost 10 percent) were foreign-born. Still greater numbers arrived in the 1850s--over 2.5 million. Almost half the residents of New York City in the 1850s were recent immigrants. In St. Louis, Chicago, and Milwaukee, the foreign-born outnumbered those of native birth. Few immigrants settled in the South. Only 500,000 lived in the slave states in 1860, and a third of these were concentrated in Missouri, mostly in St. Louis.

What were some technological innovations in the mid-19th century?

In 1839, Charles Goodyear, a New England hardware merchant, discovered a method of vulcanizing rubber (treating it to give it greater strength and elasticity); by 1860, his process had found over 500 uses and had helped create a major American rubber industry. In 1846, Elias Howe of Massachusetts constructed a sewing machine; Isaac Singer made improvements on it, and the How-Singer machine was soon being used in the manufacture of ready-to-wear clothing.

How had industry grown in the U.S. by the mid-19th century?

In 1840, the total value of manufactured goods produced in the U.S. stood at $483 million; ten years later the figure had climbed to over $1 billion; and in 1860 it reached close to $2 billion. For the first time, the value of manufactured goods was approximately equal to that of agricultural products. Of the approximately 140,000 manufacturing establishments in the country in 1860, 74,000 were located in the Northeast, including most of the larger enterprises. The Northeast had only a little more than half the mills and factories in the U.S.; but the plants there were so large that the region produced more than two-thirds of the nation's manufactured goods. Of the 1,311,000 workers in manufacturing in the U.S., about 938,000 were employed in the mills and factories of New England and the mid-Atlantic states.

What was the significance of the Associated Press?

In 1846, Richard Hoe invented the steam cylinder rotary press, making it possible to print newspapers rapidly and cheaply. The development of the telegraph, together with the introduction of the rotary press, made possible much speedier collection and distribution of news than ever before. In 1846, newspaper publishers from around the nation formed the Associated Press to promote cooperative news gathering by wire; no longer did they have to depend on the cumbersome exchange of newspapers for out-of-town reports. Major metropolitan newspapers began to appear in the larger cities of the Northeast. In New York alone, there were Horace Greeley's Tribune, James Gordon Bennett's Herald, and Henry J. Raymond's Times. All gave serious attention to national and even international events and had substantial circulations beyond the city. In the 1840s and 1850s, however, the rise of the new journalism helped to feed sectional discord. Most of the major magazines and newspapers were in the North reinforcing the South's sense of subjugation. Southern newspapers tended to have smaller budgets and reported largely local news. Few had any impact outside their immediate communities. The combined circulation of the Tribune and the Herald exceeded that of all the daily newspapers published in the South put together. Above all, the news revolution--along with the revolutions in transportation and communications that accompanied it--contributed to a growing awareness within each section of how the other sections lived and of the deep differences that had grown up between the North and the South--differences that would ultimately seem irreconcilable.

When the telegraph become a part of American life?

In 1884, when Samuel F.B. Morse, after several years of experimentation, succeeded in transmitting from Baltimore to Washington the news of James K. Polk's nomination for the presidency. The relatively low cost of constructing wire systems made the Morse telegraph system seem the ideal answer to the problems of long-distance communication. By 1860, more than 50,000 miles of wire connected most parts of the country; and a year later, the Pacific telegraph, with 3,595 miles of wire, opened between New York and San Francisco. By then nearly all the independent lines had joined in one organization, the Western Union Telegraph Company.

What activities did Americans participate in during their leisure time in the mid-19th century?

In rural America, where most people still lived, the erratic pattern of farm work gave many people some relief from the relentless working schedules of city residents. For urban people, however, leisure was something to be seized in what few free moments they had. Men gravitated to taverns for drinking, talking, and game-playing. Women gathered in one another's homes for conversation, card games, or to share work on such household tasks as sewing. For educated people, whose numbers were rapidly expanding, reading became one of the principal leisure activities. Newspapers and magazines proliferated rapidly, and books--novels, histories, autobiographies, biographies, travelogues, and others--became staples of affluent homes. Women were particularly avid readers, and women writers created a new genre of fiction specifically for females--the "sentimental novel," which often offered idealized visions of women's lives and romances.

What did life look like in rural America in the mid-19th century?

In the more densely populated farm areas east of the Appalachians and the easternmost areas of the Northwest, farmers were usually part of relatively vibrant communities and made extensive use of the institutions of those communities--the churches, schools, stores, and taverns. As white settlement moved farther west, farmers became more isolated and had to struggle to find any occasions for contact with people outside their own families. Although the extent of social interaction differed from one area to another, the forms of interaction--outside the South at least--were usually very similar. Religion drew farm communities together perhaps more than any other force, particularly since so many farm areas were populated by people of common ethnic and religious backgrounds. Towns or village churches were popular meeting places, both for services and for social events--most of them dominated by women. Even in areas with no organized churches, farm families--and, again, women in particular--gathered in one another's homes for prayer meetings, Bible readings, and other religious activities. Weddings, baptisms, and funerals also brought communities together. BUt religion was only one of many reasons for interaction. Farm people joined together frequently to share tasks that a single family would have difficulty performing on its own; festive barn raisings were among the most frequent. Women prepared large suppers while the men worked on the barn and the children played. Large numbers of families also gathered together at harvest time to help bring in crops, husk corn, or thresh wheat. Women came together to share domestic tasks as well, holding "bees" in which groups of women joined together to make quilts, baked goods, preserves, and other products. But despite the many social gatherings farm families managed to create, they lived in a world with much less contact with popular culture and public social life than people who lived in towns and cities. Rural people, often even more than urban ones, treasured their links to the outside world--letters from relatives and friends in distant places, newspapers, and magazines from cities they had never seen, catalogs advertising merchandise that their local stores never had. Yet many also valued their separation from urban culture and cherished the relative autonomy that farm life gave them. One reason many rural Americans looked back nostalgically on country life once they moved to the city was that they sensed that in the urban world they did not have as much control over the patterns of their daily lives as they had once known.

