8

The Emergence of a Market Economy

1815–1850
focus questions
How did changes in transportation and communications alter the economic landscape
during the first half of the nineteenth century?
How did industrial development impact the way people worked and lived?
In what ways did immigration alter the nation’s population and shape its politics?
How did the expanding capitalist “market economy” impact the lives of workers,
professionals, and women?
A painting of Lackawanna Valley, Pennsylvania by George Inness. A man sits on a
green hillside, and from his view, he can see factories, businesses, several farms,
and a train in the valley.
Lackawanna Valley (1855) Often hailed as the father of American landscape painting,
George Inness was commissioned by a railroad company to capture its trains coursing
through the lush Lackawanna Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania. New inventions and
rapid industrial growth would continue to change the American landscape.
Video Icon Chapter 8 Overview: Commerical Agriculture

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Amid the postwar celebrations in 1815, Americans set about transforming their
victorious young nation. Soon after the war’s end, prosperity returned as British
and European markets again welcomed American ships and commerce. During the war,
the loss of trade with Britain and Europe had forced the United States to develop
more factories and mills, spurring the development of the more diverse economy that
Alexander Hamilton had championed in the 1790s.

Between 1815 and 1850, the United States became a transcontinental power, expanding
to the Pacific coast. Swarms of land-hungry people streamed westward. Between 1815
and 1821, six new states joined the Union (Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi,
Missouri, and Maine).

Nineteenth-century Americans were a restless, ambitious people, and the country’s

energy and mobility were dizzying. A Boston newspaper commented that the entire
“population is in motion.” Everywhere, it seemed, people were moving to the next
town, the next farm, the next opportunity. In many cities, half the population
moved every ten years. In 1826, the newspaper editor in Rochester, New York,
reported that 120 people left the city every day while 130 moved in.

The lure of cheap land and plentiful jobs, as well as the promise of political and
religious freedom, attracted millions of immigrants. This great wave of humanity
was not always welcomed, however. Ethnic prejudices, anti-Catholicism, and language
barriers made it difficult for many immigrants, mostly from Ireland, Germany, and
China, to adapt to American culture.

In the Midwest, large-scale commercial agriculture emerged as big farms grew corn
and wheat and raised pigs and cattle to be sold in distant markets. In the South,
cotton became so profitable that it increasingly dominated the region’s economy,
luring farmers and planters (wealthy farmers with hundreds or even thousands of
acres worked by large numbers of enslaved people) into the new states of Alabama,
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. As the cotton culture expanded into the Gulf
coast states, it required growing numbers of enslaved workers, many of whom were
sold and relocated from Virginia and the Carolinas.

Meanwhile, the Northeast experienced a surge of industrial development. Labor-

saving machines and water- and steam-powered industries reshaped the region’s
economic and social life. Mills and factories transformed the way people labored,
dressed, ate, and lived. With the rise of the factory system, more and more
economic activity occurred outside the home and off the farm. An urban middle class
began to emerge as Americans, including young women, moved to towns and cities,
lured by jobs in new mills, factories, stores, and banks.

By 1850, the United States boasted the world’s fastest-growing economy. Dramatic
technological innovations in communication and transportation transformed the
economy into an interconnected national marketplace. The railroad, the steamboat,
the telegraph, and the clipper ship combined to shrink time and distance. Newly
elected president Andrew Jackson, for example, arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1829
riding in a horse-drawn carriage. Eight years later, he left the presidency and
returned to Tennessee in a railroad car.

Amid such dramatic changes, the nation began to divide into three powerful regional
political blocs—North, South, and West—whose shifting alliances would shape
political life until the Civil War. THE MARKET REVOLUTION
Video IconA New “Market Economy”

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A market revolution that had begun before the war for independence accelerated the
transformation of the American economy into a global powerhouse. In the eighteenth
century, most Americans were farm folk who operated within a “household economy.”
That is, they produced enough food, livestock, and clothing for their own family’s
needs and perhaps a little more to barter (exchange) with their neighbors. Their
lives revolved around a regular farmstead routine in a day-long cycle that started
with the rooster crowing at dawn and ended when the chickens went to sleep at
night, punctuated by the changing seasons and unpredictable weather.

As the nineteenth century unfolded, however, more and more farm families began
engaging in commercial rather than subsistence agriculture, producing surplus crops
and livestock to sell for cash in regional and even international markets. In 1851,
the president of the New York Agricultural Society noted that until the nineteenth
century, “‘production for consumption’ was the leading purpose” of the farm
economy. Now, however, “no farmer could find it profitable to do everything for
himself. He now sells for money.” With the cash they earned, farm families were
able to buy more land, better equipment, and the latest manufactured household
goods.

Such large-scale commercial agriculture, the first stage of a market economy,

produced boom-and-bust cycles, and was often built upon the backs of enslaved
laborers, immigrant workers, and displaced Mexicans. Overall, however, the standard
of living rose, and Americans enjoyed unprecedented opportunities for economic gain
and geographic mobility. What the market economy most needed were “internal
improvements”—deeper harbors, lighthouses, and a national network of canals,
bridges, roads, and railroads—to improve the flow of goods across states and
oceans. In 1817, for example, South Carolina congressman John C. Calhoun expressed
his desire to “bind the Republic together with a perfect system of roads and
canals.” As the world’s largest republic, the United States desperately needed a
national transportation system. “Let us conquer space,” he told the House of
Representatives.

Calhoun’s idea sparked a fierce debate over how to fund such infrastructure
improvements: Should it be the responsibility of the federal government, the
individual states, or private corporations? Since the Constitution said nothing
about the federal government’s role in funding transportation improvements, many
argued that such projects must be initiated by state and local governments. Others
insisted that the Constitution gave the federal government broad powers to promote
the “general welfare,” which included enhancing transportation and communication.
The debate over the funding of internal improvements would continue throughout the
nineteenth century.

TRANSPORTATION IMPROVEMENTS
OVERLAND TRANSPORTATION Until the nineteenth century, long-distance travel had been
slow, uncomfortable, and expensive. It took a horse-drawn coach, for example, four
days to get from New York City to Boston. Because of long travel times, many farm
products could be sold only locally before they spoiled.
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That soon changed, as an array of transportation innovations—larger horse-drawn
wagons (called Conestogas), new roads, canals, steamboats, and the first railroads—
knit together the expanding national market for goods and services and greatly
accelerated the pace of life. In addition, coach lines began using continual
relays, or “stages,” of fresh horses made available every forty or so miles. These
“stagecoaches” made travel faster, less expensive, and more accessible.
Stagecoaches increased their speed as the quality of roads improved.

TRANSPORTATION WEST, ABOUT 1840

A map entitled “Transportation West, About 1840.” Indicated are transportation
routes for canals, roads, and navigable rivers. There are canals in the Illinois
River, the Ohio River, the Wabash River, as well as the Pennsylvania State Canal,
and the Erie Canal. Roads on this map include the National Road from Illinois to
Maryland, Forbes Road in Pennsylvania, Wilderness Road in Kentucky, Virginia, and
Maryland, as well as a major road in New York. Questions that accompany the map
include the following: Why were river towns important commercial centers? What was
the economic impact of the steamboat and the flatboat in the West? How did the Erie
Canal transform the economy of New York and the Great Lakes region?
Why were river towns important commercial centers?
What was the impact of the steamboat and the flatboat on travel in the West?
How did the Erie Canal transform the economies of New York and the Great Lakes
region?
NEW ROADS As settlers moved west, people demanded better roads. In 1803, when Ohio
became a state, Congress ordered that 5 percent of the money from the sale of
federally owned land in the state should go toward building a National Road from
the Atlantic coast across Ohio and westward. Construction finally began eight years
later. Originally called the Cumberland Road, it was the first interstate roadway
financed by the federal government. By 1818, the road was open from Cumberland,
Maryland, to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), where it crossed the Ohio
River. By 1838, the National Road extended 600 miles farther westward to Vandalia,
Illinois.
The National Road quickened the settlement of the West and the emergence of a truly
national market economy by reducing transportation costs, creating new markets, and
stimulating the growth of towns. Farmers increasingly took their produce and
livestock to sell in distant markets. To the northeast, a movement for paved roads
gathered momentum after the Philadelphia-Lancaster Turnpike opened in 1794. (The
term turnpike derived from a pole, or pike, at the tollgate, which was turned by
the turnpike owner to admit traffic in exchange for a small fee, or toll.) By 1821,
some 4,000 miles of turnpikes had been built, and stagecoach and freight companies
emerged to move more people and cargo at lower rates.

WATER TRANSPORTATION By the early 1820s, the turnpike boom was giving way to
advances in water transportation. Steamboats, flatboats (barges propelled by men
using long poles), and canal boats carried people and goods far more cheaply than
did horse-drawn wagons. Hundreds of flatboats floated goods, farm produce,
livestock, and people from Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, western
Pennsylvania, and other states down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Flatboats,
however, went in only one direction: downstream. Once unloaded in Natchez,
Mississippi, or New Orleans, Louisiana, they were sold and dismantled to provide
lumber for construction.
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The difficulties of getting back upriver were solved when Robert Fulton and Robert
R. Livingston sent the Clermont, the first commercial steamboat, up the Hudson
River from New York City in 1807. The 150-mile trip took 30 hours; a sailing vessel
took four days.

