14

Forging the NationalEconomy

���

1790–1860

The progress of invention is really a threat [to monarchy]. Whenever I see a railroad I look for a republic.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1866

The new nation went bounding into the nine-teenth century in a burst of movement. New

England Yankees, Pennsylvania farmers, and south-ern yeomen all pushed west in search of cheap landand prodigious opportunity, soon to be joined byvast numbers of immigrants from Europe, who alsomade their way to the country’s fast-growing cities.But not only people were in motion. Newly inventedmachinery quickened the cultivation of crops andthe manufacturing of goods, while workers foundthemselves laboring under new, more demandingexpectations for their pace of work. Better roads,faster steamboats, farther-reaching canals, and ten-tacle-stretching railroads all helped move people,raw materials, and manufactured goods from coastto coast and Gulf to Great Lakes by the mid-nineteenth century. The momentum gave rise to amore dynamic, market-oriented, national economy.

The Westward Movement

The rise of Andrew Jackson, the first president frombeyond the Appalachian Mountains, exemplifiedthe inexorable westward march of the Americanpeople. The West, with its raw frontier, was the mosttypically American part of America. As Ralph WaldoEmerson wrote in 1844, “Europe stretches to theAlleghenies; America lies beyond.’’

The Republic was young, and so were the people —as late as 1850, half of Americans were under theage of thirty. They were also restless and energetic,seemingly always on the move, and always westward.One “tall tale’’ of the frontier described chickens thatvoluntarily crossed their legs every spring, waiting tobe tied for the annual move west. By 1840 the “demo-graphic center’’ of the American population map had

287

crossed the Alleghenies. By the eve of the Civil War, ithad marched across the Ohio River.

Legend portrays an army of muscular axmentriumphantly carving civilization out of the westernwoods. But in reality life was downright grim formost pioneer families. Poorly fed, ill-clad, housed inhastily erected shanties (Abraham Lincoln’s familylived for a year in a three-sided lean-to made ofbrush and sticks), they were perpetual victims ofdisease, depression, and premature death. Aboveall, unbearable loneliness haunted them, especiallythe women, who were often cut off from humancontact, even their neighbors, for days or evenweeks, while confined to the cramped orbit of a darkcabin in a secluded clearing. Breakdowns and evenmadness were all too frequently the “opportunities’’that the frontier offered to pioneer women.

Frontier life could be tough and crude for menas well. No-holds-barred wrestling, which permittedsuch niceties as the biting off of noses and the goug-ing out of eyes, was a popular entertainment. Pio-neering Americans, marooned by geography, wereoften ill informed, superstitious, provincial, andfiercely individualistic. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s pop-ular lecture-essay “Self-Reliance’’ struck a deeplyresponsive chord. Popular literature of the period

abounded with portraits of unique, isolated figureslike James Fenimore Cooper’s heroic Natty Bumppoand Herman Melville’s restless Captain Ahab—justas Jacksonian politics aimed to emancipate thelone-wolf, enterprising businessperson. Yet even inthis heyday of “rugged individualism,’’ there wereimportant exceptions. Pioneers, in tasks clearlybeyond their own individual resources, would callupon their neighbors for logrolling and barn raisingand upon their governments for help in buildinginternal improvements.

Shaping the Western Landscape

The westward movement also molded the physicalenvironment. Pioneers in a hurry often exhaustedthe land in the tobacco regions and then pushed on,leaving behind barren and rain-gutted fields. In theKentucky bottomlands, cane as high as fifteen feetposed a seemingly insurmountable barrier to theplow. But settlers soon discovered that when thecane was burned off, European bluegrass thrived inthe charred canefields. “Kentucky bluegrass,’’ as itwas somewhat inaccurately called, made ideal pas-

288 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

ture for livestock—and lured thousands more Amer-ican homesteaders into Kentucky.

The American West felt the pressure of civiliza-tion in additional ways. By the 1820s American fur-trappers were setting their traplines all over the vastRocky Mountain region. The fur-trapping empire wasbased on the “rendezvous’’ system. Each summer,traders ventured from St. Louis to a verdant RockyMountain valley, made camp, and waited for thetrappers and Indians to arrive with beaver pelts toswap for manufactured goods from the East. Thistrade thrived for some two decades; by the timebeaver hats had gone out of fashion, the haplessbeaver had all but disappeared from the region. Tradein buffalo robes also flourished, leading eventually tothe virtually total annihilation of the massive bisonherds that once blanketed the western prairies. Stillfarther west, on the California coast, other tradersbought up prodigious quantities of sea-otter pelts,driving the once-bountiful otters to the point of near-extinction. Some historians have called this aggres-sive and often heedless exploitation of the West’snatural bounty “ecological imperialism.’’

Yet Americans in this period also revered natureand admired its beauty. Indeed the spirit of nation-

alism fed the growing appreciation of the unique-ness of the American wilderness. Searching for theUnited States’ distinctive characteristics in thisnation-conscious age, many observers found thewild, unspoiled character of the land, especially inthe West, to be among the young nation’s definingattributes. Other countries might have impressivemountains or sparkling rivers, but none had thepristine, natural beauty of America, unspoiled byhuman hands and reminiscent of a time before thedawn of civilization. This attitude toward wildernessbecame in time a kind of national mystique, inspir-ing literature and painting, and eventually kindlinga powerful conservation movement.

George Catlin, a painter and student of NativeAmerican life, was among the first Americans toadvocate the preservation of nature as a deliberatenational policy. In 1832 he observed Sioux Indians inSouth Dakota recklessly slaughtering buffalo in orderto trade the animals’ tongues for the white man’swhiskey. Appalled at this spectacle and fearing forthe preservation of Indians and buffalo alike, Catlinproposed the creation of a national park. His idealater bore fruit with the creation of a national parksystem, beginning with Yellowstone Park in 1872.

Opening the West 289

The March of the Millions

As the American people moved west, they also multiplied at an amazing rate. By midcentury thepopulation was still doubling approximately everytwenty-five years, as in fertile colonial days.

By 1860 the original thirteen states had morethan doubled in number: thirty-three stars gracedthe American flag. The United States was the fourthmost populous nation in the western world,exceeded only by three European countries—Rus-sia, France, and Austria.

Urban growth continued explosively. In 1790there had been only two American cities that couldboast populations of twenty thousand or moresouls: Philadelphia and New York. By 1860 therewere forty-three, and about three hundred otherplaces claimed over five thousand inhabitantsapiece. New York was the metropolis; New Orleans,the “Queen of the South’’; and Chicago, the swagger-ing lord of the Midwest, destined to be “hog butcherfor the world.’’

Such overrapid urbanization unfortunatelybrought undesirable by-products. It intensified theproblems of smelly slums, feeble street lighting,

290 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

1790

1800

1810

1820

1830

1840

1850

1860

Year

19

19

19

18

18

17

16

14

PercentNonwhite

3,172,000

4,306,000

5,862,000

7,867,000

10,537,000

14,196,000

19,553,000

26,922,000

White

757,000

1,002,000

1,378,000

1,772,000

2,329,000

2,874,000

3,639,000

4,521,000

Nonwhite

3,929,000

5,308,000

7,240,000

9,639,000

12,866,000

17,070,000

23,192,000

31,443,000

TotalPopulation

10M 20M 30M 40M

Population Increase, Including Slaves and Indians, 1790–1860 Increasing European immigration and the closing of the slave trade gradually “whitened’’ the populationbeginning in 1820. This trend continued into the early twentieth century.

ME.VT.

N.H.

MASS.

CONN.

IND.

MO.

R.I.

N.Y.

PA.Pittsburgh

Boston

N.J.

DEL.

New York

Washington MD.

VA.

N.C.

S.C.GA.ALA.

TENN.

MISS.

ARK.

MINN.

IOWA MICH.

ILL. ClevelandIndianapolis

CincinnatiLouisville W. VA.

KY.

WIS.

OHIO

ATLANTICOCEAN

39°

39°

1940196019801990

18601880

1900

1920

1790180018201840St. Louis

1970

Chicago

Westward Movement of Center of Population,1790–1990 The triangles indicate the points atwhich a map of the United States weighted for thepopulation of the country in a given year wouldbalance. Note the remarkable equilibrium of thenorth-south pull from 1790 to about 1940, andthe strong spurt west and south thereafter. The1980 census revealed that the nation’s center ofpopulation had at last moved west of the MississippiRiver. The map also shows the slowing of thewestward movement between 1890 and 1940—the period of heaviest immigration from Europe,which ended up mainly in East Coast cities.

inadequate policing, impure water, foul sewage,ravenous rats, and improper garbage disposal. Hogspoked their scavenging snouts about many citystreets as late as the 1840s. Boston in 1823 pioneered a sewer system, and New York in 1842abandoned wells and cisterns for a piped-in watersupply. The city thus unknowingly eliminated the breeding places of many disease-carrying mosquitoes.

A continuing high birthrate accounted for mostof the increase in population, but by the 1840s thetides of immigration were adding hundreds of thou-sands more. Before this decade immigrants hadbeen flowing in at a rate of sixty thousand a year, butsuddenly the influx tripled in the 1840s and thenquadrupled in the 1850s. During these two feverish

decades, over a million and a half Irish, and nearlyas many Germans, swarmed down the gangplanks.Why did they come?

