Untitled

The Marquis de Lafayette was in the United States in 1824. The French nobleman was a young man when he fought at Washington's side in the War of Independence.

His tour became a triumphant Jubilee of Liberty. Since 1784, when he last traveled to the United States, the nation's population had tripled to nearly 12 million, its land area had more than doubled, and its political institutions had flourished. Lafayette's tour showed how much the nation had changed. The thirteen states of 1784 had grown to twenty-four and he visited every one of them. Lafayette traveled up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers by steamboat, a recent invention that was helping to bring economic development to the trans-Appalachian West, and crossed upstate New York via the Erie Canal, the world's longest man-made waterway.

An essential component of the market revolution was the opening of large parts of the nation's interior to commercial agriculture through the use of steamboats.

In the first half of the 19th century, Americans were fond of describing liberty as the defining quality of their new nation, the unique genius of its institutions. The likenesses of the goddess of liberty, a familiar figure in British visual imagery, became even more common in the United States.

In every region of the country, there is a celebration of freedom.

As Lafayette, Tocqueville, and many other visitors from abroad toured the United States, Americans' understanding of freedom was changing. The spread of market relations, the westward movement of the population, and the rise of a vigorous political democracy all accelerated after the War of 1812. The development of American society was affected by all of them. They helped to redefine the idea of freedom by showing it more closely with economic opportunity, physical mobility, and participation in a vibrantly democratic political system.

The presence of slavery shaped American freedom. Slavery was moving with the young republic. The growth of slave-based cotton plantations in the South was aided by the same steamboats and canals that enabled millions of farm families to send their goods to market. Slavery made voting, officeholding, and participation in the public sphere privileges for whites alone. People of color were warned not to attend the ceremonies honoring Lafayette. The central contradiction of American life after independence was the coexistence of liberty and slavery.

The market revolution swept over the United States in the first half of the 19th century. There were a number of innovations in transportation and communication. American technology did not change during the colonial era.

No major alterations were made in sailing ships, no major canals were built, and manufacturing continued to be done by hand. Most roads were rutted at the beginning of the 19th century.

It costs as much to transport goods by road as it does to ship them from England. It took fifty days to move goods from Cincinnati to New York City, via a flatboat ride down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and then a journey by sail along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.

Developments already under way in the colonial era were accelerated by the market revolution. The products of slave labor were being sold in the international market as early as the 17th century. Many people were drawn into Britain's commercial empire by the 18th century. The political battles leading up to independence were dominated by consumer goods like sugar and tea.

Americans were more and more isolated from markets as they moved across the Appalachian Mountains and into interior regions of the states along the Atlantic coast. American farm families produced most of what they needed at home in the 1800's. They obtained what they couldn't make themselves by bartering with their neighbors or buying from local stores and rural craftsmen. It was almost impossible for farmers not located near cities to market their produce.

Those who grew up in the pre-market world were typical of the early life of Abraham Lincoln.

After being born in Kentucky, Lincoln moved with his family to Indiana, where he lived until 1831. Lincoln traveled by boat to New Orleans to sell his goods to a merchant, and his father took pork down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to market in New Orleans. The Lincoln family was self-sufficient. They sewed most of their clothing at home. Lincoln's father sent his son to work for neighbors as a way of paying off debts. Lincoln embraced the market revolution as an adult. In the Illinois legislature in the 1830s, he promoted the improvement of rivers to facilitate access to markets. He came to represent the Illinois Central Railroad, which opened large areas of Illinois to commercial farming.

America was wrenched out of its economic past by the steamboat, canal, railroad, and telegraph in the first half of the 19th century. The innovations made it easier for economic enterprises to sell their products. They made farmers major consumers of manufactured goods by linking them to national and world markets.

Toll roads were the first advance in overland transportation. More than 900 companies built new roads in the New England and Middle Atlantic states between 1800 and 1830. Congress authorized the construction of the National Road from Cumberland, Maryland, to the Old Northwest in the 18th century. It began on the Ohio River in 1818 and ended in Illinois in 1838.

Most private toll roads never turned a profit because of higher than expected maintenance costs. Horse-drawn wagons were an inefficient mode of getting goods to market. Improved water transportation increased the speed and lowered the cost of commerce.

During the 1790s, Robert Fulton was living in France and experimenting with steamboat designs. He launched a steamboat on the Seine River in Paris.

The invention made it possible to travel against the current on the country's major rivers as well as rapid transport across the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean. The first steamboat on the Mississippi River was launched in 1812.

The completion of the Erie Canal across upstate New York allowed goods to flow between the Great Lakes and New York City. The canal attracted farmers from New England and gave birth to cities like Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that the canal's water was a miracle "fertilizer" for it causes towns with their mass of brick and stone, their churches and theaters.

The growth of the market economy was stimulated by the improvement of existing roads and the building of new roads.

The canal gave New York City preferential access to trade with the Old Northwest. The Erie Canal was financed by the state government. With the federal government generally under the control of political leaders hostile to federal funding for internal improvements, the burden fell on the states. Between 1787 and 1860, the federal government spent $60 million on roads and canals, but the states spent more than that.

The completion of the Erie Canal set off a scramble among other states to match New York's success. During the economic depression that began in 1837, several people borrowed so much money that they went bankrupt. More than 3,000 miles of canals were built by then, linking the Atlantic states with the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, and greatly reducing the cost of transportation.

The train is driven by a steam-powered locomotive and the cars look like horse-drawn stagecoaches.

