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
The Westward Movement
• Andrew Jackson was the first
president from beyond the
Appalachian Mountains. He
exemplified the westward
march of the American people.
“The West, with its raw frontier,
was the most typically
American part of America.”
• Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in
1844, “Europe stretches to the
Alleghenies; America lies
beyond.”
• By 1850, half of Americans
were under the age of thirty.
They were young and
energetic.
• By 1840, the “demographic center”
of the American population had
crossed the Alleghenies. By the
start of the Civil War, it had
marched across the Ohio River.
Even so, life was very hard on the
frontier.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson’s popular
lecture-essay “Self-Reliance”
portrayed life in the frontier. Writers
such as Herman Melville’s restless
Captain Ahab and James
Fennimore Cooper’s heroic Natty
Bumppo became popular
American literature.
• Pioneers learned to rely upon each
other.
Shaping the Western Landscape
• The westward movement also affected the
physical environment. Pioneers often
exhausted the land in the tobacco regions.
In Kentucky, cane as high as fifteen feet
posed an insurmountable barrier until
settlers discovered that when the cane was
burned off, European bluegrass thrived.
Erroneously, it has been called Kentucky
bluegrass. This was ideal for livestock.
• By the 1820’s, fur trappers were roaming
the Rocky Mountain region. Fur-trapping
relied upon the “rendezvous” system.
Each summer, traders from St. Louis
ventured to a Rocky Mountain valley, made
camp, and waited for the trappers and
Indians to arrive with beaver pelts to swap
for manufactured goods from the East.
Unfortunately, the beaver almost
disappeared from the region. Buffalo
almost came to a virtual annihilation due to
the buffalo hides. On the California coast,
sea-otter pelts brought in a high price.
Again, the otter almost came near
extinction.
• Some historians have called this
exploitation of the West’s natural
bounty “ecological imperialism.”
• Yet Americans during this period
reverenced nature and admired
its incredible beauty. This
attitude toward the beauty of the
American wilderness sparked
and inspired literature and
painting, and eventually led to a
conservation movement.
• George Catlin, a painter and
student of Native American life
proposed the creation of a
national park. His idea later led
to the creation of a national park
system beginning with
Yellowstone Park in 1872.
The March of the Millions
• As the American people moved
west, they multiplied at an amazing
rate. By mid-century the population
was doubling approximately every
25 years.
• By the Civil War, the United States
was the fourth most populous
nation in the western world,
exceeded only by three European
countries-Russia, France, and
Austria.
• Urban growth also exploded. By
1860 there were forty-three cities
of populations of 20,000 or more.
• Over rapid urbanization brought
undesirable by-products. Smelly
slums, bad street lighting,
inadequate policing, impure water,
foul sewage, rats, and improper
garbage disposal.
• A continuing high birthrate
accounted for most of the increase
in population, but by the 1840’s the
tides of immigration were adding
hundreds of thousands more.
• During the 1840’s-1850’s, over a
million and a half Irish and
Germans came to America.
• Why did they come:
– Europe was running out of
room
– Freedom from the aristocratic
class
– Freedom from a state church
– Abundant opportunity to own
land and better one’s condition.
– Transoceanic steamships could
bring immigrants at a much
faster rate (10-12 days
compared to 10 -12 weeks.
The Emerald Isle Moves West
• Ireland, already groaning under the
heavy handed of British overlords,
experienced additional problems.
• In the mid-1840’s a severe potato
famine it Ireland. All told, about 2
million Irish perished.
• Tens of thousands of Irish flocked
to America in the “Black Forties.”
• Too poor to move west and buy
land, livestock, and equipmentswarmed into the larger seaboard
cities. Many came to Boston and
New York which became the
largest Irish city in the world.
• The Irish were forced to live in
rudely crammed slums. They were
scorned by the older American
stock, especially “proper”
Protestant Bostonians, who
regarded the Catholic arrivals as a
social menace.