The immigrants came partly because Europeseemed to be running out of room. The populationof the Old World more than doubled in the nine-teenth century, and Europe began to generate a

An Influx of Immigrants 291

A German immigrant living in Cincinnatiwrote to his relatives in Germany in 1847:

“A lot of people come over here who were welloff in Germany but were enticed to leavetheir fatherland by boastful and imprudentletters from their friends or children andthought they could become rich in America.This deceives a lot of people, since what canthey do here? If they stay in the city they can only earn their bread at hard andunaccustomed labor. If they want to live inthe country and don’t have enough money tobuy a piece of land that is cleared and has ahouse then they have to settle in the wildbush and have to work very hard to clear thetrees out of the way so they can sow andplant. But people who are healthy, strong,and hard-working do pretty well.’’

Irish and German Immigration by Decade,1830–1900

Years Irish Germans

1831–1840 207,381 152,4541841–1850 780,719 434,6261851–1860 914,119 951,6671861–1870 435,778 787,4681871–1880 436,871 718,1821881–1890 655,482 1,452,9701891–1900 388,416 505,152

TOTAL 3,818,766 5,000,519

seething pool of apparently “surplus’’ people. Theywere displaced and footloose in their homelandsbefore they felt the tug of the American magnet.Indeed at least as many people moved about withinEurope as crossed the Atlantic. America benefitedfrom these people-churning changes but did not setthem all in motion. Nor was the United States thesole beneficiary of the process: of the nearly 60 mil-lion people who abandoned Europe in the centuryafter 1840, about 25 million went somewhere otherthan the United States.

Yet America still beckoned most strongly to thestruggling masses of Europe, and the majority ofmigrants headed for the “land of freedom andopportunity.’’ There was freedom from aristocraticcaste and state church; there was abundant oppor-tunity to secure broad acres and better one’s condi-tion. Much-read letters sent home by immigrants—“America letters’’—often described in glowing termsthe richer life: low taxes, no compulsory militaryservice, and “three meat meals a day.’’ The introduc-tion of transoceanic steamships also meant that the immigrants could come speedily, in a matter often or twelve days instead of ten or twelve weeks. Onboard, they were still jammed into unsanitary quar-ters, thus suffering an appalling death rate frominfectious diseases, but the nightmare was moreendurable because it was shorter.

The Emerald Isle Moves West

Ireland, already groaning under the heavy hand ofBritish overlords, was prostrated in the mid-1840s. Aterrible rot attacked the potato crop, on which thepeople had become dangerously dependent, andabout one-fourth of them were swept away by dis-ease and hunger. Starved bodies were found deadby the roadsides with grass in their mouths. All told,about 2 million perished.

Tens of thousands of destitute souls, fleeing theLand of Famine for the Land of Plenty, flocked toAmerica in the “Black Forties.’’ Ireland’s great exporthas been population, and the Irish take their placebeside the Jews and the Africans as a dispersed people (see “Makers of America: The Irish,’’ pp. 294–295).

These uprooted newcomers—too poor to movewest and buy the necessary land, livestock, andequipment—swarmed into the larger seaboard cit-

ies. Noteworthy were Boston and particularly NewYork, which rapidly became the largest Irish city inthe world. Before many decades had passed, morepeople of Hibernian blood lived in America than onthe “ould sod’’ of Erin’s Isle.

The luckless Irish immigrants received no red-carpet treatment. Forced to live in squalor, theywere rudely crammed into the already-vile slums.They were scorned by the older American stock,especially “proper’’ Protestant Bostonians, whoregarded the scruffy Catholic arrivals as a socialmenace. Barely literate “Biddies’’ (Bridgets) tookjobs as kitchen maids. Broad-shouldered “Paddies’’(Patricks) were pushed into pick-and-shovel drud-gery on canals and railroads, where thousands lefttheir bones as victims of disease and accidentalexplosions. It was said that an Irishman lay buriedunder every railroad tie. As wage-depressing com-petitors for jobs, the Irish were hated by nativeworkers. “No Irish Need Apply’’ was a sign com-

292 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

Margaret McCarthy, a recent arrival inAmerica, captured much of the complexity ofthe immigrant experience in a letter shewrote from New York to her family in Irelandin 1850:

“This is a good place and a good country, butthere is one thing that’s ruining this place.The emigrants have not money enough totake them to the interior of the country,which obliges them to remain here in NewYork and the like places, which causes theless demand for labor and also the greatreduction in wages. For this reason I wouldadvise no one to come to America that wouldnot have some money after landing here thatwould enable them to go west in case theywould get no work to do here. But any manor woman without a family are fools thatwould not venture and come to this plentifulcountry where no man or woman everhungered or ever will. I can assure you thereare dangers upon dangers, but my friends,have courage and come all togethercourageously and bid adieu to that lovelyplace, the land of our birth.’’

monly posted at factory gates and was often abbre-viated to NINA. The Irish, for similar reasons,fiercely resented the blacks, with whom they sharedsociety’s basement. Race riots between black andIrish dockworkers flared up in several port cities,and the Irish were generally cool to the abolitionistcause.

The friendless “famine Irish’’ were forced tofend for themselves. The Ancient Order of Hiberni-ans, a semisecret society founded in Ireland to fightrapacious landlords, served in America as a benevo-lent society, aiding the downtrodden. It also helpedto spawn the “Molly Maguires,’’ a shadowy Irishminers’ union that rocked the Pennsylvania coaldistricts in the 1860s and 1870s.

The Irish tended to remain in low-skill occupa-tions but gradually improved their lot, usually byacquiring modest amounts of property. The educa-tion of children was cut short as families struggledto save money to purchase a home. But for humbleIrish peasants, cruelly cast out of their homeland,property ownership counted as a grand “success.’’

Politics quickly attracted these gregariousGaelic newcomers. They soon began to gain controlof powerful city machines, notably New York’s Tam-many Hall, and reaped the patronage rewards.Before long, beguilingly brogued Irishmen domi-nated police departments in many big cities, wherethey now drove the “Paddy wagons’’ that had oncecarted their brawling forebears to jail.

American politicians made haste to cultivatethe Irish vote, especially in the politically potentstate of New York. Irish hatred of the British lostnothing in the transatlantic transplanting. As theIrish-Americans increased in number—nearly 2 mil-

lion arrived between 1830 and 1860—officials inWashington glimpsed political gold in those emer-ald green hills. Politicians often found it politicallyprofitable to fire verbal volleys at London—a proc-ess vulgarly known as “twisting the British lion’stail.’’

The German Forty-Eighters

The influx of refugees from Germany between 1830and 1860 was hardly less spectacular than that from Ireland. During these troubled years, over amillion and a half Germans stepped onto Ameri-can soil (see “Makers of America: The Germans,’’ pp. 298–299). The bulk of them were uprooted farm-ers, displaced by crop failures and other hardships.But a strong sprinkling were liberal political refu-gees. Saddened by the collapse of the democra-tic revolutions of 1848, they had decided to leave the autocratic fatherland and flee to America—thebrightest hope of democracy.

Germany’s loss was America’s gain. ZealousGerman liberals like the lanky and public-spiritedCarl Schurz, a relentless foe of slavery and publiccorruption, contributed richly to the elevation ofAmerican political life.

Unlike the Irish, many of the Germanic new-comers possessed a modest amount of materialgoods. Most of them pushed out to the lush lands ofthe Middle West, notably Wisconsin, where they set-tled and established model farms. Like the Irish,they formed an influential body of voters whomAmerican politicians shamelessly wooed. But theGermans were less potent politically because theirstrength was more widely scattered.

The hand of Germans in shaping American lifewas widely felt in still other ways. The Conestogawagon, the Kentucky rifle, and the Christmas treewere all German contributions to American culture.Germans had fled from the militarism and wars ofEurope and consequently came to be a bulwark ofisolationist sentiment in the upper Mississippi Val-ley. Better educated on the whole than the stump-grubbing Americans, they warmly supported publicschools, including their Kindergarten (children’sgarden). They likewise did much to stimulate artand music. As outspoken champions of freedom,they became relentless enemies of slavery duringthe fevered years before the Civil War.

Irish and German Immigration 293

An early-nineteenth-century French travelerrecorded his impressions of America andIreland:

“I have seen the Indian in his forests and theNegro in his chains, and thought, as Icontemplated their pitiable condition, that Isaw the very extreme of humanwretchedness; but I did not then know thecondition of unfortunate Ireland.’’

The Irish

For a generation, from 1793 to 1815, war ragedacross Europe. Ruinous as it was on the Conti-

nent, the fighting brought unprecedented pros-perity to the long-suffering landsmen of Ireland,groaning since the twelfth century under the yoke ofEnglish rule. For as Europe’s fields lay fallow, irri-gated only by the blood of its farmers, Ireland fedthe hungry armies that ravened for food as well asterritory. Irish farmers planted every available acre,interspersing the lowly potato amongst their fieldsof grain. With prices for food products ever mount-ing, tenant farmers reaped a temporary respite fromtheir perpetual struggle to remain on the land. Mostlandlords were satisfied by the prosperity and sorelaxed their pressure on tenants; others, stymied bythe absence of British police forces that had beenstripped of manpower to fight in Europe, had littlemeans to enforce eviction notices.

