The American Yawp argues that in the early 19th century an “almost universal ambition to get forward” defined the United States. What key events or figure provide evidence to prove this claim?
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The American Yawp
8. The Market Revolution
William James Bennett, “View of South Street, from Maiden Lane, New York City,” ca. 1827, via Metropolitan Museum of New
York
*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click here to improve this chapter.*
I. Introduction | II. Early Republic Economic Development | III. The Decline of Northern Slavery
and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom | IV. Changes in Labor Organization | V. Changes in Gender
Roles and Family Life | VI. The Rise of Industrial Labor in Antebellum America | | VII. Conclusion |
VIII. Primary Sources | IX. Reference Material
I. Introduction
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In the early years of the nineteenth century, Americans’ endless commercial ambition—what one
Baltimore paper in 1815 called an “almost universal ambition to get forward”—remade the nation.1
Between the Revolution and the Civil War, an old subsistence world died and a new more-commercial nation was born. Americans integrated the technologies of the Industrial Revolution into a new
commercial economy. Steam power, the technology that moved steamboats and railroads, fueled the
rise of American industry by powering mills and sparking new national transportation networks. A
“market revolution” remade the nation.
The revolution reverberated across the country. More and more farmers grew crops for pro t, not
self-su ciency. Vast factories and cities arose in the North. Enormous fortunes materialized. A new
middle class ballooned. And as more men and women worked in the cash economy, they were freed
from the bound dependence of servitude. But there were costs to this revolution. As northern textile
factories boomed, the demand for southern cotton swelled, and American slavery accelerated. Northern subsistence farmers became laborers bound to the whims of markets and bosses. The market revolution sparked explosive economic growth and new personal wealth, but it also created a growing
lower class of property-less workers and a series of devastating depressions, called “panics.” Many
Americans labored for low wages and became trapped in endless cycles of poverty. Some workers, often immigrant women, worked thirteen hours a day, six days a week. Others labored in slavery. Massive northern textile mills turned southern cotton into cheap cloth. And although northern states
washed their hands of slavery, their factories fueled the demand for slave-grown southern cotton and
their banks provided the nancing that ensured the pro tability and continued existence of the
American slave system. And so, as the economy advanced, the market revolution wrenched the United States in new directions as it became a nation of free labor and slavery, of wealth and inequality,
and of endless promise and untold perils.
II. Early Republic Economic Development
The growth of the American economy reshaped American life in the decades before the Civil War.
Americans increasingly produced goods for sale, not for consumption. Improved transportation enabled a larger exchange network. Labor-saving technology improved e ciency and enabled the separation of the public and domestic spheres. The market revolution ful lled the revolutionary generation’s expectations of progress but introduced troubling new trends. Class con ict, child labor, achttp://www.americanyawp.com/text/08-the-market-revolution/
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celerated immigration, and the expansion of slavery followed. These strains required new family
arrangements and transformed American cities.
American commerce had proceeded haltingly during the eighteenth century. American farmers increasingly exported foodstu s to Europe as the French Revolutionary Wars devastated the continent
between 1793 and 1815. America’s exports rose in value from $20.2 million in 1790 to $108.3 million by 1807.2 But while exports rose, exorbitant internal transportation costs hindered substantial
economic development within the United States. In 1816, for instance, $9 could move one ton of
goods across the Atlantic Ocean, but only 30 miles across land. An 1816 Senate Committee Report
lamented that “the price of land carriage is too great” to allow the pro table production of American
manufactures. But in the wake of the War of 1812, Americans rushed to build a new national infrastructure, new networks of roads, canals, and railroads. In his 1815 annual message to Congress,
President James Madison stressed “the great importance of establishing throughout our country the
roads and canals which can best be executed under national authority.”3 State governments continued to sponsor the greatest improvements in American transportation, but the federal government’s
annual expenditures on internal improvements climbed to a yearly average of $1,323,000 by Andrew
Jackson’s presidency.4.
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Clyde Osmer DeLand, “The First Locomotive. Aug. 8th, 1829. Trial Trip of the “Stourbridge Lion,” 1916, via Library of Congress.
State legislatures meanwhile pumped capital into the economy by chartering banks. The number of
state-chartered banks skyrocketed from 1 in 1783, 266 in 1820, 702 in 1840, to 1,371 in 1860.5 European capital also helped to build American infrastructure. By 1844, one British traveler declared
that “the prosperity of America, her railroads, canals, steam navigation, and banks, are the fruit of
English capital.”6
Economic growth, however, proceeded unevenly. Depressions devastated the economy in 1819,
1837, and 1857. Each followed rampant speculation in various commodities: land in 1819, land and
slaves in 1837, and railroad bonds in 1857. Eventually the bubbles all burst. The spread of paper currency untethered the economy from the physical signi ers of wealth familiar to the colonial generation, namely land. Counterfeit bills were endemic during this early period of banking. With so many
fake bills circulating, Americans were constantly on the lookout for the “con dence man” and other
deceptive characters in the urban landscape. Prostitutes and con men could look like regular honest
Americans. Advice literature o ered young men and women strategies for avoiding hypocrisy in an
attempt to restore the social ber together. Intimacy in the domestic sphere became more important
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as duplicity proliferated in the public sphere. Fear of the con dence man, counterfeit bills, and a
pending bust created anxiety in the new capitalist economy. But Americans refused to blame the logic of their new commercial system for these depressions. Instead, they kept pushing “to get forward.”
The so-called “Transportation Revolution” opened the vast lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. In 1810, before the rapid explosion of American infrastructure, Margaret Dwight left New
Haven, Connecticut, in a wagon headed for Ohio Territory. Her trip was less than 500 miles but
took six full weeks to complete. The journey was a terrible ordeal, she said. The roads were “so rocky
& so gullied as to be almost impassable.”7 Ten days into the journey, at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,
Dwight said “it appeared to me that we had come to the end of the habitable part of the globe.” She
nally concluded that “the reason so few are willing to return from the Western country, is not that
the country is so good, but because the journey is so bad.”8 Nineteen years later, in 1829, English
traveler Frances Trollope made the reverse journey across the Allegheny Mountains from Cincinnati
to the east coast. At Wheeling, Virginia, her coach encountered the National Road, the rst federally
funded interstate infrastructure project. The road was smooth and her journey across the Alleghenies was a scenic delight. “I really can hardly conceive a higher enjoyment than a botanical tour
among the Alleghany Mountains,” she declared. The ninety miles of National Road was to her “a
garden.”9
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Engraving based on W.H. Bartlett, “Lockport, Erie Canal,” 1839, via Wikimedia.
