Chapter 9

The Transformation of American Society, 1815-1840

Introduction

• Economic and social changes that took place in the United States between 1815 and 1840

• 1.) What caused the upsurge of westward migration after the War of 1812?

• 2.) How did the rise of the market economy affect where Americans lived and how they made their living?

• 3.) What caused the rise of industrialization?• 4.) What caused urban poverty in this period?

Western Expansion

• The Sweep West– By 1821 the following states were added

• VT, KY, TN, OH, LA, IN, MS, IL, AL, ME, MO– Between 1790 and 1820

• Pioneer families clustered near the navigable rivers– 1820’s and 1830’s

• With the development of canals and railroads, families could afford to fan out

– Tended to settle near others who had come from the same region back east

– Settled mostly between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River

Western Society and Customs

• Before 1830, life was crude and difficult• Easterners often looked down on westerners’

lack of refinement• Westerners in turn resented eastern

pretensions to gentility

The Far West

• Adventurous pioneers traveled across the continent

• Fur-trading and animal trapping• “mountain men”

The Federal Government and the West

• Midwestern settlement was encourage by:– Ordinance of 1785– Northwest Ordinance– Louisiana Purchase– Transcontinental Treaty of 1819– Land warrants given to War of 1812 veterans– Extension of the National Road into IL by 1838– Removal and declining strength of the Native Americans

(by 1820 were no longer receiving Spanish and British aid)

The Removal of the Indians

• By the 1820’s, the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles of the South were under heavy pressure to cede their lands to whites

• The Indian Removal Act– 1830– Andrew Jackson– Granted the president the power to move all Native

American west of the Mississippi River– Could use force if necessary– http://studyworld.com/indian_removal_act_of_1830.htm

The Removal of the Indians (cont.)

• The Creeks in GA and AL had already started to migrate by that point– In 1836, the remainder were forced out

• The Choctaws and Chickasaws suffered a similar fate

• After losing a war of resistance that lasted from 1835 to 1842, most Seminoles also were expelled from FL

The Removal of the Indians (cont.)

• The Cherokees (the most assimilated of the Indians) appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for protection

• Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in their favor• President Jackson ignored the court• Compelled the tribe to cede its land• Travel the “Trail of Tears” westward– 4,000 Cherokees died on the trip– 1838-1839– http://ngeorgia.com/history/nghisttt.html

Trail of Tears

The Removal of the Indians (cont.)

• Black Hawk War– 1832– The Sac and Fox attempted to keep their lands– Native Americans lost

• Sac, Fox and other Midwest and Northeast Indians also had to move west of the Mississippi

The Agricultural Boom

• Growth of the population in the old Northwest– The removal of the Indians– the high prices and escalating demand for wheat and corn

• Growth of the population in the old Southwest– 1793=Eli Whitney’s cotton gin– Boundless need of the British textile industry for raw

cotton

The Agricultural Boom (cont.)

• After the War of 1812– Southeasterners poured into AL and MS– Drove up land prices– Tripled the nation’s cotton production

• By 1836, cotton accounted for 2/3’s of America’s foreign exports

The Growth of the Market Economy

• Introduction– High crop prices after the War of 1812 tempted more

farmers than ever before to switch from subsistence to commercial agriculture.

– Commercial agriculture opened new opportunities for western farmers

– It also exposed them to greater risks• Many had to borrow $$$$ to buy land and to survive until they

could sell their first crops• Once in debt, the commercial farmers were particularly vulnerable

because they had no control over fluctuations in price, supply, and demand in world markets

Federal Land Policy

• Jeffersonian Republicans introduced land policies aimed at a speedy transfer of the public domain to small farmers

• Between 1800 and 1820– The govt. cut the minimum price per acre and the

minimum # of acres that could be purchased– Most govt. land was sold at auction– Speculators often bid the price up far above the minimum

• Speculators believed that the price of land would soon shoot up in value

– The easy availability of credit encouraged this speculation

The Speculator and the Squatter

• Many poor settlers who did not have the money to buy at auction simply squatted on govt. land

• They exerted mounting pressure on Congress to grant them preemption rights over speculators

• They won their demand in 1841• Squatters quickly turned to commercial agriculture• They wanted to accumulate the cash to buy their

farms• Many western farmers, after exhausting the soil’s

fertility growing cash crops, simply moved on to new land

The Panic of 1819

• The land boom soon collapsed and crop and western land prices plummeted

• Many speculators were ruined in the panic and depression of 1819

• National Bank tightened credit and called in the notes of the overextended western banks (many of which failed)

The Panic of 1819 (cont.)

