Forging the National

Economy
---~""'--

1790-1860
THE PROGRESS OF INVENTION IS REALLY A
THREAT [TO MONARCHY]. WHENEVER I SEE
A RAILROAD I LOOK FOR A REPUBLIC.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1866

he new nation went bounding into the nineteenth

T century in a burst of movement. New England Yan-
kees, Pennsylvania farmers, and southern yeomen all The Westward Movement
pushed west in search of cheap land and prodigious
opportunity, soon to be joined by vast numbers of The rise of Andrew Jackson, the first president from
immigrants from Europe, who also made their way to beyond the Appalachian Mountains, exemplified the
the country's fast -growing cities. But not only people inexorable westward march of the American people. The
were in motion. Newly invented machinery quickened West, with its raw frontier, was the most typically Ameri-
the cultivation of crops and the manufacturing of goods, can part of America. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote
while workers found themselves laboring under new, in 1844, "Europe stretches to the Alleghenies; America
more demanding expectations for their pace of work. lies beyond.
Better roads, faster steamboats, farther-reaching canals, "The Republic was young, and so were the people-
and tentacle-stretching railroads all helped move peo- as late as 1850, half of Americans were under the age of
ple, raw materials, and manufactured goods from coast thirty. They were also restless and energetic, seemingly
to coast and Gulf to Great Lakes by the mid-nineteenth always on the move, and always westward. One "tall
century. The momentum gave rise to a more dynamic, tale" of the frontier described chickens that voluntarily
market -oriented, national economy. crossed their legs every spring, waiting to be tied for the

287
288 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860

A Pioneer Homestead on the Missouri, by Karl Bodmer, 1833 The Swiss-born and
Paris-trained artist Karl Bodmer painted this scene while accompanying German
Prince Maximillian on his expedition across the American West. From St. Louis,
the party traveled up the Missouri River by steamboat under the protection of John
Jacob Astor's Fur Company. Bodmer painted scenes along the way, especially of
Indians and their surroundings.

annual move west. By 1840 the "demographic center" of Americans, marooned by geography, were often ill-
the American population map had crossed the Alleghe- informed, superstitious, provincial, and fiercely individ-
nies. By the eve of the Civil War, it had marched across ualistic. Ralph Waldo Emerson's popular lecture-essay
the Ohio River. "Self-Reliance" struck a deeply responsive chord. Popular
Legend portrays an army of muscular axmen tri- literature of the period abounded with portraits of
umphantly carving civilization out of the western woods. unique, isolated figures like James Fenimore Cooper's
But in reality life was downright grim for most pioneer heroic Natty Bumppo and Herman Melville's restless
families. Poorly fed, ill-clad, housed in hastily erected Captain Ahab-just as Jacksonian politics aimed to
shanties (Abraham Lincoln's family lived for a year in a emancipate the lone-wolf, enterprising businessperson.
three-sided lean-to made of brush and sticks), they were Yet even in this heyday of "rugged individualism," there
perpetual victims of disease, depression, and premature were important exceptions. Pioneers, in tasks clearly
death. Above all, unbearable loneliness haunted them, beyond their own individual resources, would call upon
especially the women, who were often cut off from their neighbors for logrolling and barn raising and
human contact, even their neighbors, for days or even upon their governments for help in building internal
weeks, while confined to the cramped orbit of a dark improvements.
cabin in a secluded clearing. Breakdowns and even
madness were all too frequently the "opportunities" that
the frontier offered to pioneer women.
Frontier life could be tough and crude for men as
well. No-holds-barred wrestling, which permitted such
Shaping the Western Landscape
niceties as the biting off of noses and the gouging out The westward movement also molded the physical
of eyes, was a popular entertainment. Pioneering environment. Pioneers in a hurry often exhausted the
 Opening the West 289

land in the tobacco regions and then pushed on, leaving from the region. Trade in buffalo robes also flourished,
behind barren and rain-gutted fields. In the Kentucky leading eventually to the virtually total annihilation
bottomlands, cane as high as fifteen feet posed a seem- of the massive bison herds that once blanketed the
ingly insurmountable barrier to the plow. But settlers western prairies. Still farther west, on the California
soon discovered that when the cane was burned off, coast, other traders bought up prodigious quantities of
European bluegrass thrived in the charred canefields. sea-otter pelts, driving the once-bountiful otters to the
"Kentucky bluegrass," as it was somewhat inaccurately point of near-extinction. Some historians have called
called, made ideal pasture for livestock-and lured this aggressive and often heedless exploitation of the
thousands more American homesteaders into Kentucky. West's natural bounty "ecological imperialism."
The American West felt the pressure of civilization Yet Americans in this period also revered nature and
in additional ways. By the 1820s American fur-trappers admired its beauty. Indeed the spirit of nationalism fed a
were setting their traplines all over the vast Rocky growing belief in the uniqueness of the American wilder-
Mountain region. The fur-trapping empire was based ness. Searching for the United States' distinctive charac-
on the "rendezvous" system. Each summer, traders teristics in this nation-conscious age, many observers
ventured from St. Louis to a verdant Rocky Mountain found the wild, unspoiled character of the land, espe-
valley, made camp, and waited for the trappers and cially in the West, to be among the young nation's de fin-
Indians to arrive with beaver pelts to swap for manufac- ing attributes. Other countries might have impressive
tured goods from the East. This trade thrived for some mountains or sparkling rivers, but none had the pristine,
two decades; by the time beaver hats had gone out of natural beauty of America, unspoiled by human hands
fashion, the hapless beaver had all but disappeared and reminiscent of a time before the dawn of civilization.

Mouth of the Platte River, 900 Miles above St. Louis, by George Catlin, 1832
Catlin's West unfolded as a vast panorama of flat, open space peopled only by
the Indians shown in the foreground. Catlin believed that capturing the unending
prairie on canvas required a new aesthetic, the sublime horizontal, and an
acceptance of a landscape bereft of man-built features, without "anything
rising above the horizon, which was a perfect straight line around us, like
that of the blue and boundless ocean."
290 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860

Percent Total
Year White Nonwhite Nonwhite Population

1790
•
3,172,000
•
757,000 19
•
3,929,000
1800 4,306,000 1,002,000 19 5,308,000
1810 5,862,000 1,378,000 19 7,240,000
1820 7,867,000 1,772,000 18 9,639,000
1830 10,537,000 2,329,000 18 12,866,000
1840 14,196,000 2,874,000 17 17,070,000
1850 19,553,000 3,639,000 16 23,192,000
1860 26,922,000 4,521,000 14 31,443,000

10M 20M 30M 40M

Population Increase, Including Slaves and Indians, 1790-1860 Increasing European
immigration and the closing of the slave trade gradually "whitened" the population
beginning in 1820. This trend continued into the early twentieth century.

This attitude toward wilderness became in time a kind of

national mystique, inspiring literature and painting, and
eventually kindling a powerful conservation movement. The March of the Millions
George Catlin, a painter and student of Native Ameri-
can life, was among the first Americans to advocate the As the American people moved west, they also multi-
preservation of nature as a deliberate national policy. In plied at an amazing rate. By midcentury the population
1832 he observed Sioux Indians in South Dakota recklessly was still doubling approximately every twenty-five
slaughtering buffalo in order to trade the animals' tongues years, as in fertile colonial days.
for the white man's whiskey. Appalled at this spectacle and By 1860 the original thirteen states had more than
fearing for the preservation of Indians and buffalo alike, doubled in number: thirty-three stars graced the Ameri-
Catlin proposed the creation of a national park. His idea can flag. The United States was the fourth most popu-
later bore fruit with the creation of a national park system, lous nation in the western world, exceeded only by three
beginning with Yellowstone Park in 1872. European countries-Russia, France, and Austria.

Westward Movement of Center of Population,

1790-2000 The triangles indicate the points at
which a map of the United States weighted for
the population of the country in a given year
would balance. Note the remarkable equilibrium
of the north-south pull from 1790 to about 1940,
and the strong spurt west and south thereafter.
The 1980 census revealed that the nation's
ATLANTIC center of population had at last moved west of
OCEAN
the Mississippi River. The map also shows the
slowing of the westward movement between
1890 and 1940-the period of heaviest immigra-
tion from Europe, which ended up mainly in
East Coast cities.
 An Influx of Immigrants 291

Cincinnati in 1843 Famous as a

processor of hogs, this "Queen
City of the West" was a town of
2,540 people in 1800 and 161,044
in 1860, 45 percent of them
foreign-born. Although tied
to the South by downriver
commerce on the Ohio and
Mississippi Rivers, it remained
loyal to the North during the
Civil War.