• “Biddies” (Bridgets) took jobs as
kitchen maids and “Paddies”
(Patricks) were pushed into pickand-shovel jobs on canals and
railroads. As jobs were hard to
come by, they were hated by the
workers. “No Irish Need Apply”
(NINA). The Irish, as a result
fiercely resented the blacks, who
also challenged them for the low
paying jobs.
• Race riots between black and
Irish dockworkers flared up in
several port cities.
• The Ancient Order of
Hibernians, a semisecret
society founded in Ireland to
fight the landlords, served in
America as a benevolent
society, aiding the
downtrodden. The society also
created the “Molly Maguires,”
a shadowy Irish miners’ union
that rocked the Pennsylvania
coal districts in the 1860’1870’s.
• Politics attracted the Irish. Soon,
they began to gain control of
powerful city machines (political
parties that ran cities). The most
infamous (known for something
bad) Irish organization was New
York’s Tammany Hall, a corrupt
Democratic organization that ran
New York City. Before long, Irish
dominated police departments in
many big cities, where they drove
the “Paddy wagons” that had
once carted their forebears to jail.
• Because of the Irish population,
politicians tried to get the Irish
vote, especially in the state of
New York.
• Nearly 2 million Irish arrived
between 1830 and 1860. The
Irish greatly resented Britain.
The German Forty-Eighters
• The incoming of refugees from
Germany between 1830 and
1860 was equal to that of
Ireland. Over a million and a half
Germans came to America
during this time.
• Most of the Germans had been
farmers. Due to the collapse of
the democratic revolutions of
1848, the Germans decided to
leave the autocratic fatherland
and flee to America-the brightest
hope for democracy.
• Germans, such as patriotic Carl
Schurz made a tremendous
impact on American life. Schurz
was a relentless foe of slavery
and public corruption.
• Many of the German newcomers, unlike
the Irish, possessed a modest amount of
material goods. Because of this, most of
them pushed out to the Middle West,
notably Wisconsin. Here, they settled and
established model farms. Like the Irish,
they formed an influential body of voters
whom American politicians went after. The
Germans were less politically powerful
since they were more widely scattered than
the Irish.
• The Germans contributed much to the
American culture:
– The Conestoga wagon, the Kentucky
rifle, and the Christmas tree were
German contributions to the American
culture.
– The Germans also promoted the idea of
American isolationism in the upper
Mississippi Valley. Since they had fled
from an autocratic European society,
they had no desire to entangle
themselves again with Britain.
– Being better educated than many of the
pioneers, the Germans supported their
Kindergarten (children’s garden).
• As outspoken champions of
freedom, the Germans became
relentless enemies of slavery
during the years before the Civil
War.
• Seeking to preserve their language
and culture, they sometimes
settled in compact “colonies” and
kept to themselves.
• The Germans drank huge
quantities of bier (beer). Their Old
World drinking habits caused the
advocates of temperance to double
their efforts against drinking.
Flare-Ups of Antiforeignism
• The influx of the German and
Irish immigration inflamed the
prejudices of American
“nativists.” They were afraid that
these foreigners would outbreed,
outvote, and overwhelm the
existing population.
• Not only did the newcomers take
jobs from “native” Americans, but
a large majority of the Irish were
Roman Catholic, as were a
substantial minority of the
Germans.
• Roman Catholicism spread
throughout America. The
religious fervor caused the Irish
to form their own Catholic
Schools “Parochial Schools”
(religious school). By 1850, the
Catholics were the largest
religious group.
• American nativists rallied for
political action. In 1849, they
formed the Order of the StarSpangled Banner, which
eventually formed in the American
or “Know-Nothing” Party.
• Nativists wanted strict immigration
and naturalization restrictions and
laws authorizing the deportation of
alien paupers (poor).
• The Nativists used literature,
mainly pure fiction, to belittle the
Catholics. One such book was:
Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures
(1836) which sold over 300,000.
Though fiction, the book depicted a
runaway nun who had escaped
from a Catholic convent. After
escaping, Maria Monk disclosed
the abuse that she had suffered
while at the convent.
