Setionalism 1815-1850

Agenda of Powerpoint• Based on Newman Chapter 9• Suggested reading Pageant 305-315)• Focus: How economic developments

reinforces sectionalism 1815-1850– Key Industrial Innovations and Inventions– Improvements in Transportation Network – How that

Growing Pains

– 10 fold population growth between 1790 and 1860

– Growing population reflected in relentless pursuit westward

– Nine frontier states joined the 13 original between 1791 and 1819

– This would cause a struggle to keep the balance between North and South (How and why?)

The Compromise of 1820

• 1819: 11 free and 11 slave states• Missouri was asking Congress for statehood:– a slave territory– Tallmadge amendment—

• No more slaves could be brought to Missouri:• Provided for the gradual emancipation of children born to

slave parents already there• A roar of anger burst from slaveholding Southerners:

– Southern saw the Tallmadge amendment as a threat to sectional balance.

– The future of the slave system caused profound concern.

XII. The Uneasy Missouri Compromise

• Deadlock in Washington was broken by three compromises:– Henry Clay played a leading role:• First, Congress decided to admit Missouri as a slave

state and at the same time admit Maine as free state• The balance between the North and South remained

for fifteen years• All future bondage was prohibited north of the line of

36 30’—the southern boundary of Missouri (see Map 12.3).

The West

• Redefining what is West because of population growth; becomes the Oregon, California and Texas territories

• Frontiersmen facing same issue faced in the old Northwest

• Slave or free????• The drive for Manifest Destiny

The South

• Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin • Success of Cotton an economic double edge

sword• Reinvigorates need for slaves and

justifications for the “peculiar institution”• Creates greater social stratification in South• Soil depletion creates greater westward push

Cotton Becomes “King” in the South

– Tobacco had begun to exhaust fields – Removing seeds by hand time prohibited – Cotton gin revolutionize production– Insatiable demand for cotton comes from

Britain’s established textile industry and NE emerging textile industry

– This revives the needs for slaves– Cotton Kingdom pushed westward

The Industrialization of the North

• Samuel Slater introduces factory system• Original in textiles then all other • Geographical centered in the North because

• Presence of rivers to run mills• seaports made easy the import of raw materials and

the export of the finish product• Draw of new immigrants and displaced farmers

Table 14-1 p279

p284

The Irish• Ireland was prostrated in the mid-1840s:• 2 million perished as a result of the potato

famine10,000s fled the Land of Famine• Dirt poor immigrants settle in industrial North• Boston and particularly New York became the

largest Irish city in the world• The Irish did not receive red-carpet treatment

The Irish• Ireland was prostrated in the mid-1840s:• 2 million perished as a result of the potato

famine10,000s fled the Land of Famine• Dirt poor immigrants settle in industrial North• Boston and particularly New York became the

largest Irish city in the world• The Irish did not receive red-carpet treatment

V. The Germans

• Germans:• Came seeking political freedom• foes of slavery and public corruption• They possessed a modest amount of materials goods• Most pushed to the lush lands of the Middle West,

notably Wisconsin for farming• They formed an influential body of voters whom

American politicians wooed• They were less potent politically since they were

more widely scattered

VI. Flare-ups of Antiforeignism

• The invasion of the immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s inflamed the prejudices of American “nativists”

• They feared they would outbreed, outvote, and overwhelm the old “native” stock• They took jobs from “native” Americans• They were Roman Catholics

– The Church of Rome was regarded as out of line by many old-line Americans as a “foreign” church.

VI. Flare-ups of Antiforeignism(cont.)

• Roman Catholics were on the move:• To avoid Protestant indoctrination in public schools,

they began in the 1840s to construct an entirely separate Catholic educational system:• Very expensive undertaking, but revealed the

strength of their commitment• With the Irish and German influx, the Catholics

became a powerful religious group• In 1840 they ranked fifth behind the Baptists,

Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists

VI. Flare-ups of Antiforeignism(cont.)

• Know-Nothing Party—organized by American “nativists” for political action:– Agitated for rigid restriction on immigration and

naturalization– Agitated for laws authorizing the deportation of

alien paupers – Promoted a lurid literature of exposure, much of

pure fiction– Example: Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures

VI. Flare-ups of Antiforeignism(cont.)

• There was even occasional mass violence against Catholics:– Burning their churches and schools– Some killed and wounded in days of fighting

• Immigrants were undeniably making America a more pluralistic society:– One of the most ethnically and racially diverse– Thus the wonder that cultural clashes occurred

VI. Flare-ups of Antiforeignism(cont.)

• The American economy:– Attracted immigrants and ensured them of the

share of American wealth without jeopardizing the wealth of others

– They helped fuel economic expansion– Immigrants and the American economy needed

each other– Together they help bring the Industrial

Revolution

p288

Tomorrow’s question: Is this Tomorrow’s question: Is this what a factory really looked what a factory really looked like?????like?????