Existing waterways were connected by railroads and the Telegraph Canals. The railroad opened vast new areas of the American interior to settlement, while stimulating the mining of coal for fuel and the manufacture of iron for locomotives and rails. The nation's first commercial railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, began work in the 19th century.

The first long-distance line to begin operation was the South Carolina Canal and Railroad. By 1860, the railroad network had grown to 30,000 miles, more than the total in the rest of the world combined.

instantaneous communication was made possible by the telegraph.

The invention of the device was done by Samuel F. B. Morse, an artist and amateur scientist living in New York City. Messages could be sent over electric wires with each letter and number represented by its own pattern of electrical impulses. 50,000 miles of telegraph wire were strung within sixteen years. The telegraph was a service for businesses and not individuals. It helped bring uniformity to prices throughout the country.

Improvements in transportation and communication made possible the rise of the West as a self-conscious region of the new nation. Between 1790 and 1840, 4.5 million people crossed the Appalachian Mountains--more than the entire U.S. population at the time of Washington's first inauguration. The War of 1812 unleashed a flood of settlers from eastern states. The last eastern frontier for New England was entered by six new states in the six years following the end of the war.

Few Americans moved west as pioneers. Once in the West, people traveled in groups and cooperated with each other to clear land, build houses and build communities. The new Cotton Kingdom of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas was created by a stream of migration from the South. Farm families from the Upper South crossed into southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The third population stream moved from New England to the Upper Northwest.

Some western migrants became "squatters", setting up farms on land that wasn't theirs. The land was purchased from the federal government at the price of $1.25 per acre in cash, or from land speculators on long-term credit. The Old Northwest and Old Southwest entered the Union by 1840. The migrants had left behind regional cultures that were very similar to the ones the West had become home to. New England's small towns, churches, and schools were similar to the Lower South's plantation-based society.

Settlement was brought to and across the Mississippi River in the first two decades of the 19th century. Settlement was concentrated near rivers before canals and railroads.

The nation's borders expanded as population moved west. In Florida, American settlers rushed in to claim land under the jurisdiction of foreign countries, confident that American sovereignty would follow in their wake. The desire of local inhabitants to remain outside the American republic did not deter the nation's expansion. Despite the resistance of local Indians and Spain's rejection of American offers to buy the area, Florida fell into American hands. The United States annexed the area after American residents of West Florida rebelled. Georgia and Alabama planters wanted to eliminate a refuge for slaves and hostile Indians in order to acquire East Florida. Andrew Jackson led troops into the area. He created an international crisis by executing two British traders and a number of Indian chiefs. Spain sold the territory to the United States in the Adams-Onis Treaty after Jackson withdrew.

The stories of western growth were told in successful censuses.

Two-fifths of the population lived beyond the mountains. Ohio's population grew from 231,000 in the 18th century to more than one million in the 19th. When it was ranked third among all the states, it reached nearly 2 million. The careers of the era's leading public figures reflected the westward movement. After moving west, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and many other statesmen made their mark in politics.

Before the War of 1812, the Old Northwest was a prime example of an Internal Borderland, a meeting ground of Native Americans and various people of English, French, and American descent, where cultural boundaries remained unstable and political authority uncertain. There was no doubt who would control the region after the American victory. The internal borderland region quickly developed.

The Ohio River marks a boundary between free and slave societies because of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. It was easier for people and goods to travel between Kentucky and the southern counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois than it was to the northern parts of those states. The cultural flavor of the Upper South was retained in the region stretching northward from the Ohio River. Its food, speech, settlement patterns, family ties, and economic relations had more in common with Kentucky and Tennessee than with the northern counties of their own states. Farmers in the southern counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were more likely to ship their produce southward via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers than northward or to the East until the 1850s. As the slavery controversy developed, Indiana and Illinois became key political battlegrounds because of the large concentration of people of southern ancestry.

The effects of the market revolution in the North and the westward expansion in the South increased the nation's sectional divisions. The rise of the Cotton Kingdom was the most dynamic feature of the American economy in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. The early industrial revolution began in England and spread to parts of the North where cotton textiles were produced with water-powered spinning and weaving machinery. The Lower South was particularly suited to growing cotton because of its climate and soil fertility. The laborious task of removing seeds from the plant slowed the marketing of cotton.

The cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney, a Yale graduate working in Georgia as a private tutor. A fairly simple device consisting of rollers and brushes, the gin quickly separated the seed from the cotton. It was possible to grow and sell cotton on a large scale.

Whitney's invention changed American slavery because of rising demand for cotton and the opening of new lands in the West to settlement. An institution that many Americans had expected to die out because of its major crop, tobacco, now embarked on a period of unprecedented expansion. Cotton plantations spread into the South Carolina upcountry in the first decade of the 19th century, which led to the reopening of the African slave trade.

After the War of 1812, the federal government moved to consolidate American control over the Lower South, forcing defeated Indians to cede land, encouraging white settlement, and acquiring Florida. The expansion of slavery came with American sovereignty. The region was flooded with settlers from the older southern states. Poor farmers were often confined to less productive and less accessible areas in the "hill country" and piney woods.

The labor force required by the new Cotton Kingdom was supplied by a massive trade in slaves within the United States.

The Cotton Kingdom stretches from South Carolina to Louisiana.

Around 1 million slaves were shifted from the older slave states to the Lower South between 1800 and 1860 according to historians. The majority of slaves were transported by slave traders to be sold at an auction for work in the cotton fields.