Urban growth continued explosively. In 1790 there Boston in 1823 pioneered a sewer system, and New York
had been only two American cities that could boast in 1842 abandoned wells and cisterns for a piped-in
populations of twenty thousand or more souls: water supply. The city thus unknowingly eliminated the
Philadelphia and New York. By 1860 there were forty- breeding places of many disease-carrying mosquitoes.
three, and about three hundred other places claimed A continuing high birthrate accounted for most of
over five thousand inhabitants apiece. New York was the the increase in population, but by the 1840s the tides of
metropolis; New Orleans, the "Queen of the South"; and immigration were adding hundreds of thousands more.
Chicago, the swaggering lord of the Midwest, destined Before this decade immigrants had been flowing in at a
to be "hog butcher for the world." rate of sixty thousand a year, but suddenly the influx
Such overrapid urbanization unfortunately brought tripled in the 1840s and then quadrupled in the 1850s.
undesirable by-products. It intensified the problems of During these two feverish decades, over a million and a
smelly slums, feeble street lighting, inadequate polic- half Irish, and nearly as many Germans, swarmed down
ing, impure water, foul sewage, ravenous rats, and the gangplanks. Why did they come?
improper garbage disposal. Hogs poked their scavenging The immigrants came partly because Europe
snouts about many city streets as late as the 1840s. seemed to be running out of room. The population
of the Old World more than doubled in the nineteenth
century, and Europe began to generate a seething pool
of apparently "surplus" people. They were displaced
Irish and German Immigration by Decade, and footloose in their homelands before they felt the tug
1830-1900 of the American magnet. Indeed at least as many people
moved about within Europe as crossed the Atlantic.
Years Irish Germans America benefited from these people-churning changes
1831-1840 207,381 152,454 but did not set them all in motion. Nor was the United
1841-1850 780,719 434,626 States the sole beneficiary of the process: of the nearly
1851-1860 914,119 951,667 60 million people who abandoned Europe in the
1861-1870 435,778 787,468 century after 1840, about 25 million went somewhere
1871-1880 436,871 718,182 other than the United States.
1881-1890 655,482 1,452,970 Yet America still beckoned most strongly to the
1891-1900 388,416 505,152 struggling masses of Europe, and the majority of
TOTAL 3,818,766 5,000,519 migrants headed for the "land of freedom and opportu-
nity." There was freedom from aristocratic caste and
292 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860

Tens of thousands of destitute souls, fleeing the

Land of Famine for the Land of Plenty, flocked to Amer-
A German immigrant living in Cincinnati
ica in the "Black Forties." Ireland's great export has been
wrote to his relatives in Germany in 1847:
population, and the Irish take their place beside the
"A lot of people come over here who Jews and the Africans as a dispersed people (see "Makers
were well off in Germany but were of America: The Irish," pp. 294-295).
enticed to leave their fatherland by These uprooted newcomers-too poor to move west
boastful and imprudent letters from and buy the necessary land, livestock, and equipment-
their friends or children and thought swarmed into the larger seaboard cities. Noteworthy
they could become rich in America. were Boston and particularly New York, which rapidly
This deceives a lot of people, since became the largest Irish city in the world. Before many
what can they do here? If they stay in decades had passed, more people of Hibernian blood
the city they can only earn their bread lived in America than on the "ould sod" of Erin's Isle.
at hard and unaccustomed labor. If The luckless Irish immigrants received no red-
they want to live in the country and carpet treatment. Forced to live in squalor, they were
don't have enough money to buy a rudely crammed into the already-vile slums. They were
piece of land that is cleared and has a scorned by the older American stock, especially
house then they have to settle in the "proper" Protestant Bostonians, who regarded the
wild bush and have to work very hard scruffy Catholic arrivals as a social menace. Barely
to clear the trees out of the way so they literate "Biddies" (Bridgets) took jobs as kitchen maids.
can sow and plant. But people who are Broad-shouldered "Paddies" (Patricks) were pushed into
healthy, strong, and hard-working do pick-and-shovel drudgery on canals and railroads,
pretty well." where thousands left their bones as victims of disease
and accidental explosions. It was said that an Irishman
lay buried under every railroad tie. As wage-depressing

state church; there was abundant opportunity to secure

broad acres and better one's condition. Much-read let-
ters sent home by immigrants-"America letters"-
often described in glowing terms the richer life: low Margaret McCarthy, a recent arrival in
taxes, no compulsory military service, and "three meat America, captured much of the com plexity
meals a day." The introduction of transoceanic of the immigrant experience in a letter she
steamships also meant that the immigrants could come wrote fro m New York to her f amily in
speedily, in a matter of ten or twelve days instead of ten Ireland in 1850:
or twelve weeks. On board, they were still jammed into
"This is a good place and a good country,
unsanitary quarters, thus suffering an appalling death
but there is one thing that's ruining this
rate from infectious diseases, but the nightmare was
place. The emigrants have not money
more endurable because it was shorter.
enough to take them to the interior of
the country, which obliges them to
remain here in New York and the like
places, which causes the less demand
The Emerald Isle Moves West for labor and also the great reduction
in wages. For this reason I would
Ireland, already groaning under the heavy hand of British
advise no one to come to America that
overlords, was prostrated in the mid-1840s. A terrible rot
would not have some money after
attacked the potato crop, on which the people had
landing here that would enable them
become dangerously dependent, and about one-fourth
to go west in case they would get no
of them were swept away by disease and hunger. Starved
work to do here."
bodies were found dead by the roadsides with grass in
their mouths. All told, about 2 million perished.
 Irish and German Immigration 293

transatlantic transplanting. As the Irish-Americans

increased in number-nearly 2 million arrived between
An early-nineteenth-century French traveler
1830 and 1860-officials in Washington glimpsed politi-
recorded his impressions ofAmerica and
cal gold in those emerald green hills. Politicians often
Ireland:
found it politically profitable to fire verbal volleys at
"I have seen the Indian in his forests London-a process vulgarly known as "twisting the
and the Negro in his chains, and British lion's tail."
thought, as I contemplated their
pitiable condition, that I saw the
very extreme of human wretchedness;
but I did not then know the condition
of unfortunate Ireland." The German Forty-Eighters
The influx of refugees from Germany between 1830 and
1860 was hardly less spectacular than that from Ireland.
During these troubled years, over a million and a half
Germans stepped onto American soil (see "Makers of
America: The Germans," pp. 298-299). The bulk of them
competitors for jobs, the Irish were hated by native were uprooted farmers, displaced by crop failures and
workers. "No Irish Need Apply" was a sign commonly other hardships. But a strong sprinkling were liberal
posted at factory gates and was often abbreviated to political refugees. Saddened by the collapse of the
NINA. The Irish, for similar reasons, fiercely resented democratic revolutions of 1848, they had decided to
the blacks, with whom they shared society's basement. leave the autocratic fatherland and flee to America-the
Race riots between black and Irish dockworkers flared brightest hope of democracy.
up in several port cities, and the Irish were generally Germany's loss was America's gain. Zealous German
cool to the abolitionist cause. liberals like the lanky and public-spirited Carl Schurz,
The friendless "famine Irish" were forced to fend a relentless foe of slavery and public corruption, con-
for themselves. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, a tributed richly to the elevation of American political life.
semisecret society founded in Ireland to fight rapacious Unlike the Irish, many of the Germanic newcomers
landlords, served in America as a benevolent society, possessed a modest amount of material goods. Most of
aiding the downtrodden. It also helped to spawn the them pushed out to the lush lands of the Middle West,
"Molly Maguires," a shadowy Irish miners' union that notably Wisconsin, where they settled and established
rocked the Pennsylvania coal districts in the 1860s model farms. Like the Irish, they formed an influential
and 1870s. body of voters whom American politicians shamelessly
The Irish tended to remain in low-skill occupations wooed. But the Germans were less potent politically
but gradually improved their lot, usually by acquiring because their strength was more widely scattered.
modest amounts of property. The education of children The hand of Germans in shaping American life was
was cut short as families struggled to save money to widely felt in still other ways. The Conestoga wagon, the
purchase a home. But for humble Irish peasants, cruelly Kentucky rifle, and the Christmas tree were all German
cast out of their homeland, property ownership contributions to American culture. Germans had fled
counted as a grand "success." from the militarism and wars of Europe and conse-
Politics quickly attracted these gregarious Gaelic quently came to be a bulwark of isolationist sentiment
newcomers. They soon began to gain control of power- in the upper Mississippi Valley. Better educated on the
ful city machines, notably New York's Tammany Hall, whole than the stump-grubbing Americans, they
and reaped the patronage rewards. Before long, beguil- warmly supported public schools, including their
ingly brogued Irishmen dominated police departments Kindergarten (children's garden). They likewise did much
in many big cities, where they now drove the "Paddy to stimulate art and music. As outspoken champions of
wagons" that had once carted their brawling forebears freedom, they became relentless enemies of slavery
to jail. during the fevered years before the Civil War.
American politicians made haste to cultivate the Yet the Germans-often dubbed "damned Dutch-
Irish vote, especially in the politically potent state of men" -were occasionally regarded with suspicion by
New York. Irish hatred of the British lost nothing in the their old-stockAmerican neighbors. Seeking to preserve
 The Irish
or a generation, from 1793 to 1815, war raged across The disembarking Irish were poorly prepared for
F Europe. Ruinous as it was on the Continent, the
fighting brought unprecedented prosperity to the long-
urban life. They found progress up the economic ladder
painfully slow. Their work as domestic servants or con-
suffering landsmen of Ireland, groaning since the struction laborers was dull and arduous, and mortality
twelfth century under the yoke of English rule. For as
Europe's fields lay fallow, irrigated only by the blood of
its farmers, Ireland fed the hungry armies that ravened Outward Bound, The Quay at Dublin, 1854
for food as well as territory. Irish farmers planted every Thousands fled famine in Ireland by coming
available acre, interspersing the lowly potato amongst to America in the 1840s and 1850s.
their fields of grain. With prices for food products ever
mounting, tenant farmers reaped a temporary respite
from their perpetual struggle to remain on the land.
Most landlords were satisfied by the prosperity and so
relaxed their pressure on tenants; others, stymied by the
absence of British police forces that had been stripped
of manpower to fight in Europe, had little means to
enforce eviction notices.
But the peace that brought solace to battle-scarred
Europe changed all this. After 1815 war-inflated wheat
prices plummeted by half. Hard-pressed landlords
resolved to leave vast fields unplanted. Assisted now by
a strengthened British constabulary, they vowed to
sweep the pesky peasants from the retired acreage.
Many of those forced to leave sought work in England;
some went to America. Then in 1845 a blight that rav-
aged the potato crop sounded the final knell for the Irish
peasantry. The resultant famine spread desolation
throughout the island. In five years more than a million
people died. Another million sailed for America.
Of the emigrants, most were young and literate in
English, the majority under thirty-five years old. Fami-
lies typically pooled money to send strong young sons to
the New World, where they would earn wages to pay the
fares for those who waited at home. These "famine Irish"
mostly remained in the port cities of the Northeast,
abandoning the farmer's life for the dingy congestion of
the urban metropolis.

