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Chapter 12 - Industry and the North

 

Preindustrial Ways of Working

·         Rural and Urban Home Production

o   People rarely used money; services and products were paid for mostly through trades and barters

o   Home and work were the same place and nobody was on a schedule, meaning things got done as they needed to be done.

o   Skills were learned through apprenticeship. An apprenticeship lasted form 3-7 yrs. Apprentices lived with their master during this time. Basically the trade was knowledge for work.

o   Women could not get an apprenticeship. They were taught domestic skills by their mother; this was, because it was assumed that the woman would marry.

o   Some women would work respectably as: servants, laundresses, seamstresses, cooks, and food vendors—or not respected as prostitutes.

·         Patriarchy in Family, Work, and Society

o   Men directed lives of family and apprentices: decided on occupations for sons, marriages for daughters, etc.

o   Wife was responsible for: food, clothing, child rearing, and taking care of apprentices; but still subject to men’s direction.

o   Country’s power was just like in homes, Men decided everything.

o   The man of the house represented the whole house for elections.

·         The Social Order

o   Ranked kind of like this:

1.      Large landowners (plantation owners)

2.      Merchants

3.      Artisans and Yeomen farmers were about the same

4.      Tenant farmers

5.      farm laborers

o   Social status and rank was distinguished by dress and manner; people of one class did not intermingle with the others.

The Transportation Revolution

·         Roads

o   Travel by roads was difficult and the roads themselves were poor, because the federal government only funded interstate projects.

o   In 1808 the federal government made the national road. It cost $7 million, but connected the east to the west.

·         Canals and Steamboats

o   Waterborne travel was cheapest, but you could only move north to south (MS river + Atlantic Ocean), but east and west routes (Canals) needed to be built.

o   Erie Canal

§  Idea of DeWitt Clinton, he envisioned a link between NUC and the Great lakes through the Hudson River, and a 364 mile canal from Albany to Buffalo.

§  Clinton convinced the NY legislature and some private interests to give $7 mil. 

§  Canal stats: 40 ft wide, 4 ft deep, 364 mi long, 83 locks, 300 bridges.

§  Labor- Built by farmers for $8/month until wiped out by malaria; replaced by Irish who were paid $.50/day, but many died.

§  As Clinton promised the canal was done in less than 10 yrs. declared open 10-26-1825 by sending the Seneca Chief from Buffalo to NY.

·         A side note: the Seneca Indians, who the boat was named after, were moved and put onto small reservations, because they were on the path of the canal.

§  Thousands moved west and shipping boomed.

§  Towns near the canal quickly grew into important shipping cities. (Utica, Rochester, Buffalo)

§  Other states seen the Erie canal success and between 1820-40, $200 mil was put into building canals.

o   Steamboats

§  Robert Fulton demonstrated the feasibility of steamboats in 1807

§  Led to shipping boom for the MS River and its tributaries.

§  Cities that produced steamboats saw economic booms

·         Railroads

o   Started in 1830 with Baltimore and Ohio railroad and grew to 31,000 miles in 1860.

o   To get started they faced many tech. and supply problems:

§  To move the locomotives had to be heavy and thus the railroad had to be iron not wood so this forced the iron industry into modernization.

§  Heavy also meant a solid gravel roadbed and strong wooden ties

§  They had to standardize the width of the track, because without a standardized track width there would have to several train changes and when shipping things this was very difficult.

§  Railroads started being put into real use in the 1850’s before this it was cheaper to use sea travel due to the problems with railroads.

·         The Effects of the Transportation Revolution

o   The transportation revolution meant that people could access markets that were farther away.

o   When people saw that there was money to be made off of the new methods of transport investors started supporting the transportation revolution.

o   Down side was that diseases spread just as fast as the people who carried them, which meant that epidemics of diseases like cholera broke out.

o   Created a larger market which commercialization and industrialization depended upon.

The Market Revolution

·         The Accumulation of Capital

o   Market Revolution= Transportation + Industrialization+ Commercialization

o   In the northern states, the business community was composed largely of merchants in seaboard cities.

o   When international trade faced difficulties the nation’s wealthiest men turned to local investment.

o   Much of the capital came from banks, both those for international trade and those for local investments.

o   Southern cotton provided the $ for continuing development.

o   Another big part was the willingness of Americans to take monetary risks.

·         The Putting-Out System

o   Production of goods at home under the supervision of a merchant.

o   Lynn, Massachusetts, used the putting out system to become a center of the shoe making industry.

o   System gave control of production to merchant capitalists.

·         The Spread of Commercial Markets

o   Because of the putting-out system farm families moved from local barter systems to a larger market economy.

o   Commercialization is the replacement of barter by a cash economy and it took time and certain places took longer.

·         Commercial Agriculture in the Old Northwest

o   Technological developments lead to farmers permanently moving toward commercialization.

o   Erie Canal led to accelerated migration in the Old Northwest in the 1830’s.

o   Land was cheaper now, but most still either squatted or relied on credit to buy their land.

o   Regions specialized in certain foods to produce. ex. Ohio was Porkopolis

o   New farming tech:

§  Steel plow (John Deere)

§  Seed drills

§  Reaper (Cyrus McCormick)

o   Farmers faced failure if they could not produce enough to pay off the debt on their machines.

·         British Technology and American Industrialization

o   Industrialization started in Britain and Americans thought that the best way to industrialize was to copy the Brits.

o   Samuel Slater, Father of the American Factory System, brought British textile technology to America. Slater established tenant farms and towns around his textile mills. He used primarily children in his factories (b because that’s who Britain used)

o   The Brits tried to put Americans out of business by lowering their prices and so congress defended the American businesses by passing a protective tariff in 1816.

