History Test 3 Chapter 9
The cotton kingdom continued
After the war of 1812, the federal government moved to consolidate American control over the deep south, tossing defeated Indians to cede land, Encouraging white settlement, and acquiring Florida. Settlers from the older southern states flooded into the region. Planters monopolized the most fertile land, worries poor farmers were generally confined to less productive and less accessible areas in the Hill country and Pineywoods. After Congress prohibited the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, a massive trade in slaves developed within the United States, applying labor force required by the new cotton kingdom. Slave trading became a well organized Business, with firms gathering slaves in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina and shipping them to markets in mobile, Natchez, and New Orleans. Slave coffles which were groups chained to one another on forced marches to the lower south became a common site. Indeed, stories estimated that around 1 million slaves were shifted from the older slave states to the lower south between 1818 and 1860. The source of greater freedom for many whites, the westward movement meant to African-Americans the distraction of family ties, break up of long-standing communities, and receiving opportunities for liberty. In 1793 when Whitney designed his invention, the United States produce 5,000,000 pounds of cotton. By 1820 the crop had grown to nearly 170,000,000 pounds.
The early labor movement
Although many Americans welcome to the market revolution, others felt threatened by its consequences. Surviving members of the revolutionary generation fear that the obsession with personal economic gain was undermining devotion to the public good. Many Americans experience the market revolution not as an enhancement of the power to shape their own lives, but as a loss of freedom . The. Between the war of 1812 and 1840 witnessed a sharp economic downturn in 1819, And numerous ups and downs in between, during which employment was irregular and numerous businesses failed. The economic transformation significantly widen the gap between wealthy merchants and industrialist on the one hand and impoverished factory workers, unskilled docworkers , And seamstresses laboring at home. In Massachusetts, the most industrialized state in the country, the richest 5% of the population owned more than half the wealth. Alarmed at the erosion of traditional skills and the threat of being reduced to the status of dependent wage earners, skilled craftsmen in the late 1820s created the worlds first workingman's party, short-lived political organization that site to mobilize lower class support for candidates who would press for free public education, an end to imprisonment for debt, and legislation limiting work to 10 hours per day. In the 1830s a time of rapidly rising prices, union organizations spread and strikes became commonplace. Along with demands for higher wages and shorter hours, thoroughly labor movement called for free homesteads for settlers on public land and an end to the imprisonment of union leaders for conspiracy.
The mill girls
Although some factories employed entire families the early New England textile mills Relied largely on female and child labor. At lowell , The most famous center of early textile manufacturing, young unmarried women from Yankee farm families dominated the workforce that tended to spinning machines. To persuade parents to allow their daughters to leave home to work in the Mills, lowell owners set up boarding houses with strict rules regulating personal behavior. They also establish lecture halls and churches to occupy the women's free time. This was the first time in history that large numbers of women left their homes to participate in the public world. Many mill girls complained about low wages and long hours. Others value the opportunity to earn money independently at a time when few other jobs were open to women. But these women did not become a permanent class of factory workers, they typically remained in the factory for only a few years, after what they left to return home, marry or move west.
The cotton kingdom
Although the market revolution and westward expansion occurred stimulus Lee in the north and the south, their combined affects heightened donation sectional divisions. In someways the most dynamic feature of the American economy in the first 30 years of the 19th century was the rise of the cotton kingdom. The early industrial revolution, which began in England and soon spread to parts of the north, centered on factories producing cotton textiles with water powered spinning and weaving machinery. These factories generated an immense demand for cotton, a crop the lower south was particularly suited to growing because of its climate and soil fertility. Until 1793 the marketing of cotton had been slowed by the laborious task of removing seeds from the plant itself. But in that year, Eli Whitney, Yale graduate working in Georgia as a private theater, invented the Cottongin. A fairly simple device consisting of rollers and brushes, the gin quickly separated the seed from the cotton . Coupled with rising demand for cotton in the opening of new lands in the west, Whitney's invention revolutionized American slavery, and institution that many Americans had expected to die out because its major crop, tobacco, exhaust of the soil.
The transformation of law
American law increasingly supported the efforts of entrepreneurs to participate in the market revolution, while shielding them from interference by local government and liability for some of The less desirable results of economic growth. The corporate form of business organization became central to the new market economy. The corporate firm enjoys special privileges and powers granted In a charter from the government, among them that investors and directors are not personally liable for the companies debts. Unlike companies owned by an individual, family, or limited partnership, in other words, corporation can feel without ruining it's Director in stockholders. Many Americans distrusted corporate charters as a form of government granted special privilege. But the court upheld their validity, while opposing efforts by established firms to limit competitions from newcomers. In Dartmouth College versus Woodward in 1819, John Marshall's Supreme Court define corporate charters issued by state legislatures as contracts, which feature lawmakers could not alter or rescind. Five years later, and gibbons versus Arjun, the court struck down in monopoly of the New York legislature had granted for steamboat navigation. And in 1837, with Roger B Taney now the chief justice, the court ruled the Massachusetts legislature did not infringe the charter of an existing company that had constructed a bridge over the Charles river when empowered a second company to build a competing bridge . The community, Taney declared, had a legitimate interest in promoting transportation and prosperity.
