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Chapter 13 - Coming to Terms with the New Age

The Preindustrial City
- Wealthy enjoyed unquestioned authority
- Merchants regulated public markets, set prices for foodstuffs
- Same wealthy men who established watch societies to prevent disorder
 
The Growth of Cities
- 1820-1860 - Population living in cities increased from 7% to 20%,
- NY grew from 60,000 in 1800 to 202,600 in 1830 and to more than 1 mil in 1860; emerged as nation’s largest port, financial center
- Erie Canal added commerce with interior to NY’s trade
- Philadelphia, countering the Erie Canal, financed the B&O railroad
- Boston, emerged as center of triangular trade:
- Boston ships carried cloth, shoes, to South, sent southern cotton to Europe, then returned to Boston with European manufactured goods
- 1850s - New Orleans handled about half the nation’s cotton exports
- Exports rose from 5 mil in 1815, to 107 mil
- Railroad transformed Chicago into a major junction of water and rail transport
 
Patterns of Immigration
- Surge in immigration to US began in 1820s accelerated dramatically after 1830
- By 1860 nearly half of New York’s population was foreign born
- Most immigrants from Ireland and Germany
- Political unrest, poor economic conditions in Germany
- Potato Famine in Ireland
- Clash btwn Catholic immigrants and Protestant Americans
 
Class Structure in Cities
- Benefits of market revolution were unequally distributed: by 1840s top 1% of pop owned about 40% of nation’s wealth; 1/3 of pop owned virtually nothing
 
Sanitation and Living Patterns
- Every American city suffered epidemics of sanitation-related diseases
- cholera, yellow fever, typhus
- Provision of municipal services forced residential segregation
- By 1850s middles class escaped cities, moving to ‘streetcar suburbs’
- Due to influx of European immigrants after 1830s, middle-class saw slums as homes of strange foreign people who deserved less than American born citizens
 
Ethnic Neighborhoods
- Slums represented family ties, familiar ways and community support to Irish
- Irish immigrants created their own communities in Boston and NY
- eg. parochial schools with Irish nuns
- Mutual aid societies based on kinship or town of origin in Ireland
- Boston American remarked “foreign population associating too exclusively with each other, living in groups together”
 
Urban Popular Culture
- 1820-1860, urban workers experienced:
- replacement of artisanal labor by wage work
- two serious depressions (1837-43, 1857)
- vastly increased competition from immigrant labor
- Taverns became frequent venues of riots, brawls; theaters provided another setting for violence
- “Bowery b’hoys”; deliberately provocative way they dressed was a way of thumbing their noses at more respectable classes
- “penny paper”, NY Post, NY Sun, (1833), fed popular appetite for scandal
- Concerns began to arise about civic order
 
Civic Order
- “frolics”, members of lower classes parade through streets playing drums, trumpets, whistles, etc
- NYC’s first response to increasing civic disorder was to hire more, watchmen, augmented by constables and marshals
- Opposition to idea of professional police force in US; infringed personal liberty
 
Urban Life of Free African Americans
- More than half of free African Americans in North compete with poor immigrants and poor native-born whites
- Residential segregation, job discrimination, civil rights limitations
- African Methodist Episcopal (AME), one of few places where blacks could express true feelings
 
The Labour Movement and Urban Politics
- Universal while manhood suffrage and mass politics changed urban politics
- Professional politicians and other changes spurred by working-class activism
 
The Tradition of Artisanal Politics
- Demonstration of strength and solidarity of workers’ organizations
- Artisanal system crumbling, undercut by competition btwn cities
- No unemployment or welfare
- Urban workers’ associations became active defenders of working class interests
 
 
The Union Movement
- Workingmen’s Party, Philadelphia, 1827
- Campaigned for the end of gov’t chartered monopolies, public school system, and cheap labor in West
- Many principles adopted by the Jacksonian Democrats
- Jackson against “monster” Bank of US
- Whigs - wooed workers by saying Clay’s American System & tariff protection would be good for economy and workers’ jobs
- Neither spoke for need of workers or for well paid, stable jobs
- General Trades Union, several GTUS, form National Trades Union
- Beginning of American labor movement
- Majority of workers (women, free blacks) excluded
 
Big-City Machines
- As American cities grew the electorate mushroomed
- Irish districts became Democrat strongholds
- Germans voted Republican in 1850s
- New York’s Tammany Society - key organisation of mass politics
- Became a political “machine” controlled by a politician who represented interest of group, delivered votes in exchange for patronage and favors
 