A black and white photograph shows three steamboats at the levee at St. Paul,
Minnesota, in 1859. Each ship has two tall smokestacks, side by side, forward of
the bridge.
Traveling the Western Waters Three steamboats are docked at the levee at St. Paul,
Minnesota, in 1859.
Thereafter, the use of wood-fired steamboats spread rapidly, opening nearly half
the continent to water traffic along the major rivers. By bringing two-way travel
to the Mississippi River Valley, steamboats created a transcontinental market and a
commercial agricultural empire that produced much of the nation’s cotton, timber,
wheat, corn, cattle, and hogs. By 1836, 750 steamboats operated on American rivers.
As steamboat use increased, the price for shipping goods plunged, thus increasing
profits and stimulating demand.

The use of steamboats transformed St. Louis, Missouri, from a sleepy frontier
village into a booming river port. New Orleans developed even faster. Its
population had grown over tenfold since it was acquired from France in 1803. By
1840, it was perhaps the wealthiest American city, having developed a thriving
trade with the Caribbean islands and the new Latin American republics that had
overthrown Spanish rule. A thousand steamboats a year visited New Orleans. The
annual amount of trade shipped through the river city doubled that of New York City
by 1843, in large part because of the explosion in cotton production.

Wood-burning steamboats were a risky form of transportation. Accidents, explosions,

and fires were common, and sanitation was poor. Passengers crowded on board along
with pigs and cattle. There were no toilets on steamboats until the 1850s;
passengers shared the same two washbasins and towels. Despite the inconveniences,
however, steamboats were the fastest and most convenient form of transportation in
the first half of the nineteenth century.

Canals also sped the market revolution. The Erie Canal in central New York
connected the Great Lakes and the Midwest to the Hudson River and New York City.
New York governor DeWitt Clinton took the lead in promoting the risky project,
which Thomas Jefferson dismissed as “little short of madness.” Clinton, however,
boasted that his state had the opportunity to “create a new era in history, and to
erect a work more stupendous, more magnificent, and more beneficial, than has
hitherto been achieved by the human race.”

It was not an idle boast. A “river of gold” flowed along the Erie Canal after it
opened in 1825, having taken eight years to build. It drew eastward much of the
midwestern trade (furs, lumber, textiles) that earlier had been forced to go to
Canada or make the long journey down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans
and the Gulf of Mexico. Thanks to the Erie Canal, the backwoods village of Chicago
developed into a bustling city because of its commercial connection via the Great
Lakes to New York City, and eventually to Europe.
The Erie Canal was an engineering triumph. Forty feet wide and four feet deep, it
was the longest canal in the world, extending 363 miles across New York from Albany
in the east to Buffalo and Lake Erie in the west and rising some 675 feet in
elevation. It crossed rivers and valleys, marshes and forests. The canal was built
by thousands of laborers, mostly German and Irish immigrants who were paid less
than a dollar a day to drain swamps, clear forests, build stone bridges and
aqueducts, and blast through solid rock. It brought lumber, grain, flour, and other
goods, and it unlocked the floodgates of western settlement. Transporting goods
from Buffalo to New York City previously took three weeks; now it took only eight
days. The canal also reduced the cost of moving a ton of freight from $100 to $5.
It was so profitable that it paid off its construction costs in just seven years.

The Erie Canal also had enormous economic and political consequences, as it tied
together the regional economies of the Midwest and the East while further isolating
the Deep South. The Genesee Valley in western New York became one of the most
productive grain-growing regions in the world; Rochester became a boom town,
processing wheat and corn into flour and meal. The writer Nathaniel Hawthorne said
“the town had sprung up like a mushroom.” Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo experienced
similarly dramatic growth.

The business of moving goods and people along the canal involved some 4,000 boats
and more than 25,000 workers. Canal boats, usually eleven feet wide and seventy
feet long, were pulled by teams of horses or mules walking along a towpath adjacent
to the canal. Painted in bright colors and given colorful names, the “packet” boats
carrying passengers traveled seven days a week at between two and four miles an
hour. Much time was lost waiting at one of the eighty-eight locks, where boats
would enter one at a time to be raised or lowered to match the changing water level
of the canal. Often, the boat captains took their families with them. Most boatmen,
however, were single—and rough. One traveler called them “a coarse and untaught set
of vagabonds whose chief delight is to carouse and fight.”

The success of the Erie Canal and the entire New York canal system inspired other
states to build some 3,000 miles of waterways by 1837. Canals spurred the economy
by enabling speedier and less expensive transport of goods and people. They also
boosted real estate prices for the lands bordering them and transformed sleepy
villages into booming cities.

RAILROADS The canal era was short-lived, however. During the second quarter of the
nineteenth century, a more versatile and powerful form of transportation emerged:
the railroad. In 1825, the year the Erie Canal was completed, the world’s first
steam-powered railway began operating in England. Soon thereafter, a railroad-
building “epidemic” infected the United States. In 1830, the nation had only
twenty-three miles of railroad track. Over the next twenty years, railroad coverage
grew to 30,626 miles.
THE GROWTH OF RAILROADS, 1850 AND 1860
A map entitled, The Growth of Railroads, 1850. The map shows the eastern half of
the United States with existing railroads in each state as of 1850. The highest
concentration of railroads is located in the northeastern states, such as Vermont,
New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and
Pennsylvania. There is one main railroad lines extending south into Virginia and
North Carolina. There are a few lines connecting South Carolina, Georgia, and
Tennessee, and a few more connecting Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. Also, A
map entitled The Growth of Railroads, 1860. The map shows the eastern half of the
United States with existing railroads in each state as of 1860 along with the
principal east-west interstate lines. The highest concentration of railroads are in
states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut,
Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Wyoming, Indiana, Illinois, North
Carolina, and South Carolina. The railroads have extended much further and there
are many more of them in the south and in the midwest. One principal east-west line
runs from Trenton, New Jersey west through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and then
terminates in St. Louis. Another principal line runs from Connecticut up to New
York and then west along Lake Erie in northern Pennsylvania and Ohio, through
Indiana, and then terminates in Chicago. Questions that accompany the maps include
the following: What role did railroads play in the development of the nation? Why
did railroads expand rapidly from 1850 to 1860?
What role did railroads play in the development of the nation?
Why did railroads expand rapidly from 1850 to 1860?
The railroad quickly surpassed other forms of transportation because trains could
move people and freight faster, farther, and cheaper than could wagons or boats.
The early railroads averaged ten miles per hour, more than twice the speed of
stagecoaches and four times that of canal boats and barges. That railroads could
operate year-round gave them a huge advantage over canals that could not operate
when the canals were frozen over in winter. Railroads also encouraged western
settlement and the expansion of commercial agriculture. A westerner reported that
the opening of a new rail spur off the main line resulted in the emergence of three
new villages. The depot or rail station became the central building in every town,
a public place where people from all walks of life converged.

Building railroads stimulated the national economy not only by improving

transportation but by creating a huge demand for iron, wooden crossties, bridges,
locomotives, freight cars, and other equipment. Railroads also became the nation’s
largest corporations and employers.

Perhaps most important, railroads changed what in the eighteenth century had been a
cluster of mostly local markets into an interconnected national marketplace for
goods and services. Railroads thereby expanded the geography of capitalism, making
possible larger industrial and commercial enterprises from coast to coast.
Railroads were also the first “big” businesses, huge corporations employing
thousands of people while exercising extraordinary influence over the life of the
regions they served.

Railroad mania, however, had negative effects as well. Its quick and shady profits
frequently led to political corruption. Railroad titans often bribed legislators to
pass legislation favorable to their corporations. By facilitating access to the
trans-Appalachian West, the railroads also accelerated the decline of Native
American culture. In addition, they dramatically increased the tempo, mobility, and
noise of everyday life. Writer Nathaniel Hawthorne spoke for many when he said that
the locomotive, with its startling whistle, brought “the noisy world into the midst
of our slumberous space.” Canals, railroads, and improved roads combined to reduce
the cost of transporting goods to market by 95 percent between 1815 and 1860. Such
improvements made a truly national market possible.

OCEAN TRANSPORTATION The year 1845 brought a great innovation in ocean transport
with the launch of the first clipper ship, the Rainbow. Built for speed, the
clipper ships were twice as fast as the older merchant ships. Long and lean, with
sleek hulls, flat bottoms, taller masts, and more sails, they cut dashing figures
during their brief but colorful career, which lasted less than two decades. The
American thirst for Chinese tea prompted the clipper boom. Asian tea leaves had to
reach markets quickly after harvest, and the fast clipper ships made this possible.
An 1833 oil painting depicting the Messrs. Smith and Co shipyard in Manhattan. Many
timbers lie stacked in the foreground. Ramps give the workers access to various
parts of the hull under construction, which as yet has no masts. In the background,
a completed ship lies at anchor.
Building a Clipper Ship This 1833 oil painting captures the Messrs. Smith & Co.
Ship Yard in Manhattan, where shipbuilders are busy shaping timbers to construct a
clipper ship.
Clipper ships became even more important after the discovery of gold in California
in 1848, which spurred thousands of prospectors and entrepreneurs from the Atlantic
seaboard. The clipper ships were needed to make the run from Boston or New York to
San Francisco, which required going around South America’s dangerous Cape Horn. A
clipper ship could make the trip in 123 days, some 80 days faster than a
conventional ship. The massive wave of would-be miners also generated an urgent
demand for goods on the West Coast; the clippers met it. But clippers, while fast,
lacked space for cargo or passengers. After the Civil War, the clipper ship would
give way to the steamship and the transcontinental railroad.

