Growth of Market Economy to Social Revolution enduring vision notes

The Growth of the Market Economy

•      Introduction

–     Subsistence agriculture – growing only enough food to feed your family

–     Commercial agriculture – AKA market economy – adds a cash crop where crops were sold for profit

–     High crop prices after the War of 1812 tempted more farmers than ever before to switch from subsistence to commercial agriculture.

–     Commercial agriculture opened new opportunities for western farmers

–     It also exposed them to greater risks

•      Many had to borrow $$$$ to buy land and to survive until they could sell their first crops

•      Once in debt, the commercial farmers were particularly vulnerable because they had no control over fluctuations in price, supply, and demand in world markets

Federal Land Policy

•      Jeffersonian Republicans introduced land policies aimed at a speedy transfer of the public domain to small farmers

•      Ordinance of 1785 – divided public lands into sections of 640 acres

•      Between 1800 and 1820

–     The govt. cut the minimum price per acre and the minimum # of acres that could be purchased

–     Most govt. land was sold at auction

–     Speculators often bid the price up far above the minimum

•      Speculators believed that the price of land would soon shoot up in value

–     The easy availability of credit encouraged this speculation

The Speculator and the Squatter

•      Squatter – formed claims associations to police land auctions and prevent speculators from bidding up the price of land

•      Preemption rights – right to purchase at the minimum price lands that they had already settled on and improvised

•      Many poor settlers who did not have the money to buy at auction simply squatted on govt. land

•      They exerted mounting pressure on Congress to grant them preemption rights over speculators

–     They won their demand in 1841

•      Squatters quickly turned to commercial agriculture

–     They wanted to accumulate the cash to buy their farms

•      Many western farmers, after exhausting the soil’s fertility growing cash crops, simply moved on to new land

The Panic of 1819

•      The land boom soon collapsed and crop and western land prices plummeted

•      Many speculators were ruined in the panic and depression of 1819

•      National Bank tightened credit and called in the notes of the overextended western banks (many of which failed)

•      The hard times experienced by agriculture and industry had long-term effects

–     Many westerners hated the National Bank

•      Blamed it for the crisis

–     Western farmers intensified their search for internal improvements that would cut transportation expenses for shipping their product to market

•      Causes

–     State banks’ loose practices – passed out more bank notes than they could redeem

–     Bumper crops in Europe and recession in Britain trimmed foreign demand for US agriculture

–     To pay debts to the Bank of the US, state banks had to force farmers and land speculators to repay loans

•      Significance

–     Left a bitter taste about banks, especially the Bank of the US

–     Plummeting prices for cash crops demonstrated how dependent farmers were on distant markets

–     Accelerated search for better forms of transformation to distant markets b/c if cost of transportation could be cut, farmers could keep a larger share of the value of their crops and thereby adjust to falling prices

The Transportation Revolution:  Steamboats, Canals, and Railroads

•      Before 1820, available transportation facilities were unsatisfactory

•      Problems with America’s transportation system in 1820:

–     Rivers flowed only North to South, not East to West

–     Roads expensive to maintain

–     Horse drawn wagons could carry only limited produce

•      Existing roads were adequate for transporting people, but moving bulky loads over them by horse-drawn wagons was slow and costly

•      Steamboats

–     1807 Robert R. Livingston and Robert Fulton introduced steamboat Clermont on Hudson River

–     Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) – Chief Justice john Marshall rules that congress’s constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce applied to navigation and thus had to prevail over New York’s power to license the Livingston-Fulton monopoly

–     Faster than keelboats and travel on low water levels

–     Upriver navigation

–     Robert Fulton’s steamboat

•      Allowed the great rivers west of the Appalachian Mountains that flowed north to south became two-way streets for commerce

•      By 1855, 727 steamboats were providing regular ferry service on all the western rivers

•      Rivers did NOT always exist where they were most needed for trade

•      Americans began to build canals in 1820’s

• Canals

o   Erie Canal

• 1817 to 1825 it was built
• State of New York constructed it
• Connected Albany on the Hudson River with Buffalo on Lake Erie
• Lowered freight rates to a fraction of what they  had been
• Made NYC a leading outlet for Midwestern production
• The Erie Canal’s success encouraged dozens of other state-supported projects
• The canal-building boom deflated with the depression of the late 1830’s
• Expensive to build but cheap to maintain
• Offered prospect of connecting Mississippi-Ohio river with Great lakes, and Great Lakes with eastern markets
• 1817 – 1825 Erie Canal – connected Hudson River with Lake Erie
• reduced shipping costs
• rapidly speeded the growth of lake cities (Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago) but populations in river cities (Cincinnati, Louisville) declined