If the two decades between Margaret Dwight’s and Frances Trollope’s journeys transformed the
young nation, the pace of change only accelerated in the following years. If a transportation revolution began with improved road networks, it soon incorporated even greater improvements in the
ways people and goods moved across the landscape.
New York State completed the Erie Canal in 1825. The 350 mile-long manmade waterway linked the
Great Lakes with the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean. Soon crops grown in the Great Lakes
region were carried by water to eastern cities, and goods from emerging eastern factories made the
reverse journey to midwestern farmers. The success of New York’s “arti cial river” launched a canalbuilding boom. By 1840 Ohio created two navigable, all-water links from Lake Erie to the Ohio
River.
Robert Fulton established the rst commercial steam boat service up and down the Hudson River in
New York in 1807. Soon thereafter steamboats lled the waters of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.
Downstream-only routes became watery two-way highways. By 1830, more than 200 steamboats
moved up and down western rivers.
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The United States’ rst long-distance rail line launched from Maryland in 1827. Baltimore’s city government and the state government of Maryland provided half the start-up funds for the new Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Rail Road Company. The B&O’s founders imagined the line as a means to
funnel the agricultural products of the trans-Appalachian West to an outlet on the Chesapeake Bay.
Similar motivations led citizens in Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, and Charleston, South Carolina to launch their own rail lines. State and local governments provided the means for the bulk of
this initial wave of railroad construction, but economic collapse following the Panic of 1837 made
governments wary of such investments. Government supports continued throughout the century,
but decades later the public origins of railroads were all but forgotten, and the railroad corporation
became the most visible embodiment of corporate capitalism.
By 1860 Americans laid more than 30,000 miles of railroads.10 The ensuing web of rail, roads, and
canals meant that few farmers in the Northeast or Midwest had trouble getting goods to urban markets. Railroad development was slower in the South, but there a combination of rail lines and navigable rivers meant that few cotton planters struggled to transport their products to textile mills in the
Northeast and in England.
Such internal improvements not only spread goods, they spread information. The “transportation
revolution” was followed by a “communications revolution.” The telegraph rede ned the limits of
human communication. By 1843 Samuel Morse persuaded Congress to fund a forty-mile telegraph
line stretching from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore. Within a few short years, during the MexicanAmerican War, telegraph lines carried news of battle eld events to eastern newspapers within days.
This contrasts starkly with the War of 1812, when the Battle of New Orleans took place nearly two
full weeks after Britain and the United States had signed a peace treaty.
The consequences of the transportation and communication revolutions reshaped the lives of Americans. Farmers who previously produced crops mostly for their own family now turned to the market. They earned cash for what they had previously consumed; they purchased the goods they had
previously made or went without. Market-based farmers soon accessed credit through eastern banks,
which provided them with the opportunity to expand their enterprise but left also them prone before the risk of catastrophic failure wrought by distant market forces. In the Northeast and Midwest,
where farm labor was ever in short supply, ambitious farmers invested in new technologies that
promised to increase the productivity of the limited labor supply. The years between 1815 and 1850
witnessed an explosion of patents on agricultural technologies. The most famous of these, perhaps,
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was Cyrus McCormick’s horse-drawn mechanical reaper, which partially mechanized wheat harvesting, and John Deere’s steel-bladed plough, which more easily allowed for the conversion of unbroken
ground into fertile farmland.
A. Janicke & Co., “Our City, (St. Louis, Mo.),” 1859, via Library of Congress.
Most visibly, the market revolution encouraged the growth of cities and reshaped the lives of urban
workers. In 1820, only two cities in the United States—New York and Philadelphia—had over
100,000 inhabitants. By 1850, six American cities met that threshold, including Chicago, which had
been founded fewer than two decades earlier.11 New technology and infrastructure paved the way for
such growth. The Erie Canal captured the bulk of the trade emerging from the Great Lakes region,
securing New York City’s position as the nation’s largest and most economically important city. The
steamboat turned St. Louis and Cincinnati into centers of trade, and Chicago rose as it became the
railroad hub of the western Great Lakes and Great Plains regions. The geographic center of the nation shifted westward. The development of steam power and the exploitation of Pennsylvania coalelds shifted the locus of American manufacturing. By the 1830s, for instance, New England was
losing its competitive advantage to the west.
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Meanwhile, the cash economy eclipsed the old, local, informal systems of barter and trade. Income
became the measure of economic worth. Productivity and e ciencies paled before the measure of
income. Cash facilitated new impersonal economic relationships and formalized new means of production. Young workers might simply earn wages, for instance, rather than receiving room and board
and training as part of apprenticeships. Moreover, a new form of economic organization appeared:
the business corporation.
States o ered the privileges of incorporation to protect the fortunes and liabilities of entrepreneurs
who invested in early industrial endeavors. A corporate charter allowed investors and directors to
avoid personal liability for company debts. The legal status of incorporation had been designed to
confer privileges to organizations embarking upon expensive projects explicitly designed for the public good, such as universities, municipalities, and major public works projects. The business corporation was something new. Many Americans distrusted these new, impersonal business organizations
whose o cers lacked personal responsibility while nevertheless carrying legal rights. Many wanted
limits. Thomas Je erson himself wrote in 1816 that “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy
of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength,
and bid de ance to the laws of our country.”12 But in Dartmouth v. Woodward (1819) the Supreme
Court upheld the rights of private corporations when it denied the government of New Hampshire’s
attempt to reorganize Dartmouth College on behalf of the common good. Still, suspicions remained. A group of journeymen cordwainers in New Jersey publically declared in 1835 that they
“entirely disapprov[ed] of the incorporation of Companies, for carrying on manual mechanical business, inasmuch as we believe their tendency is to eventuate and produce monopolies, thereby crippling the energies of individual enterprise.”13
III. The Decline of Northern Slavery and the Rise of the Cotton
Kingdom
Slave-labor helped fuel the market revolution. By 1832, textile companies made up 88 out of 106
American corporations valued at over $100,000.14 These textile mills, worked by free labor, nevertheless depended upon southern cotton, and the vast new market economy spurred the expansion of the
plantation South.