COMMUNICATIONS Innovations in transportation also helped spark improvements in

communications, which knit the nation even closer together. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, it often took days or weeks for news to travel along the
Atlantic Seaboard. For example, after George Washington died in 1799 in Virginia,
the news did not appear in New York City newspapers until a week later. By 1829,
however, it was possible to deliver Andrew Jackson’s inaugural address from
Washington, D.C., to New York City by relay horse riders in less than twenty hours.
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The number of newspapers also soared along with the creation of new towns and the
rapid growth of cities. In 1790, there were 92 weekly newspapers; by 1810, there
were 371 newspapers, and many had become dailies. America had more newspaper
readers than any other nation. When a British traveler asked a milkman in
Cincinnati why Americans spent so much time reading newspapers, he quickly replied:
“How should freemen spend their time, but looking after their government, and
watching that them fellers as we give offices to, does their duty?”

Mail deliveries also improved. The number of post offices soared from 75 in 1790 to
28,498 in 1860. In addition, new steam-powered printing presses reduced the cost of
newspapers from 6¢ to a penny each, enabling virtually everyone to benefit from the
news contained in the “penny press.” In the new western states and territories,
however, postal service was scarce and slow. To address the problem, two
entrepreneurs, Henry Wells and William G. Fargo, formed an express delivery service
called Wells Fargo & Company in 1852. Within a few years, Wells Fargo stagecoaches
pulled by six horses were delivering passengers, mail, and “strongboxes” filled
with gold across California and eventually from coast to coast. In 1857, Wells
Fargo joined other express companies to form the Overland Mail Company,
establishing regular twice-a-week mail service between St. Louis and San Francisco.
Prior to that innovation, mail service was twice a month by steamship.

Still, people sought even faster delivery. In 1860, the Pony Express Company was
founded to deliver mail cross country between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento,
California. By then, California had almost 400,000 people, and they needed faster
connections to the rest of the nation. The owners of the Pony Express Company
decided to deliver mail by using horses instead of wagons. To do so, they acquired
400 fast horses and established 184 relay stations from Missouri west to
California, enabling their 120 riders to change horses every ten to fifteen miles.
The Pony Express riders set their fastest time delivering Abraham Lincoln’s
presidential inaugural address in 1861, which arrived in California in eight days.
Riding day and night alone across western prairies, deserts, and snow-covered
mountains was a dangerous enterprise. Indians attacked many of the relay stations,
stealing the horses, killing the station keepers, and burning the buildings. The
likelihood of Indian raids was a factor in the selection of horses for the express
riders. Their ponies, fed with grain rather than grass, could outrun most Indian
ponies.

A hand colored woodcut based on Frederic Remington"s oil painting of Pony Express
riders changing horses. Several men are standing around while another man takes off
on a horse. One of the men is holding a horse. The landscape is barren and there is
a log building in the background.
Pony Express Founded in 1860, the Pony Express Company pledged speedy delivery of
mail from Missouri to as far west as California, relying on a relay team of 400
horses instead of the stagecoach of Wells Fargo & Company. In this hand-colored
woodcut based on Frederic Remington’s oil painting, Pony Express riders are shown
changing horses.
The Pony Express Company, however, lasted only eighteen months. It was driven out
of business by the most important advance in communications: the development of a
national electromagnetic telegraph system. Samuel F. B. Morse, a portrait painter
turned inventor, developed the telegraph. In May 1844, he sent the first intercity
telegraph message from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland. It read: “What
Hath God Wrought!” By the end of the 1840s, most major cities benefited from
telegraph lines strung on poles. By allowing people to communicate faster and more
easily across long distances, the telegraph system triggered many changes, not the
least of which was helping railroad operators schedule trains more precisely and
thus avoid collisions. A New Orleans newspaper claimed that, with the invention of
the telegraph, “scarcely anything now will appear to be impossible.”

THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

Steamboats, canals, and railroads connected the western areas of the country with
the East, boosted trade, helped open the Far West for settlement, and spurred
dramatic growth in cities. Between 1800 and 1860, an undeveloped nation of
scattered farms, primitive roads, and modest local markets became an engine of
capitalist expansion, urban energy, and global reach.

The transportation improvements were financed by both state governments and private
investors. The national government bought stock in turnpike and canal companies
and, after the success of the Erie Canal, awarded land grants to several western
states to support canal and railroad projects. In 1850, Democrat Stephen A.
Douglas, a powerful Illinois senator, convinced Congress to provide a major land
grant to support a north-south rail line connecting Chicago and Mobile, Alabama.
The 1850 congressional land grant set a precedent for other bounties that totaled
about 20 million acres by 1860. However, this would prove to be a small amount when
compared to the land grants that Congress would award transcontinental railroads
during the 1860s and after. The national government also sent federal cavalry
troops to “pacify” the Indians along the route of the railroads. INDUSTRIAL
DEVELOPMENT
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The concentration of huge numbers of people in cities, coupled with the
transportation and communication revolutions, greatly increased the number of
potential customers for a given product. Such expanding market demand in turn gave
rise to a system of mass production, whereby companies used new technologies
(labor-saving machines) to produce greater quantities of products that could be
sold at lower prices to more people, thus generating higher profits. The innovation
of water-powered mills and coal-powered steam engines sparked an industrial
revolution in Europe and America from the mid-eighteenth century to the late
nineteenth century.

The Industrial Revolution, centered on the invention of the steam engine, was the
most important development in human history since the advent of agriculture. Prior
to 1800, most products were made by hand by skilled artisans. That changed quickly
with the development of textile machinery, soon followed by a dazzling array of
machinery invented to manufacture almost everything. Factories, mills, mines, and
industrial plants emerged to replace many artisans and craftsmen making clothing,
shoes, clocks and watches, furniture, firearms, and an array of other items. “It is
an extraordinary era in which we live,” reported Daniel Webster in 1847. “It is
altogether new. The world has seen nothing like it before.”

AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY During the nineteenth century, Americans became known for their
“practical” inventiveness. Between 1790 and 1811, the U.S. Patent Office approved
an annual average of 77 patents certifying new inventions; by the 1850s, the Patent
Office was approving more than 28,000 new inventions each year.
Many inventions generated dramatic changes. In 1844, for example, Charles Goodyear
patented a process for “vulcanizing” rubber, making it stronger, more elastic,
waterproof, and winter-proof. Vulcanized rubber was soon being used for everything
from shoes and boots to seals, gaskets, hoses and, eventually, tires. In 1846,
Elias Howe patented his design of the sewing machine. It was soon improved upon by
Isaac Merritt Singer, who founded the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which
initially produced only industrial sewing machines for use in textile mills but
eventually offered machines for home use. Sewing machines helped transform everyday
life for many women. The new machines dramatically reduced the time for making
clothes at home, thus freeing up more leisure time for many women.

Technological advances improved living conditions; houses could be larger, better

heated, and better illuminated. The first sewer systems helped clean up cities by
ridding their streets of human and animal waste. Mechanization of factories meant
that more goods could be produced faster and with less labor, and machines helped
industries produce “standardized parts” that could be assembled by unskilled wage
workers. Machine-made clothes using standardized forms fit better and were less
expensive than those sewn by hand; machine-made newspapers and magazines were more
abundant and affordable, as were clocks, watches, guns, and plows.

THE COTTON GIN One invention launched an economic revolution. In 1792, Eli Whitney,
a recent Yale graduate from New England, spent several months at Mulberry Grove
plantation on the Georgia coast, where he “heard much said of the difficulty of
ginning cotton”—that is, separating the fibers from the sticky seeds. Cotton had
been used for clothing and bedding from ancient times, but until the nineteenth
century, cotton cloth was rare and expensive because it took so long to separate
the lint (fibers) from the seeds. One person working all day could separate barely
one pound by hand.
An engraving showing an early stage in the process of separating cotton seeds from
the fibers. A male worker up in a loft feeds loose cotton down a ramp into a gin
being operated by a female worker.
Cotton Gin Before Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, it would have taken the four people in
this engraving days to pick through the avalanche of cotton depicted here and
separate the cotton seeds from the fibers.
At Mulberry Grove, Whitney learned that the person who could invent a “machine” to
gin cotton would become wealthy overnight. That was incentive enough for him.
Within just ten days, he had devised what he called “an absurdly simple
contrivance” using nails attached to a roller to remove the seeds from cotton
bolls. Completed in 1793, the cotton gin (short for engine) proved to be fifty
times more productive than a hand laborer. Almost overnight, it transformed cotton
from simply a local crop to a global industry led by the American South, whose
climate from Virginia southward offered the 200 frost-free days required to grow
the fibrous plant. In becoming America’s most profitable crop, cotton transformed
southern agriculture, northern industry, race-based slavery, national politics, and
international trade.