Railroads

–     By 1840 some 3,000 miles of railroad track had been laid

–     trains were beginning to supplement and compete with canal shipping

–     Started after depression in 1830s -  had to scrap expensive canal projects

–     Transportation for areas with no water

–     Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (1828)

–     Boston and Worcester Railroad (1831)

The Growth of Cities

•      This transportation revolution stimulated the development of towns and cities

•      River port cities (steamboat)

–     Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, New Orleans

•      Lake port cities (canals)

–     Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee

•      The period from 1820 to 1860 saw the most rapid urbanization in American history

Industrial Beginnings

•      Introduction

–     Early industrialization stimulated urbanization

–     The first cotton mill in the U.S.A. opened in Pawtucket, RI

•      Skilled mechanic Samuel Slater managed to sneak out of Britain and arrived in America with his ability to reproduce Richard Arkwright’s spinning frame

•      Slater’s 1st mill opened in 1790

–     Soon joined by many other manufacturing textiles and shoes

•      The rapidity of industrialization varied from region to region

–     New England leading the way

–     The South lagged far behind

•      Planters preferred to put their capital in land and slaves

•      Subdivided workers by task

•      Replaced workers with machines

•      Made products cheaper b/c not produced by hand anymore

•      Industrialization began to change people’s lives

–     Forced workers to regulate their labor by the clock and pace of the machine

–     Downgraded the position of skilled artisans

–     Cheaper machine-made products were available in greater profusion to working-class Americans

Causes of Industrialization

•      Embargo Act of 1807

–     Induced merchants barred from foreign trade to divert their capital to founding factories

•      After the War of 1812=fledgling industries received protection from high tariffs

–     Especially in the 1820’s

•      Transportation improvements opened distant markets to manufactures

•      Era of Good Feelings

•      Environmental advantage – water power for mills

•      Americans had no craft organizations that tied artisans to a single trade

•      Relatively high wages paid to American workers

–     Made employers eager to adopt laborsaving techniques

–     Eli Whitney’s interchangeable parts

–     Other new technology

Textile Towns in New England

•      New England was the 1st region to industrialize

–     Its merchants were particularly hard hit by foreign trade disruptions

–     It had swift-flowing rivers for waterpower

–     It had excess female farm population for labor

•      Textile manufacturing became its leading industry

•      Boston Manufacturing Company (1813) – Boston Associates and Francis Cabot Lowell

–     ten times the capital of any previous American mill

–     The Waltham and Lowell mills in MA were the first to concentrate on total cloth production within the factory

–     turned out finished fabrics that required only the additional step of stitching into clothing, unlike Slater’s mills that only carded and spun yarn

–     upset the traditional order of New England society – young unmarried women worked there instead of men, lured from farms by promise of wages

–     miserly mill conditions (air kept purposely humid, windows boarded, etc.)

•      Originally 80% of the mill operatives were unmarried young women

–     Lived in company housing under the strict supervision of management

–     During the 1830’s, these Lowell women staged 2 of the largest strikes in American history to that date. (1834 and 1836)

Artisans and Workers in Mid-Atlantic Cities

•      New York City and Philadelphia

•      Shoes, saddles, clothing

•      Done in small shops as well as factories

•      Much of the work was still done by hand rather than by machine

•      But increasingly production was subdivided into small specialized tasks

–     Done by low-paid, semiskilled or unskilled laborers (often women)

•      This resulted in a declining importance for skilled artisans

–     in protest in the late 1820’s, formed trade unions and “workingmen’s” political parties

•      steadily deteriorating working conditions of early 1830s tended to throw skilled/unskilled workers into same boat

–     1835 US’s first general strike – coal haulers in Philadelphia struck for a ten hour day and were quickly joined by carpenters, cigar makers, shoemakers, leather workers and other artisans

Equality and Inequality

·         egalitarianism – rich treated poor as equal and vice versa

·         servants were neighbors, invited to assist in running a house rather than as a permanent subordinate

