Chapter 14 Reading Guide Forging the National Economy

Chapter xiv: Forging the National Economic system, 1790-1860

1. The Westward Movement
   1. The ascent of Andrew Jackson, the first president grade beyond the Appalachian Mountains, exemplified the inexorable due west march of the American people; the West, with its raw frontier, was the well-nigh typically American part of America
   2. The Republic and the people were so immature —every bit tardily as 1850, one-half of Americans were under the age of thirty; Past 1840 the "demographic center" of the American population map had crossed the Alleghenies; by the Civil State of war it had crossed the Ohio River
   3. Legend portraying men carving civilization out of the western woods were false equally in reality, life was downright grim for almost pioneer families in the Due west
      1. Poorly fed, ill-clad, housed in hastily erected shanties, they were perpetual victims of disease, low, and premature death; to a higher place all, unbearable loneliness haunted them, specially the women, who were often cut off from human contact
      2. Frontier life could be tough and crude for men as well as no-holds-barred wrestling was a pop entertainment and pioneering Americans, marooned by geography, were often sick informed, superstitious, provincial, and fiercely individualistic
      3. Popular literature of the flow abounded with portraits of unique, isolated figures like Cooper's heroic Natty Bumppo and Melville's restless Helm Ahab
      4. Fifty-fifty in the era of "rugged individualist" there were important exceptions; pioneers, in tasks beyond their resources would telephone call upon their neighbors for logrolling and barn raising and upon their government for help in building internal improvements
2. Shaping the Western Landscape
   1. The westward movement also molded the physical environment
      1. Pioneers in a hurry often exhausted the land in the tobacco regions then pushed on
      2. In the Kentucky bottomlands, alpine cane posed a barrier but settlers soon discovered that when the cane was burned off, European bluegrass thrived in the canefields
      3. Kentucky bluegrass" made ideal pasture for livestock—and lured thousands
   2. The American West felt the pressure of civilization in additional ways
      1. Past the 1820s American fur trappers were in the Rocky Mountain regions and the fur-trapping empire was based on the "rendezvous" system; each summertime, traders ventured from St. Louis to the Rocky Mountain valley and waited for the trappers and Indians to arrive with beaver pelts to swap for manufactured goods from the East
      2. The trade thrived for ii decades earlier the hats went out of style and fewer beavers
      3. Trade in buffalo robbers besides flourished, leading somewhen to the virtually total anything of the massive bison herds and nonetheless farther west, on the California declension, other traders bought upwardly sea-otter pelts, driving otters to the point of about-extinction
      4. Ambitious, daydreaming exploitation of W natural bounty—"ecological imperialism"
   3. Yet Americans in this menses as well revered nature and admired its beauty; the spirit of nationalism fed the growing appreciation of the uniqueness of the American wilderness
      1. Searching for the United States' distinctive characteristics, many observers establish the wild, unspoiled character of the country, especially the West, to be defining
      2. Other countries may have mountains or rivers, but none had the pristine, natural beauty of America, unspoiled past human easily and reminiscent of a time earlier the dawn of culture—attitude became a kind of national mystique, inspiring literature and painting, and somewhen kindling a powerful conservation motility
      3. George Catlin was among the first to advocate for preservation of nature every bit deliberate national policy; he proposed the creation of a national park (Yellowstone, 1872)
3. The March of the Millions
   1. Equally the American people moved westward, they also multiplied at an astonishing rate; by mid-century the population was yet doubling approximately every xx-five years
   2. By 1860, the original thirteen states had more than doubled in number: 30-iii stars graced the American flag and the United States was the 4th about populous nation in the western globe, exceed only by three European countries—Russia, French republic, and Republic of austria
   3. Urban growth continued explosively; in 1790 only two American cities (Philadelphia and New York) had populations of twenty k or more than but by 1860, in that location were 43
   4. Such over rapid urbanization unfortunately brought undesirable by-products; It intensified the issues of smelly slums, feeble street lighting, inadequate policing, impure water, foul sewage, ravenous rats, and improper garbage disposal
   5. A continuing high birthrate accounted for most of the increase in population, just by the 1840s the tides of immigration were calculation hundreds of thousands more
      1. Before this decade immigrants had been flowing in at a rate of 6th thousand a twelvemonth, but all of a sudden the influx tripled in the 1840s and then quadrupled in the 1850s
      2. During these 2 feverish decades, over a million and a half Irish, and nearly every bit many Germans, swarmed down the gangplanks—why did they come up?