294
Saint Patrick's Day Parade in America, Union Square, c. 1870
This painting shows a Saint Patrick's Day parade in New York
City. The religious festival was celebrated with greater fanfare in
America than in Ireland itself, as Irish immigrants used it to boost
their ethnic solidarity and assert their distinctive identity in their
adopted country.

rates were astoundingly high. Escape from the potato life in America's cities, life in the Old Country never-
famine hardly guaranteed a long life to an Irish Ameri- theless had instilled in them an aptitude for politics.
can; a gray-bearded Irishman was a rare sight in nine- Irish Catholic resistance against centuries of English
teenth-century America. Most of the new arrivals toiled Anglican domination had instructed many Old Coun-
as day laborers. A fortunate few owned boardinghouses try Irish in the ways of mass politics. That political
or saloons, where their dispirited countrymen sought experience readied them for the boss system of the
solace in the bottle. For Irish-born women, opportuni- political "machines" in America's northeastern cities.
ties were still scarcer; they worked mainly as domestic The boss's local representatives met each newcomer
servants. soon after he landed in America. Asking only for votes,
But it was their Roman Catholicism, more even than the machine supplied coal in wintertime, food, and
their penury or their perceived fondness for alcohol, help with the law. Irish voters soon became a bulwark
that earned the Irish the distrust and resentment oftheir of the Democratic party, reliably supporting the party
native-born, Protestant American neighbors. The cor- of Jefferson and Jackson in cities like New York and
nerstone of social and religious life for Irish immigrants Boston. As Irish Americans like New York's "Honest
was the parish. Worries about safeguarding their chil- John" Kelly themselves became bosses, white-collar
dren's faith inspired the construction of parish schools, jobs in government service opened up to the Irish.
financed by the pennies of struggling working-class They became building inspectors, aldermen, and even
Irish parents. policemen-an astonishing irony for a people driven
If Ireland's green fields scarcely equipped her sons from their homeland by the nightsticks and bayonets
and daughters for the scrap and scramble of economic of the British police.

295
296 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860

their language and culture, they sometimes settled in

compact "colonies" and kept aloof from the surrounding
Strong antiforeignism was reflected in the
community. Accustomed to the "Continental Sunday"
platform of the American (Know-Nothing)
and uncurbed by Puritan tradition, they made merry
party in 1856:
on the Sabbath and drank huge quantities of an amber
beverage called bier (beer), which dates its real popularity "Americans must rule America; and to
in America to their coming. Their Old World drinking this end, native-born citizens should
habits, like those of the Irish, spurred advocates of be selected for all state, federal, or
temperance in the use of alcohol to redouble their municipal offices of government
reform efforts. employment, in preference to
naturalized citizens."

Flare-ups of Roman Catholics were now on the move. Seeking to

Antiloreignism protect their children from Protestant indoctrination in
The invasion by this so-called immigrant "rabble" in the the public schools, they began in the 1840s to construct
1840s and 1850s inflamed the prejudices of American an entirely separate Catholic educational system-an
"nativists." They feared that these foreign hordes would enormously expensive undertaking for a poor immi-
outbreed, outvote, and overwhelm the old "native" grant community, but one that revealed the strength of
stock. Not only did the newcomers take jobs from its religious commitment. They had formed a negligible
"native" Americans, but the bulk of the displaced Irish minority during colonial days, and their numbers
were Roman Catholics, as were a substantial minority had increased gradually. But with the enormous influx
of the Germans. The Church of Rome was still widely of the Irish and Germans in the 1840s and 1850s, the
regarded by many old -line Americans as a "foreign" Catholics became a powerful religious group. In 1840
church; convents were commonly referred to as "popish they had ranked fifth, behind the Baptists, Methodists,
brothels." Presbyterians, and Congregationalists. By 1850, with
some 1.8 million communicants, they had bounded into
first place-a position they have never lost.
Older-stock Americans were alarmed by these
Crooked Voting A bitter "nativist" cartoon
charging Irish and German immigrants with
mounting figures. They professed to believe that in due
"stealing" elections. time the "alien riffraff" would "establish" the Catholic
Church at the expense of Protestantism and would
introduce "popish idols." The noisier American
"nativists" rallied for political action. In 1849 they
formed the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which
soon developed into the formidable American, or "Know-
Nothing," party-a name derived from its secretiveness.
"Nativists" agitated for rigid restrictions on immigration
and naturalization and for laws authorizing the depor-
tation of alien paupers. They also promoted a lurid
literature of exposure, much of it pure fiction. The
authors, sometimes posing as escaped nuns, described
the shocking sins they imagined the cloisters concealed,
including the secret burial of babies. One of these
sensational books-Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures
(1836)-sold over 300,000 copies.
Even uglier was occasional mass violence. As early
as 1834, a Catholic convent near Boston was burned by a
howling ~ob, and in ensuing years a few scattered
 Dawn of the Industrial Revolution 297

attacks fell upon Catholic schools and churches. The going to coop themselves up in smelly factories when
most frightful flare-up occurred during 1844 in they might till their own acres in God's fresh air and sun-
Philadelphia, where the Irish Catholics fought back light. Labor was therefore generally scarce, and enough
against the threats of the "nativists." The City of Brotherly nimble hands to operate the machines were hard to
Love did not quiet down until two Catholic churches find-until immigrants began to pour ashore in the
had been burned and some thirteen citizens had been 1840s. Money for capital investment, moreover, was not
killed and fifty wounded in several days of fighting. plentiful in pioneering America. Raw materials lay
These outbursts of intolerance, though infrequent undeveloped, undiscovered, or unsuspected. The
and generally localized in the larger cities, remain an Republic was one day to become the world's leading
unfortunate blot on the record of America's treatment of coal producer, but much of the coal burned in colonial
minority groups. times was imported all the way from Britain.
Immigrants were undeniably making America a If labor was scarce, consumers were not. But the
more pluralistic society-one of the most ethnically and young country had difficulty producing goods of high
racially varied in the history of the world-and perhaps enough quality and cheap enough cost to compete with
it was small wonder that cultural clashes would occur. mass-produced European products. Long-established
Why, in fact, were such episodes not even more frequent British factories in particular provided cutthroat
and more violent? Part of the answer lies in the robust- competition. Their superiority was attested by the fact
ness of the American economy. The vigorous growth of that a few unscrupulous Yankee manufacturers, out to
the economy in these years both attracted immigrants make a dishonest dollar, stamped their own products
in the first place and ensured that, once arrived, they with fake English trademarks.
could claim their share of American wealth without The British also enjoyed a monopoly of the textile
jeopardizing the wealth of others. Their hands and machinery, whose secrets they were anxious to hide
brains, in fact, helped fuel economic expansion. Immi- from foreign competitors. Parliament enacted laws, in
grants and the American economy, in short, needed one harmony with the mercantile system, forbidding the
another. Without the newcomers, a preponderantly export of the machines or the emigration of mechanics
agricultural United States might well have been con- able to reproduce them.
demned to watch in envy as the Industrial Revolution Although a number of small manufacturing enter-
swept through nineteenth-century Europe. prises existed in the early Republic, the future industrial
colossus was still snoring. Not until well past the middle
of the nineteenth century did the value of the output of
the factories exceed that of the farms.

Creeping Mechanization
A group of gifted British inventors, beginning about
1750, perfected a series of machines for the mass pro-
Whitney Ends
duction of textiles. This harnessing of steam multiplied
the power of human muscles some ten-thousandfold the Fiber Famine
and ushered in the modern factory system-and with it, Samuel Slater has been acclaimed the "Father of the
the so-called Industrial Revolution. It was accompanied Factory System" in America, and seldom can the pater-
by a no-less-spectacular transformation in agricultural nity of a movement more properly be ascribed to one
production and in the methods of transportation and person. A skilled British mechanic of twenty-one, he
communication. was attracted by bounties being offered to British
The factory system gradually spread from Britain- workers familiar with the textile machines. After memo-
"the world's workshop"-to other lands. It took a gener- rizing the plans for the machinery, he escaped in
ation or so to reach western Europe, and then the disguise to America, where he won the backing of Moses
United States. Why was the youthful American Repub- Brown, a Quaker capitalist in Rhode Island. Laboriously
lic, eventually to become an industrial giant, so slow to reconstructing the essential apparatus with the aid of a
embrace the machine? blacksmith and a carpenter, he put into operation in
For one thing, land was cheap in America. Land- 1791 the first efficient American machinery for spinning
starved descendants of land-starved peasants were not cotton thread.
 The Germans
etween 1820 and 1920, a sea of Germans lapped at These "Germans" actually hailed from many different
B America's shores and seeped into its very heartland.
Their numbers surpassed those of any other immigrant
Old World lands, because there was no unified nation
of Germany until 1871, when the ruthless and crafty
group, even the prolific and often -detested Irish. Yet this Prussian Otto von Bismarck assembled the German
Germanic flood, unlike its Gaelic equivalent, stirred state out of a mosaic of independent principalities,
little panic in the hearts of native-born Americans kingdoms, and duchies. Until that time, "Germans"
because the Germans largely stayed to themselves, far came to America as Prussians, Bavarians, Hessians,
from the madding crowds and nativist fears of north- Rhinelanders, Pomeranians, and Westphalians. They
eastern cities. They prospered with astonishing ease, arrived at different times and for many different rea-
building towns in Wisconsin, agricultural colonies in sons. Some, particularly the so-called Forty-Eighters-
Texas, and religious communities in Pennsylvania. They the refugees from the abortive democratic revolutions of
added a decidedly Germanic flavor to the heady brew 1848-hungered for the democracy they had failed to
of reform and community building that so animated win in Germany. Others, particularly Jews, Pietists, and
antebellum America. Anabaptist groups like the Amish and the Mennonites,
coveted religious freedom. And they came not only to
America. Like the Italians later, many Germans sought a
new life in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. But the largest
number ventured into the United States.
Typical German immigrants arrived with fatter
purses than their Irish counterparts. Small landowners
or independent artisans in their native countries, they
did not have to settle for bottom-rung industrial
employment in the grimy factories of the Northeast and
instead could afford to push on to the open spaces of
the American West.
In Wisconsin these immigrants found a home away
from home, a place with a climate, soil, and geography
much like central Europe's. Milwaukee, a crude frontier
town before the Germans' arrival, became the "German
Athens." It boasted a German theater, German beer gar-
dens, a German volunteer fire company, and a German-
English academy. In distant Texas, German settlements
like New Braunfels and Friedrichs burg flourished. When
the famous landscape architect and writer Frederick
A German Homestead in Wisconsin Law Olmsted stumbled upon these prairie outposts of
These settlers' Germanic heritage is evident in the Teutonic culture in 1857, he was shocked to be "wel-
architecture of the log cabin. Traditional log cabins comed by a figure in a blue flannel shirt and pendant
used log walls right up to the roofline, but the Germans beard, quoting Tacitus." These German colonies in the
closed their gables with vertical board siding. frontier Southwest mixed high European elegance with