X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”

• The factory system created an increasingly acute labor problem:– Manufacturing had been done in the home:• Master craftsman and his apprentice worked

together• The Industrial Revolution submerged this personal

association into impersonal ownership of stuffy factories in “spindle cities”• Around these the slumlike hovels of the “wage

slaves” tended to cluster

X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”(cont.)

• Workers’ conditions:– Working people wasted away at their benches– Hours were long, wages were low, meals skimpy

and hastily gulped– Workers forced to toil in unsanitary buildings,

poorly ventilated, lighted, and heated– They were forbidden to form unions to raise

wagesThus there were only 24 recorded strikes before 1835

X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”(cont.)

• Exploitation of child labor:– In 1820 a significant number of the nation’s

industrial toilers were children under ten– Victims of factory labor, many children were

mentally blighted, emotionally starved, physically stunted, and brutally whipped in special “whipping rooms”

– Samuel Slater’s mill of 1791: the first machine tenders were 7 boys and 2 girls, all under 12.

X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”(cont.)

• Lot of adult wage workers in 1820s-1830s:– Many states granted the laboring man the vote– He first strove to lightened his burden through

workingmen’s parties– Many workers gave their loyalty to the

Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson:– In addition to goals of ten-hour day, higher wages, and

tolerable working conditions, they demanded public education for their children and an end to inhuman practice of imprisonment for debt

X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”(cont.)

• Employers:– Fought the ten-hour day• Argued reduced hours would lessen production• Increase costs, and demoralize the workers• Laborers would have so much leisure time that the

Devil would lead them to mischief

– In 1840 President Van Buren established the ten-hour day for federal employees on public works.• In ensuing years many states began reducing the

hours of working people.

X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”(cont.)

• Day laborers tried to improve their lot:– Their strongest weapon was to lay down their

tools– Dozens of strikes erupted in the 1830s and

1840s:• For higher wages, ten-hour days and goals such as

the right to smoke on the job• Workers usually lost most strikes than they won• Employers imported strike-breakers• Labor raised its voice against these immigrants

X. Workers and “Wage Slaves”(cont.)

• Labor’s effort to organize:– Netted some 300,000 trade unionists by 1830– Suffered as a result of the severe depression,

1837– Toilers won a promising legal victory in 1842• Commonwealth v. Hunt—Mass. Supreme Court—

labor unions were not illegal conspiracies, provided that their methods were “honorable and peaceful.”– This case did not legalize the strike overnight– Trade unions had a long road to go

p288

XI. Women and the Economy

• Women became part of the clanging mechanism of factory production:– New factories undermined the work of women

in their homes– Some factories offered work to those displayed– Factory jobs promised greater economic

independence for women– And the means to buy the manufactured

products of the new market economy

XI. Women and the Economy(cont.)

• “Factory girls”– Toiled six days a week, twelve to thirteen hours

“from dark to dark”– Textile mill at Lowell, Mass. as a showplace:

– Workers were virtually all New England farm girls– Carefully supervised on and off the job by watchful matrons– Escorted regularly to church from their company

boardinghouses– Forbidden to form unions – Few opportunities to share their grueling working condition

XI. Women and the Economy(cont.)

• Factory jobs wee unusual for women:– Opportunities to be economically self-supporting

were scarce– Consisted mainly of nursing, domestic services,

and teaching– Catherine Beecher urged women to enter the

teaching profession—became “feminized”– Other “opportunities” beckoned in household

services

XI. Women and the Economy(cont.)

• Statistics:– One white family in ten employed poor white,

immigrant, or black women– 10 % white women worked outside their homes– 20% of all women had been employed at some

time before marriage– The vast majority of working women were single– Upon marriage they left their job to become

wives and mothers, without wages.