Slave trading became a well-organized business, with firms gathering slaves in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina and shipping them to markets in Mobile, Natchez, and New Orleans. Slave groups were chained to one another on forced marches to the Lower South. A British visitor to the United States in the 1840s encountered a file of about two hundred slaves, manacled and chained together, being marched from Virginia to Louisiana. A source of greater freedom for many whites, the westward movement meant to African-Americans the destruction of family ties, and the break up of long-standing communities.

The United States produced 5 million pounds of cotton when Whitney designed his invention. The crop had grown to 170 million pounds by 1820. The most important export of the empire of liberty was cotton, which was produced on slave plantations and became the linchpin of southern development.

America's first inland freight and passenger service network was developed when paddlewheelers became commercially viable early in the 19th century.

The canals of the 1820s and 1830s made New York City the largest port in the country, connecting the Great Lakes to the East Coast.

The cotton- producing region relied on mostly slave labor and spanned from North Carolina west to Louisiana and as far north as southern Illinois.

The machine that separated cotton seed from cotton fiber was invented by Eli Whitney in 1793 and led to the dramatic expansion of slavery in the South.

The South was the most commercially oriented part of the United States because cotton was only sold in national and international markets. The social order of the older states was reproduced by the expansion of the South. The region was mostly rural. 80% of southerners worked the land in 1860, the same percentage as in 1800. The transportation and banking systems of the South were used to finance the purchase of land and slaves.

The market revolution and westward expansion set in motion changes that transformed the region into an integrated economy of commercial farms and manufacturing cities. As in the case of Lincoln's family, the initial pioneer stage of settlement reinforced the farmer's selfsufficiency for the tasks of felling trees, building cabins, breaking the soil, and feeding the family left little time for agriculture geared to the market. Farmers were drawn into the new market economy as the Old Northwest became more settled, thanks to a web of transportation and credit to eastern centers of commerce and banking. They were more focused on growing crops and raising animals for sale.

In the growing cities of the East, Western farmers can find a market for their produce and a source of credit. The acquisition of land and supplies was financed by loans from eastern banks and insurance companies. The rapid subduing of the western prairies was made possible by the steel plow. The reaper, a horse-drawn machine that increased the amount of wheat a farmer could harvest, was invented in the 19th century. On the eve of the Civil War, thousands were in use. America's output of wheat nearly tripled between 1840 and 1860.

The majority of the crop was consumed within the country. Eastern farmers can't grow wheat and corn as cheaply as their western counterparts, so they focus on producing dairy products, fruits, and vegetables for nearby urban centers.

Cities formed part of the western frontier from the beginning.

At the crossroads of interregional trade, Louis experienced extraordinary growth. Hundreds of thousands of pigs were butchered each year in Cincinnati and the meat was shipped to eastern consumers. Chicago was the greatest city in the west. It was a small settlement on the shore of Lake Michigan. Thanks to the railroad, Chicago became the fourth largest city in the US by 1860.

Dramatic changes were witnessed in urban centers due to the market revolution. The number of cities with populations over 5000 rose from 12 in 1820 to nearly 150 three decades later. Merchants, bankers, and master craftsmen took advantage of the economic opportunities created by commercial farmers. The nature of work was fundamentally altered by the drive among these businessmen to increase production and reduce labor costs. Craftsmen used to make goods at home, where they controlled the pace and intensity of their labor. In order to subdivide their work, entrepreneurs gathered artisans into large workshops.

Craftsmen who traditionally produced an entire pair of shoes or piece of furniture saw the labor process broken down into numerous steps requiring far less skill and training. They found themselves under constant supervision by their employers and under pressure to produce more.

Major cities had arisen in the northern and northwestern states by 1840. The South was behind in urban growth. Most cities were located on rivers that provided water power for early factories.

The factory replaced traditional craft production in some industries. Factories replaced hand tools with power-driven machinery as they gathered large groups of workers under central supervision. America's first factory was established in Rhode Island by an immigrant from England. One of the key inventions of the early industrial revolution was the powerdriven spinning jenny, a skilled mechanic built from memory.

The early industrial revolution was centered in New England, where cotton factories sprang up along the region's many rivers, taking advantage of water power to drive their machinery.

The yarn was sent to traditional hand-loom weavers and farm families to be woven into cloth. Early industrialization typified the "outwork" system in which rural men and women earned money by working in factories. Before shoe production was fully mechanized, parts of the shoe were produced in factories and then returned to the factories for finishing. The entire manufacturing process in textiles, shoes, and many other products was brought under one roof.

The establishment of the first large-scale American factory using power looms was stimulated by the cutoff of British imports. A group of merchants in Massachusetts built this in 1814. They created a new factory town on the Merrimack River, twenty-seven miles from Boston, in the 1820s. They built a group of modern textile factories that brought together all phases of production from the spinning of thread to the weaving and finishing of cloth.

More than 10,000 workers were employed by the fifty-two mills. Small industrial cities sprang up across New England. After Great Britain, Massachusetts became the second most industrialized region of the world.

The earliest factories were located along the "fall line," where waterfalls and river rapids could be harnessed to provide power for spinning and weaving machinery. By the 1840s, steam power made it possible for factory owners to locate in towns like New Bedford nearer to the coast and in large cities like Philadelphia and Chicago. Tools, firearms, shoes, clocks, ironware, and agricultural machinery were all produced in factories in 1850. The American system of manufactures relied on mass production of interchangeable parts that could be quickly assembled into finished products. Eli Terry, a Connecticut craftsman, and Eli Whitney, who had previously invented the cotton gin, were the first to use this technique.