298
 These Germanic colonizers of America's heartland
also formed religious communities, none more distinc-
tive or durable than the Amish settlements of Pennsyl-
vania, Indiana, and Ohio. The Amish took their name
from their founder and leader, the Swiss Anabaptist
Jacob Amman. Like other Anabaptist groups, they
shunned extravagance and reserved baptism for adults,
repudiating the tradition of infant baptism practiced
by most Europeans. For this they were persecuted, even
imprisoned, in Europe. Seeking escape from their
oppression, some five hundred Amish ventured to
Pennsylvania in the 1700s, followed by three thousand
in the years from 1815 to 1865.
In America they formed enduring religious com-
munities-isolated enclaves where they could shield
themselves from the corruption and the conveniences
of the modern world. To this day the German-speaking
Amish still travel in horse-drawn carriages and farm
without heavy machinery. No electric lights brighten
"Little Germany" Cincinnati's "Over-the-Rhine" the darkness that nightly envelops their tidy farm-
district in 1887. houses; no ringing telephones punctuate the reverent
tranquility of their mealtime prayer; no ornaments
relieve the austere simplicity of their black garments.
Texas ruggedness. Olmsted described a visit to a The Amish remain a stalwart, traditional community
German household where the settlers drank "coffee in tin in a rootless, turbulent society, a living testament to
cups upon Dresden saucers" and sat upon "barrels for the religious ferment and social experiments of the
seats, to hear a Beethoven symphony on the grand piano." antebellum era.

Amish Country, near

Lancaster, Pennsylvania
For more than two centuries,
the Amish people have
preserved their traditional
way of life.

299
300 C HAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860

America's First Textile Mill When Samuel Slater first built his mill on the Blackstone River in 1791, angry
neighbors tore down the dam that provided power to its water-driven machinery-an early instance of grass-
roots environmental protest. This Pawtucket, Rhode Island, mill began by producing only thread, which was
then distributed to home weavers who turned it into cloth. Within two years, Slater and his partners were
selling their product to the far-flung markets of Salem, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. By 1805, the
mill featured the "mule," a new machine which made possible the spinning of finer yarns.

The ravenous mechanism was now ready, but where

was the cotton fiber? Handpicking one pound of lint
from three pounds of seed was a full day's work for one
slave, and this process was so expensive that American-
made cotton cloth was relatively rare.
Another mechanical genius, Massachusetts-born Eli
Whitney, now made his mark. After graduating from
Yale, he journeyed to Georgia to serve as a private tutor
while preparing for the law. There he was told that the
poverty of the South would be relieved if someone could
only invent a workable device for separating the seed
from the short -staple cotton fiber. Within ten days, in
1793, he built a crude machine called the cotton gin
(short for engine) that was fifty times more effective
than the handpicking process.
Few machines have ever wrought so wondrous a
change. The gin affected not only the history of America
but that of the world. Almost overnight the raising of
cotton became highly profitable, and the South was tied

A Pioneer Woman Batting Cotton Making cotton

"batts" from the raw fiber was the first step in making
"homespun" cloth. Mechanical looms and sewing
machines would soon make this traditional women's
work obsolete.
 The Upsurge of Manufacturing 30 1

One observer in 1836 published a newspaper

account of conditions in some of the New
England factories:
"The operatives work th irteen hours a
day in the summer time, and from
daylight to dark in the winter. At half
past four in the morning the factory
bell rings, and at five the girls must
be in the mills ... . So fatigued .. . are
numbers of girls that they go to bed
soon after receiving their e vening meal,
and endeavor by a comparatively long
sleep to resuscitate their weakened
frames for the toil of the coming day."

plains, over the Piedmont, and onto the black loam

bottomlands of Alabama and Mississippi. Humming
gins poured out avalanches of snowy fiber for the
Patent for Eli Whitn ey's Cotton Gin spindles of the Yankee machines, though for decades to
Whitney's revolutionary little machine was artfully
come the mills of Britain bought the lion's share of
simple. Wire hooks on a rotating cylinder pulled the
cotton fibers through slots too narrow to allow seeds
southern cotton. The American phase of the Industrial
to pass. A set of brushes then removed the fibers. Revolution, which first blossomed in cotton textiles,
Whitney's gin made possible the mass cultivation of was well on its way.
upland, or short-staple, cotton, which was unprofitable Factories at first flourished most actively in New
to raise when its seeds had to be laboriously removed England, though they branched out into the more pop-
by hand. Before Whitney's invention, cotton growing ulous areas of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
had been largely confined to long-staple, or Sea The South, increasingly wedded to the production of
Island cotton, which could grow only in hot, humid cotton, could boast of comparatively little manufacturing.
coastal areas. With the advent of the cotton gin, Its capital was bound up in slaves; its local consumers
short-staple cotton cultivation spread across the for the most part were desperately poor.
southern interior-and so did slavery.
New England was singularly favored as an industrial
center for several reasons. Its narrow belt of stony soil
made farming difficult and hence made manufacturing
attractive. A relatively dense population provided labor
and accessible markets, shipping brought in capital, and
hand and foot to the throne of King Cotton. Human snug seaports made easy the import of raw materials
bondage had been dying out, but the insatiable demand and the export of the finished products. Finally, the rapid
for cotton reriveted the chains on the limbs of the rivers-notably the Merrimack in Massachusetts-
downtrodden southern blacks. provided abundant water power to turn the cogs of the
South and North both prospered. Slave-driving machines. By 1860 more than 400 million pounds of
planters cleared more acres for cotton, pushing the southern cotton poured annually into the gaping maws
Cotton Kingdom westward off the depleted tidewater of over a thousand mills, mostly in New England.
302 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860

Daguerreotype of a Young
Girl with Sample of Cotton
Dress Fabric, c. 1850s
The growing availability of
inexpensive American-made
calico, or printed cotton cloth,
vastly expanded women's
wardrobes.

Manufacturing Guns, c. 1860 A rare daguerreotype

showing an operator working the Lock Frame Jigging
Marvels in Manufacturing Machine in Samuel Colt's state-of-the-art Hartford,
America's factories spread slowly until about 1807, when Connecticut, gun factory.
there began the fateful sequence of the embargo, nonin-
tercourse, and the War of 1812. Stern necessity dictated
the manufacture of substitutes for normal imports,
while the stoppage of European commerce was tern-
porarily ruinous to Yankee shipping. Both capital and
labor were driven from the waves onto the factory floor,
as New England, in the striking phrase of John Ran-
dolph, exchanged the trident for the distaff. Generous
bounties were offered by local authorities for home-
11 11
grown goods, Buy American" and Wear American"
became popular slogans, and patriotism prompted
the wearing of baggy homespun garments. President
Madison donned some at his inauguration, where he
was said to have been a walking argument for the better
processing of native wool.
But the manufacturing boomlet broke abruptly with
the peace of Ghent in 1815. British competitors unloaded
their dammed-up surpluses at ruinously low prices, and
American newspapers were so full of British advertise-
ments for goods on credit that little space was left for
news. In one Rhode Island district, all 150 mills were
forced to close their doors, except the original Slater
plant. Responding to pained outcries, Congress provided
some relief when it passed the mildly protective Tariff of
1816-among the earliest political contests to control
the shape of the economy.
 Inventions in Industrialization 303