KING COTTON During the first half of the nineteenth century, southern-grown cotton
became the dominant force driving both the national economy and the controversial
efforts to expand slavery into the western territories. People called it “white
gold”; it brought enormous wealth to southern planters and merchants, as well as
New England textile mill owners and New York shipowners and cotton traders.
Slavery expanded accordingly. The number of enslaved people increased from 700,000
in 1787 to over 4 million on the eve of the American Civil War; approximately 70
percent were involved in some way with cotton production. So closely tied were
cotton and slavery that the price of an enslaved person directly correlated to the
price of cotton (except during years of excessive speculation). The commercial
growing of cotton spread plantation slavery across the South, especially the
Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and
Texas.

By 1812, cotton gins had reduced the cost of producing cotton yarn by 90 percent.
Suddenly, cotton clothing was affordable to everyone. By the mid-nineteenth
century, people worldwide were wearing more-comfortable and easier-to-clean cotton
clothing. When British textile manufacturers chose the less brittle American cotton
over the varieties grown in the Caribbean, Brazil, and India, the demand for
southern cotton skyrocketed, as did its price. Cotton became America’s largest
export. By 1860, British textile mills were processing a billion pounds of cotton a
year, 92 percent of which came from the southern states. On the eve of the Civil
War, cotton represented 60 percent of America’s exports.

The southern cotton boom also had beneficial effects across the nation. It spurred
the development of textile mills in New England; expanded the shipping fleets of
New York City; and made the ports of New Orleans, Mobile, Savannah, and Charleston
sources of enormous profits for the regional and national economies. The South
harvested raw cotton, and northern buyers and shipowners carried it to New England,
Great Britain, and France, where textile mills spun the fiber into thread and
fabric. Bankers in New York City and London financed the growth of global cotton
capitalism.

THE EXPANSION OF SLAVERY Because cotton was a labor-intensive crop, growers were
convinced that only enslaved Blacks could make their farms and plantations
profitable. Many Virginia and Maryland planters sold their surplus of enslaved
people to work in the new cotton-growing areas in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi,
and Louisiana. In 1790, planters in Virginia and Maryland had owned 56 percent of
all the enslaved people in the United States; by 1860, they owned only 15 percent,
as some 835,000 enslaved people were “sold south.”
In the search for higher profits, the price of enslaved workers soared as did the
abuses they suffered—whippings, sexual assaults, children separated from mothers,
and being overworked to death. Cotton created boom times in Alabama, Mississippi,
and Louisiana, where land was cheap. “The ALABAMA FEVER rages here,” a North
Carolina planter lamented . . . and has carried off vast numbers of our citizens.”
A cotton farmer in Mississippi urged a friend in Kentucky to sell his farm and join
him: “If you could reconcile it to yourself to bring your negroes to the
Mississippi Territory, they would certainly make you a handsome fortune in ten
years by the cultivation of Cotton.” Enslaved people became so valuable that
stealing them became a common problem.

FARMING THE MIDWEST By 1860, more than half the nation’s population lived west of
the Appalachian Mountains. The flat, fertile farmlands in the Midwest—Ohio,
Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa—drew farmers from the rocky hillsides of New
England and the exhausted soils of Virginia. People traveled on foot, on horseback,
and in wagons and on trains, eager to start fresh on their own land made available
by the government.
A national land law of 1820 reduced the price of federal land. Even that was not
enough for westerners, however. They demanded “preemption,” the right of squatters
(people who simply built a cabin and started farming without actually purchasing
government land) to buy land at the minimum price, and “graduation,” the
progressive reduction of the price of land that did not sell immediately. Congress
eventually responded with two bills. Under the Preemption Act of 1830, squatters
could get 160 acres at the minimum price of $1.25 per acre. Under the Graduation
Act of 1854, prices of unsold lands were to be lowered in stages over thirty years.

A drawing of a reaping machine pulled by horses. A man pulls the horses by harness
in front, and another man stands at the back of the machine, behind the large
blades.
McCormick’s Reaping Machine This illustration appeared in the catalog of the Great
Exhibition, held at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851. The plow eased the
transformation of rough plains into fertile farmland, and the reaping machine
accelerated the harvesting of hay, wheat, and other grains.
Technology also enabled greater agricultural productivity. The development of
durable iron plows (replacing wooden ones) eased the backbreaking job of tilling
the soil. In 1819, Jethro Wood of New York introduced an iron plow with separate
parts that were easy to replace. Further improvements would follow, including
Vermonter John Deere’s steel plow (1837), whose sharp edges could cut through the
tough prairie grass in the Midwest and Great Plains. By 1845, Massachusetts alone
had seventy-three plants making more than 60,000 plows per year. Most were sold to
farmers in the western states and territories, illustrating the emergence of a
national marketplace for goods and services made possible by the transportation
revolution.

Other technological improvements quickened the growth of commercial agriculture. By

the 1840s, new mechanical seeders had replaced the process of sowing seed by hand.
In 1831, twenty-two-year-old Virginian Cyrus Hall McCormick invented a clumsy-
looking mechanical reaper pulled by horses to harvest wheat, a development as
significant to the agricultural economy of the Midwest and Great Plains as the
cotton gin was to the South, for it replaced muscle power with mechanical power. By
1847, McCormick reapers were selling so fast that McCormick moved to Chicago and
built a huge manufacturing plant that produced 4,000 machines a year. McCormick
reapers transformed the scale of commercial agriculture. Using a handheld sickle, a
farmer could harvest a half acre of wheat a day; with a McCormick reaper, two
people could cut twelve acres a day.

EARLY TEXTILE MANUFACTURERS While technological breakthroughs such as the cotton

gin, mechanical harvester, and railroads quickened agricultural development and
enabled a national economy, other technologies altered the economic landscape even
more profoundly.
Industrial capitalists who financed and built the first factories were
transformational figures, for they altered the nature of work and the dynamics of
workers’ communities. People had never labored for twelve-hour shifts in large,
windowless buildings filled with deafening machines and scores or even hundreds of
sweating workers. The informal routine of farmwork was replaced by the close
supervision of managers and the regimentation signaled by the factory whistle and
the time clock. As Karl Marx pointed out in Capital, traditionally, “the workman
makes use of a tool, [whereas] the machine makes use of him.”

Mills and factories were initially powered by waterwheels and then by coal-fired
steam engines. The shift from river water to coal as a source of energy quickened
the growth rate of the textile industry (and industries of all types), and
initiated an Industrial Revolution destined to end Great Britain’s long domination
of the global economy.

The foundations of Britain’s advantage were the invention of the steam engine in
1705, its improvement by James Watt in 1765, and a series of additional inventions
that mechanized the production of textiles (including thread, fabric, bedding, and
clothing). Britain carefully guarded its industrial secrets, forbidding the export
of machines or the publication of descriptions of them, and even restricting the
emigration of skilled mechanics.
But the secrets could not be kept forever. In 1789, Samuel Slater arrived in
America from England with a detailed plan in his head of a water-powered spinning
machine. He contracted with an enterprising merchant-manufacturer in Rhode Island
to build a mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and in that little mill, completed in
1790, nine children turned out a satisfactory cotton yarn, which was then worked up
by the “putting-out system,” whereby women would weave the yarn into cloth in their
homes.

In 1800, the output of America’s mills and factories amounted to only one sixth of
Britain’s production, and the growth rate remained slow until Thomas Jefferson’s
embargo in 1807 stimulated the domestic production of cloth. By 1815, hundreds of
textile mills in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania were producing thread,
cloth, and clothing. By 1860, the output of America’s mills and factories would be
a third, and by 1880 two thirds, that of British.

After the War of 1812, British textile companies blunted America’s industrial
growth by flooding the United States with cheap cotton cloth in an effort to regain
their customers who had been shut off by the war. Such postwar “dumping” nearly
killed the American textile industry. A delegation of New England mill owners
traveled to Washington, D.C., to demand a federal tariff (tax) on imported cloth to
deter the British from selling their cloth in the United States for less than the
prices charged by American manufacturers. Their efforts created a culture of
industrial lobbying for congressional tariff protection against imported products
that continues to this day.

The mill owners neglected to admit that import tariffs hurt consumers by forcing
them to pay higher prices for imported goods. Over time, as Scotsman Adam Smith
explained in his pathbreaking book on capitalism, The Wealth of Nations (1776),
consumers not only pay higher prices for foreign goods as a result of tariffs, but
they also pay higher prices for domestic goods, since businesses invariably take
advantage of opportunities to raise the prices charged for their products.

Tariffs helped protect American industries from foreign competition, but

competition is the engine of innovation and efficiency in a capitalist economy. New
England shipping companies opposed higher tariffs because the taxes would reduce
the amount of goods carried in their vessels across the Atlantic from Britain and
Europe. Many southern planters opposed tariffs because of fears that Britain and
France would retaliate by imposing tariffs on American cotton and tobacco shipped
to their ports.

In the end, Congress passed the Tariff of 1816, which placed a tax of 25¢ on every
yard of imported cloth. Such tariffs were a major factor in promoting
industrialization. By impeding foreign competition, the tariffs enabled American
manufacturers to dominate the national marketplace.

