Foundations of a New Economic Order PDF

Foundations of a New Economic Order The emerging economic order was based on core principles grounded in republican ideals. Private property, market exchange, and individual opportunity were widely shared values, and throughout the nation, activist state governments pursued neomercantilist policies...

Foundations of a New Economic Order The emerging economic order was based on core principles grounded in republican ideals. Private property, market exchange, and individual opportunity were widely shared values, and throughout the nation, activist state governments pursued neomercantilist policies to help achieve them. New systems of banking and credit, often supported by state charters, increased the money supply and made capital more widely available to American entrepreneurs. State legislatures also issued charters to turnpike and canal companies, whose new roads and waterways reduced the cost of transportation and stimulated economic activity. As a result, beginning around 1800 the average per capita income of Americans increased by more than 1 percent a year—more than 30 percent in a single generation. Credit and Banking America was “a Nation of Merchants,” a British visitor reported from Philadelphia in 1798, “keen in the pursuit of wealth in all the various modes of acquiring it.” Acquire it they did, making spectacular profits as the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon (1793–1815) crippled European firms. Merchants John Jacob Astor and Robert Oliver became the nation’s first millionaires. After working for an Irish-owned linen firm in Baltimore, Oliver struck out on his own, achieving affluence by trading West Indian sugar and coffee. Astor, who migrated from Germany to New York in 1784, began by selling dry-goods and became wealthy carrying furs from the Pacific Northwest to China and investing in New York City real estate (AP ® Thinking Like a Historian). To finance their ventures, Oliver, Astor, and other merchants needed capital, from either their own savings or loans. Before the American Revolution, colonial merchants often relied on credit from British suppliers. In 1781, the Confederation Congress chartered the Bank of North America in Philadelphia, and traders in Boston and New York soon founded similar institutions to raise and loan money. “Our monied capital has so much increased from the Introduction of Banks, & the Circulation of the Funds,” Philadelphia merchant William Bingham boasted in 1791, “that the Necessity of Soliciting Credits from England will no longer exist.” The China Trade Following the Revolution, New England merchants traded actively with the major Asian manufacturing centers of China and India. In this painting by George Chinnery (1774–1852), the American flag flies prominently, alongside other national banners, in front of the warehouse district in Canton (modern Guangzhou). There, merchants exchanged bundles of American furs for cargoes of Chinese tea, silks, and porcelain plates, cups, and serving dishes. That same year, Federalists in Congress chartered the Bank of the United States (Chapter 7). By 1805, the bank had branches in eight seaport cities, profits that averaged a handsome 8 percent annually, and clients with easy access to capital. As trader Jesse Atwater noted, “the foundations of our [merchant] houses are laid in bank paper.” But Jeffersonians attacked the bank as an unconstitutional expansion of federal power “supported by public creditors, speculators, and other insidious men.” When the bank’s charter expired in 1811, the Jeffersonian Republican–? dominated Congress refused to renew it. Merchants, artisans, and farmers quickly persuaded state legislatures to charter banks—in Pennsylvania, no fewer than 41. By 1816, when Congress (now run by National Republicans) chartered a new national bank (the Second Bank of the United States), there were 246 state-chartered banks with tens of thousands of stockholders and $68 million in banknotes in circulation. These state banks were often shady operations that issued notes without adequate specie reserves, made loans to insiders, and lent generously to farmers buying overpriced land. Bad banking policies helped bring on the Panic of 1819 (just as they caused the financial crisis of 2008), but broader forces were equally important. As the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, American imports of English woolen and cotton goods spiked. Then, in 1818, farmers and planters faced an abrupt 30 percent drop in world agricultural prices. As farmers’ income declined, they could not pay debts owed to stores and banks, many of which went bankrupt. “A deep shadow has passed over our land,” lamented one New Yorker, as land prices dropped by 50 percent. The panic gave Americans their first taste of a business cycle, the periodic boom and bust inherent to an unregulated market economy. Transportation and the Market Revolution Economic expansion also depended on improvements in transportation, where governments once again played a crucial role. As with bank charters, legislative charters for turnpikes and canal companies reflected the ideology of mercantilism—government-assisted economic development. Just as Parliament had used the Navigation Acts to spur British prosperity, so American legislatures enacted laws “of great public utility” to increase the “common wealth.” Following Jefferson’s embargo of 1807, which cut off goods and credit from Europe, the New England states awarded charters to two hundred iron-mining, textile-manufacturing, and banking companies, while Pennsylvania granted more than eleven hundred. By 1820, state governments had created a republican political economy: a Commonwealth System that funneled state aid to private businesses whose projects would improve the general welfare. Transportation projects were among the greatest beneficiaries of the Commonwealth System. Between 1793 and 1812, for example, the Massachusetts legislature granted charters to more than one hundred private turnpike corporations. These charters gave the companies special legal status and often included monopoly rights to a transportation route. Pennsylvania issued fifty- five charters, including one to the Lancaster Turnpike Company, which built a 65-mile graded and graveled toll road to Philadelphia. The road quickly boosted the regional economy. A farm woman noted, “The turnpike is finished and we can now go to town at all times and in all weather.” New turnpikes soon connected dozens of inland market centers to seaport cities. Westward migration beyond the seaboard states created a rapidly growing demand for new transportation routes. The vital precondition for westward migration was the dispossession of Native American peoples. In the War of 1812, the United States defeated the confederation of Great Lakes and Ohio Indians led by Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa and claimed their lands, along with 23 million acres ceded by the Creeks after the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Subsequent treaties with the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws in the South and with the Miamis, Ottawas, Sauks, Fox, and other nations in the North brought millions more acres into the public domain. (See Map 7.2, p. 216.) For farmers, artisans, and merchants to capitalize on these new lands, however, they needed access to transportation routes. Farmers in Kentucky, Tennessee, southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois settled near the Ohio River and its many tributaries, so they could easily get goods to market. Similarly, speculators hoping to capitalize on the expansion of commerce bought up property in the cities along the banks of major rivers: Cincinnati, Louisville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis. Farmers and merchants built barges to carry cotton, grain, and meat downstream to New Orleans, which by 1815 was exporting about $5 million in agricultural products yearly. But natural waterways were not enough, by themselves, to connect east and west. To link westward migrants to the seaboard states, Congress approved funds for a National Road constructed of compacted gravel. The project began in 1811 at Cumberland in western Maryland, at the head of navigation of the Potomac River; reached Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), on the Ohio River in 1818; and ended in Vandalia, Illinois, in 1839. As migrants traveled west on the National Road and other interregional highways, they passed livestock herds heading in the opposite direction, destined for eastern markets. Shrinking Space: Canals Even on well-built gravel roads, overland travel was slow and expensive. As U.S. territory expanded and artisans, farmers, and manufacturers produced an ever expanding array of goods, legislators and businessmen created faster and cheaper ways to get those products to consumers. To carry people, crops, and manufactures to and from the great Mississippi River basin, public money and private businesses developed a water-borne transportation system of unprecedented size, complexity, and cost. State governments and private entrepreneurs dredged shallow rivers and constructed canals to bypass waterfalls and rapids. Around 1820, they began constructing a massive system of canals and roads linking states along the Atlantic coast with new states in the trans-Appalachian west. This transportation system set in motion a mass migration of people to the Greater Mississippi River basin. This huge area, drained by six river systems (the Missouri, Arkansas, Red, Ohio, Tennessee, and Mississippi), contains the largest and most productive contiguous acreage of arable land in the world. By 1860, nearly one-third of the nation’s citizens lived in eight of its states—the “Midwest,” consisting of the five states carved out of the Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) along with Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. There they created a rich agricultural economy and an industrializing society. The key event was the New York legislature’s 1817 financing of the Erie Canal, a 364-mile waterway connecting the Hudson River and Lake Erie. Previously, the longest canal in the United States was just 28 miles long—reflecting the huge capital cost of canals and the lack of American engineering expertise. New York’s ambitious project had three things working in its favor: the vigorous support of New York City’s merchants, who wanted access to western markets; the backing of New York’s governor, De Witt Clinton, who proposed to finance the waterway from tax revenues, tolls, and bond sales to foreign investors; and the relatively gentle terrain west of Albany. Even so, the task was enormous. Workers—many of them Irish immigrants—dug out millions of cubic yards of soil, quarried thousands of tons of rock for the huge locks that raised and lowered the boats, and constructed vast reservoirs to ensure a steady supply of water. The first great engineering project in American history, the Erie Canal altered the ecology of an entire region. As farming communities and market towns sprang up along the waterway, settlers cut down millions of trees to provide wood for houses and barns and to open the land for growing crops and grazing animals. Cows and sheep foraged in pastures that had recently been