8. The Market Revolution

The nation was called Metropoli.

The Museum of gies of the Industrial Revolution was integrated into a new commercial economy by Americans.

The nation was changed by a market revolution.

There was a revolution in the country.

More and more farmers are growing crops for profit.
There were many factories and cities in the North.
Enormous fortunes came true.
A new class of people.
The MaRkeT RevoluTIon 199 economy freed men and women from their dependence on servitude as more men and women worked in the cash.

There were costs to the revolution.

The demand for southern cotton increased as northern textile factories grew.
Farmers from the north were bound to markets and bosses.
Americans were trapped in endless cycles of poverty because of low wages.
Some workers worked thirteen hours a day, six days a week.
Others worked in slavery.
Textile mills in the north turned cotton into cheap cloth.
The demand for slave-grown cotton was fueled by the factories of the northern states and their banks provided the financing that ensured the profitability and continued existence of the American slave system.
As the economy advanced, the market revolution wrenched the United States in new directions as it became a nation of free labor and slavery, of wealth and inequality, and of endless promise and untold perils.

The growth of the American economy changed American life before the Civil War.

Americans are more likely to produce goods for sale than for consumption.
A larger exchange network was enabled by improved transportation.
Labor-saving technology allowed the separation of the public and domestic spheres.
The market revolution fulfilled the expectations of the revolutionary generation but introduced troubling new trends.
Class conflict, child labor, accelerated immigration, and the expansion of slavery followed.
These strains required new family arrangements.

American commerce had stopped during the 18th century.

During the French Revolutionary Wars, American farmers exported food to Europe.
The value of America's exports increased from $20.2 million in 1790 to $108.3 million by 1807.2, but internal transportation costs hindered economic development within the United States.
In 1816, the cost of moving one ton of goods across the Atlantic Ocean was $9.

The price of land carriage is too high to allow profitable production of American manufactures according to the Senate Committee Report.

In the wake of the War of 1812, Americans rushed to build new infrastructure.

President James Madison told Congress that the roads and canals should be executed under national authority.
State governments continued to sponsor the greatest improvements in American transportation, but the federal government's annual expenditures on internal improvements climbed to a yearly average of $1,323,000 by Andrew Jackson's presidency.
The number of state-chartered banks increased from 1 in 1783 to 1,371 in 1860.
Economic growth went on unevenly.

The spread of paper currency eliminates the physical signifiers of wealth that are familiar to the colonial generation.

The early period of banking was rife with counterfeit bills.
Americans were always on the lookout for the "confidence man" and other deceptive characters in the urban landscape.
Prostitution and con men look similar to honest Americans.

Advice literature offered strategies for avoiding hypocrisy for young men and women.

duplicity in the public sphere made intimacy more important in the domestic sphere.
Fear of the confidence man, counterfeit bills, and a pending bust created anxiety in the new capitalist economy.
Americans didn't blame the logic of their new commercial system for the depressions.

The lands west of the Appalachian Mountains were opened up by the transportation revolution.

Margaret Dwight left New Haven, Connecticut, in a wagon headed for Ohio Territory in the 18th century.
She traveled less than 500 miles but took six weeks to complete.
She said the journey was terrible.
The roads were so rocky that they were almost impossible to navigate.
She concluded that the reason so few are willing to return from the Western country is because the journey is so bad.
In the 19th century, an English traveler traveled across the Allegheny Mountains from Cincinnati to the East Coast.
The first federally funded interstate infrastructure project was encountered by her coach at Wheeling, Virginia.
Her journey across the Alleghenies was enjoyable.
She said that she can't think of a better way to enjoy a botanical tour among the Alleghany Mountains.
She had a garden on the ninety miles of the National Road.
The pace of change only accelerated in the following years if the two decades between Margaret Dwight's and Frances Trollope's journeys transformed the young nation.
If a transportation revolution began with improved road networks, it soon incorporated even greater improvements in the ways people and goods moved across the landscape.

The Erie Canal was completed by New York State.

The engraving is based on the Atlantic Ocean.

