Industry and the North,
1790s-1840s
Chapter 12
Preindustrial Ways of Working
• Preindustrial families did most of their work at or
near home
– Spinning, weaving, and sewing
• Women taught daughters
– Barn and field tasks were done by men
• Men taught sons
• In New England, many farmers needed to find a
second job
– Noah Webster stated: “he is a husbandsman [farmer]
in summer and mechanic in winter.”
Preindustrial Ways of Working
• There were no fixed
prices and people usually
didn’t pay for items with
money
– Trade and barter system
– Slow, unscheduled, taskoriented pace
– No such place as “work,”
it was mixed with home
Preindustrial Ways of Working
• In urban areas the apprenticeship system usually began
when a boy was 12-14 years old
– Only allowed to be done by males
– It would take 3-7 years to complete
– The craftsman would teach the boy as
well as house, feed, and cloth him
– He would work for the craftsman until he
could save enough of his own money to
open his own shop
– Typically didn’t marry until they reached
master craftsman themselves
Preindustrial Ways of Working
• Farmers and artisans alike kept long
hours
– However, they had “work” and
“home”
– They constantly ran into customers
after work
– Work would be interrupted for
neighborliness
• Women who had to find work found
respectable jobs:
– Servants, laundresses, seamstresses,
cooks, or managed boarding houses
– Prostitution, common in seaports, was
not respectable work
Preindustrial Ways of Working
• Typically the male would rely on the family to
help with the shop
– Bakers would have their wives work during
the day hours
– Painters would have their wives run the
shop while they were gone
– Blacksmiths would have the children run
errands while he worked
• Men had unquestionable authority, arranged marriages
for daughters and chose professions for sons
– Women and children did not have legal rights
– Sons received property in father’s death
Transportation Revolution
• Improvements encouraged Americans to look beyond their
local communities to broader ones
• Fostered the enterprising commercial spirit for which they
became so widely known
• Roads
– Local gov’ts tried to improve roads
by contracting w/ private companies
to build, maintain, & collect tolls on important stretches of land
• Canals
– Shipments of bulky goods were too slow & expensive along roads
– The Erie Canal was built around this time period
• 364 mile long stretch from Albany to Buffalo & cost $7 million
• Removed Seneca Indians in the process & sent them to reservations
– Other states began building canals
Transportation Revolution
• Steamboats
– Robert Fulton, 1807
– Efficient engines,
shallower & broader hulls
– Could be dangerous
however
• Effects of the Revolution
–
–
–
–
–
Fueled economic growth
Made distant markets more accessible
Fostered an optimistic, risk-taking mentality in the US
Inventions & innovations boomed
Creation of national pride & identity
Market Revolution
• Social order began to be blurred at the start of the Market
Revolution
– Three factors brought about the Market Revolution:
• Better transportation
• Commercialization
• Industrialization
• With better roads came ability to transport people and goods
with ease
• Commercialization involved moving away from selfsufficiency to purchasing goods with money
• Industrialization took out goods that were made by hand
• Together this led to lots of goods at cheap prices (sounds like
America)
Market Revolution
• From 1790-1807 earnings
of merchants went from$5.9-$42.1M
• Newcomers were welcome to trade
– John Jacob Astor from Germany arrived penniless in
1784 was America’s wealthiest man in 1834 ($25M)
• While some investors got their capital from banks,
others used their network of friends/family to raise
the money
• The North benefited more than the South despite a
large percentage of profit being funneled to the
North
Market Revolution
• The “put-out” system was how merchants initially
ran businesses
– They would “put-out” the raw materials
– Workers would work from home and get paid by the
completed piece
– The pieces would be sold in foreign markets
• System gave control of production to merchant
capitalists
– Now controlled labor costs & production goals
• Loss of independence for artisans
Market Revolution
• The shoe industry was the first
to be restructured so that the
workers came to “work”
– The women would sew the
uppers and the men/boys would
sole the bottoms
– Shoe production increased
enormously
– Some artisans became wealthy
workshop owners, most became
wage earners and the
apprenticeships disappeared
Market Revolution
• Control of production went to merchant capitalists
– They owned the labor/materials, created production
goals, determined the styles created
– Shoes were now created to be sold where demand was
(work boots for South) creating specialty shops and a
“national” market
– Production could now be based on demand
– Shoes were followed by flax, wool spinning, straw
braiding, glove making, and stocking knitting
– The effects of industrial capitalism would take a long
time to appear
Market Revolution
• Industrialization brought about the greatest change
to lives
– Starts in Great Britain
– People would have to come to work during certain hours
and work at the pace of the machines
– Wealthy people opposed it due to dirt and squalor
• Americans (not Jeffersonians) attempted to learn
the secrets of industrialization
Market Revolution
• The British were not keen on giving up their secrets
– They passed laws forbidding exportation of equipment
and emigration of skilled workers (who could mimic
equipment)
– Americans still found a way to lure British artisans to the
US
• Samuel Slater brought the technology of cotton
spinning to America
– Financed by Moses Brown and William Almy, he
duplicated the machine
– This factory became known as Slater’s mill
Market Revolution
• Slater’s workforce was his family and women who he
paid cheaper than a skilled man
• The yarn spun in the mill would
be given to pieceworkers for home
weaving (later threatened by
new tech)
• The Tariff of 1816 was created to
protect the new industry (Britain
dropped prices drastically to destroy our businesses)
– Despised by the South, even the seaport merchants didn’t
like the tariff
Market Revolution
• Slater’s mills near Dudley and Oxford, MA were not
on good terms with neighboring farm communities
– These communities fought over dams, roads, taxes, and
schools
