Chapter Twelve

Industry and the North, 1790s–1840s

Part One:

Introduction

Chapter Focus Questions

What were the preindustrial ways of working and living?

What was the nature of the market revolution?

What effects did industrialization have on workers in early factories?

In what ways did the market revolution change the lives of ordinary people?

How did middle class emerge?

Part Two:

Women Factory Workers Form a Community in Lowell,

Massachusetts

Every small community had artisans such as blacksmiths and wheelwrights, who did such essential work as shoeing horses and mending wagons for local farmers. Artist John Neagle’s heroic image of the blacksmith Pat Lyon, presents him as the very model of honest industry. SOURCE:John Neagle,Pat Lyon at the Forge. Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Lowell, Massachusetts

Lowell textile mills.Women found the work a welcome change.By the 1830s, mill owners cut wages.Paternalistic practices ended. The result was strikes, replacement.

Part Three:

Preindustrial Ways of Working

In the 1840s, Edward Hicks painted his childhood home, rendering an idealized image of rural harmony that owes more to faith in republican agrarianism than to the artist’s accurate memory. The prosperous preindustrial farm depicted was similar to the Springers’ farm described in the text in its mixed yield—sheep, cattle, dairy products, and field crops—and its employment of an African American farm worker, shown plowing.SOURCE:Residence of David Twinning, 1787. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum.

Rural and Urban Home Production

Entire family worked. Barter systemIn New England, farm families engaged in outside workEuropean apprenticeship system in cities.

Rural and Urban Home Production

Artisans, journeymen and possibly master craftsmen. No apprenticeship system existed for women.Work for the urban craftsman:

was a family affairwas organized along patriarchal lineswas specialized in one area

Patriarchy in Family, Work, and Society

The father was head of family and boss.

Legally, the father owned all family property.

Women were seen as managers of the household.

The Social Order

Preindustrial society fixed the place of people in the social order.

Artisans did not challenge traditional authority.

Market revolution undermined the traditional social order.

Part Four

The Transportation Revolution

MAP 12.2 Commercial Links: Rivers, Canals, Roads, 1830 and Rail Lines, 1850 By 1830, the United States was tied together by a network of roads, canals and rivers. This “transportation revolution” fostered a great burst of commercial activity and economic growth. Transportation improvements accelerated the commercialization of agriculture by getting farmers’ products to wider, nonlocal markets. Access to wider markets likewise encouraged new textile and other manufacturers to increase their scale of production. By 1850, another revolutionary mode of transportation, the railroad, had emerged as a vital link to the transportation infrastructure.

The Transportation Revolution

Map: Commercial Links1800 -1840, roads and canals, and steamboat stimulated transportation revolution:

encouraged growth;promoted the mobility of people and goods; and fostered the growing commercial spirit.

By 1850, rivers, canals, roads, and railroads tied nation together.

One of the Erie Canal’s greatest engineering feats occured at Lockport, where the famous “combined” locks—two sets of five locks—rose side by side for 60 feet. One observer boasted, “Here the great Erie Canal has defied nature.” SOURCE:Lockport,New York.Lithograph

This Currier and Ives print of 1849, The Express Train, captures the popular awe at the speed and wonder of the new technology. This “express” probably traveled no more than 30 miles per hour. SOURCE:Currier and Ives,The Express Train ,1849.The Granger Collection,New York.

Roads

National Road in 1808—the single greatest transportation expense

East and West tied together.

Canals and Steamboats

Canals:Water transport was quicker and less expensiveThe Erie Canal stimulated east-west travelThe canal helped farmers in the West became part of a national market.Towns along the canal grew rapidly. A canal boom followed.

Canals and Steamboats

Steamboats:made upstream travel viable;helped to stimulate trade along western rivers; and turned frontier outposts like Cincinnati into commercial centers.

Railroads

The most remarkable innovation was the railroad.

Technical problems included the absence of a standard gauge.

By 1850s consolidation of rail lines facilitated standardization.

This carved and painted figure, designed as a whirligig and trade sign, shows a woman at a spinning wheel. Until cotton textile mills industrialized this work, spinning was one of the most time-consuming tasks that women and young girls did at home. SOURCE:Woman at Spinning Wheel,ca.1850 –70.Carved and painted wood and iron.Photographed by Ken Burris.Shelburne Museum, Shelburne,Vermont.