   6. The immigrants came partly because Europe seemed to be running out of room; Europe grew and "surplus" people, who were displaced and footloose in their homelands before they felt the tug of the American magnet (nearly 60 one thousand thousand people abased Europe in the century afterward 1840, most 25 million went somewhere other than in the Usa)
   7. However American still beckoned most strongly to the struggling masses of Europe, and the majority of migrants headed for the "land of freedom and opportunity"
      1. There was freedom from aloof caste and state church; there was abundant opportunity to secure broad acres and better ane's condition
      2. Messages sent by immigrants—"America letters"—often described in glowing terms the richer life: depression taxes, no compulsory military serve, and "three meat meals a twenty-four hours"
      3. The introduction of transoceanic steamships too meant that the immigrants could come chop-chop, in a affair of x or twelve days instead of ten or twelve weeks
4. The Emerald Isle Moves Westward
   1. Ireland was drained in the mid-1840s; a terrible rot attacked the potato ingather, on which the people had become dangerously dependent, and most 1-fourth of them were swept abroad by disease and hunger; all told, about two million perished
   2. Tens of thousands of destitute souls, feeling the Land of Famine for the Land of Enough, flocked to America in the "Black Forties"—Ireland's great export has been population
   3. These uprooted newcomers—too poor to move west and buy the necessary land, livestock, and equipment—swarmed into the larger seaboard cities (Boston and NYC)
   4. The luckless Irish immigrants received no red-carpet treatment
      1. Forced to alive in squalor, they were rudely crammed into the already-vile slums and were scorned by the older American stock, peculiarly "proper" Protestant Bostonians, who regarded the scruffy Catholic arrivals every bit a social menace
      2. As wage-depressing competitors for jobs (kitchen maids and railroads) the Irish were hated past native workers—"No Irish Need Apply" was a sign commonly posted
      3. The Irish gaelic, for like reasons, fiercely resented the blacks, with whom they shared society's basement; race riots between black and Irish dockworkers flared up
   5. The friendless "famine Irish" were forced to fend for themselves; the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a semisecret society founded in Ireland to fight rapacious landlords, served in America as a benevolent society, aiding the downtrodden; it also helped spawn the "Molly Maguires," a shadowy Irish gaelic miners' union in the PA coal districts in 1860s-70s
   6. The Irish tended to remain in low-skill occupations but gradually improved their lot, usually by acquiring minor amounts of holding (education of children commonly cut short)
   7. Politics quickly attracted these gregarious Gaelic newcomers and they soon began to gain control of powerful urban center machines—American politicians made hast to cultivate the Irish vote, specially in the politically strong state of New York and politicians usually found it politically assisting to fire exact volleys at London (Irish hatred of the British)
5. The German language Forty-Eighters
   1. The influx of refugees from Germany between 1830 and 1860 was simply as spectacular every bit that from Ireland; during these troubled years, over a 1000000 and a half Germans arrived
      1. The bulk of them were uprooted farmers, displaced by crop failures and other hardships; but a potent sprinkling were liberal political refugees
      2. Saddened past the plummet of the autonomous revolutions of 1848, they had decided to get out the autocratic fatherland and flee to America—the brightest promise of commonwealth
   2. Zealous German language liberals similar Carl Schurz, a relentless foe of slavery and public corruption, contributed richly to the summit of American political life
   3. Unlike the Irish, many Germanic newcomers possessed a small amount of material goods; must of them pushed out to the lush lands of the Middle Westward, notably Wisconsin, where they settled and established model farms—like the Irish, they formed an influential body of voters, but they were less potent politically because they were more scattered