XI. Women and the Economy(cont.)

• Cult of domesticity:– A widespread cultural creed that glorified the

customary functions of the homemaker– From their pedestal:• Married women commanded immense moral power

– They increasingly made decisions that altered the character of the family itself

– Women’s changing roles:• The Industrial Revolution changed life in the home of

nineteenth-century: traditional “women’s sphere.”

XI. Women and the Economy(cont.)

• Love, not parental “arrangement” determined the choice of a spouse—yet parents retained the power of veto• Families became more closely knit and affectionate,

providing the emotional refuge against the threatening impersonality of big-city industrialism• Families grew smaller• The “fertility rate” dropped for women between 14

and 45• Birth control was still a taboo topic

IX. Women and the Economy(cont.)

• Women played a large part in having fewer children• This newly assertive role has been called “domestic

feminism”• Smaller families meant child-centered families• What Europeans saw in the American families as

permissiveness was in reality the consequence of an emerging new idea of child-rearing:– The child’s will was not simply broken, but rather shaped

• Good citizens were raised not to be meekly obedient to authority, but to be independent individuals, making their own decisions on internalized morals

IX. Women and the Economy(cont.)

• The outlines of the “modern” family:– It was small, affectionate and child-centered– It provided a special area for the talents of

women– It was a big step upward from the conditions of

grinding toil—often alongside men in the fields.

p294

p295

Click image to learn more about the reaper.

Highways and Steamboats• In 1790s a private company completed the Lancaster

Turnpike in Pennsylvania, running 60 miles from Philadelphia to Lancaster

• As driver approached the tollgate, they were confronted with a barrier of sharp pikes, which were turned aside when they paid their toll—turnpike.

• Westerners scored a notable triumph in 1811 when the federal government started the construction of the National Road—known as the Cumberland Road

• This overcame obstacles like– Noisy states’ righters, who opposed federal aid to local projects– Eastern states protested against being bled of their populations

by the westward-reaching arteries

Highways and Steamboats

• Robert Fulton started the steamboat craze:– Installed a powerful steam engine, the Clermont:

• It ran in 1807 from New York City up the Hudson River toward Albany—150 miles in 32 hours

• The success of the steamboat was sensational• Fulton had changed all of America’s navigable streams

into two-way arteries, doubling carrying capacity• By 1820 there were 60 steamboats on the Mississippi

and its tributaries• By 1860 there were one thousand.

p297

XIV. “Clinton’s Big Ditch” in New York

• A canal-cutting craze paralleled the boom in turnpikes and steamboats (see Map 14.2):– New Yorkers, cut off from federal aid by states’

righters, themselves dug the Erie Canal, linking the Great Lakes with the Hudson River• Blessed by the driving leadership of Governor DeWitt

Clinton, the project was called “Clinton’s Big Ditch” or “the Governor’s Gutter.”

XIV. “Clinton’s Big Ditch” in New York (cont.)

• Begun in 1817, the canal was 363 mi long• Went from Buffalo, on Lake Erie, to the Hudson River,

on to New York harbor• The water from Clinton’s keg baptized the Empire State• Shipping was sped up as the cost/time dropped

– Other economic ripples• The value of land along the route skyrocketed and new

cities, Rochester and Syracuse, blossomed• The new profitability of farming in the Old Northwest-

Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois—attracted European immigrants.

XIV. “Clinton’s Big Ditch” in New York (cont.)

– Many dispirited New England farmers abandoned their rocky holdings and went elsewhere:

– Finding it easier to go west over the Erie Canal, some took new farmland south of the Great Lakes

– The transformation in the Northeast—canal consequences—showed how long-established local market structures:» Could be swamped by the emerging behemoth of a

continental economy– American goods on the international market; far-off

Europeans began to feel the effects of America’s economic vitality

Map 14-2 p298

XV. The Iron Horse

– The development of the railroad• It was fast, reliable, cheaper than canals to construct,

and not frozen over in winter• Able to go anywhere—it defied terrain and weather• First railroad appeared in 1828 and new lines spread

with amazing swiftness– Faced strong opposition from canal builders– They were prohibited, at first, to carry freight– Considered a dangerous public menace

• Other obstacles:– Brakes were so feeble that engineers might miss the station– Arrivals and departures were conjectural

XV. The Iron Horse(cont.)

– Numerous differences in gauge—required passengers to make frequent changes of trains

• Improvements came:– Gauges gradually became standard– Safety devices wee adopted– The Pullman “sleeping palace” was introduced in 1859.