THE LOWELL SYSTEM The factory system, centered on wage-earning workers, emerged at
Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1813, when a group known as the Boston Associates
constructed the first textile mill in which the mechanized processes of spinning
yarn and weaving cloth (copied from English mills) were brought together under one
roof. In 1822, the Boston Associates, led by Francis Cabot Lowell, developed
another cotton mill at a village along the Merrimack River twenty-eight miles north
of Boston, which they renamed Lowell. It soon became the model for mill towns
throughout New England, often referred to as the Lowell system.
The founders of the Lowell system sought not just to improve industrial efficiency,
but to develop ideal industrial communities. To avoid the wretched conditions of
the overcrowded English textile-mill villages, they located their four- and five-
story brick-built mills along rivers in the countryside and lined the streets with
trees and tidy flower beds.
Women—mostly young women from farm families—were the first factory workers in the
nation. Mill owners preferred women laborers because of their skill in operating
textile machines. Also valued was their general ability to endure the mind-numbing
boredom of operating spinning machines and looms for a wage of $2.50 per week—a
wage lower than that paid to men for the same work. At the time, these jobs offered
the highest wages, for women, of any in the world. Moreover, by the 1820s, New
England had a surplus of women because so many men had migrated westward. Many,
perhaps most, of the young women viewed their work in mills as temporary. “There
are few who look upon factory labor as a pursuit for life,” one of them reported.
“It is but a temporary vocation; and most of the girls resolve to quit the
Mill. . . . Money is their object.” Whatever their motives, in the early 1820s, a
steady stream of lively young girls and single women began flocking to Lowell. To
reassure worried parents, mill owners promised to provide the “Lowell girls” with
tolerable work, competitive wages, prepared meals, comfortable boardinghouses (four
girls to a room) run by virtuous matrons, moral discipline, and educational and
cultural opportunities. Work in the mill village would provide a righteous escape
from the isolation and boredom of farm life.

Initially the “Lowell idea” worked. Visitors commented on the well-designed mills,
with their lecture halls and libraries. The “Lowell girls” were “neatly dressed”
and appeared “healthy and happy.” They lived in cramped dormitories staffed by
“virtuous” matrons who enforced strict rules regarding contact with men, evening
curfews, and mandatory church attendance. Despite twelve-hour workdays and five-
and-a-half-day workweeks (longer hours than those imposed upon prison inmates),
some women still found the time and energy to form study groups, write poetry,
publish a literary magazine, and attend lectures.

A colorized photograph of two Massachusetts mill girls holding shuttles. They both
wear white aprons over long-sleeved dresses.
Mill Girls Massachusetts mill workers of the mid-nineteenth century, photographed
holding shuttles. Thread was spun around the inner bobbin.
Lowell, however, lost its innocence as it grew—and as the owners accumulated
“unbelievable profits.” By 1832, some 500 cotton mills were operating in New
England. Eight years later, Lowell had come to house 8,000 textile workers. The
once clean and tidy rural village had become a grimy industrial city, and the
repetitive routine of tending a spinning machine or a loom all day led to boredom
and fatigue. Greed led mill owners to produce too much cloth, which depressed
prices. The owners slashed wages and quickened the pace of work. One worker
described the situation as constituting “factory tyranny.”

In 1834, the Lowell women went on strike to protest wage cuts and deteriorating
working and living conditions. The angry mill owners labeled the hundreds of
striking women “ungrateful” and “unfeminine”—and tried to get rid of the strike’s
leaders. One mill manager reported that “we have paid off several of these Amazons
& presume that they will leave town on Monday.” The workers lost the strike. Labor
activist Seth Luther denounced the mill system in New England for degrading the
“bodies and minds of the producing classes, destroying the energies of both, and
for no other object than to enable the ‘rich’ to ‘take care of themselves,’ while
the poor ‘must work or starve.’” Two years later, the Lowell workers again walked
out, to protest rent increases in company-owned boarding houses. This time the
owners backed down. Over time, however, the owners began hiring Irish immigrants,
mostly young women, who were so desperate for jobs that they rarely complained
about the working conditions. By 1850, some 40 percent of the mill workers were
Irish, and the mill owners also started hiring boys for jobs once reserved for
girls only.

The economic success of the New England textile mills raises an obvious question:
Why didn’t the South build its own mills close to the cotton fields to keep profits
in the region? A few mills did appear in the Carolinas and Georgia, but they
struggled because Whites generally resisted factory work, and planters refused to
allow enslaved people to leave the fields. Agricultural slavery had made the
planters rich. Why should they change?

THE GROWTH OF INDUSTRY IN THE 1840s

A map entitled, “The Growth of Industry in the 1840s.” The map covers the area of
the northeast and the Ohio Valley. Principal industrial areas are located around
the cities of Lowell, Boston, Providence, New Haven, New York, Newark,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. Questions
that accompany the map include the following: What made the Lowell system of
textile mill villages unique? What were the consequences of industrial expansion in
the Northeast?
What made the Lowell system unique?
What were the consequences of industrial expansion in the Northeast?
INDUSTRIALIZATION, CITIES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT The rapid growth of commerce and
industry drove the expansion of cities and mill villages. Lowell’s population in
1820 was 200. By 1830, it was 6,500, and ten years later it had soared to 21,000.
Other factory centers sprouted up across New England, displacing forests, farms,
and villages while filling the air with smoke, noise, and stench. In addition, the
profusion of dams—built to harness water to turn the mill wheels—flooded pastures,
decimated fish populations, and spawned rapid urban growth that polluted the
rivers.
In 1859, farmers far upstream of the big Massachusetts textile factories tried to
destroy a massive dam in Lake Village, New Hampshire, but their axes and crowbars
caused little damage. By then, the process of industrialization could not be
stopped. The textile mill system was not only transforming lives and property—it
was reshaping nature as well.

THE GROWTH OF CITIES, 1820 AND 1860

A map entitled, The Growth of Cities, 1820. Cities on the map indicate population
for Boston at 35,000 to 100,000, Providence at 10,000 to 34,999, Albany at 10,000
to 34,999, New York at over 100,000, Philadelphia at 35,000 to 100,000, Baltimore
at 35,000 to 100,000, Washington at 10,000 to 34,999, Richmond at 10,000 to 34,999,
Charleston at 10,000 to 34,999 and New Orleans at 35,000 to 100,000. Also, A map
entitled, The Growth of Cities, 1860. Population densities of cities from 35,000 to
100,000 and over 100,000 are indicated. Lowell, Providence, New Haven, Troy,
Albany, Newark, Rochester, Buffalo, Washington, Richmond, Charleston Cleveland,
Detroit, Louisville, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Montgomery, and San Francisco show
populations of 35,000 to 100,000. Boston, New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, Cincinnati, Chicago, and New Orleans show populations of over 100,000.
Questions that accompany the map include the following: What were the largest
cities in the United States in 1820? Why did those cities have the densest
populations? Why did Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and St. Louis become major
urban centers in the mid-nineteenth century?
What were the largest cities in the United States in 1820?
Why did those cities have the densest populations?
Why did Chicago, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and St. Louis become major urban centers
in the mid-nineteenth century?
Between 1820 and 1840, the number of Americans engaged in manufacturing increased
800 percent, and the number of city dwellers more than doubled. As Thomas Jefferson
and other agrarians had feared, the United States was rapidly becoming a global
industrial power, producing its own clothing and shoes, iron and engines.

Between 1790 and 1860, the urban proportion of the national population grew from 3
percent to 16 percent. Because of their strategic locations along rivers flowing
into the ocean, the Atlantic seaports of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
and Boston remained the largest cities. New Orleans became the nation’s fifth-
largest city because of its location and role in the shipment of goods floated down
the Mississippi River for distribution to the East Coast and to Europe. New York
eventually outpaced all its competitors in growth. By 1860, it was the first city
whose population surpassed 1 million, largely because of its superior harbor and
its unique access to the commerce along the Erie Canal and the Atlantic Ocean.

POPULAR CULTURE During the colonial era, working-class people had little time for
amusement. Most adults worked from dawn to dusk six days a week. In rural areas,
free time was often spent in communal activities, such as barn raisings, shooting
matches, and footraces, while coastal residents sailed and fished. In cities,
people attended dances, went on sleigh rides and picnics, and played “parlor games”
such as billiards, cards, and chess.
By the early nineteenth century, however, an increasingly urban society enjoyed
more diverse forms of recreation. A distinctive urban culture emerged, and laborers
and shopkeepers sought new forms of leisure and entertainment.

Urban Recreation Social drinking was pervasive during the first half of the
nineteenth century. In 1829, the secretary of war estimated that three quarters of
the nation’s laborers drank at least four ounces of “hard liquor” daily, in part
because the available water was often contaminated. Taverns and social or sporting
clubs served as centers of recreation and leisure.
So-called blood sports were also popular, especially among the working poor.
Cockfighting and dogfighting attracted frenzied betting, but prizefighting (boxing)
eventually displaced the animal contests and proved popular with all social
classes. The early contestants tended to be Irish or English immigrants who fought
with bare knuckles, and the results were brutal. A match ended only when a
contestant could not continue. One bout in 1842 lasted 119 rounds and ended when a
fighter died in his corner. Such deaths prompted several cities to outlaw boxing,
only to see it reappear as an underground activity.