The limits of prosperity Liberty and prosperity
As the market revolution progressed, the right to compete for economic advancement became a touchstone of American freedom. Americans celebrated the opportunities open to the self-made man, a term that came into use at the time. According to this idea, those who achieved success in America did so not as a result of hereditary privilege or government favoritism as in Europe, but through their own intelligence and hard work. Market revolution in Riched numerous bankers, merchants, industrialists, and planters. Produce a new middle class an army of clerks, accountants, and other office employees who staffed businesses in Boston, New York, and elsewhere. I create a new opportunities for farmers who profited from the growing demand at home and abroad for American agricultural products, and for skills craftsman such as Thomas Rogers, a machine builder who established a successful loco motive factory in Paterson, New Jersey. New opportunities for talented men opened in professions such as law, medicine, and teaching. But the early 1820s, there were An estimated 10,000 physicians in the United States.
An international border in
Before the war of 1812, the old northwest was a prime example of borderland, meeting around of native Americans and various people of English, French, and American dissent, where cultural boundaries remain unstable and political authority uncertain. American victory over the British and Indians erased any doubt over he will control the region. But I need you, internal borderland region quickly developed. Because the northwest ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the old northwest, the Ohio river came to mark a boundary between free and slave societies. But for many years it was easier for people and goods to travel between the slave state Kentucky and the southern counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois then to the northern part of those states. The region stretching NorthWord from the Ohio river retain much of the cultural flavor of the upper south. It's food, speech, settlement patterns, family ties, and economic relations had more in common with Kentucky and Tennessee then with the northern counties of their own states, soon to be settled by New Englanders. Until the 1850s, farmers in the south counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were far from likely to ship their products south word Vienna Ohio and Mississippi rivers the north word to the east. The large concentration of people of southern ancestry would make Indiana and Illinois keep a little ground as a slavery controversy developed.
The liberty of living
But over and above the specific issues workers language of protest Drew and older ideas of freedom link to economic autonomy, public spirited virtue, and social equality.
The free individual
By the 1830s the market revolution and westward expansion had produced a society that amazed European visitors; energetic, materialistic, and seemingly in constant motion. Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by Americans restless energy and apparent lack of attachment to place. No sooner do you set foot on American soil, he observed then you find yourself in a sort of tumult. All around you, everything is on the move.
Railroads and the telegraph
Canals connected existing waterways. The railroad opened vast new areas of the American interior to settlement, while stimulating the mining of coal for fuel and the manufacture of iron for locomotives and rails. Work on the Baltimore and Ohio, the nations first commercial railroad, began in 1828. By 8060, the railroad network had grown to 30,000 miles, more than the total in the rest of the world combined. At The same time the telegraph made possible instantaneous communication throughout the nation. The device was invented during the 1830s by Samuel FB Morse, and artist and amateur scientist living in New York City, and was put into commercial operation in 1844. Within 16 years, some 50,000 miles of telegraph wire has been strong. Initially the telegraph was a service for businesses, and especially newspapers, rather than individuals. It helps speed the flow of information and brought uniformity to prices throughout the country.
The growth of immigration
Economic expansion fueled a demand for labor, which was met, in part, by increased immigration from abroad. Between 1790 and 1830, immigrants contributed only marginally to American population growth. But between 1840 and 1860/4,000,000 more than the entire population in 1790, entered the United States, the majority from Ireland and Germany. About 90% headed for the northern states, we're job opportunities were most abundant and the new arrivals would not have to compete with slave labor. In 1860, the 814,000 residents of New York City, the major port of entry, including more than 384,000 immigrants, and 1/3 of the population of Wisconsin was foreign born. Numerous factors inspired the massive flow A population across the Atlantic. In Europe, modernization of agriculture and the industrial nerve Aleutian disrupted centuries-old patterns of life, pushing peasants off the land and eliminating the jobs of traditional craft workers. The introduction of oceangoing steamship and the railroad made long distant travel more practical. Moreover, America's political and religious freedoms attracted Europeans, including political refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848, who chafed Under the continents repressive government and rigid social hierarchies.