What did the Northwestern population of Indians look like in the mid-19th century?

Indians remained the most numerous inhabitants of much of the upper third of the Great Lakes states until after the Civil War. In those areas, hunting and fishing, along with some sedentary agriculture, remained the principal economic activities of both whites and Native Americans. But the tribes did not become integrated into the new commercialized economy that was emerging elsewhere in the Northwest.

When did corporations begin to come into play in the U.S.?

Individuals or limited partnerships continued to operate most businesses, and the dominating figures were still the great merchant capitalists, who generally had sole ownership of their enterprises. In some larger businesses, however, the individual merchant capitalist was giving way to the corporation. Corporations began to develop particularly rapidly in the 1830s, when some legal obstacles to their formation were removed. Previously, a corporation could obtain a charter only by a special act of the state legislature--a cumbersome process that stifled corporate growth. By the 1830s, however, states were beginning to pass general incorporation laws, under which a group could secure a charter merely by paying a fee. The new laws also permitted a system of limited liability, which meant that individual stockholders risked losing only the value of their own investment if a corporation should fail, and that they were not liable (as they had been in the past) for the corporations made possible the accumulation of much greater amounts of capital and hence made possible much larger manufacturing and business enterprises. Such businesses relied heavily on credit, and their borrowing often created dangerous instability. Credit mechanisms remained very crude in the early nineteenth century. The government alone could issue official currency, but the official currency consisted only of gold and silver(or paper certificates backed literally by gold and silver), and there was thus too little of it to support the growing demand for credit. Under pressure from corporate promoters, many banks issued large quantities of bank notes--unofficial currency that circulated in much the same way that government currency did but was of much less stable value. But the notes had value only to the degree that the bank could sustain public confidence in their value; and some banks issued so many notes that their own reserves could not cover them. As a result, bank failures were frequent, and bank deposits were often insecure. The difficulty of obtaining credit for business investment remained, therefore, an impediment to economic growth.

What was the reason for some of the country welcoming the booming trend of immigration?

Industrialists and other employers welcomed the arrival of a large supply of cheap labor, which they believed would help them keep wage rates low. Land speculators and others with investments in the sparsely populated West hoped that many of the immigrants would move into the region and help expand the population, and thus the market for land and goods, there. Political leaders in western states and territories hoped the immigrants would, by swelling their population, also increase the political influence of the region. Wisconsin, for example, permitted foreign-born residents to become voters as soon as they had declared their intention of seeking citizenship and had resided in the state for a year; other western states soon followed its lead. In eastern cities, too, urban political organizations eagerly courted immigrant voters, hoping to enhance their own political strength.

What did the working conditions look like for immigrants in textiles?

Irish workers began to predominate in the New England textile mills as well in the 1840s, and their arrival accelerated the deterioration of working conditions there. There was far less social pressure on owners to provide a decent environment for Irish workers than there had been to provide the same for native women. Employers began paying piece rates (wages tied to how much a worker produced) rather than a daily wage and employed other devices to speed up production and use the labor force more profitably and efficiently. By the mid-1840s, Lowell--once a model for foreign visitors of enlightened industrial development--had become a squalid slum. Similarly miserable working-class neighborhoods were emerging in other northeastern cities. Conditions were still not as bad as in most factory towns in England and Europe, but in almost all industrial areas, factories themselves were becoming large, noisy, unsanitary, and often dangerous places to work. The average workday was extending to twelve, often fourteen hours. Wages were declining, so that even skilled male workers could hope to earn only from $4 to $10 per week, while unskilled laborers were likely to earn only about $1 to $6 per week. Women and children, whatever their skills, also earned less than most men.

What was the social mobility when it came to geographical mobility in the mid-19th century?

It was more extensive in the U.S. than in Europe, where it was considerable. America had a huge expanse of uncultivated land in the West, much of it open for settlement for the first time in the 1840s and 1850s. Some workers saved money, bought land, and moved west to farm it. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner later referred to the availability of western lands as a "safety valve" for discontent, a basic explanation for the relative lack of social conflict in the antebellum U.S. But few urban workers, and even fewer poor ones, could afford to make such a move or had the expertise to know how to work land even if they could. Much more common was the movement of laborers from one industrial town to another. Restless, questing, sometimes hopeful, sometimes despairing, these frequently moving people were often the victims of layoffs, looking for better opportunities elsewhere. Their search may seldom have led to a marked improvement in their circumstances, but the rootlessness of this large segment of the work force--one of the most distressed segments--made effective organization and protest far more difficult.