But the peace that brought solace to battle-scarred Europe changed all this. After 1815 war-inflated wheat prices plummeted by half. Hard-pressed landlords resolved to leave vast fieldsunplanted. Assisted now by a strengthened Britishconstabulary, they vowed to sweep the pesky peas-ants from the retired acreage. Many of those forcedto leave sought work in England; some went toAmerica. Then in 1845 a blight that ravaged thepotato crop sounded the final knell for the Irishpeasantry. The resultant famine spread desolationthroughout the island. In five years, more than amillion people died. Another million sailed forAmerica.

Of the emigrants, most were young and literatein English, the majority under thirty-five years old.Families typically pooled money to send strongyoung sons to the New World, where they wouldearn wages to pay the fares for those who waited at home. These “famine Irish’’ mostly remained inthe port cities of the Northeast, abandoning the

farmer’s life for the dingy congestion of the urbanmetropolis.

The disembarking Irish were poorly prepared forurban life. They found progress up the economicladder painfully slow. Their work as domestic ser-

294

vants or construction laborers was dull and arduous,and mortality rates were astoundingly high. Escapefrom the potato famine hardly guaranteed a long lifeto an Irish-American; a gray-bearded Irishman was arare sight in nineteenth-century America. Most ofthe new arrivals toiled as day laborers. A fortunatefew owned boardinghouses or saloons, where theirdispirited countrymen sought solace in the bottle.For Irish-born women, opportunities were still scar-cer; they worked mainly as domestic servants.

But it was their Roman Catholicism, more eventhan their penury or their perceived fondness foralcohol, that earned the Irish the distrust and resent-ment of their native-born, Protestant Americanneighbors. The cornerstone of social and religiouslife for Irish immigrants was the parish. Worriesabout safeguarding their children’s faith inspired theconstruction of parish schools, financed by the pen-nies of struggling working-class Irish parents.

If Ireland’s green fields scarcely equipped hersons and daughters for the scrap and scramble of

economic life in America’s cities, life in the OldCountry nevertheless had instilled in them an apti-tude for politics. Irish-Catholic resistance againstcenturies of English-Anglican domination hadinstructed many Old Country Irish in the ways ofmass politics. That political experience readiedthem for the boss system of the political “machines’’in America’s northeastern cities. The boss’s localrepresentatives met each newcomer soon after he landed in America. Asking only for votes, themachine supplied coal in wintertime, food, andhelp with the law. Irish voters soon became a bul-wark of the Democratic party, reliably supportingthe party of Jefferson and Jackson in cities like NewYork and Boston. As Irish-Americans like New York’s“Honest John’’ Kelly themselves became bosses,white-collar jobs in government service opened upto the Irish. They became building inspectors, alder-men, and even policemen—an astonishing irony fora people driven from their homeland by the night-sticks and bayonets of the British police.

295

Yet the Germans—often dubbed “damnedDutchmen’’—were occasionally regarded with sus-picion by their old-stock American neighbors. Seek-ing to preserve their language and culture, theysometimes settled in compact “colonies’’ and keptaloof from the surrounding community. Accus-tomed to the “Continental Sunday’’ and uncurbedby Puritan tradition, they made merry on the Sab-bath and drank huge quantities of an amber bever-age called bier (beer), which dates its real popularityin America to their coming. Their Old World drink-ing habits, like those of the Irish, spurred advocatesof temperance in the use of alcohol to redoubletheir reform efforts.

Flare-ups of Antiforeignism

The invasion by this so-called immigrant “rabble’’ inthe 1840s and 1850s inflamed the prejudices ofAmerican “nativists.’’ They feared that these foreignhordes would outbreed, outvote, and overwhelmthe old “native’’ stock. Not only did the newcomerstake jobs from “native’’ Americans, but the bulk ofthe displaced Irish were Roman Catholics, as were asubstantial minority of the Germans. The Church ofRome was still widely regarded by many old-lineAmericans as a “foreign’’ church; convents werecommonly referred to as “popish brothels.’’

Roman Catholics were now on the move. Seek-ing to protect their children from Protestant indoc-

trination in the public schools, they began in the1840s to construct an entirely separate Catholic edu-cational system—an enormously expensive under-taking for a poor immigrant community, but onethat revealed the strength of its religious commit-ment. They had formed a negligible minority duringcolonial days, and their numbers had increasedgradually. But with the enormous influx of the Irishand Germans in the 1840s and 1850s, the Catholicsbecame a powerful religious group. In 1840 they hadranked fifth, behind the Baptists, Methodists, Pres-byterians, and Congregationalists. By 1850, withsome 1.8 million communicants, they had boundedinto first place—a position they have never lost.

Older-stock Americans were alarmed by thesemounting figures. They professed to believe that indue time the “alien riffraff’’ would “establish’’ theCatholic Church at the expense of Protestantismand would introduce “popish idols.’’ The noisierAmerican “nativists’’ rallied for political action. In1849 they formed the Order of the Star-SpangledBanner, which soon developed into the formidableAmerican, or “Know-Nothing,’’ party—a namederived from its secretiveness. “Nativists’’ agitatedfor rigid restrictions on immigration and naturaliza-tion and for laws authorizing the deportation ofalien paupers. They also promoted a lurid literatureof exposure, much of it pure fiction. The authors,sometimes posing as escaped nuns, described theshocking sins they imagined the cloisters con-cealed, including the secret burial of babies. One ofthese sensational books—Maria Monk’s Awful Dis-closures (1836)—sold over 300,000 copies.

Even uglier was occasional mass violence. Asearly as 1834, a Catholic convent near Boston wasburned by a howling mob, and in ensuing years afew scattered attacks fell upon Catholic schools and

296 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

Strong antiforeignism was reflected in theplatform of the American (Know-Nothing)party in 1856:

“Americans must rule America; and to thisend, native-born citizens should be selectedfor all state, federal, or municipal offices ofgovernment employment, in preference tonaturalized citizens.’’

churches. The most frightful flare-up occurred dur-ing 1844 in Philadelphia, where the Irish Catholicsfought back against the threats of the “nativists.’’The City of Brotherly Love did not quiet down untiltwo Catholic churches had been burned and somethirteen citizens had been killed and fifty woundedin several days of fighting. These outbursts of intol-erance, though infrequent and generally localized inthe larger cities, remain an unfortunate blot on therecord of America’s treatment of minority groups.

Immigrants were undeniably making America amore pluralistic society—one of the most ethnicallyand racially varied in the history of the world—andperhaps it was small wonder that cultural clasheswould occur. Why, in fact, were such episodes noteven more frequent and more violent? Part of theanswer lies in the robustness of the American econ-omy. The vigorous growth of the economy in theseyears both attracted immigrants in the first placeand ensured that, once arrived, they could claimtheir share of American wealth without jeopardizing

the wealth of others. Their hands and brains, in fact,helped fuel economic expansion. Immigrants andthe American economy, in short, needed oneanother. Without the newcomers, a preponderantlyagricultural United States might well have beencondemned to watch in envy as the Industrial Revo-lution swept through nineteenth-century Europe.

The March of Mechanization

A group of gifted British inventors, beginning about1750, perfected a series of machines for the massproduction of textiles. This enslavement of steammultiplied the power of human muscles some ten-thousandfold and ushered in the modern factorysystem—and with it, the so-called Industrial Revo-lution. It was accompanied by a no-less-spectaculartransformation in agricultural production and inthe methods of transportation and communication.

Dawn of the Industrial Revolution 297

The Germans

Between 1820 and 1920, a sea of Germans lappedat America’s shores and seeped into its very

heartland. Their numbers surpassed those of anyother immigrant group, even the prolific and often-detested Irish. Yet this Germanic flood, unlike itsGaelic equivalent, stirred little panic in the hearts of native-born Americans because the Germanslargely stayed to themselves, far from the maddingcrowds and nativist fears of northeastern cities.They prospered with astonishing ease, buildingtowns in Wisconsin, agricultural colonies in Texas,and religious communities in Pennsylvania. Theyadded a decidedly Germanic flavor to the headybrew of reform and community building that so ani-mated antebellum America.

These “Germans’’ actually hailed from manydifferent Old World lands, because there was no uni-fied nation of Germany until 1871, when the ruth-less and crafty Prussian Otto von Bismarckassembled the German state out of a mosaic ofindependent principalities, kingdoms, and duchies.Until that time, “Germans’’ came to America as Prussians, Bavarians, Hessians, Rhinelanders,Pomeranians, and Westphalians. They arrived at different times and for many different reasons. Some, particularly the so-called Forty-Eighters—therefugees from the abortive democratic revolution of1848—hungered for the democracy they had failedto win in Germany. Others, particularly Jews,Pietists, and Anabaptist groups like the Amish andthe Mennonites, coveted religious freedom. Andthey came not only to America. Like the Italianslater, many Germans sought a new life in Brazil,Argentina, and Chile. But the largest number ven-tured into the United States.

Typical German immigrants arrived with fatterpurses than their Irish counterparts. Small land-owners or independent artisans in their nativecountries, they did not have to settle for bottom-rung industrial employment in the grimy factoriesof the Northeast and instead could afford to push onto the open spaces of the American West.

