Untest Assignment HIST 1301

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I. Introduction | II. Early Republic Economic Development | III. The Decline of Northern Slavery

and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom | IV. Changes in Labor Organization | V. Changes in Gender

Roles and Family Life | VI. The Rise of Industrial Labor in Antebellum America | VII. Conclusion |

VIII. Primary Sources | IX. Reference Material

THE AMERICAN YAWP

8. The Market Revolution

William James Bennett, View of South Street, from Maiden Lane, New York City, c. 1827, via Metropolitan Museum of New
York

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I. Introduction

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08. The Market Revolution

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In the early years of the nineteenth century, Americans’ endless commercial ambition—what one

Baltimore paper in 1815 called an “almost universal ambition to get forward”—remade the nation.

Between the Revolution and the Civil War, an old subsistence world died and a new more-commer-

cial nation was born. Americans integrated the technologies of the Industrial Revolution into a new

commercial economy. Steam power, the technology that moved steamboats and railroads, fueled the

rise of American industry by powering mills and sparking new national transportation networks. A

“market revolution” remade the nation.

The revolution reverberated across the country. More and more farmers grew crops for pro�t, not

self-su�ciency. Vast factories and cities arose in the North. Enormous fortunes materialized. A new

middle class ballooned. And as more men and women worked in the cash economy, they were freed

from the bound dependence of servitude. But there were costs to this revolution. As northern textile

factories boomed, the demand for southern cotton swelled, and American slavery accelerated.

Northern subsistence farmers became laborers bound to the whims of markets and bosses. The mar-

ket revolution sparked explosive economic growth and new personal wealth, but it also created a

growing lower class of property-less workers and a series of devastating depressions, called “panics.”

Many Americans labored for low wages and became trapped in endless cycles of poverty. Some work-

ers, often immigrant women, worked thirteen hours a day, six days a week. Others labored in slavery.

Massive northern textile mills turned southern cotton into cheap cloth. And although northern

states washed their hands of slavery, their factories fueled the demand for slave-grown southern cot-

ton and their banks provided the �nancing that ensured the pro�tability and continued existence of

the American slave system. And so, as the economy advanced, the market revolution wrenched the

United States in new directions as it became a nation of free labor and slavery, of wealth and inequal-

ity, and of endless promise and untold perils.

 

II. Early Republic Economic Development

The growth of the American economy reshaped American life in the decades before the Civil War.

Americans increasingly produced goods for sale, not for consumption. Improved transportation en-

abled a larger exchange network. Labor-saving technology improved e�ciency and enabled the sepa-

ration of the public and domestic spheres. The market revolution ful�lled the revolutionary

generation’s expectations of progress but introduced troubling new trends. Class con�ict, child la-

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bor, accelerated immigration, and the expansion of slavery followed. These strains required new fam-

ily arrangements and transformed American cities.

American commerce had proceeded haltingly during the eighteenth century. American farmers in-

creasingly exported foodstu�s to Europe as the French Revolutionary Wars devastated the continent

between 1793 and 1815. America’s exports rose in value from $20.2 million in 1790 to $108.3 mil-

lion by 1807. But while exports rose, exorbitant internal transportation costs hindered substantial

economic development within the United States. In 1816, for instance, $9 could move one ton of

goods across the Atlantic Ocean, but only thirty miles across land. An 1816 Senate Committee Re-

port lamented that “the price of land carriage is too great” to allow the pro�table production of

American manufactures. But in the wake of the War of 1812, Americans rushed to build a new na-

tional infrastructure, new networks of roads, canals, and railroads. In his 1815 annual message to

Congress, President James Madison stressed “the great importance of establishing throughout our

country the roads and canals which can best be executed under national authority.” State govern-

ments continued to sponsor the greatest improvements in American transportation, but the federal

government’s annual expenditures on internal improvements climbed to a yearly average of

$1,323,000 by Andrew Jackson’s presidency. .

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Clyde Osmer DeLand, “The First Locomotive. Aug. 8th, 1829. Trial Trip of the “Stourbridge Lion,” 1916. Library of Congress.

State legislatures meanwhile pumped capital into the economy by chartering banks. The number of

state-chartered banks skyrocketed from 1 in 1783, 266 in 1820, and 702 in 1840 to 1,371 in 1860.