   4. The hand of Germans in shaping American life was widely felt in notwithstanding other ways
      1. The Conestoga wagon, the Kentucky rifle, and the Christmas tree were all High german
      2. Germans had fled from the militarism and wars of Europe and consequently came to be a safeguard of isolationist sentiment in the upper Mississippi valley
      3. Better educated on the whole than the stump-grubbing Americans, they warmly supported public schools, including their Kindergarten (children's garden)
      4. The Germans likewise did much to stimulate art and music; as outspoken champions of freedom, they became relentless enemies of slavery earlier the Civil War
   5. Yet the Germans—often dubbed "damned Dutchmen"—were regarded with suspicion by their old-stock American neighbors; seeking to preserve their linguistic communication and civilization, they sometimes settled in compact "colonies" and kept aloof from the surrounding customs
   6. They were accustomed to the "Continental Sun" and drank huge quantities of an amber beverage chosen bier (beer)—their Old World drinking habits, like the Irish, spurred advocates of temperance in the use of booze to redouble their reform efforts
6. Flare-ups of Antiforeignism
   1. The invasion by this so-called immigrant "rabble" in the 1840s and 1850s inflamed the prejudices of American "nativists"—they feared that these foreign hordes would outbreed, outvote, and overwhelm the old "native" people of America
      1. Not simply did the newcomers take jobs from "native" Americans, simply the bulk of the displaced Irish were Roman Catholics, as were a substantial minority of the Germans
      2. The Church of Rome was still widely regarded by many old-line Americans as a "foreign" church building; convents were commonly referred to as "popish brothels"
   2. Roman Catholics were at present on the motility; seeking to protect their children from Protestant indoctrination in the public schools, they began in the 1840s to construct a separate Catholic educational organization (expensive but revealed the strength of its delivery)
   3. With the enormous influx of the Irish and Germans in the 1840s and 1850s, the Catholics became a powerful religious group; in 1840 they ranked fifth behind the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists just by 1850, they bounded into first
   4. Older-stock Americans were alarmed by these mounting figures; they professed to believe that in due time the immigrants would establish the Catholic Church at the expense of Protestantism and would introduce "popish idols"
      1. The noisier American "nativists" rallied for political action; in 1849, they formed the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which soon adult into the formidable American, or "Know-Nothing," party—a name derived from its secretiveness
      2. Nativists" agitated for rigid restrictions on clearing and naturalization for laws authorizing the deportation of conflicting paupers; promoted a lurid literature of exposure
      3. At that place was occasional mass violence and the almost frightful flare-up occurred during 1844 in Philadelphia were the Irish Catholics fought back against the threats of "nativists"—two Catholic churches had been burned and over fifty wounded
   5. Immigrants were making America a more pluralistic society and mayhap it was small wonder that cultural clashes would occur past why weren't there more episodes?
      1. The vigorous growth of the economy in these years both attracted immigrants in the start place and ensured that they could claim their share of the American wealth
      2. They helped fuel economic expansion simply without the newcomers, an agricultural United States might have just watched the Industrial Revolution in envy
7. The March of Mechanization
   1. A group of gifted British inventors, beginning virtually 1750, perfected a series of machines for the mass production of textiles and this enslavement of steam multiplied the power of man muscles some 10-thousand fold and ushered in the modern manufacturing plant system
      1. The Industrial Revolution was accompanied by a transformation in agricultural production and in the methods of transportation and advice
      2. The Factory system gradually spread from Britain to other lands and it took a generation or so to reach western Europe, and then the U.s.