A painting by George A. Hayes that portrays the blood sport of bare knuckle boxing.
A crowd of men are standing around a ring. Inside the ring, three shirtless men
with brown pants are fighting three shirtless men with red pants. Two of the men
are facing each other with their fists raised. Four other men, who are fully
dressed, are in the ring with them. The ring is outside in the dirt with green
hills in the background.
Bare-Knuckle Boxing Blood sports such as “bare-knuckle boxing,” portrayed here in a
contemporary painting George A. Hayes, emerged as popular urban entertainment for
men of all social classes, but especially among the working poor.
The Popular Arts Theater became the most popular form of indoor entertainment.
People from all walks of life flocked to opera houses, playhouses, and music halls
to watch a wide spectrum of performances: Shakespearean tragedies, “blood and
thunder” melodramas, comedies, minstrel shows, operas, and local pageants.
Audiences were predominantly men. “Respectable” women rarely attended, as the
prevailing “cult of domesticity” kept them at home. Raucous audiences cheered the
heroes and heroines and hissed at the villains. If an actor did not meet
expectations, spectators hurled curses, nuts, eggs, fruit, shoes, or chairs.
The 1830s brought the first uniquely American form of mass entertainment: Blackface
minstrel shows, featuring White performers made up as Blacks. “Minstrelsy,” which
drew upon African American folklore and reinforced racial stereotypes, featured
banjo and fiddle music, “shuffle” dances, and lowbrow humor. Between the 1830s and
the 1870s, minstrel shows were immensely popular, especially among northern
working-class ethnic groups and southern Whites.

The most popular minstrel songs were written by a White composer named Stephen
Foster. In 1846, he composed “Oh! Susanna,” which immediately became a national
favorite. Its popularity catapulted Foster into the limelight, and he responded
with equally well-received tunes such as “Old Folks at Home” (popularly known as
“Way Down upon the Swanee River”), “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground,” “My Old
Kentucky Home,” and “Old Black Joe,” all of which perpetuated the sentimental myth
of contented enslavement. IMMIGRATION
Video IconIrish and German Immigration

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Transcript
During the forty years from the outbreak of the Revolution to the end of the War of
1812, immigration to America had slowed to a trickle. The French Revolution and the
Napoleonic Wars restricted travel to and from Europe until 1815. Thereafter,
however, the number of immigrants rose steadily. New U.S. territories and states in
the West encouraged immigrants from Europe, often offering special incentives such
as voting rights after only six-months’ residency. Ships overflowing with
adventurous and desperate people arrived from across the world. They were eager to
experience the American Dream—the seductive promise that in the United States
everyone had a chance to improve their life.

After 1837, a worldwide economic slump accelerated the pace of immigration.

American employers aggressively recruited foreigners, in large part because they
would work for lower wages than native-born Americans. The Chicago Daily Tribune
observed that the tide of German immigrants was perfect for the “cheap and
ingenious labor of the country.” A German laborer was willing “to live as cheaply
and work infinitely more intelligently than the negro.”

The years from 1845 to 1854 marked the greatest proportional influx of immigrants
in U.S. history, 2.4 million, or about 14.5 percent of the total population in
1845. In 1860, more than one of every eight Americans was foreign-born. British
immigrants continued to arrive in large numbers. By the 1850s, the rapid
development of California lured Chinese immigrants in significant numbers, while
Scandinavians settled mostly in Wisconsin and Minnesota, where the climate and
woodlands reminded them of home. By far, however, the largest number of immigrants
between 1840 and 1860 came from Ireland and Germany.

THE IRISH No country proportionately sent more of its people to America than
Ireland, a nation long treated as a colony of England. They first arrived in
British America in significant numbers during the 1720s. By 1790, they represented
a sixth of the national population. During the mid-nineteenth century, however,
their numbers soared. A prolonged agricultural crisis that brough immense social
hardships caused many Irish to flee their homeland.
POPULATION DENSITY, 1820 AND 1860
A map entitled Population Density, 1820. The map of the United States shows the
number of persons per square mile. Boston, New York, Newark, and Philadelphia are
shown at over 90 persons per square mile. Other areas of New York, Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts, and Connecticut are shown at 46 to 90 persons per square mile. The
majority of the eastern seaboard from northeastern Georgia to southeastern Maine,
and states extending further west are shown at either 19 to 45 persons or 7 to 18
persons per square mile. The midwestern and southeastern states have 2 to 6 or less
persons per square mile. Also, a map entitled Population Density, 1860. The map
shows the number of persons per square mile. The greatest density of over 90 is
indicated in the northeastern area around Boston, New York, Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh, and Newark. Other areas of this density include Cincinnati and St.
Louis. Density of 46 to 90 persons per square mile occurred in most of the
northeastern states, as well as in Tennessee, Kentucky, and California. Density
from 19 to 45 and 7 to 18 persons per square mile cover the rest of the eastern
half of the United States with the exception of Florida. Density in Florida and the
rest of the country was 2 or less persons per square mile. Questions that accompany
the map include the following: In 1820, which regions had the greatest population
density? Why? How did the changes in the 1820 land law encourage western expansion?
In 1860, which regions had the greatest population density? Why? How did new
technologies allow farmers to produce more crops on larger pieces of land?
In 1820, which regions had the greatest population density? Why?
How did changes in the 1820 land law encourage western expansion?
In 1860, which regions had the greatest population density? Why?
How did new technologies allow farmers to grow more crops on larger pieces of land?
Farmers in Ireland primarily grew potatoes. The average Irishman ate five pounds of
potatoes a day. In 1845, a fungus destroyed the potato crop and triggered what came
to be called the Irish Potato Famine. More than a million people died, and almost 2
million more left Ireland, whose total population was only 8 million.

Most Irish immigrants, almost all of them Roman Catholics whose average age was
twenty-two, traveled to Canada and the United States. In just one year, Boston’s
Irish population jumped from 30,000 to 100,000. As one group of exiles explained,
“All we want to do is get out of Ireland; we must be better anywhere but here.”
America, they knew, had plenty “to eat” and plenty of jobs paying twice as much as
they earned in Ireland. By the 1850s, the Irish made up more than half the
population of Boston and New York City, and were almost as dominant in
Philadelphia. Most were desperately poor and crowded into filthy, poorly ventilated
tenement apartment houses. Irish neighborhoods were plagued by crime, diseases,
prostitution, and alcoholism. Almost 80 percent of infants born to Irish immigrants
died. The Catholic archbishop of New York described the Irish as “the poorest and
most wretched population that can be found in the world.”

The Irish often took on the hardest and most dangerous jobs. A visiting Irish
journalist wrote that there were “several sorts of power working at the fabric of
the Republic: water-power, steam-power, horse-power, and Irish power. The last
works hardest of them all.” It was mostly Irish men who built the canals and
railroads, and mostly Irish women who worked in the textile mills and served as
maids for tens of thousands of upper-middle-class Americans. One Irishman hired to
dig cellars under houses groaned that he worked like “a slave for the Americans,”
from sunrise to dark.

In the South, planters often hired Irishmen to do hazardous work rather than use
enslaved people. A southern rice planter explained to a northern visitor that he
hired groups of Irishmen to drain flooded areas. “It’s dangerous work, and a
negro’s life is too valuable to be risked at it. If a negro dies, it’s a
considerable loss, you know.”

Nativists caricatured the destitute and illiterate Irish immigrants as filthy, bad-
tempered, and heavy drinkers. They also encountered intense anti-Catholic prejudice
among native-born Protestants. Many employers posted signs reading “No Irish Need
Apply.”

A racist caricature drawn by Thomas Nast showing an Irishman and African American
southerner evenly balanced on a scale. The Black man is grinning foolishly. The
White man has a monkey-like face and is scowling.
The Ignorant Vote--Honors Are Easy Thomas Nast’s racist caricature of an Irishman
and African American southerner evenly balanced on a scale appeared on the cover of
Harper’s Weekly in December 1876.
Anti-Catholic and anti-Irish newspapers and magazines emerged in every major city.
A New England magazine called the thousands of Irish immigrants pouring into the
region “the most corrupt, debased, and the most brutally ignorant” race in America.
Various commentators referred to the Irish as “low-browed,” “savage,” “bestial,”
“lazy,” and “wild.” Cartoonists repeatedly depicted Irishmen as apes. Samuel F. B.
Morse took the lead in the anti-Catholic/anti-Irish crusade. He was one of many
Protestants who claimed that the pope in Rome, Italy, was sending Irish immigrants
to America to take over the nation.

Otherwise progressive people, like Horace Mann of Massachusetts, who fought for
public schools across the nation, embraced the anti-immigrant movement. “A foreign
people, born and bred and dwarfed under the despotisms of the Old World,” he
argued, “cannot be transformed into the full stature of American citizens merely by
a voyage across the Atlantic.”

Irish Americans, however, could be equally mean-spirited toward other groups, such
as free African Americans, who competed with them for low-wage, mostly unskilled
jobs. In 1850, the New York Tribune expressed concern that the Irish, having
escaped from “a galling, degrading bondage” in their homeland, opposed equal rights
for Blacks and frequently arrived at the polls shouting, “Down with the Colored
people! Let them go back to Africa, where they belong.” Irish freedom fighter
Daniel O’Connell scolded the immigrants for their racism: “It was not in Ireland
you learned this cruelty.”