The canal-building boom began in New York.

Two all-water links were created from Lake Erie to the Ohio River.

The first commercial steamboat service up and down the Hudson River in New York was established by Robert Fulton.

The waters of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers were filled by steamboats.
Downstream-only routes became two-way highways.
More than two hundred steamboats moved up and down western rivers by 1830.

Mary land was the location of the first long-distance rail line in the United States.

Half of the start-up funds for the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Rail Road Company were provided by Baltimore's city government and the state government of Maryland.
The B&O's founders thought of the line as a way to get the agricultural products of the trans-Appalachian West to an outlet on the bay.
In Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, and Charleston, South Carolina, citizens launched their own rail lines.
The MaRkeT RevoluTIon 203 nomic collapse made governments wary of such investments, but state and local governments provided the means for the bulk of this initial wave of railroad construction.
The railroad corporation became the most visible embodiment of corporate capitalism after the public origins of railroads were all but forgotten.

The web of rail, roads, and canals meant that few farmers in the Northeast or Midwest had trouble getting goods to urban markets.

Railroad development was slower in the South, but a combination of rail lines and rivers allowed cotton planters to transport their products to textile mills in the Northeast and in England.

The internal improvements spread infor mation.

The communications revolution followed the transportation revolution.
The limits of human communication were redefined by the telegraph.

The telegraph line stretching from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore was funded by Samuel Morse.

During the Mexican-American War, telegraph lines carried news of battlefield events to eastern newspapers within days.
The Battle of New Orleans took place nearly two weeks after the United States and Britain signed a peace treaty.

The lives of Americans were changed by the consequences of transportation and communication.

Farmers who used to produce most of their crops for their family are now going to the market.
They earned money for what they had previously eaten, and then they bought the goods they had previously made.
Market-based farmers soon accessed credit through eastern banks, which provided them with the opportunity to expand their enterprise but left them prone before the risk of catastrophic failure wrought by distant market forces.
In the Northeast and Midwest, ambitious farmers invested in new technologies that promised to increase the productivity of the limited labor supply.
There was an explosion of patents on agricultural technologies in the 19th century.
Cyrus McCormick's mechanical reaper, which partially mechanized wheat harvesting, and John Deere's steel-bladed plow were the most famous of these.

The market revolution encouraged the growth of cities and changed the lives of urban workers.

The bulk of the trade from the Great Lakes region was captured by the Erie Canal, making New York City the most important city in the country.

As the railroad hub of the western Great Lakes and Great Plains regions, Chicago rose as it became a center of trade.
The geographic center of the nation moved to the west.
The development of steam power and the exploitation of Pennsylvania coalfields shifted the center of American manufacturing.
New England was losing its competitive advantage by the 1830s.

The old, local, informal barter and trade was replaced by the cash economy.

The measure of economic worth was income.

Productivity and efficiency were not as important as income.

Cash allowed for impersonal economic relationships and new means of production.
Young workers might simply earn their wages, rather than receiving room and board and training as part of an apprenticeship.
The business corporation was a new form of economic organization.

Entrepreneurs who invested in early industrial endeavors were protected by the privileges of incorporated.

Directors and investors can avoid personal liability for company debts with a corporate charter.
The legal status of incorporated had been designed to give privileges to organizations embarking on expensive projects designed for the public good.
The corporation was new.
Many Americans distrusted these impersonal business organizations because their officers lacked personal responsibility while still carrying legal rights.
Limits were wanted by many.
In 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote that he hoped we would crush the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dared already to challenge our government to a trial of strength.
Still, there were suspicions.
In 1835, a group of journeymen in New Jersey publicly declared that they were against the idea of companies being incorporated for carrying on manual mechanical business.
Slave labor helped fuel the market revolution.
The vast new market economy spurred the expansion of the plantation South, despite the fact that textile mills worked by free labor.