As the factory system flourished, it embraced War. It drove many a seamstress from the shelter of the
numerous other industries in addition to textiles. private home to the factory, where, like a human robot,
Prominent among them was the manufacturing of she tended the clattering mechanisms.
firearms, and here the wizardly Eli Whitney again Each momentous new invention seemed to stimulate
appeared with an extraordinary contribution. Frus- still more imaginative inventions. For the decade
trated in his earlier efforts to monopolize the cotton gin, ending in 1800, only 306 patents were registered in
he turned to the mass production of muskets for the Washington; but the decade ending in 1860 saw the
U.S. Army. Up to this time, each part of a firearm had amazing total of 28,000. Yet in 1838 the clerk of the
been hand-tooled, and if the trigger of one broke, the Patent Office resigned in despair, complaining that all
trigger of another might or might not fit. About 1798 worthwhile inventions had been discovered.
Whitney seized upon the idea of having machines make Technical advances spurred equally important
each part, so that all the triggers, for example, would be changes in the form and legal status of business organi-
as much alike as the successive imprints of a copperplate zations. The principle of limited liability aided the
engraving. Journeying to Washington, he reportedly concentration of capital by permitting the individual
dismantled ten of his new muskets in the presence of investor, in cases of legal claims or bankruptcy, to risk
skeptical officials, scrambled the parts together, and no more than his own share of the corporation's stock.
then quickly reassembled ten different muskets. Fifteen Boston families formed one of the earliest
The principle of interchangeable parts was widely investment capital companies, the Boston Associates.
adopted by 1850, and it ultimately became the basis of They eventually dominated the textile, railroad, insur-
modern mass-production, assembly-line methods. It ance, and banking business of Massachusetts. Laws of
11
gave to the North the vast industrial plant that ensured free incorporation," first passed in New York in 1848,
military preponderance over the South. Ironically, the meant that businessmen could create corporations
Yankee Eli Whitney, by perfecting the cotton gin, gave without applying for individual charters from the
slavery a renewed lease on life, and perhaps made the legislature.
Civil War more likely. At the same time, by popularizing Samuel E B. Morse's telegraph was among the
the principle of interchangeable parts, Whitney helped inventions that tightened the sinews of an increasingly
factories to flourish in the North, giving the Union a complex business world. A distinguished but poverty-
decided advantage when that showdown came. stricken portrait painter, Morse finally secured from
The sewing machine, invented by Elias Howe in Congress, to the accompaniment of the usual jeers, an
1846 and perfected by Isaac Singer, gave another strong appropriation of $30,000 to support his experiment
11
boost to northern industrialization. The sewing machine with talking wires." In 1844 Morse strung a wire forty
became the foundation of the ready- made clothing miles from Washington to Baltimore and tapped out
11
industry, which took root about the time of the Civil the historic message, What hath God wrought?" The
invention brought fame and fortune to Morse, as he put
distantly separated people in almost instant communi-
cation with one another. By the eve of the Civil War, a
web of singing wires spanned the continent, revolution-
Said Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) in
izing news gathering, diplomacy, and finance.
a lecture in 1859,
"The patent system secured to the
inventor for a limited time exclusive
use of his invention, and thereby
added the fuel of interest to the fire of
genius in the discovery and production
Workers and ..Wage Slaves••
of new and useful things." One ugly outgrowth of the factory system was an
Ten years earlier Lincoln had received patent increasingly acute labor problem. Hitherto manufacturing
had been done in the home, or in the small shop, where
no. 6469 for a scheme to buoy steamboats
the master craftsman and his apprentice, rubbing
over shoals. It was never practically applied,
elbows at the same bench, could maintain an intimate
but he remains the only president ever to
and friendly relationship. The Industrial Revolution
have secured a patent.
submerged this personal association in the impersonal
11
ownership of stuffy factories in Spindle cities." Around
304 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860

The Master Craftsman

Dignity and pride of workmanship
are evident in this tidy wheelwright's
shop. Small-scale, intimate workplaces
like this were eventually overshadowed
by the mass-production, impersonal
factory system, as in the illustrations
on pages 306 and 309.

these, like tumors, the slumlike hovels of the "wage granted the laboring man the vote. Brandishing the
slaves" tended to cluster. ballot, he first strove to lighten his burden through
Clearly the early factory system did not shower its workingmen's parties. Eventually many workers gave
benefits evenly on all. While many owners grew plump, their loyalty to the Democratic party of Andrew Jackson,
workingpeople often wasted away at their work- whose attack on the Bank of the United States and
benches. Hours were long, wages were low, and meals against all forms of "privilege" reflected their anxieties
were skimpy and hastily gulped. Workers were forced about the emerging capitalist economy. In addition to
to toil in unsanitary buildings that were poorly such goals as the ten-hour day, higher wages, and
ventilated, lighted, and heated. They were forbidden tolerable working conditions, they demanded public
by law to form labor unions to raise wages, for such education for their children and an end to the inhuman
cooperative activity was regarded as a criminal con- practice of imprisonment for debt.
spiracy. Not surprisingly, only twenty-four recorded Employers, abhorring the rise of the "rabble" in poli-
strikes occurred before 1835. tics, fought the ten-hour day to the last ditch. They argued
Especially vulnerable to exploitation were child that reduced hours would lessen production, increase
workers. In 1820 a significant portion of the nation's costs, and demoralize the workers. Laborers would have
industrial toilers were children under ten years of age. so much leisure time that the Devil would lead them into
Victims of factory labor, many children were mentally mischief. A red-letter gain was at length registered for
blighted, emotionally starved, physically stunted, and labor in 1840, when President Van Buren established the
even brutally whipped in special "whipping rooms." In ten-hour day for federal employees on public works. In
Samuel Slater's mill of 1791, the first machine tenders ensuing years a number of states gradually fell into line by
were seven boys and two girls, all under twelve years reducing the hours of workingpeople.
of age. Day laborers at last learned that their strongest
By contrast, the lot of most adult wage workers weapon was to lay down their tools, even at the risk of
improved markedly in the 1820s and 1830s. In the full prosecution under the law. Dozens of strikes erupted in
flush of Jacksonian democracy, many of the states the 1830s and 1840s, most of them for higher wages,
 Examing the Evidence 305

rt.t:a·'
l--rfl
1
'
/J' (tl•bt4 1
.~,~. EX A M I N I N G
t'i·_, .. - ' _
THE EV IDEN C E
,_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __

.rr ; ,{, ,, I

"•the Invention of the Sewing Machine Historians Hundreds of thousands of sewing machines were
of technology examine not only the documentary produced beginning in the 1850s for commercial
evidence of plans and patents left behind by inventors, manufacturing of clothing, books, shoes, and many
but surviving machines themselves. In 1845 Elias Howe, other products and also for home use. The sewing
a twenty-six-year-old apprentice to a Boston watch- machine became the first widely advertised consumer
maker, invented a sewing machine that could make 250 product. Due to its high cost, the Singer company intro-
stitches a minute, five times what the swiftest hand- duced an installment buying plan, which helped place
sewer could do. A year later Howe received a patent for sewing machines in most middle-class households.
his invention, but because the hand-cranked machine Why was the sewing machine able to find eager cus-
could only stitch straight seams for a short distance tomers in commercial workshops and home sewing
before requiring resetting, it had limited commercial rooms alike? How might the sewing machine have
appeal. Howe took his sewing machine abroad, where changed other aspects of American life, such as work
he worked with British manufacturers to improve it, patterns, clothing styles, and retail selling? What other
and then returned to America and combined his patent advances in technology might have been necessary for
with those of other inventors, including Isaac M. Singer. the invention of the sewing machine?
306 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860

some for the ten-hour day, and a few for such unusual
goals as the right to smoke on the job. The workers
Violence broke out along the New York
usually lost more strikes than they won, for the
waterfront in 1836 when laborers striking
employer could resort to such tactics as the importing of
for higher wages attacked "scabs." Philip
strikebreakers-often derisively called "scabs" or "rats,"
Hone's (1780-1851) diary records:
and often fresh off the boat from the Old World. Labor
"The Mayor, who acts with vigour and long raised its voice against the unrestricted inpouring
firmness, ordered out the troops, who of wage-depressing and union-busting immigrant
are now on duty with loaded arms .... workers.
These measures have restored order Labor's early and painful efforts at organization
for the present, but I fear the elements had netted some 300,000 trade unionists by 1830. But
of disorder are at work; the bands of such encouraging gains were dashed on the rocks of
Irish and other foreigners, instigated hard times following the severe depression of 1837. As
by the mischievous councils of the unemployment spread, union membership shriveled.
trades-union and other combinations Yet toilers won a promising legal victory in 1842. The
of discontented men, are acquiring supreme court of Massachusetts ruled in the case of
strength and importance which will Commonwealth v. Hunt that labor unions were not
ere long be difficult to quell." illegal conspiracies, provided that their methods were
"honorable and peaceful." This enlightened decision

The Sewing Floor of Thompson's Skirt Factory. 1859 The burgeoning textile industry provided
employment for thousands of women in antebellum America-and also produced the clothes that
women wore. This view of a New York City shop in 1859 illustrates the transition from hand-sewing
(on the right) to machine-stitching (on the left). It also vividly illustrates the contrast between the
kinds of "sewing circles" in which women had traditionally sought companionship to the impersonal
mass-production line of the modern manufacturing plant. Note especially the stark exhortation on
the wall: "Strive to Excel." Contrast this impersonal scene with the workplace depicted on page 304.
 Working Women 307