Introductory paragraph continued
Even as Lafayette, tocqueville , And numerous other visitors from abroad toward the United States, however, Americans understandings of freedom or changing. Three historical processes unleashed by the revolution accelerated after the war of 1812; the spread of market relations, the westward movement of the population and the rise of vigorous political democracy. The first two will be discussed in this chapter the third in chapter 10. I'll help to reshape the idea freedom identifying it ever more closely with economic opportunity, physical mobility, and participation in a vibrantly democratic political system. But American freedom also continued to be shaped by the presence of slavery. Lafayette, who had purchased a plantation in west Indies and freed its slaves, one through I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery. Yes slavery was moving westward with the younger republic. Half a century after the winning of independence, the coexistence of liberty and slavery, and are simultaneous expansion, remain the central contradiction of American life.
The awakening impact
Even more than its predecessor of several decades later, the great awakening stress the right of private judgment in spiritual matters and the possibility of universal salvation through faith and good works. Every person, Finney he insisted was a moral free agent that is, a person free to choose between Christian life and sin. Revivalist ministers seize opportunities offered by the market revolution to spreader message. They raise funds, embarked on lengthy preaching Tours by canal, steam boats, and railroads, and flooded the country with mass produced, in expensive religious tracts. The revivals opening of religion to mass participation and their message that ordinary Americans should shape their own spiritual destiny's resonated with the spread of market values. To be sure, evangelical preachers can hardly be described as cheerleaders for a market Society. They regularly railed against greed and indifference to the welfare of others as a sin. Yet the revivals thrived in areas caught up in the rapid expansion of the market economy, such as the region of upstate New York along the path of the Erie canal. Most of finneys converts here came from the commercial and professional classes. Evangelical ministers promoted what might be called a controlled individualism as the essence of freedom. In stressing the importance of industry, sobriety, and self-discipline as examples of freely chosen moral behavior, Evangelical preachers Promoted the very qualities necessary for success in a market culture.
The growth of cities
From the beginning, cities form part of the western frontier Cincinnati was known as porkopolis comma after it's slaughterhouse, we are hundreds of thousands of pigs were butchered each year and processed for shipment to eastern consumers of meat. The greatest of all the western cities was Chicago. In the early 1830s, it was a tiny settlement on the shore of Lake Michigan. By 1860 thanks to the railroad, Chicago had become the nation's fourth largest city, where farm products from throughout the Northwest were gathered to be sent east. Like rural areas, Arben centers witnessed dramatic changes due to the market revolution. Urban merchants, bankers, and master craftsman took it vantage of the economic opportunities created by the expanding market among commercial farmers. The drive among these businessman to increase production and reduce labor cost fundamentally alter the nature of work. Traditionally, skilled artisans had manufactured goods at home, where they control the pace and intensity of their own labor. Now, entrepreneurs gathered artisans into large workshops in order to oversee their work and subdivide their tasks. Craftsman who traditionally produced an entire pair of shoes or piece of furniture so the labor process broken down into numerous steps required for less skill and training. They found themselves subjected to constant supervision by their employers and relentless pressure for a greater output in lower wages.
The rise of the west
Improvements in transportation and communication made possible the rise of the west as a powerful, self-conscious region of the new nation. Between 1790 and 1840, some 4.5 million people across the Appalachian mountains more than the entire US population at the time of Washington's first inauguration. Most of the migration took place after the war of 1812 which unleashed a flood of land hungry settlers moving from eastern states. In the six years following the end of the war in 1815, 60 states enter the union Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, and Maine, The last in eastern frontier for New England. Few Americans moved west as Lone pioneers. More frequently, people traveled in groups and once they arrived in the west, cooperated with each other to clear land, built houses and barns, and established communities. One stream of migration, including both small farmers and planters with their slaves, flowed out of the South to create a gnu cotton kingdom of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and our Kansas. Many farm families from the upper south crossed into southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The third population stream moved from New England across New York to the upper Northwest northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and Michigan and Wisconsin.
Introductory paragraph
In 1824 the Marquis de Lafayette visited the United States. Nearly 50 years have passed since, as a youth of 20, the French nobleman fought at Washington side in the war of independence. Since 1784, when he last journey to the United States, the nations population had tripled to nearly 12,000,000, its land area had more than doubled, and its political institutions had thrived. The 13 states of 1784 had grown to 24 and Lafayette day visited every one. He traveled up the Mississippi and Ohio river by steamboat, A recent invention that was helping to bring economic development to the trans Appalachian west, and crossed upstate New York via the Erie Canel, the worlds longest man-made waterway, which like the region around the great lakes with the Atlantic coast via the Hudson River. Americans in the first half of the 19th century were fond of describing Liberty as a defining quality of their new nation, the unique genius of its institutions. Likeness of the goddess of liberty, a familiar figure in 18 century British visual imagery, became even more common in the United States, appearing in paintings and sculptures and on folk art from weather vanes to quilts and tavern signs. In democracy in America, the front historian and politician Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the holy colt of freedom he encountered on his own visit to the United States during the early 1830s. For 50 years, he wrote the inhabitants of the United States have been repeatedly and constantly told that they are the only religious, invited, and free people. They have an immensely high opinion of themselves and are not far from believing that they form a species apart from the rest of human race.