European capital also helped build American infrastructure. By 1844, one British traveler declared

that “the prosperity of America, her railroads, canals, steam navigation, and banks, are the fruit of

English capital.”

Economic growth, however, proceeded unevenly. Depressions devastated the economy in 1819,

1837, and 1857. Each followed rampant speculation in various commodities: land in 1819, land and

enslaved laborers in 1837, and railroad bonds in 1857. Eventually the bubbles all burst. The spread

of paper currency untethered the economy from the physical signi�ers of wealth familiar to the colo-

nial generation, namely land. Counterfeit bills were endemic during this early period of banking.

With so many fake bills circulating, Americans were constantly on the lookout for the “con�dence

man” and other deceptive characters in the urban landscape. Prostitutes and con men could look like

regular honest Americans. Advice literature o�ered young men and women strategies for avoiding

hypocrisy in an attempt to restore the social �ber. Intimacy in the domestic sphere became more im-

portant as duplicity proliferated in the public sphere. Fear of the con�dence man, counterfeit bills,

and a pending bust created anxiety in the new capitalist economy. But Americans refused to blame

the logic of their new commercial system for these depressions. Instead, they kept pushing “to get

forward.”

The so-called Transportation Revolution opened the vast lands west of the Appalachian Mountains.

In 1810, before the rapid explosion of American infrastructure, Margaret Dwight left New Haven,

Connecticut, in a wagon headed for Ohio Territory. Her trip was less than �ve hundred miles but

took six weeks to complete. The journey was a terrible ordeal, she said. The roads were “so rocky &

so gullied as to be almost impassable.” Ten days into the journey, at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,

Dwight said “it appeared to me that we had come to the end of the habitable part of the globe.” She

�nally concluded that “the reason so few are willing to return from the Western country, is not that

the country is so good, but because the journey is so bad.” Nineteen years later, in 1829, English

traveler Frances Trollope made the reverse journey across the Allegheny Mountains from Cincinnati

to the East Coast. At Wheeling, Virginia, her coach encountered the National Road, the �rst feder-

ally funded interstate infrastructure project. The road was smooth and her journey across the Al-

leghenies was a scenic delight. “I really can hardly conceive a higher enjoyment than a botanical tour

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among the Alleghany Mountains,” she declared. The ninety miles of the National Road was to her

“a garden.”

Engraving based on W.H. Bartlett, “Lockport, Erie Canal,” 1839. Wikimedia.

If the two decades between Margaret Dwight’s and Frances Trollope’s journeys transformed the

young nation, the pace of change only accelerated in the following years. If a transportation revolu-

tion began with improved road networks, it soon incorporated even greater improvements in the

ways people and goods moved across the landscape.

New York State completed the Erie Canal in 1825. The 350-mile-long human-made waterway linked

the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean. Soon crops grown in the Great

Lakes region were carried by water to eastern cities, and goods from emerging eastern factories made

the reverse journey to midwestern farmers. The success of New York’s “arti�cial river” launched a

canal-building boom. By 1840 Ohio created two navigable, all-water links from Lake Erie to the

Ohio River.

Robert Fulton established the �rst commercial steamboat service up and down the Hudson River in

New York in 1807. Soon thereafter steamboats �lled the waters of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

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Downstream-only routes became watery two-way highways. By 1830, more than two hundred

steamboats moved up and down western rivers.

The United States’ �rst long-distance rail line launched from Maryland in 1827. Baltimore’s city

government and the state government of Maryland provided half the start-up funds for the new Bal-

timore & Ohio (B&O) Rail Road Company. The B&O’s founders imagined the line as a means to

funnel the agricultural products of the trans-Appalachian West to an outlet on the Chesapeake Bay.

Similar motivations led citizens in Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, and Charleston, South Car-

olina to launch their own rail lines. State and local governments provided the means for the bulk of

this initial wave of railroad construction, but economic collapse following the Panic of 1837 made

governments wary of such investments. Government supports continued throughout the century,

but decades later the public origins of railroads were all but forgotten, and the railroad corporation

became the most visible embodiment of corporate capitalism.

By 1860 Americans had laid more than thirty thousand miles of railroads. The ensuing web of rail,

roads, and canals meant that few farmers in the Northeast or Midwest had trouble getting goods to

urban markets. Railroad development was slower in the South, but there a combination of rail lines

and navigable rivers meant that few cotton planters struggled to transport their products to textile

mills in the Northeast and in England.

