Readings #1- Toward a Market Economy, Changes in American Society, Growth in Manufacturing - Fall 2024 PDF

Readings #1: Toward a Market Economy, Changes in American Society, Growth in Manufacturing To-Do Date: Oct 22 at 11:59pm Toward a Market Economy Several factors played a role in the development of the market economy in the United States. Millions of acres of land belonging t...

Readings #1: Toward a Market Economy, Changes in American Society, Growth in Manufacturing To-Do Date: Oct 22 at 11:59pm Toward a Market Economy Several factors played a role in the development of the market economy in the United States. Millions of acres of land belonging to Native Americans in the Old Northwest and Southeast were taken over by the federal government. Federal land policy, though often benefiting speculators more than individual homesteaders, certainly encouraged settlement. American agriculture experienced an unprecedented boom from the introduction of new staple crops, such as cotton, and productivity advancements in farm equipment. Although the United States remained overwhelmingly rural, the country experienced significant urban growth between 1815 and 1860. :  Notice the pattern of population between 1810 and 1820. Although the total population increased, it also concentrated in urban areas. Removal of Native Americans. The economic growth of the United States was achieved to a great degree at the expense of Native Americans. Despite giving up tens of thousands of acres through treaties, the tribes found the demand for land by settlers and speculators insatiable. Even the willingness of Native Americans to acculturate did not relieve the pressure on their land. The Cherokee—one of the “Five Civilized Tribes” along with the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole—were farmers and even owned slaves. They developed a written language in which books, tribal laws, and a constitution were published, and they were ready to press the case for their sovereignty in court. Even though the Supreme Court found in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that the Cherokee were entitled to federal protection of their lands against state claims, President Andrew Jackson did not enforce the decision. :  Jackson's solution to the land question was to resettle the tribes west of the Mississippi, which Congress authorized through the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Within a few years, the Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw had given up their lands in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi and were moved to the Indian Territory in what is today Oklahoma. The Cherokee held out until 1838. Of the approximately fifteen thousand Cherokee who took the grueling trek from Georgia to the west, a route that became known as the Trail of Tears (https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-trail-of-tears-georgia-public- broadcasting/ugXhj9aKly6-LQ?hl=en) , a quarter died of disease and exposure. Some tribes resisted relocation. The Sauk and Fox were easily defeated by U.S. troops and militia forces in the Black Hawk War (1832), and the Seminoles fought a guerrilla action in Florida for seven years (1835-42). In the end, however, more than 200 million acres of Indian land passed into the control of the United States. Federal land policy. The sale of public lands, which the federal government offered at $2 per acre (for a minimum of 160 acres) with four years to pay, increased quickly after the War of 1812. Land speculators were encouraged by the credit provisions, and they bought up land with the expectation of turning a profit when its value rose. The Panic of 1819 and the economic depression that followed led to legal changes intended to make the direct purchase of land easier for small farmers. The price was cut to $1.25 an acre, and the minimum amount of land that could be purchased was reduced first to eighty acres (1820) and then to forty acres (1832), but payments had to be made in cash, which many settlers :  did not have. Speculators continued to buy up most of the available land and then loan money to small farmers for the purchase price and farm equipment. Aside from the terms of purchase, an important issue was the claims of squatters, who had settled and begun to work the land before it was surveyed and auctioned. The Pre-Emption Act, enacted as a temporary measure in 1830 and made permanent in 1841, allowed squatters to buy up to 160 acres at the minimum price of $1.25 an acre. A boom period for agriculture. The period from 1815 to 1860 proved a golden age for American agriculture. Demand for American farm products was high, both in the United States and Europe, and agricultural prices and production rose dramatically. A key factor was the increasing importance of cotton. Until the 1790s, cotton was a relatively minor crop because the variety that grew best in the more southerly latitudes contained seeds that were difficult to remove from the cotton boll. In 1793, Eli Whitney of Connecticut learned of the seed problem while visiting friends in South Carolina; he devised a simple machine known as the cotton gin to separate the fiber from the seeds. With cotton demand high from the textile industry in Great Britain and soon mills in New England, Whitney's invention led to the expansion of cotton production across Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and into Texas. The Cotton Kingdom, as this vast region was called, produced most of the world's cotton supply and more than fifty percent of American exports by 1860. :  The cotton boom also revitalized slavery. Despite the end of the foreign slave trade in 1808, more than four times the number of slaves lived in the United States on the eve of the Civil War than on the day Thomas Jefferson took office. Cotton was a labor- intensive