forests occupied by deer and bears, and spring rains caused massive erosion of the denuded landscape. View of the Erie Canal This pastoral view of the Erie Canal near Lockport, New York, painted by artist John William Hill, hints at this waterway’s profound impact on American life. Without the canal, the town in the background would not exist and farmers such as the man in the foreground would not have a regional market for their cattle and grain. The success of the Erie Canal had led to the construction of a vast system of canals by 1860. This infrastructure was as important to the nation as the railroad network of the late nineteenth century and the interstate highway and airport transportation systems of the late twentieth century. Whatever its environmental consequences, the Erie Canal was an instant economic success. The first 75-mile section opened in 1819 and quickly yielded enough revenue to repay its construction cost. When workers finished the canal in 1825, a 40-foot-wide ribbon of water stretched from Buffalo, on the eastern shore of Lake Erie, to Albany, where it joined the Hudson River for the 150-mile trip to New York City. The canal’s water “must be the most fertilizing of all fluids,” suggested novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, “for it causes towns with their masses of brick and stone, their churches and theaters, their business and hubbub, their luxury and refinement, their gay dames and polished citizens, to spring up.” The Erie Canal brought prosperity to the farmers of central and western New York and the entire Great Lakes region. Northeastern manufacturers shipped clothing, boots, and agricultural equipment to farm families; in return, farmers sent grain, cattle, hogs, and raw materials (leather, wool, and hemp, for example) to eastern cities and foreign markets. Two horses pulling a wagon overland could tow 4 tons of freight; now, those same two horses working the towpaths of the Erie Canal could pull 100-ton freight barges at a steady 30 miles a day, cutting transportation costs and accelerating the flow of goods. In 1818, the mills in Rochester, New York, processed 26,000 barrels of flour for export. Ten years later their output soared to 200,000 barrels, and by 1840 it was at 500,000 barrels. The spectacular benefits of the Erie Canal prompted a national canal boom. Civic and business leaders in Philadelphia and Baltimore proposed waterways to link their cities to the Midwest. Copying New York’s fiscal innovations, they persuaded their state legislatures to invest directly in canal companies or to force state-chartered banks to do so, and to offer guarantees that encouraged British and Dutch investors. Soon, artificial waterways connected Philadelphia and Baltimore, via the Pennsylvania Canal and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, to the Great Lakes region. The Michigan and Illinois Canal (finished in 1848), which linked Chicago to the Mississippi River, completed an inland all-water route from New York City to New Orleans, the two most important port cities in North America (Map 8.1). Historians have labeled the economic boom resulting from these new banking and transportation systems the Market Revolution. Americans had greater access to capital, more financial liquidity, and more opportunities to buy and sell products over long distances, than they had ever had before. MAP8.1 The Transportation Revolution: Roads and Canals, 1820–1850By 1850, the United States had an efficient system of water-borne transportation with three distinct parts. Short canals and navigable rivers carried cotton, tobacco, and other products from the countryside of the southern seaboard states into the Atlantic commercial system. A second system, centered on the Erie, Chesapeake and Ohio, and Pennsylvania Mainline canals, linked northeastern seaports to the vast trans-Appalachian region. Finally, a set of regional canals in the Midwest connected most of the Great Lakes region to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and the port of New Orleans. This map shows the Transportation Revolution: Roads and Canals from 1820 to 1850. The map key shows Canals, Roads, and Navigable river transportation routes in the eastern half of the present-day U.S. As the map indicates, by 1850, the United States had an efficient system of water-borne transportation with three distinct parts - (1) Short canals and navigable rivers to carry products from the countryside of the southern seaboard states into the Atlantic, (2) canals centering on the Erie, Ohio and Pennsylvania areas linked to the northeastern seaports to the vast trans-Appalachian region, and (3) regional canals in the Midwest connected to the Great Lakes and port of New Orleans. Shrinking Space: Steamboats The steamboat, another product of the industrial age, added crucial flexibility to the Mississippi basin’s river-based transportation system. In 1807, engineer-inventor Robert Fulton piloted the first American steamboat, the Clermont, up the Hudson River. To navigate shallow western rivers, engineers broadened steamboats’ hulls to reduce their draft and enlarge their cargo capacity. These vessels halved the cost of upstream river transport and dramatically increased the flow of goods, people, and news. In 1830, a traveler or a letter from New York could reach Buffalo or Pittsburgh by water in less than a week and Detroit, Chicago, or St. Louis in two weeks. In 1800, the same journeys had taken twice as long. Slave-owning planters from the Lower South settled in Missouri (admitted to the Union in 1821) and pushed on to Arkansas (admitted in 1836). Simultaneously, yeomen families from the Upper South joined migrants from New England and New York in farming the fertile lands near the Great Lakes. Once Indiana and Illinois were settled, American-born farmers poured into Michigan (1837), Iowa (1846), and Wisconsin (1848)—where they resided among tens of thousands of hardworking immigrants from Germany. To meet the demand for cheap farmsteads, Congress in 1820 reduced the price of federal land from $2.00 an acre to $1.25. For $100, a farmer could buy 80 acres, the minimum required under federal law. By the 1840s, this generous policy had enticed about 5 million people to states and territories west of the Appalachians (Map 8.2). MAP8.2 Western Land Sales, 1830–1839 and 1850–1862The federal government set up local offices to sell land in the national domain to settlers. During the 1830s, the offices sold huge amounts of land in the corn and wheat belt of the Midwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan) and the cotton belt to the south (especially Alabama and Mississippi). As settlers moved westward in the 1850s, most sales were in the upper Mississippi River Valley (particularly Iowa and Wisconsin). Each circle indicates the relative amount of land sold at a local office. This map shows Western Land Sales from 1830 to 1839 and from 1850 to 1862. As the first map shows for 1830 to 1839, federal government offices sold huge amounts of land in the corn and wheat belt of the Midwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan) and the cotton belt to the south (especially Alabama and Mississippi). However, in the second map for 1850 to 1862, the indication is that as settlers moved westward during this period, most sales were in the upper Mississippi River Valley (particularly Iowa and Wisconsin). While state legislatures subsidized canals, the national government created a vast postal system, the first network for the exchange of information. Thanks to the Post Office Act of 1792, there were more than eight thousand post offices by 1830, and the postal service had more employees than all the rest of the government’s civilian employees combined. They safely delivered thousands of letters and banknotes worth millions of dollars, along with newspapers that carried information from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi basin. The U.S. Supreme Court, headed by John Marshall, likewise encouraged interstate trade by firmly establishing federal authority over interstate commerce (Chapter 7). In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), the Court voided a New York law that created a monopoly on steamboat travel into New York City. That decision prevented local or state monopolies—or tariffs—from impeding the flow of goods, people, and news across the nation. Shrinking Space: The Telegraph An efficient postal service was a great boon to merchants and manufacturers doing business across long distances. But for decades, inventors who were familiar with the properties of electricity dreamed of a much faster form of communication: electrical telegraphy. Across Europe, scientists experimented with various methods of using electrical impulses to send messages, but they struggled to devise a practical way to represent the alphabet. In 1837, a Massachusetts painter-turned-inventor, Samuel F. B. Morse, devised a telegraph capable of sending signals through miles of wire. Of equal importance, Morse and his collaborator, machinist and inventor Alfred Vail, invented a code for transmitting letters and numbers along a single wire by means of a contact key. A telegraph line was strung between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore in 1844; a year later, the Magnetic Telegraph Company was founded to create the first network of telegraph lines. By 1848, telegraph wires connected New York and Chicago. Western Union was formed in 1856 to consolidate the operations of smaller companies, and in 1861 it completed a transcontinental telegraph line connecting New York with San Francisco. All these innovations—roads and turnpikes, canals and steamboats, the postal service and the telegraph—helped to shrink the vast spaces of North America. They enabled farmers and merchants to sell goods in distant markets, helped entrepreneurs to coordinate business activity, aided immigrants as they relocated, and created a network of information that shaped politics and culture on a national scale. Together, they constituted the foundation of a new social order. The Cotton Complex: Northern Industry and Southern Agriculture In 1800, the economy of the United States remained overwhelmingly agricultural and manufacturing was still in its infancy. Nevertheless, in the first half of the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution came to the United States. At its center was the cotton complex: the relationship between northern industry and southern agriculture that drove a major economic transformation. In the Northeast, merchants and manufacturers invested in new textile mills that relied on the labor of young women drawn from nearby farms. These northeastern mills, and many more like them in Great Britain, created vast demand for cotton, which transformed the southern economy as well. As northern merchants and manufacturers reorganized work routines and increased output, goods that were once luxury items became part of everyday life. Southern planters poured capital into land and slaves, revolutionizing agricultural production and sentencing additional generations of African American slaves to the miseries of plantation life. The American Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution had its roots in Great Britain, where textile manufacturing had undergone major changes in the