What were labor conditions like in the early years of the factories in America?

Labor conditions in these early years of the factory system were significantly better than those in English industry, better too than they would ultimately become in much of the U.S. The employment of young children created undeniable hardships. But the misery was not as great as in European factories, since working children in America usually remained under the supervision of their parents. In England, by contrast, asylum authorities often hired out orphans to factory owners who showed little concern for their welfare and kept them in something close to slavery.

What kept America's working class from uniting against their oppressors?

Many factors combined to inhibit the growth of effective labor resistance. Among the most important was the flood of immigrant laborers into the country. The newcomers were usually willing to work for lower wages than native workers. Because they were so numerous, manufacturers had little difficulty replacing disgruntled or striking workers with eager immigrants. Ethic divisions and tensions--both between natives and immigrants and among the various immigrant groups themselves--often led workers to channel their resentments into internal bickering rather than into their shared grievances against employers. There was, too, the sheer strength of the industrial capitalists, who had not only economic but also political and social power and could usually triumph over even the most militant challenges.

What did the middle class diet look like in the mid-19th century?

Middle-class diets were changing rapidly in the antebellum years, and not just because of the wider range of cooking the stove made possible. The expansion and diversification of American agriculture, and the ability of farmers to ship goods to urban markets by rail from distant regions greatly increased the variety of food available in cities. Fruits and vegetables were difficult to ship over long distances in an age with little refrigeration, but families had access to a greater variety of meats, grains, and dairy products than they had had in the past. A few households acquired iceboxes in the years before the Civil War, and the sight of wagons delivering large chunks of ice to wealthy and middle-class homes began to become a familiar part of urban life. Iceboxes allowed their owners to keep fresh meat and dairy products for as long as several days without spoilage. Most families, however, did not yet have any kind of refrigeration. Preserving food for them meant curing generally much heavier and starchier than they are today, and middle-class people tended to be considerably stouter than would be fashionable in the twentieth century.

What did women's education look like in the mid-19th century?

Most women also had much less access to education than men, a situation that survived into the mid-nineteenth century. Although they were encouraged to attend school at the elementary level, they were strongly discouraged--and in most cases effectively barred--from pursuing higher education. Oberlin in Ohio became the first college in America to accept female students; it permitted four to enroll in 1837, despite criticism that coeducation was a rash experiment approximating free love. Oberlin authorities were confident that "the mutual influence of the sexes upon each other is decidedly happy in the cultivation of both mind & manners." But few other institutions shared their views. Coeducation remained extraordinarily rare until long after the Civil War; and only a very few women's colleges--such as Mount Holyoke, founded in Massachusetts by Mary Lyon in 1837--emerged.

How were the life conditions of the working class improving by the mid-nineteenth century?

Much of the relative economic position of American workers may have been declining, the absolute living standard of most laborers was improving. Life, in material terms at least, was usually better for factory workers than it had been on the farms or in the European societies from which they had migrated. They ate better, they were often better clothed and housed, and they had greater access to consumer goods.

Where did people immigrate to in the U.S. during the 1820-1840?

Much of this new European immigration flowed into the rapidly growing cities of the Northeast. But urban growth was a result of substantial internal migration as well. As the agricultural regions of New England and other areas grew less profitable, more and more people picked up stakes and moved--some to more promising agricultural regions in the West, but many to eastern cities. In 1790, one person in thirty had lived in a city (defined as a community of 8,000 or more); in 1820, one in twenty; and in 1840, one in twelve.

What were some new household inventions that came about in the mid-19th century?

New household inventions altered, and greatly improved, the character of life in middle-class homes. Perhaps the most important was the invention of the cast-iron stove, which began to replace fireplaces as the principal vehicle for cooking and also as an important source of heat. These wood- or coal-burning devices were hot, clumsy, and dirty by the standards of the twentieth century; but compared to the inconvenience and danger of cooking on an open hearth, they seemed a great luxury. Stoves gave cooks more control over the preparation of food and allowed them to cook several things at once.

What did the separate culture that women were beginning to occupy in the mid-19th century look like?

Occupying their own "separate sphere," some women began to develop a distinctive female culture. Friendships among women became increasingly intense; women began to form their own social networks (and, ultimately, to form female clubs and associations that were of great importance to the advancement of various reforms). A distinctive feminine literature began to emerge to meet the demands of middle-class women. There were romantic novels (many of them by female writers), which focused on the private sphere that women now inhabited. There were women's magazines, of which the most prominent was Godey's Lady's Book, edited after 1837 by Sarah Hale, who had earlier founded a women's magazine of her own. The magazine scrupulously avoided dealing with public controversies, or political issues and focused instead on fashions, shopping and homemaking advice, and other purely domestic concerns. Politics and religion were inappropriate for the magazine, Hale explained in 1841, because "other subjects are more important for our sex and more proper for our sphere."

How did the distribution of goods change in the early 19th century?

One important change came in the retail distribution of goods, which was becoming increasingly systematic and efficient. In the larger cities, stores specializing in groceries, dry goods, hardware, and other lines appeared, although residents of smaller towns and villages still depended on general stores (stores that did not specialize). In these less populous areas, many people did much of their business by barter.

What was the importance of the creation of interchangeable parts?

