Transcript Part One: - Schoolwires

Chapter Twelve
Industry and the North,
1790s–1840s
Part One:
Introduction
Chapter Focus Questions
What were the preindustrial ways of working and
living?
What was the nature of the market revolution?
What effects did industrialization have on workers
in early factories?
In what ways did the market revolution change the
lives of ordinary people?
How did middle class emerge?
Part Two:
Women Factory Workers Form
a Community in Lowell,
Massachusetts
Every small community had artisans
such as blacksmiths and wheelwrights,
who did such essential work as shoeing
horses and mending wagons for local
farmers. Artist John Neagle’s heroic
image of the blacksmith Pat Lyon,
presents him as the very model of
honest industry.
SOURCE:John Neagle,Pat Lyon at the Forge. Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
Lowell, Massachusetts
Lowell textile mills.
Women found the work a welcome change.
By the 1830s, mill owners cut wages.
Paternalistic practices ended.
The result was strikes, replacement.
Part Three:
Preindustrial Ways of
Working
In the 1840s, Edward Hicks painted his childhood home, rendering an idealized image of rural
harmony that owes more to faith in republican agrarianism than to the artist’s accurate memory.
The prosperous preindustrial farm depicted was similar to the Springers’ farm described in the text
in its mixed yield—sheep, cattle, dairy products, and field crops—and its employment of an African
American farm worker, shown plowing.
SOURCE:Residence of David Twinning, 1787. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum.
Rural and Urban Home Production
Entire family worked.
Barter system
In New England, farm families engaged in outside
work
European apprenticeship system in cities.
Rural and Urban Home Production
Artisans, journeymen and possibly master
craftsmen.
No apprenticeship system existed for women.
Work for the urban craftsman:
was a family affair
was organized along patriarchal lines
was specialized in one area
Patriarchy in Family, Work, and Society
The father was head of family and boss.
Legally, the father owned all family
property.
Women were seen as managers of the
household.
The Social Order
Preindustrial society fixed the place of
people in the social order.
Artisans did not challenge traditional
authority.
Market revolution undermined the
traditional social order.
Part Four
The Transportation
Revolution
MAP 12.2 Commercial Links:
Rivers, Canals, Roads, 1830 and
Rail Lines, 1850 By 1830, the
United States was tied together by
a network of roads, canals and
rivers. This “transportation
revolution” fostered a great burst of
commercial activity and economic
growth. Transportation
improvements accelerated the
commercialization of agriculture by
getting farmers’ products to wider,
nonlocal markets. Access to wider
markets likewise encouraged new
textile and other manufacturers to
increase their scale of production.
By 1850, another revolutionary
mode of transportation, the railroad,
had emerged as a vital link to the
transportation infrastructure.
The Transportation Revolution
Map: Commercial Links
1800 -1840, roads and canals, and steamboat
stimulated transportation revolution:
encouraged growth;
promoted the mobility of people and goods; and
fostered the growing commercial spirit.
By 1850, rivers, canals, roads, and railroads tied
nation together.
One of the Erie Canal’s greatest engineering feats occured at Lockport, where the famous
“combined” locks—two sets of five locks—rose side by side for 60 feet. One observer
boasted, “Here the great Erie Canal has defied nature.” SOURCE:Lockport,New York.Lithograph
This Currier and Ives print of 1849, The Express Train, captures the popular awe at the speed
and wonder of the new technology. This “express” probably traveled no more than 30 miles
per hour. SOURCE:Currier and Ives,The Express Train ,1849.The Granger Collection,New York.
Roads
National Road in 1808—the single greatest
transportation expense
East and West tied together.
Canals and Steamboats
Canals:
Water transport was quicker and less expensive
The Erie Canal stimulated east-west travel
The canal helped farmers in the West became
part of a national market.
Towns along the canal grew rapidly.
A canal boom followed.
Canals and Steamboats
Steamboats:
made upstream travel viable;
helped to stimulate trade along western
rivers; and
turned frontier outposts like Cincinnati
into commercial centers.
Railroads
The most remarkable innovation was the
railroad.
Technical problems included the absence of
a standard gauge.
By 1850s consolidation of rail lines
facilitated standardization.
This carved and painted figure,
designed as a whirligig and trade
sign, shows a woman at a spinning
wheel. Until cotton textile mills
industrialized this work, spinning was
one of the most time-consuming
tasks that women and young girls
did at home.
SOURCE:Woman at Spinning Wheel,ca.1850 –70.Carved and painted wood and
iron.Photographed by Ken Burris.Shelburne Museum, Shelburne,Vermont.