last half of the eighteenth century. Clothmaking was an ancient enterprise common to Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, but until this time it was driven by small-scale production. For millennia, spinning and weaving—whether wool, cotton, linen, or silk—were crafts that were plied in the home, using technology that had been very slow to change. Strands of fiber were spun into thread and yarn by hand or using foot-driven spinning wheels, while yarn was woven into cloth on foot-powered looms. A series of technical innovations in Britain in the eighteenth century made clothmaking increasingly efficient. The flying shuttle, invented in 1733, made it possible to weave cloth much more rapidly than yarn could be spun. Then, beginning in the 1760s, a series of devices for spinning fibers into yarn were invented: first a spinning jenny, then a water frame, and then a mule. Because the water frame and the mule were machines that relied on water or steam power, spinning moved out of households and into factories built alongside rivers that could drive the apparatus. Water-powered spinning mills could now produce abundant yarn, and cloth production soared. In India, it took 50,000 hours of labor to spin 100 pounds of raw cotton. In Britain in 1790, workers using a spinning mule could do the same work in 1,000 hours; by 1825, it took only 135 hours. This was a revolution in productivity. To protect its textile industry from American competition, Great Britain prohibited the export of textile machinery and the emigration of the skilled craftsmen who could replicate the mills. But the promise of higher wages brought thousands of these skilled mechanics to the United States illegally. Samuel Slater, the most important émigré mechanic, came to America in 1789 after working for Richard Arkwright, who had invented the most advanced British machinery for spinning cotton. A year later, Slater reproduced Arkwright’s innovations in merchant Moses Brown’s cotton mill in Providence, Rhode Island—the first in North America. The fast-flowing rivers that cascaded down from the Appalachian foothills to the coastal plain provided a cheap source of energy. From Massachusetts to Delaware, these waterways were soon lined with industrial villages and textile mills as large as 150 feet long, 40 feet wide, and four stories high (Map 8.3). The Industrial Revolution had arrived on American shores. MAP8.3 New England’s Dominance in Cotton Spinning, 1840Although the South grew the nation’s cotton, it did not process it. Prior to the Civil War, entrepreneurs in Massachusetts and Rhode Island built most of the factories that spun and wove raw cotton into cloth. Their factories made use of the abundant water power available in New England and the region’s surplus labor force. Initially, factory managers hired young farmwomen to work the machines; later, they relied on immigrants from Ireland and the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec. This map shows New England’s Dominance in Cotton Spinning around 1840. The map key shows the Number of Spindles in Operation in 1840 and has five category groupings: Under 5,000, 5,000–25,000, 25,000–100,000, 100,000–250,000, and 250,000–500,000. The largest numbers are found in the area of the original 13 colonies, with the largest concentration around Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. American and British Advantages British textile manufacturers nevertheless easily undersold their American competitors, for two reasons. First, they enjoyed the benefit of efficient shipping networks, which brought raw cotton to Britain at bargain prices, and low interest rates, which enabled mill owners to borrow money cheaply to support and expand their operations. Second, Britain had cheap labor: it had a larger population—about 12.6 million in 1810 compared to 7.3 million Americans—and thousands of landless laborers prepared to accept low-paying factory jobs, while in the United States labor was scarce and well paid. To offset these advantages, American entrepreneurs relied on help from the federal government: in 1816, 1824, and 1828, Congress passed tariff bills that placed high taxes on imported cotton and woolen cloth. However, in the 1830s, Congress reduced tariffs because southern planters, western farmers, and urban consumers demanded inexpensive imports. Better Machines, Cheaper Workers American producers used two other strategies to compete with their British rivals. First, they improved on British technology. In 1811, Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston merchant, toured British textile mills, secretly making detailed drawings of their power machinery. Paul Moody, an experienced American mechanic, then copied the machines and improved their design. In 1814, Lowell joined with merchants Nathan Appleton and Patrick Tracy Jackson to form the Boston Manufacturing Company. Having raised the staggering sum of $400,000, they built a textile plant in Waltham, Massachusetts—the first American factory to perform all clothmaking operations under one roof. Thanks to Moody’s improvements, Waltham’s power looms operated at higher speeds than British looms and needed fewer workers. The second strategy was to tap a cheaper source of labor. In the 1820s, the Boston Manufacturing Company recruited thousands of young women from farm families, providing them with rooms in boardinghouses and with evening lectures and other cultural activities. To reassure parents about their daughters’ moral welfare, the mill owners enforced strict curfews, prohibited alcoholic beverages, and required regular church attendance. At Lowell (1822), Chicopee (1823), and other sites in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the company built new factories that used this labor system, known as the Waltham-Lowell System. By the early 1830s, more than 40,000 New England women were working in textile mills. As an observer noted, the wages were “more than could be obtained by the hitherto ordinary occupation of housework,” the living conditions were better than those in crowded farmhouses, and the women had greater independence. Lucy Larcom became a Lowell textile operative at age eleven to avoid being “a trouble or burden or expense” to her widowed mother. Other women operatives used wages to pay off their father’s farm mortgages, send brothers to school, or accumulate a marriage dowry for themselves (AP America in the World). ® Some operatives just had a good time. Susan Brown, who worked as a Lowell weaver for eight months, spent half her earnings on food and lodging and the rest on plays, concerts, lectures, and a two-day excursion to Boston. Like most textile workers, Brown soon tired of the rigors of factory work and the never-ceasing clatter of the machinery, which ran twelve hours a day, six days a week. After she quit, she lived at home for a time and then moved to another mill. Whatever the hardships, waged work gave young women a sense of freedom. “Don’t I feel independent!” a woman mill worker wrote to her sister. “The thought that I am living on no one is a happy one indeed to me.” The owners of the Boston Manufacturing Company were even happier. By combining tariff protection with improved technology and cheap female labor, they could undersell their British rivals. Their textiles were also cheaper than those made in New York and Pennsylvania, where farmworkers were paid more than in New England and textile wages consequently were higher. Manufacturers in those states garnered profits by using advanced technology to produce higher-quality cloth. Even Thomas Jefferson, the great champion of yeoman farming, was impressed. “Our manufacturers are now very nearly on a footing with those of England,” he boasted in 1825. Origins of the Cotton South As its industrial capacity grew in the eighteenth century, Great Britain began to import cotton in larger quantities. But the world supply was relatively small because cotton production was immensely labor-intensive. A revolution in cotton cloth production would require a revolution in cotton agriculture, based on new forms of cheap labor. The black belt of the American Southeast—an arc of fertile soil stretching from western South Carolina through central Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—provided a landscape that was ideal for cotton cultivation, and the slave plantation complex offered a system of labor discipline that could bring cotton to world markets on an entirely new scale. The Decline of Slavery, 1776–1800 The possibility that cotton production would lead to a boom in African slavery would have come as a surprise to the generation that lived through the American Revolution, because in that era slavery was in a steep decline. Whites and blacks alike perceived a contradiction between the colonies’ pursuit of liberty and the institution of slavery. “I wish most sincerely there was not a Slave in the province,” Abigail Adams confessed to her husband, John. “It always appeared a most iniquitous Scheme to me—to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we do.” The North Ends Slavery — Slowly Beginning in the 1750s, Quaker evangelist John Woolman urged Friends to free their slaves, and many did so. In 1780, antislavery activists in Pennsylvania passed the first gradual emancipation law in the United States. Though it freed no one, the law set an important precedent. In subsequent years, legislators in Connecticut (1784), Rhode Island (1784), New York (1799), and New Jersey (1804) adopted gradual emancipation statutes as well (Map 8.4). These laws recognized white property rights by requiring slaves to buy their freedom by years— even decades—of additional labor. For example, the New York Emancipation Act of 1799 allowed slavery to continue until 1828 and freed slave children only at the age of twenty-five. Consequently, as late as 1810, almost 30,000 blacks in the northern states—nearly one-fourth of the African Americans living there—were still enslaved. MAP8.4 The Status of Slavery, 1800In 1775, racial slavery was legal in all of the British colonies in North America. By the time the confederated states achieved their independence in 1783, the New England region was mostly free of slavery. By 1800, all of the states north of Maryland had provided for the gradual abolition of slavery except New Jersey, whose legislature finally acted in 1804, but the process of gradual emancipation dragged on until the 1830s. Some slave owners in the Chesapeake region manumitted a number of their slaves, leaving only the whites of the Lower South firmly committed to racial bondage. This map shows the Status of Slavery in 1800. A general explanation callout box notes: "This simple map illustrates a complex process: the abolition of slavery in the United States up to 1800. The political boundaries are those of the states and territories in 1800." A callout box points to the map key and notes: " The three colors show areas where slavery was legally abolished (Free), where it continued to exist (Slave), and where it was in the process of being eliminated (Gradual abolition)." Gradual abolition is shown in New York and Pennsylvania; Free is shown in Indiana Territory (as of 1787), Ohio Territory (as of 1787), New Hampshire (1783), Massachusetts (1780), Rhode Island (1780), Connecticut (1780); Slave is shown in future Mississippi