States north of the Mason-Dixon Line began to abolish slavery in the early 19th century.

abolition was included in the 1777 state constitution of Vermont.
Children freed from slavery must serve an indenture term of twenty-eight years.
Defending the interests of northern masters and controlling another generation of black Americans was a part of Gradualism.
The last of the northern states to adopt gradual emancipation plans was New Jersey.
Many northern states only promised to liberate future children born to enslaved mothers during the immediate moment of jubilee.
In order to compensate the slaveholder's loss, such children remain in indentured servitude to their mother's master.
When James Mars protested the arrangement that kept him bound to his mother's master until he was 25, he risked being thrown in jail.
Escape was dangerous and rare.

As early as 1793 Congress made the harboring of a fugitive slave a federal crime.

Only a few northern slaveholders emancipated their own slaves.
Roughly one fifth of the white families in New York City owned slaves, and fewer than eighty slaveholders in the city voluntarily manumitted slaves between 1783 and 1800.
According to the 1830 census, at least 3,500 people were still enslaved in the North.
In New Jersey slavery lasted until after the Civil War, and in Connecticut it lasted until the late 19th century.
In 1790, the free black population was less than 60,000.
Black communities fought for civil rights.
African Americans in New England can vote and send their children to public schools.
Black citizens were granted property rights in most northern states.
African Americans owned land and businesses, founded mutual aid societies, established churches, and voted.

The slave population grew from less than 700,000 in 1790 to more than 1.5 million by 1820.

Cotton drove the process more than any other crop.
Eli Whitney's cotton gin, a simple hand-cranked device designed to mechanically remove sticky green seeds from short staple cotton, allowed southern planters to dramatically expand cotton production for the national and international markets.
Water-powered textile factories in England and the American Northeast turned cotton into cloth quickly.
The demand for cotton increased as a result of technology.
To the Mississippi River and beyond, white southerners expanded their cultivation.
The growth of cotton farther south and west increased the demand for human bondage, even though slavery had been growing less profitable in tobacco-planting regions like Virginia.

New slaves were invested by cotton planters.

Speculation about slavery was fueled by the cotton boom.

It is hard to find people willing to buy slaves from Missis Commons.

The plantation boom was fueled by new national and international markets.

In the 19th century American cotton exports rose from 150,000 bales to 4,541,000 bales.

Cotton is the most striking feature of the industrial history of the last fifty years according to the Census Bureau's 1860 Census of Manufactures.
Slave owners shipped their cotton north to textile manufacturers.
Insurance brokers and exporters in the Northeast made a lot of money.

While the United States ended its legal participation in the global slave trade in 1808, slave traders moved one million slaves from the tobacco Producing Upper South to cotton fields in the Lower South between 1790 and 1860.

It helped the expansion of northeastern textile mills.

Cotton production in the southern part of the US nurtured industrialization in the Northeast and Midwest.

In the early republic, manufacturing workers were expected to work at every stage of production.

A new system called piecework divided production into smaller steps performed by different workers.

Merchants and investors sent materials to individuals and families to complete at home in this new system.
The partially finished goods were turned over to the owner by the independent laborers.

Merchants in New England began experimenting with machines to replace the putting-out system.

The machines they needed were built with British technological knowledge.

In 1789, a textile mill in Rhode Island contracted a British immigrant to build a yarnspinning machine and a carding machine.
The English machinery that was mimicked by Slater was the same as the English mill.

The powered loom used in the mills of Manchester, England was re-created by Francis and Paul Moody.

During his two years in Britain, he toured mills in England.
He committed the design of the powered loom to memory so that, no matter how many times British customs officials searched his luggage, he could sneak England's industrial know-how into New England.

Lowell's contribution to American industrialism was organizational.

The American manufacturing process was reorganized by him.
The textile mill that defined antebellum New England and American industrialism was created by the Waltham-Lowell System.
Four years after the death of the planned mill town's founder, the modern American textile mill was fully realized.
The process of textile manufacturing was centralized by the mills ofLowell, which were powered by the Merrimack River.
The American factory was born.
Ten thousand workers labored in one place.
Sarah Rice, who worked at the nearby Millbury factory, found it to be more confined than she wanted to be.
Many desperate "mill girls" who operated the factories relentlessly from sunup to sundown were subjected to harsh working conditions.
A large class of females are destined to be slaves according to one worker.
22 women went on strike.
They wanted better working hours.