   2. The American Republic was slow to comprehend the mill organisation considering the virgin soil in America was cheap; labor was therefore generally deficient and enough nimble hands to operate machines were hard to fine—until immigrants began to cascade ashore in the 1840s
   3. Money for capital letter investment was not plentiful in pioneering America; raw materials lay undeveloped, undiscovered, or unsuspected—much of coal was imported from Britain
   4. Just as labor was deficient, so were consumers—the young country at outset lacked a domestic market large enough to make factory-scale manufacturing profitable
   5. Established British factories provided cutthroat competition and posed another problem
   6. The British also enjoyed a monopoly of the material machinery, whose secrets they were anxious to hibernate from foreign competitors; parliament enacted laws to protect its economy
   7. Not until the middle of the nineteen^th century did the factories exceed output of the farms
8. Whitney Ends the Fiber Famine
   1. Samuel Slater has been acclaimed the "Male parent of the Manufactory System"
      1. A skilled British mechanic, he was attracted by bounties being offered to British workers familiar with the material machines; subsequently memorizing the plans for the mechanism, he escaped in disguise to America, where he won the back of Moses Chocolate-brown, a Quaker capitalist in Rhode Island  (he put into operation in 1791 the offset efficient American machinery for spinning cotton thread)
      2. Although the mechanism was ready, where was the cotton—procedure expensive
   2. Another mechanical genius, Massachusetts-born Eli Whitney, at present made his mark
      1. After graduating from Yale and journeying to Georgia, in 1793, he congenital a crude automobile called the cotton gin that was 50 times more effective than the manus process
      2. Near overnight the raising of cotton became highly profitable and the South was tied paw and human foot to the throne of Rex Cotton; the insatiable demand for cotton revived the chains on the limbs of the downtrodden southern blacks
   3. South and Northward both prospered; slave-driving planters cleared more acres for cotton, pushing the Cotton Kingdom due west off the depleted ride-water plains
   4. Factories at beginning flourished most actively in New England, though they branched out into the more populous areas of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; the South's upper-case letter was jump up in slaves—its local consumers for the most office were desperately poor
   5. New England was singularly favored equally an industrial center for several reasons
      1. Dumbo population provided labor and accessible markets; aircraft brought in capital; snug seaports made import of raw materials and consign of finished products piece of cake
      2. The Rapid rivers provided abundant h2o power to plow the cogs of the machines; past 1860 more than 400 million pounds of southern cotton wool poured annually into the gaping maws of over a thousand mills, generally in the New England region
9. Marvels in Manufacturing
   1. America's factories spread slowly until about 1807, when there began the fateful sequence of the embargo, nonintercourse, and the State of war of 1812
      1. Stern necessity dictated the manufacture of substitutes for normal imports, while the stoppage of European commerce was temporarily ruinous to Yankee shipping
      2. Generous bounties were offered by local authorities from home-grown appurtenances
   2. The manufacturing boomlet broke abruptly with the peace of Ghent in 1815
      1. British competitors unloaded their dammed-upward surpluses at ruinously low prices
      2. Responding to the pained out-cries, Congress provided some relief when it passed the mildly protective Tariff of 1816—attempt to control the shape of the economy
   3. As the factory arrangement flourished, information technology embraced numerous other industries besides textiles
      1. Prominent among them was the manufacturing of firearms and hither the wizardly Eli Whitney again appeared with an extraordinary contribution
      2. Well-nigh 1798, Whitney seized upon the idea of having machines make each part, so that muskets could be scrambled and reassembled—interchangeable parts
      3. The principle of interchangeable parts was widely adopted past 1850 and it ultimately became the footing of mod mass-product, assembly-line methods
   4. The sewing machines, invented by Elias Howe in 1846 and perfected by Isaac Singer, gave another strong heave to northern industrialization; the sewing machine became the foundation of the ready-made wear manufacture, which took root near the Civil State of war
   5. Each momentous new invention seemed to stimulate sill more than imaginative inventions, patents in 1800 numbered only 306 patents but by the stop of 1860, it totaled 28,000
   6. Technical advances spurred equally important changes in the course and legal condition of business organizations—the principle of limited liability aided the concentration of capital by permitting the private investor to adventure no more than his ain share of stock
   7. One of the earliest investment capital companies, the Boston Associates, eventually dominated the textile, railroad, insurance, and banking business organisation of Massachusetts