England farm girls, carefully supervised on and off the

job by watchful matrons. Escorted regularly to church
A woman worker in the Lowell mills
from their company boardinghouses and forbidden to
wrote a friend in 1844:
form unions, they had few opportunities to share dissat-
"You wish to know minutely of our isfactions over their grueling working conditions.
hours of labor. We go in [to the mill] at But factory jobs of any kind were still unusual for
five o'clock; at seven we come out to women. Opportunities for women to be economically
breakfast; at half-past seven we return self-supporting were scarce and consisted mainly of
to our work, and stay until half-past nursing, domestic service, and especially teaching. The
twelve. At one, or quarter-past one four dedicated Catharine Beecher, unmarried daughter of a
months in the year, we return to our famous preacher and sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe,
work, and stay until seven at night. tirelessly urged women to enter the teaching profes-
Then the evening is all our own, which sion. She eventually succeeded beyond her dreams, as
is more than some laboring girls can men left teaching for other lines of work and school-
say, who think nothing is more tedious teaching became a thoroughly "feminized" occupation.
than a factory life." Other work "opportunities" for women beckoned in
household service. Perhaps one white family in ten
employed servants at mid century, most of whom were
poor white, immigrant, or black women. About 10 percent
of white women were working for pay outside their own
homes in 1850, and estimates are that about 20 percent
did not legalize the strike overnight throughout the of all women had been employed at some time prior
country, but it was a significant signpost of the times. to marriage.
Trade unions still had a rocky row to hoe, stretching The vast majority of workingwomen were single.
ahead for about a century, before they could meet Upon marriage they left their paying jobs and took up
management on relatively even terms. their new work (without wages) as wives and mothers.
In the home they were enshrined in a "cult of domesticity,"
a widespread cultural creed that glorified the customary
functions of the homemaker. From their pedestal,
Women and married women commanded immense moral power,
and they increasingly made decisions that altered the
the Economy
character of the family itself.
Women were also sucked into the clanging mechanism Women's changing roles and the spreading Indus-
of factory production. Farm women and girls had an trial Revolution brought some important changes in the
important place in the preindustrial economy, spinning life of the nineteenth -century home-the traditional
yarn, weaving cloth, and making candles, soap, butter, "women's sphere." Love, not parental "arrangement,"
and cheese. New factories such as the textile mills of more and more frequently determined the choice of a
New England undermined these activities, cranking out spouse-yet parents often retained the power of veto.
manufactured goods much faster than they could be Families thus became more closely knit and affectionate,
made by hand at home. Yet these same factories offered providing the emotional refuge that made the threatening
employment to the very young women whose work they impersonality of big-city industrialism tolerable to
were displacing. Factory jobs promised greater eco- many people.
nomic independence for women, as well as the means Most striking, families grew smaller. The average
to buy the manufactured products of the new market household had nearly six members at the end of the
economy. eighteenth century but fewer than five members a
"Factory girls" typically toiled six days a week, earn- century later. The "fertility rate," or number of births
ing a pittance for dreary, limb-numbing, earsplitting among women age fourteen to forty- five, dropped
stints of twelve or thirteen hours-"from dark to dark." sharply among white women in the years after the
The Boston Associates, nonetheless, proudly pointed to Revolution and, in the course of the nineteenth cen-
their textile mill at Lowell, Massachusetts, as a show- tury as a whole, fell by half. Birth control was still a
place factory. The workers were virtually all New taboo topic for polite conversation, and contraceptive
308 CHAPTER 14 Forging the Na tiona! Economy, 1790-1860

to the United States in the nineteenth century often

complained about the unruly behavior of American
"brats." But though American parents may have increas-
ingly spared the rod, they did not spoil their children.
Lessons were enforced by punishments other than the
hickory stick. When the daughter of novelist Harriet
Beecher Stowe neglected to do her homework, her
mother sent her from the dinner table and gave her
"only bread and water in her own apartment." What
Europeans saw as permissiveness was in reality the
consequence of an emerging new idea of child-rearing,
in which the child's will was not to be simply broken, but
rather shaped.
In the little republic of the family, as in the Republic
at large, good citizens were raised not to be meekly
obedient to authority, but to be independent individuals
who could make their own decisions on the basis of
internalized moral standards. Thus the outlines of the
"modern" family were clear by midcentury: it was small,
affectionate, and child-centered, and it provided a
special arena for the talents of women. Feminists of a
later day might decry the stifling atmosphere of the
nineteenth-century home, but to many women of the
time, it seemed a big step upward from the conditions of
grinding toil-often alongside men in the fields-in
which their mothers had lived.

York, Pennsylvania, Family with Negro Servant. c. 1828

This portrait of a Pennsylvania family presents a
somewhat idealized picture of the home as the Western Farmers Reap
woman's sphere. The wife and mother sits at the a Revolution in the Fields
center of activity; while she reads to the children, the
husband and father stands by somewhat superfluously. As smoke-belching factories altered the eastern
A black servant cares for an infant in the corner, skyline, flourishing farms were changing the face of
suggesting the prosperous status of this household. the West. The trans-Allegheny region-especially the
Ohio-Indiana-Illinois tier-was fast becoming the
nation's breadbasket. Before long it would become a
granary to the world.
Pioneer families first hacked a clearing out of
technology was primitive, but clearly some form of the forest and then planted their painfully furrowed
family limitation was being practiced quietly and effec- fields to corn. The yellow grain was amazingly versatile.
tively in countless families, rural and urban alike. It could be fed to hogs ("corn on the hoof") or distilled
Women undoubtedly played a large part-perhaps the into liquor ("corn in the bottle"). Both these products
leading part-indecisions to have fewer children. This could be transported more easily than the bulky grain
newly assertive role for women has been called "domestic itself, and they became the early western farmer's staple
feminism," because it signified the growing power and market items. So many hogs were butchered, traded, or
independence of women, even while they remained shipped at Cincinnati that the city was known as the
wrapped in the "cult of domesticity." "Porkopolis" of the West.
Smaller families, in turn, meant child-centered Most western produce was at first floated down the
families, since where children are fewer, parents can Ohio-Mississippi River system, to feed the lusty appetite
lavish more care on them individually. European visitors of the booming Cotton Kingdom. But western farmers
 Advances in Agriculture 309

were as hungry for profits as southern slaves and than the South-which was becoming self-sufficient in
planters were for food. These tillers, spurred on by the food production-could devour. They began to dream
easy availability of seemingly boundless acres, sought of markets elsewhere-in the mushrooming factory
ways to bring more and more land into cultivation. towns of the East or across the faraway Atlantic. But
Ingenious inventors came to their aid. One of the they were still largely landlocked. Commerce moved
first obstacles that frustrated the farmers was the thickly north and south on the river systems. Before it could
matted soil of the West, which snagged and snapped begin to move east-west in bulk, a transportation
fragile wooden plows. John Deere of Illinois in 1837 revolution would have to occur.
finally produced a steel plow that broke the stubborn
soil. Sharp and effective, it was also light enough to be
pulled by horses, rather than oxen.
In the 1830s Virginia-born Cyrus McCormick con-
tributed the most wondrous contraption of all: a mechan-
Highways and Steamboats
ical mower-reaper. The clattering cogs of McCormick's In 1789, when the Constitution was launched, primitive
horse-drawn machine were to the western farmers what methods of travel were still in use. Waterborne com-
the cotton gin was to the southern planters. Seated on his merce, whether along the coast or on the rivers, was
red-chariot reaper, a single husbandman could do the slow, uncertain, and often dangerous. Stagecoaches and
work of five men with sickles and scythes. wagons lurched over bone-shaking roads. Passengers
No other American invention cut so wide a swath. It would be routed out to lay nearby fence rails across
made ambitious capitalists out of humble plowmen, muddy stretches, and occasionally horses would drown
who now scrambled for more acres on which to plant in muddy pits while wagons sank slowly out of sight.
more fields of billowing wheat. Subsistence farming Cheap and efficient carriers were imperative if raw
gave way to production for the market, as large-scale materials were to be transported to factories and if
("extensive"), specialized, cash-crop agriculture came to finished products were to be delivered to consumers.
dominate the trans-Allegheny West. With it followed On December 3, 1803, a firm in Providence, Rhode
mounting indebtedness, as farmers bought more land Island, sent a shipment of yarn to a point sixty miles
and more machinery to work it. Soon hustling farmer- away, notifying the purchaser that the consignment
businesspeople were annually harvesting a larger crop could be expected to arrive in "the course of the winter."

McCormick Reaper Works, 1850s

Contrast this scene of "mass
production" with the workplace
depicted in "The Master
Craftsman" on page 304.
310 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860

McCormick's Miraculous
Reaper This illustration
shows an early test of Cyrus
McCormick's mechanical
reaper near his home in
Virginia in 1831. The reaper
was best suited, however,
to the horizonless fields of
wheat on the rolling prairies
of the Midwest. By the 1850s
McCormick's Chicago factory
was cranking out more than
twenty thousand reapers a
year for midwestern farmers.

A promising improvement came in the 1790s, when western development. The turnpikes beckoned to the
a private company completed the Lancaster Turnpike in canvas-covered Conestoga wagons, whose creakings
Pennsylvania. It was a broad, hard-surfaced highway heralded a westward advance that would know no real
that thrust sixty-two miles westward from Philadelphia retreat.
to Lancaster. As drivers approached the tollgate, they Western road building, always expensive, encoun-
were confronted with a barrier of sharp pikes, which tered many obstacles. One pesky roadblock was the
were turned aside when they paid their toll. Hence the noisy states' righters, who opposed federal aid to local
term turnpike. projects. Eastern states also protested against being bled
The Lancaster Turnpike proved to be a highly of their populations by the westward-reaching arteries.
successful venture, returning as high as 15 percent Westerners scored a notable triumph in 1811 when
annual dividends to its stockholders. It attracted a rich the federal government began to construct the elongated
trade to Philadelphia and touched off a turnpike-building National Road, or Cumberland Road. This highway
boom that lasted about twenty years. It also stimulated ultimately stretched from Cumberland, in western Mary-