Effects of the Transportation
Revolution
Map: Travel Times
The transportation revolution:
provided Americans greater mobility;
allowed farmers to produce for a national market; and
fostered a risk-taking, promoted invention and
innovation.
National pride and identity.
Part Five:
The Market Revolution
MAP 12.1 Travel Times, 1800 and 1857 The transportation revolution dramatically reduced travel times,
and vastly expanded everyone’s horizons. Improved roads, canals, and the introduction of steamboats
and railroads made it easier for Americans to move, and made even those who did not move less isolated.
Better transportation linked the developing West to the eastern seaboard and fostered a sense of national
identity and pride.
The Accumulation of Capital
The market revolution.
Merchants accumulating great wealth.
Trade conflicts between 1807–1815 led merchants to
invest in local enterprises.
Southern cotton produced by slaves bankrolled
industrialization.
Chart: Growth of Cotton Textile Manufacturing
The Putting-Out System
19th century merchants “put out” raw
goods in homes.
In the case of shoe-making artisans:
journeymen cut the leather
wives and daughters bound the upper parts
together
the men stitched the shoe together
The Putting-Out System: Central
Workshop
As demand grew, central workshops grew.
Pratt modified the putting-out system
Artisan shops declined.
Cyrus McCormick is shown demonstrating his reaper to skeptical farmers. When they saw
that the machine cut four times as much wheat a day as a hand-held scythe, farmers flocked
to buy McCormick’s invention. Agricultural practices, little changed for centuries, were
revolutionized by machines such as this. SOURCE:The Testing of the First Reaping Machine, lithograph,1831.Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society.
The Spread of Commercial Markets
As more workers became part of the putting-out
system:
wages for piecework replaced bartering
families bought mass-produced goods rather than
making them at home.
Commercialization did not happen immediately.
Commercial Agriculture in the Old
Northwest
The transportation revolution helped farmers sell
in previously unreachable markets.
Government policy encouraged commercial
agriculture by keeping land cheap.
Regional specialization enabled farmers to
concentrate on growing a single crop.
Innovations in farm tools greatly increased
productivity.
This 1850 engraving by the American Banknote company shows women tending looms at
Lowell. The contrast between this industrial activity and the figure of a woman spinning at
home illustrates one of the most important effects of industrialization: Now machines, not
individuals, determined the pace of production.
SOURCE:Print Collection,Miriam and Ira D.Wallach Division of Art,Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library,Astor,Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
British Technology and
American Industrialization
The Industrial Revolution began in the British textile
industry.
Samuel Slater’s mill.
Mill followed British custom by hiring women and
children.
New England was soon dotted with factories along
its rivers.
The Lowell Mills
Francis C. Lowell studied the British spinning
machine.
Lowell helped invent a power loom.
First integrated cotton mill near Boston in
1814.
Entire town built to house the new enterprise.
MAP 12.3 Lowell, Massachusetts, 1832 This town plan of Lowell, Massachusetts in 1832,
illustrates the comprehensive relationship the owners envisaged between the factories and the
workforce. The mills are located on the Merrimack River, while nearby are the boarding houses for
the single young female workers, row houses for the male mechanics and their families, and
houses for the overseers. Somewhat farther away is the mansion of the company agent.
Lowell, Massachusetts
Map: Lowell Massachusetts
This early nineteenth-century watercolor shows Slater’s mill, the first cotton textile mill in the
United States, which depended on the waterpower of Pawtucket Falls for its energy. New
England was rich in swiftly flowing streams that could provide power to spinning machines
and power looms. SOURCE:Rhode Island Historical Society.
Family Mills
Factories developed elaborate divisions of labor.
Hierarchy of value and pay.
Mills were run with strict schedules, fines and
penalties.
Precise timetable was a major change.
Family Mills
Most mills were “family mills,”.
Antagonistic relationships with the mill/town
In 1816, Connecticut gunsmith Simeon North did what Eli Whitney had only hoped to do.
North produced the first gun with interchangeable parts. North’s invention, taken up and
improved by the national armories at Springfield and Harpers Ferry, formed the basis of the
American system of manufactures. SOURCE:(top)Photograph by James L.Amos;(bottom)John H.Hall ’s patent for a breech-loading rifle,1811.Both,National Geographic Society.
“The American System of
Manufactures”
Interchangeable parts
Eli Whitney
Simeon North
and John Hall
Standardization spread into other areas.
The availability of these goods affected American
thinking about democracy and equality.
Americans could have mass-produced copies,
indistinguishable from the originals.