One of the principal results of the creation of better machine tools was that the principle of interchangeable parts, which Eli Whitney and Simeon North had tried to introduce into gun factories they had designed decades earlier, now found its way into many industries. Eventually, interchangeability would revolutionize watch and clock making, the manufacturing of locomotives and steam engines, and the making of many farm tools. It would also help make possible such newer devices as bicycles, sewing machines, typewriters, cash registers, and eventually the automobile.

Why did the population increase during the span of time from 1820-1840?

One reason for this substantial population growth was improvements in public health. The number and ferocity of epidemics--which had periodically decimated urban and even rural populations in America--slowly declined, as did the nation's mortality rate as a whole. The population increase was also a result of a high birth rate. In 1840, white women bore an average of 6.14 children each, a decline from the very high rates of the eighteenth century but still substantial enough to produce rapid population increases, particularly since a larger proportion of children could expect to grow to adulthood than had been the case a generation or two earlier. Immigration, chocked off by wars in Europe and economic crises in America, contributed little to the American population in the first three decades of the nineteenth century but rapidly revived beginning in the 1830s. Of the total 1830 population of nearly 13 million, the foreign-born numbered fewer than 500,000. But the number of immigrants climbed by 60,000 in 1832 and nearly 80,000 in 1837. Reduced transportation costs and increasing economic opportunities helped stimulate the immigration boom, as did deteriorating economic conditions in some areas of Europe.

What was the Native American Party and the Know-Nothings?

Out of the tensions and prejudices emerged a number of new secret societies created to combat what nativists had come to call the "alien menace." Most of them originated in the Northeast. Some later spread to the West and even to the South. The first of these, the Native American Association, began agitating against immigration in 1837. In 1845, nativists held a convention in Philadelphia and formed the Native American Party. Many of the nativist groups combined in 1850 to form the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. It endorsed a list of demands that included banning Catholics or the foreign-born from holding public office, more restrictive naturalization laws, and literacy tests for voting. The order adopted a strict code of secrecy, which included the secret password, used in lodges across the country, "I know nothing." Ultimately, members of the movement became known as the "Know-Nothings." Gradually, the Know-Nothings turned their attention to party politics, and after the election of 1852 they created a new political organization that they called the American Party. In the East, the new organization scored an immediate and astonishing success in the elections of 1854; the Know-Nothings cast a large vote in Pennsylvania and New York and won control of the state government in Massachusetts. Elsewhere, the progress of the Know-Nothings was more modest. Western members of the party, because of the presence of many German voters in the area, found it expedient not to oppose naturalized Protestants. After 1854, the strength of the Know-Nothings declined. The Know-Nothing Party's most lasting impact was its contribution to the collapse of the existing party system (organized around the Whig and Democratic parties) and the creation of new national political alignments.

What new roles emerged for women, especially those of middle class, in the mid-19th century?

Reflecting an emerging view of women as guardians of the "domestic virtues." Their role as mothers, entrusted with the nurturing of the young, seemed more central to the family than it had in the past. And their role as wives--as companions and helpers to their husbands--grew more important as well. Middle-class women, no longer producers, now became more important as consumers. They learned to place a high value on keeping a clean, comfortable, and well-appointed home, on entertaining, and dressing elegantly and stylishly.

What led to agricultural specialization?

Rising farm prices around the world provided a strong incentive for these western farmers to engage in commercial agriculture: to concentrate on growing a single crop or raising one type of animal for market. In the early years of white settlement in the Northwest, farm prices rose because of the debilitation of European agriculture in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the growing urban population (and hence the growing demand for food) of industrializing areas of Europe. The Northwest, with good water routes on the Mississippi for getting its crops to oceangoing vessels, profited from this international trade. But industrialization, in both the U.S. and Europe, provided the greatest boost to agriculture. With the growth of factories and cities in the Northeast, the domestic market for farm goods increased dramatically. The growing national and worldwide demand for farm products resulted in steadily rising farm prices. For most farmers, the 1840s and early 1850s were years of increasing prosperity.

How did northeastern farmers respond to the change in agriculture in the mid-19th century?

Some eastern farmers responded to these changes by moving west themselves and establishing new farms. Still others moved to mill towns and became laborers. Some farmers, however, remained on the land and managed to hold their own. As the eastern urban centers increased in population, many farmers turned to the task of supplying food to the cities; they raised vegetables (truck farming) or fruit and sold it in nearby towns. New York, for example, led all other states in apple production. the rise of cities also stimulated the rise of profitable dairy farming. Approximately half the dairy products of the country were produced in the East; most of the rest came from the West, where Ohio was the leading dairy state. Partly because of the expansion of the dairy industry, in the Northeast led other sections in the production of hay. New York was the leading hay state in the nation; Pennsylvania and New England grew large crops as well. The Northeast also exceeded other areas in producing potatoes. But while agriculture in the region remained an important part of the economy, it was steadily becoming less important relative both to the agriculture of the Northwest and to the industrial growth of the Northeast itself. As a result, the rural population in many parts of the Northeast continued to decline.

How did technology advanced in the U.S. in the mid-19th century?