The transcendentalists continued
In his own life, thoreau, illustrated Emerson's point about the primacy of individual conscience in matters political, social and personal, and the need to find one's own way rather than following the crowd. Thoreau became persuaded that modern societies stifled individual judgment by making men tools of their tools, trapped in stultifying jobs by their obsession with acquiring wealth. Even in this comparatively free country. He wrote, most persons were so preoccupied with material things that they had no time to contemplate the beauties of nature. To escape this fate, thoreau retreated for two years to a cabin on Walden pond near Concorde, where he could enjoy the freedom of isolation from the economical and moral Tairney he believed ruled American society. He subsequently published Walden in 1854, an account of his experiences and critique of how the market revolution was, in his opinion, degrading both Americans values and natural environment. An area that had been covered with dense forest in his youth, he observed, I've been so transformed by wood cutters and farmers that it was almost completely devoid of trees and wild animals. Thoreau appeal to Americans to simplify their lives rather than become obsessed with the accumulations of wealth. Genuine freedom he insisted, lay within.
Commercial farmers
In north, however, the market revolution in westward expansion certain motion changes that transform the region into an integrated economy of commercial farms and manufacturing cities. As old Northwest became a more settled society, bound by a web of transportation in credit to eastern centers of commerce and banking, farmers on themselves drawn into the new market economy. They increasingly concentrated on growing Crops and raising livestock for sale, while purchasing at stores goods previously produced at home. Western farmers found in the growing cities of the east market for their produce and a source of credit. Loans originating with eastern banks and insurance companies financed the acquisition of land and supplies and, in the 1840s and 1850s, the purchase of fertilizer in new agricultural machinery to expand production. The steel plow, invented by John Deere in 1837 and mass produced by the 1850s, made possible in the rapid subduing of the western prairies. The reaper, a horse drawn machine that greatly increase the amount of wheat a farmer could harvest, was invented by Cyrus McCormick in 1831 and produced in large quantities soon after. Eastern farmers, unable to grow wheat and corn as cheaply as their western counterparts, increasingly concentrated on producing dairy products, fruits, and vegetables for nearby urban centers.
The factory system
In some industries, most notably textiles, the factories superseded traditional craft production all together. Factories gathered large groups of workers under central supervision and replace handles with power driven machinery. Samuel Slater, an immigrant from England, established America's first factory in 1790 at pawtucket, Rhode Island. Since British law made it illegal to explore the plans for industrial machinery. Slater, skilled mechanic built for memory a power driven spinning Jenny, one of the key mansions of the early industrial revolution. Spinning factories such as leaders produced yarn, which was then sent to traditional land loom weavers inform families to be woven into clothes. This at work system, in which rural men and women earn money By taking in jobs from factories, typified early industrialization. Eventually, however, the entire manufacturing process and textiles, shoes, and many other products was brought under a single factory roof. The Cut off of British imports because of the embargo of 1807 and the war of 1812 stimulated the establishment of the first large scale American factory utilizing power looms for weaving cotton cloth. This was constructed in 1814 at Waltham, Massachusetts, by a group of merchants two came to be called the Boston associates. In the 1820s, they expanded their enterprise by creating an entirely new factory town incorporated out of the city of Lowell in 1836 on the Merrimack River, 27 miles from Boston. Here they built a group of modern textile factories that brought together all the phases of production from spinning to thread to the weaving and finishing of cloth.