crop, causing the demand and price for field hands to skyrocket. Planters in Virginia found it very profitable to sell their surplus slaves farther south. Cotton was not the only sector of agriculture to benefit from technological innovations. In 1831, Cyrus McCormick invented the mechanical reaper, which harvested considerably more wheat with less labor. John Deere developed a steel plow (1837) that was far more :  efficient in turning the soil than cast iron and wooden moldboards. The new equipment allowed American farmers to put more land under cultivation and increase production to meet the growing world-wide demand for wheat, corn, and other cereal grains. Changing demographics. During the nineteenth century, the United States became a country on the move. By 1850, almost half of all Americans did not reside in the state where they were born, and the population had made a clear shift to the west. About a third lived west of the Appalachian Mountains, and two million people were already west of the Mississippi River. Rapid urbanization also characterized the pre-Civil War decades. According to the 1850 census, cities (defined as towns with a population of 2500 or more) were home to one in five Americans. Although the nation's largest cities were in the Northeast—New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston—the population of St. Louis had already topped one hundred thousand. The midcentury urban growth was caused by improvements in transportation, industrial opportunities, and renewed immigration. U.S. immigration, which had been sharply curtailed during the Napoleonic wars, began to increase in the 1820s and then rose dramatically—to well over two hundred thousand people a year—in the 1840s and 1850s. Irish Catholics, fleeing the effects of the potato famine that started in 1846, and Germans, seeking either economic opportunity or refuge from the failed liberal revolution of 1848, were the two largest immigrant groups. The Irish were an important part of the labor force that built the canals and railroads, and they tended to remain in the eastern cities. The Germans, on the other hand, moved west and contributed to the growth of St. Louis and Milwaukee. Scandinavians, who had also begun to leave their homelands, established farming communities in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Changes in American Society :  The economic expansion between 1815 and 1860 was reflected in changes in American society. The changes were most evident in the northern states, where the combined effects of the transportation revolution, urbanization, and the rise of manufacturing were keenly felt. In the northern cities, a small, wealthy percentage of the population controlled a large segment of the economy, while the working poor, whose numbers swelled by large-scale immigration, owned little or nothing. Despite the “rags-to-riches” stories that were popular during the period, wealth remained concentrated in the hands of those who already had it. Opportunities for social mobility were limited, even though personal income was rising. Certainly there were craftsmen who entered the middle class by becoming factory managers or even owners, but many skilled workers found themselves as permanent wage earners with little hope for advancement. Women and the family. The legal position of women in the middle of the nineteenth century was essentially the same as it had been in the colonial period. Although New York :  gave married women control over their property in 1848, it was the only state to do so. The beginnings of industrialization did change the role that urban, middle-class women in particular played in society. Because of the rise of manufacturing, goods mat were once made in the home and that provided an important source of additional income (especially clothing, but also a variety of household items) were produced in factories and sold at low prices. Rather than contributing to the sustenance and economic welfare of their family, women were expected to create a clean and nurturing environment in the home, while their husbands became the sole breadwinners and dealt with the outside world. An important element of this doctrine of “separate spheres,” or “ cult of domesticity,” was the role of mothers in preparing their children for adulthood. Indeed, women were having fewer children on which to lavish their attention. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the birth rate in the United States declined steadily, the drop sharper in the urban upper and middle classes. Although considered an economic asset on the farm, children could be a financial burden in the cities, where clothing, food, and other necessities had to be purchased. Middle-class women controlled the size of their families through abstinence or the birth control methods available at the time, including abortion. The status of free blacks. On the eve of the Civil War, there were just under half a million free blacks in the United States, and slightly more than half lived in the southern states, particularly Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. Southern free blacks, or “free persons of color” as they were called, could not vote, hold office, or testify against whites in court. Most were laborers, although some were artisans, farmers, and even slaveowners themselves. Although slavery had been abolished in the northern states by 1820, the status of free blacks there was not much different from that of free blacks in the southern part of the country. More than ninety percent of the northern blacks were denied voting rights; the notable exception was in New England. New York required blacks to own at least $250 worth of real property to vote, and New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut rescinded :  black suffrage in the early nineteenth