Cumberland (National) Road and

Main connections
Lancaster Turnpike
Main Connections Note also the
Lancaster Turnpike.
 The Transportation Revolution 311

land, to Vandalia, in Illinois, a distance of 591 miles. The By 1820 there were some sixty steamboats on the
War of 1812 interrupted construction, and states' rights Mississippi and its tributaries; by 1860 about one
shackles on internal improvements hampered federal thousand, some of them luxurious river palaces. Keen
grants. But the thoroughfare was belatedly brought to its rivalry among the swift and gaudy steamers led to mem-
destination in 1852 by a combination of aid from the orable races. Excited passengers would urge the captain
states and the federal government. to pile on wood at the risk of bursting the boilers, which
The steamboat craze, which overlapped the turn- all too often exploded, with tragic results for the floating
pike craze, was touched off by an ambitious painter- firetraps. When the steamer Sultana blew up in April
engineer named Robert Fulton. He installed a powerful 1865, the explosion killed seventeen hundred passengers,
steam engine in a vessel that posterity came to know including many Union prisoners of war being repatri-
as the Clermont but that a dubious public dubbed ated to the North.
"Fulton's Folly." On a historic day in 1807, the quaint Chugging steamboats played a vital role in the
little ship, belching sparks from its single smokestack, opening of the West and South, both of which were
churned steadily from New York City up the Hudson richly endowed with navigable rivers. Like bunches of
River toward Albany. It made the run of 150 miles in grapes on a vine, population clustered along the banks
32 hours. of the broad-flowing streams. Cotton growers and
The success of the steamboat was sensational. other farmers made haste to take up and turn over the
People could now in large degree defy wind, wave, tide, now-profitable soil. Not only could they float their
and downstream current. Within a few years, Fulton produce out to market, but, hardly less important, they
had changed all of America's navigable streams into could ship in at low cost their shoes, hardware, and
two-way arteries, thereby doubling their carrying other manufactured necessities.
capacity. Hitherto keelboats had been pushed up the
Mississippi, with quivering poles and raucous profanity,
at less than one mile an hour-a process that was
prohibitively expensive. Now the steamboats could
..Ciinton•s Big Ditch .. in Hew York
churn rapidly against the current, ultimately attaining
speeds in excess of ten miles an hour. The mighty A canal-cutting craze paralleled the boom in turnpikes
Mississippi had met its master. and steamboats. A few canals had been built around

Mississippi in Time of Peace, by

Mrs. Frances Flora Bond Palmer,
1865 By the mid-nineteenth
century, steamboats had made
the Mississippi a bustling river
highway-as it remains today.
312 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860

falls and elsewhere in colonial days, but ambitious Flotillas of steamships soon plied the Great Lakes, con-
projects lay in the future. Resourceful New Yorkers, cut necting with canal barges at Buffalo. Interior waterside
off from federal aid by states' righters, themselves dug villages like Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago exploded
the Erie Canal, linking the Great Lakes with the Hudson into mighty cities.
River. They were blessed with the driving leadership of Other profound economic and political changes
Governor DeWitt Clinton, whose grandiose project was followed the canal's completion. The price of potatoes in
scoffingly called "Clinton's Big Ditch" or "the Governor's New York City was cut in half, and many dispirited New
Gutter." England farmers, no longer able to face the ruinous
Begun in 1817, the canal eventually ribboned 363 competition, abandoned their rocky holdings and went
miles. On its completion in 1825, a garlanded canal elsewhere. Some became mill hands, thus speeding the
boat glided from Buffalo, on Lake Erie, to the Hudson industrialization of America. Others, finding it easy to go
River and on to New York harbor. There, with colorful west over the Erie Canal, took up new farmland south of
ceremony, Governor Clinton emptied a cask of water the Great Lakes, where they were joined by thousands of
from the lake to symbolize "the marriage of the waters." New Yorkers and other northerners. Still others shifted
The water from Clinton's keg baptized the Empire to fruit, vegetable, and dairy farming. The transforma-
State. Mule-drawn passengers and bulky freight could tions in the Northeast-canal consequences-showed
now be handled with thrift and dispatch, at the dizzy how long-established local market structures could be
speed of five miles an hour. The cost of shipping a ton swamped by the emerging behemoth of a continental
of grain from Buffalo to New York City fell from $100 to economy.
$5, and the time of transit from about twenty days to six.
Ever-widening economic ripples followed the
completion of the Erie Canal. The value of land along
the route skyrocketed, and new cities-such as
Rochester and Syracuse-blossomed. Industry in the
The Iron Horse
state boomed. The new profitability of farming in the The most significant contribution to the development of
Old Northwest-notably in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, such an economy proved to be the railroad. It was fast,
and Illinois-attracted thousands of European immi- reliable, cheaper than canals to construct, and not
grants to the unaxed and untaxed lands now available. frozen over in winter. Able to go almost anywhere, even

CANADA

Erie Canal and Main Branches The Erie Canal

system, and others like it, tapped the fabulous
agricultural potential of the Midwest, while
VT. canal construction and maintenance provided
employment for displaced eastern farmers
squeezed off the land by competition from
their more productive midwestern cousins. The
transportation revolution thus simultaneously
expanded the nation's acreage under cultivation
PENNSYLVANIA and speeded the shift of the work force from
- Erie Canal agricultural to manufacturing and "service"
1. Genesee Valley Canal occupations. In 1820 more than three-quarters
2. Oswego Canal of American workers labored on farms; by 1850
3. Black River Canal
4. Chenango Canal only a little more than half of them were so
5. Champlain Canal employed. (Also see the map on the top of
page 313.)
 Canals and Railroads 313

Principal Canals in 1840 Note that

ATLANTIC the canals mainly facilitated east-west
OCEAN traffic, especially along the great Lake
Erie artery. No comparable network of
canals existed in the South-a disparity
that helps to explain northern superiority
in the Civil War that came two decades
- Ohio and Erie Canal
later.

through the Allegheny barrier, it defied terrain and

weather. The first railroad appeared in the United States BRITISH NORTH AMERICA
in 1828. By 1860, only thirty-two years later, the United (CANADA)
States boasted thirty thousand miles of railroad track,
three-fourths of it in the rapidly industrializing North.
At first the railroad faced strong opposition from
vested interests, especially canal backers. Anxious to
protect its investment in the Erie Canal, the New York
legislature in 1833 prohibited the railroads from
carrying freight-at least temporarily. Early railroads
were also considered a dangerous public menace, for
flying sparks could set fire to nearby haystacks and
houses, and appalling railway accidents could turn the
wooden "miniature hells" into flaming funeral pyres
for their riders.
Railroad pioneers had to overcome other obstacles
as well. Brakes were so feeble that the engineer might
miss the station twice, both arriving and backing
up. Arrivals and departures were conjectural, and
numerous differences in gauge (the distance between
. the rails) meant frequent changes of trains for passen-
gers. In 1840 there were seven transfers between - - Railroads , 1850
Philadelphia and Charleston. But gauges gradually - - Railroads built 1850- 1860
became standardized, better brakes did brake, safety
devices were adopted, and the Pullman ''sleeping
palace" was introduced in 1859. America at long last The Railroad Revolution Note the explosion of
was being bound together with braces of iron, later to new railroad construction in the 1850s and its
be made of steel. heavy concentration in the North.
314 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860

Poster-Timetable for Baltimore &

Susquehanna Railroad, 1840
Advertising the Baltimore &
Susquehanna's train schedule alone
was not sufficient to get passengers to
their destinations. A typical trip often
entailed coordinating legs on other
railroad lines, stagecoaches, and
canal boats.

and 1837. American naval designers made few con-

tributions to maritime progress. A pioneer American
Cables. Clippers. and steamer, the Savannah, had crept across the Atlantic
in 1819, but it used sail most of the time and was pur-
Pony Riders
sued for a day by a British captain who thought it
Other forms of transportation and communication were afire.
binding together the United States and the world. A In the 1840s and 1850s, a golden age dawned for
crucial development came in 1858 when Cyrus Field, American shipping. Yankee naval yards, notably Donald
called "the greatest wire-puller in history," finally McKay's at Boston, began to send down the ways sleek
stretched a cable under the deep North Atlantic waters new craft called clipper ships. Long, narrow, and majestic,
from Newfoundland to Ireland. Although this initial they glided across the sea under towering masts and
cable went dead after three weeks of public rejoicing, clouds of canvas. In a fair breeze, they could outrun any
a heavier cable laid in 1866 permanently linked the steamer.
American and European continents. The stately clippers sacrificed cargo space for speed,
The United States merchant marine encountered and their captains made killings by hauling high-value
rough sailing during much of the early nineteenth cargoes in record times. They wrested much of the tea-
century. American vessels had been repeatedly laid up carrying trade between the Far East and Britain from
by the embargo, the War of 1812, and the panics of 1819 their slower-sailing British competitors, and they sped
 Communication and Trade 315

Chariot of Fame Clipper Ship. by Duncan McFarlane. 1854

thousands of impatient adventurers to the goldfields of No story of rapid American communication would
California and Australia. be complete without including the Far West. By 1858
But the hour of glory for the clipper was relatively horse-drawn overland stagecoaches, immortalized by
brief. On the eve of the Civil War, the British had clearly Mark Twain's Roughing It, were a familiar sight. Their
won the world race for maritime ascendancy with their dusty tracks stretched from the bank of the muddy
iron tramp steamers ("teakettles"). Although slower and Missouri River clear to California.
less romantic than the clipper, these vessels were steadier, Even more dramatic was the Pony Express, estab-
roomier, more reliable, and hence more profitable. lished in 1860 to carry mail speedily the two thousand
lonely miles from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento,
California. Daring, lightweight riders, leaping onto wiry
ponies saddled at stations approximately ten miles
apart, could make the trip in an amazing ten days.
As late as 1877, stagecoach passengers These unarmed horsemen galloped on, summer or
were advised in print, winter, day or night, through dust or snow, past Indians
and bandits. The speeding postmen missed only one
"Never shoot on the road as the noise
trip, though the whole enterprise lost money heavily and
might frighten the horses .... Don't
folded after only eighteen legend-leaving months.
point out where murders have been
Just as the clippers had succumbed to steam, so
committed, especially if there are
were the express riders unhorsed by Samuel Morse's
women passengers .... Expect
clacking keys, which began tapping messages to Califor-
annoyances, discomfort, and
nia in 1861. The swift ships and the fleet ponies ushered
some hardships."
out a dying technology of wind and muscle. In the
future, machines would be in the saddle.
316 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860