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By the early-nineteenth century, states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had taken steps to abolish
slavery. Vermont included abolition as a provision of its 1777 state constitution. Pennsylvania’s
emancipation act of 1780 stipulated that freed children serve an indenture term of twenty-eight
years. Gradualism brought emancipation while also defending the interests of Northern masters and
controlling still another generation of black Americans. In 1804 New Jersey became the last of the
northern states to adopt gradual emancipation plans. There was no immediate moment of jubilee, as
many Northern states only promised to liberate future children born to enslaved mothers. Such laws
also stipulated that such children remain in indentured servitude to their mother’s master in order to
compensate the slaveholder’s loss. James Mars, a young man indentured under this system in Connecticut, risked being thrown in jail when he protested the arrangement that kept him bound to his
mother’s master until age twenty ve.15
Quicker routes to freedom included escape or direct emancipation by masters. But escape was dangerous and voluntary manumission rare. Congress, for instance, made the harboring of a fugitive
slave a federal crime as early as 1793. Hopes for manumission were even slimmer, as few Northern
slaveholders emancipated their own slaves. Roughly one- fth of the white families in New York City
owned slaves, and fewer than 80 slaveholders in the city voluntarily manumitted slaves between 1783
and 1800. By 1830, census data suggests that at least 3,500 people were still enslaved in the North.
Elderly Connecticut slaves remained in bondage as late as 1848, and in New Jersey slavery endured
until after the Civil War.16
Emancipation proceeded slowly, but proceeded nonetheless. A free black population of fewer than
60,000 in 1790 increased to more than 186,000 by 1810. Growing free black communities fought for
their civil rights. In a number of New England locales, free African Americans could vote and send
their children to public schools. Most northern states granted black citizens property rights and trial
by jury. African Americans owned land and businesses, founded mutual aid societies, established
churches, promoted education, developed print culture, and voted.
Nationally, however, the slave population continued to grow, from less than 700,000 in 1790 to
more than 1.5 million by 1820.17 The growth of abolition in the North and the acceleration of slavery in the South created growing divisions. Cotton drove the process more than any other crop. Eli
Whitney’s cotton gin, a simple hand-cranked device designed to mechanically remove sticky green
seeds from short staple cotton, allowed southern planters to dramatically expand cotton production
for the national and international markets. Water-powered textile factories in England and the Amerhttp://www.americanyawp.com/text/08-the-market-revolution/
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ican northeast rapidly turn raw cotton into cloth. Technology increased both the supply of and demand for cotton. White Southerners responded by expanding cultivation farther west, to Mississippi
River and beyond. Slavery had been growing less pro table in tobacco planting regions like Virginia,
but the growth of cotton further south and west increased demand for human bondage. Eager cotton planters invested their new pro ts in new slaves.
The cotton boom fueled speculation in slavery. Many slave owners leveraged potential pro ts into
loans used to purchase ever increasing numbers of slaves. For example, one 1840 Louisiana
Courier ad warned “it is very di cult now to nd persons willing to buy slaves from Mississippi or
Alabama on account of the fears entertained that such property may be already mortgaged to the
banks of the above named states.”18
Sidney & Ne , Detail from “Plan of the City of Lowell, Massachusetts,” 1850, via Wikimedia Commons.
New national and international markets fueled the plantation boom. American cotton exports rose
from 150,000 bales in 1815 to 4,541,000 bales in 1859. The Census Bureau’s 1860 Census of Manufactures stated that “the manufacture of cotton constitutes the most striking feature of the industrial
history of the last fty years.”19 Slave owners shipped their cotton north to textile manufacturers and
to northern nancers for overseas shipments. Northern insurance brokers and exporters in the
Northeast pro ted greatly.
While the United States ended its legal participation in the global slave trade in 1808, slave traders
moved 1,000,000 slaves from the tobacco-producing Upper South to cotton elds in the Lower
South between 1790 and 1860.20 This harrowing trade in human esh supported middle-class occuhttp://www.americanyawp.com/text/08-the-market-revolution/
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pations North and South: bankers, doctors, lawyers, insurance brokers, and shipping agents all profited. And of course it facilitated the expansion of northeastern textile mills.
IV. Changes in Labor Organization
While industrialization bypassed most of the American South, southern cotton production nevertheless nurtured industrialization in the Northeast and Midwest. The drive to produce cloth transformed the American system of labor. In the early republic, laborers in manufacturing might typically have been expected to work at every stage of production. But a new system, “piece work,” divided
much of production into discrete steps performed by di erent workers. In this new system, merchants or investors sent or “put-out” materials to individuals and families to complete at home.
These independent laborers then turned over the partially nished goods to the owner to be given to
another laborer to nish.
As early as the 1790s, however, merchants in New England began experimenting with machines to
replace the “putting-out” system. To e ect this transition, merchants and factory owners relied on
the theft of British technological knowledge to build the machines they needed. In 1789, for instance, a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island contracted twenty-one-year-old British immigrant
Samuel Slater to build a yarn-spinning machine and then a carding machine. Slater had apprenticed
in an English mill and succeeded in mimicking the English machinery. The fruits of American industrial espionage peaked in 1813 when Francis Cabot Lowell and Paul Moody recreated the powered
loom used in the mills of Manchester, England. Lowell had spent two years in Britain observing and
touring mills in England. He committed the design of the powered loom to memory so that, no matter how many times British customs o cials searched his luggage, he could smuggle England’s industrial know-how into New England.
Lowell’s contribution to American industrialism was not only technological, it was organizational.