Territory, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey. A callout box points to Indiana and notes: “Some areas marked “free” on the map, the Indiana Territory, for example, actually had slaves dating from the French colonial days.” Another callout points to the Slave states and notes: “In 1800, the free black population of the United States numbered about 100,000, roughly 10 percent of those of African ancestry. Half of these free blacks lived in states in which slavery remained legal until the end of the Civil War.” Freed blacks faced severe prejudice from whites who feared job competition and racial melding. When Massachusetts judges abolished slavery through case law in 1784, the legislature reenacted an old statute that prohibited whites from marrying blacks, mulattos, or Indians. For African Americans in the North, freedom meant second-class citizenship; nevertheless, the institution of slavery was being ushered slowly out of existence. Manumission in the Chesapeake The coming of war encouraged many southern slaves to expect that the Revolution would bring their freedom. A black preacher in Georgia told his fellow slaves that King George III “was about to alter the World, and set the Negroes free.” Similar rumors, prompted in part by Royal Governor Lord Dunmore’s proclamation of 1775 and the Philipsburg Proclamation of 1779 (see Chapters 5 and 6), led thousands of African Americans to flee behind British lines. Two neighbors of Virginia Patriot Richard Henry Lee lost “every slave they had in the world,” as did many other planters. In 1781, when the British army evacuated Charleston, more than 6,000 former slaves went with them; another 4,000 left from Savannah. All told, about 30,000 blacks fled their owners. Yet thousands of African Americans supported the Patriot cause as well. In Maryland, some slaves took up arms for the rebels in return for the promise of freedom. Enslaved Virginians struck informal bargains with their Patriot owners, trading loyalty in wartime for the hope of liberty. Following the Virginia legislature’s passage of a manumission act in 1782, allowing owners to free their slaves, 10,000 slaves won their freedom. The southern states faced the most glaring contradiction between liberty and property rights because enslaved blacks represented a huge financial investment. But in the Chesapeake, slavery was in decline for three reasons. First, the tobacco economy was chronically depressed, and many tobacco planters were shifting to wheat and livestock production, a less labor-intensive form of farming that gave them an oversupply of slaves. Second, many leading planters were committed to the principle of human liberty and saw, in the institution of slavery, the same contradiction that their northern counterparts did. Third, evangelical Christianity encouraged some planters to regard their slaves as spiritual equals. In 1784, a conference of Virginia Methodists declared that slavery was “contrary to the Golden Law of God on which hang all the Law and the Prophets.” Under these influences, many Chesapeake slave owners manumitted their slaves or allowed them to buy their freedom by working as artisans or laborers. In 1785 a Powhatan planter named Joseph Mayo manumitted all of his slaves, 150 to 170 in number; in the 1790s, Robert “Councillor” Carter manumitted more than 500 slaves and provided them with land. John Randolph of Roanoke manumitted hundreds of slaves in his will, and also left money to buy them land. Widespread manumission gradually brought freedom to one-third of the African Americans in Maryland. Slavery Resurgent But slavery still had powerful advocates. In Virginia, slave owners pushed back against the wave of manumissions. Fearing the possibility of total emancipation, hundreds of slave owners petitioned the Virginia legislature to repeal the manumission act and thereby protect “the most valuable and indispensible Article of our Property, our Slaves.” In 1792, legislators forbade further manumissions. Following the lead of Thomas Jefferson, who owned more than a hundred slaves, political leaders now argued that slavery was a “necessary evil” required to maintain white supremacy and the luxurious planter lifestyle. In North Carolina, legislators condemned private Quaker manumissions as “highly criminal and reprehensible.” Farther south, in the rice-growing states of South Carolina and Georgia, slavery was even more deeply entrenched. Yet rice plantations were confined to the seaboard; at the time of the Revolution, there was no cash crop that could support plantation agriculture farther inland. Cotton was about to change that. In 1786, responding to rising prices resulting from Great Britain’s mechanized processing, Georgia planters on the Sea Islands harvested their first crop of long-staple cotton. Its silky fibers produced a high grade of cotton, but—like rice and indigo— Sea Island cotton would not grow in the uplands. Hardier varieties of short-staple cotton could thrive in rich inland soils, but their bolls, with tightly packed fibers, required machine processing. American inventors immediately put their minds to the problem. In 1793, Massachusetts native Eli Whitney devised a machine, called a cotton engine (or cotton “gin” for short), that could quickly separate the seeds of a short-staple cotton boll from their delicate fibers, an innovation that increased the speed of cotton processing fiftyfold. The cotton rush was on. The Cotton Boom and Slavery In the early nineteenth century, slave plantations pushed into the interior of North America in two directions at once: westward, from the coastal states of South Carolina and Georgia; and northward from New Orleans up the Mississippi (Map 8.5). In the lower Mississippi Valley, sugar was a viable crop; thus, a combination of sugar and cotton drove the development of formerly French Louisiana (admitted as a state in 1812) and Mississippi (admitted in 1817). After crossing the Appalachians, westward-moving cotton planters settled in southern Tennessee (admitted 1796) and Alabama (1819), then pushed into Missouri (1821), Arkansas (1836), and Texas (1845). These migratory streams converged in the rich alluvial soils of the black belt, which stretched from western South Carolina all the way to east Texas. Between 1800 and 1848, the new cotton-growing lands of the American Southeast became some of the most valuable real estate in the world. MAP8.5 Distribution of the Slave Population in 1790 and 1830 The cotton boom shifted the African American population to the South and West. In 1790, most slaves lived and worked on Chesapeake tobacco and Carolina rice and indigo plantations. By 1830, those areas were still heavily populated by black families, but hundreds of thousands of slaves also labored on the cotton and sugar lands of the lower Mississippi Valley and on cotton plantations in Georgia, northern Florida, and Alabama. In the decades to come, the cotton frontier would push across Mississippi and Louisiana and into Texas. This map shows a side-by-side presentation of two maps: Distribution of the Slave Population in 1790 and Distribution of the Slave Population in 1830. The map key shows the categories of: areas without slaves, under 10% slaves, 10 to 30% slaves, 30 to 50% slaves, and 50% or over slaves. As the first map for 1790 shows, most slaves lived and worked on Chesapeake tobacco and Carolina rice and indigo plantations. A much wider distribution is shown for 1830; although the 1790 areas are still heavily populated by black families, hundreds of thousands of slaves also labored on the cotton and sugar lands of the lower Mississippi Valley and on cotton plantations in Georgia, northern Florida, and Alabama. The cotton boom immediately tripled the value of good southern farmland. As Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws ceded land, the federal government made it available to southern planters as quickly as possible. Capital investments from overseas helped to speed the process, as wealthy British investors like banker and cotton merchant Thomas Baring loaned money to bring the lands under cultivation. Cotton was wildly profitable; in 1807, a Mississippi cotton plantation returned 22.5 percent a year on its investment. As cotton cultivation expanded, it became the cornerstone of the nation’s economy: between 1815 and 1860, it accounted for more than half of all U.S. exports. By 1840, the South produced and exported 1.5 million bales of raw cotton a year, over two-thirds of the world’s supply. The cotton-producing capacity of the South dwarfed the industrial capacity of the Northeast. In the first half of the nineteenth century, more than 85 percent of the U.S. cotton crop was sold in Liverpool to be processed in Great Britain, while only a small fraction could be absorbed by American mills. “Cotton is King,” boasted the Southern Cultivator. To plant this vast new inland frontier, white planters first imported enslaved laborers from Africa. Between 1776 and 1808, when Congress outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, planters purchased about 115,000 Africans. “The Planter will… Sacrifice every thing to attain Negroes,” declared one slave trader. But demand far exceeded the supply. Planters also imported new African workers illegally, through the Spanish colony of Florida until 1819 and then through the Mexican province of Texas. Yet these Africans—about 50,000 between 1810 and 1865—did not satisfy the demand either. The Upper South Exports Slaves Planters seeking labor also looked to the Chesapeake region, where the African American population was growing by natural increase at an average of 27 percent a decade, creating a surplus of enslaved workers on many plantations. The result was a growing domestic trade in slaves. Between 1818 and 1829, planters in just one Maryland tobacco-growing county— Frederick—sold at least 952 slaves to traders or cotton planters. Plantation owners in Virginia sold 75,000 slaves during the 1810s and again during the 1820s. That number jumped to nearly 120,000 during the 1830s and then averaged 85,000 during the 1840s and 1850s. By 1860, the “mania for buying negroes” from the Upper South had resulted in a massive transplantation of more than 1 million slaves (Figure 8.1). A majority of African Americans now lived and worked in the Deep South, the lands that stretched from Georgia to Texas. FIGURE8.1 Forced Slave Migration to the Lower South, 1790–1860The cotton boom set in motion a vast redistribution of the African American population. Between 1790 and 1860, white planters moved or sold more than a million enslaved people from the Upper to the Lower South, a process that broke up families and long-established black communities. This figure shows a bar graph of the Forced Slave Migration to the Lower South from 1790– 1860. Between 1790 and 1860, white planters moved or sold more than a million enslaved people from the Upper to the Lower South, a process that broke up families and long-established black communities. The dates are on the x-axis in increments of 10 years and the number of people in millions is on the y-axis in increments of 250,000. The bars show two things: Slaves displaced each decade and Cumulative shift southward. The total for 1790 to 1860 was 1,000,500. Of this total, the number of slaves displaced in the 1790s was 20,500; 37,000 