A worker noted that there were a lot of ladies.

Other industries were affected by the market revolution.

Craftsmen realized that new markets increased demand for their products.
The traditional method of making custom-built shoes at home was abandoned by some shoemakers who began making larger quantities of shoes in ready-made sizes to be shipped to urban centers.
The old personal approach of relying on a single live-in apprentice for labor and instead hiring unskilled wage laborers who did not have to be trained in all aspects of making shoes but could simply be assigned a single repeatable aspect of the task has been abandoned by manufacturers wanting increased production.
Shops were slowly replaced by factories.
The paternalistic apprenticeship system gave way to a more impersonal and flexible labor system in which unskilled laborers could be hired and fired as the market dictated.

24 Masters-turned-employers had a less attachment to their workers.

They no longer shared the bonds of their trade but were subsumed under new class-based relationships.
Workers were freed from long-term obligations of apprenticeship and legal subjugation of indentured servitude.
Men and women were free to apportion among themselves their respective shares when they agreed to work for wages.

Many Americans were uneasy with the growing gap between rich and poor as the northern United States rushed toward commercialization and an early capitalist economy.

Daniel Webster might argue that all workers could achieve a career of usefulness and enterprise if they were "industrious and sober," but labor activist Seth Luther countered that capitalism created a cruel system of extraction on the bodies and minds of the producing.
26 Americans embarked on their Industrial Revolution with the Expec tation that all men could start their careers as humble wage workers but later achieve positions of ownership and stability with hard work.

Wage work used to be seen as a waypoint for young men without resources on their path to the middle class and the economic success necessary to support a wife and children ensconced within the domestic sphere.

There is a chance of moving up the economic ladder.

The commercial economy failed in its promise of social mo bility.

Businesses might be destroyed by depressions and downturns.
The MaRkeT RevoluTIon 211 depended on supplemental income from their wives and young children, even in times of prosperity, because unskilled workers lacked good wages and economic security.

Low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions are faced by wage workers, who are disproportionately composed of immi grants and poorer Americans.

There was a class conflict.
Instead of a master-servant contract, the employer and employee entered a contract as equals.
Employers had financial security and political power, while employees faced uncertainty and powerlessness in the workplace.
Some workers relied on strikes and unions to pool their resources.
A group of journeymen in Boston formed a union to protest their inability to maintain a family at the present time with the wages which are now usually given.
"28 working men organized unions to assert themselves and win both the respect and the resources due to a breadwinner and a citizen."

Middle-class managers and civic leaders were caught in the middle of a dangerous antagonism between employers and employees.

There were claims of class conflict with the ideology of social mobility.
Middle-class owners and managers were justified in their economic privilege because of their superior character traits.

With a just weight and influence in society, mechanics have been able to acquire property and respectability.

Abraham Lincoln had to assure his audience that the country's commercial transformation had not reduced American laborers to slavery.
He said that Southerners believed that their slaves were better off than Northern freemen.
There is no such class as they think.
This year the man who laboured for another year is labouring for himself.
He will hire others to work for him next year.
The northern commitment to free labor was undergirded by this essential belief.

The cash economy was created in the first half of the 19th century by the chapTeR 8 market revolution.

Work moved away from the home during the first stirrings of industrialization.
The Americans' notions of what constituted work and what it meant to be an American woman and an American man were changed by these changes.
As Americans encountered more goods in stores and produced less at home, the ability to remove women and children from work determined a family's class status.
This ideal ignores the reality of women's work at home and is only possible for the wealthy.
The market revolution changed the nature of the American family.

The market revolution redefined gender roles.

The purity of the domestic sphere--the idealized realm of women and children--increasingly signified a family's class status as Americans purchased more goods in stores and produced fewer at home.

Women and children worked to make ends meet.