He helped reorganize and centralize the American manufacturing process. A new approach, the
Waltham-Lowell System, created the textile mill that de ned antebellum New England and American industrialism before the Civil War. The modern American textile mill was fully realized in the
planned mill town of Lowell in 1821, four years after Lowell himself died. Powered by the Merrimack River in northern Massachusetts and operated by local farm girls, the mills of Lowell centralhttp://www.americanyawp.com/text/08-the-market-revolution/
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ized the process of textile manufacturing under one roof. The modern American factory was born.
Soon ten thousand workers labored in Lowell alone. Sarah Rice, who worked at the nearby Millbury
factory, found it “a noisy place” that was “more con ned than I like to be.”21 Working conditions
were harsh for the many desperate “mill girls” who operated the factories relentlessly from sun-up to
sun-down. One worker complained that “a large class of females are, and have been, destined to a
state of servitude.”22 Women workers went on strike. They lobbied for better working hours. But the
lure of wages was too much. As another worker noted, “very many Ladies…have given up millinery,
dressmaking & school keeping for work in the mill.”23 With a large supply of eager workers, Lowell’s
vision brought a rush of capital and entrepreneurs into New England. The rst American manufacturing boom was underway.
Winslow Homer, “Bell-Time,” Harper’s Weekly vol. XII (July 1868): p. 472, via Wikimedia.
The market revolution shook other industries as well. Craftsmen began to understand that new markets increased the demand for their products. Some shoemakers, for instance, abandoned the traditional method of producing custom-built shoes at their home workshop and instead began producing larger quantities of shoes in ready-made sizes to be shipped to urban centers. Manufacturers
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wanting increased production abandoned the old personal approach of relying upon a single live-in
apprentice for labor and instead hired unskilled wage laborers who did not have to be trained in all
aspects of making shoes but could simply be assigned a single repeatable aspect of the task. Factories
slowly replaced shops. The old paternalistic apprentice system, which involved long-term obligations
between apprentice and master, gave way to a more impersonal and more exible labor system in
which unskilled laborers could be hired and red as the market dictated. A writer in the New York
Observer in 1826 complained, “The master no longer lives among his apprentices [and] watches over
their moral as well as mechanical improvement.”24 Masters-turned-employers now not only had fewer obligations to their workers, they had a lesser attachment. They no longer shared the bonds of
their trade but were subsumed under a new class-based relationships: employers and employees, bosses and workers, capitalists and laborers. On the other hand, workers were freed from the long-term,
paternalistic obligations of apprenticeship or the legal subjugation of indentured servitude. They
could theoretically work when and where they wanted. When men or women made an agreement
with an employer to work for wages, they were “left free to apportion among themselves their respective shares, untrammeled…by unwise laws,” as Reverend Alonzo Potter rosily proclaimed in 1840.25
But while the new labor system was celebrated throughout the northern United States as “free
labor,” it was simultaneously lamented by a growing powerless class of laborers.
As the northern United States rushed headlong toward commercialization and an early capitalist
economy, many Americans grew uneasy with the growing gap between wealthy businessmen and impoverished wage laborers. Elites like Daniel Webster might defend their wealth and privilege by insisting that all workers could achieve “a career of usefulness and enterprise” if they were “industrious
and sober,” but labor activist Seth Luther countered that capitalism created “a cruel system of extraction on the bodies and minds of the producing classes…for no other object than to enable the ‘rich’
to ‘take care of themselves’ while the poor must work or starve.”26
Americans embarked upon their industrial revolution with the expectation that all men could start
their careers as humble wage workers but later achieve positions of ownership and stability with hard
work. Wage work had traditionally been looked-down upon as a state of dependence, suitable only as
a temporary waypoint for young men without resources on their path toward the middle class and
the economic success necessary to support a wife and children ensconced within the domestic sphere.
Children’s magazines – such as Juvenile Miscellany and Parley’s Magazine – glori ed the prospect of
moving up the economic ladder. This “free labor ideology” provided many Northerners with a keen
sense of superiority over the slave economy of the southern states.27
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But the commercial economy often failed in its promise of social mobility. Depressions and downturns might destroy businesses and reduce owners to wage work. Even in times of prosperity unskilled workers might perpetually lack good wages and economic security and therefore had to forever depend upon supplemental income from their wives and young children.
Wage workers—a population disproportionately composed of immigrants and poorer Americans—
faced low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. Class con ict developed. Instead of
the formal inequality of a master-servant contract, employer and employee entered a contract presumably as equals. But hierarchy was evident: employers had nancial security and political power;
employees faced uncertainty and powerlessness in the workplace. Dependent upon the whims of
their employers, some workers turned to strikes and unions to pool their resources. In 1825 a group
of journeymen in Boston formed a Carpenters’ Union to protest their inability “to maintain a family
at the present time, with the wages which are now usually given.”28 Working men organized unions
to assert themselves and win both the respect and the resources due to a breadwinner and a citizen.
For the middle-class managers and civic leaders caught between workers and owners, unions enamed a dangerous antagonism between employers and employees. They countered any claims of
inherent class con ict with the ideology of social mobility. Middle-class owners and managers justied their economic privilege as the natural product of superior character traits, including decisionmaking and hard work. One group of master carpenters denounced their striking journeyman in
1825 with the claim that workers of “industrious and temperate habits, have, in their turn, become
thriving and respectable Masters, and the great body of our Mechanics have been enabled to acquire
property and respectability, with a just weight and in uence in society.”29 In an 1856 speech in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Abraham Lincoln had to assure his audience that the country’s commercial transformation had not reduced American laborers to slavery. Southerners, he said “insist that their slaves
are far better o than Northern freemen. What a mistaken view do these men have of Northern
labourers! They think that men are always to remain labourers here – but there is no such class. The
man who laboured for another last year, this year labours for himself. And next year he will hire others to labour for him.”30 It was this essential belief that undergirded the northern commitment to
“free labor” and won the market revolution much widespread acceptance.
V. Changes in Gender Roles and Family Life
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In the rst half of the nineteenth century, families in the northern United States increasingly participated in the cash economy created by the market revolution. The rst stirrings of industrialization
shifted work away from the home. These changes transformed Americans’ notions of what constituted work, and therefore shifted what it meant to be an American woman and an American man.