Effects of the Transportation Revolution

Map: Travel Times

The transportation revolution: provided Americans greater mobility;

allowed farmers to produce for a national market; and

fostered a risk-taking, promoted invention and innovation.

National pride and identity.

Part Five:

The Market Revolution

MAP 12.1 Travel Times, 1800 and 1857 The transportation revolution dramatically reduced travel times, and vastly expanded everyone’s horizons. Improved roads, canals, and the introduction of steamboats and railroads made it easier for Americans to move, and made even those who did not move less isolated. Better transportation linked the developing West to the eastern seaboard and fostered a sense of national identity and pride.

The Accumulation of Capital

The market revolution.Merchants accumulating great wealth. Trade conflicts between 1807–1815 led merchants to invest in local enterprises.Southern cotton produced by slaves bankrolled industrialization. Chart: Growth of Cotton Textile Manufacturing

The Putting-Out System

19th century merchants “put out” raw goods in homes.

In the case of shoe-making artisans:journeymen cut the leather

wives and daughters bound the upper parts together

the men stitched the shoe together

The Putting-Out System: Central Workshop

As demand grew, central workshops grew. Pratt modified the putting-out systemArtisan shops declined.

Cyrus McCormick is shown demonstrating his reaper to skeptical farmers. When they saw that the machine cut four times as much wheat a day as a hand-held scythe, farmers flocked to buy McCormick’s invention. Agricultural practices, little changed for centuries, were revolutionized by machines such as this. SOURCE:The Testing of the First Reaping Machine, lithograph,1831.Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society.

The Spread of Commercial Markets

As more workers became part of the putting-out system:

wages for piecework replaced barteringfamilies bought mass-produced goods rather than making them at home.

Commercialization did not happen immediately.

Commercial Agriculture in the Old Northwest

The transportation revolution helped farmers sell in previously unreachable markets.

Government policy encouraged commercial agriculture by keeping land cheap.

Regional specialization enabled farmers to concentrate on growing a single crop.

Innovations in farm tools greatly increased productivity.

This 1850 engraving by the American Banknote company shows women tending looms at Lowell. The contrast between this industrial activity and the figure of a woman spinning at home illustrates one of the most important effects of industrialization: Now machines, not individuals, determined the pace of production. SOURCE:Print Collection,Miriam and Ira D.Wallach Division of Art,Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library,Astor,Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

British Technology and

American Industrialization

The Industrial Revolution began in the British textile industry.

Samuel Slater’s mill.

Mill followed British custom by hiring women and children.

New England was soon dotted with factories along its rivers.

The Lowell Mills

Francis C. Lowell studied the British spinning machine.Lowell helped invent a power loom.First integrated cotton mill near Boston in 1814. Entire town built to house the new enterprise.

MAP 12.3 Lowell, Massachusetts, 1832 This town plan of Lowell, Massachusetts in 1832, illustrates the comprehensive relationship the owners envisaged between the factories and the workforce. The mills are located on the Merrimack River, while nearby are the boarding houses for the single young female workers, row houses for the male mechanics and their families, and houses for the overseers. Somewhat farther away is the mansion of the company agent.

Lowell, Massachusetts

Map: Lowell Massachusetts

This early nineteenth-century watercolor shows Slater’s mill, the first cotton textile mill in the United States, which depended on the waterpower of Pawtucket Falls for its energy. New England was rich in swiftly flowing streams that could provide power to spinning machines and power looms. SOURCE:Rhode Island Historical Society.

Family Mills

Factories developed elaborate divisions of labor.Hierarchy of value and pay. Mills were run with strict schedules, fines and penalties.Precise timetable was a major change.

Family Mills

Most mills were “family mills,”.Antagonistic relationships with the mill/town

In 1816, Connecticut gunsmith Simeon North did what Eli Whitney had only hoped to do. North produced the first gun with interchangeable parts. North’s invention, taken up and improved by the national armories at Springfield and Harpers Ferry, formed the basis of the American system of manufactures. SOURCE:(top)Photograph by James L.Amos;(bottom)John H.Hall ’s patent for a breech-loading rifle,1811.Both,National Geographic Society.

“The American System of Manufactures”

Interchangeable partsEli Whitney

Simeon North

and John Hall

Standardization spread into other areas.

The availability of these goods affected American thinking about democracy and equality.

Americans could have mass-produced copies, indistinguishable from the originals.