Technology advanced more rapidly in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century than in any other country in the world--partly because Americans were still catching up with the more advanced technologies of Europe and had to move quickly in order to compete; and partly because the American economy was growing so rapidly that the rewards of technological innovation were very great. Change was so rapid, in fact, that some manufacturers built their new machinery out of wood; by the time the wood wore out, they reasoned, improved technology would have made the machine obsolete. By the beginning of the 1830s, American technology had become so advanced--particularly in textile manufacturing--that industrialists in Britain and Europe were beginning to travel to the U.S. to learn new techniques instead of the other way around.

What was life like for the women in the Lowell System?

The Lowell workers lived in clean boardinghouses and dormitories, which the factory owners maintained for them. They were well fed and carefully supervised. Because many New Englanders considered the employment of women to be vaguely immoral, the factory owners placed great emphasis on maintaining a proper environment for their employees, enforcing strict curfews and requiring regular church attendance. Employers quickly dismissed women suspected of immoral conduct. Wages for the Lowell workers were low, but generous by the standards of the time. The women even found time to write and publish a monthly magazine, the Lowell Offering. They now had to spend long days performing tedious, unvarying chores, and that their schedules did not change from week to week or season to season, made the adjustment to factory work especially painful. But however uncomfortable women may have found factory work, they had few other options.

What did democracy look like in the Northwest in the mid-19th century?

The Northwest considered itself the most democratic section of the country. But its democracy was based on a defense of economic freedom and the rights of property--a white, middle-class vision of democracy that was becoming common in many other parts of the country as well. Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois Whig, voiced the economic opinions of many of the people of his section. "I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can," said Lincoln. "Some will get wealthy. I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good...When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor for his whole life."

What new agricultural techniques improved farm production in the mid-19th century in the Northwest?

The Northwest increased production not only by expanding the area of settlement, but also by adopting new agricultural techniques that greatly reduced the labor necessary for producing a crop and slowed the exhaustion of the region's rich soil. Farmers began to cultivate new varieties of seed, notably Mediterranean wheat, which was hardier than the native type; and they imported better breeds of animals, such as hogs and sheep from England and Spain, to take the place of native stock. Most important were improved tools and farm machines, which American inventors and manufacturers produced in rapidly increasing numbers. During the 1840s, more efficient grain drills, harrows, mowers, and hay rakes came into wide use. The cast-iron plow, an earlier innovation remained popular because its parts could be replaced when broken. An even better tool appeared in 1847, when John Deere established at Moline, Illinois, a factory to manufacture steel plows, which were more durable than those made of iron.

What is the significance of the Erie Canal?

The ambitious state governments of the Northeast took the lead in constructing canals. New York was the first to act. It had the natural advantage of a good land route between the Hudson River and Lake Erie through the only real break in the Appalachian chain. But the engineering tasks were still imposing. The distance was more than 350 miles, several times as long as any of the existing canals in America. The route was interrupted by high ridges and a wilderness of woods. After a long public debate over whether the scheme was practical, canal advocates prevailed when De Witt Clinton, a late but ardent convert to the cause, became governor in 1817. Digging began on July 4, 1817. The building of the Erie Canal was the greatest construction project the U.S. had ever undertaken. The canal itself was simple: basically a ditch forty feet wide and four feet deep, with towpaths along the banks. But hundreds of difficult cuts and fills, some of them enormous, were required to enable the canal to pass through hills and over valleys; stone aqueducts were necessary to carry it across streams; and eighty-eight locks, of heavy masonry with great wooden gates, were needed to permit ascents and descents. The Erie Canal was not just an engineering triumph, but an immediate financial success. It opened in October 1825, amid elaborate ceremonies and celebrations, and traffic was soon so heavy that within about seven years tolls had repaid the entire cost of construction. By providing a route to the Great Lakes, the canal gave New York direct access to Chicago and the growing markets of the West. New York could now compete (and increasingly replace) New Orleans as a destination for agricultural goods (particularly wheat) and other products of the West, and as a source for manufactured goods to be sold in the region. The system of water transportation--and the primacy of New York--extended farther when the states of Ohio and Indiana, inspired by the success of the Erie Canal, provided water connections between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. These canals helped connect them by an inland water route all the way to New York, although it was still necessary to transfer cargoes several times between canal, lake, and river craft. One of the immediate results of these new transportation routes was increased white settlement in the Northwest, because canals made it easier for migrants to make the westward journey and to ship their goods back to eastern markets.

How had the agriculture of the U.S. changed by mid-19th century?

The beginnings of an industrial labor supply came instead from the transformation of American agriculture in the nineteenth century. The opening of vast, fertile new farmlands in the Midwest, the improvement of transportation systems, the development of new farm machinery--al combined to increase food production dramatically. New farming methods were also less labor intensive than the old ones; the number of workers required to produce large crops in the West was much smaller than the number required to produce smaller crops in the Northeast. No longer did each region have to feed itself entirely from its own farms; it could import food from other regions. As a result, farmers and their families began to abandon some of the relatively unprofitable farming areas of the East. In the Northeast, and especially in New England, where poor land had always placed harsh limits on farm productivity, rural people began leaving the land to work in the factories.

How did the ties grow between the Northwest and Northeast in the mid-19th century?

The expansion of agricultural markets had profound effects on sectional alignments in the U.S. The Northwest sold most of its products to the residents of the Northeast and was thus dependent on eastern purchasing power. Eastern industry, in turn, found an important market for its products in the prospering West. Between the two sections a strong economic relationship was emerging that was profitable to both--and that was increasing the isolation of the South within the Union.