   8. Laws of "free incorporation," first passed in New York in 1848, meant that businessmen could create corporations without applying for private charters from legislatures
   9. Samuel F. B. Morse'southward telegraph was among the inventions that tightened the sinews of an increasingly circuitous business world; past the eve of the Civil War, a web of singing wires spanned the continent, revolutionizing news gathering, diplomacy, and finance
10. Workers and "Wage Slaves"
    1. Ane bad outgrowth of the factory system was an astute labor problem; the industrial revolution submerged the personal association to the impersonal ownership of factories
    2. Clearly the early factory system did now shower its benefits evenly on all
       1. While many owners waxed fat, working people oft wasted away at their workbenches; hours were long, wages were low, and meals were skimpy
       2. Workers were forced to toil in unsanitary buildings and were forbidden by law to course labor unions for such activities were regarded equally criminal conspiracies
       3. Vulnerable to exploitation were kid workers; in 1820 one-half the nation'south industrial toilers were children nether 10 years of age; they were victims of factory labor
    3. By contrast, the lot of most adult wage workers improved markedly in the 1820s and 1830s; in flush of Jacksonian democracy, many of the states granted the laborers the vote
    4. Every bit well as demanding the 10-hour day, higher wages, and tolerable working conditions, workers demanded public education for children and an stop to imprisonment for debt
       1. Employers fought the ten-hour day to the last ditch and argued that reduced hours would lessen product, increment costs, and demoralize the workers—more free time
       2. A red-letter of the alphabet gain was at length registered for labor in 1840, when President Van Buren established the 10-hour twenty-four hour period for federal employees on public works
    5. Day laborers at last learned that their strongest weapon was to lay down their tools
       1. Dozens of strikes erupted in the 1830s and 1840s, most of them for higher wages, some for the ten-hour mean solar day, and a few for such unusual goals every bit correct to fume on job
       2. The workers usually lost more strikes than they won for the employer could resort to importing strikebreakers, often fresh off the boat from the Old World
       3. Labor's early on and painful efforts at organization had netted some 300,000 trade unionists past 1830; merely such gains were negated with the astringent depression of 1837
       4. Every bit unemployment spread, spousal relationship membership shriveled; nonetheless toilers won a promising legal victory in 1842 when the supreme court of Massachusetts ruled in the case of Commonwealth 5. Hunt that labor unions were not illegal conspiracies
       5. The enlightened conclusion did not legalize the strike overnight but it was pregnant
11. Women and the Economy
    1. Women were too sucked into the clanging mechanism of factory production; farm women and girls had an of import place in the preindustrial economy, spinning yarn, weaving cloth, and making candles, soap, butter, and cheese
       1. New factories such as the material mills undermined these activities, cranking out manufactured appurtenances much faster than they could be made past hand at dwelling
       2. Yet these same factories offered employment to the very young women whose work they were displacing; factory jobs promised greater economic independence
       3. Manufactory girls" typically toiled half dozen days a week, earning work "from dark to dark"
       4. The Boston Associates pointed to their material mill at Lowell, MA as a showplace mill where most workers were farm girls who were advisedly supervised on and off
    2. Opportunities for women to be economically self-supporting were scarce and consisted mainly of nursing, domestic service, and especially education
       1. Catharine Beecher tirelessly urged women to enter the teaching profession; she eventually succeeded across her dreams, as men left teaching for other lines of work and schoolhouse pedagogy became a thoroughly "feminized" occupation
       2. Most 10% of white women were working for pay outside their won homes in 1850, and estimates are that almost xx% of all women had been employed before spousal relationship
    3. The vast bulk of workingwomen were single; upon marriage, they left their paying jobs and took up their new work as wives and mothers (they were enshrined in a "cult of domesticity" a widespread cultural creed that glorified functions of the homemaker)
    4. From their pedestal, married women commanded immense moral power and they increasingly made decisions that altered the grapheme of the family itself
    5. Women'due south changing roles and the spreading Industrial Revolution brought some of import changes in the life of the nineteenth-century changes in the life of the 19^thursday century domicile
    6. Women'due south irresolute roles and the spreading Industrial Revolution brought some important changes in the life of the nineteenth-century home—the tradition "women'southward sphere"
       1. Love, not parental "arrangement" more and more frequently determined the pick of a spouse—yet parents often retained the power of veto; families more closely knit