Such internal improvements not only spread goods, they spread information. The transportation

revolution was followed by a communications revolution. The telegraph rede�ned the limits of hu-

man communication. By 1843 Samuel Morse had persuaded Congress to fund a forty-mile telegraph

line stretching from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Within a few short years, during the Mexican-

American War, telegraph lines carried news of battle�eld events to eastern newspapers within days.

This contrasts starkly with the War of 1812, when the Battle of New Orleans took place nearly two

full weeks after Britain and the United States had signed a peace treaty.

The consequences of the transportation and communication revolutions reshaped the lives of Amer-

icans. Farmers who previously produced crops mostly for their own family now turned to the mar-

ket. They earned cash for what they had previously consumed; they purchased the goods they had

previously made or went without. Market-based farmers soon accessed credit through eastern banks,

which provided them with the opportunity to expand their enterprise but left also them prone be-

fore the risk of catastrophic failure wrought by distant market forces. In the Northeast and Midwest,

where farm labor was ever in short supply, ambitious farmers invested in new technologies that

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promised to increase the productivity of the limited labor supply. The years between 1815 and 1850

witnessed an explosion of patents on agricultural technologies. The most famous of these, perhaps,

was Cyrus McCormick’s horse-drawn mechanical reaper, which partially mechanized wheat harvest-

ing, and John Deere’s steel-bladed plow, which more easily allowed for the conversion of unbroken

ground into fertile farmland.

A. Janicke & Co., “Our City, (St. Louis, Mo.),” 1859. Library of Congress.

Most visibly, the market revolution encouraged the growth of cities and reshaped the lives of urban

workers. In 1820, only New York had over one hundred thousand inhabitants. By 1850, six Ameri-

can cities met that threshold, including Chicago, which had been founded fewer than two decades

earlier. New technology and infrastructure paved the way for such growth. The Erie Canal cap-

tured the bulk of the trade emerging from the Great Lakes region, securing New York City’s posi-

tion as the nation’s largest and most economically important city. The steamboat turned St. Louis

and Cincinnati into centers of trade, and Chicago rose as it became the railroad hub of the western

Great Lakes and Great Plains regions. The geographic center of the nation shifted westward. The

development of steam power and the exploitation of Pennsylvania coal�elds shifted the locus of

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American manufacturing. By the 1830s, for instance, New England was losing its competitive ad-

vantage to the West.

Meanwhile, the cash economy eclipsed the old, local, informal systems of barter and trade. Income

became the measure of economic worth. Productivity and e�ciencies paled before the measure of

income. Cash facilitated new impersonal economic relationships and formalized new means of pro-

duction. Young workers might simply earn wages, for instance, rather than receiving room and

board and training as part of apprenticeships. Moreover, a new form of economic organization ap-

peared: the business corporation.

States o�ered the privileges of incorporation to protect the fortunes and liabilities of entrepreneurs

who invested in early industrial endeavors. A corporate charter allowed investors and directors to

avoid personal liability for company debts. The legal status of incorporation had been designed to

confer privileges to organizations embarking on expensive projects explicitly designed for the public

good, such as universities, municipalities, and major public works projects. The business corpora-

tion was something new. Many Americans distrusted these new, impersonal business organizations

whose o�cers lacked personal responsibility while nevertheless carrying legal rights. Many wanted

limits. Thomas Je�erson himself wrote in 1816 that “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy

of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength,

and bid de�ance to the laws of our country.” But in Dartmouth v. Woodward (1819) the Supreme

Court upheld the rights of private corporations when it denied the attempt of the government of

New Hampshire to reorganize Dartmouth College on behalf of the common good. Still, suspicions

remained. A group of journeymen cordwainers in New Jersey publically declared in 1835 that they

“entirely disapprov[ed] of the incorporation of Companies, for carrying on manual mechanical busi-

ness, inasmuch as we believe their tendency is to eventuate and produce monopolies, thereby crip-

pling the energies of individual enterprise.”

 

III. The Decline of Northern Slavery and the Rise of the Cotton

Kingdom

Slave labor helped fuel the market revolution. By 1832, textile companies made up 88 out of 106

American corporations valued at over $100,000. These textile mills, worked by free labor, never-

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theless depended on southern cotton, and the vast new market economy spurred the expansion of

the plantation South.