As Americans encountered more goods in stores and produced fewer at home, the ability to remove
women and children from work determined a family’s class status. This ideal, of course, ignored the
reality of women’s work at home and was possible for only the wealthy. The market revolution therefore not only transformed the economy, it changed the nature of the American family. As the market
revolution thrust workers into new systems of production, it rede ned gender roles. The market integrated families into a new cash economy. As Americans purchased more goods in stores and produced fewer at home, the purity of the domestic sphere—the idealized realm of women and children
—increasingly signi ed a family’s class status.
Women and children worked to supplement the low wages of many male workers. Around age
eleven or twelve, boys could take jobs as o ce runners or waiters, earning perhaps a dollar a week to
support their parents’ incomes. The ideal of an innocent and protected childhood was a privilege for
middle- and upper-class families, who might look down upon poor families. Joseph Tuckerman, a
Unitarian minister who served poor Bostonians, lamented the lack of discipline and regularity
among poor children: “At one hour they are kept at work to procure fuel, or perform some other service; in the next are allowed to go where they will, and to do what they will.”31 Prevented from attending school, poor children served instead as economic assets for their destitute families.
Meanwhile, the education received by middle-class children provided a foundation for future economic privilege. As artisans lost control over their trades, young men had a greater incentive to invest
time in education to nd skilled positions later in life. Formal schooling was especially important for
young men who desired apprenticeships in retail or commercial work. Enterprising instructors established schools to assist “young gentlemen preparing for mercantile and other pursuits, who may wish
for an education superior to that usually obtained in the common schools, but di erent from a college education, and better adapted to their particular business,” such as that organized in 1820 by
Warren Colburn of Boston.32 In response to this need, the Boston School Committee created the
English High School (as opposed to the Latin School) that could “give a child an education that shall
t him for active life, and shall serve as a foundation for eminence in his profession, whether Mercantile or Mechanical” beyond that “which our public schools can now furnish.”33
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Educatio
n
equip
ped
youn
g
wome
n
with
the
tools
to live
sophisticated,
genteel
lives.
After
sixteenyear“The Sphere of Woman,” Godey’s Lady’s Book vol. 40 (March 1850): p. 209, via University of Virginia.
old
Elizabeth
Davis left home in 1816 to attend school, her father explained that the experience would “lay a foundation for your future character & respectability.”34 After touring the United States in the 1830s,
Alexis de Tocqueville praised the independence granted to the young American woman, who had
“the great scene of the world…open to her” and whose education prepared her to exercise both reason and moral sense.35 Middling young women also utilized their education to take positions as
school teachers in the expanding common school system. Bristol Academy in Tauten, Maine, for instance, advertised “instruction…in the art of teaching” for female pupils.36 In 1825, Nancy Denison
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left Concord Academy with references indicating that she was “quali ed to teach with success and
pro t” and “very cheerfully recommend[ed]” for “that very responsible employment.”37
Middle-class youths found opportunities for respectable employment through formal education, but
poor youths remained in marginalized positions. Their families’ desperate nancial state kept them
from enjoying the fruits of education. When pauper children did receive teaching through institutions such the House of Refuge in New York City, they were often simultaneously indentured to
successful families to serve as eld hands or domestic laborers. The Society for the Reformation of
Juvenile Delinquents in New York City sent its wards to places like Sylvester Lusk’s farm in En eld,
Connecticut. Lusk took boys to learn “the trade and mystery of farming” and girls to learn “the trade
and mystery of housewifery.” In exchange for “su cient Meat, Drink, Apparel, Lodging, and Washing, tting for an Apprentice,” and a rudimentary education, the apprentices promised obedience,
morality, and loyalty.38 Poor children also found work in factories such as Samuel Slater’s textile mills
in southern New England. Slater published a newspaper advertisement for “four or ve active Lads,
about 15 Years of Age to serve as Apprentices in the Cotton Factory.”39
And so, during the early-nineteenth century, opportunities for education and employment often depended on a given family’s class. In colonial America, nearly all children worked within their parent’s
chosen profession, whether it be agricultural or artisanal. During the market revolution, however,
more children were able to postpone employment. Americans aspired to provide a “Romantic
Childhood” – a period in which boys and girls were sheltered within the home and nurtured
through primary schooling.40 This ideal was available to families that could survive without their
children’s labor. As these children matured, their early experiences often determined whether they
entered respectable, well-paying positions or became dependent workers with little prospects for social mobility.
Just as children were expected to be sheltered from the adult world of work, American culture expected men and women to assume distinct gender roles as they prepared for marriage and family life.
An ideology of “separate spheres” set the public realm—the world of economic production and political life—apart as a male domain, and the world of consumers and domestic life as a female one.
(Even non-working women labored by shopping for the household, producing food and clothing,
cleaning, educating children, and performing similar activities. But these were considered “domestic”
because they did not bring money into the household, although they too were essential to the house-
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hold’s economic viability.) While reality muddied the ideal, the divide between a private, female
world of home, and a public, male world of business de ned American gender hierarchy.
The idea of separate spheres also displayed a distinct class bias. Middle- and upper-classes reinforced
their status by shielding “their” women from the harsh realities of wage labor. Women were to be
mothers and educators, not partners in production. But lower-class women continued to contribute
directly to the household economy. The middle- and upper-class ideal was only feasible in households where women did not need to engage in paid labor. In poorer households, women engaged in
wage labor as factory workers, piece-workers producing items for market consumption, tavern and
inn keepers, and domestic servants. While many of the fundamental tasks women performed remained the same—producing clothing, cultivating vegetables, overseeing dairy production, and performing any number of other domestic labors—the key di erence was whether and when they performed these tasks for cash in a market economy.
Domestic expectations constantly changed and the market revolution transformed many women’s
traditional domestic tasks. Cloth production, for instance, advanced throughout the market revolution as new mechanized production increased the volume and variety of fabrics available to ordinary
people. This relieved many better-o women of a traditional labor obligation. As cloth production
became commercialized, women’s home-based cloth production became less important to household economies. Purchasing cloth, and later, ready-made clothes, began to transform women from
producers to consumers. One woman from Maine, Martha Ballard, regularly referenced spinning,
weaving, and knitting in the diary she kept from 1785 to 1812.41 Martha, her daughters, and female
neighbors spun and plied linen and woolen yarns and used them to produce a variety of fabrics to
make clothing for her family. The production of cloth and clothing was a year-round, labor-intensive
process, but it was for home consumption, not commercial markets.