• Attacks mounted against
Catholic schools and churches.
The most frightful occurred
during 1844 in Philadelphia,
where the Irish Catholics fought
back against the threats of the
“nativists.” Two Catholic
churches had been burned and
some thirteen citizens and been
killed and fifty wounded during
the several days of fighting.
• Immigrants were making
America a more pluralistic
society (many cultures).
America was one of the most
ethnically and racially varied in
the history of the world. It was
no wonder that cultural clashes
would occur.
• The reason why more riots did not
occur was due to the robustness of
the American economy. Once the
immigrants arrived, they could
claim their share of American
wealth without jeopardizing the
wealth of others. Most of the
isolated riots occurred in the
congested cities of America. The
immigrants hands and brains
helped fuel the American
economy.
• Immigrants and the American
economy needed each other.
Without the newcomers an
agricultural united States might
well have been condemned to
watch as the Industrial Revolution
swept through nineteenth-century
Europe.
The March of Mechanization
• Samuel Slater has been acclaimed
the “Father of the Factory
System.” Slater was a skilled
British mechanic of 21. He came to
America in disguise after
memorizing the plans for the
machinery. In 1791, Slater put into
operation the first efficient
American machinery for spinning
cotton thread.
• Eli Whitney, from Massachusetts,
invented the cotton gin (gin-short
for engine)-1798 which separated
the cotton fibers from the seeds.
The cotton gin revolutionized the
cotton industry of America as well
as the whole world.
• The South was now tied to King
Cotton. Slavery had been dying
out but was revitalized by this new
invention. Slave-driving planters
were not moving from the depleted
tidewater plains over into Alabama
and Mississippi.
• The Industrial Revolution was
now on the march in America.
• New England now thrived as an
industrial center:
– Stony soil discouraged farming
– Dense population provided
labor
– Shipping brought in capital
(materials with which to
manufacture)
– Seaports- importing raw
materials and exporting
finished products
– Rapid rivers provided abundant
water power. By 1860, there
were over 1,000 cotton mills,
mostly in New England.
Marvels in Manufacturing
• American factories spread slowly until
about 1807, when there began the
embargo Act, nonintercourse Act, and
the War of 1812.
• Manufacturing halted after the treaty of
Ghent in 1815. British manufactures
dumped low priced products onto the
American market. Many mills were forced
to close. The Tariff of 1816 brought some
relief.
• Manufacturing of firearms greatly
increased after Eli Whitney, again,
began producing muskets with
interchangeable parts. This would be
done by machine rather than by hand.
• The principle of interchangeable parts
was widely adopted by 1850, which
ultimately became the basis of modern
mass-production, assembly-line
methods.
• Eli Whitney contributed much to the
North winning the Civil War.
• Elias Howe in 1846 and perfected
by Isaac Singer, gave another
strong boost to northern
industrialization.
• The sewing machine became the
foundation of the ready-made
clothing industry, which took hold
about the time of the Civil War. It
drove many seamstresses from the
home to the factory.
• 306 patents in 1800 grew to
28,000 by 1860.
• The principle of limited liability
aided the growth of business in
allowing the individual investor, in
cases of legal claims or
bankruptcy, to risk no more than
his own share of the corporation’s
stock. These were called
investment capital companies.
• Laws of “free incorporation,”
first passed in New York in 1848,
which meant that businessmen
could create corporations without
applying for individual charters
from the legislature.
• Samuel F.B. Morse’s telegraph
was among the inventions that
tightened the links of an
increasingly complex business
world. His first typed message
over 40 miles of wires said, “What
hath God wrought?”. Instantly
separated people were joined
together.
Workers and “Wage Slaves”
• Prior to the factory system most work
was done in the home. Both owner and
apprentice worked together. The factory
system isolated the owner and worker.
Working conditions were very harsh
and little contact was made between
the worker and owners.
• Workers were forbidden by law to form
labor unions since it was considered
criminal conspiracy. Only 24 recorded
strikes were recorded before 1835.