“The American System of
Manufactures”
Goods affected American thinking about democracy
and equality.
Americans could have mass-produced copies.
Part Six:
From Artisan to Worker
This illustration of seamstresses at work, from Sartain’s Union Magazine, January 1851, shows an early abuse
created by the market revolution. Women workers were crowded into just a few occupations, thereby allowing
owners to offer very low wages for very long hours of work. The women in this illustration appear to be gathered
together in a central workshop, where they had each other for company. Many other women sewed alone at
home, often for even lower wages. SOURCE:Illustration from Sartain’s Union Magazine, January 1851.Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.
This timetable from the Lowell Mills
illustrates the elaborate time
schedules that the cotton textile mills
expected their employees to meet.
For workers, it was difficult to adjust
to the regimentation imposed by
clock time, in contrast to the
approximate times common to
preindustrial work.
SOURCE:Baker Library,Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University.
Personal Relationships
Artisans to workers: lives were transformed.
The putting out-system destroyed apprenticeships
artisan production replaced.
child labor instituted.
Impersonal wage system.
Low skilled workers employed.
Textile mills replaced home occupation.
Mechanization and Women’s Work
Chart: Occupations of Women Wage Earners
Garment industry led many women to work
Women might work 15 to 18 hours a day.
Women’s work centered on hats, bonnets, boots
and shoes.
FIGURE 12.1 Occupations of Women Wage Earners in Massachusetts, 1837 This chart
shows how important outwork was for women workers. Textile work in factories occupied less
than 20 percent of women, while outwork in palm-leaf hats, straw bonnets, and boots and
shoes accounted for over half of the total workforce. Teaching was a new occupation for
women in 1837. The small percentage of 3.6 would grow in the future.
SOURCE:Based on Thomas Dublin,Transforming Women ’s Work (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press,1991),Table 1.1,p.20.
Time, Work, and Leisure
Workers did not readily adjust to the factory.
They were not acclimated to the strict regimen.
Rigid separation between work and leisure.
Leisure spots and activities emerged.
Taverns.
Spectator sports
The Cash Economy
Cash economy led to the decline of barter system.
Worker contact with employers—pay.
Workers searched for jobs..
Laborers saw themselves as “free.
Early Strikes
Owners cited worker individualism.
Most early strikes were unsuccessful.
Women played significant roles in labor
protests.
Part Seven:
A New Social Order
Wealth and Class
Market revolution created a social order with class
mobility.
The upper class stayed about the same.
“Middling sorts” grew rapidly.
Religion helped shape the new attitudes.
The middle class also changed their attitudes by:
emphasizing sobriety and steadiness
removing themselves from the boisterous sociability of
the working class.
Wealth and Class
The middle class also changed their attitudes by:
emphasizing sobriety and steadiness
removing themselves from the boisterous sociability of
the working class.
Religion and Personal Life
The Second Great Awakening.
Salvation through personal faith.
Charles G. Finney:
urged businessmen to convert
accept self-discipline and individualism
Evangelism became the religion of the new
middle class.
The New Middle-Class Family
Middle-class women managed their homes.
Attitudes about appropriate male and female
roles and qualities hardened.
Men were seen as steady, industrious, and
responsible
Women seen as nurturing, gentle, and moral.
Radical changes occurring in middle-class
families.
Family Limitation
Middle-class couples limited their family
size:
birth control.
abstinence.
and abortion.
Family Limitation
Physicians urged that sexual impulses be
controlled.
Middle-Class Children
New views of motherhood emerged.
Women formed networks and read advice
magazines.
Children prolonged their education and professional
training.
Success was very much the result of his family’s
efforts.
Sentimentalism
Competitive spirit led Americans to
sentimentalism and nostalgia.
Publishers found a lucrative market for
novels.
Sentimentalism became more concerned with
maintaining social codes.
In a time before ready-made clothing was available, middle class women used Godey’s
Ladies Book as a pattern book, taking elaborate fashion illustrations such as this one from
1856, to local seamstresses, or remaking older dresses to fit the current trends.
SOURCE:CORBIS © Bettmann//CORBIS
Transcendentalism and Self-Reliance
Intellectual reassurance for middle-class
morality--Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Transcendentalist writers emphasized
individualism :
Henry David Thoreau.
Margaret Fuller.
Emerson’s romantic glorification
of nature included the notion of
himself as a “transparent
eyeball,” as he wrote in “Nature”
in 1836. This caricature of
Emerson is from “Illustrations of
the New Philosophy” by
Christopher Pearce Cranch.
SOURCE:Library of Congress.
Part Eight:
Conclusion