In Wisconsin these immigrants found a homeaway from home, a place with a climate, soil, andgeography much like central Europe’s. Milwaukee, acrude frontier town before the Germans’ arrival,became the “German Athens.’’ It boasted a Germantheater, German beer gardens, a German volunteerfire company, and a German-English academy. Indistant Texas, German settlements like New Braun-fels and Friedrichsburg flourished. When thefamous landscape architect and writer FrederickLaw Olmsted stumbled upon these prairie outpostsof Teutonic culture in 1857, he was shocked to be

298

“welcomed by a figure in a blue flannel shirt andpendant beard, quoting Tacitus.’’ These Germancolonies in the frontier Southwest mixed high Euro-pean elegance with Texas ruggedness. Olmsteddescribed a visit to a German household where thesettlers drank “coffee in tin cups upon Dresdensaucers’’ and sat upon “barrels for seats, to hear aBeethoven symphony on the grand piano.’’

These Germanic colonizers of America’s heart-land also formed religious communities, none moredistinctive or durable than the Amish settlements ofPennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio. The Amish tooktheir name from their founder and leader, the SwissAnabaptist Jacob Amman. Like other Anabaptistgroups, they shunned extravagance and reservedbaptism for adults, repudiating the tradition ofinfant baptism practiced by most Europeans. Forthis they were persecuted, even imprisoned, inEurope. Seeking escape from their oppression,some five hundred Amish ventured to Pennsylvaniain the 1700s, followed by three thousand in the yearsfrom 1815 to 1865.

In America they formed enduring religiouscommunities—isolated enclaves where they couldshield themselves from the corruption and the con-veniences of the modern world. To this day the German-speaking Amish still travel in horse-drawncarriages and farm without heavy machinery. Noelectric lights brighten the darkness that nightlyenvelops their tidy farmhouses; no ringing tele-phones punctuate the reverent tranquility of theirmealtime prayer; no ornaments relieve the austeresimplicity of their black garments. The Amishremain a stalwart, traditional community in a root-less, turbulent society, a living testament to the religious ferment and social experiments of theantebellum era.

299

The factory system gradually spread fromBritain—“the world’s workshop’’—to other lands. Ittook a generation or so to reach western Europe,and then the United States. Why was the youthfulAmerican Republic, destined to be an industrialgiant, so slow to embrace the machine?

For one thing, virgin soil in America was cheap.Land-starved descendants of land-starved peasantswere not going to coop themselves up in smelly fac-tories when they might till their own acres in God’sfresh air and sunlight. Labor was therefore generallyscarce, and enough nimble hands to operate themachines were hard to find—until immigrantsbegan to pour ashore in the 1840s. Money for capitalinvestment, moreover, was not plentiful in pioneer-ing America. Raw materials lay undeveloped, undis-covered, or unsuspected. The Republic was one dayto become the world’s leading coal producer, butmuch of the coal burned in colonial times wasimported all the way from Britain.

Just as labor was scarce, so were consumers.The young country at first lacked a domestic marketlarge enough to make factory-scale manufacturingprofitable.

Long-established British factories, which pro-vided cutthroat competition, posed another prob-

lem. Their superiority was attested by the fact that afew unscrupulous Yankee manufacturers, out tomake a dishonest dollar, stamped their own prod-ucts with fake English trademarks.

The British also enjoyed a monopoly of the tex-tile machinery, whose secrets they were anxious tohide from foreign competitors. Parliament enactedlaws, in harmony with the mercantile system, for-bidding the export of the machines or the emigra-tion of mechanics able to reproduce them.

Although a number of small manufacturingenterprises existed in the early Republic, the futureindustrial colossus was still snoring. Not until wellpast the middle of the nineteenth century did thevalue of the output of the factories exceed that ofthe farms.

Whitney Ends the Fiber Famine

Samuel Slater has been acclaimed the “Father of theFactory System’’ in America, and seldom can thepaternity of a movement more properly be ascribedto one person. A skilled British mechanic of twenty-one, he was attracted by bounties being offered toBritish workers familiar with the textile machines.After memorizing the plans for the machinery, heescaped in disguise to America, where he won thebacking of Moses Brown, a Quaker capitalist inRhode Island. Laboriously reconstructing the essen-tial apparatus with the aid of a blacksmith and a car-penter, he put into operation in 1791 the firstefficient American machinery for spinning cottonthread.

The ravenous mechanism was now ready, butwhere was the cotton fiber? Handpicking onepound of lint from three pounds of seed was a fullday’s work for one slave, and this process was soexpensive that cotton cloth was relatively rare.

Another mechanical genius, Massachusetts-born Eli Whitney, now made his mark. After gradu-

300 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

Examing the Evidence 301

The Invention of the Sewing Machine Histori-ans of technology examine not only the documen-tary evidence of plans and patents left behind byinventors, but surviving machines themselves. In1845, Elias Howe, a twenty-six-year-old apprenticeto a Boston watchmaker invented a sewingmachine that could make two hundred and fiftystitches a minute, five times what the swiftest handsewer could do. A year later Howe received apatent for his invention, but because the hand-cranked machine could only stitch straight seamsfor a short distance before requiring resetting, ithad limited commercial appeal. Howe took hissewing machine abroad where he worked withBritish manufacturers to improve it, and thenreturned to America and combined his patent withthose of other inventors, including Isaac M. Singer.

Hundreds of thousands of sewing machines wereproduced beginning in the 1850s for commer-cial manufacturing of clothing, books, shoes, andmany other products and also for home use. Thesewing machine became the first widely adver-tised consumer product. Due to its high cost, theSinger company introduced an installment buyingplan, which helped to place a sewing machine in most middle-class households. Why was thesewing machine able to find eager customers incommercial workshops and home sewing roomsalike? How might the sewing machine havechanged other aspects of American life, such aswork patterns, clothing styles, and retail selling?What other advances in technology might havebeen necessary for the invention of the sewingmachine?

ating from Yale, he journeyed to Georgia to serve asa private tutor while preparing for the law. There hewas told that the poverty of the South would berelieved if someone could only invent a workabledevice for separating the seed from the short-staplecotton fiber. Within ten days, in 1793, he built acrude machine called the cotton gin (short forengine) that was fifty times more effective than thehandpicking process.

Few machines have ever wrought so wondrous achange. The gin affected not only the history ofAmerica but that of the world. Almost overnight the raising of cotton became highly profitable,

and the South was tied hand and foot to the throne of King Cotton. Human bondage had been dying out, but the insatiable demand for cotton rerivetedthe chains on the limbs of the downtrodden southernblacks.

South and North both prospered. Slave-drivingplanters cleared more acres for cotton, pushing theCotton Kingdom westward off the depleted tide-water plains, over the Piedmont, and onto the blackloam bottomlands of Alabama and Mississippi.Humming gins poured out avalanches of snowy fiberfor the spindles of the Yankee machines, though fordecades to come the mills of Britain bought the lion’sshare of southern cotton. The American phase of theIndustrial Revolution, which first blossomed in cot-ton textiles, was well on its way.

Factories at first flourished most actively in NewEngland, though they branched out into the morepopulous areas of New York, New Jersey, and Penn-sylvania. The South, increasingly wedded to the production of cotton, could boast of comparativelylittle manufacturing. Its capital was bound up inslaves; its local consumers for the most part weredesperately poor.

New England was singularly favored as anindustrial center for several reasons. Its narrow beltof stony soil discouraged farming and hence mademanufacturing more attractive than elsewhere. Arelatively dense population provided labor andaccessible markets; shipping brought in capital; andsnug seaports made easy the import of raw materi-als and the export of the finished products. Finally,the rapid rivers—notably the Merrimack in Massa-chusetts—provided abundant water power to turnthe cogs of the machines. By 1860 more than 400million pounds of southern cotton poured annuallyinto the gaping maws of over a thousand mills,mostly in New England.

Marvels in Manufacturing

America’s factories spread slowly until about 1807,when there began the fateful sequence of theembargo, nonintercourse, and the War of 1812.Stern necessity dictated the manufacture of substi-tutes for normal imports, while the stoppage ofEuropean commerce was temporarily ruinous toYankee shipping. Both capital and labor were drivenfrom the waves onto the factory floor, as New Eng-

302 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

land, in the striking phrase of John Randolph,exchanged the trident for the distaff. Generousbounties were offered by local authorities for home-grown goods, “Buy American’’ and “Wear American’’became popular slogans, and patriotism promptedthe wearing of baggy homespun garments. Presi-dent Madison donned some at his inauguration,where he was said to have been a walking argumentfor the better processing of native wool.

But the manufacturing boomlet broke abruptlywith the peace of Ghent in 1815. British competitorsunloaded their dammed-up surpluses at ruinouslylow prices, and American newspapers were so full ofBritish advertisements for goods on credit that littlespace was left for news. In one Rhode Island district,all 150 mills were forced to close their doors, exceptthe original Slater plant. Responding to pained out-cries, Congress provided some relief when it passedthe mildly protective Tariff of 1816—among the ear-

liest political contests to control the shape of theeconomy.