       2. Most hitting, families grew smaller; the "fertility rate," or number of births among women age xiv to 40-five, dropped sharply among white women in the years after the Revolution and in the course of the 19^thursday century as a whole, fell by half
       3. Women undoubtedly played a large part in decisions to have fewer children
       4. This newly assertive part for women has been called "domestic feminism" considering information technology signified the growing power and independence of women ("cult of domesticity")
    7. Smaller families, in turn, meant kid-centered families, since where children are fewer, parents tin lavish more care on them individually; lessons were enforced by punishments other than the hickory stick (shaping the child instead of simply breaking the kid)
    8. In the fiddling republic of the family, good citizens were raised not to exist meekly obedient to authority, but to be independent individuals who could make their own decisions on the footing of internalized moral standards (small, affectionate, child-centered modernistic family)
12. Western Farmers Reap a Revolution in the Fields
    1. The trans-Allegheny region—especially the Ohio-Indiana-Illinois tier—was becoming the nation's breadbasket and earlier long information technology would go a granary to the world
       1. Pioneer families first planted their painfully uneven fields to corn; the yellow grain was amazingly versatile and could be fed to hogs or distilled into liquor
       2. Both these products could exist transported more than easily than the bulky grain and they became the early on western farmer'due south staple market items (trade of hogs)
    2. Virtually western produce was at first floated down the Ohio-Mississippi River system, to feed the lusty appetite of the booming Cotton Kingdom just western farmers were as hungry for profits as southern slaves and planters were for food (cultivated more land)
    3. Ingenious inventors came to the air of these western tillers
       1. One of the showtime obstacles that frustrated the farmers was the thickly matted soil of the West, which snapped fragile wooden plows and John Deere of Illinois in 1827 finally produced a steel plough; abrupt and effective, information technology was lite enough to be pulled by horses
       2. In the 1830s, Cyrus McCormick contributed the almost wondrous contraption of all: a mechanical mower-reaper; the clattering cogs of his horse-fatigued machine were to western farmers what the cotton wool gin was to southern planters
       3. Seated on his reaper, a single man could do the piece of work of five men with scythes
    4. The mower-reaper fabricated ambitious capitalists out of humble plowmen who now scrambled for more acres on which to plant more than fields of billowing wheat
    5. Subsistence farming gave way to production for the market place, as large-calibration, specialized, cash-crop agriculture came to dominate the trans-Allegheny West; soon hustling farmer-businesspeople were annually harvesting a larger ingather than the Due south could devour
    6. They began to dream of markets elsewhere but they were still largely land-locked; commerce moved n and south on the river systems; before it could begin to move east-west in majority, a transportation revolution would have to occur
13. Highways and Steamboats
    1. In 1789, primitive methods of travel were still in apply; waterborne commerce, whether along the declension or on the rivers, was slow, uncertain, and often dangerous
    2. Inexpensive and efficient carriers were imperative if raw materials were to be transported to factories and if finished products were to be delivered to consumers
    3. A promising improvement came in the 1790s, when a private company completed the Lancaster Turnpike in Pennsylvania; a broad difficult-surfaced highway from Philly to Lancaster; as drivers approached the tollgate, they were confronted with a barrier of sharp pikes, which were turned aside when they paid their toll—hence the term turnpike
       1. ​The Lancaster Turnpike proved to exist a highly successful venture, returning as high as xv percent annual dividends to its stockholders; it attracted a rich merchandise to Philadelphia and touched off a turnpike-edifice boom that lasted about twenty years
       2. The turnpike also stimulated western development and beckoned to the canvas-covered Conestoga wagons, whose creakings herald a westward advance
    4. Western road edifice, e'er expensive, encountered many obstacles
       1. 1 pesky roadblock was the noisy states' righters, who opposed federal aid to local projects; Eastern states also protested against their populations moving westward
       2. Westerners scored a notable triumph in 1811 when the federal government began to construct the elongated National Road, or Cumberland Route
       3. This highway ultimately stretched from Cumberland, in western Maryland, to Vandalia, in Illinois, a altitude of 591 miles; War of 1812 interrupted construction and states' rights shackles on internal improvements hampered federal grants
       4. But the thoroughfare was finally, belatedly brought to its destination in 1852 past a combination of aid from united states of america and the federal authorities