Urban Inequality:  The Rich and the Poor

–     The gap between the rich and the poor grew during the 1st half of the 19th century

–     The extremes were especially obvious in the cities

•      Mansions of the wealthy line the fashionable avenues

•      The poor crowded into noxious slums like New York’s Five Points district

–     1833 in Boston=the richest 4% of the population owned almost 60% of the land

•      Contrary to the self-made man, rages-to-riches myth, 90% of the very wealthy had started out with considerable means

•      most antebellum Americans lived close to edge of misery, depended on their children’s labor to meet expenses, and had little money to spend on medical care or recreation

•      At the other end of the scale, cities were developing a pauperized class consisting of aged and infirm; widows; and destitute Irish immigrants, whose labor built the Erie and other canals in the North

•      Americans blamed the poor for being poor

•      treated most with contempt

–     particularly the Irish, for being poor and Catholic

–     Free blacks for being poor and black

Free Blacks in the North

•      Overwhelming discrimination kept most free blacks in poverty

•      They were generally denied the vote

·         laws frequently barred free blacks from migrating too their states and cities

·         segregation everywhere

•       

•      Educated in inferior segregated schools (if at all)

•      Forced to use separate and unequal facilities

•      Kept out of all but the lowest-paying, least skilled occupations

•      In response to this pervasive discrimination, northern blacks founded their own churches

–     Richard Allen started the first of these

•      African Methodist Episcopal Church In Philadelphia in 1816

•      By 1822, there were AME congregations all over the North

•      The black churches engaged in antislavery activities and ran schools and mutual-aid societies

The “Middling Classes”

•      The  majority of white Americans were neither rich nor poor

•      Belonged to what was then called the middling classes

•      For most people in that group the standard of living rose between 1800 and 1860

•      Members of the middle class experienced a lot of insecurity

•      They also exhibited a high degree of transience, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, and region to region

The Revolution in Social Relationships

•      The Attack on the Professions

–     One sign that economic changes were disrupting traditional relationships and forms of authority could be seen in the intense criticism of professionals (doctors, lawyers, ministers) between 1820 and 1850

–     The denial that professionals had any special expertise was particularly prevalent on the frontier

The Challenge to Family Authority

•      Children became more inclined to question parental authority

–     Young men left home at an earlier age and struck out on their own

–     Young women increasingly made their own choice of whom to marry or even whether to marry

Wives and Husbands

•      Relations between spouses also were evolving

•      Wives continued to be legally subordinate to their husbands

•      But under the doctrine of separate spheres, middle-class women were demanding and winning greater voice in those areas where they were deemed to be particularly

–     Exerting moral influence on the family

–     Creating within the home a calm refuge from the harsh, competitive world outside

•      Middle-class women gained more control over the frequency of their pregnancies

–     The size of white middle-class families declined markedly

•      The birthrate remained high among black and immigrant women

Horizontal Allegiances & the Rise of Voluntary Associations

•      vertical allegiance – authority flows from top to bottom (artisan and apprentice, father and family, etc.)

•      horizontal allegiance – linked people in similar positions (maternal associations, etc.)

–     professed to strengthen family/community, not overthrow authority

·         voluntary association – association that arose apart form government and sought to accomplish some goal of value to their members

o   encouraged sociability

o   different associations based on gender, race, etc.

o   moral reform societies

§  temperance

§  combating prostitution

o    

•      Authority of fathers, husbands, professionals, and other social “superiors” waned

•      New relationships among persons in similar positions were forged through the proliferation of voluntary associations

–     Temperance and moral-reform societies of white middle-class women, union, and workingmen’s parties and black fraternal, and other clubs encouraged sociability among members

–     Also these were attempts to enhance their influence on outside groups

Conclusion

•      After 1815, white Americans’ westward movement speeded up due to a heightened European demand for agricultural products

–     especially cotton

•      Federal govt. policies also hastened western settlement

–     Removal of eastern Indians to west of the Mississippi River

–     The sale of land on more generous terms

•      Improved transportation facilitated the shipment of western farmers’ produce to eastern and European markets

–     Steamboat, canals, railroads

•      This transportation revolution encouraged the growth of cities, commerce, manufacturing, and industrialization

•      The economic transformations made some American wealthy and impoverished others

•      Affected social relations within the family and society