Transcript The Market Revolution

The Market Revolution
North
1815-1860
Study Guide: Identifications
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Transportation, Market & Industrial Revolutions
Immigration and Scapegoat
Status of artisan
Rhode Island and Waltham System
Cult of Domesticity
Purity Crusade
Universal White Male suffrage
2nd Great Awakening
Study Guide: Questions
• What marked the increasing industrialization
in the US economy between 1815 – 1860?
• How and why did inequalities increase
among the rich, the middle class and the
working class?
Changes that allowed for the
Industrial Revolution
• Transportation Revolution
– Improvements in transportation made that
transformation possible
• Federal, state and corporate investments in transportation
improvements
• Roads, Canals, Railroads
• Market Revolution
– Transition from domestic markets to for distant
markets
• Industrial Revolution
– Domestic hand labor to machine and factory output
• Immigration
– Cheap and exploitable labor
Immigration
• Political turmoil and Famine brought Massive
immigration
– Irish Potato Famine 1845-1846
• 2.5 Million (30% of Ireland’s population)
– German immigration 1840-60
• 4.2 Million
• Provided Cheap/Exploitable Labor
• Used to scapegoat political, economic & social
issues
“The Bog Trotters”
The Poor House from Galway
“The Irish fill our prisons, our
poor houses, scratch a convict
or a pauper, and the chances
are that you tickle the skin of an
Irish Catholic. Putting them on
a boat and sending them home
would end crime in this country”
The Great Fear of the Period
That Uncle Sam is Swallowed by
Foreigners
The Problem Solved
Thomas Nast
Cartoon,
1870
Expresses
the worry that
the Irish
Catholics
threatened
American
Freedom
Artisan Status
• Early industry & The Putting Out System
• Status of Artisan:
– Owned tools of production
– Owned shops
– Managed time and produce
– skilled workers
– Independence
– prestige
Shoe Makers
Textile Industries & Industrial
Espionage
• Slater’s Rhode Island System
– Water powered spinning machine
– The Rhode Island System
• The countryside factory towns & Labor of Farmer’s
daughters
• Lowell’s Waltham System
• Machines that turned raw cotton into finished cloth
– Boston Associates Co. 1813
• Fully mechanized
• By the 1830s - Unskilled, female labor
Daguerreotype of a young mill girl, c.
1850, Massachusetts
Middlesex Company Woolen Mills 1848
Urban Industry
• Industrial Revolution and the Widening
gap between the rich and the poor
– By 1835 cities were serving commercial
agriculture and factory towns that produced
for largely rural domestic market.
• Creation of the Urban working class
– In the cities there was little concern for
creating a classless industrial society.
Class Hierarchy
• The richest men
– importers and exporters and took control of banks and insurance
companies and made great fortunes in urban real estate
• Growing middle class
– Commercial Class
• Wholesale and retail merchants,
• lawyers, salesmen, auctioneers, bookkeepers and accountants
• clerks on the bottom creating a white-collar class to cater to the new
emerging consumer society.
Middle Class Ideal
Consumer goods
Symbols of
their middle class
status
Notions of gentility
 distinction
between manual
and non manual
work
Cult of Domesticity
• The separation of work and
home
– New sense of classconsciousness.
• Middle class fathers left for
their jobs while mothers
governed households.
• Reduction in size of
families
• 1820s ministers and female
writers elevated the family role of
middle class women into a cult of
domesticity
Cult of Domesticity
– Biological difference
determined separate social
roles for men and women.
– Men:
• strong, aggressive and
ambitious, intelligent
• Place in business and
politics.
– Women:
• Kind, pure, emotional,
moral
• Place to preserve religion
and morality in the home
and family
“The Hands”
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Producers of consumer goods
The “hands”
Growth in Demand
Growth in Working class
– Shoemaking, tailoring and the building trade were
divided into skilled and semiskilled segments and
farmed out to subcontractors who could turn a
profit by cutting labor costs
Rising Standard of Living
• After 1815
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per capita income doubled
living standards rose
Houses: larger, better furnished, heated.
Food: more plentiful and varied
• The cost:
– Half of all adult white males without land
– wealth had become more concentrated.
• In 1800 the richest 10 percent of Americans owned 4050% of the national wealth, by the 1850s they owned
70%. In the cities they owned over 80%.
Lowered Standard of Living
• First Slums appeared in the mid 1800s
– Huge influx of immigrants and creation of
exploitable labor force
– Overcrowded Housing
– Contaminated water supplies
– Lack of Sewage
– Disease and high mortality rates
• Cholera and Typhus
Five Points District
Evangelical Crusades
• Early 19th C ministers bolstered doctrine of
separate spheres
– Clerical endorsement of female moral superiority in
exchange for women’s activism
• Decline of clerical authority in society
• Opposed forces that seemed to act against
women’s interests
– Materialism
– Intemperance
– Licentiousness
Purity Crusade
• Traditionally: both men and women wee
sexual beings, women weaker willed,
lustful and licentious and insatiable
• Purity Crusade: women lacked sexual
feeling, lust and carnality became a part of
men’s sphere
– Etiquette manuals counseled to deter male
advances
Professional Medicine & Women’s
Sexuality
• Women were Asexual beings
– Defined by their sex & sexual roles, yet did not desire
it
– Dr Alcott, “Women, as is well known, in a natural
state…seldom if ever makes any of those advances,
which clearly indicates sexual desire and for this very
plain reason, she does not feel them.”
– Only “low” women suffered from the indignity of
sexual desire
• Long periods of abstinence proper
• Masturbation damaged future offspring, and
caused “mania” and “idiocy” on the guilty party
Middle & Upper class invalids
• Chronic invalidism among women
• Middle class culture idealized female
debility
• 1800’s doctors came close the defining
femaleness as an illness itself
Twin Revolutions
• Universal White Male Suffrage Movement
– Suffrage extended to white males (18071860’s)
• By the 1800s race and gender began to replace
wealth and status as the basis for defining the
limits of political participation
Twin Revolutions
• Second Great Awakening (1800-1840)
– “Salvation open to all” reinforced the
legitimacy of “one man, one vote”
– Women: provided a welcomed release from
“being treated like beasts of burden and
drudges of domineering masters”
– Blacks: advocated spiritual and secular
equality
• Platform to directly challenge slavery
Social Changes
• Extension of white male suffrage
• Development of common schools
– By 1850 ½ women gained literacy
• Evangelicalism – democratized salvation
• Development of the Abolition movement
out of the evangelical revivals
• Abolition movement split into the Women’s
movement
New York 1837
“Foreigners and
aliens to our
government and
laws, strangers to
our institutions are
permitted to flock to
this land and in a few
years are endowed
with all the privileges
of citizens, but we
native born
Americans…are
most of us shut out.”