The wide dispersion of mechanical skills throughout northern society was more impressive than factory production. It seemed that every town had a paper mill, ironworks, shoemaker, tailor, and other small businesses.

New England and a few cities outside it were the focus of the early industrial revolution.

The South had a weak internal market and a slaveholding class that was opposed to industrial development. Outside New England, most manufacturing was done in small-scale establishments employing a few workers. Most workers in Cincinnati in 1850 worked in small unmechanized workshops.

Americans' conception of time was changed by the market revolution. Farm life was regulated by the seasons. In cities, work and leisure time were marked off from one another, and clocks became part of daily life. In the artisan workshops of the colonial and early national eras, bouts of intense work alternated with periods of leisure. The artisans would set down their tools to enjoy a drink or a political discussion. As the market revolution accelerated, work in factories and workshops and even for servants in Americans' homes took place for a specified number of hours per day. The "price" of an artisan's work was linked to the goods he produced. According to an hourly or daily rate, pay became a "wage" in the 19th century.

Closely supervised work tending a machine for a period determined by a clock seemed to violate the independence Americans considered an essential element of freedom. Few native-born men were interested in working in the early factories. Employers turned to people who didn't have other ways of earning a living.

The early New England textile mills relied on female and child labor. Young unmarried women from Yankee farm families dominated the workforce that tended the spinning machines at the most famous center of early textile manufacturing. To convince parents to allow their daughters to leave home to work in the mills, owners set up boardinghouses with strict rules regulating personal behavior. The women's free time was occupied by lecture halls and churches.

From a modern point of view, the constant supervision of the workers' private lives seems impossibly restrictive. This was the first time in history that large numbers of women left their homes. Many people complained about low wages and long hours. At a time when few other jobs were open to women, others valued the opportunity to earn money on their own. Mill girls were taught to go out of themselves and enter into the lives of others by living and working atLowell.

Women like Larcom didn't become permanent factory workers. After a few years in the factories, they left to return home, marry, or move west. She became a teacher and writer in Illinois. When large-scale immigration began in the 1840s and 1850s, the shortage of industrial labor was alleviated.

Increased immigration from abroad helped meet a demand for labor caused by the economic expansion. Immigrants contributed less to American population growth between 1790 and 1830. Over 4 million people from Ireland and Germany entered the United States between 1840 and 1860, more than the entire population of 1790. The new arrivals would not have to compete with slave labor in the northern states because of the abundant job opportunities. New Orleans, St. Louis, and Baltimore were the only cities in the South where immigrants were known.

They were visible in both urban and rural areas. One-third of the population of Wisconsin was foreign-born in 1860, when New York City was the major port of entry.

Many migrants settled in tightly knit communities and worked together. Olof Krans came to the United States from Sweden with his family in 1850 at the age of twelve and painted a picture of a group of women preparing to plant corn.

There were a lot of factors that led to the massive flow of population across the Atlantic. The industrial revolution and modernization of agriculture pushed peasants off the land and eliminated the jobs of traditional craft workers in Europe. Long-distance travel was made more practical by the introduction of the oceangoing steamship. Regular sailings from Britain to Boston and New York City were started by the Cunard Line in the 1840s. Europe's emigration to Canada and Australia accelerated around 1840. A male family member would usually send back money to the rest of the family after they emigrate.

European political refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848 were attracted to America's political and religious freedoms.

Irish men and women fleeing the Great Famine of 1845-1851 were the largest number of immigrants. Most of the million people who left in those years were to the United States. Lacking industrial skills and capital, these impoverished agricultural laborers and small farmers ended up filling the low-wage unskilled jobs native-born Americans sought to avoid. Male Irish immigrants built America's railroads, dug canals, and worked as common laborers, servants, and factory operatives. Irish women often went to work as servants in the homes of native-born Americans, although some preferred factory work to domestic service. The freedom that we want when the work is done is what one Irish woman said. "Our day is ten hours long, but when it's done it's done; however, servants were on call at any time." The Yankee farm women were replaced by immigrant Irish families at the end of the 1850s. The majority of Irish immigrants stayed in the Northeast. In Boston, New York, and smaller industrial cities, they congregated in overcrowded urban ghettos notorious for poverty, crime, and disease.

The second-largest group of immigrants, Germans, had a larger number of skilled craftsmen than the Irish. Many Germans were able to establish themselves as craftsmen, shopkeepers, and farmers in the West, even though they settled in tightly knit neighborhoods in eastern cities. The cities of Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee attracted large German populations. Wherever large numbers of Germans settled, a vibrant German-language culture developed with its own schools, newspapers, associations, and churches.

Most of the 40,000 Scandinavians who moved to the United States settled on farms in the Old Northwest. The continued expansion of industry and the failure of the Chartist movement of the 1840s inspired many English workers to emigrate to the United States.

Her critique of the northern labor system was similar to the one advanced by George Fitzhugh.

It is immoral to shut us up in a close room twelve hours a day in the most tedious and tedious of employment and I am told that we can leave when we will. This form of human freedom is remarkable. A slave goes willingly to his task, but his will is quickened by the overseer.

NECESSITY is the whip that brings us to Lowell. We need money to support an aged mother, a brother's ambition to be aided, and so the factories are supplied. Everybody knows that it is necessity alone, in some form or other, that takes us to Lowell and keeps us there.

I think it is the same thing as slavery in Turkey or Carolina. It doesn't matter if the slave is forced to work by the whip of the over-seer or the wages of theLowell Corporation. It is not free will if it leads the worker to work, but an outward necessity that puts free will out of the question.