• Child workers were especially
vulnerable to exploitation. In 1820, one
half of the nation’s industrial workers
were children under ten years of age.
“Whipping” rooms were used to
brutally whip children. Many children
were mentally, emotionally, and
physically scarred.
• In contrast, the situation of most adult
workers improved in the 1820’s and
1830’s. Many states granted the
laboring man the right to vote.
• Many workers gave their loyalty to
the Democratic Party of Andrew
Jackson, whose attack on the
Bank of the United States and
against all forms of “privilege”
reflected their anxieties about the
emerging capitalist economy
(economy whereby businesses are
privately owned.
• The ten-hour workday, higher
wages, better working conditions,
public education for the children,
and an end to imprisonment for
debt heightened the Jacksonian
era.
• Workers learned the value of the
strike even if it was against the
law. Dozens of strikes erupted in
the 1830’s and 1840’s. Employers
would hire “scabs” or “rats” (those
hired to replace strikers).
Immigrant workers would fill the
jobs.
• By 1830, there were 300,000
trade unions. However, the
depression of 1837 ended
union membership as
unemployment grew.
• In 1842, the supreme court of
Massachusetts ruled in the case
of Commonwealth v. Hunt that
labor unions were not illegal
conspiracies, provided that their
methods were “honorable and
peaceful.”
• Unions still had about a century
before they could meet
management on relatively even
terms.
Women and the Economy
• Working conditions were very
difficult for women. They worked
six days a week for twelve or
thirteen hours- “from dark to dark.”
• Boston factories pridefully pointed
to their textile mill at Lowell,
Massachusetts (The Lowell
System). The workers were all
New England farm girls, carefully
supervised on and off the job. They
were escorted regularly to church
from their company
boardinghouses, forbidden to form
unions, they were as disciplined
and docile a labor force as any
employer could wish.
• Opportunities for women to be
economically self-supporting were
scarce. Nursing, domestic service,
and teaching were the primary jobs
for women.
• Catherine Beecher, sister of
Harriet Beecher Stowe and
daughter of a famous preacher,
encouraged women to enter the
teaching profession.
• About 10% of white women were
working for pay outside their
homes by 1850.
• Most working women were
single. After marriage they left
their jobs and took their jobs at
home. At home, they were
enshrined in a “cult of
domesticity,” a widespread
cultural creed that glorified the
customary functions of the
homemaker. From their
pedestal, married women
commanded immense moral
power, and they increasingly
made decisions that altered the
character of the family itself.
• The changing roles of women and
the spreading industrial revolution
brought some important changes
in the life of the nineteenth-century
home-the traditional “women’s
sphere.”
• Love, not parental “arrangement,”
more frequently determined the
choice of a spouse. Families thus
became more closely knit and
affectionate, providing the
emotional refuge from the big-city
tolerable.
• Families grew smaller often by the
woman’s choice. This new role for
women has been called “domestic
feminism.” It signified the growing
power and independence of
women, even while they remained
wrapped in the “cult of
domesticity.”
• Families became more child-centered.
Europeans saw American families as
being too permissive. The reality was 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 based on internalized moral
standards.
• The “modern family” was: small,
affectionate, child-centered, and
provided a special arena for the
talents of women.
• To many feminists later, this role
would look stifling but to many
women of the time it was a big step
from the conditions of grinding, often
alongside men in the fields, in which
their mothers had lived.
Western Farmers Reap a Revolution in the
Fields
• As factories altered the East,
flourishing farms were changing the
face of the West. The transAllegheny region, especially the
Ohio-Indiana-Illinois areas was fast
becoming the nation’s and the
world’s breadbasket.
• Corn was processed into grain and
liquor. They became the farmer’s
staple market items. So many hogs
were butchered, traded, or shipped
that Cincinnati came to be know as
the “Porkopolis” of the West.
• West produce was at first floated
down the Ohio-Mississippi River to
the booming Cotton Kingdom.