Boys as young as eleven or twelve can take jobs as office runners or waiters to support their parents' incomes.
The ideal of an innocent and protected childhood was a privilege for middle- and upper-class families.
Poor children in Boston are kept at work for an hour at a time to procure fuel, or perform other service, in the next they are allowed to go where they will, and to do what they please.
Poor children were used as economic assets for their families.

The education received by middle-class children provided a foundation for economic privilege.

Young men were more likely to invest time in education to find skilled positions later in life as artisans lost control over their trades.
Young men who wanted apprenticeships in retail or commercial work needed formal education.

Young women were given the tools to live a good life.

After Elizabeth Davis left home in 1816 to attend school, her father explained that the experience would lay a foundation for her future character and respectability.
After touring the United States in the 1830s, de Tocqueville praised the young American woman, who had "the great scene of the world".
Bristol Academy in Maine advertised "instruction".

Middle-class youths were able to find employment through formal education, but poor youths were not.

They couldn't enjoy the fruits of education because of their families' financial state.
The House of refuge in New York City was one of the institutions where the children of poor families were indentured to serve as field hands or domestic laborers.
The wards of the society for the reformation of juvenile delinquents were sent to places like the farm of Sylvester Lusk.
In exchange for "sufficient Meat, Drink, Apparel, Lodging, and Washing, fitting for an Apprentice," and a rudimentary education, the apprentices promised obedience, morality, and loyalty.

Four or five active Lads about 15 years of age were advertised in a newspaper as apprentices in the Cotton Factory.

During the early 19th century, opportunities for employment and educa tion were often dependent on the family's class.
In colonial America, almost all children worked for their parents in their chosen profession.
More children were able to delay employment during the market revolution.

The ideal of a "Romantic Childhood" was available to families that could survive without their children's labor.

The early experiences of these children determined whether they became dependent workers with little prospects for social mobility or entered respectable, well-paying positions.

As children were expected to be sheltered from the adult world of work, American culture expected men and women to assume different gender roles as they prepared for marriage and family life.

The world of economic production and political life were separated from the world of consumers and domestic life by an ideology of "separate spheres".

The American gender hierarchy was defined by the divide between a private, female world of home and a public, male world of business.

A class bias was displayed by the idea of separate spheres.

The MaRkeT RevoluTIon 215 was protected from the harsh realities of wage labor by the upper classes.
Women were not partners in production.
Lower-class women contributed directly to the household economy.
The middle- and upper-class ideal could only be achieved in households where women did not need to work.
Women in poorer households engaged in wage labor as factory workers, pieceworkers, and domestic servants.
Producing clothing, cultivating vegetables, overseeing dairy production, and performing any number of other domestic labors remained the same, but the key difference was whether or not they were performed for cash in a market economy.

Many women's traditional domestic tasks were transformed by the market revolution.

As new mechanized production increased the volume and variety of fabrics available to ordinary people, cloth production advanced throughout the market revolution.
Many better-off women were relieved by this.
Women's home-based cloth production became less important as cloth production became commercially important.
The transformation of women from producers to consumers began with the purchase of cloth and ready-made clothes.
Martha, her daughters, and her female neighbors spun and plied linen and woolen yarns and used them to produce a variety of fabrics for her.
The production of cloth and clothing was labor intensive and only for home consumption.

Women became skilled consumers when they could buy cheap imported cloth to turn into clothing.

They stewarded their husbands' money by haggling over prices.
Mrs. Peter Simon, a captain's wife, inspected twentysix yards of Holland cloth to make sure it was worth the price.
The mistress of the household trusted her discriminating eye alone for expensive or specific purchases while servants or slaves made low-value purchases.

Women can use their skills into businesses.

Women who work as seamstresses, milliners, or laundresses can also work for neighbors, acquaintances, or combine clothing production with management of a boardinghouse.

Domestic expectations were the same in the slave states.