    5. The steamboat craze, which overlapped the turnpike craze, was touched off past an ambitious painter-engineer named Robert Fulton who installed a powerful steam engine in a vessel that posterity came to know as the Clermont but was dubbed "Fulton'southward Folly"
    6. On a historic day in 1807, the picayune ship churned steadily from New York Metropolis up the Hudson River toward Albany and made the run of 150 miles in 32 hours
    7. The success of the steamboat was sensational; people could at present in large caste defy wind, wave, tide, and downstream current (within years, conveying capacity doubled)
       1. As keelboats had been pushed up the Mississippi at less than one mile an hr, a process that was prohibitively expensive, now the steamboats could churn rapidly confronting eh current, ultimately attaining speeds in excess of ten miles an hour
       2. By 1820 there were some 60 steamboats on the Mississippi and by 1860 about yard; keen rivalry amid the swift and gaudy steamers led to memorable races
       3. Chugging steamboats played a vital role in the opening of the West and Due south, both of which were richly endowed with navigable rivers (population clusters)
14. Clinton's Big Ditch" in New York
    1. A canal-cutting craze paralleled the boom in turnpikes and steamboats
       1. A few canals had been built effectually falls and elsewhere n the colonial days; resourceful New Yorkers, cut off from federal assist by states' righters, themselves dug the Erie Canal, linking the Great Lakes with the Hudson River
       2. They were blessed with the driving leadership of Governor DeWitt Clinton, whose grandiose project was called "Clinton'due south Big Ditch" or "the Governor'southward Gutter"
       3. Begun in 1817, the canal eventually ribboned 363 miles and on its completion in 1825, a garlanded canal boat glided from Buffalo, on Lake Erie, to the Hudson River and on to New York harbor—water from Clinton'due south keg baptized the Empire state
       4. Mule-drawn passengers and bulky freight could now be handled with austerity and dispatch, at the dizzy speed of 5 miles an hour (cost of shipping fell drastically)
    2. E'er-widening economic ripples followed the completion of the Erie Culvert; the value of land along the route skyrocketed and new cities (Rochester, Syracuse) blossomed
       1. Manufacture in the state boomed; the new profitability of farming in the Former Northwest attracted thousands of European immigrants to the unaxed and untaxed lands there
       2. Other profound economic and political changes followed the culvert'southward completion
       3. The price of potatoes in NYC was cut in one-half, and many dispirited New England farmers, no longer able to face the ruinous contest, abased their holdings
       4. Some considering mill easily, thus speeding the industrialization of America and others, finding information technology easy to go w over the Erie Canal, took upwardly new farmland south of the Great Lakes; notwithstanding others shifted to fruit, vegetable, and dairy farming
15. The Fe Horse
    1. The most pregnant contribution to the development of such an economic system proved to exist the railroad; it was cheaper than canals to construct, and non frozen over in the winter
       1. Able to go well-nigh anywhere, fifty-fifty through the Allegheny barrier, it defied terrain and atmospheric condition; the start railroad appeared in the U.s.a. in 1828 and by 1860, the The states boasted thirty thousand miles of railroad track; ¾ of it in the North
       2. At first the railroad faced potent opposition from vested interests, especially canal backers; early railroads were also considered a dangerous public menace for flight sparks could fix fire to nearby haystacks and houses and fearfulness railway accidents
    2. Railroad pioneers had to overcome other obstacles as well; brakes were so feeble that the engineer might miss the station twice, both arriving and back; distance between the rails meant frequent changes of trains for passengers; but gauges soon became standardized, better brakes did brake, safe devices were adopted, and luxury trains introduced
16. Cables, Clippers, and Pony Riders
    1. Other forms of transportation and communication were binding together the U.s. and the earth; a crucial development came in 1858 when Cyrus Field finally stretched a cable under the deep North Atlantic waters from Newfoundland to Ireland
    2. Although this initial cable went dead after iii weeks of public rejoicing, a heavier cable laid in 1866 permanently linked the American and European continents
    3. The United States merchant marine encountered rough sailing during much of the early on nineteenth century; American vessels had been repeatedly laid upwards by the embargo, the War of 1812, and the panics of American in the years of 1819 and 1837
    4. In the 1840s and 1850s, a golden age dawned for American shipping
       1. Yankee naval yards, notably Donald McKay's at Boston, began to send down the ways sleek new craft called clipper ships—they glided across the sea under towering masts and clouds of canvas; in a fair breeze, they could outrun whatsoever steamer