in the 1800s, 120,000 in the 1810s, 145,000 in the 1820s, 267,500 in the 1830s, 179,000 in the 1840s, and 231,500 in the 1850s. This African American migration took two forms: transfer and sale. Looking for new opportunities, thousands of Chesapeake and Carolina planters sold their existing plantations and moved their slaves to the Southwest. Many other planters gave slaves to sons and daughters who moved west. Such transfers accounted for about 40 percent of the African American migrants. The rest—about 60 percent of the 1 million migrants—were sold south through traders. One set of trading routes ran to the Atlantic coast and sent thousands of slaves to rapidly developing sugar plantations in Louisiana. As sugar output soared, slave traders scoured the countryside near the port cities of Baltimore, Alexandria, Richmond, and Charleston—searching, as one of them put it, for “likely young men such as I think would suit the New Orleans market.” Because this coastal trade in laborers was highly visible, it elicited widespread condemnation by northern abolitionists. Sugar was a “killer” crop, and Louisiana (like the eighteenth-century West Indies) soon had a well-deserved reputation among African Americans “as a place of slaughter.” Maryland farmer John Anthony Munnikhuysen refused to allow his daughter Priscilla to marry a Louisiana sugar planter, declaring: “Mit has never been used to see negroes flayed alive and it would kill her.” The inland system that fed slaves to the Cotton South was less visible than the coastal trade but more extensive. Professional slave traders went from one rural village to another buying “young and likely Negroes.” The traders marched their purchases in coffles—columns of slaves bound to one another—to Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri in the 1830s and to Arkansas and Texas in the 1850s. The Inland Slave Trade Mounted whites escort a convoy of slaves from Virginia to Tennessee in Lewis Miller’s Slave Trader, Sold to Tennessee (1853). For white planters, the interstate trade in slaves was lucrative; it pumped money into the declining Chesapeake economy and provided young workers for the expanding plantations of the cotton belt. For blacks, it was a traumatic journey, a new Middle Passage that broke up their families and communities. “Arise! Arise! and weep no more, dry up your tears, we shall part no more,” the slaves sing sorrowfully as they journey to new lives in Tennessee. Chesapeake and Carolina planters provided the human cargo. Some planters sold slaves when they ran into debt. “Trouble gathers thicker and thicker around me,” Thomas B. Chaplin of South Carolina lamented in his diary. “I will be compelled to send about ten prime Negroes to Town on next Monday, to be sold.” Many more planters doubled as slave traders, earning substantial profits by traveling south to sell some of their slaves and those of their neighbors. Colonel E. S. Irvine, a member of the South Carolina legislature and “a highly respected gentleman” in white circles, traveled frequently “to sell a drove of Negroes.” Prices marched in step with those for cotton; during a boom year in the 1850s, a planter noted that a slave “will fetch $1000, cash, quick.” The domestic slave trade was crucial to the prosperity of the fast-developing Cotton South. Equally important, it sustained the wealth of slave owners in the East. By selling surplus black workers, planters in the Chesapeake and Carolinas added about 20 percent to their income. As a Maryland newspaper remarked in 1858, “[The trade serves as] an almost universal resource to raise money. A prime able-bodied slave is worth three times as much to the cotton or sugar planter as to the Maryland agriculturalist.” The Impact on Blacks For African American families, the domestic slave trade was a personal disaster that underlined their status—and vulnerability—as chattel slaves. In law, they were the movable personal property of the whites who owned them. As Lewis Clark, a fugitive from slavery, noted: “Many a time i’ve had ’em say to me, ‘You’re my property.’” “The being of slavery, its soul and its body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle,” declared former slave James W. C. Pennington. As a South Carolina master put it, “[The slave’s earnings] belong to me because I bought him.” Slave property underpinned the entire southern economic system. Whig politician Henry Clay noted that the “immense amount of capital which is invested in slave property… is owned by widows and orphans, by the aged and infirm, as well as the sound and vigorous. It is the subject of mortgages, deeds of trust, and family settlements.” As a slave owner, Clay also knew that property rights were key to slave discipline. “I govern them… without the whip,” another master explained, “by stating… that I should sell them if they do not conduct themselves as I wish.” The threat was effective. “The Negroes here dread nothing on earth so much as this,” a Maryland observer noted. “They regard the south with perfect horror, and to be sent there is considered as the worst punishment.” Thousands of slaves suffered that fate, which destroyed about one in every four slave marriages. “Why does the slave ever love?” asked black abolitionist Harriet Jacobs in her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, when her partner “may at any moment be wrenched away by the hand of violence?” After being sold, one Georgia slave lamented, “My Dear wife for you and my Children my pen cannot Express the griffe I feel to be parted from you all.” The interstate slave trade often focused on young adults. In northern Maryland, planters sold away boys and girls at an average age of seventeen years. “Dey sole my sister Kate,” Anna Harris remembered decades later, “and I ain’t seed or heard of her since.” The trade also separated almost a third of all slave children under the age of fourteen from one or both of their parents. Sarah Grant remembered, “Mamma used to cry when she had to go back to work because she was always scared some of us kids would be sold while she was away.” Despite these sales, 75 percent of slave marriages remained unbroken, and the majority of children lived with one or both parents until puberty. Consequently, the sense of family among African Americans remained strong. Sold from Virginia to Texas in 1843, Hawkins Wilson carried with him a mental picture of his family. Twenty-five years later and now a freedman, Wilson set out to find his “dearest relatives” in Virginia. “My sister belonged to Peter Coleman in Caroline County and her name was Jane.… She had three children, Robert, Charles and Julia, when I left—Sister Martha belonged to Dr. Jefferson.… Sister Matilda belonged to Mrs. Botts.” During the decades between sale and freedom, Hawkins Wilson and thousands of other African Americans constructed new lives for themselves in the Mississippi Valley. Undoubtedly, many did so with a sense of foreboding, knowing from personal experience that their owners could disrupt their lives at any moment. Like Charles Ball, some “longed to die, and escape from the bonds of my tormentors.” The darkness of slavery shadowed even moments of joy. Knowing that sales often ended slave marriages, a white minister blessed one couple “for so long as God keeps them together.” The Inherent Brutality of Slavery Like all systems of forced labor, American racial slavery relied ultimately on physical coercion. Slave owners and overseers routinely whipped slaves who worked slowly or defied their orders. On occasion, they applied the whip with such ferocity that the slave was permanently injured or killed. This photograph of a Mississippi slave named Gordon, taken after he fled to the Union army in Louisiana in 1863 and published in Harper’s Weekly, stands as graphic testimony to the inherent brutality of the system. The Ideology and Reality of “Benevolence” The planter aristocracy flourished around the periphery of the South’s booming Cotton Belt—in Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana—and took the lead in defending slavery. Within a generation after the Revolution, southern apologists rejected the view that slavery was, at best, a “necessary evil.” In 1837, South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun argued that the institution was a “positive good” because it subsidized an elegant lifestyle for a white elite and provided tutelage for genetically inferior Africans. “As a race, the African is inferior to the white man,” declared Alexander Stephens, the future vice president of the Confederacy. “Subordination to the white man is his normal condition.” Apologists depicted planters and their wives as aristocratic models of “disinterested benevolence,” who provided food and housing for their workers and cared for them in old age. One wealthy Georgian declared, “Plantation government should be eminently patriarchal.… The pater-familias, or head of the family, should, in one sense, be the father of the whole concern, negroes and all.” Those planters who embraced Christian stewardship tried to shape the religious lives of their chattel. They built churches on their plantations, welcomed evangelical preachers, and required their slaves to attend services. A few encouraged African Americans with spiritual “gifts” to serve as exhorters and deacons. Most of these planters acted from sincere Christian belief, but they also hoped to counter abolitionist criticism and to use religious teachings to control their workers. The Chattel Principle This public notice for a New Orleans raffle in which the prizes are a horse and buggy and a female slave named Sarah dramatically illustrates the “chattel principle” governing the institution of slavery, which made slaves the property of their owners. Joseph Jennings, the store owner conducting the raffle, has valued Sarah at nine hundred dollars. Indeed, slavery’s defenders increasingly used religious justifications for human bondage. Protestant ministers in the South pointed out that the Hebrews, God’s chosen people, had owned slaves and that Jesus Christ had never condemned slavery. As James Henry Hammond told a British abolitionist in 1845: “What God ordains and Christ sanctifies should surely command the respect and toleration of man.” In making their case, slavery’s advocates rarely acknowledged its day-to-day brutality and exploitation. “I was at the plantation last Saturday and the crop was in fine order,” a son wrote to his absentee father, “but the negroes are most brutally scarred & several have run off.” Despite the violence inherent in the chattel principle, many white planters considered themselves benevolent masters, committed to the welfare of “my family, black and white.” Historians have labeled this idea paternalism. Some masters gave substance to the paternalist ideal by treating kindly “loyal and worthy” slaves—black overseers, the mammy who raised their children, and trusted house servants. By preserving the families of these slaves, many planters could believe that they “sold south” only “coarse” troublemakers who had “little sense of family.” Other owners were more honest about the human cost of their pursuit of wealth. “Tomorrow the negroes are to get off [to Kentucky],” a slave-owning woman in Virginia wrote to a friend, “and I expect there will be great crying and moaning, with children Leaving there mothers, mothers there children, and women there husbands.” Whether or not they acknowledged the slaves’ pain, few southern whites questioned the morality of the slave trade. Responding to abolitionists’ criticism, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina, declared that “the removal of slaves from place to place, and their transfer from master to master, by gift, purchase, or otherwise” was completely consistent “with moral principle and with the highest order of civilization” (AP Analyzing Voices).