In cities, where women could buy cheap imported cloth to turn into clothing, they became skilled
consumers. They stewarded money earned by their husbands by comparing values and haggling over
prices. In one typical experience, Mrs. Peter Simon, a captain’s wife, inspected twenty-six yards of
Holland cloth to ensure it was worth the £130 price.42 Even wealthy women shopped for high-value
goods. While servants or slaves routinely made low-value purchases, the mistress of the household
trusted her discriminating eye alone for expensive or speci c purchases.
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Women might also parlay their feminine skills into businesses. In addition to working as seamstresses, milliners, or laundresses, women might undertake paid work for neighbors or acquaintances or
combine clothing production with management of a boarding house. Even slaves with particular
skill at producing clothing could be hired out for a higher price, or might even negotiate to work
part-time for themselves. Most slaves, however, continued to produce domestic items, including simpler cloths and clothing, for home consumption.
Thomas Horner, “Broadway, New York,” 1836, via Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Similar domestic expectations played out in the slave states. Enslaved women labored in the elds.
Whites argued that African American women were less delicate and womanly than white women
and therefore perfectly suited for agricultural labor. The southern ideal meanwhile established that
white plantation mistresses were shielded from manual labor because of their very whiteness.
Throughout the slave states, however, aside from the minority of plantations with dozens of slates,
the majority of white women by necessity continued to assist with planting, harvesting, and processing agricultural projects despite the cultural stigma attached to it. White southerners continued to
produce large portions of their food and clothing at home. Even when they were market-oriented
producers of cash crops, white southerners still insisted that their adherence to plantation slavery and
racial hierarchy made them morally superior to greedy Northerners and their callous, cutthroat commerce. Southerners and northerners increasingly saw their ways of life as incompatible.
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While the market revolution remade many women’s economic roles, their legal status remained essentially unchanged. Upon marriage, women were rendered legally dead by the notion of coverture,
the custom that counted married couples as a single unit represented by the husband. Without special precautions or interventions, women could not earn their own money, own their own property,
sue, or be sued. Any money earned or spent belonged by law to their husbands. Women shopped on
their husbands’ credit and at any time husbands could terminate their wives’ access to their credit.
Although a handful of states made divorce available—divorce had before only been legal in Congregationalist states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut, where marriage was strictly a civil contract,
rather than a religious one—it remained extremely expensive, di cult, and rare. Marriage was typically a permanently binding legal contract.
Ideas of marriage, if not the legal realities, began to change. This period marked the beginning of the
shift from “institutional” to “companionate” marriage.43 Institutional marriages were primarily labor arrangements that maximized the couple’s and their children’s chances of surviving and thriving.
Men and women assessed each other’s skills as they related to household production, although looks
and personality certainly entered into the equation. But in the late-eighteenth century, under the inuence by Enlightenment thought, young people began to privilege character and compatibility in
their potential partners. Money was still essential: marriages prompted the largest redistributions of
property prior to the settling of estates at death. But the means of this redistribution was changing.
Especially in the North, land became a less important foundation for matchmaking as wealthy young
men became not only farmers and merchants but bankers, clerks, or professionals. The increased emphasis on a ection and attraction that young people embraced was facilitated by an increasingly
complex economy that o ered new ways to store, move, and create wealth, which liberalized the criteria by which families evaluated potential in-laws.
To be considered a success in family life, a middle-class American man typically aspired to own a
comfortable home and to marry a woman of strong morals and religious conviction who would take
responsibility for raising virtuous, well-behaved children. The duties of the middle-class husband
and wife would be clearly delineated into separate spheres. The husband alone was responsible for
creating wealth and engaging in the commerce and politics—the public sphere. The wife was responsible for the private—keeping a good home, being careful with household expenses, raising children,
and inculcating them with the middle class virtues that would ensure their future success. But for
poor families sacri cing the potential economic contributions of wives and children was an
impossibility.
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VI. The Rise of Industrial Labor in Antebellum America
More than ve million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1860. Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants sought new lives and economic opportunities. By the Civil War, nearly
one out of every eight Americans had been born outside of the United States. A series of push and
pull factors drew immigrants to the United States.
In England, an economic slump prompted Parliament to modernize British agriculture by revoking
common land rights for Irish farmers. These policies generally targeted Catholics in the southern
counties of Ireland and motivated many to seek greater opportunity elsewhere. The booming American economy pulled Irish immigrants towards ports along the eastern United States. Between 1820
and 1840, over 250,000 Irish immigrants arrived in the United States.44 Without the capital and
skills required to purchase and operate farms, Irish immigrants settled primarily in northeastern
cities and towns and performed unskilled work. Irish men usually emigrated alone and, when possible, practiced what became known as chain migration. Chain migration allowed Irish men to send
portions of their wages home, which would then be used to either support their families in Ireland or
to purchase tickets for relatives to come to the United States. Irish immigration followed this pattern
into the 1840s and 1850s, when the infamous Irish Famine sparked a massive exodus out of Ireland.
Between 1840 and 1860, 1.7 million Irish ed starvation and the oppressive English policies that accompanied it.45 As they entered manual, unskilled labor positions in urban America’s dirtiest and
most dangerous occupations, Irish workers in northern cities were compared to African Americans
and anti-immigrant newspapers portrayed them with ape-like features. Despite hostility, Irish immigrants retained their social, cultural, and religious beliefs and left an indelible mark on American
culture.
While the Irish settled mostly in coastal cities, most German immigrants used American ports and
cities as temporary waypoints before settling in the rural countryside. Over 1.5 million immigrants
from the various German states arrived in the United States during the antebellum era. Although
some southern Germans ed declining agricultural conditions and repercussions of the failed revolutions of 1848, many Germans simply sought steadier economic opportunity. German immigrants
tended to travel as families and carried with them skills and capital that enabled them to enter middle
class trades. Germans migrated to the Old Northwest to farm in rural areas and practiced trades in
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growing communities such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee, three cities that formed what
came to be called the German Triangle.