The Rise of Nativism continued
In the eyes of protestants, the newly assertive activities of the Catholic Church raised a gnu the question of national identity, the question, who is an American, and its close relative, what kinds of immigrants should the country welcome. Catholicism, they fear threatened American institutions and American freedom. 1834, Lyman Beecher, prominent Presbyterian minister and father of the religious leader Henry Ward Beecher and the writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Beecher, delivered a sermon in Boston, soon published Aza plea for the west. Preacher warned that Catholics were seeking to dominate the American west, where the future of Khushi in the in the world would be worked out. His sermon inspired mom to burn a Catholic convent in the city Irish influx of the 1840s and 1850s thoroughly alarmed many native born Americans. Those who fear the impact of immigration on American political and social life are called nativists. They blamed immigrants for urban crime, political corruption, and fondness for intoxicating liquor, and accuse them of undercutting native born skilled laborers bye working for starvation wages. Stereotypes similar to those directed at blacks florist regarding the Irish as well, seen as childlike, lazy, and slaves of their passions, they were sad to be unsealed for Republican freedom. Nativism will not become a national political movement until the 1850s, as we Will see in chapter 13. But in the 1840s, nativism found expression both in the streets and at the ballot box. New York City and Philadelphia witnessed violent anti-immigrant, anti-catholic riots.
A new economy
In the first half of the 19th century, an economic transformation no the historians of the market revolution swept over the United States. Its catalyst was a series of innovations in transportation and communication. The market revolution was an acceleration of developments already underway in the colonial era. As noted in previous chapters, southern planters were selling the products of slave labor in the international market as early as a 17 century. By the 18th, many colonist had been drawn into Britain's commercial empire. Consumer goods like sugar and tea and market oriented tactics like the boycott of British goods had been central to the political battles leading up to independence. Nonetheless As Americans moved across the Appalachian mountains and into interior regions of the states along the Atlantic coast. They found themselves more and more isolated from markets. In 1800, American farm families produced at home most of what they needed, from clothing to farm implements. What they cannot make themselves, they obtain by bartering with their neighbors are purchasing from local stores and from rural craftsman like blacksmiths and shoemakers. Those farmers not located near cities or navigable waterway is found it almost impossible to market their produce. Many Americans devoted their energies into solving the technological problems that inhibited commerce within the country.
Roads and steamboats
In the first half of the 19th century, in rapid succession, the steamboat, canal, railroad, and telegraph wrenched America out of its economic past. These innovations opened New anti-settlement, lowered transportation costs, and made it far easier for economic enterprise to sell their products. They linked farmers to national and world markets and made the major consumers of manufactured goods. Americans, wrote Tocqueville, Had annihilated space and time. In 1806 Congress authorize the construction of the paved national road from Cumberland, Maryland, to the old northwest . It reached Wheeling, on the Ohio river , In 1818 and by 1838 extended to Illinois, where it ended. But it was improved water transportation that most dramatically increase the speed and lowered the expense of commerce. Robert Fulton, I Pennsylvania born artist and engineer, had experimented with steamboat designs while living in France during the 1790s. But not until 1807, when Fultons ship the Clermont navigated Hudson River from New York City to Albany, was the steamboats technological and commercial feasibility demonstrated. The invention made possible upstream commerce that is, travel against the current, on the countries major rivers as well as rapid transfer across the great lakes and eventually the Atlantic ocean. By 1811, the first steamboat had been introduced on the Mississippi River; 20 years later some 200 plied its waters.
The emergence of mormonism
Mormonism emerged in the center of the great awakening, upstate New York . The church founded by Smith shared some features with other Christian denominations including a focus on the family and community as the basis of social order and a rejection of alcohol. Gradually, however, Smith began to receive visions that led to more controversial doctrines, notably polygamy, which allows one man to have more than one wife. By the end of his life, Smith had married know if you were than 30 women. Along with the absolute authority Smith exercised over his followers, this doctrine outraged the Mormons neighbors. Mobster of Smith and his followers out of New York, Ohio, and Missouri before they settled in 1839 in Nauvoo, Illinois. There, five years later, Smith was arrested on the charge of inciting a riot that destroyed an anti-Mormon newspaper. While in jail awaiting trial, Smith was murdered by a group of intruders. In 1847, his successor as Mormon leader , Brigham young, lead more than 2000 followers across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains to shores of the great Salt Lake in present day Utah, by 1852, the number of Mormons in various settlements in Utah reach 16,000. The Mormons experience revealed the limits of religious toleration in 19 century America but also the opportunities offered by religious pluralism. Today, Mormons can situate the fourth largest church in the United States, and the book of Mormon has been translated into over 100 languages.