Main Routes West Before the Civil

War Mark Twain described his
stagecoach trip to California in the
1860s in Roughing It: "We began to
PACIFIC
get into country, now, threaded here
OCEAN and there with little streams. These
had high, steep banks on each side,
and every time we flew down one
bank and scrambled up the other,
our party inside got mixed some-
what. First we would all be down
in a pile at the forward end of the
stage, ... and in a second we would
shoot to the other end, and stand on
- - Oregon Trail our heads. And ... as the dust rose
- - California Trail from the tumult, we would all sneeze
in chorus, and the majority of us
- - Mormon Trail would grumble, and probably say
- - Santa Fe Trail
Gulf of some hasty thing, like: 'Take your
Mexico elbow out of my ribs!-can't you
- - Spanish Trail
quit crowding?'"

duce than New Orleans. Between 1836 and 1860, grain

shipments through Buffalo increased a staggering six-
tyfold. New York City became the seaboard queen of
The Transport Web Binds the Union
the nation, a gigantic port through which a vast hin-
More than anything else, the desire of the East to tap the terland poured its wealth and to which it daily paid
West stimulated the "transportation revolution." Until economic tribute.
about 1830 the produce of the western region drained By the eve of the Civil War, a truly continental econ-
southward to the cotton belt or to the heaped-up omy had emerged. The principle of division of labor,
wharves of New Orleans. The steamboat vastly aided the which spelled productivity and profits in the factory,
reverse flow of finished goods up the watery western applied on a national scale as well. Each region now
arteries and helped bind West and South together. But specialized in a particular type of economic activity. The
the truly revolutionary changes in commerce and com- South raised cotton for export to New England and
munication came in the three decades before the Civil Britain; the West grew grain and livestock to feed factory
War, as canals and railroad tracks radiated out from the workers in the East and in Europe; the East made
East, across the Alleghenies and into the blossoming machines and textiles for the South and the West.
heartland. The ditch -diggers and tie-layers were attempt- The economic pattern thus woven had fateful politi-
ing nothing less than a conquest of nature itself. They cal and military implications. Many southerners regarded
would offset the "natural" flow of trade on the interior the Mississippi as a silver chain that naturally linked
rivers by laying down an impressive grid of "internal together the upper valley states and the Cotton Kingdom.
improvements." They would become convinced, as secession approached
The builders succeeded beyond their wildest in the 1850s, that some or all of these states would have to
dreams. The Mississippi was increasingly robbed of its secede with them or be strangled. But they would overlook
traffic, as goods moved eastward on chugging trains, the man-made links that increasingly bound the upper
puffing lake boats, and mule-tugged canal barges. Mississippi Valley to the East in intimate commercial
Governor Clinton had in effect picked up the mighty union. Southern rebels would have to fight not only
Father of Waters and flung it over the Alleghenies, Northern armies but the tight bonds of an interdependent
forcing it to empty into the sea at New York City. By the continental economy. Economically, the two northerly
1840s the city of Buffalo handled more western pro- sections were Siamese twins.
 Forging a Continental Economy 317

with the newcomers and argued that "the rights of the

community" outweighed any exclusive corporate rights.
Taney's decision opened new entrepreneurial channels
The Markel Revolution
and encouraged greater competition. So did the passage
No less revolutionary than the political upheavals of the of more liberal state incorporation laws beginning in the
antebellum era was the "market revolution" that trans- 1830s, granting investors the benefit of "limited liability"
formed a subsistence economy of scattered farms and if their companies were sued or went bankrupt.
tiny workshops into a national network of industry and As more and more Americans-mill workers as well
commerce. Greater mechanization and a more robust as farmhands, women as well as men-linked their eco-
market -oriented economy raised new legal questions nomic fate to the burgeoning market economy, the
about winners and losers. How tightly should patents self-sufficient households of colonial days were trans-
protect inventions? Should the government regulate formed. Most families had once raised all their own
monopolies? Who should own the technologies and food, spun their own wool, and bartered with their
networks that made America hum in the 1840s and neighbors for the few necessities they could not make
1850s? themselves. In growing numbers they now scattered to
Under Chief Justice John Marshall, the U.S. work for wages in the mills, or they planted just a
Supreme Court vigilantly protected contract rights by few crops for sale at market and used the money to buy
requiring state governments to grant irrevocable charters. goods made by strangers in far-off factories. As store-
Monopolies easily developed, as new companies found bought fabric, candles, and soap replaced homemade
it difficult to break into markets. After Marshall died in products, a quiet revolution occurred in the household
1835, the climate began to change and the winds of division of labor and status. Traditional women's work
economic opportunity blew more freely. When the pro- was rendered superfluous and devalued. The home
prietors of Boston's Charles River Bridge (which itself, once a center of economic production in which all
included Harvard College) sued the owners of the new family members cooperated, grew into a place of refuge
Warren Bridge for unconstitutionally violating their orig- from the world of work, a refuge that became increasingly
inal contract, the new chief justice, Roger B. Taney, sided the special and separate sphere of women.

The Levee at New Orleans. 1854

With the expansion of cotton growing into
the new states of the trans-Appalachian
Southwest and the coming of the steam-
boat, the entire Cotton Kingdom paid
economic tribute to New Orleans, Queen
City of the South. With a banner slung from
the flagstaff, the captain of the dangerously
overloaded "Henry Frank" boasted of the
number of bales his boat carried.
318 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860

\ CANADA

NEBRASKA

TERRITORY

ATLANTIC
KANSAS TERRITORY OCEAN

F Flour and meal

T Textiles
S Shoes and clothing
I Iron and steelworks
PACIFIC
~ First oil well, 1859
OCEAN (Titusville, PA)
§ Silver and gold
Principal manufacturing cities [2] Copper
product value • lronore
__ Tobacco and he @over $100,000,000 c:J Bituminous coal
D Cotton • over $10,000,000 ~ Anthracite coal
D Rice and sugar cane o Other major city

Industry and Agriculture, 1860 Still a nation of farmers on the eve of the
Civil War, Americans had nevertheless made an impressive start on their
own Industrial Revolution, especially in the Northeast.

Revolutionary advances in manufacturing and trans- and unsung, they are among the forgotten men and
portation brought increased prosperity to all Americans, women of American history.
but they also widened the gulf between the rich and the Many myths about "social mobility" grew up over
poor. Millionaires had been rare in the early days of the the buried memories of these unfortunate day laborers.
Republic, but by the eve of the Civil War, several speci- Mobility did exist in industrializing America-but not in
mens of colossal financial success were strutting across the proportions that legend often portrays. Rags-to-riches
the national stage. Spectacular was the case of fur-trader success stories were relatively few.
and real estate speculator John Jacob Astor, who left an Yet America, with its dynamic society and wide-open
estate of $30 million on his death in 1848. spaces, undoubtedly provided more "opportunity" than
Cities bred the greatest extremes of economic did the contemporary countries of the Old World-which
inequality. Unskilled workers, then as always, fared is why millions of immigrants packed their bags and
worst. Many of them came to make up a floating mass of headed for New World shores. Moreover, a rising tide lifts
"drifters," buffeted from town to town by the shifting all boats, and the improvement in overall standards of
prospects for menial jobs. These wandering workers living was real. Wages for unskilled workers in a labor-
accounted at various times for up to half the population hungry America rose about 1 percent a year from 1820 to
of the brawling industrial centers. Although their num- 1860. This general prosperity helped defuse the potential
bers were large, they left little behind them but the class conflict that might otherwise have exploded-and
homely fruits of their transient labor. Largely unstoried that did explode in many European countries.
 Chronology 319

Chronology

c.1750 Industrial Revolution begins in Britain 1842 Massachusetts declares labor unions legal in
Commonwealth v. Hunt
1791 Samuel Slater builds first U.S. textile factory
c. 1843-
1793 Eli Whitney invents cotton gin 1868 Era of clipper ships
~:;:;: t.:at:f ... nua;a+:s.M..,..( .;mr:a:a. . •

1798 Whitney develops interchangeable parts for 1844 Samuel Morse invents telegraph
muskets Anti-Catholic riot in Philadelphia
~ == . ,,, .. . s •::::mrs
1807 Robert Fulton's first steamboat 1845-
Embargo spurs American manufacturing 1849 Potato famine in Ireland
~

1811 Cumberland Road construction begins 1846 Elias Howe invents sewing machine
Cl .,...YtQ'.O

1817 Erie Canal construction begins 1848 First general incorporation laws in New York
Democratic revolutions collapse in Germany
1825 Erie Canal completed
1849 American, or Know-Nothing, party formed
1828 First railroad in United States
1852 Cumberland Road completed
1830s Cyrus McCormick invents mechanical
mower-reaper 1858 Cyrus Field lays first transatlantic cable
' .. ~~ :3'?"""'7"~t:, ..;

1834 Anti-Catholic riot in Boston 1860 Pony Express established

===--
1837 John Deere develops steel plow 1861 First transcontinental telegraph
.::::==:;;.;.. ..;. . f¥4F*'+e" .ifll!i!i"?.t5Jiitl!i
1840 President Van Buren establishes ten-hour 186& Permanent transatlantic cable established
day for federal employees

For further reading, see the Appendix. For web resources, go to [Link]/highered.