® Technological Innovation and Labor The technical advances that spurred the rise of cotton mills in the North were part of a larger pattern of economic innovation and change. Americans became inventive, seeking countless ways to improve and simplify production. Machines were at the center of many of these improvements, and American mechanics led the world in creating devices that worked faster and better than before. But workers did not always benefit. Skilled laborers formed unions to strengthen their bargaining position with employers. Lower-skilled workers in factory jobs, who often performed repetitive labor under close supervision, tried to organize as well, but they often faced legal obstacles. In the first half of the nineteenth century, many Americans struggled to understand their place in an increasingly complex social order. Urban growth was one sign of change, as wageworkers swelled the size of older cities and prompted the creation of many new ones. The Spread of Innovation By the 1820s, American-born artisans had replaced British immigrants at the cutting edge of technological innovation. In the Philadelphia region, the remarkable Sellars family produced the most important inventors. Samuel Sellars Jr. invented a machine for twisting worsted woolen yarn to give it an especially smooth surface. His son John improved the efficiency of the waterwheels powering the family’s sawmills and built a machine to weave wire sieves. John’s sons and grandsons ran machine shops that turned out riveted leather fire hoses, papermaking equipment, and eventually locomotives. In 1824, the Sellars and other mechanics founded the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Named after Benjamin Franklin, whom the mechanics admired for his work ethic and scientific accomplishments, the institute published a journal; provided high-school-level instruction in chemistry, mathematics, and mechanical design; and organized exhibits of new products. Craftsmen in Ohio and other states established similar institutes to disseminate technical knowledge and encourage innovation. Between 1820 and 1860, the number of patents issued by the U.S. Patent Office rose from two hundred to four thousand a year. American craftsmen pioneered the development of machine tools—machines that made parts for other machines. Eli Whitney was a key innovator. At the age of fourteen, Whitney began fashioning nails and knife blades; later, he made women’s hatpins. Aspiring to wealth and status, Whitney won admission to Yale College and subsequently worked as a tutor on a Georgia cotton plantation. He capitalized on his expertise in making hatpins to design his cotton gin. Although Whitney patented the machine, other manufacturers improved on his design and captured the market. Still seeking his fortune, Whitney decided in 1798 to manufacture military weapons. He eventually designed and built machine tools that could rapidly produce interchangeable musket parts, bringing him the wealth and fame he had long craved. After Whitney’s death in 1825, his partner John H. Hall built an array of metalworking machine tools, such as turret lathes, milling machines, and precision grinders. McCormick’s Reaper The economic revolution was the result, in part, of increased output created by power-driven machinery used in factories. However, machines also dramatically increased farm productivity. The mechanical reaper invented by Cyrus McCormick, first patented in 1834, revolutionized the harvesting process. Using McCormick’s reaper and a horse, a farmer and his son could cut as much grain in a day as seven men with scythes. They could now plant more acres and not worry about the wheat sprouting (and becoming worthless) before it could be harvested. Threshing machines similarly allowed farmers to use animal power to process the grain. Eventually, a single horse-drawn machine— the combine harvester, or combine—could execute both operations. Technological innovation now swept through American manufacturing. Mechanics in the textile industry invented lathes, planers, and boring machines that turned out standardized parts for new spinning jennies and weaving looms. Despite being mass-produced, these jennies and looms were precisely made and operated at higher speeds than British equipment. Richard Garsed nearly doubled the speed of the power looms in his father’s Delaware factory and patented a cam-and-harness device that allowed damask and other elaborately designed fabrics to be machine-woven. Meanwhile, the mechanics employed by Samuel W. Collins built a machine for pressing and hammering hot metal into dies (cutting forms). Using this machine, a worker could make three hundred ax heads a day—compared to twelve using traditional methods. In Richmond, Virginia, Welsh- and American-born mechanics at the Tredegar Iron Works produced low-cost parts for complicated manufacturing equipment. As a group of British observers noted admiringly, many American products were made “with machinery applied to almost every process… all reduced to an almost perfect system of manufacture.” As mass production spread, the American Industrial Revolution came of age. Reasonably priced products such as Remington rifles, Singer sewing machines, and Yale locks became household names in the United States and abroad. After winning praise at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851—the first major international display of industrial goods—Remington, Singer, and other American firms became multinational businesses, building factories in Great Britain and selling goods throughout Europe. By 1877, the Singer Manufacturing Company controlled 75 percent of the world market for sewing machines. Wageworkers and the Labor Movement As the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum, it changed the nature of workers’ lives. Following the American Revolution, many craft workers espoused artisan republicanism, an ideology of production based on liberty and equality. They saw themselves as small-scale producers, equal to one another and free to work for themselves. The poet Walt Whitman summed up their outlook: “Men must be masters, under themselves.” Free Workers Form Unions However, as the outwork and factory systems spread, more and more workers became wage earners who labored under the control of an employer. Unlike young women, who embraced factory work because it freed them from parental control and domestic service, men bridled at their status as supervised wageworkers. To assert their independence, male wageworkers rejected the traditional terms of master and servant and used the Dutch word boss to refer to their employer. Likewise, lowly apprentices refused to allow masters to control their private (nonwork) lives and joined their mates in building a robust plebeian culture. Still, as hired hands, they received meager wages and had little job security. The artisan-republican ideal of “self- ownership” confronted the harsh reality of waged work in an industrializing capitalist society. Labor had become a commodity, to be bought and sold. Some wage earners worked in carpentry, stonecutting, masonry, and cabinetmaking— traditional crafts that required specialized skills. Their strong sense of identity, or trade consciousness, enabled these workers to form unions and bargain with their master- artisan employers. They resented low wages and long hours, which restricted their family life and educational opportunities. In Boston, six hundred carpenters went on strike in 1825. That protest failed, but in 1840, craft workers in St. Louis secured a ten-hour day, and President Van Buren issued an executive order setting a similar workday for federal workers. Woodworker, c. 1850 Skilled makers took great pride in their furniture, which was often intricately designed and beautifully executed. To underline the dignity of his occupation, this woodworker poses in formal dress and proudly displays the tools of his craft. A belief in the value of their labor was an important ingredient of the artisan-republican ideology held by many workers. Artisans in other occupations were less successful in preserving their pay and working conditions. As aggressive entrepreneurs and machine technology took command, shoemakers, hatters, printers, furniture makers, and weavers faced low-paid factory work. In response, some artisans in these trades moved to small towns, while in New York City, 800 highly skilled cabinetmakers made fashionable furniture. In status and income, these cabinetmakers outranked a group of 3,200 semitrained, wage-earning workers who made cheaper tables and chairs in factories. Thus the new industrial system split the traditional artisan class into self-employed craftsmen and wage-earning workers. When wage earners banded together to form unions, they faced a legal hurdle: English and American common law branded such groups as illegal “combinations.” As a Philadelphia judge put it, unions interfered with a “master’s” authority over his “servant.” Other lawsuits accused unions of “conspiring” to raise wages and thereby injure employers. “It is important to the best interests of society that the price of labor be left to regulate itself,” the New York Supreme Court declared in 1835, while excluding employers from this rule. Clothing manufacturers in New York City collectively agreed to set wage rates and to dismiss members of the Society of Journeymen Tailors. Labor Ideology Despite such obstacles, during the 1830s journeymen shoemakers founded mutual benefit societies in Lynn, Massachusetts, and other shoemaking centers. As the workers explained, “The capitalist has no other interest in us, than to get as much labor out of us as possible.” To exert more pressure on their employers, in 1834 local unions from Boston to Philadelphia formed the National Trades Union, the first regional union of different trades. Workers found considerable popular support for their cause. When a New York City court upheld a conspiracy verdict against their union, tailors warned that the “Freemen of the North are now on a level with the slaves of the South,” and organized a mass meeting of 27,000 people to denounce the decision. In 1836, local juries hearing conspiracy cases acquitted shoemakers in Hudson, New York; carpet makers in Thompsonville, Connecticut; and plasterers in Philadelphia. Then, in Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld the right of workers to form unions and call strikes to enforce closed-shop agreements that limited employment to union members. But many judges continued to resist unions by forbidding strikes. Union leaders expanded artisan republicanism to include wageworkers. Arguing that wage earners were becoming “slaves to a monied aristocracy,” they condemned the new factory system in which “capital and labor stand opposed.” To create a just society in which