Women and work
Prevailing ideas concerning gender bore little relations to the experience of those women who worked for wages at least sometime in their lives. They did so despite severe disadvantages. Women cannot compete really for employment, since only low paying jobs were available to them. Married women still cannot sign independent contracts or sue in their own names, and not until after the Civil War did they, not their husbands, control the wages they earned. Nonetheless, for poor city dwellers and farm families, the labor of all family members was essential to economic survival. Thousands of poor women found jobs as domestic servants, factory workers, and seamstresses. For The expanding middle class, however it became a badge of respectability for wives to remain at home, outside the disorderly new market economy, while husbands conducted business in their offices, Shops, and factories. In larger cities, where families of different social classes had previously lived alongside one another, fashionable middle class neighborhoods populated by merchants, factory owners, and professionals like lawyers and doctors begin to develop. Work in middle-class homes was done by domestic servants, the largest employment category for women in 19th century America. The freedom of the middle-class women defined in part as freedom from labor arrested on the employment of other women within her household. Even though most women were anything but idle , In a market economy where labor increasingly meant work that created monetary value, it became more and more difficult to think of labor as encompassing anyone but men. Discussions of labor rarely mentioned housewives, domestic servants, and female outworkers, except as an indication of how The spread of capitalism was degrading men. The idea that male head of household should command a Family wage that enabled him to support his wife and children became a popular definition of social justice. It sank deep roots not only among middle-class Americans but among working class men as well.
Market society
Since cotton was produced solely for sale in national and international markets, the south was in someways the most commercially oriented region of the United States. Yet rather than spring economic change, the south's expansion westward simply reproduce the agrarian , Slave based social order of the older states. The region remained overwhelmingly rural. In 1860 , Roughly 80% of the Southerners worked the land the same proportion as in 1800.
The rise of the west continued
Some western migrants became squatters, setting up farms on an occupied land without a clear legal title. Those who purchased land acquired it either from the federal government, at the price after 1820, of $1.25 Per acre payable in cash or from land speculators on long-term credit. Wes became the home of regional cultures very much alike those the migrants had left behind. Upstate New York in the upper north west resembled New England, with a small towns, churches, schools, while the lower south replicated the plantation Bay society of the southern Atlantic states. National boundaries made a little difference To territorial expansion in Florida, and later in Texas and Oregon. American settlers rushed into claim land under the jurisdiction of foreign countries like Spain Mexico and Britain, or Indian tribes, confident that American sovereignty would soon follow in their week. In 1810 American residents of West Florida rebelled and seized Baton Rouge, in the United States soon annexed the area. The drive for the accusation of east Florida was spurred by Georgia and Alabama planters who wished to eliminate a refuge for fugitive slaves in hostile Seminole Indians. Andrew Jackson led troops into the area and 1818. While on foreign soil, he created an international crisis by executing two British traders and a number of Indian chiefs. Although Jackson withdrew, Spain, where that could not defend the territory, sold it to the United States in the Adams Onis treaty of 1819 by John Quincy Adams. Successive censuses told the remarkable story of western growth. In 1840, by which time the government had sold to settlers and land companies nearly 43,000,000 acres of land, 7 million Americans, which was 2/5 of the total population of beyond the Appalachian mountains. Between 1810 and 1830, Ohio's population grew from 231,002 more than 900,000. I reach nearly 2,000,000 in 1850, when it ranked third among all the states. The careers of the eras leading public figure reflected the westward movement. Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and many other states men were born in states along the Atlantic coast but made their mark in politics after moving west.
The Erie canal
The completion in 1825 of the 363 mile Erie canal grass upstate New York a remarkable feat of engineering at a time when America's next largest canal was only 28 miles long. Allowed goods to flow between the Great Lakes and New York City. Almost instantaneously , The canal attracted an influx of farmers migrating from New England, giving birth to cities like Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse along its path. New York governor de Witt Clinton Who oversaw the construction of the state financed canal, predicted that it would make New York City the Graneri of the world, the Emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations. And indeed, the canal gave New York City primacy over competing ports in access to trade with the old northwest. And it's financing by the state government, the Erie canal typified the developing transportation infrastructure. The completion of the Erie canal set off a scramble among other states to match New York's success. Several borrowed so much money to finance elaborate programs of canal construction that they went bankrupt during the economic depression that began in 1837. By then however more than 3000 miles of canals had been built, creating a network linking the Atlantic states with the Ohio and Mississippi valleys drastically reducing the cost of transportation.
The factory system continued
The earliest factories, including those at pawtucket , Waltham, and lowell, we're located along the fall line, where waterfalls and river rapids could be harnessed to provide power for spinning and weaving machinery. By the 1840s, steam power made it possible for factory owners to locate in towns like New Bedford that were near to the coast , And in large cities like Philadelphia and Chicago with their immense local markets. In 1850 manufactures produced in factories not only textiles but also a wide variety of other goods, including tools, firearms, shoes, clocks, ironware, and agricultural machinery. What came to be called the American system of manufactures relied on the mass production of interchangeable parts that could be rapidly assembled into Standardized finished products. More impressive in a way, then factory production was the wide dispersion of mechanical skills throughout Northern society. Every town, it seemed, had its sawmill, Papermill, ironworks, Shoemaker, Hatmaker, Tailor, And a host of other small enterprises.