As the factory system flourished, it embracednumerous other industries in addition to textiles.Prominent among them was the manufacturing offirearms, and here the wizardly Eli Whitney againappeared with an extraordinary contribution. Frus-trated in his earlier efforts to monopolize the cottongin, he turned to the mass production of musketsfor the U.S. Army. Up to this time, each part of afirearm had been hand-tooled, and if the trigger ofone broke, the trigger of another might or might notfit. About 1798 Whitney seized upon the idea of hav-ing machines make each part, so that all the trig-gers, for example, would be as much alike as thesuccessive imprints of a copperplate engraving.Journeying to Washington, he reportedly disman-tled ten of his new muskets in the presence of skep-tical officials, scrambled the parts together, andthen quickly reassembled ten different muskets.

The principle of interchangeable parts waswidely adopted by 1850, and it ultimately becamethe basis of modern mass-production, assembly-line methods. It gave to the North the vast industrialplant that ensured military preponderance over theSouth. Ironically, the Yankee Eli Whitney, by perfect-ing the cotton gin, gave slavery a renewed lease onlife, and perhaps made inevitable the Civil War. Atthe same time, by popularizing the principle ofinterchangeable parts, Whitney helped factories toflourish in the North, giving the Union a decidedadvantage when that showdown came.

The Upsurge of Manufacturing 303

One observer in 1836 published a newspaperaccount of conditions in some of the NewEngland factories:

“The operatives work thirteen hours a day inthe summer time, and from daylight to darkin the winter. At half past four in themorning the factory bell rings, and at fivethe girls must be in the mills. . . . So fatigued. . . are numbers of girls that they go to bedsoon after receiving their evening meal, andendeavor by a comparatively long sleep toresuscitate their weakened frames for thetoil of the coming day.’’

The sewing machine, invented by Elias Howe in1846 and perfected by Isaac Singer, gave anotherstrong boost to northern industrialization. Thesewing machine became the foundation of theready-made clothing industry, which took rootabout the time of the Civil War. It drove many aseamstress from the shelter of the private home tothe factory, where, like a human robot, she tendedthe clattering mechanisms.

Each momentous new invention seemed to stim-ulate still more imaginative inventions. For thedecade ending in 1800, only 306 patents were regis-tered in Washington; but the decade ending in 1860saw the amazing total of 28,000. Yet in 1838 the clerkof the Patent Office had resigned in despair, com-plaining that all worthwhile inventions had beendiscovered.

Technical advances spurred equally importantchanges in the form and legal status of businessorganizations. The principle of limited liabilityaided the concentration of capital by permitting theindividual investor, in cases of legal claims or bank-ruptcy, to risk no more than his own share of thecorporation’s stock. Fifteen Boston families formedone of the earliest investment capital companies,the Boston Associates. They eventually dominatedthe textile, railroad, insurance, and banking busi-ness of Massachusetts. Laws of “free incorporation,’’first passed in New York in 1848, meant that busi-nessmen could create corporations without apply-ing for individual charters from the legislature.

Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph was among theinventions that tightened the sinews of an increas-

ingly complex business world. A distinguished butpoverty-stricken portrait painter, Morse finallysecured from Congress, to the accompaniment ofthe usual jeers, an appropriation of $30,000 to sup-port his experiment with “talking wires.’’ In 1844Morse strung a wire forty miles from Washington toBaltimore and tapped out the historic message,“What hath God wrought?’’ The invention broughtfame and fortune to Morse, as he put distantly sepa-rated people in almost instant communication withone another. By the eve of the Civil War, a web ofsinging wires spanned the continent, revolutioniz-ing news gathering, diplomacy, and finance.

Workers and “Wage Slaves’’

One ugly outgrowth of the factory system was anincreasingly acute labor problem. Hitherto manu-facturing had been done in the home, or in thesmall shop, where the master craftsman and hisapprentice, rubbing elbows at the same bench,could maintain an intimate and friendly relation-ship. The industrial revolution submerged this per-sonal association in the impersonal ownership ofstuffy factories in “spindle cities.’’ Around these, liketumors, the slumlike hovels of the “wage slaves’’tended to cluster.

Clearly the early factory system did not showerits benefits evenly on all. While many owners waxedfat, workingpeople often wasted away at their work-benches. Hours were long, wages were low, andmeals were skimpy and hastily gulped. Workerswere forced to toil in unsanitary buildings that werepoorly ventilated, lighted, and heated. They wereforbidden by law to form labor unions to raisewages, for such cooperative activity was regarded asa criminal conspiracy. Not surprisingly, only twenty-four recorded strikes occurred before 1835.

Especially vulnerable to exploitation were childworkers. In 1820 half the nation’s industrial toilerswere children under ten years of age. Victims of fac-tory labor, many children were mentally blighted,emotionally starved, physically stunted, and evenbrutally whipped in special “whipping rooms.’’ InSamuel Slater’s mill of 1791, the first machine ten-ders were seven boys and two girls, all under twelveyears of age.

By contrast, the lot of most adult wage workersimproved markedly in the 1820s and 1830s. In the

304 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

Said Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) in alecture in 1859,

“The patent system secured to the inventorfor a limited time exclusive use of hisinvention, and thereby added the fuel ofinterest to the fire of genius in the discoveryand production of new and useful things.’’

Ten years earlier Lincoln had received patentno. 6469 for a scheme to buoy steamboatsover shoals. It was never practically applied,but he remains the only president ever tohave secured a patent.

full flush of Jacksonian democracy, many of thestates granted the laboring man the vote. Brandish-ing the ballot, he first strove to lighten his burdenthrough workingmen’s parties. Eventually manyworkers gave their loyalty to the Democratic party ofAndrew Jackson, whose attack on the Bank of theUnited States and against all forms of “privilege”reflected their anxieties about the emerging capital-ist economy. In addition to such goals as the ten-hour day, higher wages, and tolerable workingconditions, they demanded public education fortheir children and an end to the inhuman practiceof imprisonment for debt.

Employers, abhorring the rise of the “rabble’’ inpolitics, fought the ten-hour day to the last ditch.They argued that reduced hours would lessen pro-duction, increase costs, and demoralize the work-ers. Laborers would have so much leisure time thatthe Devil would lead them into mischief. A red-letter gain was at length registered for labor in 1840,when President Van Buren established the ten-hourday for federal employees on public works. In ensu-ing years a number of states gradually fell into lineby reducing the hours of workingpeople.

Day laborers at last learned that their strongestweapon was to lay down their tools, even at the riskof prosecution under the law. Dozens of strikeserupted in the 1830s and 1840s, most of them forhigher wages, some for the ten-hour day, and a fewfor such unusual goals as the right to smoke on thejob. The workers usually lost more strikes than theywon, for the employer could resort to such tactics asthe importing of strikebreakers—often derisivelycalled “scabs’’ or “rats,’’ and often fresh off the boatfrom the Old World. Labor long raised its voiceagainst the unrestricted inpouring of wage-depressing and union-busting immigrant workers.

Labor’s early and painful efforts at organizationhad netted some 300,000 trade unionists by 1830.But such encouraging gains were dashed on therocks of hard times following the severe depressionof 1837. As unemployment spread, union member-ship shriveled. Yet toilers won a promising legal vic-tory in 1842. The supreme court of Massachusettsruled in the case of Commonwealth v. Hunt thatlabor unions were not illegal conspiracies, providedthat their methods were “honorable and peaceful.’’This enlightened decision did not legalize the strike

Industrial Laborers 305

overnight throughout the country, but it was a sig-nificant signpost of the times. Trade unions still hada rocky row to hoe, stretching ahead for about a cen-tury, before they could meet management on rela-tively even terms.

Women and the Economy

Women were also sucked into the clanging mecha-nism of factory production. Farm women and girlshad an important place in the preindustrial econ-omy, spinning yarn, weaving cloth, and making can-dles, soap, butter, and cheese. New factories such asthe textile mills of New England undermined theseactivities, cranking out manufactured goods muchfaster than they could be made by hand at home. Yetthese same factories offered employment to thevery young women whose work they were displac-ing. Factory jobs promised greater economic inde-pendence for women, as well as the means to buythe manufactured products of the new marketeconomy.

“Factory girls” typically toiled six days a week,earning a pittance for dreary, limb-numbing, ear-splitting stints of twelve or thirteen hours—“fromdark to dark.’’ The Boston Associates, nonetheless,proudly pointed to their textile mill at Lowell, Mass-achusetts, as a showplace factory. The workers were

virtually all New England farm girls, carefully super-vised on and off the job by watchful matrons.Escorted regularly to church from their companyboardinghouses and forbidden to form unions, theyhad few opportunities to share dissatisfactions overtheir grueling working conditions.

But factory jobs of any kind were still unusual for women. Opportunities for women to be eco-nomically self-supporting were scarce and consistedmainly of nursing, domestic service, and especiallyteaching. The dedicated Catharine Beecher, unmar-ried daughter of a famous preacher and sister of Har-riet Beecher Stowe, tirelessly urged women to enterthe teaching profession. She eventually succeededbeyond her dreams, as men left teaching for otherlines of work and schoolteaching became a thor-oughly “feminized’’ occupation. Other work “oppor-tunities’’ for women beckoned in household service.Perhaps one white family in ten employed servantsat midcentury, most of whom were poor white,immigrant, or black women. About 10 percent ofwhite women were working for pay outside their

306 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

Violence broke out along the New Yorkwaterfront in 1836 when laborers striking forhigher wages attacked “scabs.’’ Philip Hone’sdiary records:

“The Mayor, who acts with vigour andfirmness, ordered out the troops, who arenow on duty with loaded arms. . . . Thesemeasures have restored order for thepresent, but I fear the elements of disorderare at work; the bands of Irish and otherforeigners, instigated by the mischievouscouncils of the trades-union and othercombinations of discontented men, areacquiring strength and importance which will ere long be difficult to quell.’’