What did the rapidly expanding middle class look like in the mid-19th century?

The expansion of the middle class was in part a result of the growth of the industrial economy and the increasing commercial life that accompanied it. Economic development opened many more opportunities for people to own or work in businesses, to own shops, to engage in trade, to enter professions, and to administer organizations. In earlier times, when ownership of land had been the only real basis of wealth, society had been divided between people with little or no land (people Europeans generally called peasants) and a landed gentry (which in Europe usually became an inherited aristocracy). Once commerce and industry became a source of wealth, these rigid distinctions broke down; and many people could become prosperous without owning land, but by providing valuable services to the new economy or by owning capital other than land. Middle-class life in the years before the Civil War rapidly established itself as the most influential cultural form of urban America. Middle-class families lived in solid and often substantial homes, which, like the wealthy, they tended to own. Workers and artisans were increasingly becoming renters--a relatively new phenomenon in American cities that spread widely in the early nineteenth century.

What became of the artisans when the industrial revolution grew in America?

The factory system threatened that world with obsolescence. Some artisans made successful transitions into small-scale industry. But others found themselves unable to compete with the new factory-made goods that sold for a fraction of the artisans' prices. In the face of this competition from industrial capitalists, craftsmen began early in the nineteenth century to form organizations--workingmen's political parties and the first American labor unions--to protect their endangered positions and to resist the new economic order.

What was the importance of the telegraph to the railroad industry?

The magnetic telegraph. Telegraph lines extended along the tracks, connecting one station with another and aiding the scheduling and routing of trains. BUt the telegraph had an importance to the nation's economic development beyond its contribution to the railroads. On the one hand, it permitted instant communication between distant cities, tying the nation together as never before. On the other hand, it helped reinforce the schism between the North and South. Like railroads, telegraph lines were far more extensive in the North than in the South, and they helped similarly to link the North to the Northwest (and thus to separate the Northwest further from the South).

What did the earliest American railroads look like?

The first company to begin actual operations was the Baltimore and Ohio, which opened a thirteen-mile stretch of track in 1830. In New York, the Mohawk and Hudson began running trains along the sixteen miles between Schenectady and Albany in 1831. By 1836, more than a thousand miles of track had been laid in eleven states. But there was not yet a true railroad system. Even the longest of the lines was comparatively short in the 1830s, and most of them served simply to connect water routes, not to link one railroad to another. Even when two lines did connect, the tracks often differed in gauge (width), so that cars from one line often could not fit onto the tracks of another. Schedules were erratic, and wrecks were frequent. But railroads made some important advances in the 1830s and 1840s. The introduction of heavier iron rails improved the roadbeds. Steam locomotives became more flexible and powerful. Redesigned passenger cars became stabler, more comfortable, and larger.

How did the U.S. government help make advances in industry during the mid-18th century?

The government supported much of the research and development of machine tools, often in connection with supplying the military. For example, a government armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, developed two important tools--the turret lathe (used for cutting screws and other metal parts) and the universal milling machine (which replaced the hand chiseling of complicated parts and dies)--early in the nineteenth century. The precision grinding machine (which became critical to, among other things, the construction of sewing machines) was designed in the 1850s to help the U.S. Army produce standardized rifle parts.

How did Irish and German patterns of settlement in the U.S. differ?

The great majority of the Irish settled in the eastern cities, where they swelled the ranks of unskilled labor. Most Germans moved on to the Northwest, where they became farmers or went into business in the western towns. One reason for the difference was wealth: German immigrants generally arrived with at least some money; the Irish had practically none. Another important reason was gender. Most German immigrants were members of family groups or were single men, for whom movement to the agricultural frontier was both possible and attractive. Many Irish immigrants were young, single women, for whom movement west was much less plausible. They were more likely to stay in the eastern cities, where factory and domestic work was available

What were the pros and cons of steamboats?

The larger rivers, especially the Mississippi and the Ohio, had been important transportation routes for years. And these rivers had become vastly more important by the 1820s, as steamboats grew in number and improved in design. The new riverboats carried the corn and wheat of north-western farmers and the cotton and tobacco of south-western planters to New Orleans in a fraction of the time of the old barges. From New Orleans, oceangoing ships took the cargoes on to eastern ports. Steamboats also developed a significant passenger traffic, and companies built increasingly lavish vessels to compete for this lucrative trade(even though most passengers could not afford the luxurious amenities and slept in the hold or on the deck.) But neither the farmers of the West nor the merchants of the East were wholly satisfied with this pattern of trade. Farmers would pay less to transport their goods (and eastern consumers would pay less to consume them) if they could ship them directly eastward to market, rather than by the roundabout river-sea quantities of their manufactured goods if they could transport their merchandise more directly and economically to the West. New highways across the mountains provided a partial solution to the problem. But the costs of hauling goods overland, although lower than before, were still too high for anything except the most compact and valuable merchandise. The thoughts of some merchants and entrepreneurs began, therefore, to turn to an alternative: canals.

What did corporate organization look like in the mid-19th century?