The emergence of Mormonism
The end of governmental support for establish churches promoted competition between religious groups that kept religion vibrant and permitted the emergence of new dominations. Hmong the most successful of the religions that spring up was the church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints, or Mormons, which helped to create a kingdom of God on earth. The Mormons were founded in the 1820s by Joseph Smith, a farmer in upstate New York who has a youth begin to experience religious visions. He claimed to have been led by an angel to a set Golden plates covered with strange writings. Smith translated and publish them as the book of Mormon, after a fourth century prophet. The book of Mormon tells the story of three families Who traveled from the ancient Middle East to the Americas, where they eventually evolved into Native American tribes. Jesus Christ plays a prominent role in the book, pairing to one of the family groups in the western hemisphere after his death and resurrection. The second coming of Christ will take place in the New World, where Smith was gods prophet.
The rise of nativism
The idea of the United States as a refuge for those seeking economic opportunity or as an escape from oppression has always coexisted with suspicion of and hostility to foreign newcomers. American history has witnessed Periods of intense anxiety over immigration. The alien act of 1798 reflected fear of immigrants with radical political views. During the early 20th century, as will be discussed below there was widespread hostility to the new immigration from southern and eastern Europe. In the early 21st-century, the question of how many persons should be allowed to enter the United States, and under what circumstances, remains of volatile political issue. Arc Bishop John Hughes of New York City made The Catholic Church a more assertive institution. He condemned the use of the protestant king James Bible in the city public schools, pressed Catholic parents to send their children to an expanding network of parochial schools, and sought government funding to pay for them. He aggressively sought to win converts from Protestantism.
The growth of immigration continued
The largest number of immigrants, however, refugees from disaster, Irish men and women fleeing the great famine of 1845 through 1851, when a blight destroyed the potato crop on which the islands diet relied. An estimated 1 million persons starve to death and another million immigrated in those years, most of them to the United States. Lacking industrial skills and capital, these improvershed Agricultural laborers and small farmers ended up filling the low wage unskilled jobs native born Americans sought to avoid. Male Irish immigrants built Americas railroads, dug canals, and worked as common laborers, service, longshoreman , And factory operative. Irish women frequently went to work as servants in the homes of nativeborn Americans, although some preferred factory work to domestic service. By the end of the 1850s the low well textile mills had largely replaced Yankee farm women with Immigrant Irish families. 4/5 of Irish immigrants remained in the north east. The second largest group of immigrants, Germans included considerably large number of skilled craftsmen then the Irish. Germans also settled in tightly knit neighborhoods in eastern cities, but many were able to move to the west , Where they establish themselves as craftsman, shopkeepers, and farmers. The German triangle, as the cities of Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee were sometimes called, attracted large numbers of populations. Some 40,000 Scandinavians also immigrated to the United States in these years, most of whom settled on farms in the old Northwest.
Race and opportunity
The market revolution affected the lives of all Americans. But not all were positioned to take advantages of its benefits. Most blacks, of course were slaves, but even free blacks found themselves excluded from the new economic opportunities. The 220,000 blacks living in the free state on the eve of the Civil War less than 2% of the Norths population, suffered discrimination in every phase of their lives. The majority of blacks lived in the poorest, unhealthiest, sections of cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. And even these neighborhoods were subject occasional mobile assault by white moms, like the armed bands that attack blacks and destroy their homes and businesses in Cincinnati in 1829. Barred from Schools and other public facilities, free blacks laboriously constructed their own institutional life, centered on mutual aid and educational societies, as well as independent churches, most notably the African Methodist episcopal church. Richard Allen of Philadelphia, a Methodist preacher, had been spurred to found out it after being Forcibly removed from his former church for praying at the altar rail, a place reserved for weights.
The Second Great Awakening
The popular religious revivals that swept the country during the second great awakening added a religious undermining to the celebration of personal self improvement, self reliance, and self determination. These revivals, which began at the turn of the century were originally organized by established religious leaders alarmed by low levels of church attendance in youth Republic perhaps as few as 10% of white Americans regularly attended church during the 1790s. They quickly expanded far beyond existing churches. They peaked in the 1820s and early 1830s when the Reverend Charles Grandison Finney held months long revival meetings in upstate New York and New York City. Like the evangelists traveling preachers, The first great awakening of the mid 18th century discussed in chapter 4, finney warned of hell in vivid language while offering the promise of salvation to converts to abandoned their sinful ways. The second great awakening democratized American Christianity, making it a truly mass enterprise. At the time of independence, fewer than 2000 Christian ministers preached in the United States. In 1845, they numbered 40,000. The magical denominations such as Methodists and Baptists enjoyed explosive growth in membership, and smaller sects proliferated. By the 1840s methodism, with more than 1 million members, had become the country's largest denomination. At large camp meetings, especially prominent of the frontier, theory rivivalists Preachers rejected the idea that man is a simple creature with a pre-ordained fate , Promoting inside the doctrine of human free will. At these gatherings, rich and poor, male and female, and in some instances whites and blacks worshiped alongside one another and pledged to abandon worldly sins in favor of the godly life.
