The Market Revolution
1820 -1860
Agrarian to Industrial Changes in
America
The Rise of Interchangeable Parts

Remember the story of Chauncey Jerome
 Started
as an apprentice for a master
clockmaker
 Started on company by age of 24 and realized
he could mass produce clocks by using
interchangeable parts.
 Prices dropped from $20 to $2
Industrial Revolution
Individuals efforts to make industrial
changes
 Leads to a new economic era, but also led
to class-divided society

Division of Labor in the Factory
Take semi-skilled workers and teach the
employee a specific task.
 No longer a master cobbler in shoe
factories, but mass production of product.
 Leads to lower prices.

Porkopolis
Grain Mills

A mill could grind 100,000 bushels of grain
a year with six employees
Samuel Slater
Father of the Industrial Revolution
British government forbade anyone
migrating to the America’s who were
textile mechanics .
 Slater comes to the U.S. in 1789 having
memorized Richard Arkwright's spinning
frame plans.
 Worked with Moses Brown in Providence
Rhode Island.

Samuel Slater
Father of the Industrial Revolution
FYI

Before machinery, thread was spun by
unmarried women, orphan girls, and
widows with no prospects for remarriage.
Thus the term for unmarried women
became “spinster”
Tariffs

English manufacturers could undersell
American goods
 Larger
population
 More landless people willing to work in
factories
 Lower wages, less opportunities
The Lowell Factory Girls
Francis Cabot Lowell went to England and
stole the best of the ideas of the British
Factory System
 Opens factories in Waltham, Massachusetts
 Built the largest and fastest mill in the
world.
 To lower prices, recruit farm girls and
women to work in the mill

The Lowell Factory Girls
Lowell Factory Girl

Oh! isn't it a pity, such a pretty girl as I
Should be sent to the factory to pine away
and die?
Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a
slave,
For I'm so fond of liberty,
That I cannot be a slave.
Lowell Factory Girl

We must leave our looms. We are daughters of free men and are
being forced to work under conditions that approach slavery. Do we
need this money so badly that we will submit to these inhumane
working conditions while this aristocracy of mill owners lives off the
profits of our sweat? Are we not entitled to reasonable breaks in our
toil to eat our meals as decent people do - not racing to our
boardinghouses and bolting our food like piglets at the trough? And
is it not reasonable to limit the workday to ten hours so we have
time in the evenings to improve our minds as we were promised?
WE must prevent our sex from being made into living machines to
do the bidding of incorporated aristocrats and reduced to a sum for
their services hardly sufficient to keep soul and body together. The
mill managers have been deaf to our petitions and our rallies. They
will only hear us when the factories are stilled by workers leaving
their looms to secure their dignity and their rights
Wage Workers and Labor Movement
Craft unions came first
 Carpenters, Stone cutters, cabinet Makers
 Organized to deal with the Master artisans
who hired them
 Wanted a ten hour work day with and
hour for breakfast and lunch ( Day would
be 6 – 6
 Industrialization worked against them

Eli Whitney
Yale graduate
 Cotton Gin
 Manufacturing of military weapons
 In 1798, given a large contract to
manufacture muskets for U.S. Government
 Interchangeable parts, new ways to use
machines in manufacturing
 Father of “mass production”

Expansion of Markets
Westward expansion
 Government land being sold at $1.25 an
acre
 For $100 a farmer could buy 80 acres of
land

Transportation

The National Road – Cumberland, Md. To
Vandalia, Ill. 1818 - 1839
Transportation
The Steamboat – 1807 Robert Fulton –
The Clermont traveled up the Hudson
River – Why important?
 Later will help improve transportation on
the Mississippi R.
 Canals- To carry corn and wheat and
manufactured goods – Canal system

Robert Fulton & the
Steamboat
The Clermont
Erie Canal System
The Erie Canal, 1820s
The Erie Canal
 1st
major engineering feat in America.
 Supported by the New York City
Merchants, Gov. DeWitt Clinton, and the
tax payers.
 Moved millions of cubic yards of dirt,
quarry rocks and build locks to raise and
lower boats
The Erie Canal
Brought prosperity to central and western
New York
 Towns and industries developed along the
route
 Led to a canal building boom

The Erie Canal

I've got a mule, and her name is Sal,
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.
She's a good ol' worker an' a good ol' pal,
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.
We've hauled some barges in our day,
Filled with lumber, coal, and hay,
And we know every inch of the way
From Albany to Buffalo.

