The Market RevolutionNorth

1815-1860

Study Guide: Identifications

• Transportation, Market & Industrial Revolutions• Immigration and Scapegoat• Status of artisan• Rhode Island and Waltham System• Cult of Domesticity• Purity Crusade• Universal White Male suffrage• 2nd Great Awakening

Study Guide: Questions

• What marked the increasing industrialization in the US economy between 1815 – 1860?

• How and why did inequalities increase among the rich, the middle class and the working class?

Changes that allowed for the Industrial Revolution

• Transportation Revolution– Improvements in transportation made that transformation

possible• Federal, state and corporate investments in transportation

improvements • Roads, Canals, Railroads

• Market Revolution– Transition from domestic markets to for distant markets

• Industrial Revolution– Domestic hand labor to machine and factory output

• Immigration – Cheap and exploitable labor

Immigration

• Political turmoil and Famine brought Massive immigration

– Irish Potato Famine 1845-1846• 2.5 Million (30% of Ireland’s population)

– German immigration 1840-60• 4.2 Million

• Provided Cheap/Exploitable Labor• Used to scapegoat political, economic & social

issues

“The Bog Trotters”

The Poor House from Galway

“The Irish fill our prisons, our poor houses, scratch a convict or a pauper, and the chances are that you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic. Putting them on a boat and sending them home would end crime in this country”

The Great Fear of the PeriodThat Uncle Sam is Swallowed by

Foreigners

The Problem Solved

Thomas Nast Cartoon,

1870Expresses

the worry that the Irish Catholics

threatened American Freedom

Artisan Status

• Early industry & The Putting Out System• Status of Artisan:

– Owned tools of production– Owned shops– Managed time and produce

– skilled workers– Independence– prestige

Shoe Makers

Textile Industries & Industrial Espionage

• Slater’s Rhode Island System – Water powered spinning machine– The Rhode Island System

• The countryside factory towns & Labor of Farmer’s daughters

• Lowell’s Waltham System • Machines that turned raw cotton into finished cloth

– Boston Associates Co. 1813• Fully mechanized• By the 1830s - Unskilled, female labor

Daguerreotype of a young mill girl, c. 1850, Massachusetts

Middlesex Company Woolen Mills 1848

Urban Industry

• Industrial Revolution and the Widening gap between the rich and the poor– By 1835 cities were serving commercial

agriculture and factory towns that produced for largely rural domestic market.

• Creation of the Urban working class– In the cities there was little concern for

creating a classless industrial society.

Class Hierarchy

• The richest men

– importers and exporters and took control of banks and insurance companies and made great fortunes in urban real estate

• Growing middle class

– Commercial Class• Wholesale and retail merchants, • lawyers, salesmen, auctioneers, bookkeepers and accountants • clerks on the bottom creating a white-collar class to cater to the new

emerging consumer society.

Middle Class Ideal

Consumer goodsSymbols of their middle class status

Notions of gentility distinction between manual and non manual work

Cult of Domesticity• The separation of work and

home

– New sense of class-consciousness.

• Middle class fathers left for their jobs while mothers governed households.

• Reduction in size of families

• 1820s ministers and female writers elevated the family role of middle class women into a cult of domesticity

Cult of Domesticity

– Biological difference determined separate social roles for men and women.

– Men: • strong, aggressive and

ambitious, intelligent• Place in business and

politics. – Women:

• Kind, pure, emotional, moral

• Place to preserve religion and morality in the home and family

“The Hands”

• Producers of consumer goods • The “hands”• Growth in Demand• Growth in Working class

– Shoemaking, tailoring and the building trade were divided into skilled and semiskilled segments and farmed out to subcontractors who could turn a profit by cutting labor costs

Rising Standard of Living

• After 1815 – per capita income doubled– living standards rose– Houses: larger, better furnished, heated. – Food: more plentiful and varied

• The cost:– Half of all adult white males without land– wealth had become more concentrated.

• In 1800 the richest 10 percent of Americans owned 40-50% of the national wealth, by the 1850s they owned 70%. In the cities they owned over 80%.

Lowered Standard of Living

• First Slums appeared in the mid 1800s – Huge influx of immigrants and creation of

exploitable labor force– Overcrowded Housing– Contaminated water supplies– Lack of Sewage– Disease and high mortality rates

• Cholera and Typhus

Five Points District

Evangelical Crusades

• Early 19th C ministers bolstered doctrine of separate spheres– Clerical endorsement of female moral superiority in

exchange for women’s activism• Decline of clerical authority in society

• Opposed forces that seemed to act against women’s interests– Materialism– Intemperance– Licentiousness

Purity Crusade

• Traditionally: both men and women wee sexual beings, women weaker willed, lustful and licentious and insatiable

• Purity Crusade: women lacked sexual feeling, lust and carnality became a part of men’s sphere– Etiquette manuals counseled to deter male

advances

Professional Medicine & Women’s Sexuality

• Women were Asexual beings– Defined by their sex & sexual roles, yet did not desire

it– Dr Alcott, “Women, as is well known, in a natural

state…seldom if ever makes any of those advances, which clearly indicates sexual desire and for this very plain reason, she does not feel them.”

– Only “low” women suffered from the indignity of sexual desire

• Long periods of abstinence proper• Masturbation damaged future offspring, and

caused “mania” and “idiocy” on the guilty party

Middle & Upper class invalids

• Chronic invalidism among women

• Middle class culture idealized female debility

• 1800’s doctors came close the defining femaleness as an illness itself

Twin Revolutions

• Universal White Male Suffrage Movement– Suffrage extended to white males (1807-

1860’s)

• By the 1800s race and gender began to replace wealth and status as the basis for defining the limits of political participation

Twin Revolutions

• Second Great Awakening (1800-1840)

– “Salvation open to all” reinforced the legitimacy of “one man, one vote”

– Women: provided a welcomed release from “being treated like beasts of burden and drudges of domineering masters”

– Blacks: advocated spiritual and secular equality

• Platform to directly challenge slavery

Social Changes

• Extension of white male suffrage

• Development of common schools– By 1850 ½ women gained literacy

• Evangelicalism – democratized salvation

• Development of the Abolition movement out of the evangelical revivals

• Abolition movement split into the Women’s movement

New York 1837

“Foreigners and aliens to our

government and laws, strangers to our institutions are permitted to flock to

this land and in a few years are endowed

with all the privileges of citizens, but we

native born Americans…are

most of us shut out.”