Women were working in the fields.
Whites argued that African American women were better suited for agricultural labor because they were less delicate and womanly than white women.
White plantation mistresses were protected from manual labor because of their whiteness, according to the southern ideal.
Despite the cultural stigma attached to it, most white women in the slave states continued to assist with planting, harvesting, and processing agricultural projects.
White southerners produced a lot of their food and clothing at home.
When they were producers of cash crops, white southerners insisted that their adherence to plantation slavery and racial hierarchy made them morally superior to greedy northerners.
The ways of life of southerners and northerners were incompatible.

The legal status of women remained the same despite the market revolution.

Women were rendered legally dead by the idea of coverture, a custom that counted married couples as a single unit.

Without special precautions or interventions, women couldn't earn The MaRkeT RevoluTIon 217 their own money, own their own property, or be sued.

Their husbands owned any money earned or spent.
At any time, husbands could end their wives' access to their credit at any time.
Divorce was only legal in a few states, such as Massachusetts and Connecticut, where marriage was a civil contract rather than a religious one.
Marriage was a legal contract.

The legal realities began to change the ideas of marriage.

The shift from "institutional" to "companionate" marriage began during this period.
Institutional marriages were primarily labor arrangements that maximized the couple's and their children's chances of surviving and thriving.
Both men and women assessed each other's skills as they related to household production.
Under the influence of Enlightenment thought, young people began to privilege character and compatibility in their potential partners.
Marriages led to the largest redistribution of property prior to the settlement of estates at death.
The means of redistribution were changing.
In the North, land became less important as wealthy young men became not only farmers and merchants but bankers, clerks, or professionals.

A complex economy that offered new ways to store, move, and create wealth was one of the reasons why young people embraced affection and attraction.

To be considered a success in family life, a middle-class American man usually aspires to own a comfortable home and to marry a woman of strong morals and religious conviction who would take responsibility for raising well-behaved children.

The duties of the middleclass husband and wife would be clearly defined.

The husband alone was responsible for creating wealth and engaging in politics.

The wife was responsible for keeping a good home, being careful with household expenses, and raising children, inculcating them with the middle-class virtues that would ensure their future success.
Poor families couldn't sacrifice the economic contributions of their wives and children.

Between 1820 and 1860, five million immigrants arrived in the United States.

New lives and economic opportunities were sought by Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants.
One out of eight Americans were born outside the United States by the Civil War.
Push and pull factors drew immigrants to the United States.

Common land rights for Irish farmers were revoked in England due to an economic slump.

Many Catholics in the south of Ireland sought greater opportunity elsewhere because of these policies.

Irish immigrants were drawn to ports along the eastern United States because of the booming American economy.
Irish immigrants came to the United States without the capital and skills required to purchase and operate farms, and instead settled in northeastern cities and towns.
Chain migration is when Irish men emigrate alone and practice it.
Irish men were able to send some of their wages home to support their families in Ireland or purchase tickets for relatives to come to the United States through chain migration.
Irish immigration began in the 1840s and 1850s when the Irish Famine caused a huge exodus out of Ireland.
Irish workers in northern cities were compared to African Americans and anti-immigration newspapers portrayed them as dangerous as 1.7 million Irish fled starvation between 1840 and 1860.
Irish immigrants left an indelible mark on American culture by retaining their social, cultural, and religious beliefs.

Most German immi grants used American ports and cities as temporary waypoints before they settled in the rural countryside.

The United States received over 1.5 million immigrants from Germany during the antebellum era.
Many Germans sought steadier economic opportunity despite fleeing declining agricultural conditions and the failed revolutions of 1848.
German immigrants were able to enter middle-class trades because of their skills and capital.
The MaRkeT RevoluTIon 219 Northwest was where Germans migrated to farm in rural areas and then practiced trades in growing communities such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee.

The regions of the republic were transformed by Catholic and Jewish Germans.

New York's Jewish population increased from five hundred in 1824 to forty thousand in 1860.

Jewish immigrants hailing from southwestern Germany and parts of occupied Poland moved to the United States through family units.
Jewish immigrants rarely settled in rural areas.
Jewish immigrants found work in retail, commerce, and tailoring once established.
They quickly became part of the American market economy.
Jewish immigrants built synagogues and made their mark on American culture, just as Irish immigrants did through the construction of churches and Catholic schools.