       2. The stately clippers sacrificed cargo space for speed, and their captains fabricated killings by hauling high-value cargoes in record times; they wrested much of the tea-carrying merchandise between the Far East and Britain from their slower-sailing British competitors
       3. The hr of glory for the clipper was relatively brief as on the eve of the Ceremonious War, the British had conspicuously won the globe race for maritime ascendancy with their iron tramp steamers; although slower and less romantic, they were more reliable/roomier
    5. Rapid American advice would be complete by including the Far West
       1. By 1858 horse-drawn overland stagecoaches were a familiar sight and their dusty tracks stretched from the bank of the Missouri River clear to California
       2. Even more dramatic was the Pony Express, established in 1860 to acquit postal service apace the two g lonely miles from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California
       3. Daring lightweight riders, leaping onto wiry ponies saddled at stations approximately 10 miles apart, could make the trip in an amazing 10 days (folded subsequently 1.five years)
    6. The limited riders were unhorsed by Samuel Morse'south clacking keys, which began tapping messages to California in 1861—dying engineering of current of air and muscle
17. The Transport Web Binds the Union
    1. The desire of the East to tap the West stimulated the "transportation revolution"
       1. Until well-nigh 1830 the produce of the western region drained southward to the cotton fiber belt but the steamboat vastly aided the contrary flow of finished goods up the watery western arteries and helped demark W and South together
       2. But the truly revolutionary changes in commerce and communication came in the iii decades before the Ceremonious War, as canals and railroad tracks radiated out from the Eastward, across the Alleghenies and into the blossoming heartland
       3. They would beginning the "natural" flow of trade by a grid of "internal improvements"
    2. The builders succeeded across their wildest dreams; the Mississippi was increasingly robbed of its traffic; by the 1840s the urban center of Buffalo handled more western produce than New Orleans; New York City became the seaboard queen of the nation (huge port)
    3. By the eve of the Civil War, the principle of segmentation of labor, which spelled productivity and profits in the factory, applied on a national calibration too (each region was specialized)
       1. The South raised cotton for export to livestock to feed factory workers in the E and in Europe; the East mad machines and textiles for the South and the Westward
       2. Many Southerners regarded the Mississippi as the chain linking the Northward and South
18. The Market place Revolution
    1. The "market place revolution" transformed a subsistence economy of scattered farms and tiny workshops into a national network of industry and commerce
       1. as more and more Americans linked their economic fate to the burgeoning marketplace economic system, the self-sufficient households of colonial days were transformed
       2. In growing numbers they now scattered to work for wages in the mills, or they planted just a few crops for auction at market and used the money to buy goods made past strangers in far-off factories (shop-bought products replaced homemade products)
    2. A tranquility revolution occurred in the household partitioning of labor and status
       1. Traditional women's work was rendered superfluous and devalued; the habitation itself, once a center of economic production in which all family members cooperated, grew into a identify of refuge from the world of piece of work—special and dissever sphere of women
       2. Revolutionary advances in manufacturing and transportation brought increased prosperity to all Americans, simply they also widened the gulf between the rich and poor
    3. Cities bred the greatest extremes of economic inequality; unskilled workers fared worst and many of them came to make up a floating mass of "drifters," buffeted from boondocks to town by the shifting prospects for menial jobs—accounted for brawling industrial centers
    4. Although their numbers were big, they left footling behind them; many myths almost "social mobility" grew up over the cached memories of these unfortunate day laborers; rags-to-riches success stories were relatively few but there was not excessive mobility
    5. Nevertheless America, with its dynamic society and wide-open spaces, undoubtedly provided more than "opportunity" than the gimmicky countries of the Old Globe; general prosperity helped defuse the potential class conflict that might otherwise take explode

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Y'all merely finished Affiliate fourteen: Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860. Squeamish piece of work!

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How to cite this note (MLA)

Aboukhadijeh, Feross. "Chapter 14: Forging the National Economy, 1790-1860" StudyNotes.org. Written report Notes, LLC., 17 Nov. 2012. Web. 03 Mar. 2022. <https://www.apstudynotes.org/us-history/outlines/chapter-14-forging-the-national-economy-1790-1860/>.

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Source: https://www.apstudynotes.org/us-history/outlines/chapter-14-forging-the-national-economy-1790-1860/

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