• More than 20 million people living in the North and growing….
• Most immigrants such as Irish and German new to the United States
settled in the North to work in factories.
• Northerners were leaving their farms and moving to cities to get jobs
in newly developed factories.
– This created a wage-based economy that resulted in a large middle class. This
group lead a lot of social reforms.
• Increasing railroad made shipments and travel quicker and easier.
By1850, 30,000 miles of tracks connected distant parts of the United
States. Most of the new rail lines were in the North.
Economy in the North
•
.
The North had more small
manufacturing industries, capitalists
and banking then the South.
– By 1840 there were 1,200
cotton factories in the United
States, two-thirds of them in the
North.
– By 1850 the North had more
than 1,500 woolen mills, most
of them individually owned,
producing blankets, flannel and
worsteds.
– Firearms and furniture were
being produced in the North.
– People were investing in labor
saving machinery -- advancing
technology in order to reduce
manual labor or labor costs.
Factory Workers
The North was also the heart of sea
born trade in the United States. By the
late 1840s, ships powered by steam
engines had replaced sailing ships in
hauling freight and passengers across
the Atlantic Ocean, the new technology
and competition reducing shipping
rates.
Foreign commerce grew dramatically in
the 1840s and 1850s. The North was
manufacturing power looms and
exporting them to Europe. Ships owned
by Northerners were shipping the
South's cotton to Europe, mainly to
Britain -- cotton being two-thirds of U.S.
exports.
.
Life as a Northern Factory
Worker
• Small factories employed families, relying primarily on
the labor of children (usually between the ages of 10
and 20) to work in factories.
• Factory managers argued that these groups of people
needed close supervision because they could not
be trusted to take care of themselves.
• In the North, factory owners paid wages to their
workers.
• Workers experienced lots of abuse, long hours, no
safety programs, unsafe machinery, no worker's comp,
the use of child labor, etc,
• Many northern factory workers were no more
enamored of their jobs than slaves were of theirs.
Indeed, they sometimes called themselves wage
slaves.
Women before the Civil War
The weekly schedule of "drudge" likely included;
• laundry on Monday,
• ironing and mending on Tuesday,
• baking on Wednesday and Saturday,
• daily tidying of kitchen and parlor, and thorough cleaning
on Thursday and again on Saturday.
This was in addition to;
• childcare,
• three meals a day,
• hauling water and keeping the fire burning in the stove, a
chore that in itself took at least one hour each day.
• Then there was making the family garments and seasonal
preserving of fruits, vegetables and meat.
• Women also had charge of the farm garden, livestock and
poultry
•
During planting and harvest, if she did not work in the
fields herself, she provided room and board for the extra
help that did.
Northern Culture
The North was more devoted to education than was the South. Of the nation's 321
public high schools only 30 were in the South.
Women were viewed differently. In the North, women were more active and hard
working, a few of them becoming doctors, writers or activists in their church.