Over 4 million people from Ireland and Germany entered the United States between 1840 and 1860 in the letter of Margaret McCARTHY to her family. Chain migration is a process in which money is sent home to family members. Margaret McCarthy, an immigrant from New York City, wrote a letter to her family in Ireland.

My father says that this is a good place and a good country for if one place doesn't suit a man he can go to another and be happy. No man or woman without a family will ever come to this country because it is so plentiful.

Come together and bid adieu to the land of our birth. The gulf of misery, oppression, degradation and ruin is what I am told. My father told me to send 20 dollars to you. Dan Keliher tells me that you know more about house carpentry than he does, and that he can make up to fourteen shillings a day, and that Florence will do well, and that Michael can get a place right off. I don't want you to come here because of slavery, I want you to come here because of my brothers and sisters and the chance to show our kindness and gratitude.

I'm happy that the Lord didn't want me to get married.

The Rise of Nativism Immigrants from England were easy to absorb, but those from Ireland encountered intense hostility. The tradition of "antipopery" still ran deep as Roman Catholics faced discrimination in a largely Protestant society. Most parts of the country had a minor presence in the Catholic Church before the Irish influx. John Hughes of New York City made the church more assertive. Hughes was against the use of the Protestant King James Bible in New York City's public schools, pressed Catholic parents to send their children to an expanding network of parochial schools, and sought government funding to pay for them. He wanted to win converts from Protestantism.

American institutions and American freedom were threatened by Catholicism. The future of Christianity in the world would be worked out if Catholics were to dominate the American West. A mob burned a convent after his sermon.

The United States has always been seen as a refuge for those seeking economic opportunity or escaping oppression. American history has seen periods of anxiety over immigration. Fear of immigrants with radical political views was reflected in the Alien Act of 1798. There was a lot of opposition to the "new immigration" from southern and eastern Europe. The question of how many people should be allowed into the United States is a political issue.

Many native-born Americans were alarmed by the Irish influx.

They blamed immigrants for urban crime, political corruption, and a penchant for liquor, and they accused them of undercutting native-born skilled laborers.

The local bosses of the Democratic Party provided jobs and poor relief to struggling newcomers, who were quickly brought into the urban political machines of the party. Nativists said the Irish posed a threat to democratic institutions, social reform, and public education because they were unfamiliar with American conceptions of liberty. Stereotypes similar to those directed at blacks flourished regarding the Irish as well--seen as lazy, and slaves of their passions, they were unsuited for republican freedom.

Racist, anti-Catholic riots took place in NativismCity and Philadelphia. New York City's mayor in 1844 was a nativist who appealed to skilled native-born workers who were worried about immigrants taking their jobs and undercutting their wages.

The market revolution and shielding entrepreneurs from interference by local governments were supported by the Transformation of Law. The corporate form of business organization was central to the new market economy. The government grants special privileges and powers to a corporate firm, among them that investors and directors are not personally liable for the company's debts. Unlike companies owned by an individual, family, or limited partnership, a corporation can fail without ruining its directors and stockholders. Corporations were able to raise more capital than traditional forms of enterprise. By the 1830s, many states had replaced the granting of charters through specific acts of legislation with general incorporated laws, which allowed any company to obtain a corporate charter if it paid a specified fee.

The courts upheld their validity, while opposing efforts by established firms to limit competition. John Marshall's Supreme Court defined corporate charters issued by state legislatures as contracts, which future lawmakers could not change. The New York legislature granted a monopoly for steamboat navigation. The court ruled that the Massachusetts legislature did not violate the charter of an existing company that had constructed a bridge over the Charles River when it allowed a second company to build a bridge. The community was interested in promoting transportation and prosperity.

Local judges held businessmen responsible for property damage done by factory construction, such as the flooding of upstream farmlands and the disruption of fishing when dams were built to harness water power. The old common law of conspiracy to punish workers who seek to strike for higher wages was invoked in many court decisions. In Commonwealth v. Hunt, Massachusetts chief justice Lemuel Shaw decided that there was nothing inherently illegal in workers organizing a union.

Nickname of Cincinnati was first used in the mid-nineteenth century.

A system of production relied on mass production of interchangeable parts that could be quickly assembled into finished products. Eli Terry and Eli Whitney were the first to make clockmakers in Connecticut.

Women who worked in textile mills during the Industrial Revolution enjoyed new freedom and independence.

New York's Order of the Star-Spangled Banner was the largest group of proponents of the anti-Catholic feeling from the 1830s through the 1850s.

The precedent of support of contracts against state interference was set in the 1819 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the original charter of the college against New Hampshire's attempt to alter the board of trustees.

Chief Justice John Marshall ruled against the state of New York's granting of steamboat monopolies because of the 1824 US Supreme Court decision reinforcing the "commerce clause" of the Constitution.

The legality of labor unions was established by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1842.

By the 1830s, the market revolution and westward expansion had produced a society that amazed European visitors: energetic, materialistic, and seemingly in constant motion. The streets of Chicago were crowded with land speculators in the 19th century. Americans' restless energy and lack of attachment to place was what struck de Tocqueville. He said that you should not set foot on American soil until you find yourself in a tumult.

A large mobile population no longer tied to local communities sought to seize the opportunities offered by economic change as a result of westward migration and urban development.

The lives of all Americans were profoundly affected by the West and Freedom Westward expansion. They helped to create new ideas of freedom. The availability of land in the West was linked to American freedom. The phrase "manifest destiny" was first used by a New York journalist, John L. O' Sullivan.