A woman worker in the Lowell mills wrote afriend in 1844:

“You wish to know minutely of our hours oflabor. We go in [to the mill] at five o’clock; atseven we come out to breakfast; at half-pastseven we return to our work, and stay untilhalf-past twelve. At one, or quarter-past onefour months in the year, we return to ourwork, and stay until seven at night. Then theevening is all our own, which is more thansome laboring girls can say, who thinknothing is more tedious than a factory life.’’

Another worker wrote in 1845:

“I am here, among strangers—a factory girl—yes, a factory girl; that name which isthought so degrading by many, though, intruth, I neither see nor feel its degradation.But here I am. I toil day after day in the noisymill. When the bell calls I must go: and mustI always stay here, and spend my days withinthese pent-up walls, with this ceaseless dinmy only music?’’

own homes in 1850, and estimates are that about 20percent of all women had been employed at sometime prior to marriage.

The vast majority of workingwomen were single.Upon marriage, they left their paying jobs and tookup their new work (without wages) as wives andmothers. In the home they were enshrined in a “cultof domesticity,’’ a widespread cultural creed that glo-rified the customary functions of the homemaker.From their pedestal, married women commandedimmense moral power, and they increasingly madedecisions that altered the character of the familyitself.

Women’s changing roles and the spreading Industrial Revolution brought some importantchanges in the life of the nineteenth-centuryhome—the traditional “women’s sphere.’’ Love, notparental “arrangement,’’ more and more frequentlydetermined the choice of a spouse—yet parentsoften retained the power of veto. Families thus

became more closely knit and affectionate, provid-ing the emotional refuge that made the threateningimpersonality of big-city industrialism tolerable tomany people.

Most striking, families grew smaller. The aver-age household had nearly six members at the end ofthe eighteenth century but fewer than five membersa century later. The “fertility rate,’’ or number ofbirths among women age fourteen to forty-five,dropped sharply among white women in the yearsafter the Revolution and, in the course of the nine-teenth century as a whole, fell by half. Birth controlwas still a taboo topic for polite conversation, andcontraceptive technology was primitive, but clearlysome form of family limitation was being practicedquietly and effectively in countless families, ruraland urban alike. Women undoubtedly played a largepart—perhaps the leading part—in decisions tohave fewer children. This newly assertive role forwomen has been called “domestic feminism,’’

Working Women 307

because it signified the growing power and inde-pendence of women, even while they remainedwrapped in the “cult of domesticity.’’

Smaller families, in turn, meant child-centeredfamilies, since where children are fewer, parents canlavish more care on them individually. Europeanvisitors to the United States in the nineteenth cen-tury often complained about the unruly behavior ofAmerican “brats.’’ But though American parentsmay have increasingly spared the rod, they did notspoil their children. Lessons were enforced by punishments other than the hickory stick. When the daughter of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe

neglected to do her homework, her mother sent herfrom the dinner table and gave her “only bread andwater in her own apartment.’’ What Europeans sawas permissiveness was in reality the consequence ofan emerging new idea of child-rearing, in which thechild’s will was not to be simply broken, but rathershaped.

In the little republic of the family, as in theRepublic at large, good citizens were raised not to bemeekly obedient to authority, but to be independ-ent individuals who could make their own decisionson the basis of internalized moral standards. Thusthe outlines of the “modern’’ family were clear bymidcentury: it was small, affectionate, and child-centered, and it provided a special arena for the tal-ents of women. Feminists of a later day might decrythe stifling atmosphere of the nineteenth-centuryhome, but to many women of the time, it seemed abig step upward from the conditions of grindingtoil—often alongside men in the fields—in whichtheir mothers had lived.

Western Farmers Reap a Revolution in the Fields

As smoke-belching factories altered the eastern sky-line, flourishing farms were changing the face of the West. The trans-Allegheny region—especially theOhio-Indiana-Illinois tier—was fast becoming thenation’s breadbasket. Before long it would become agranary to the world.

Pioneer families first hacked a clearing out of theforest and then planted their painfully furrowedfields to corn. The yellow grain was amazingly versa-tile. It could be fed to hogs (“corn on the hoof’’) ordistilled into liquor (“corn in the bottle’’). Both theseproducts could be transported more easily than thebulky grain itself, and they became the early westernfarmer’s staple market items. So many hogs werebutchered, traded, or shipped at Cincinnati that thecity was known as the “Porkopolis’’ of the West.

Most western produce was at first floated downthe Ohio-Mississippi River system, to feed the lustyappetite of the booming Cotton Kingdom. But west-ern farmers were as hungry for profits as southernslaves and planters were for food. These tillers,spurred on by the easy availability of seeminglyboundless acres, sought ways to bring more andmore land into cultivation.

308 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

Ingenious inventors came to their aid. One ofthe first obstacles that frustrated the farmers was thethickly matted soil of the West, which snagged andsnapped fragile wooden plows. John Deere of Illinoisin 1837 finally produced a steel plow that broke thevirgin soil. Sharp and effective, it was also lightenough to be pulled by horses, rather than oxen.

In the 1830s Virginia-born Cyrus McCormickcontributed the most wondrous contraption of all: amechanical mower-reaper. The clattering cogs ofMcCormick’s horse-drawn machine were to thewestern farmers what the cotton gin was to thesouthern planters. Seated on his red-chariot reaper,a single husbandman could do the work of five menwith sickles and scythes.

No other American invention cut so wide aswath. It made ambitious capitalists out of humbleplowmen, who now scrambled for more acres onwhich to plant more fields of billowing wheat. Sub-sistence farming gave way to production for themarket, as large-scale (“extensive’’), specialized,cash-crop agriculture came to dominate the trans-Allegheny West. With it followed mounting indebt-edness, as farmers bought more land and moremachinery to work it. Soon hustling farmer-businesspeople were annually harvesting a largercrop than the South—which was becoming self-

sufficient in food production—could devour. Theybegan to dream of markets elsewhere—in themushrooming factory towns of the East or acrossthe faraway Atlantic. But they were still largely land-locked. Commerce moved north and south on theriver systems. Before it could begin to move east-west in bulk, a transportation revolution wouldhave to occur.

Highways and Steamboats

In 1789, when the Constitution was launched, prim-itive methods of travel were still in use. Waterbornecommerce, whether along the coast or on the rivers,was slow, uncertain, and often dangerous. Stage-coaches and wagons lurched over bone-shakingroads. Passengers would be routed out to lay nearbyfence rails across muddy stretches, and occasionallyhorses would drown in muddy pits while wagonssank slowly out of sight.

Cheap and efficient carriers were imperative ifraw materials were to be transported to factoriesand if finished products were to be delivered to con-sumers. On December 3, 1803, a firm in Providence,Rhode Island, sent a shipment of yarn to a point

Advances in Agriculture 309

sixty miles away, notifying the purchaser that theconsignment could be expected to arrive in “thecourse of the winter.’’

A promising improvement came in the 1790s,when a private company completed the LancasterTurnpike in Pennsylvania. It was a broad, hard-surfaced highway that thrust sixty-two miles west-ward from Philadelphia to Lancaster. As driversapproached the tollgate, they were confronted witha barrier of sharp pikes, which were turned asidewhen they paid their toll. Hence the term turnpike.

The Lancaster Turnpike proved to be a highlysuccessful venture, returning as high as 15 percentannual dividends to its stockholders. It attracted a rich trade to Philadelphia and touched off a turnpike-building boom that lasted about twentyyears. It also stimulated western development. Theturnpikes beckoned to the canvas-covered Con-estoga wagons, whose creakings heralded a west-ward advance that would know no real retreat.

Western road building, always expensive,encountered many obstacles. One pesky roadblockwas the noisy states’ righters, who opposed federalaid to local projects. Eastern states also protestedagainst being bled of their populations by the westward-reaching arteries.

Westerners scored a notable triumph in 1811when the federal government began to construct

the elongated National Road, or Cumberland Road.This highway ultimately stretched from Cumber-land, in western Maryland, to Vandalia, in Illinois, adistance of 591 miles. The War of 1812 interruptedconstruction, and states’ rights shackles on internalimprovements hampered federal grants. But thethoroughfare was belatedly brought to its destina-tion in 1852 by a combination of aid from the statesand the federal government.

The steamboat craze, which overlapped theturnpike craze, was touched off by an ambitiouspainter-engineer named Robert Fulton. He installeda powerful steam engine in a vessel that posteritycame to know as the Clermont but that a dubiouspublic dubbed “Fulton’s Folly.’’ On a historic day in1807, the quaint little ship, belching sparks from itssingle smokestack, churned steadily from New YorkCity up the Hudson River toward Albany. It madethe run of 150 miles in 32 hours.