By the early nineteenth century, states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had taken steps to abolish

slavery. Vermont included abolition as a provision of its 1777 state constitution. Pennsylvania’s

emancipation act of 1780 stipulated that freed children must serve an indenture term of twenty-

eight years. Gradualism brought emancipation while also defending the interests of northern en-

slavers and controlling still another generation of Black Americans. In 1804 New Jersey became the

last of the northern states to adopt gradual emancipation plans. There was no immediate moment of

jubilee, as many northern states only promised to liberate future children born to enslaved mothers.

Such laws also stipulated that such children remain in indentured servitude to their mother’s en-

slaver in order to compensate the enslaver’s loss. James Mars, a young man indentured under this sys-

tem in Connecticut, risked being thrown in jail when he protested the arrangement that kept him

bound to his mother’s enslaver until age twenty-�ve.

Quicker routes to freedom included escape or direct emancipation by enslavers. But escape was dan-

gerous and voluntary manumission rare. Congress, for instance, made the harboring of a freedom-

seeking enslaved person a federal crime as early as 1793. Hopes for manumission were even slimmer,

as few northern enslavers emancipated their own enslaved laborers. Roughly one �fth of the white

families in New York City owned enslaved laborers, and fewer than eighty enslavers in the city volun-

tarily manumitted their enslaved laborers between 1783 and 1800. By 1830, census data suggests

that at least 3,500 people were still enslaved in the North. Elderly enslaved people in Connecticut

remained in bondage as late as 1848, and in New Jersey slavery endured until after the Civil War.

Emancipation proceeded slowly, but proceeded nonetheless. A free Black population of fewer than

60,000 in 1790 increased to more than 186,000 by 1810. Growing free Black communities fought

for their civil rights. In a number of New England locales, free African Americans could vote and

send their children to public schools. Most northern states granted Black citizens property rights and

trial by jury. African Americans owned land and businesses, founded mutual aid societies, estab-

lished churches, promoted education, developed print culture, and voted.

Nationally, however, the enslaved population continued to grow, from less than 700,000 in 1790 to

more than 1.5 million by 1820. The growth of abolition in the North and the acceleration of slav-

ery in the South created growing divisions. Cotton drove the process more than any other crop. Eli

Whitney’s cotton gin, a simple hand-cranked device designed to mechanically remove sticky green

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seeds from short staple cotton, allowed southern planters to dramatically expand cotton production

for the national and international markets. Water-powered textile factories in England and the

American Northeast rapidly turned raw cotton into cloth. Technology increased both the supply of

and demand for cotton. White southerners responded by expanding cultivation farther west, to the

Mississippi River and beyond. Slavery had been growing less pro�table in tobacco-planting regions

like Virginia, but the growth of cotton farther south and west increased the demand for human

bondage. Eager cotton planters invested their new pro�ts in more enslaved laborers.

The cotton boom fueled speculation in slavery. Many enslavers leveraged potential pro�ts into loans

used to purchase ever increasing numbers of enslaved laborers. For example, one 1840 Louisiana

Courier ad warned, “it is very di�cult now to �nd persons willing to buy slaves from Mississippi or

Alabama on account of the fears entertained that such property may be already mortgaged to the

banks of the above named states.”

Sidney & Ne�, Detail from Plan of the City of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1850. Wikimedia Commons.

New national and international markets fueled the plantation boom. American cotton exports rose

from 150,000 bales in 1815 to 4,541,000 bales in 1859. The Census Bureau’s 1860 Census of Manu-

factures stated that “the manufacture of cotton constitutes the most striking feature of the industrial

history of the last �fty years.” Enslavers shipped their cotton north to textile manufacturers and to

northern �nancers for overseas shipments. Northern insurance brokers and exporters in the North-

east pro�ted greatly.

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While the United States ended its legal participation in the global slave trade in 1808, slave traders

moved one million enslaved people from the tobacco-producing Upper South to cotton �elds in the

Lower South between 1790 and 1860. This harrowing trade in human �esh supported middle-

class occupations in the North and South: bankers, doctors, lawyers, insurance brokers, and ship-

ping agents all pro�ted. And of course it facilitated the expansion of northeastern textile mills.