He claimed that Americans had a better title to western lands than any international treaty, right of discovery, or long-term settlement could. The nation's mission to extend the area of freedom gave them their right to the continent. European powers like Great Britain and Spain, as well as Native Americans and Mexicans, were obstacles to the progress of freedom.

The essential idea was familiar before O' Sullivan wrote these words. As the population moved across the mountains, so did the link between expansion and freedom. When the pursuit of happiness seemed to demand it, a sense of spatial openness became a central component of American freedom.

The West promised to prevent the United States from following down the path of Europe and becoming a society with fixed social classes and a large group of wage-earning poor. In the West, factory labor was less common than in the East. With population and the price of land rising dramatically in the older states and young men's prospects for acquiring a farm declining, the West still held out the chance to achieve economic independence, the social condition of freedom.

The restless, competitive world of the market revolution encouraged the identification of American freedom with the absence of restrictions on self-directed individuals seeking economic advancement and personal development. The opportunity for personal growth offered a new definition of Jefferson's pursuit of happiness, one well suited to a world in which territorial expansion and the market revolution had shattered traditional spatial and social boundaries and made moving from place to place and status common features of American life.

The daguerreotype required the sitter to remain still for twenty seconds or longer, meaning that the subject looked stiff.

In a widely reprinted 1837 address, "The American Scholar," Emerson called on the person engaged in writing and thinking to "feel all confidence in himself." Freedom was an open-ended process of self-realization by which individuals could remake themselves and their own lives.

The most prominent member of the group of New England intellectuals known as the transcendentalists was Emerson. The writer Henry David Thoreau echoed his call for individual self-reliance.

The term "individualism" was first used in the language in the 1820s.

The idea of the "sovereign individual" was promoted as the market revolution promoted commercial connections. American freedom has long been associated with personal independence. Private happiness and self sacrificing public virtue were both defined as devotion to the common good. individualism led each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, observed Tocqueville. The realm of the self, which came to be called "privacy", was understood by Americans as one with which neither government nor individuals had a right to interfere. In the next chapter, individualism will be discussed, as it helped to inspire the expansion of democracy. The right to vote has been made possible by ownership of one's self rather than property.

The era before the Civil War was when "social existence" gave way to "the enlargement and independency of the individual", according to Emerson. The importance of individual conscience in matters political, social, and personal, and the need to find one's own way rather than following the crowd, were illustrated by Thoreau in his own life. Modern society made men "tools of their tools" by trapping them in stultifying jobs and stifled individual judgement. In this comparatively free country, most people were so focused on material things that they had no time to contemplate the beauty of nature.

In order to escape this fate, he retreated to a cabin on Walden Pond near Concord, where he could enjoy the freedom of isolation from the "economical and moral tyranny" he believed ruled American society. He observed that an area that had been covered with dense forest in his youth was almost completely devoid of trees and animals. It seemed impossible to escape the market revolution because of the distant sound of a locomotive whistle. Americans were urged to simplify their lives rather than become obsessed with wealth. He insisted that genuine freedom lay within.

The popular religious revivals that swept over the country added a religious underpinning to the celebration of personal self-improvement, self-reliance, and self-sufficiency. The revivals began at the turn of the century because religious leaders were alarmed by the low levels of church attendance in the young republic. They quickly expanded beyond the existing churches. Revival meetings were held in upstate New York and New York City.

After attending a religious revival, the son of Connecticut farmers was inspired to preach. The promise of salvation to converts who abandoned their sinful ways was discussed in Chapter 4 of the first Great Awakening of the mideighteenth century. After his success in upstate New York, he became a national celebrity. According to one report, the area had been completely overthrown by the Holy Ghost after Finney preached.

The Second Great Awakening spread to all regions of the country, making it a mass enterprise. Less than 2,000 Christian ministers preached in the United States at the time of independence. The Methodists and Baptists enjoyed rapid growth in membership. Methodism had more than 1 million members by the 1840s. Deism, a form of religious belief hostile to organized churches, had been prominent among the generation of the founding fathers. Christianity became even more important to American culture after it waned.

The doctrine of human free will was promoted by fiery revivalist preachers at large camp meetings on the frontier. At these gatherings, rich and poor, male and female, and in some instances whites and blacks worshiped alongside one another and pledged to abandon worldly sins in favor of the godly life.

The Second Great Awakening emphasized the right of private judgement in spiritual matters and the possibility of universal salvation through faith and good works. The moral free agent is a person who is free to choose between a Christian life and sin. It is possible for sinners to experience a change of heart.

The market revolution allowed revivalist ministers to spread their message. They flooded the country with cheap, mass-produced religious tracts after raising funds, embarking on lengthy tours, and preaching by canal, steamboat, and railroad. The revivals' opening of religion to mass participation and their message that ordinary Americans could shape their own spiritual destinies resonated with the spread of market values.

To be clear, evangelical preachers are not cheerleaders for a market society. They railed against greed and indifference to the welfare of others. The law of Satan's empire, not God's, is the extreme form of individualism encouraged by the scramble for wealth. The region of upstate New York along the path of the Erie Canal was where the revivals flourished. The majority of Finney's converts were from the commercial and professional classes. The essence of freedom was promoted by evangelical ministers. Emphasizing the importance of industry, sobriety, and self-discipline as examples of freely chosen moral behavior, evangelical preachers promoted the very qualities necessary for success in a market culture.

The Second Great Awakening showed how the end of government support for established churches promoted religious pluralism. The emergence of new denominations was promoted by competition among religious groups. One of the most successful religions in upstate New York was when a youth began to experience religious visions. He claimed to have been led by an angel to a set of plates.