·         The Lowell Mills

o   Francis Cabot Lowell went to Britain and stayed with English hosts that owned textile mills, but based on memory of what he saw he made schematics of the machines.

o   He then brought the schematics back to the U.S. and improved the designs and that improved efficiency allowed him to compete with the Brits.

o   Size mattered; only the larger mills were efficient enough to compete in this industry.

·         Family Mills

o   Most mills opened in existing farm communities and hired entire families of people from nearby (thus why they are called family mills)

o   Work force:

§  50% kids (YO)

§  25% Adult women

§  25% Adult men (they got paid way more than the Women and Children)

o   Most of the workforce came in search of better lives and rarely stayed long (they lost 50% of the workforce each year)

o   Slater controlled his mill towns completely so the workers got mad and disagreed with how he ruled (they wanted a democracy).

·         “The American System of Manufactures”

o   Many Americans invented their mill technology (instead of stealing from the Brits)

o   Standardized parts: when something was made all of its parts came from the same mold so that every part fit every product (they wasted less; less waste=more money). Also made repairs easier; they just sold replacement parts instead of each part having to be made especially for a single product.

o   Brits called this the American System.

o   Also greatly sped up production.

From Artisan to Worker

·         Personal Relationships

o   Apprenticeship system was effectively replaced with child labor.

o   This was empowering for the women and children, because they earned wages and women could kind of make choices for themselves.

o   Southern slave owners compared the treatment of their slaves with the treatment of the workers in the Northern mills.

o   Slaves were often cared for better than the factory workers of the North. (Slaves cost money whereas there were plenty of poor whites to replace factory workers). 

·         Mechanization and Women’s Work

o   Industrialization and mechanization threatened skilled male workers.

o   Mechanization created opportunities for women to work outside the home.

o   The growing garment industry of the 1820s depended on cheap female labor.

·         Time, Work, and Leisure

o   Before factory work the work day ended at sunset, but Slater demanded that people worked at night by candle light.

o   Workers slowly adjusted, but still considered the owners of the mill and the communities’ tyrants.

o   Time became divided between work and leisure. (Longer work day=less leisure time)

o   Men started going to taverns after work and cities began to replace community wide celebrations with spectator sports.

·         The Cash Economy

o   Shift from barter system to cash economy.

o   The pay envelope was the only direct contact between owner and worker.

o   Artisans had to move if they wanted to continue their craft, their other option being factory work.

·         Free Labor

o   Free labor= hard work, self-discipline, and a striving for economic independence.

o   Many factory workers argued that they weren’t really free because their voices were not heard.

·         Early Strikes

o   Rural women led the first strikes against the American labor system.

o   The strike at Lowell was one famous example of these strikes. Workers considered themselves mistreated, but the owner thought they were ungrateful.

o   Most of these strikes were not completely unsuccessful.

A New Social Order

·         Wealth and Class

o   Social class always existed in America

o   Market revolution downgraded some independent artisans and elevated others.

o   New work patterns helped form distinctive attitudes of new middle class.

·         Religion and Personal Life

o   Religion played a key role in the development of new attitudes.

o   The 2nd Great Awakening had supplanted the orderly and intellectual Puritan religion of early New England.

o   The 2nd Great Awakening was most successful on the western frontier, but it reached a new audience by the 1820s; it gave hope to the workers whose lives were changed by the market revolution.

o   Women were particularly religious and prayed and pleaded to the men they lived with.

·         The New Middle-Class Family

o   Economic changes lead to changes in family roles:

§  Father the breadwinner

§  Mother the nurturer

§  Together raising children to successfully work.

o   Production moved away from the family home and its members

o   Catharine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy became the standard housekeeping guide for a generation of middle-class American women.

o   As the work roles of middle-class men and women diverged, so did social attitudes about appropriate male and female characteristics and behavior.

o   The maintenance or achievement of a middle-class lifestyle required the joint efforts of husband and wife.

·         Family Limitation

o   Middle class chose to have fewer children, because now they cost more (education, training, care, etc.)

o   They did so through methods of birth control although condoms were not used very often since most associated them with prostitution rather than family planning.

o   Abortion began to be used as birth control in the 1830s (1 in 4 pregnancies ended in abortion), states found out about this and for some reason decided to ban it (20 states by 1860)

o   Women were urged in books to tell their husbands to limit their sexuality for reasons of “morality”.

o   This reduction in the amount of children people had is an example of how economic changes affect people personal lives.

·         Middle-Class Children

o   The children of this time period were thought to need more nurturing, a job the mother would do.

o   Mothers read magazines put out by churches to learn how to be a good parent.

o   Children now started working later in their lives (unlike before where they went to work at 15). They really weren’t self-made men since the families were a route to success for them through money and training.

·         Sentimentalism

o   The individualistic competitiveness engendered by the market revolution caused members of the new middle class to place emphasis on sincerity and feeling.

o   For guidance women turned to the sentimental novel; thus women became more literate. The novels quickly became more popular than the sermons and essays that would have been read before.

o   “Lady novelists” were looked down on in the writing world

§  Susan Warner’s The Wide Wide World

o   Sentimentalism developed into an etiquette for many occasions

·         Transcendentalism and Self-Reliance

o   Transcendentalism is a group of ideas in literature and philosophy that developed in the 1830s and '40s as a protest against the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian church taught at Harvard Divinity School.

o    Among transcendentalists' core beliefs was the belief in an ideal spirituality that "transcends" the physical and empirical and is realized only through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.

o   People:

§  Ralph Waldo Emerson

§  Henry David Thoreau 

§  Margaret Fuller

Answers:
1.) E
2.) C
3.) A
4.) D
5.) A
6.) E
7.) C
8.) D
9.) B
10.) E
11.) C
12.) B
13.) D
14.) A 

 

Subject: 
Subject X2: 

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