“The American System of Manufactures”

Goods affected American thinking about democracy and equality.

Americans could have mass-produced copies.

Part Six:

From Artisan to Worker

This illustration of seamstresses at work, from Sartain’s Union Magazine, January 1851, shows an early abuse created by the market revolution. Women workers were crowded into just a few occupations, thereby allowing owners to offer very low wages for very long hours of work. The women in this illustration appear to be gathered together in a central workshop, where they had each other for company. Many other women sewed alone at home, often for even lower wages. SOURCE:Illustration from Sartain’s Union Magazine, January 1851.Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

This timetable from the Lowell Mills illustrates the elaborate time schedules that the cotton textile mills expected their employees to meet. For workers, it was difficult to adjust to the regimentation imposed by clock time, in contrast to the approximate times common to preindustrial work. SOURCE:Baker Library,Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University.

Personal Relationships Artisans to workers: lives were transformed. The putting out-system destroyed apprenticeships

artisan production replaced.child labor instituted.

Impersonal wage system. Low skilled workers employed.Textile mills replaced home occupation.

Mechanization and Women’s Work

Chart: Occupations of Women Wage EarnersGarment industry led many women to workWomen might work 15 to 18 hours a day.Women’s work centered on hats, bonnets, boots and shoes.

FIGURE 12.1 Occupations of Women Wage Earners in Massachusetts, 1837 This chart shows how important outwork was for women workers. Textile work in factories occupied less than 20 percent of women, while outwork in palm-leaf hats, straw bonnets, and boots and shoes accounted for over half of the total workforce. Teaching was a new occupation for women in 1837. The small percentage of 3.6 would grow in the future. SOURCE:Based on Thomas Dublin,Transforming Women ’s Work (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press,1991),Table 1.1,p.20.

Time, Work, and Leisure

Workers did not readily adjust to the factory. They were not acclimated to the strict regimen. Rigid separation between work and leisure. Leisure spots and activities emerged.

Taverns.Spectator sports

The Cash Economy

Cash economy led to the decline of barter system.

Worker contact with employers—pay.

Workers searched for jobs..

Laborers saw themselves as “free.

Early Strikes

Owners cited worker individualism.

Most early strikes were unsuccessful.

Women played significant roles in labor protests.

Part Seven:

A New Social Order

Wealth and Class

Market revolution created a social order with class mobility. The upper class stayed about the same.“Middling sorts” grew rapidly. Religion helped shape the new attitudes. The middle class also changed their attitudes by:

emphasizing sobriety and steadinessremoving themselves from the boisterous sociability of the working class.

Wealth and Class

The middle class also changed their attitudes by:emphasizing sobriety and steadinessremoving themselves from the boisterous sociability of the working class.

Religion and Personal Life

The Second Great Awakening.Salvation through personal faith. Charles G. Finney:

urged businessmen to convertaccept self-discipline and individualism

Evangelism became the religion of the new middle class.

The New Middle-Class Family

Middle-class women managed their homes.Attitudes about appropriate male and female roles and qualities hardened. Men were seen as steady, industrious, and responsibleWomen seen as nurturing, gentle, and moral. Radical changes occurring in middle-class families.

Family Limitation

Middle-class couples limited their family size:

birth control.

abstinence.

and abortion.

Family Limitation

Physicians urged that sexual impulses be controlled.

Middle-Class Children

New views of motherhood emerged.Women formed networks and read advice magazines.Children prolonged their education and professional training. Success was very much the result of his family’s efforts.

Sentimentalism

Competitive spirit led Americans to sentimentalism and nostalgia.

Publishers found a lucrative market for novels.

Sentimentalism became more concerned with maintaining social codes.

In a time before ready-made clothing was available, middle class women used Godey’s Ladies Book as a pattern book, taking elaborate fashion illustrations such as this one from 1856, to local seamstresses, or remaking older dresses to fit the current trends.SOURCE:CORBIS © Bettmann//CORBIS

Transcendentalism and Self-Reliance

Intellectual reassurance for middle-class morality--Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Transcendentalist writers emphasized individualism :

Henry David Thoreau.

Margaret Fuller.

Emerson’s romantic glorification of nature included the notion of himself as a “transparent eyeball,” as he wrote in “Nature” in 1836. This caricature of Emerson is from “Illustrations of the New Philosophy” by Christopher Pearce Cranch. SOURCE:Library of Congress.

Part Eight:

Conclusion