1815-1860

• Transportation, Market & Industrial Revolutions
• Putting Out system
• Immigration and Scapegoat
• Status of artisan
• Rhode Island and Waltham System
• Cult of Domesticity
• Purity Crusade
• Universal White Male suffrage
• 2 nd Great Awakening

• What marked the increasing industrialization in the US economy between 1815 – 1860?
• How and why did inequalities increase among the rich, the middle class and the working class?

• Transportation Revolution
– Improvements in transportation made that transformation possible
• Federal, state and corporate investments in transportation improvements
• Roads, Canals, Railroads
• Market Revolution
– Transition from domestic markets to for distant markets
• Industrial Revolution
– Domestic hand labor to machine and factory output
• Immigration
– Cheap and exploitable labor

• Made the transition to the market society possible
– Reduction in time and money it took to move heavy goods.
– Growth of Cities
• Exports increased 6 fold and imports tripled
• Urban population grew
– The north and west developed into a selfsustaining internal market
• Rural and Urban Market exchange

• Political turmoil and Famine brought Massive immigration
– Irish Potato Famine 1845-1846
• 2.5 Million (30% of Ireland’s population)
– German immigration 1840-60
• 4.2 Million
• Provided Cheap/Exploitable Labor
• Used to scapegoat political, economic & social issues

“The Irish fill our prisons, our poor houses, scratch a convict or a pauper, and the chances are that you tickle the skin of an
Irish Catholic. Putting them on a boat and sending them home would end crime in this country”

The Problem Solved

• The northeast led Americans industrial revolution
– Household and small workshop production
– Putting-out system
• Local merchants furnished or put out raw materials to rural households and paid at a piece rate for the labor that converted those raw materials into manufacture products. The supplying merchant then marketed and sold these goods.

• Status of Artisan:
– Owned tools of production
– Owned shops
– Managed time and produce
– skilled workers
– Independence
– prestige

• Slater’s Rhode Island System
– Water powered spinning machine
• Richard Arkwright -1769 had invented a water power machine that spun yarn and thread
• Samuel Slater - Memorized machine & 1790
Imported the plans from England to Patuxet,
Rhode Island
– The Rhode Island System
• The countryside factory towns
• Labor of Farmer’s daughters
• Mill Villages

• Lowell’s Waltham System
• Machines that turned raw cotton into finished cloth
• Francis Cabot Lowell Toured factories in England in 1811
– Boston Associates Co. 1813
• Fully mechanized
• By the 1830s - Unskilled, female labor

Daguerreotype of a young mill girl, c.
1850, Massachusetts

• Industrial Revolution and the Widening gap between the rich and the poor
– By 1835 cities were serving commercial agriculture and factory towns that produced for largely rural domestic market.
• Creation of the Urban working class
– In the cities there was little concern for creating a classless industrial society.

• The richest men
– importers and exporters and took control of banks and insurance companies and made great fortunes in urban real estate
• Growing middle class
– Commercial Class
• Wholesale and retail merchants ,
• lawyers, salesmen, auctioneers, bookkeepers and accountants
• clerks on the bottom creating a white-collar class to cater to the new emerging consumer society.

Consumer goods
 Symbols of their middle class status
Notions of gentility
 distinction between manual and non manual work

• P roducers of consumer goods
• The “hands”
• Growth in Demand
• Growth in Working class
– Shoemaking, tailoring and the building trade were divided into skilled and semiskilled segments and farmed out to subcontractors who could turn a profit by cutting labor costs

• New York: Ready made clothing trade
– Cheap manufactured cloth
– Cheap, female labor
– Southern Markets
• “negro cottons”
– Western Markets
• Dungarees & hickory shirts

• After 1815
– per capita income doubled
– living standards rose
– Houses: larger, better furnished, heated.
– Food: more plentiful and varied
• The cost:
– Half of all adult white males without land
– wealth had become more concentrated.
• In 1800 the richest 10 percent of Americans owned 40-
50% of the national wealth, by the 1850s they owned
70%. In the cities they owned over 80%.

• Polar opposites: Separate Spheres
• Women’s sphere – a moral issue
• Democratization of “The Lady”
– Class status
– Staying at home, devoting self to family and developing feminine traits

• Immigrant women
• Poor farm women
• Black women
• Poor native born women
• Factory women
– Denial of status of lady also meant the denial of the status of “respectable”
– Disrespecting non-ladies acceptable
– Targets of exploitation

• Appropriate to elevated status
– Home idealized as bastion of feminine values
– Piety, morality, affection, self-sacrifice
– Iconography of Motherhood
– Elevated importance & significance of the home

• Early 19 th C ministers bolstered doctrine of separate spheres
– Clerical endorsement of female moral superiority in exchange for women’s activism
• Decline of clerical authority in society
• Opposed forces that seemed to act against women’s interests
– Materialism
– Intemperance
– Licentiousness

• The separation of work and home
– New sense of classconsciousness.
• Middle class fathers left for their jobs while mothers governed households.
• Reduction in size of families
• 1820s ministers and female writers elevated the family role of middle class women into a cult of domesticity

– Biological difference determined separate social roles for men and women.
– Men:
• strong, aggressive and ambitious, intelligent
• Place in business and politics.
– Women:
• Kind, pure, emotional, moral
• Place to preserve religion and morality in the home and family

• Traditionally: both men and women wee sexual beings, women weaker willed, lustful and licentious and insatiable
• Purity Crusade : women lacked sexual feeling, lust and carnality became a part of men’s sphere
– Etiquette manuals counseled to deter male advances

• Frances Trollope (England) 1830s
• “I have never seen a country where the religion had so strong a hold upon the women, or slighter upon the men”
• 3:2 converts women
• Women took an active role in religion
• Men continued to control the boundaries

• First Slums appeared in the mid 1800s
– Huge influx of immigrants and creation of exploitable labor force
– Overcrowded Housing
– Contaminated water supplies
– Lack of Sewage
– Disease and high mortality rates
• Cholera and Typhus

• Women were Asexual beings
– Defined by their sex & sexual roles, yet did not desire it
– Dr Alcott, “Women, as is well known, in a natural state…seldom if ever makes any of those advances, which clearly indicates sexual desire and for this very plain reason, she does not feel them.”
– Only “low” women suffered from the indignity of sexual desire
• Long periods of abstinence proper
• Masturbation damaged future offspring, and caused “mania” and “idiocy” on the guilty party

• Chronic invalidism among women
• Middle class culture idealized female debility
• 1800’s doctors came close the defining femaleness as an illness itself

• Universal White Male Suffrage Movement
– Suffrage extended to white males (1807-
1860’s)
• By the 1800s race and gender began to replace wealth and status as the basis for defining the limits of political participation

• Extension of white male suffrage
• Development of common schools
– By 1850 ½ women gained literacy
• Evangelicalism – democratized salvation
• Development of the Abolition movement out of the evangelical revivals
• Abolition movement split into the Women’s movement

• Second Great Awakening (1800-1840)
– “ Salvation open to all” reinforced the legitimacy of “ one man, one vote ”
– Women: provided a welcomed release from
“being treated like beasts of burden and drudges of domineering masters”
– Blacks: advocated spiritual and secular equality
• Platform to directly challenge slavery

New York 1837
“Foreigners and aliens to our government and laws, strangers to our institutions are permitted to flock to this land and in a few years are endowed with all the privileges of citizens, but we native born
Americans…are most of us shut out.”