• The hard times experienced by agriculture and industry had long-term effects– Many westerners hated the National Bank• Blamed it for the crisis

– Western farmers intensified their search for internal improvements that would cut transportation expenses for shipping their product to market

The Transportation Revolution: Steamboats, Canals, and Railroads• Before 1820, available transportation facilities were

unsatisfactory• Existing roads were adequate for transporting

people, but moving bulky loads over them by horse-drawn wagons was slow and costly

• Robert Fulton’s steamboat– Allowed the great rivers west of the Appalachian

Mountains that flowed north to south became two-way streets for commerce

– By 1855, 727 steamboats were providing regular ferry service on all the western rivers

Steamboats, Canals, and Railroads (cont.)

• Rivers did NOT always exist where they were most needed for trade

• Americans began to build canals in 1820’s• Erie Canal– 1817 to 1825 it was built– State of New York constructed it– Connected Albany on the Hudson River with Buffalo on

Lake Erie– Lowered freight rates to a fraction of what they had been – Made NYC a leading outlet for Midwestern production

Erie Canal

Steamboats, Canals, and Railroads (cont.)

• The Erie Canal’s success encouraged dozens of other state-supported projects

• The canal-building boom deflated with the depression of the late 1830’s

• Railroads– By 1840 some 3,000 miles of railroad track had

been laid– trains were beginning to supplement and compete

with canal shipping

The Growth of Cities

• This transportation revolution stimulated the development of towns and cities

• River port cities (steamboat)– Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, New Orleans

• Lake port cities (canals)– Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee

• The period from 1820 to 1860 saw the most rapid urbanization in American history

Industrial Beginnings

• Introduction– Early industrialization stimulated urbanization– The first cotton mill in the U.S.A. opened in

Pawtucket, RI • Skilled mechanic Samuel Slater managed to sneak out

of Britain and arrived in America with his ability to reproduce Richard Arkwright’s spinning frame• Slater’s 1st mill opened in 1790

– Soon joined by many other manufacturing textiles and shoes

Introduction (cont.)

• The rapidity of industrialization varied from region to region– New England leading the way– The South lagged far behind• Planters preferred to put their capital in land and slaves

Introduction (cont.)

• Industrialization began to change people’s lives– Forced workers to regulate their labor by the clock

and pace of the machine– Downgraded the position of skilled artisans– Cheaper machine-made products were available

in greater profusion to working-class Americans

Causes of Industrialization

• Embargo Act of 1807– Induced merchants barred from foreign trade to

divert their capital to founding factories

• After the War of 1812=fledgling industries received protection from high tariffs– Especially in the 1820’s

• Transportation improvements opened distant markets to manufactures

Causes of Industrialization (cont.)

• Relatively high wages paid to American workers– Made employers eager to adopt laborsaving

techniques– Eli Whitney’s interchangeable parts– Other new technology

Textile Towns in New England

• New England was the 1st region to industrialize – Its merchants were particularly hard hit by foreign trade

disruptions– It had swift-flowing rivers for waterpower– It had excess female farm population for labor

• Textile manufacturing became its leading industry• The Waltham and Lowell mills in MA were the first to

concentrate on total cloth production within the factory

Textile Towns in New England (cont.)

Textile Towns in New England (cont.)

• Originally 80% of the mill operatives were unmarried young women– Lived in company housing under the strict

supervision of management– During the 1830’s, these Lowell women staged 2

of the largest strikes in American history to that date. (1834 and 1836)

– http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5714

Lowell “girls”

Artisans and Workers in Mid-Atlantic Cities

• New York City and Philadelphia• Shoes, saddles, clothing• Done in small shops as well as factories• Much of the work was still done by hand rather than

by machine• But increasingly production was subdivided into

small specialized tasks– Done by low-paid, semiskilled or unskilled laborers (often

women)

Artisans and Workers in Mid-Atlantic Cities (cont.)