• John Deere of Illinois in 1837
produced a steel plow that broke the
hard matted soil. In the 1830’s Cyrus
McCormick of Virginia invented the
mechanical mower-reaper. The
reaper was to the western farmer what
the cotton gin was to the southern
planters. The reaper allowed the small
farmer to become wealthy capitalists.
• Subsistence farming (farming enough
to live on) gave way to production for
the market (sold to the public). Largescale (“extensive”), specialized, cashcrop agriculture came to dominate the
trans-Allegheny West. Farmers wanted
more land and more machinery which
in turn increased debt.
• The industrial farmer needed
expanded markets in which to sell their
products. Farm products traveled North
and South along the Ohio and
Mississippi. A transportation revolution
would be necessary.
Highways and Byways
• In the 1790’s the Lancaster
turnpike in Pennsylvania was
made. It was a 62 mile hardsurfaced highway that went from
Philadelphia to Lancaster. As
drivers approached the toll gate,
they had to pass a barrier of sharp
pike. After a toll was paid, the
barrier was turned aside to let the
driver through-thus, the term
turnpike. Proving to be so
successful, turnpikes were built
throughout the west stimulating
trade.
• States’ righters objected to
federal money being given to the
states. They were fearful that the
national government could control
the states. Easterners also
resented the federal money since
the new roads reduced their
populations.
• The National Road, or
Cumberland Road connected
western Maryland to Illinois a
distance of 591 miles. This road
with numerous branches was a
major stimulus to American
prosperity. Immigrants, freight and
commerce flooded to the west.
The age of rapid land
transportation was now
dawning.
Fulton Reverses the Rivers
• The steam boat revolution
overlapped the turnpike revolution
in transportation.
• Robert Fulton became the first
engineer to build a successful
seam engine that could navigate a
boat up river. His first boat, the
Clermont successful ran up the
Hudson River toward Albany, New
York a distance of 150 miles in 32
hours.
• Trade by river doubled since trade
could now go both up and down
rivers.
• By 1860, 1000 steamboats sailed
up and down the Mississippi.
• Steamboats played a major role in
opening up the West and South
and populating cities along the
rivers.
“Clinton’s Big Ditch” in New York
• New Yorker’s were not given
federal aid for the Erie Canal,
linking the Great Lakes with the
Hudson River. As a result, they
built the canal themselves.
Governor DeWitt Clinton’s project
was, at first, called “Clinton’s Big
Ditch” or “the Governor’s Gutter.”
• The canal proved to be an
explosive economic success. The
cost of shipping a ton of grain from
Buffalo to New York City fell from
$100 to $5 and the time of transit
went from twenty days to six days.
• Land skyrocketed along the sides
of the canal. New Cities grew and
blossomed along the canal banks.
• Industry grew
• Farming attracted many settlers
and immigrants in Ohio, Michigan,
Indiana, and Illinois.
• Cities such as Cleveland, Detroit,
and Chicago exploded into might
cities.
• Industrialization grew as a result of
canal building.
• Long-established local market
economies were now being
swamped by a huge continental
economy. Instead of selling to a
small area, products could be
shipped and sold all over the
nation and world.
Pioneer Railroad Promoters
• The railroad proved to be the
most significant contribution to
the development of a continental
economy.
• The railroad was fast, reliable,
cheaper than canals to construct,
and not frozen over in winter. It
could go almost anywhere.
• The railroad was first introduced in
the United States in 1828. by 1860
(32 years later) the United States
had 30,000 miles of railroad track,
three-fourths of it was in the rapidly
industrializing North.
• At first, canal investors resented
the competition of the railroad.
• The railroad bound America
together with iron and later steel.
• The Pullman car (“sleeping
palace”) was introduced in 1859.
The Transport Web Binds the Union
• The desire of the East to tap the
West stimulated the
“transportation revolution.”
• Until about 1830, the “natural” flow
of trade was southbound down the
Mississippi river. With the
steamboat, transportation could
flow up river. The West and South
were connected by North/South
waterways.