Most German immigrants were Catholics, but many were Jewish. Although records are sparse, New
York’s Jewish population rose from approximately 500 in 1825 to 40,000 in 1860.46 Similar gains
were seen in other American cities. Jewish immigrants, hailing from southwestern Germany and
parts of occupied Poland, moved to the United States through chain migration and as family units.
Unlike other Germans, Jewish immigrants rarely settled in rural areas. Once established, Jewish immigrants found work in retail, commerce, and artisanal occupations such as tailoring. They quickly
found their footing and established themselves as an intrinsic part of the American market economy.
Just as Irish immigrants shaped the urban landscape through the construction of churches and
Catholic schools, Jewish immigrants erected synagogues and made their mark on American culture.
The sudden in ux of immigration triggered a backlash among many native-born Anglo-Protestant
Americans. This nativist movement, especially fearful of the growing Catholic presence, sought to
limit European immigration and prevent Catholics from establishing churches and other institutions. Popular in northern cities such as Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities with large
Catholic populations, nativism even spawned its own political party in the 1850s. The American Party, more commonly known as the “Know-Nothing Party,” found success in local and state elections
throughout the North. The party even nominated candidates for President in 1852 and 1856. The
rapid rise of the Know-Nothings, re ecting widespread anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment,
slowed European immigration. Immigration declined precipitously after 1855 as nativism, the
Crimean War, and improving economic conditions in Europe discouraged potential migrants from
traveling to the United States. Only after the American Civil War would immigration levels match,
and eventually surpass, the levels seen in the 1840s and 1850s.
In industrial northern cities, Irish immigrants swelled the ranks of the working class and quickly encountered the politics of industrial labor. Many workers formed trade unions during the early republic. Organizations such as the Philadelphia’s Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers or the Carpenters’ Union of Boston operated within speci c industries in major American cities. These unions
worked to protect the economic power of their members by creating closed shops—workplaces
wherein employers could only hire union members—and striking to improve working conditions.
Political leaders denounced these organizations as unlawful combinations and conspiracies to promote the narrow self-interest of workers above the rights of property holders and the interests of the
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common good. Unions did not become legally acceptable until 1842 when the Massachusetts
Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of a union organized among Boston bootmakers, arguing that
the workers were capable of acting “in such a manner as best to subserve their own interests.”47 Even
after the case, unions remained in a precarious legal position.
N. Currier, “The Propagation Society, More Free than Welcome,” 1855, via Library of Congress.
In the 1840s, labor activists organized to limit working hours and protect children in factories. The
New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workingmen (NEA) mobilized to establish a ten-hour work day across industries. They argued that the ten-hour day would improve the
immediate conditions of laborers by allowing “time and opportunities for intellectual and moral improvement.”48 After a city-wide strike in Boston in 1835, the Ten-Hour Movement quickly spread
to other major cities such as Philadelphia. The campaign for leisure time was part of the male working-class e ort to expose the hollowness of the paternalistic claims of employers and their rhetoric of
moral superiority.49
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Women, a dominant labor source for factories since the early 1800s, launched some of the earliest
strikes for better conditions. Textile operatives in Lowell, Massachusetts, “turned-out” (walked o )
their jobs in 1834 and 1836. During the Ten-Hour Movement of the 1840s, female operatives provided crucial support. Under the leadership of Sarah Bagley, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association organized petition drives that drew thousands of signatures from “mill girls.” Like male activists, Bagley and her associates used the desire for mental improvement as a central argument for
reform. An 1847 editorial in the Voice of Industry, a labor newspaper published by Bagley, asked
“who, after thirteen hours of steady application to monotonous work, can sit down and apply her
mind to deep and long continued thought?”50 Despite the widespread support for a ten-hour day,
the movement achieved only partial success. President Martin Van Buren established a ten-hour-day
policy for laborers on federal public works projects. New Hampshire passed a state-wide law in 1847,
and Pennsylvania followed a year later. Both states, however, allowed workers to voluntarily consent
to work more than ten hours per day.
In 1842, child labor became a dominant issue in the American labor movement. The protection of
child laborers gained more middle-class support than the protection of adult workers. A petition
from parents in Fall River, a southern Massachusetts mill town that employed a high portion of child
workers, asked the legislature for a law “prohibiting the employment of children in manufacturing
establishments at an age and for a number of hours which must be permanently injurious to their
health and inconsistent with the education which is essential to their welfare.”51 Massachusetts
quickly passed a law prohibiting children under the age of twelve from working more than ten hours
a day. By the mid-nineteenth century, every state in New England had followed Massachusetts’ lead.
Between the 1840s and 1860s, these statutes slowly extended the age of protection of labor and the
assurance of schooling. Throughout the region, public o cials agreed that young children (between
nine and twelve years) should be prevented from working in dangerous occupations, and older children (between twelve and fteen years) should balance their labor with education and time for
leisure.52
Male workers sought to improve their income and working conditions to create a household that
kept women and children protected within the domestic sphere. But labor gains were limited, and
the movement remained moderate. Despite its challenge to industrial working conditions, labor activism in antebellum America remained largely wedded to the free labor ideal. The labor movement
later supported the northern free soil movement, which challenged the spread of slavery in the 1840s,
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simultaneously promoting the superiority of the northern system of commerce over the southern
institution of slavery while trying, much less successfully, to reform capitalism.
VII. Conclusion
During the early nineteenth century, southern agriculture produced by slaves fueled northern industry produced by wage workers and managed by the new middle class. New transportation, new machinery, and new organizations of labor integrated the previously isolated pockets of the colonial
economy into a national industrial operation. Industrialization and the cash economy tied diverse
regions together at the same time ideology drove Americans apart. By celebrating the freedom of
contract that distinguished the wage worker from the indentured servant of previous generations or
the slave in the southern cotton eld, political leaders claimed the American Revolution’s legacy for
the North. But the rise of industrial child labor, the demands of workers to unionize, the economic
vulnerability of women, and the in ux of non-Anglo immigrants left many Americans questioning
the meaning of liberty after the market revolution.
