Industrialization and Reform
Kids at the Oneida Community Dancing
Economic Transformation
• Agriculture to Manufacturing
– 1820: 80% are farmers
– 1850: 55% are farmers. Manufacturing = 1/3rd of all
production
• Rising Consumption Fuels Demand
– Cash crop production pays for new goods
– This demand motivates creating cheaper transportation
• Roads
• Canals
• Trains
The National Road
The Transportation Revolution
Begins (1825-40)
•
•
Water transport is cheaper
Canals boom 1825-40: 3000 miles
–
This begins in 1825 with the Erie Canal
•
•
•
Joint Public/Private venture
325 miles long
10 times cheaper transport!
The Erie Canal (1825)
Trains
•
•
•
•
Invented for mines
Requires iron boom
3000 miles by 1840
States aid rise of
rail
• Facilitates regional
unity
Political Support
• Public/Private ventures fuel Transport
Boom
• Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)
–
–
Overthrows a steamboat monopoly in NY
Only Federal Government can regulate
interstate transit and commerce!
Urbanization: Big Picture
• 1790
– 1 in 20 in 2,500 or more
– Philadelphia: 40,000
• 1850
– 1 in 7 in 2,500 or more
– 10 cities of 50,000+
– NYC = over 800,000
– Most cities in North
Urbanization: Transport
• Cities are too big to walk around now
• New Urban Transport
– omnibuses (horse-drawn)
– steam ferries
– commuter rail
• City districts take on distinct purposes
• Population outraces new housing, creating slums.
City Types
• Ports – NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, New
Orleans
• Interior Transport Hubs—Cleveland,
Chicago, Saint Louis
• Industrial Cities
– New England
– Immigrants dominate the population
Immigration
• Upheavals in
Europe drive
immigration of
Germans and Irish
• They compete with
former artisans for
city jobs.
The Industrial Revolution Begins
• Slavery and war drive enhanced wealth +
demand for goods
• Artisans can't keep up with demand
• At first, farmers do part-time craft work
• New machines begin to replace artisan labor
–
–
Spinning Jenny (Thread)
Mechanical Looms (Cloth)
Labor Problems
• How do you get factory workers?
–
–
–
Rhode Island System (farms + factory
work)
Waltham System (hire young women who
need money and can't get married)
The Irish (will do anything to avoid
starving)
The Cotton Gin
•
•
•
Eli Whitney
invents it in 1793
Goal is to speed
raw cotton
processing
Cotton production
now BOOMS.
The Steam Engine
•
•
•
Invented by
James Watt in
1763-75
Enabled
replacing muscle
power with
machine power
Coal powered
Replaceable Parts
•
•
•
Eli Whitney
invents in early
1800s for guns
Allows standard
parts
This eases repair
and construction
•
Machines can
make other
machines!
The Rise of Class:
The Rise of Elites
• Colonial Elites based on land
–
Strongly Rural
• Industrial Elites based on owning means of
industrial production
–
Strongly URBAN
The Rise of Class:
The Making of the Middle Class
• Professionals, Small Businessmen, Middle
Managers
• Evangelical in Religion
• They reject Alcohol consumption
• Women are expected to stay home and raise
kids (Cult of Domesticity)
–
They can afford to do this.
The Working Classes
• Those who must work for wages
–
–
–
Day labor on farms
Factory workers
Many are ex-Artisans, replaced by
machines
• They form the first unions
• Often hostile to Immigrants
Evangelical Reform
•
Fix society by eliminating sin!
–
–
–
•
Keep the Sabbath holy (and not fun)
Bible societies and Sunday Schools
Eliminate Alcohol!
Run by interlocking societies (The
Benevolent Empire)
Reverend Lyman Beecher
• Congregationalist
Preacher
• Leader of the
Sabbatarian
movement
Temperance Reform
•
•
1826: 7.1 gallons •
of pure
alcohol/adult/year!
!!
American
Temperance
Society is formed
A Middle Class
movement
Temperance
•
Successes by 1851 •
–
–
Many dry
counties
Down to 1.9
gallons/ adult/
year
Failures
–
–
Most
Americans still
drink a lot
Angers
Working Class
Crusading Women
• MC women go out to reform the world,
despite gender rules of the time.
• Auxillaries → founding their own groups
• Rising Militancy
– American Female Moral Reform Society
• Many states ban adultery and abandonment
Backlash Against Evanglical
Reform
• Catholics dislike it due to old feuds
• WC resents bosses trying to control their
homelife
• Some men complain women have taken
over the churches
Joseph Smith
•
•
•
NY Farmer
Claims to find a
new revelation
from God, the
Book of Mormon
Founds a new
Religion
Mormonism / The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints
• Condemns other churches as evil
• Male authority is supreme
–
Polygamy practiced by older men
• They live communally
• Heavily persecuted
• They flee to Utah.
The Enlightenment Impulse:
School Reform
• School Reform
–
–
–
–
Starts in Massachusetts (1837)
Six years of State-funded education for all
Much more common in North than South
By 1860, 50% of Whites are literate
The Enlightenment Impulse:
Places of Confinement
• Goal: Micro-Society changes your bad
behavior
• Types
–
–
–
Prison (Criminals)
Insane Asylum (Insane)
Workhouse (Poor)
• Limited success in goals due to bad design
Utopians: The Shakers
• Mystic Group
Dancers
• Celibate
• Communal Property
• 6000 at height
• Economically
Successful
Utopians: The Oneida
Community (1847-79)
• John Noyes-Founder
• Common Property
• Group Marriage
(everyone adult!)
• Effort at Gender
Equality
Utopian Experiments: Socialism
• New Harmony
(1825-9)
– Communal property
and production
– Lacked a central
vision
• Owen's vision of the
town (the plan)
Brook Farm
• 1841-7
• Intellectuals try to
farm due to
delusions about
nature
• Ends in financial
ruin due to bad
management and
fires
The Colonization Movement
• American
Colonization
Society
– Voluntary
Emancipation
– 1,400 slaves sent to
Liberia
– Fades after 1830
Abolitionism
• African-Americans are first to organize
abolitionism
• Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World
(1829)
–
Uses Declaration of Independence ideas,
like equality of all men
William Lloyd Garrison
•
•
•
A printer turned
abolitionist after
being put in jail
Calls for
immediate
abolition!
Inspires the
Radical
Abolitionists
Organized Abolitionism
• The American Anti-Slavery Society (1833)
–
–
–
–
–
White/Black Alliance
Uses Evangelical Persuasion Methods
Many are evangelicals
Women play a huge role, like former slave
owner Angelica Grimke
Unable to persuade public by moral
appeals alone
Political Abolitionism
• The Liberty Party (1840)
–
First Abolitionist PARTY.
• “The Slave Power”
–
–
Many come to fear South is out to cram
slavery down everyone's throat
They notice South has no free speech,
mail is censored, etc.
Women's Rights
•
•
•
•
•
Female Abolitionists found this
1848: Seneca Falls Convention
Presses for right to vote and right to
property
By Civil War, many states allow women
more property rights!
(Right to vote: 1919)