Many native-born Anglo-Protestant Americans were upset by the sudden influx of immigration.

The nativist movement wanted to limit European immigration and prevent Catholics from establishing churches and other institutions.
nativism even spawned its own political party in the 1850s, as it was popular in northern cities with large Catholic populations.
The American Party had success in local and state elections.
European immigration was slowed by the rise of the KnowNothings.
nativism, the Crimean War, and improved economic conditions in Europe discouraged potential migrants from traveling to the United States after 1855.
After the American Civil War, immigration levels would match and surpass levels seen in the past.

Irish immigrants swelled the ranks of the working class and encountered the politics of industrial labor in northern cities.

During the early republic, many workers formed trade unions.

Philadelphia's Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers and the Carpenters' Union of Boston were both in major American cities.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of the Boston bootmakers' union in 1842, arguing that the workers were capable of acting in such a way as to serve their own interests.

After the case, unions remained in a precarious legal position.

Labor activists in the 1840s wanted to limit working hours and protect children.

A ten-hour workday was established by the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workingmen.
The ten-hour day would allow time and opportunities for intellectual and moral improvement and improve the immediate conditions of laborers.
The Ten-Hour movement spread to other major cities after a strike in Boston in 1835.

Some of the earliest strikes for better conditions were launched by women.

Textile operatives walked off their jobs in Massachusetts in 1834 and 1836.
Female operatives provided crucial support during the Ten-Hour movement.
Like male activists, Bagley and her associates used the desire for mental improvement as a central argument for reform.
The movement achieved only partial success despite widespread support.
The ten-hour-day policy was established by President Van Buren.
Pennsylvania and New Hampshire both passed statewide laws in 1847.

Workers in both states were allowed to work more than ten hours a day.

Child labor was a major issue in the American labor movement.

The middleclass supported the protection of child laborers more than adult workers.
A petition from parents in Fall River, a southern Massachusetts mill town that employed a high portion of child workers, asked the legislature for a law prohibiting the employment of children in manufacturing establishments at an age and for a number of hours which must be permanently injurious to their health.
Children under the age of twelve are not allowed to work more than ten hours a day.
Every state in New England followed Massachusetts's lead by the midnineteenth century.
The age of protection of labor and the assurance of school were extended by these statutes.

Male workers sought to improve their income and working conditions to create a household that kept women and children protected within the domestic sphere.

The movement remained moderate and labor gains were limited.
Labor activism in antebellum America was largely wedded to the free labor ideal despite its challenge to industrial working conditions.
The labor movement supported the northern free soil movement, which challenged the spread of slavery in the 1840s, but also promoted the superiority of the northern system of commerce over the southern one.

During the early 19th century, southern agriculture produced by slaves fueled northern industry produced by wage workers and was managed by the new middle class.

New transportation, new machinery, and new organizations of labor integrated the previously isolated pockets of the colonial economy into a national industrial operation.
At the same time that ideology drove Americans apart, industrialization and the cash economy tied diverse regions together.
Political leaders claimed the American Revolution's legacy for the North by celebrating the freedom of contract that distinguished the wage worker from the indentured servant of previous generations or the slave in the southern cotton field.
The rise of child labor, the demands of workers to unionize, the economic vulnerability of women, and the influx of non-Anglo immigrants left many Americans questioning the meaning of liberty after the market revolution.

The chapter was edited by Jane Fiegen Green, with contributions from Kelly Arehart, Lindsay Keiter, and William Kerrigan.

There are 3,568 enslaved people in the northern states in the 1830 census.

The Massachusetts Historical Society had an advertisement for Colburn's school for young gentle men.

The MaRkeT RevoluTIon 225 tices were given to Sylvester Lusk of Enfield, Connecticut by the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents of the City of New York.

The Catholic University of America published "The Historical Development of Child-Labor Legislation in the United States" in 1921.

R ecoM M n De D R e a DI nG Ball was written by Edward J.