century. Segregation was the rule, and blacks were denied civil liberties by both law and tradition. Only Massachusetts allowed blacks to sit on juries, and several Midwestern states prohibited blacks from settling within their boundaries, using laws comparable to those banning free blacks from entering the southern states. In the northern cities, competition between blacks and immigrants—mainly the Irish—for low- wage, unskilled jobs created tensions that erupted in violence. A series of race riots occurred in Philadelphia between 1832 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1834_Philadelphia_race_riot) and 1849. Growth of Manufacturing American industry grew phenomenally in the first half of the nineteenth century. A series of tariffs enacted by Congress between 1816 and 1828 protected manufacturing, particularly textile milling, from foreign competition. As manufacturing work sites were gradually relocated from the home and small workshop to the factory, the makeup of the labor force changed. The number of artisans and craftsmen declined, and reliance on semiskilled or unskilled workers, including women, to operate machines increased. Just as in agriculture, advances in technology helped boost manufacturing production and increase efficiency. Indeed, the manufacture of such agricultural inventions as the reaper and steel plow became important sectors of the industrial economy. Technological innovation. Machines for spinning cotton into thread were developed in Great Britain in the eighteenth century, and how they were built and operated were closely guarded secrets. Although the British prohibited the emigration of anyone with a knowledge of their design, Samuel Slater arrived in the United States from England with the plans in his head. In 1790, he established the first American cotton mill in Rhode Island. (Notice in the image on the left how close a worker's (often enslaved) hand came to the rotating mechanism. While the cotton :  gin increased cotton processing, it had the combined effect of increasing slavery and increasing serious injury to the enslaved workers who used the equipment.) “Borrowed” technology aside, Americans made their own inventive contributions to industrial development. Eli Whitney, already famous for the cotton gin, developed machine tools capable of producing parts so precisely that they were interchangeable. Interchangeable parts significantly increased industrial efficiency and cut labor costs. Charles Goodyear developed a process known as vulcanization that made natural rubber stronger (1839). The sewing machine was invented by Elias Howe (1846) and improved on a few years later by Isaac Singer. Perhaps the most significant American invention of the first half of the nineteenth century was Samuel Morse's electric telegraph, which had its first practical application in 1844. Within twenty years, telegraph lines stretched from coast to coast and ushered in a communications revolution. Combined with improvements in printing, the telegraph was a boon to journalism. The number of daily newspapers in the United States soared from eight in 1790 to nearly four hundred in 1860, and many sold for just a penny. The factory system. New England's textile industry led the way in developing new forms of manufacturing. The factory system as it evolved in the Northeast had three characteristics —the breakdown of an item's production into phases, the use of machines in all phases of production, and the division of labor. Division of labor meant that a worker performed the task required by one phase of the production, no longer creating the entire product from start to finish. In 1813, the first factory in which spinning and weaving were performed by power machinery all under one roof was established in Waltham, Massachusetts. In Lowell, which was planned and built as a model factory town in 1822, young women made up the majority of the workforce at the mills. The women lived in dormitories or boarding houses provided by the company and worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. Although the women were paid much less than the men, even when doing comparable work, their wages were enough to give them a measure of independence that their mothers and grandmothers never enjoyed. The young women were not a permanent labor force in the mills, however. Most of them worked for only a few years and were gradually replaced by immigrants, mainly Irish men, in the 1840s and 1850s. Textile manufacturing was the leading American industry before the Civil War and was concentrated in the Northeast because the region's rivers provided both water power and transportation. The cloth produced in New England mills was turned into shirts, pants, and :  other articles of clothing in smaller factories in New York and Philadelphia. Proximity to raw materials influenced industrial development in other parts of the country. For example, Pittsburgh was a center of the iron industry because it was close to both ore and coal fields, while Cincinnati was an early hub for meatpacking in agricultural Ohio. The Lowell Mill Girls developmen t of the factory system produced tensions. Craftsmen were threatened by manufacturi ng's increasing reliance on machines and cheap labor, so they began to form trade unions and political parties in the 1830s to protect their interests. Although initially antagonistic toward unskilled workers, the craftsmen often discovered that they were on common ground over such issues as hours, wages, and working conditions. The first general strike in the United States took place in Philadelphia in 1835, when artisans joined with coal heavers to support the ten-hour workday. A shorter workday was the principal demand of the early trade unions, and most industries accepted it by the 1860s, with the exception of the New England textile mills. :