chapter 12 pp on industrial rev & transcendentalism

Out of Many

A History of the American People Seventh Edition Brief Sixth Edition

Chapter

12

Industry and the North 1790s-1840s

Out of Many: A History of the American People, Brief Sixth Edition John Mack Faragher • Mari Jo Buhle • Daniel Czitrom • Susan H. Armitage

Copyright ©2012 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

Chapter Focus Questions • What were the effects of the transportation revolution? • What was the market revolution? • What did industrialization affect workers in early factories? • How did the market revolution change the lives of ordinary people? • What were the values of the new middle class?

Women Factory Workers Form a Community in Lowell, Massachusetts • Young women from New England farms worked in the Lowell textile mills. • Initially, the women found the work a welcome change from farm routine, but later conflict arose with their employers. • By the 1830s, mill owners cut wages and ended their paternalistic practices.

Women Factory Workers Form a Community in Lowell, Massachusetts • The result was strikes and the replacement of the young women with more manageable Irish immigrants. • The Market Revolution changed the way people worked and increased differences between North and South.

The Transportation Revolution

The Transportation Revolution • Between 1800 and 1840, the building of roads and canals, and the steamboat stimulated the transportation revolution that:  encouraged growth;  promoted the mobility of people and goods; and  fostered the growing commercial spirit.

Roads • Federal Government funds the National Road in 1808—at the time the single greatest federal transportation expense • The National Road tied the East and West together providing strong evidence of the nation’s commitment to expansion and cohesion

MAP 12.1 Travel Times, 1800 and 1857

Railroads (cont'd) • By the 1850s consolidation of rail lines facilitated standardization.

Effects of the Transportation Revolution • The transportation revolution:  provided Americans much greater mobility;  linked Americans beyond the local communities;  Made a Market Revolution possible and;  fostered a risk-taking mentality that promoted invention and innovation.

MAP 12.2 Commercial Links: Rivers, Canals, Roads, 1830, and Rail Lines, 1850

The Market Revolution

A woman at a spinning wheel.

The Market Revolution • The market revolution was caused by rapid improvements in transportation, commercialization, and industrialization. • Power driven machinery produced goods and replaced hand made products.

The Spread of Commercial Markets • As more workers became part of the putting-out system  wages for piecework replaced bartering.  families bought mass-produced goods rather than making them at home.

• Commercialization did not happen immediately or in the same way across the nation.

The Yankee West

New Routes West • Between 1830 and 1850 the population of the Old Northwest almost quadrupled. • The National Road and Erie Canal both facilitated movement from the Northeast to the Midwest. • Southern migrants moved to the Old Southwest.

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.

Commercial Agriculture in the Old Northwest (cont'd) • Regional specialization enabled farmers to concentrate on growing a single crop, but made them dependent on distant markets and credit.

Transportation Changes Affect Western Cities • Railroads and the Erie Canal dramatically changed the local economies. • The transportation changes linked the Northwest with the Northeast. • Railroad links made Chicago a major eastwest hub. • The loser in the economic redistribution was New Orleans.

Industrialization Begins

British Technology and American Industrialization • The Industrial Revolution began in the British textile industry and created deplorable conditions. • Samuel Slater slipped out of England bringing plans for a cotton-spinning factory. • He built a mill that followed British custom by hiring women and children.

The Lowell Mills • Francis C. Lowell studied the British spinning machine. • Lowell helped invent a power loom and built the first integrated cotton mill near Boston in 1814. • The mill drove smaller competitors out of business. • Lowell’s successors soon built an entire town to house the new enterprise.

MAP 12.4 Lowell, Massachusetts, 1832

Lowell, Massachusetts The town plan of Lowell shows that factory growth also led to growth of hotels, churches, municipal buildings and private homes.

Timetable from the Lowell Mills illustrates

Family Mills • Lowell was unique; most mills were smaller rural mills, locally owned and run. • Factories developed elaborate divisions of labor that set up a hierarchy of value and pay. • Relations between the small mill communities and the local farmers were often difficult.

Family Mills (cont'd) • Slater’s mills provided a substantial amount of work for local people. • Industrial work led to new social distinctions.

“The American System of Manufactures” • American manufacturing based on interchangeable parts  rifles developed by Eli Whitney, Simeon North, John Hall

• Standardization  sewing machines

• American thinking about democracy and equality

“The American System of Manufactures” (cont'd) • Americans could have mass-produced copies, indistinguishable from the originals.

The first gun with interchangeable parts.

Pre-industrial Ways of Working • Before Lowell, 97% of Americans still lived on farms and most work was done near or in the home. • Pre-industrial labor, both urban and rural, was patriarchal and followed existing family patterns dominated by fathers and husbands. • Labor organization remained informal and unrecognized.

Mechanization and Gender • Industrialization a major threat to status, independence of skilled male workers • Breakdown of the family work system harmed independent urban artisans, destroyed apprenticeship system • Garment industry led many women to work, sewing ready-made clothing for piece rates.

Time, Work, and Leisure • Hard adjustment to demands of factory  Strict regime  Absenteeism

• A much more rigid separation between work and leisure developed. • Leisure spots like taverns emerged, as did leisure activities like spectator sports, replacing community-wide events and casual sociability.

Early Strikes • Women at Lowell protested a wage cut with a spontaneous strike in 1834. • Pressure from workers led New Hampshire, Maine and Pennsylvania to adopt “ten hour day” laws in the 1840s. • Most early strikes were unsuccessful because owners were able to find new workers.

Wealth and Rank (cont'd) • The middle class also changed their attitudes by:  Entering new, “white collar” careers tied to new markets  emphasizing sobriety, steadiness and responsibility.

Religion and Personal Life • Religion helped shape the new attitudes. • The Second Great Awakening moved from the frontier to the new market towns stressing salvation through personal faith. • Preachers such as Charles G. Finney urged businessmen to convert and accept the self-discipline and individualism that religion brought.

Religion and Personal Life (cont’d) • Evangelism became the religion of the new middle class. • Middle class women promoted Finney’s ideals of self-discipline and personal responsibility.

The New Middle-Class Family • Middle-class women managed their homes and provided a safe haven for their husbands. • Attitudes about appropriate male and female roles and qualities hardened. • Men were seen as steady, industrious, and responsible; women as nurturing, gentle, and moral.

The New Middle-Class Family (cont’d) • The popularity of housekeeping guides underscored the radical changes occurring in middle-class families. • Middle-class couples limited their family size through birth control, abstinence, and abortion.

The New Middle-Class Family (cont’d) • Physicians urged that sexual impulses be controlled, particularly among women whom they presumed to possess superior morality.

Middle-Class Children • Mother one responsible for training children in self-discipline. • Women formed networks and read advice magazines to help them in these tasks. • Mothers made contacts that would contribute to their children’s latter development.

Middle-Class Children (cont'd) • “Childhood” emerged as an ideal as children prolonged their education and professional training. • A man’s success was very much the result of his family’s efforts.

Sentimentalism and Transcendentalism • The competitive spirit led many Americans to turn to sentimentalism and nostalgia. • Publishers found a lucrative market for novels of this genre, especially those written by women.

Sentimentalism and Transcendentalism (cont.) • Sentimentalism became more concerned with maintaining social codes. • The intellectual reassurance for middleclass morality came from writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. • Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller emphasized individualism and communion with nature.

Emerson’s romantic glorification of nature included the notion of himself as a “transparent eyeball