The transcendentalists
The restless, competitive world of the market revolution strongly encourage the identification of American freedom with the absence of restraints on self-directed individuals seeking economic advancement and personal development. The one important revolution of the day, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1830s , What is the new value of the private man. In Emerson's definition, rather than pre-existing set of rights or privileges, freedom was an open ended process of self realization by which individuals could remake themselves in their own lives. Emerson was perhaps the most prominent member of a group of New England intellectuals known as transcendentalists, who insisted on the primacy of individual judgment over existing social traditions and institutions. Emersons Concord, Massachusetts, neighbor, the writer Henry David thoreau , Echoed his calls for individual self-reliance. Any man more right than his neighbors, thorough is a majority of one.
The west and freedom
Westward expansion in the market revolution reinforced some older ideas of freedom and help to create new ones. American freedom, for example, how long been linked with the availability of land in the west. A New York journalist, John L O'Sullivan First employed the phrase manifest destiny, meaning that the United States had a divinely appointed mission , So obvious as to be beyond dispute, to occupy all of North America. Americans, he proclaimed, had a far better title to western lands then can be provided by any international treaty, Right of discovery, or long-term settlement. O Sullivan wrote these words in 1845, but the central idea was familiar much earlier. Many Americans believed that the settlement an economic exploration of the west would prevent the United States from following the path of Europe and becoming a society with thick social classes and a large group of wage earning poor. In the west, where land was more readily available and oppressive factory labor far less common than in the east, they continue to be the chance to achieve economic independence, The social condition of freedom. In the national myth an ideology, the west with long remain, as the writer Wallace Stegner later put it, The last home of the free born American.
Race and opportunity continued
Whereas many white Americans could look forward to a life of economic accumulation and individual advancement, large numbers of free blocks experience downward mobility. At the time of abolition in the north, because of widespread slave ownership among 18 century artisanscom a considerable number of northern blacks possessed craft skills. But it became more and more difficult for blacks to utilize these skills once they became free. Although many white artisans criticized slavery, most viewed the freed slaves as low wage competitors and sought to borrow them from skilled employment. Hostility from White craftsman , However it was only one of many obstacles that kept blacks comfined to the lowest ranks of the labor market. White employers refused to hire them in anything but Menial positions, and white customers did not wish to be served by them. The result was a rapid decline in economic status until by mid century, the vast majority of northern blacks labored for wages in unskilled jobs and as domestic servants. The state census of 1855 revealed 122 black barbers and 808 black servants in New York City, but only one lawyer and six doctors. Nor could free blacks take advantage of the opening of the west to improve their economic status, a central component of American freedom. Federal law barred them from access to public land, and by 1864 states Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Oregon prohibited them from entering their territory altogether.
The cult of domestcity
Women, too, found many of the opportunities open by the market revolution closed to them. As a household declined as a center of economic production, many women saw their traditional roles undermined by the availability of mass produce goods previously made at home. Some women, as noted above followed work as it moved from household to factory. Others embraced a new definition of femininity, which glorified not a woman's contribution to the families economic well-being, but her ability to create a private environment shielded from the competitive tensions of the market economy. Women's place was in the Home, I say increasingly emptied of economically productive functions as work moved from household to workshops and factories. Her role was a sustain non-market value like love, friendship, and mutual obligation, providing men with shelter from the competitive market place The earlier ideology of republican motherhood, which allowed women a kind of public role as mothers of future citizens, suddenly evolved into the mid-19 century cult of domesticity . In whatever situation of life a woman is placed from her cradle to her grave, to clear the young ladies book, one of numerous popular magazines addressed to female audience of the 1820s and 1830s, a spirit of a Beadiant and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mine, required from her. With more and more men leaving the home for work, women did exercise considerable power over a personal affairs within the family. The rapid decline in The American birth rate during the 19th century, from an average of seven children per women in 1800 to 4 in 1900, cannot be explained except by the conscious decision of millions of women to limit the number of children they bore. But the idea of domestic city minimized women's even indirect participation in the outside world. Men moved freely between the public and private fears, women were supposed to remain cloistered in the private realm of family.