• This resulted in a declining importance for skilled artisans– in protest in the late 1820’s, formed trade unions

and “workingmen’s” political parties

Equality and Inequality

• Urban Inequality: The Rich and the Poor– The gap between the rich and the poor grew during the

1st half of the 19th century– The extremes were especially obvious in the cities

• Mansions of the wealthy line the fashionable avenues• The poor crowded into noxious slums like New York’s Five Points

district

– 1833 in Boston=the richest 4% of the population owned almost 60% of the land

Urban Inequality: The Rich and the Poor (cont.)

• Contrary to the self-made man, rages-to-riches myth, 90% of the very wealthy had started out with considerable means

• At the other end of the scale, cities were developing a pauperized class consisting of aged and infirm; widows; and destitute Irish immigrants, whose labor built the Erie and other canals in the North

Urban Inequality: The Rich and the Poor (cont.)

• Americans blamed the poor for being poor• treated most with contempt– particularly the Irish, for being poor and Catholic– Free blacks for being poor and black

Free Blacks in the North

• Overwhelming discrimination kept most free blacks in poverty

• They were generally denied the vote• Educated in inferior segregated schools (if at all)• Forced to use separate and unequal facilities• Kept out of all but the lowest-paying, least skilled

occupations

New York’s Five Points District

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADmX9eMEV9U

Free Blacks in the North (cont.)

• In response to this pervasive discrimination, northern blacks founded their own churches– Richard Allen started the first of these

• African Methodist Episcopal Church• In Philadelphia• 1816

• By 1822, there were AME congregations all over the North

• The black churches engaged in antislavery activities and ran schools and mutual-aid societies

Free Blacks in the North (cont.)

• http://search.eb.com/blackhistory/article-9003944

The “Middling Classes”

• The majority of white Americans were neither rich nor poor

• Belonged to what was then called the middling classes

• For most people in that group the standard of living rose between 1800 and 1860

• Members of the middle class experienced a lot of insecurity

• They also exhibited a high degree of transience, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, and region to region

The Revolution in Social Relationships

• The Attack on the Professions– One sign that economic changes were disrupting

traditional relationships and forms of authority could be seen in the intense criticism of professionals (doctors, lawyers, ministers) between 1820 and 1850

– The denial that professionals had any special expertise was particularly prevalent on the frontier

The Challenge to Family Authority

• Children became more inclined to question parental authority

• Young men left home at an earlier age and struck out on their own

• Young women increasingly made their own choice of whom to marry or even whether to marry

Wives and Husbands

• Relations between spouses also were evolving• Wives continued to be legally subordinate to their

husbands• But under the doctrine of separate spheres, middle-

class women were demanding and winning greater voice in those areas where they were deemed to be particularly– Exerting moral influence on the family– Creating within the home a calm refuge from the harsh,

competitive world outside

Wives and Husbands (cont.)

• Middle-class women gained more control over the frequency of their pregnancies– The size of white middle-class families declined

markedly

• The birthrate remained high among black and immigrant women

Horizontal Allegiances & the Rise of Voluntary Associations

• Authority of fathers, husbands, professionals, and other social “superiors” waned

• New relationships among persons in similar positions were forged through the proliferation of voluntary associations– Temperance and moral-reform societies of white middle-

class women, union, and workingmen’s parties and black fraternal, and other clubs encouraged sociability among members

– Also these were attempts to enhance their influence on outside groups

Conclusion

• After 1815, white Americans’ westward movement speeded up due to a heightened European demand for agricultural products– especially cotton

• Federal govt. policies also hastened western settlement– Removal of eastern Indians to west of the Mississippi River– The sale of land on more generous terms

Conclusion (cont.)

• Improved transportation facilitated the shipment of western farmers’ produce to eastern and European markets– Steamboat, canals, railroads

• This transportation revolution encouraged the growth of cities, commerce, manufacturing, and industrialization

Conclusion (cont.)

• The economic transformations made some American wealthy and impoverished others

• Affected social relations within the family and society