workers could “live as comfortably as others,” they advanced a labor theory of value. Under this theory, the price of goods should reflect the labor required to make them, and the income from their sale should go primarily to the producers, not to factory owners, middlemen, or storekeepers. “The poor who perform the work, ought to receive at least half of that sum which is charged” to the consumer, declared minister Ezra Stiles Ely. Union activists agreed, organizing nearly fifty strikes for higher wages in 1836. Appealing to the spirit of the American Revolution, which had destroyed the aristocracy of birth, they called for a new revolution to demolish the aristocracy of capital. Women textile operatives were equally active. Competition in the woolen and cotton textile industries was fierce because mechanization caused output to grow faster than consumer demand. As textile prices fell, manufacturers’ revenues declined. To maintain profits, employers reduced workers’ wages and imposed tougher work rules. In 1828 and again in 1834, women mill workers in Dover, New Hampshire, went on strike and won some relief. In Lowell, two thousand women operatives backed a strike by withdrawing their savings from an employer- owned bank. “One of the leaders mounted a pump,” the Boston Transcript reported, “and made a flaming… speech on the rights of women and the iniquities of the ‘monied aristocracy.’” Increasingly, young New England women refused to enter the mills, and impoverished Irish (and later French Canadian) immigrants took their places (AP Interpreting the Past). ® The Growth of Cities and Towns The expansion of industry and trade dramatically increased America’s urban population. In 1820, there were 58 towns with more than 2,500 inhabitants; by 1840, there were 126 such towns, located mostly in the Northeast and Midwest. During those two decades, the total number of city dwellers grew more than fourfold, from 443,000 to 1,844,000 (Map 8.6). MAP8.6 The Nation’s Major Cities, 1840By 1840, the United States boasted three major conglomerations of cities. The long-settled ports on the Atlantic—from Boston to Baltimore—served as centers for import merchants, banks, insurance companies, and manufacturers of ready-made clothing, and their financial reach extended far into the interior—nationwide in the case of New York City. A second group of cities stretched along the Great Lakes and included the commercial hubs of Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago, as well as the manufacturing center of Cleveland. A third urban system extended along the Ohio River, comprising the industrial cities of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and the wholesale centers of Louisville and St. Louis. This map shows the Nation’s Major Cities as of 1840. Three major conglomerations of cities existed at that point. They were: (1) Long-settled ports on the Atlantic from Boston to Baltimore (centers for import merchants, banks, insurance companies, and manufacturers of ready-made clothing), (2) cities along the Great Lakes, including commercial hubs of Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago and the manufacturing city of Cleveland, and (3) cities along the urban subsystem of the Ohio River, including industrial cities of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and wholesale centers of Louisville and St. Louis. Cities on this map are identified according to the specialized roles of Major diversified city, Shipping center, Wholesale center, Regional center, Industrial center, and Whaling ports. There is also identification of Urban subsystems and their financial reach extended far into the interior—nationwide in the case of New York City. The fastest growth occurred in the new industrial towns that sprouted along the “fall line,” where rivers descended rapidly from the Appalachian Mountains to the coastal plain. In 1822, the Boston Manufacturing Company built a complex of mills in a sleepy Merrimack River village that quickly became the bustling textile factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts. The towns of Hartford, Connecticut; Trenton, New Jersey; and Wilmington, Delaware, also became urban centers as mill owners exploited the water power of their rivers and recruited workers from the countryside. Western commercial cities such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and New Orleans grew almost as fast. They began as transit centers, where workers transferred goods from farmers’ rafts and wagons to flatboats or steamboats. As the midwestern population grew during the 1830s and 1840s, St. Louis, Detroit, and especially Buffalo and Chicago also emerged as dynamic centers of commerce. “There can be no two places in the world,” journalist Margaret Fuller wrote from Chicago in 1843, “more completely thoroughfares than this place and Buffalo.… The life-blood [of commerce] rushes from east to west, and back again from west to east.” Chicago’s merchants and bankers developed the marketing, provisioning, and financial services essential to farmers and small-town shopkeepers in its vast hinterland. “There can be no better [market] any where in the Union,” declared a farmer in Paw Paw, Illinois. View of Cincinnati, by John Caspar Wild, c. 1835 Thanks to its location on the Ohio River (a tributary of the Mississippi), Cincinnati quickly became one of the major processing centers for grain and hogs in the trans-Appalachian west. By the 1820s, passenger steamboats and freight barges connected the city with Pittsburgh to the north and the ocean port of New Orleans far to the south. These midwestern hubs quickly became manufacturing centers. Capitalizing on the cities’ links to rivers and canals, entrepreneurs built warehouses, flour mills, packing plants, and machine shops, creating work for hundreds of artisans and factory laborers. In 1846, Cyrus McCormick moved his reaper factory from western Virginia to Chicago to be closer to his midwestern customers. The old Atlantic seaports—Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and especially New York City—remained important for their foreign commerce and, increasingly, as centers of finance and small-scale manufacturing. New York City and nearby Brooklyn grew at a phenomenal rate: between 1820 and 1860, their combined populations increased nearly tenfold to 1 million people, thanks to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of German and Irish immigrants. Drawing on these workers, New York became a center of the ready-made clothing industry, which relied on thousands of low-paid seamstresses. “The wholesale clothing establishments are… absorbing the business of the country,” a “Country Tailor” complained to the New York Tribune, “casting many an honest and hardworking man out of employment [and helping]… the large cities to swallow up the small towns.” New York City had the best harbor in the United States and, thanks to the Erie Canal, was the best gateway to the Midwest and the best outlet for western grain. Recognizing the city’s advantages, in 1818 four English Quaker merchants founded the Black Ball Line to carry cargo, people, and mail between New York and London, Liverpool, and Le Havre, establishing the first regularly scheduled transatlantic shipping service. By 1840, its port handled almost two-thirds of foreign imports into the United States, almost half of all foreign trade, and much of the immigrant traffic. New York likewise monopolized trade with the newly independent South American nations of Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela, and its merchants took over the trade in cotton by offering finance, insurance, and shipping to southern planters and merchants. New Social Classes and Cultures The economic changes of the early nineteenth century improved the lives of many Americans, who now lived in larger houses, cooked on iron stoves, and wore better-made clothes, but they also created a more stratified society. In 1800, white Americans thought of their society in terms of rank: “notable” families had higher status than those from the “lower orders.” Yet in rural areas, people of different ranks often shared a common culture. Gentlemen farmers talked easily with yeomen about crop yields, while their wives conversed about the art of quilting. In the South, humble tenants and aristocratic slave owners enjoyed the same amusements: gambling, cockfighting, and horse racing. Rich and poor attended the same Quaker meetinghouse or Presbyterian church. “Almost everyone eats, drinks, and dresses in the same way,” a European visitor to Hartford, Connecticut, reported in 1798, “and one can see the most obvious inequality only in the dwellings.” The rise of the cotton complex heightened economic inequality. In the South, the cotton boom sharpened distinctions between poorer and wealthier whites and concentrated slaves on larger plantations. In the booming cities, the new economic order spawned distinct social classes: a small but wealthy business elite, a substantial middle class, and a mass of propertyless wage earners. By creating a class-divided society, industrialization posed a momentous challenge to America’s republican ideals. Planters, Yeomen, and Slaves By the time of the American Revolution, tobacco and rice planting in the South had already created a three-tiered slave society. Large planters who owned dozens, or even hundreds, of slaves dominated the life of the Chesapeake and the Carolina lowcountry, while poorer whites with less land and fewer slaves deferred to their wealthy neighbors’ leadership. African American slaves possessed little or nothing of their own and lived at the mercy of their owners. After 1800, South Carolina rice planters remained at the apex of the seaboard plantation aristocracy. In 1860, the fifteen proprietors of the vast plantations in All Saints Parish in South Carolina owned 4,383 slaves—nearly 300 apiece—who annually grew and processed 14 million pounds of rice. As inexpensive Asian rice entered the world market in the 1820s, the Carolina rice planters sold some slaves and worked the others harder to maintain their lifestyle. A Slave Family Picking Cotton Picking cotton—thousands of small bolls attached to 3-foot-high woody and often prickly stalks—was a tedious and time-consuming task, taking up to four months on many plantations. However, workers of both sexes and all ages could pick cotton, and masters could measure output by weighing the baskets of each picker or family, chastising those who failed to meet their quotas. What does this early photograph of a family of pickers, taken on a plantation near Savannah, Georgia, suggest about women’s and children’s lives, family relations, and living conditions? In tobacco-growing regions, the planter aristocracy followed a different path. Slave ownership had always been more widely diffused: in the 1770s, about 60 percent of white families in the Chesapeake owned at least one slave. As wealthy tobacco planters moved their estates and slaves to the Cotton South, middling whites (who owned between five and twenty slaves) came to dominate the Chesapeake economy. The descendants of the old tobacco aristocracy remained influential, but increasingly as slave-owning grain farmers, lawyers, merchants, industrialists, and politicians. They hired out surplus slaves, sold them south, or allowed them to purchase