The merchant capitalist--entrepreneurs who were engaged primarily in foreign and domestic trade and who at times invested some of their profits in small-scale manufacturing ventures--remained figures of importance in the 1840s. But merchant capitalism was declining by the middle of the century. This was partly because British competitors were stealing much of America's export trade. But the more important reason for the decline was the discovery by the merchants themselves that there were greater opportunities for profit in manufacturing than in trade. That was one reason why industries developed first in the Northeast: an affluent merchant class already existed there and had the money and the will to finance them. By the 1840s, the corporate form of organization was spreading rapidly, particularly in the textile industry. Ownership of American enterprise was gradually moving away from individuals and families and toward its highly dispersed modern form: many stockholders, each owning a relatively small proportion of the total. But whatever the form of business organization--and there continued to be many different forms--industrial capitalists soon became the new ruling class, the aristocrats of the Northeast, with far-reaching economic and political influence.

What lead to the downfall of the Lowell System?

The paternalistic factory system of Lowell did not, in any case, survive for long. In the competitive textile market as it developed in the 1830s and 1840s--a market prey to the booms and busts that afflicted the American economy as a whole--manufacturers found it difficult to maintain the high living standards and reasonably attractive working conditions with which they had begun. Wages declined; the hours of work lengthened; the conditions of the boardinghouses deteriorated as the buildings decayed and overcrowding increased. In 1834, mill workers in Lowell organized a union--the Factory Girls Association--which staged a strike to protest a 25 percent wage cut. Two years later, the association struck again--against a rent increase in the boardinghouses. Both strikes failed, and a recession in 1837 virtually destroyed the organization. Eight years later the Lowell women, led by the militant Sarah Bagley, created the Female Labor Reform Association and began agitating for a ten-hour day and for improvements in conditions in the mills. The new association not only made demands of management; it also turned to state government and asked for legislative investigation of conditions in the mills. By then, however, the character of the factory work force was changing again. The mill girls were gradually moving into other occupation: teaching, domestic service, or marriage. And textile manufacturers were turning to a less contentious labor supply: immigrants.

What migration was taking place within the U.S. during the 1850s and 1860s?

The population had rose more than a third--from 23 million to over 31 million--in the decade of the 1850s alone. By 1860, the American population was larger than Britain's and quickly approaching that of France and Germany. Urban growth was also a result of the continuing, indeed increasing, flow of people into cities from the farms of the Northeast, which continued to decline because of the competition from Europe and the American West (and because of the relative disadvantages of their own soil).

How had the American Population increased between 1820-1840?

The population was increasing rapidly; much of it was moving from the countryside into the industrializing cities of the Northeast and Northwest; and much of it was migrating westward. The American population had stood at only 4 million in 1790. By 1820, it had reached 10 million; by 1830, nearly 13 million; and by 1840, 17 million. The U.S. was growing much more rapidly in population than Britain or Europe.

Why did much of the farming in northeastern America shift to the northwestern section in the mid-19 century?

The story of agriculture in the Northeast after 1840 is one of decline and transformation. The reason for the decline was simple: the farmers of the section could no longer compete with the new and richer soil of the Northwest. Centers of production were gradually shifting westward for many of the farm goods that had in the past been most important to northeastern agriculture: wheat, corn, grapes, cattle, sheep, and hogs.

What did life look like in an urban household in the mid-19th century?

The urban household itself became less important as a center of production. Instead, most income earners left home each day to work elsewhere. A sharp distinction began to emerge between the public world of the workplace--the world of commerce and industry--and the private world of the family. The world of the family was now dominated not by production, but by housekeeping, child rearing, and other primarily domestic concerns It was also a world dominated by women.

What were the views of those who opposed the rise in immigration?

Their fears led to the rise of what is known as "nativism," a defense of native-born people and a hostility to the foreign-born, usually combined with a desire to stop or slow immigration. The emerging nativism took many forms. Some of it was a result of simple racism. Many nativists (conveniently overlooking their own immigrant heritage) argued that the new immigrants were inherently inferior to older-stock Americans. Some viewed them with the same contempt and prejudice--and the same low estimate of their potential abilities--with which they viewed African Americans. Many nativists avoided racist arguments but argued nevertheless that the newcomers were socially unfit to live alongside people of older stock, that they did not bring with them sufficient standards of civilization. Evidence for that, they claimed, was the wretched urban and sometimes rural slums in which they lived. Others--especially workers--complained that because foreigners were willing to work for low wages, they were stealing jobs from the native labor force. Protestants, observing the success of Irish Catholics in establishing footholds in urban politics, warned that the church of Rome was gaining a foothold in American government. Whig politicians were outraged because so many of the newcomers voted Democratic. Others complained that the immigrants corrupted politics by selling their votes. Many older-stock Americans of both parties feared that immigrants would bring new, radical ideas into national life.

What had become of the wealthy class by the mid-nineteenth century?

There had been wealthy classes in America almost from the beginning of European settlement. But the extent and character of wealth was changing in response to the commercial revolution of the mid-nineteenth century. Merchants and industrialists were accumulating enormous fortunes; and because there was now a significant number of rich people living in cities, a distinctive culture of wealth began to emerge. In large cities people of great wealth gathered together in neighborhoods of astonishing opulence. They founded clubs and developed elaborate social rituals. They looked increasingly for ways to display their wealth--in the great mansions they built, the showy carriages in which they rode, the lavish household goods they accumulated, the clothes they wore, the elegant social establishments they patronized. New York, which had more wealthy families than anywhere else, developed a particularly elaborate high society. The construction of the city's great Central Park, which began in the 1850s, was in part a result of pressure from the members of high society, who wanted an elegant setting for their daily carriage rides.