Many African Americans viewed the Irish with equal contempt. In 1850, an enslaved
person expressed a common sentiment: “My Master is a great tyrant, he treats me
badly as if I were a common Irishman.” Irish immigrants in large cities often took
jobs as waiters, dockworkers, and deliverymen that had long been held by African
Americans. A free Black person voiced a criticism of immigrants threatening to take
over their low-skilled jobs that is still being made in the twenty-first century.
The Irish, he said, were “crowding themselves into every place of business and
labor and driving the poor colored American citizen out.”

Some enterprising Irish immigrants did forge remarkable careers in America,

however. Twenty years after arriving in New York, Alexander T. Stewart became the
owner of the nation’s largest department store and accumulated vast real estate
holdings. Michael Cudahy, who began working at age fourteen in a Milwaukee
meatpacking business, became head of the Cudahy Packing Company and developed a
process for the curing of meats under refrigeration. Dublin-born Victor Herbert
emerged as one of America’s most revered composers, and Irish dancers and
playwrights came to dominate the stage.

By the start of the Civil War, the Irish in America had energized American trade
unions, become the most important ethnic group supporting the Democratic party, and
made the Roman Catholic Church the nation’s largest religious denomination. Years
of persecution had instilled a fierce loyalty to the Catholic Church as “the
supreme authority over all the affairs of the world.” Such passion for Catholicism
generated unity among Irish Americans—and fear among American Protestants. The
Irish stuck together. Most of them settled in Irish neighborhoods in the nation’s
largest cities and formed powerful Democratic political organizations such as
Tammany Hall in New York City that would dominate political life during the second
half of the nineteenth century.

THE GERMANS German immigrants were almost as numerous as the Irish. Unlike the
Irish, however, the Germans included a large number of skilled craftsmen and well-
educated professional people—doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers—some of whom
were refugees from the failed German revolution of 1848.
In addition to an array of political opinions, Germans brought with them a variety
of religious preferences. Most were Protestants (usually Lutherans), a third were
Roman Catholics, and a significant number were Jews. Among the Germans who
prospered were Heinrich Steinweg, a piano maker who in America changed his name to
Steinway and became famous for the quality of his instruments, and Levi Strauss, a
Jewish tailor who followed the gold rush to California and began making work pants,
later dubbed “Levi’s.”

Germans often settled in rural areas. Many were independent farmers, skilled
workers, and shopkeepers who were able to establish themselves immediately. More so
than the Irish, they migrated in families and groups. This clannish quality helped
them better sustain elements of their language and culture. More of them also
returned to their native country. About 14 percent of the Germans eventually went
back to their homeland, compared with just 9 percent of the Irish.
NATIVISM The flood of immigrants created a backlash among a growing number of
“nativists,” people born in the United States who resented the newcomers. The flood
of Irish and German Catholics especially angered Protestant nativists. A Boston
minister described Catholicism as “the ally of tyranny, the opponent of material
prosperity, the foe of thrift, the enemy of the railroad, the caucus, and the
school.”
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Transcript
Nativists eventually organized to stop the tide of immigrants. Anti-Catholicism had
been a force in colonial America but did not crystallize into a national movement
until the 1840s. The Native American party was formed in New York in 1843 and
quickly spread to other states. In 1845, the Massachusetts philosopher-poet Ralph
Waldo Emerson expressed his distaste for the new movement in his journal: “I hate
the narrowness of the Native American party. It is the dog in the manger. It is
precisely opposite to all the dictates of love & magnanimity: & therefore of
course, opposite to true wisdom.” He added that the strongest nations in history
were those formed by many different peoples and cultures.

An image of a political cartoon that visualizes the common nativists complaints of

the group called the Know Nothings. Two men carry a ballot box between them. One
wears a whiskey barrel, marking him as Irish. The other wears a beer barrel,
marking him as German.
Know-Nothings This political cartoon (ca. 1850) visualizes the Know-Nothings’
common complaints: that in contrast to hardworking Americans, the Irish and German
immigrants were drunkards who were stealing American elections and disrupting the
political status quo.
Roving gangs of nativists terrorized and even murdered Catholic immigrants to keep
them from voting. The Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, founded as an oath-bound
secret society in New York City in 1849, soon spread to most other large cities. In
the early 1850s, it had grown into a powerful political group known in some cities
as the American party. In 1855, the American party became a national organization.
Members pledged never to vote for foreign-born or Catholic candidates. When asked
about their secretive organization, they were told to say, “I know nothing,” a
phrase that gave rise to the informal name for the party: the Know-Nothings.

The Know-Nothings demanded that immigrants and Roman Catholics be excluded from
public office and that the waiting period for naturalization (earning citizenship)
be extended from five to twenty-one years. Their shouted battle cry was “America
for Americans,” and many of them engaged in riotous violence, assaulting Catholic
neighborhoods; killing Catholic immigrants; and burning churches, convents, and
homes.

Then, as now, nativists generated intense opposition. Abraham Lincoln expressed his
revulsion at the anti-immigrant party in a letter to a friend in 1855:

I am not a Know-Nothing—that is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors
the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people just
because of their religion or their place of origin? As a nation, we began by
declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are
created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read
‘all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’

For a while, the Know-Nothings threatened to control New England, New York, and
Maryland, but the anti-Catholic movement subsided when slavery became the focal
issue of the 1850s, and after 1856 members opted either for the Republican or
Democratic parties. By 1860, the nativist American party was [Link] LABOR
AND NEW PROFESSIONS
While most Americans continued to work as farmers during the nineteenth century, a
growing number found employment in new or expanding enterprises: textile mills,
shoe factories, banks, railroads, publishing, retail stores, teaching, preaching,
medicine, law, construction, and engineering. Technological innovations (steam
power, mechanized tools, and new modes of transportation) and their social
applications (mass communication, turnpikes, the postal service, banks, and
corporations) transformed the nature of work for many Americans, both men and
women.

Still, during the first half of the nineteenth century, most Americans continued to
live on isolated farms, their lives revolving around the changing seasons and the
hours of daylight. Most grew their own food and made their own clothes. Information
from the outside world was scarce and usually stale by the time it appeared in
rural areas. By the end of the century, however, all that had changed thanks to
technological innovations.

EARLY UNIONS In 1800, only 12 percent of Americans worked for wages; by 1860, that
number had grown to 40 percent. The rapid growth of wage workers often came at the
expense of skilled, self-employed artisans and craftsmen who owned small shops
where they made or repaired carriages, shoes, hats, saddles, silverware, jewelry,
glass, ropes, furniture, boats, and a broad array of other products. Other skilled
craftsmen were blacksmiths, printers, or barrel makers.
An image of shoemakers working in the bottoming room at a Massachusetts shoe
factory. Here, the soles of shoes are attached to the uppers, or tops. In the
foreground are workers doing hand stitching. In the background, other workers
operate belt-driven machinery.
The Shoe Factory When Philadelphia shoemakers went on strike in 1806, a court found
them guilty of a “conspiracy to raise wages.” Here shoemakers work in the bottoming
room at a Massachusetts shoe factory.
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the number of self-employed
craftsmen steadily declined as the number of factories and mills increased. Those
who emphasized quality and craftsmanship in their custom-made products found it
increasingly hard to compete with the low prices for similar products made in much
larger numbers in factories and mass-production workshops.

The production of shoes, for example, was transformed by the shift to mass
manufacturing. Until the nineteenth century, boots and shoes were made by hand for
local customers. Working in their own home or small shop, shoemakers might also
employ one or two journeymen (assistants) as well as an apprentice, a young man
learning the skilled trade.

That changed during the early nineteenth century, as the number and size of shoe
shops increased in New England, largely driven by the demand for inexpensive shoes,
many of which were shipped south for the rapidly growing enslaved population. Shoe
shops were displaced by factories, and the master shoemaker became a manager rather
than an artisan. Instead of creating a shoe from start to finish, workers were
given specific tasks such as cutting the leather or stitching the “uppers” onto the
soles.

Skilled workers forced to make the transition to mass production and a strict
division of labor often resented the change. A Massachusetts worker complained that
the factory owners were “little stuck up, self-conceited individuals” who forced
workers to follow their orders or be fired. In 1850, the Board of Health in Lynn,
Massachusetts, reported that the life expectancy of a shoe worker was almost twenty
years shorter than that of a farmer.

During the early nineteenth century, a growing fear that they were losing status
led artisans in the major cities to become involved in politics and unions. At
first, these workers organized into interest groups representing their individual
skills or trades. Philadelphia furniture craftsmen, for example, called for their
peers to form a “union” to protect “their mutual independence.” Such “trade
associations” were the first type of labor unions. They pressured politicians for
tariffs to protect their industries from foreign imports, provided insurance
benefits, and drafted regulations to improve working conditions. In addition, they
sought to control the number of tradesmen in their profession so as to maintain
wage levels.

Early labor unions faced major legal obstacles—in fact, they were prosecuted as
unlawful conspiracies. In 1842, though, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
issued a landmark ruling in Commonwealth v. Hunt declaring that forming a trade
union was not in itself illegal, nor was a demand that employers hire only members
of the union. The court also said that union workers could strike if an employer
hired laborers who refused to join the union.

Until the 1820s, labor organizations took the form of local trade unions, each
confined to one city and one craft or skill. From 1827 to 1837, however,
organization on a larger scale began to take hold. In 1834, the National Trades’
Union was formed to organize local trade unions into a stronger national
association. At the same time, shoemakers, printers, carpenters, and weavers
established their own national craft unions. But all the national groups and most
of the local ones vanished during the economic depression in the late 1830s.