their freedom. In the Cotton South, ambitious planters worked their slaves ferociously as they sought to establish themselves. A Mississippi planter put it plainly: “Everything has to give way to large crops of cotton.” It was a demanding crop. Frederick Law Olmsted, the future architect of New York’s Central Park, noted during his travels that slaves in the Cotton South worked “much harder and more unremittingly” than those in the tobacco regions. To increase output, profit- seeking cotton planters began during the 1820s to use a rigorous gang-labor system. Previously, many planters had supervised workers only sporadically, or had assigned them tasks to complete at their own pace. Now masters with twenty or more slaves organized disciplined teams, or “gangs,” supervised by black drivers and white overseers. They worked the gangs at a steady pace, clearing and plowing land or hoeing and picking cotton. The gang-labor system enhanced profits by increasing productivity. Because slaves in gangs finished tasks in thirty-five minutes that took a white yeoman planter an hour to complete, gang labor became ever more prevalent. As the price of raw cotton surged after 1846, the wealth of the planter class skyrocketed. And no wonder: nearly 2 million enslaved African Americans now labored on the plantations of the Cotton South and annually produced 4 million bales of the valuable fiber. On the eve of the Civil War, southern slave owners accounted for nearly two-thirds of all American men with wealth of $100,000 or more. Other white southerners—backcountry yeoman farmers and cotton-planting tenants in particular—occupied some of the lowest rungs of the nation’s social order. The expansion of southern slavery, like the flowering of northern capitalism, increased inequalities of wealth and status. The Northern Business Elite In the North, the Industrial Revolution altered the older agrarian social order. The urban economy made a few city residents—the merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and landlords who made up the business elite—very rich. In 1800, the richest 10 percent of the nation’s families owned about 40 percent of the wealth; by 1860, they held nearly 70 percent. In New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and New Orleans, the superrich—the top 1 percent—owned more than 40 percent of the land, buildings, and other tangible property and an even higher share of intangible property, such as stocks and bonds. Government tax policies facilitated the accumulation of wealth. There were no federal taxes on individual and corporate income. Rather, the U.S. Treasury raised most of its revenue from tariffs: regressive taxes on textiles and other imported goods purchased mostly by ordinary citizens. State and local governments also favored the wealthy. They taxed real estate (farms, city lots, and buildings) and tangible personal property (furniture, tools, and machinery), but almost never taxed stocks and bonds or the inheritances the rich passed on to their children. Hartford Family Completely at home in their elegant drawing room, this elite family in Hartford, Connecticut, enjoys the fruits of the father’s business success. As the father lounges in his silk robe, his eldest son (and presumptive heir) adopts an air of studied nonchalance, and his daughter fingers a piano, signaling her musical accomplishments and the family’s gentility. A diminutive African American servant (her size suggesting her status) serves fruit to the lavishly attired woman of the house. The sumptuously appointed drawing room reflects the owners’ prosperity and their aesthetic and cultural interests. As cities expanded in size and wealth, affluent families set themselves apart. They dressed in well-tailored clothes, rode in fancy carriages, and bought expensively furnished houses tended by butlers, cooks, and other servants. The women no longer socialized with those of lesser wealth, and the men no longer labored side by side with their employees. Instead, they became managers and directors and relied on trusted subordinates to supervise their employees. Merchants, manufacturers, and bankers placed a premium on privacy and lived in separate neighborhoods, often in exclusive central areas or at the city’s edge. The geographic isolation of privileged families and the massive flow of immigrants into separate districts divided cities spatially along lines of class, race, and ethnicity. The Middle Class Standing between wealthy owners and propertyless wage earners was a growing middle class— the social product of increased commerce. The “middling class,” a Boston printer explained, was made up of “the farmers, the mechanics, the manufacturers, the traders, who carry on professionally the ordinary operations of buying, selling, and exchanging merchandize.” Professionals with other skills—building contractors, lawyers, surveyors, and so on—were suddenly in great demand and well compensated, as were middling business owners and white- collar clerks. In the Northeast, men with these qualifications numbered about 30 percent of the population in the 1840s. But they also could be found in small towns of the agrarian Midwest and South. In 1854, the cotton boomtown of Oglethorpe, Georgia (population 2,500), boasted eighty “business houses” and eight hotels. Architecture for the Emergent Middle Class This dwelling was well suited for a “farmer of wealth” or a middle-class suburbanite, according to Andrew Downing, author of The Architecture of Country Houses (1850). The exterior of the house exhibited “a considerable degree of elegance,” while the interior boasted a substantial drawing room and dining room, for the entertainment of guests, and a parlor for more intimate conversations among family and friends. Downing’s books helped to define the culture of the growing middle class and diffuse it across the nation. The emergence of the middle class reflected a dramatic rise in prosperity. Between 1830 and 1857, the per capita income of Americans increased by about 2.5 percent a year, a remarkable rate that has never since been matched. This surge in income, along with an abundance of inexpensive mass-produced goods, fostered a distinct middle-class urban culture. Middle-class husbands earned enough to save about 15 percent of their income, which they used to buy well- built houses in a “respectable part of town.” Middle-class wives became purveyors of genteel culture, buying books, pianos, lithographs, and comfortable furniture for their front parlors. Upper-middle-class families hired Irish or African American domestic servants, while less prosperous folk enjoyed the comforts provided by new industrial goods. For their homes they acquired furnaces (to warm the entire house and heat water for bathing), cooking stoves with ovens, and Singer’s treadle-operated sewing machines. Some urban families now kept their perishable food in iceboxes, which ice-company wagons periodically refilled. If material comfort was one distinguishing mark of the middle class, moral and mental discipline was another. Middle-class writers denounced raucous carnivals and festivals as a “chaos of sin and folly, of misery and fun” and, by the 1830s, had largely suppressed them. Ambitious parents were equally concerned with their children’s moral and intellectual development, providing a high school education (in an era when most white children received only five years of schooling) and stressing the importance of discipline and hard work. American Protestants had long believed that diligent work in an earthly “calling” was a duty owed to God. Now the business elite and the middle class gave this idea a secular twist by celebrating work as the key to individual social mobility and national prosperity. Young, middle-class men saved their money, adopted temperate habits, and aimed to rise in the world. There was an “almost universal ambition to get forward,” observed Hezekiah Niles, editor of Niles’ Weekly Register. Warner Myers, a Philadelphia housepainter, rose from poverty by saving his wages, borrowing from his family and friends, and becoming a builder, eventually constructing and selling sixty houses. Countless children’s books, magazine stories, self-help manuals, and novels recounted the tales of similar individuals. The self-made man became a central theme of American popular culture. Just as the yeoman ethic had served as a unifying ideal in pre-1800 agrarian America, so the gospel of personal achievement linked the middle and business classes of the new industrializing society. Urban Workers and the Poor As thoughtful business leaders surveyed their society, they concluded that the yeoman farmer and artisan-republican ideal—a social order of independent producers—was no longer possible. “Entire independence ought not to be wished for,” Ithamar A. Beard, the paymaster of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company (in Lowell, Massachusetts), told a mechanics’ association in 1827. “In large manufacturing towns, many more must fill subordinate stations and must be under the immediate direction and control of a master or superintendent, than in the farming towns.” Beard had a point. In 1840, all of the nation’s slaves, some 2.5 million people, and about half of its adult white workers, another 3 million (of a total population of 17 million), were laboring for others. The bottom 10 percent of white wage earners consisted of casual workers hired on a short-term basis for arduous jobs. Poor women washed clothes; their husbands and sons carried lumber and bricks for construction projects, loaded ships, and dug out dirt and stones to build canals. Even when they could find jobs, they could never save enough “to pay rent, buy fire wood and eatables” when the job market or the harbor froze up. During business depressions, casual laborers suffered and died; in good times, their jobs were temporary and dangerous. Other laborers had greater security of employment, but few were prospering. In Massachusetts in 1825, an unskilled worker earned about two-thirds as much as a mechanic did; two decades later, it was less than half as much. A journeyman carpenter in Philadelphia reported that he was about “even with the World” after several years of work but that many of his coworkers were in debt. Only the most fortunate working-class families could afford to educate their children, buy apprenticeships for their sons, or accumulate small dowries for their daughters. Most families sent ten-year-old children out to work, and the death of a parent often threw the survivors into dire poverty. As a charity worker noted, “What can a bereaved widow do, with 5 or 6 little children, destitute of every means of support but what her own hands can furnish (which in a general way does not amount to more than 25 cents a day)?” Impoverished workers congregated in dilapidated housing in bad neighborhoods. Single men and women lived in crowded boardinghouses, while families jammed themselves into tiny apartments in the basements and attics of small houses. As immigrants poured in after 1840, urban populations soared, and developers squeezed more and more dwellings and foul-smelling outhouses onto a single lot. By 1848, America’s largest cities were deeply divided between the genteel dwellings of the middle and upper classes and the impoverished neighborhoods of the working poor.