– Slater sought to make his mill areas its own town
– The disdain of the farmers spilled over to the workers
who were not accepted in any social circles
Market Revolution
• Francis Cabot Lowell went to Britain to “casually
observe” the mills
– He went back to his room at night and sketched what he
remembered
– When he returned to the US he, with Paul Moody, recreated
and improved on British designs as well as creating a power
loom
• The Lowell mill became the first mill that could take
material and create final product in one place
– It was a much larger mill (larger capital) than others, and
thus survived the British competition
– As the Boston Associates (Lowell financers) expanded they
thought big
– A whole town sprung up around the renamed city of Lowell
Market Revolution
• The more common style of
mills were the “family mills”
– Hired entire families from
rural communities
– Salaries ranged from $1/week
to $12/week based on skill
(avg. =$2.50-$3.50/wk)
– Yearly salary=~$150/year
– Need $300/year to stay above
poverty line
– $25/year to rent home,
$200/year for food
Market Revolution
• Not all inventions in America were copied from the
British
– One of the most important was standardized parts
(interchangeable parts)
– The British dubbed it the “American system of
manufactures”
– Eventually the spread of interchangeable parts led to
more efficient ways of producing goods which lead to
cheaper, better goods
From Artisan to Worker
Artisan
• Apprenticeships
• Women married within the
town
• Patriarch absolute
• Skilled labor
• Flexible work hours
• Leisure was mixed with
work
• Barter
Worker
• Child laborer
• Women moved to urban
settings
• Patriarch diminishes
• Semi or unskilled labor
• Long set hours
• Leisure was infrequent and
usually at a bar
• Cash economy
Mechanization & Women’s Work
• Women in the Workforce
– Industrialization threatened skilled male
workers
– Mechanization created opportunities for
women to work outside the home
– The growing garment industry of the 1820s
depended on cheap female labor
• First unfitted clothing for sailors & southern
slaves
• Then onto overalls & shirts for westerners
A New Social Order
• The Market Revolution ended the old class system
and created the current one: Wealth, middle,
working class, and poor
• Social classes:
– Wealthy—planters in the South, merchants in the North
– Middle—lawyers, ministers, schoolteachers, doctors,
public officials, shop and innkeepers
– Lower class—laborers, servants, marginal farmers
– The others—paupers, slaves
Class Consciousness
• Social class always existed in America
• Market revolution downgraded some independent
artisans & elevated others
• New work patterns helped form distinctive
attitudes of the middle class
A New Social Order
• The ability to move beyond your original social class
fascinated outsiders like Alex de Tocqueville
• In one generation jobs went from artisan to white
collar (accounting, managerial, etc.)
• Employees and employers were now expected to
show sobriety, responsibility, steadiness, and hard
work
Religion
• goes from having original sin to willingness to be
saved will ensure salvation
• Conversion and repentance
were community experiences
• The saved one was now
responsible for demonstrating
their faith through morally
respectable behavior
• New religion called for individualism and selfdiscipline
Roles Within the Family
• Men were to be steady,
industrious, responsible, and
attentive to their business
(could lose job if not)
• Women were to be nurturing,
gentle, kind, moral, and
selflessly devoted to family
• The home was to be “an
elysium to which he can flee
and find rest from the stormy
strife of a selfish world”
Birth Rates
• decreased during this time period due to the cost of
raising a middle class child
• Birth control wasn’t often used
because it was used by
prostitutes, therefore not
fitting for the pious people
• When “mutual efforts” to
control number of children
didn’t work, abortion was used
• The surgical practice was used from 1840-1860,
when it was banned
Parenting
• Being a mother in the 1800s
meant you cared for both
sexes (boys didn’t get
trained by fathers anymore)
– Boys stayed at home and
studied until they were
“established” enough to live
on their own and marry
– Girls were still trained on
“how to be a mother”
Sentimentalism
• a literary movement in the US that was popular,
accessible, and emotionally engrossing
– Susan Warner wrote The Wide Wide World
– These novels focused on private life—religious feelings,
apathy to the economic strife, and preparedness in the
harsh world were common themes
• The movement established a code of etiquette for
ladies
The Transcendentalists
• Philosophy saying that there was an ideal, intuitive
reality transcending ordinary life
– You could achieve Universal Being through being alone
in the natural world
– You can only know what you know, because you know,
not because the outside world tells you
The Transcendentalists: Emerson
• Ralph Waldo Emerson is the
transcendentalist
• Urged American not to
imitate European culture,
but to create an entirely new
& original culture
• Northerner – will become a
leading critic of
slavery & a Union
supporter during
Civil War
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nature”
“Standing on the bare ground
– my head bathed by the
blithe air, and uplifted into
infinite space – all mean
egotism vanishes. I become a
transparent Eyeball; I am
nothing; I see all; the current
of the Universal Being
circulate through me; I am
part and parcel of God.”
The Transcendentalists: Thoreau
• Henry David Thoreau lived a
transcendental life for 2 years which
inspired him to write Walden
– Denounced materialism, said lead to a life of
quite desperation
– Simple life left time for spiritual thought
• Would be remembered as a pioneer
ecologist & conservationist
• Established himself as an early advocate
of nonviolent protest
– Refused to pay a tax that funded an
“immoral” war
– Had to spend a night in jail
– His essays & actions will influence the
movements of Gandhi & MLK Jr.
The Transcendentalists: Brook Farm
• 1841, George Ripley (protestant minister) launched a
communal experiment in MA
• Goal was to achieve “a more natural union between
intellectual & manual labor”
• Some of the leading transcendentalists visited here: Emerson,
Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, & Nathaniel Hawthorne
• A bad fire & heavy debts forced the end of the experiment in
1849