(chorus)
Low bridge, everybody down!
Low bridge, for we're comin' through a town!
And you'll always know your neighbor,
You'll always know your pal,
If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal.
Growth Cities and Towns
Chicago – fastest growing boom town
 Cleveland
 Detroit
 Buffalo
 St. Louis – 2nd fastest growing boom town

The Railroad
In 1830 the first American-built
locomotives were put into regular
operation on the Baltimore and Ohio,
Charleston and Hamburg, and Mohawk
and Hudson railroads
 Vested interests, including turnpike and
bridge companies, stagecoaches, ferries,
and canals, sought laws to prohibit trains
from carrying freight

The Railroad
After 1830 that railroads were destined to
become the nation's chief means of moving
freight.
 During the 1830s, construction companies laid
down 3,328 miles of track, roughly equal to all
the miles of canals in the country.
 With an average speed of 10 miles an hour,
railroads were faster than other vehicles and
could travel in any season.

Results of the Transportation
revolution
The transportation revolution sharply
reduced the cost of shipping goods to
market and stimulated agriculture and
industry.
 New roads, canals, and railroads speeded
the pace of commerce and strengthened
ties between the East and West.

Communication Revolution
During the 1790s, it took 3 weeks for a letter to
travel from New York to Cincinnati or Detroit
and 4 weeks to arrive in New Orleans.
 In 1799 it took 1 week for news of George
Washington's death to reach New York City from
Virginia.
 A decade and a half later, it still took 49 days for
word of the peace treaty ending the War of
1812 to reach New York from London.

The Telegraph
As early as the 1720s, it was known that
electricity could be conducted along a wire
to convey messages
 Iit was not until 1844 that an American
artist and inventor named Samuel F. B.
Morse demonstrated the practicality of the
telegraph and devised a workable code for
sending messages

Changes in Social Structure

Business Elite
 Bankers
 Merchants
 Landlords
 By
1860 the 10% wealthiest families owned 70%
of the wealth in America
 Able to accumulate mass wealth because of the
tax system
 Set themselves apart from the rest of the
population
Changes in Social Structure

The Middle Class
 Professional
groups such as lawyers, building
contractors, business owners
 They managed the Wealthy peoples
businesses
 Mostly in the Northeast, will go to high school
then move into family businesses
 Puritan work ethic
Changes in Social Structure

New Urban Poor
 By
1840 half of the native born freemen were
working for others
 They had money for food and rent and not for
much
 Lived in slums amid great squalor and vermin
 Mass consumption of alcohol added to the
squalor
Concern over Effects of Market
Revolution
1. Acquisitiveness as threat to public good
2. Cycle of boom and bust
3. Irregular employment
4. Widening inequalities of living
standards
5. Erosion of craft skills
6. Specter of wage dependency; “wage
slavery”
Westward expansion
1.
2.
Contributing impact of transportation
and communications revolutions
Pace and magnitude
Westward expansion
3. Streams of migration
a. From Lower South
b. From Upper South
c. From New England
4. Regional patterns
a. Old Northwest
b. Old Southwest
Rise of the Cotton Kingdom
1. Pace and magnitude
2. Contributing factors
a. Industrial demand for cotton
b. Invention of cotton gin
c. Opening of Deep South to white settlement
3. Revitalization and spread of plantation slavery
a. Growth of domestic slave trade
b. Consequences for slaves
c. Consequences for South’s social and economic
development
Market society
Commercialization of northwest farming
1. Eastern markets
2. Transportation networks
3. Availability of credit
4. Improved farm machinery
Market society
Growth of cities
1. Place on western frontier
2. Pace of growth
From craft production to mass production
1. Decline of artisan tradition
a. Larger workshops
b. Subdivision of tasks
c. Increased supervision
Immigration
Push Pull Factors
 1840 – 1860

2
million Irish – stayed in the cities
 1.5 million Germans – moved to farms in the
West
 750,000 English
Immigration


Large rise of Catholicism
Leads to Nativism
Protestantism worried about this
Samuel Morse wrote books about the conspiracy of
the Catholic Church
 Boston – Burning of convents
 Philadelphia – Riots when the Catholic Bishop
persuaded the schools to add a Catholic Bible along
with the Protestant Bible
 Blamed Immigrants for job losses among the poor
Protestants
 Founding of the Know Nothing Party