Women also formed trade unions. Sarah Monroe, who helped organize the New York
Tailoresses’ Society, explained that it was intended to defend “our rights.” If it
was “unfashionable for men to bear [workplace] oppression in silence,” she
wondered, “why should it not also become unfashionable with the women?” In 1831,
the women tailors went out on strike demanding a “just price for labor.”

THE RISE OF THE PROFESSIONS The dramatic social changes of the first half of the
nineteenth century opened up an array of new professions. Bustling new towns
required new services—retail stores, printing shops, post offices, newspapers,
schools, banks, law firms, medical practices, and others—that created more high-
status professions than had existed before.
In 1849, Henry Day delivered a lecture titled “The Professions” at the Western
Reserve School of Medicine. He declared that the most important social functions in
modern life were the professional skills and claimed that society had become
utterly dependent upon “professional services.”

A painting of a one-room schoolhouse. A female teacher stands in the front of the

classroom behind a desk. Children sit on benches around the room. Boy are mostly
seated on the left and girls on the right.
The Country School A one-room schoolhouse in rural New England, as depicted by
Winslow Homer in 1871. The young teacher presides over her class, which, as was
custom, is arranged with boys on one side of the room and girls on the other (the
youngest boy and girl, on the right, are likely siblings who have been allowed to
sit next to each other). (Winslow Homer, American, 1836–1910; The Country School,
1871; oil on canvas; 21 1/4 x 38 1/4 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum
Purchase 123:1946)
Teaching Teaching became one of the fastest-growing professions. Horace Mann of
Massachusetts was instrumental in promoting the idea of free public education as
the best way to transform children into disciplined, judicious citizens. Many
states, especially in the North, agreed, and the number of schools exploded during
the second quarter of the nineteenth century. New schools required teachers, and
Mann helped create “normal schools” to train future teachers. Public schools
initially preferred men as teachers, usually hiring them at age seventeen or
eighteen. The pay was so low that few stayed in the profession their entire career,
but for many educated, young adults, teaching offered independence and social
status, as well as an alternative to the rural isolation of farming. Church groups
and civic leaders started private academies, or seminaries, for girls.
Law, Medicine, and Engineering Teaching was a common stepping-stone for men who
became lawyers. In the decades after the American Revolution, young men would teach
for a year or two before joining an experienced attorney as an apprentice (what
today would be called an intern). They would learn the practice of law in exchange
for their labors.
Like attorneys, physicians in the early nineteenth century often had little formal
academic training. Healers of every stripe assumed the title of doctor and
established medical practices without regulation. Most were self-taught or had
assisted a physician for several years, while occasionally taking classes at the
handful of medical schools. By 1860, there were 60,000 self-styled physicians, many
of whom were “quacks” or frauds. As a result, the medical profession lost the
public’s confidence until the emergence of formal medical schools.

The industrial expansion of the United States also spurred the profession of
engineering, a field that, by the outbreak of the Civil War, would become the
nation’s largest professional occupation for men. Specialized expertise was
required for the design and construction of canals and railroads, the development
of machine tools and steam engines, and the building of roads, bridges, and
factories.

WOMEN IN THE PROFESSIONAL WORKFORCE During the first half of the nineteenth
century, most women still worked primarily in the home or on a farm. The only
professions readily available to them were nursing (often midwifery, the delivery
of babies) and teaching. Many middle-class women spent their time outside the home
doing religious and social-service work.
A few women, however, courageously pursued careers in male-dominated professions.
Elizabeth Blackwell of Ohio managed to gain admission to Geneva Medical College
(now Hobart and William Smith College) in western New York despite the disapproval
of the faculty. When she arrived at her first class, a hush fell upon the students
“as if each member had been struck with paralysis.” The idea of a woman studying
anatomy alongside men was scandalous.

Blackwell, however, had the last laugh when she finished first in her class in
1849, but thereafter the medical school refused to admit any more women. Her sister
Emily was forced to enroll at the Cleveland Medical College in 1854.

The first American woman to earn a medical degree, Elizabeth Blackwell went on to
start the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and later was professor of
gynecology at the London School of Medicine for Women.

Elizabeth Blackwell was remarkably self-confident, once confiding that “I know that
I am one of the Elect.” Yet she was no early feminist. She opposed giving women the
vote and even denounced women in general as being “petty, trifling, priest-ridden,
gossiping, stupid [and] inane.”

EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES The dynamic market economy that emerged in the nineteenth
century helped spread the idea that individuals should have equal opportunities to
better themselves through their abilities and hard work. Equality of opportunity,
however, did not assume equal outcomes. Americans wanted an equal chance to earn
unequal amounts of wealth. In America, observed a journalist in 1844, “one has as
good a chance as another according to his talents, prudence, and personal
exertions.”
The same ideals that prompted so many White immigrants to risk everything to come
to the United States were equally appealing to those groups that still did not
enjoy equal opportunities to pursue their American dream: namely, African Americans
and women. By the 1830s, they, too, began to demand their right to “life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.” Such desires of “common people” to pursue economic
opportunities would quickly spill over into the political arena. Still, progress in
those arenas was achingly slow. The prevailing theme of political life in the first
half of the nineteenth century would be the continuing democratization of
opportunities for White men, regardless of income or background, to vote and hold
office. SUMMARY
Transportation and Communication Revolutions Canals and other improvements in
transportation such as the steamboat, which could be used on the nation’s rivers
and lakes, allowed goods to reach markets more quickly and cheaply, helping to
create a national market economy in which people bought and sold goods at longer
distances. Clipper ships shortened the amount of time to transport goods across the
oceans. The railroads (which expanded rapidly during the 1850s) and the telegraph
system diminished the isolation of the West and united the country economically and
socially. The Erie Canal (1825) contributed to New York City’s emerging status as
the nation’s economic center even as it spurred the growth of Chicago and other
midwestern cities. Improvements in transportation and communication linked rural
communities to a worldwide marketplace.
The Industrial Revolution Inventions in machine tools and technology spurred an
Industrial Revolution during the nineteenth century. The cotton gin dramatically
increased cotton production, and a rapidly spreading cotton culture boomed in the
South, with a resultant increase in slavery. Other inventions, such as John Deere’s
steel plow and the mechanized McCormick reaper, helped Americans, especially
westerners, farm their land more efficiently and more profitably. In the North,
mills and factories, at first water-powered and eventually powered by coal-fired
steam engines, spread rapidly. They initially produced textiles for clothing and
bedding from southern cotton, as well as iron, shoes, and other products. The
federal government’s tariff policy encouraged the growth of domestic manufacturing,
especially cotton textiles, by reducing imports of British cloth. Between 1820 and
1840, the number of Americans engaged in manufacturing increased 800 percent. Many
mill workers, such as the women employed in the Lowell system of New England
textile factory communities, worked long hours for low wages in unhealthy
conditions. Industrialization, along with increased commerce, helped spur the
growth of cities. By 1860, 16 percent of the population lived in urban areas.
Immigration The promise of cheap land and good wages drew millions of immigrants to
America. By 1844, about 14.5 percent of the population was foreign born. Many of
those who arrived in the 1840s came not just from the Protestant regions of
Northern Europe that had supplied most of America’s previous immigrants. The
devastating potato famine led to an influx of poor Irish Catholic families. By the
1850s, they represented a significant portion of the urban population in the United
States, constituting a majority in New York and Boston. German migrants, many of
them Catholics and Jews, came to the country at the same time. Not all native-born
Americans welcomed the immigrants. Nativists became a powerful political force in
the 1850s, with the Know-Nothings nearly achieving major-party status with their
message of excluding immigrants and Catholics from the nation’s political
community.
Workers, Professionals, and Women Skilled workers (artisans) in American cities had
long formed trade associations to protect their members and to lobby for their
interests. As the Industrial Revolution spread, some workers expanded these
organizations nationally, forming the National Trades’ Union. The growth of the
market economy also expanded opportunities for those with formal education to serve
in new or expanding professions. The number of physicians, teachers, engineers, and
lawyers grew rapidly. By the mid-nineteenth century, women, African Americans, and
immigrants began to agitate for equal social, economic, and political
opportunities.
CHRONOLOGY
1793
Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin

1794
Philadelphia-Lancaster Turnpike is completed

1807
Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston launch steamship transportation on the Hudson
River in New York

1825
Erie Canal opens in upstate New York

1831
Cyrus McCormick invents a mechanical reaper

1834
National Trades’ Union is organized

1837
John Deere invents the steel plow

1842
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issues Commonwealth v. Hunt decision

1845
The Rainbow, the first clipper ship, is launched

Irish potato famine

1846
Elias Howe invents the sewing machine

1848
California gold rush begins

1855
Know-Nothings (American party) formed

KEY TERMS
market economy p. 365

steamboats p. 369

Erie Canal (1825) p. 369

railroads p. 370

clipper ships p. 372

telegraph system p. 374

Industrial Revolution p. 376

cotton gin p. 377

cotton p. 377

McCormick reaper p. 380

Lowell system p. 382

nativists p. 393
Know-Nothings p. 393

National Trades’ Union p. 396

professions p. 397