How did people in the mid-nineteenth century have more social mobility than before?

There was also a significant amount of mobility within the working class, which helped to limit discontent. Opportunities for social mobility, for working one's way up the economic ladder, were relatively modest. A few workers did manage to move from poverty to riches by dint of work, ingenuity, and luck--a very small number, but enough to support the dreams of those who watched them. And a much larger number of workers managed to move at least one notch up the ladder--for example, becoming in the course of a lifetime a skilled, rather than an unskilled, laborer. Such people could envision their children and grandchildren moving up even further.

What were the lives of the poor like in the mid-19th century?

There was also a significant population of genuinely destitute people emerging in the growing urban centers of the nation. These were people who were not merely poor, in the sense of having to struggle to sustain themselves--most Americans were poor in that sense. They were almost entirely without resources, often, homeless, dependent on charity or crime or both for survival. Substantial numbers of people actually starved to death or died of exposure. Some of these "paupers," as contemporaries called them, were recent immigrants who had failed to find work or to adjust to life in the New World. Some were widows and orphan, stripped of the family structures that allowed most working-class Americans to survive. Some were people suffering from alcoholism or mental illness, unable to work. Others were victims of native prejudice--barred from all but the most menial employment because of race or ethnicity. The Irish were particular victims of such prejudice. Among the worst victims were free blacks. African-American communities in antebellum northern cities were small by later standards, but most major urban areas had significant black populations. Some of these African Americans were descendants of families that had lived in the North for generations. Others were former slaves who had escaped from the South or been released by their masters or had bought their freedom; some former slaves, once free then worked to buy the freedom of relatives left behind. In material terms, at least, life was not always much better for them in the North than it had been in slavery. Most had access only to very menial jobs, which usually paid too little to allow workers to support their families or educate their children; in bad times many had access to no jobs at all. In most parts of the North, blacks could not vote, could not attend public schools, indeed could not use any of the public services available to white residents. Most blacks preferred life in the North, however arduous, to life in the South because it permitted them at least some level of freedom. But that freedom did not bring anything approaching equality.

What events did people spectate in the mid-19th century?

There was also a vigorous culture of public leisure, even if many families had to struggle to find time or means to participate in it. In larger cities, theaters were becoming increasingly popular, and while some of them catered to particular social groups, others attracted audience that crossed class lines. Wealthy people, middle-class people, workers and their families: could all sometimes be found watching a performance of Shakespeare or a melodrama based on a popular novel or an American myth. Minstrel shows--in which white actors mimicked(and ridiculed) African-American culture--became increasingly popular. Public sporting events--boxing, horse racing, cockfighting (already becoming controversial), and others--often attracted considerable crowds. Baseball--not yet organized into professional leagues--was beginning to attract large crowds when played in city parks or fields on the edges of towns. A particularly exciting event in many communities was the arrival of the circus--a traveling entertainment with roots in the middle ages that continued to entertain, delight, and bamboozle children and adults alike.

How was the Northwest industrializing during the mid-19th century?

There was some industry in the states of the Northwest, more than in the South; and in the two decades before the Civil War, the section experienced steady industrial growth. By 1860, it had 36,785 manufacturing establishments employing 209,909 workers. There was a flourishing industrial and commercial area along the shore of Lake Erie, with Cleveland at its center. Another manufacturing region was the Ohio River valley; the meatpacking city of Cincinnati was its nucleus. Farther west, the rising city of Chicago, destined to become the great metropolis of the section, was emerging as the national center of the agricultural machinery and meatpacking industries. Most of the major industrial activities of the West either served agriculture, or relied on agricultural products. As this suggests, industry, was on the whole, much less important in the Northwest than farming.

What countries were immigrants to the U.S. from in the mid-19th century?

They came from many different countries and regions: England, France, Italy, Scandinavia, Poland, and Holland. But the overwhelming majority came from Ireland and Germany. In 1850, the Irish constituted approximately 45 percent and the Germans over 20 percent of the foreign-born in America. By 1860, there were more than 1.5 million Irish-born and approximately 1 million German-born people in the U.S.

What conditions did immigrants work in when it came it working on turnpikes, canals, and railroads?

the rapidly increasing supply of immigrant workers after 1840 was a boon to manufacturers and other entrepreneurs. At last they had access to a source of labor that was both large and inexpensive. These new workers, because of their vast numbers and their unfamiliarity with their new country, had even less leverage than the women they at times displaced. As a result, they often encountered far worse working conditions. Constrution gangs, made up increasingly of Irish immigrants, performed the heavy, unskilled work on turnpikes, canals, and railroads under often intolerable conditions. Because most of these workers had no marketable skills and because of native prejudice against them, they received wages so low (and so intermittently, since the work was seasonal and uncertain) that they generally did not earn enough to support their families in even minimal comfort. Many of them lived in flimsy shanties, in grim condition that endangered the health of their families (and reinforced native prejudices toward the "shanty Irish").