The success of the steamboat was sensational.People could now in large degree defy wind, wave,tide, and downstream current. Within a few years,Fulton had changed all of America’s navigablestreams into two-way arteries, thereby doublingtheir carrying capacity. Hitherto keelboats had beenpushed up the Mississippi, with quivering poles andraucous profanity, at less than one mile an hour—aprocess that was prohibitively expensive. Now the

310 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

steamboats could churn rapidly against the current,ultimately attaining speeds in excess of ten miles anhour. The mighty Mississippi had met its master.

By 1820 there were some sixty steamboats on theMississippi and its tributaries; by 1860 about onethousand, some of them luxurious river palaces.Keen rivalry among the swift and gaudy steamers ledto memorable races. Excited passengers would urgethe captain to pile on wood at the risk of bursting theboilers, which all too often exploded, with tragicresults for the floating firetraps.

Chugging steamboats played a vital role in theopening of the West and South, both of which wererichly endowed with navigable rivers. Like bunchesof grapes on a vine, population clustered along thebanks of the broad-flowing streams. Cotton growersand other farmers made haste to take up and turnover the now-profitable virgin soil. Not only couldthey float their produce out to market, but, hardlyless important, they could ship in at low cost their shoes, hardware, and other manufacturednecessities.

The Transportation Revolution 311

St. Louis

Indianapolis Springfield

Baltimore

LancasterWheeling

Terre HauteColumbus

PhiladelphiaCumberland

Vandalia

IOWA

WIS.

MO.

ILL.IND.

MICH.

OHIO

KY.

VA.MD.

N.J.

DEL.

N.Y.

PA.

Miss

issippi

R.

Ohio

R.

Susquehanna R.

Delaware R.

Cumberland RoadMain connectionsLancaster Turnpike

Cumberland (National) Roadand Main ConnectionsNote also the Lancaster Turnpike.

“Clinton’s Big Ditch’’ in New York

A canal-cutting craze paralleled the boom in turn-pikes and steamboats. A few canals had been builtaround falls and elsewhere in colonial days, butambitious projects lay in the future. ResourcefulNew Yorkers, cut off from federal aid by states’righters, themselves dug the Erie Canal, linking theGreat Lakes with the Hudson River. They wereblessed with the driving leadership of GovernorDeWitt Clinton, whose grandiose project was scoff-ingly called “Clinton’s Big Ditch’’ or “the Governor’sGutter.’’

Begun in 1817, the canal eventually ribboned363 miles. On its completion in 1825, a garlandedcanal boat glided from Buffalo, on Lake Erie, to theHudson River and on to New York harbor. There,with colorful ceremony, Governor Clinton emptieda cask of water from the lake to symbolize “the mar-riage of the waters.’’

The water from Clinton’s keg baptized theEmpire State. Mule-drawn passengers and bulkyfreight could now be handled with thrift and dis-patch, at the dizzy speed of five miles an hour. Thecost of shipping a ton of grain from Buffalo to NewYork City fell from $100 to $5, and the time of transitfrom about twenty days to six.

Ever-widening economic ripples followed thecompletion of the Erie Canal. The value of landalong the route skyrocketed, and new cities—suchas Rochester and Syracuse—blossomed. Industry inthe state boomed. The new profitability of farmingin the Old Northwest—notably in Ohio, Michigan,Indiana, and Illinois—attracted thousands of Euro-pean immigrants to the unaxed and untaxed landsnow available. Flotillas of steamships soon plied the Great Lakes, connecting with canal barges atBuffalo. Interior waterside villages like Cleveland,Detroit, and Chicago exploded into mighty cities.

Other profound economic and political changesfollowed the canal’s completion. The price of pota-toes in New York City was cut in half, and manydispirited New England farmers, no longer able toface the ruinous competition, abandoned theirrocky holdings and went elsewhere. Some becamemill hands, thus speeding the industrialization ofAmerica. Others, finding it easy to go west over theErie Canal, took up new farmland south of the GreatLakes, where they were joined by thousands of NewYorkers and other northerners. Still others shifted tofruit, vegetable, and dairy farming. The transfor-mations in the Northeast—canal consequences—showed how long-established local market struc-tures could be swamped by the emerging behemothof a continental economy.

312 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

Erie Canal and Main Branches The Erie Canal system, and others like it, tapped thefabulous agricultural potential of the Midwest, whilecanal construction and maintenance providedemployment for displaced eastern farmers squeezedoff the land by competition from their moreproductive midwestern cousins. The transportationrevolution thus simultaneously expanded the nation’sacreage under cultivation and speeded the shift of thework force from agricultural to manufacturing and“service’’ occupations. In 1820 more than three-quarters of American workers labored on farms; by1850 only a little more than half of them were soemployed. (Also see the map on the top of page 313.)

1. Genesee Valley Canal2. Oswego Canal3. Black River Canal4. Chenango Canal5. Champlain Canal

C A N A D A

Erie Canal

Lake Ontario

Lake Champlain

Niagara Falls Mohawk R.

Hud

son

R.Lake Erie

SchenectadyTroy

Albany

UticaRome

Syracuse

Carthage

Lockport

Buffalo

Olean

Oswego

Binghamton

Rochester

New York

1

2

3

4

5

N.J.

CONN.

MASS.

VT.

NEW YORK

PENNSYLVANIA

The Iron Horse

The most significant contribution to the develop-ment of such an economy proved to be the railroad.It was fast, reliable, cheaper than canals to con-struct, and not frozen over in winter. Able to goalmost anywhere, even through the Allegheny bar-rier, it defied terrain and weather. The first railroadappeared in the United States in 1828. By 1860, onlythirty-two years later, the United States boastedthirty thousand miles of railroad track, three-fourths of it in the rapidly industrializing North.

At first the railroad faced strong oppositionfrom vested interests, especially canal backers. Anx-ious to protect its investment in the Erie Canal, theNew York legislature in 1833 prohibited the railroadsfrom carrying freight—at least temporarily. Earlyrailroads were also considered a dangerous publicmenace, for flying sparks could set fire to nearbyhaystacks and houses, and appalling railway acci-dents could turn the wooden “miniature hells’’ intoflaming funeral pyres for their riders.

Railroad pioneers had to overcome other obsta-cles as well. Brakes were so feeble that the engineermight miss the station twice, both arriving andbacking up. Arrivals and departures were conjec-tural, and numerous differences in gauge (the dis-tance between the rails) meant frequent changes of

Canals and Railroads 313

Erie CanalDelaware and Raritan CanalPennsylvania CanalOhio and Erie Canal

(Under construction)Chesapeake and Ohio CanalWabash and Erie CanalMiami and Erie Canal

Lake Huron

Lake

Mic

higa

n

Lake Erie

Lake Ontario

Toledo

Evansville

Portsmouth

Cincinnati

New YorkNew Brunswick

Baltimore

Washington

Trenton

AlbanyTroy

Buffalo

Pittsburgh

Cumberland

Cleveland

Columbia Philadelphia

ATLANTIC

OCEANOhi

oR.

MASS.

R.I.

MAINEVT.

NEW YORK

N.J.

CONN.

DEL.

PENNSYLVANIA

VIRGINIA

MD.

WIS.

ILL.OHIO

INDIANA

MICHIGAN

N.H.

Principal Canals in 1840 Note that the canals mainly facilitatedeast-west traffic, especially along thegreat Lake Erie artery. No comparablenetwork of canals existed in the South—a disparity that helps to explain northernsuperiority in the Civil War that cametwo decades later.

Railroads, 1850

Houston New Orleans

Jacksonville

SavannahCharleston

Jackson

Memphis

Nashville

Louisville

Cincinnati

St. Louis

St. Joseph

Chicago

Detroit

Pittsburgh

Richmond

Washington,D.C.

PhiladelphiaNew York

Boston

BRITISH NORTH AMERICA�(CANADA)

Railroads built 1850 – 1860

The Railroad Revolution Note the explosion of new railroad construction in the 1850sand its heavy concentration in the North.

trains for passengers. In 1840 there were seventransfers between Philadelphia and Charleston. But gauges gradually became standardized, betterbrakes did brake, safety devices were adopted, andthe Pullman “sleeping palace’’ was introduced in1859. America at long last was being bound togetherwith braces of iron, later to be made of steel.

Cables, Clippers, and Pony Riders

Other forms of transportation and communicationwere binding together the United States and theworld. A crucial development came in 1858 whenCyrus Field, called “the greatest wire puller in his-tory,’’ finally stretched a cable under the deep NorthAtlantic waters from Newfoundland to Ireland.

Although this initial cable went dead after threeweeks of public rejoicing, a heavier cable laid in1866 permanently linked the American and Euro-pean continents.

The United States merchant marine encoun-tered rough sailing during much of the early nine-teenth century. American vessels had beenrepeatedly laid up by the embargo, the War of 1812,and the panics of 1819 and 1837. American navaldesigners made few contributions to maritimeprogress. A pioneer American steamer, the Savan-nah, had crept across the Atlantic in 1819, but itused sail most of the time and was pursued for a dayby a British captain who thought it afire.

In the 1840s and 1850s, a golden age dawned for American shipping. Yankee naval yards, notablyDonald McKay’s at Boston, began to send down theways sleek new craft called clipper ships. Long, nar-

314 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

row, and majestic, they glided across the sea undertowering masts and clouds of canvas. In a fairbreeze, they could outrun any steamer.