• America at long last was being bound together with braces of iron, later to be made of steel.

Map 14-3 p299

Advent of Patents– Each new invention stimulated still more

imaginative inventions:– Patents give inventor legal protection from

copycats– Insures others can’t profit from ideas

• Decade ending in 1800: only 306 patents were registered in Washington

• Decade ending in 1860: there were 28,000• In 1838 the clerk of the Patent Office resigned in

despair, complaining that all worthwhile inventions had been discovered

Advent of Corporations

• Corporations– Changes in the form and legal status of business

organizations:• The principle of limited liability aided the

concentration of capital• Laws of “free incorporation” meant that businessmen

could create corporation without applying for individual charters from the legislature

IX. Marvels in Communication

• Samuel F. B. Morse:– Inventor of the telegraph– Secured from Congress an appropriation of

$30,000 to support his experiment with “talking wires”

– In 1844 he strung a wire 40 miles from Washington to Baltimore and tapped out the historic message, “What hath God wrought?”

Map 14-4 p301

XVII. The Transport Web Binds the Union

– The transportation revolution:• Was stimulated by the desire of the East to tap the

West– Western region drained southward to the cotton belt– Steamboats reversed the flow of finished goods to the

western arteries and helped bind the West and South together

– Three decades after the Civil War, canals and railroads out from the East, over the Alleghenies and into the blossoming heartland

– An impressive grid of “internal improvements” was laid

• By the eve of the Civil War, a truly continental economy had emerged.

XVII. The Transportation Web Binds the Union (cont.)– The principle of division of labor was applied on a national

level– Each region specialized in a particular type of economic activity

» The South raised cotton» The West grew grain and livestock» The East made machines

• The economic pattern had fateful political and military implications:– Many southerners regarded the Mississippi as a chain linking

the upper valley states to the southern Cotton Kingdom– They believed that some or all of these states would secede

with them or be strangled

XVII. The Transportation Web Binds the Union (cont.)– They overlooked the man-made links that bound the upper

Mississippi Valley to the East; intimate commercial union– Southern rebels would not only have

» to fight Northern armies,» but the tight bonds of an interdependent continental

economy– Economically, the two northerly sections were conjoined

twins

XVIII. The Market Revolution

– The Market Revolution:• Transformed a subsistence economy of scattered farms

and tiny workshops:– Into a national network of industry and commerce (see Map 14.5)

• Greater mechanization and robust market-oriented economy raised new legal questions:– How tightly should patents protect inventions?– Should the government regulate monopolies?– Who should own the technologies and networks?

• Chief Justice John Marshall:– The U.S. Supreme Court protected contract rights by requiring

state governments to grant irrevocable charters.

XVIII. The Market Revolution(cont.)

• Monopolies easily developed, as new companies found it difficult to break into markets

• Chief justice Roger B. Taney argued that “the rights of the community” outweighed any exclusive corporate rights– His decision opened new entrepreneurial channels– And encouraged greater competition– So did the passage of more liberal state incorporation laws.

• The self-sufficient households of colonial days were transformed:– Now families scattered to work for wages in the mills– Or they planted just a few crops for sale at market– Used the money to buy goods made by strangers in far-off

factories.

XVIII. The Market Revolution(cont.)

– Store-bought products replaced homemade products– Caused a division of labor and status in the households– Traditional women’s work was rendered superfluous and

devalued– The home grew into a place of refuge from the world of

work that increasingly became the special and separate sphere of woman.

• Revolutionary advance in manufacturing and trans-portation brought increased prosperity:– They widened the gulf between the rich and the poor– Several specimens of colossal financial success were

strutting across the national stage.– John Jacob Astor left an estate of $30 million in 1848.

XVIII. The Market Revolution(cont.)

• Cities bred the greatest extremes of economic inequality:– Unskilled workers fared worst– Became floating mass of “drifters.”– These wandering workers accounted for up to ½ the population

of the brawling industrial centers– They are the forgotten men and women of American history

• Many myths about “social mobility:”– Mobility did exist in industrializing America– Rags-to riches success stories were relatively few– American did provide more “opportunity” then elsewhere– Millions of immigrants packed their bags and headed for New

World shores.– General prosperity defused potential class conflict.