• The truly revolutionary changes in
commerce and communication
came during the 30 years before
the Civil War as canals and
railroad tracks radiated out from
the East to West and vice-versa.
• The Mississippi and New Orleans
was increasingly robbed of its
traffic, as goods moved eastward
and westward on trains and canal
boats.
• New York City became the
Seaboard queen of the nation.
• As did the division of labor apply to
the factory (each person doing a
particular job) so was the nation
regionalized (sectionalized) to a
particular type of economic activity:
– The South raised cotton for
export to New England and Old
England
– The West grew grain and
livestock to feed factory
workers in the East and in
Europe
– The East made machines and
textiles for the South and the
West.
• Many southerners regarded
the Mississippi as a silver
chain that naturally linked the
upper valley states to the
Cotton Kingdom. They were
convinced, as secession
approached, that some or all of
these states would have to
secede with them or be
economically cut off.
• However, this proved not to be
the case since the upper
Mississippi states proved to be
tightly linked economically to
the East.
• Social Effects: The emergence
of a specialized, continentalscale economy had far-reaching
social effects.
– As more and more Americans
were linked to the national
economy, the self-sufficient
households of the colonial days
were transformed. Most
families had once raised all
their own food, spun their own
wool, and bartered with their
neighbors for necessities. Now,
they scattered to work for
wages in the mills, or they
planted just a few crops for sale
at market and used the money
to buy goods made by
strangers in far-off factories.
• “A quiet revolution occurred
in the household division of
labor and status.” Traditional
women’s work was rendered
superfluous and devalued as
store-bought fabrics,
candles, and soap replaced
homemade products. The
home, once a center of
economic production in
which all family members
cooperated, grew into a
place of refuge from the
world of work, a refuge that
became increasingly the
special and separate sphere
of women.
Wealth and Poverty
• Revolutionary advances in
manufacturing and transportation
brought increased prosperity to all
Americans, but these advances also
widened the gulf between the rich
and the poor. By the Civil War, a
new class of “millionaires” was
forming.
• “Cities bred the greatest extremes of
economic inequality.” The Unskilled
workers always fared worst. Many
of these were “drifters” or wanderers
who, at times, made up half the
population of the industrial centers.
• “Social Mobility” did occur but not
at the rate imagined. “Rags-toriches” success stories were
relatively few.
• The American standard of living was
still higher than those countries of
Europe.
Cables, Clippers, and Pony riders
• A new pattern of American foreign
trade emerged in the antebellum
(before the Civil War) years.
Cotton accounted for more than
half the value of all American
exports.
• “After the repeal of the British
exclusionary Corn Laws in 1846,
the wheat gathered by
McCormick’s reapers began to
play an increasingly important role
in trade with Great Britain.”
• Americans tended to export
agricultural products and imported
manufactured goods. They tended
to import more than they exported,
running up substantial debts to
foreign creditors.
• In 1858 Cyrus Field stretched a
cable under the deep North
Atlantic waters from Newfoundland
to Ireland. America and Europe
was now connected.
• American shipping rose to
prominence with the
Savannah, a steamer that
sailed across the Atlantic in
1819.
• By the 1840’s and 1850’s, a
golden age dawned for
American shipping. Clipper
Ships were being build that
sailed at very fast speeds.
The ships sacrificed cargo
for speed. The ships took the
tea trade between the Far
East and England from the
slow British sailing ships.
They were used to sail
adventures to the gold fields
of California and Australia.
• The British won out on the eve of
the Civil War with their “steamers”
(“teakettles”).
• By 1858 stagecoaches,
immortalized by Mark Twain’s
Roughing It, were riding the west
from the Missouri River to
California.
• 1860 saw the Pony Express in
1860 to carry mail 2,000 from
St. Joseph, Missouri, to
Sacrament, California in 10
days. It lasted only 18 months.
Morse’s telegraph led to the
doom of the Pony Express by
1861.
• “The swift ships and the fleet
ponies ushered out a dying
technology of wind and muscle.
In the future, machines would be
in the saddle.”