The stately clippers sacrificed cargo space forspeed, and their captains made killings by haulinghigh-value cargoes in record times. They wrestedmuch of the tea-carrying trade between the Far Eastand Britain from their slower-sailing British com-petitors, and they sped thousands of impatientadventurers to the goldfields of California and Australia.

But the hour of glory for the clipper was rela-tively brief. On the eve of the Civil War, the Britishhad clearly won the world race for maritime ascen-dancy with their iron tramp steamers (“teakettles’’).Although slower and less romantic than the clipper,these vessels were steadier, roomier, more reliable,and hence more profitable.

No story of rapid American communicationwould be complete without including the Far West. By 1858 horse-drawn overland stagecoaches,immortalized by Mark Twain’s Roughing It, were

a familiar sight. Their dusty tracks stretched fromthe bank of the muddy Missouri River clear to California.

Even more dramatic was the Pony Express,established in 1860 to carry mail speedily the twothousand lonely miles from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. Daring, lightweight rid-ers, leaping onto wiry ponies saddled at stations

Communication and Trade 315

As late as 1877, stagecoach passengers wereadvised in print,

“Never shoot on the road as the noise mightfrighten the horses. . . . Don’t point outwhere murders have been committed,especially if there are women passengers. . . .Expect annoyances, discomfort, and somehardships.’’

approximately ten miles apart, could make the tripin an amazing ten days. These unarmed horsemengalloped on, summer or winter, day or night,through dust or snow, past Indians and bandits. Thespeeding postmen missed only one trip, though thewhole enterprise lost money heavily and foldedafter only eighteen legend-leaving months.

Just as the clippers had succumbed to steam, sowere the express riders unhorsed by Samuel Morse’sclacking keys, which began tapping messages toCalifornia in 1861. The swift ships and the fleetponies ushered out a dying technology of wind andmuscle. In the future, machines would be in thesaddle.

The Transport Web Binds the Union

More than anything else, the desire of the East to tapthe West stimulated the “transportation revolution.’’Until about 1830 the produce of the western regiondrained southward to the cotton belt or to theheaped-up wharves of New Orleans. The steamboatvastly aided the reverse flow of finished goods upthe watery western arteries and helped bind West

and South together. But the truly revolutionarychanges in commerce and communication came inthe three decades before the Civil War, as canals andrailroad tracks radiated out from the East, across theAlleghenies and into the blossoming heartland. Theditch-diggers and tie-layers were attempting noth-ing less than a conquest of nature itself. They wouldoffset the “natural’’ flow of trade on the interiorrivers by laying down an impressive grid of “internalimprovements.’’

The builders succeeded beyond their wildestdreams. The Mississippi was increasingly robbed ofits traffic, as goods moved eastward on chuggingtrains, puffing lake boats, and mule-tugged canalbarges. Governor Clinton had in effect picked up themighty Father of Waters and flung it over theAlleghenies, forcing it to empty into the sea at NewYork City. By the 1840s the city of Buffalo handledmore western produce than New Orleans. Between1836 and 1860, grain shipments through Buffaloincreased a staggering sixtyfold. New York Citybecame the seaboard queen of the nation, a giganticport through which a vast hinterland poured itswealth and to which it daily paid economic tribute.

By the eve of the Civil War, a truly continentaleconomy had emerged. The principle of division of

316 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

Main Routes West Before theCivil War Mark Twain describedhis stagecoach trip to California inthe 1860s: “We began to get intocountry, now, threaded here andthere with little streams. These hadhigh, steep banks on each side, andevery time we flew down one bankand scrambled up the other, ourparty inside got mixed somewhat.First we would all be down in a pileat the forward end of the stage, . . . and in a second we would shootto the other end, and stand on ourheads. And . . . as the dust rosefrom the tumult, we would allsneeze in chorus, and the majorityof us would grumble, and probablysay some hasty thing, like: ‘Takeyour elbow out of my ribs!—can’tyou quit crowding?’”

Colu mbia R.

ColoradoR.

Mis

siss

ippi

R.

Snak e R.

Missouri

R.

Platte R.

Mississippi R.

Arkansa s R.

PACIFICOCEAN

Gulf of Mexico

GreatSalt Lake

Omaha

St. JosephSt. LouisSalt Lake City

Portland

San Diego

FortKearny

Santa Fe

Independence

FortLaramie

Sacramento(Sutter's Fort)

San Francisco

Los Angeles

FortSmith

Cut-off

SouthPass

Oregon Trail

California Trail

Pony Express overland mail

Mormon Trail

Santa Fe Trail

Spanish Trail

labor, which spelled productivity and profits in thefactory, applied on a national scale as well. Eachregion now specialized in a particular type of eco-nomic activity. The South raised cotton for export toNew England and Britain; the West grew grain andlivestock to feed factory workers in the East and inEurope; the East made machines and textiles for theSouth and the West.

The economic pattern thus woven had fatefulpolitical and military implications. Many southern-ers regarded the Mississippi as a silver chain thatnaturally linked together the upper valley states andthe Cotton Kingdom. They were convinced, assecession approached, that some or all of thesestates would have to secede with them or be stran-gled. But they overlooked the man-made links thatnow bound the upper Mississippi Valley to the Eastin intimate commercial union. Southern rebelswould have to fight not only Northern armies butthe tight bonds of an interdependent continentaleconomy. Economically, the two northerly sectionswere Siamese twins.

The Market Revolution

No less revolutionary than the political upheavals ofthe antebellum era was the “market revolution” thattransformed a subsistence economy of scatteredfarms and tiny workshops into a national network ofindustry and commerce. As more and more Ameri-cans—mill workers as well as farmhands, women aswell as men—linked their economic fate to the bur-geoning market economy, the self-sufficient house-holds of colonial days were transformed. Mostfamilies had once raised all their own food, spuntheir own wool, and bartered with their neighborsfor the few necessities they could not make them-selves. In growing numbers they now scattered towork for wages in the mills, or they planted just afew crops for sale at market and used the money tobuy goods made by strangers in far-off factories. Asstore-bought fabrics, candles, and soap replacedhomemade products, a quiet revolution occurred in the household division of labor and status.

Forging a Continental Economy 317

Traditional women’s work was rendered superfluousand devalued. The home itself, once a center of eco-nomic production in which all family memberscooperated, grew into a place of refuge from theworld of work, a refuge that became increasingly thespecial and separate sphere of women.

Revolutionary advances in manufacturing andtransportation brought increased prosperity to allAmericans, but they also widened the gulf betweenthe rich and the poor. Millionaires had been rare inthe early days of the Republic, but by the eve of theCivil War, several specimens of colossal financialsuccess were strutting across the national stage.Spectacular was the case of fur-trader and realestate speculator John Jacob Astor, who left anestate of $30 million on his death in 1848.

Cities bred the greatest extremes of economicinequality. Unskilled workers, then as always, faredworst. Many of them came to make up a floatingmass of “drifters,’’ buffeted from town to town by theshifting prospects for menial jobs. These wanderingworkers accounted at various times for up to halfthe population of the brawling industrial centers.

Although their numbers were large, they left littlebehind them but the homely fruits of their transientlabor. Largely unstoried and unsung, they areamong the forgotten men and women of Americanhistory.

Many myths about “social mobility’’ grew upover the buried memories of these unfortunate daylaborers. Mobility did exist in industrializing Amer-ica—but not in the proportions that legend oftenportrays. Rags-to-riches success stories were rela-tively few.

Yet America, with its dynamic society and wide-open spaces, undoubtedly provided more “opportu-nity’’ than did the contemporary countries of the OldWorld—which is why millions of immigrants packedtheir bags and headed for New World shores. More-over, a rising tide lifts all boats, and the improvementin overall standards of living was real. Wages forunskilled workers in a labor-hungry America roseabout 1 percent a year from 1820 to 1860. This gen-eral prosperity helped defuse the potential classconflict that might otherwise have exploded—andthat did explode in many European countries.

318 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

Industry and Agriculture, 1860 Still a nation of farmers on the eve of the Civil War, Americans hadnevertheless made an impressive start on their own Industrial Revolution, especially in the Northeast.

Chronology 319

Chronology

c. 1750 Industrial Revolution begins in Britain

1791 Samuel Slater builds first U.S. textile factory

1793 Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin

1798 Whitney develops interchangeable parts for muskets

1807 Robert Fulton’s first steamboatEmbargo spurs American manufacturing

1811 Cumberland Road construction begins

1817 Erie Canal construction begins

1825 Erie Canal completed

1828 First railroad in United States

1830s Cyrus McCormick invents mechanical mower-reaper

1834 Anti-Catholic riot in Boston

1837 John Deere develops steel plow

1840 President Van Buren establishes ten-hour day for federal employees

1842 Massachusetts declares labor unions legal in Commonwealth v. Hunt

c. 1843-1868 Era of clipper ships

1844 Samuel Morse invents telegraphAnti-Catholic riot in Philadelphia

1845-1849 Potato famine in Ireland

1846 Elias Howe invents sewing machine

1848 First general incorporation laws in New YorkDemocratic revolutions collapse in Germany

1849 Order of the Star-Spangled Banner (Know-Nothing party) formed

1852 Cumberland Road completed

1858 Cyrus Field lays first transatlantic cable

1860 Pony Express established

1861 First transcontinental telegraph

1866 Permanent transatlantic cable established

For further reading, see page A10 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.