The story of three families who traveled from the Middle East to the Americas is told.

One of the family groups in the Western Hemisphere after Jesus Christ's death and resurrection appeared in the book. Smith was God's prophet and the second coming of Christ would take place in the New World. The edition of 5,000 copies was published in 1830.

The center of the Second Great Awakening was where Mormonism emerged. Smith founded a church that responded to the market revolution. It was democratic to admit anyone, regardless of wealth or occupation, who accepted Smith's message. The appeal of a religious text written on golden plates may be explained by the fact that gold remained an unquestioned standard of value.

Smith began to receive visions that led to more controversial beliefs such as polygamy, which allows one man to have more than one wife. Smith married thirty women by the time he died. Smith exercised absolute authority over his followers and this doctrine upset the Mormons' neighbors. Mobs drove Smith and his followers out of New York, Ohio, and Missouri before they settled in Illinois, where they hoped to wait for the Second Coming. Smith was arrested five years later for inciting a riot that destroyed a newspaper. Smith was murdered by a group of people while he was in jail. In 1847, the successor to Mormon leader, Brigham Young, led more than 2,000 followers to the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah in order to practice their faith undisturbed. The number of Mormons in Utah reached 16,000 by the year 1852. Mormon theology was shaped by the experience of expulsion. Modern members of the church posthumously baptize long-dead ancestors in order to unite families separated by death and migration. The practice has led the church to gather and make publicly available an enormous library of genealogy records from around the world, a gold mine for scholars of every religion.

The Mormons' experience showed the limits of religious toleration in nineteenth-century America but also the opportunities offered by religious pluralism.

In 1845 it was used to encourage the annexation of Texas and later to encourage the settlement of European colonial and Indian lands in the Great Plains and the West.

The philosophy of a small group of mid-nineteenth-century New England writers and thinkers was to stress personal and intellectual self-reliance.

The predominance of the Baptist and Methodist Churches was caused by the religious revival movement of the early decades of the 19th century.

The phrase entered the language in the 1820s to describe the emphasis on pursuit of personal advancement and private fulfillment free of outside interference.

The revivalism of the "burned-over district" of New York led to the creation of the religious sect founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith. Thousands of Smith's followers fled to Utah in 1847 to escape persecution.

The right to compete for economic advancement became a symbol of American freedom as the market revolution progressed. The goddess of liberty was linked to emblems of wealth.

The seal of Arkansas was admitted to the Union in 1836 and pictured liberty atop an image of a steamboat and two horns of plenty.

Many Americans took advantage of the market revolution to enrich themselves. In the early 19th century, John Jacob Astor, the son of a poor German butcher who migrated to the United States at the end of the War of Independence, earned large profits by shipping furs to China and imports of tea and silk. The nation's most famous hotel was built after Astor invested his wealth in Manhattan real estate, which was rapidly rising in value. He was the richest man in the United States when he died, leaving a fortune of $10 million, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars today.

Lyon asked the artist to paint him in his work clothes because he was proud of his accomplishments as a self-made man who had achieved success through hard work and skill rather than inheritance.

During his lifetime, the term "self-made man" was used to describe the opportunities open to him. The idea is that those who achieved success in America did so because of their own intelligence and hard work, not because of government favoritism. He was hardly typical in the extent of his wealth. The quickening of commercial life enriched bankers, merchants, industrialists, and planters. An army of clerks, accountants, and other office employees staffed businesses in Boston, New York, and elsewhere. It created new opportunities for farmers who profited from the growing demand at home and abroad for American agricultural products, and for skilled craftsmen like Thomas Rodgers, a machine builder who established a successful locomotive factory in New Jersey. Talented men can find new opportunities in professions like law, medicine, and teaching. There were an estimated 10,000 physicians in the United States by the early 1820s.

All Americans were affected by the market revolution. Not everyone was prepared to take advantage of its benefits. Even though most blacks were slaves, they were not excluded from the new economic opportunities. The 220,000 blacks living in the free states on the eve of the Civil War were treated differently in every phase of their lives. The majority of blacks lived in the poorer parts of cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. In Cincinnati in the 19th century, the neighborhoods were attacked by white mobs, like the armed bands that attacked blacks and destroyed their homes and businesses.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church is an example of how free blacks laboriously constructed their own institutional life, centered on mutual aid and educational societies. Richard Allen, a Methodist preacher from Philadelphia, was kicked out of his former church for praying at the altar rail, a place reserved for whites.

Many white Americans could look forward to a life of economic accumulation and individual advancement, but large numbers of free blacks experienced downward mobility. Because of widespread slave ownership, a lot of northern blacks had craft skills. It became more difficult for blacks to use these skills once they were free. The freed slaves were viewed as low- wage competitors by most white artisans and they sought to bar them from skilled employment. "They are leaders in the cause of equal rights for themselves," a black editor commented of New York City's artisans in the 1830s.

Hostility from white craftsmen was one of many obstacles that kept blacks out of the labor market. White customers didn't want to be served by the white employers, so they refused to hire them. The result was a rapid decline in economic status, until the mid-century, when the majority of blacks worked as domestic servants. In New York City, there were 122 black barbers and 808 black servants, but only one lawyer and 6 doctors. Blacks can't take advantage of the opening of the West to improve their economic status, a central component of American freedom. They were banned from entering their territory by four states by 1860 because of federal law.