 

IV. Changes in Labor Organization

While industrialization bypassed most of the American South, southern cotton production never-

theless nurtured industrialization in the Northeast and Midwest. The drive to produce cloth trans-

formed the American system of labor. In the early republic, laborers in manufacturing might typi-

cally have been expected to work at every stage of production. But a new system, piecework, divided

much of production into discrete steps performed by di�erent workers. In this new system, mer-

chants or investors sent or “put out” materials to individuals and families to complete at home.

These independent laborers then turned over the partially �nished goods to the owner to be given to

another laborer to �nish.

As early as the 1790s, however, merchants in New England began experimenting with machines to

replace the putting-out system. To e�ect this transition, merchants and factory owners relied on the

theft of British technological knowledge to build the machines they needed. In 1789, for instance, a

textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, contracted twenty-one-year-old British immigrant Samuel

Slater to build a yarn-spinning machine and then a carding machine. Slater had apprenticed in an

English mill and succeeded in mimicking the English machinery. The fruits of American industrial

espionage peaked in 1813 when Francis Cabot Lowell and Paul Moody re-created the powered loom

used in the mills of Manchester, England. Lowell had spent two years in Britain observing and tour-

ing mills in England. He committed the design of the powered loom to memory so that, no matter

how many times British customs o�cials searched his luggage, he could smuggle England’s indus-

trial know-how into New England.

Lowell’s contribution to American industrialism was not only technological, it was organizational.

He helped reorganize and centralize the American manufacturing process. A new approach, the

Waltham-Lowell System, created the textile mill that de�ned antebellum New England and Ameri-

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can industrialism before the Civil War. The modern American textile mill was fully realized in the

planned mill town of Lowell in 1821, four years after Lowell himself died. Powered by the Merri-

mack River in northern Massachusetts and operated by local farm girls, the mills of Lowell central-

ized the process of textile manufacturing under one roof. The modern American factory was born.

Soon ten thousand workers labored in Lowell alone. Sarah Rice, who worked at the nearby Millbury

factory, found it “a noisy place” that was “more con�ned than I like to be.” Working conditions

were harsh for the many desperate “mill girls” who operated the factories relentlessly from sunup to

sundown. One worker complained that “a large class of females are, and have been, destined to a

state of servitude.” Female workers went on strike. They lobbied for better working hours. But the

lure of wages was too much. As another worker noted, “very many Ladies . . . have given up

millinery, dressmaking & school keeping for work in the mill.” With a large supply of eager work-

ers, Lowell’s vision brought a rush of capital and entrepreneurs into New England. The �rst Ameri-

can manufacturing boom was under way.

Winslow Homer, “Bell-Time,” Harper’s Weekly vol. 12 (July 1868): 472. Wikimedia.

The market revolution shook other industries as well. Craftsmen began to understand that new mar-

kets increased the demand for their products. Some shoemakers, for instance, abandoned the tradi-

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tional method of producing custom-built shoes at their home workshops and instead began produc-

ing larger quantities of shoes in ready-made sizes to be shipped to urban centers. Manufacturers

wanting increased production abandoned the old personal approach of relying on a single live-in ap-

prentice for labor and instead hired unskilled wage laborers who did not have to be trained in all as-

pects of making shoes but could simply be assigned a single repeatable aspect of the task. Factories

slowly replaced shops. The old paternalistic apprentice system, which involved long-term obligations

between apprentice and master, gave way to a more impersonal and more �exible labor system in

which unskilled laborers could be hired and �red as the market dictated. A writer in the New York

Observer in 1826 complained, “The master no longer lives among his apprentices [and] watches over

their moral as well as mechanical improvement.” Masters-turned-employers now not only had

fewer obligations to their workers, they had a lesser attachment. They no longer shared the bonds of

their trade but were subsumed under new class-based relationships: employers and employees, bosses

and workers, capitalists and laborers. On the other hand, workers were freed from the long-term, pa-

ternalistic obligations of apprenticeship or the legal subjugation of indentured servitude. They could

theoretically work when and where they wanted. When men or women made an agreement with an

employer to work for wages, they were “left free to apportion among themselves their respective

shares, untrammeled . . . by unwise laws,” as Reverend Alonzo Potter rosily proclaimed in 1840.

But while the new labor system was celebrated throughout the northern United States as “free la-

bor,” it was simultaneously lamented by a growing …