Social Reform Movements
- Middle class passion for reform was now focused on the problems of big cities
- Reformers joined organizations devoted to various causes
- Reform movements depended communities of like-minded people
 
Evangelism, Reform and Social Control
- Evangelical religion fundamental to social reform
- Middle class set agenda for reform
- Large cities needed to make large-scale provisions for social misfits - institutional rather than private efforts needed
- Belief in goodness of human nature 
- Moralistic dogmatism
- Temperance, uniformity in behavior rather than tolerance
- Beecher and the General Union wanted to prevent business on Sundays
- Workingmen angered with closure of taverns, quick to vote against Whigs
 
Education and Women Teachers
- Horace Mann was the Secretary of Mass. State Board of Education
- 1827 - Mass. pioneered compulsory education by legislating that public schools be supported by taxes
- Mann wanted friendly learning atmosphere - who better than women?
- Low pay, community supervision, made any marriage proposal appealing
 
 
Temperance
- 1826 - American Society for Promotion of Temperance - largest reform org.
- Panic of 1837, affected temperance movement
- Men’s groups involved in working-class, women’s stressed harm to homes
 
Moral Reform, Asylums, and Prisons
- Reformers would “rescue” prostitutes
- Offer salvation of religion, prayer, and temporary shelter
- 1843 - Dorothea Dix - described how poorly insane women were treated
 
Utopianism and Mormonism
- Prolonged depression with Panic of 1837, belief in imminent catastrophe
- Shakers - offshoot of Quakers
- called for the abolishment of family,
- union of brothers and sisters joined in equal fellowship
- Oneida - notorious for sexual freedom, rather than celibacy, “complex marriage”
- New Harmony, founded by Robert Owen
- Was a manufacturing community without unemployment or poverty
- 1830, Joseph Smith founded Church of Jesus Christ for Latter-day Saints
- Close cooperation, hard work made Mormons successful
- Outsiders intervened after dissention arose regarding Smith’s issue of polygamy
 
Antislavery and Abolitionism
- African Americans, Quakers, and militant white reformers wanted to end slavery
- African Americans needed white allies to succeed
- 1820 Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery in Louisiana Purchase lands
 
The American Colonization Society
- First attempt to “solve” the problem of slavery by gradual emancipation
- Designed by American Colonization Society (ACS), 1817
- North religious reformers, south slave owners, Clay supporters
- Was ineffective, by 1830, only sent 1,400 black people to colony in Liberia
 
African Americans’ Fight Against Slavery
- Most free blacks rejected colonization, wanted commitment to end of slavery
- Black abolitionists Douglass, Tubman, Truth spoke at annual conventions
 
Abolitionists
- Led by William Lloyd Garrison, broke with gradualist persuaders of the ACS
- 1833 - Weld, formed American Anti-Slavery Society with Garrison
- Anti-Slavery reformers moved to Oberlin College in N. Ohio
- North abolitionists believed a full description of the evils of slavery would lead to south slave owners freeing their slaves
 
 
Abolitionism and Politics
- 1830s - Various petitions for abolition of slavery rebuffed by Congress
- 1836 - Jackson and Congress passed “gag” rule, prohibited antislavery petitions
- John Quincy Adams denounced gag rule, it was repealed in 1844
- Adams key in freeing of 53 slaves on Spanish ship Amistad
- Won case against American government
- Douglass and Garrison eventually parted ways
- Some Quaker meetings devoted to antislavery maintained segregated seating
- Many wanted civil equality, but not social equality
- Majority moved towards party politics and founded the Liberal Party
- Later becameRepublican in 1850s
 
The Women’s Rights Movement
- Middle-class women became involved in social reform movements
 
The Grimké Sisters
- Rejected slavery out of religious conviction
- Angelina Grimké - first woman to address meeting of Mass. State Legislature
- Sisters were criticized for speaking, because they were women
- Sarah Grimké wrote that men and women were created equal
 
Women’s Rights
- Seneca Falls Convention - 1848 - first women’s rights convention
- Women gained vote in Wyoming in 1869
- Women challenged notion of separate spheres, public for men, home and family for women
- Empowered by religious beliefs and activism, Seneca Falls reformers demanded end to unfair restrictions they suffered as women
 
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