Many of the opportunities opened by the market revolution were found by the Cult of Domesticity Women. As the household declined as a center of economic production, many women saw their traditional roles undermined by the availability of mass-produced goods previously made at home. As work moved from household to factory, some women followed it. A new definition of femininity was embraced by others who said that a woman's ability to create a private environment shielded from the competitive tensions of the market economy was more important than her contribution to the family's economic wellbeing. As work moved from the household to workshops and factories, the woman's "place" was in the home. Her role was to provide a shelter from the competitive marketplace for men with nonmarket values like love, friendship, and mutual obligation.

The ideology of "republican motherhood," which allowed women a kind of public role as mothers of future citizens, evolved into the "Virtue," which was a political characteristic of men essential to the success of republican government.

Women had considerable power over personal affairs within the family with more and more men leaving the home for work. The decline in the American birthrate can't be explained by the decision of millions of women to limit the number of children they have. The idea of domesticity minimized women's participation in the outside world. Freedom meant fulfilling both sexes' innate qualities. Men were aggressive and domineering, while women were less suited for public life. If submission to the will of another became less accepted for free men, it was still expected of them. Women were supposed to remain cloistered in the private realm of the family, while men were supposed to move freely between the public and private spheres.

The experience of those women who worked for wages at least some time in their lives was not related to thevailing ideas about gender. Despite their disadvantages, they did so. Only low-paying jobs were available to women, so they couldn't compete for employment. After the Civil War, married women were able to control their own wages, but not independent contracts or lawsuits. Poor city dwellers and farm families depended on the labor of their family members to survive.

Poor women found jobs as domestic servants, factory workers, and seamstresses. The spread of the putting-out system in shoemaking, hatmaking, and clothing manufacture allowed women to work at home and contribute to family income even as they retained responsibility for domestic chores, as early industrialization enhanced the availability of paid work for northern women.

It became a badge of respectability for wives to remain at home, outside of the disorderly new market economy, as husbands conducted business in their offices, shops, and factories. Fashionable middle-class neighborhoods were developed in larger cities where families of different social classes had previously lived together. Domestic servants were the largest employment category for women in the 19th century. The middle-class woman's freedom was dependent on the employment of other women in her household.

It became more and more difficult to think of labor as belonging to anyone but men in a market economy where work that created monetary value became more and more important. Child supported her family by writing and became a prominent advocate of women's rights. She sewed thirty-six pieces of clothing, prepared more than 700 meals, and spent a lot of time supervising household help in a single year.

Child worked at home and as a writer. The spread of capitalism degrading men was an indication of how labor discussions rarely mentioned housewives, domestic servants, and female outworkers. The idea that the male head of household should command a family wage that enabled him to support his wife and children became a popular definition of social justice. Middle-class Americans and working-class men were 888-609- 888-609- 888-609- 888-609-

There is an ad for a domestic worker in a New York City newspaper that is crumpled on the ground. The prospective employer is seated in the middle of the agent who runs the office. Female employment in the 19th century was dominated by domestic work.

Many Americans experienced the market revolution not as an enhancement of the power to shape their own lives, but as a loss of freedom. Between the War of 1812 and 1840 there was a sharp economic downturn, a full-fledged depression, and numerous ups and downs. Every aspiring American who rode the tide of economic progress seemed to sink beneath the waves. The nation's output and trade grew rapidly as a result of the economic transformation. It widened the gap between wealthy merchants and industrialists on the one hand and impoverished factory workers, unskilled dockworkers, and seamstresses on the other. The richest 5 percent of the population owned more than half of the wealth in Massachusetts, the most industrialized state in the country. In Philadelphia, the top 1 percent had more wealth than the rest of the population combined. Men who couldn't pay their debts ended up in the prisons of major cities.

The world's first Workingmen's Parties, short-lived political organizations that sought to mobilize lower-class support for candidates who would press, were created in the late 1820s by skilled craftsmen who were alarmed at the erosion of traditional skills and the threat of being reduced to the status The time of rapidly rising prices in the 1830s saw union organization spread and strikes become commonplace. Along with demands for higher wages and shorter hours, the early labor movement called for free homesteads for settlers on public land and an end to the imprisonment of union leaders for conspiracy.

Older ideas of freedom linked to economic autonomy, public-spirited virtue, and social equality were the basis of workers' language of protest. Male workers were not the only ones who had such actions and language. Two years after the young mill women of Lowell walked off their jobs to protest a reduction in wages, their employers raised rents at their boardinghouses. The "very essence of slavery" was how labor spokesmen like Langdon Byllesby described wage labor, since dependence on another person for one's economic livelihood was incompatible with freedom.

Labor's critique of the market economy directly challenged the idea of individual improvement, because of the traditions of the small producer and the identification of freedom with economic independence. Orestes Brownson wrote in his influential essay "The Laboring Class" that wealth and labor were at war. He said that workers' problems must be understood as institutional.

"We are free, but not free enough," wrote Peter Rodel, an immigrant German shoemaker. The idea of economic security, a standard of life below which no person would fall, formed an essential part of American freedom.

The market revolution changed American society and its conception of freedom. It encouraged a new emphasis on individualism and physical mobility among white men, while severely limiting the options available to women and African-Americans. It opened new opportunities for economic freedom for many Americans, while causing others to fear that their economic independence was being eroded. The debate over the market revolution and its consequences for freedom would be reflected in American politics.

The qualities of modesty and virtue were essential to proper womanhood in the 19th century.

Men should be paid enough to enable them to support their entire family without their wives having to work outside the home.

The rise of individualism was shown in some examples.

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