VIII. Primary Sources
James Madison Asks Congress to Support Internal Improvements, 1815
After the War of 1812, Americans looked to strengthen their nation through government spending on infrastructure, or what were then called internal improvements. In his seventh annual address to congress, Madison called for public investment to create national roads, canals, and even
a national seminary. He also called for a tari , or tax on certain imports, designed to make foreign goods more expensive, giving American producers an advantage in domestic markets.
A Traveler Describes Life Along the Erie Canal, 1829
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Basil Hall, a British visitor traveled along the Erie Canal and took careful notes on what he
found. In this excerpt, he described life in Rochester, New York. Rochester, and other small
towns in upstate New York, grew rapidly as a result of the Erie Canal.
Blacksmith Apprentice Contract, 1836
The factories and production of the Market Revolution eroded the wealth and power of skilled
small business owners called artisans. This indenture contract illustrated the former way of doing things, where a young person would agree to serve for a number of years as an apprentice to a
skilled artisan before venturing out on his own.
Harriet H. Robinson Remembers a Mill Workers’ Strike, 1863
The social upheavals of the Market Revolution created new tensions between rich and poor, particularly between the new class of workers and the new class of managers. Lowell, Massachusetts
was the location of the rst American factory. In this document, a woman reminisces about a
strike that she participated in at a Lowell textile mill.
Alexis de Toqueville, “How Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes,” 1840
The French political thinker Alexis de Toqueville travelled extensively through the United States
in gathering research for his book Democracy In America. In this excerpt, he described the belief
that American men and women lived in “separate spheres:” men in public, women in the home.
This expectation justi ed the denial of rights to women. All women were denied political rights
in nineteenth century America, but only a small number of wealthy families could a ord to remove women from economic production, like de Toqueville claimed.
Abolitionist Sheet Music Cover Page, 1844
The “transportation revolution” shaped economic change in the early 1800s, but the massive
construction of railroads also had a profound impact on American politics and culture. This
sheet music title page shows how abolitionists used railroad imagery to advocate for the immediate emancipation of enslaved people and to promote their political platform before the 1844
presidential election.
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Anti-Catholic Cartoon, 1855
Irish immigration transformed American cities. Yet many Americans greeted the new arrivals
with suspicion or hostility. Nathanial Currier’s anti-Catholic cartoon re ected the popular
American perception that Irish Catholic immigrants posed a threat to the United States.
IX. Reference Material
This chapter was edited by Jane Fiegen Green, with content contributions by Kelly Arehart, Myles
Beaurpre, Kristin Condotta, Jane Fiegen Green, Nathan Jeremie-Brink, Lindsay Keiter, Brenden
Kennedy, William Kerrigan, Christopher Sawula, David Schley, and Evgenia Shayder Shoop.
Recommended citation: Kelly Arehart et al., “Market Revolution,” Jane Fiegen, ed., in The Ameri-
can Yawp, Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, eds., last modi ed August 1, 2017, http://www.AmericanYawp.com.
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Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Dublin, Thomas. Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial
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Faler, Paul G. Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn,
Massachusetts, 1760-1860. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981.
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Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before
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Greenberg, Joshua R. Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the
Household in New York, 1800-1840. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
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Hartigan-O’Connor, Ellen. Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary
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Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-
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Luskey, Brian P. On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century
America. New York: New York University Press, 2010.
Matson, Cathy and Wendy A. Woloson. Risky Business: Winning and Losing in the Early
American Economy, 1780-1850. Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia: 2003.
McNeur, Catherine. Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City.
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Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New Eng-
land, 1780-1860. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.
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the United States. Harvard University Press, 2009.
Murphy, Teresa Anne. Ten Hours’ Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New
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Rothenberg, Winifred Barr. From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transforma-
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Sellers, Charles Grier. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. New
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Notes
1. Hezekiah Niles, Dec. 2, 1815, Niles’ Weekly Register, Volume 9 (Baltimore: 1816), 238. [ ]
2. Douglass C. North, Economic Growth in the United States, 1790-1860 (Englewood Cli s, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1961), 25. [ ]
3. James Madison, Annual Message to Congress, December 5, 1815. [ ]
4. William L. Garrison and David M. Levinson, The Transportation Experience: Policy, Planning, and
Deployment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 51. [ ]
5. Warren E. Weber, “Early State Banks in the United States: How Many Were There and When Did They
Exist?” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Quarterly Review, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Sept. 2006): 28-40. [ ]
6. John Robert Godley, Letters from America (J. Murray, 1844), 267. [ ]
7. Margaret Van Horn Dwight, A Journey to Ohio in 1810, Max Farrand, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1912), 13. [ ]
8. Margaret Van Horn Dwight, A Journey to Ohio in 1810, Max Farrand, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1912), 37. [ ]
9. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, Vol. 1 (London: Whittaker, Treacher & Co., 1832), 274.
[ ]
10. Cathy Matson, Risky Business: Winning and Losing in the Early American Economy, 1780-1850 (Library Company of Philadelphia: 2003), 29. [ ]
11. Leonard P. Curry, The Corporate City: The American City as a Political Entity, 1800-1850 (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Publishing, 1997), 46. [ ]
12. Je erson to George Logan, 12 Nov 1816 Works of Thomas Je erson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, Federal Edition, 12
vols. (New York: 1904), 12:43 [ ]
13. Quoted in Michael Zakim and Gary John Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transforma-
tion of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 158. [ ]
14. Philip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 800-1885 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 12. [ ]
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15. Robert J. Cottrol, ed., From African to Yankee: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum New
England (Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 62. [ ]
16. The 1830 census enumerates 3,568 enslaved people in the northern states (designation of Northern States in
1830 includes Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York,
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont). 1830 US Census data taken from Minnesota Population
Center. National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota 2011. Accessible online: http://www.nhgis.org; David Menschel, “Abolition Without Deliverance: The
Law of Connecticut Slavery 1784-1848,” Yale Law Journal. Vol. 111 Is. 1, (Oct 2001), 191; James J. Gigantino
II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey 1775-1865 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 248. [ ]
17. Minnesota Population Center. National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota 2011. Accessible online: http://www.nhgis.org. [ ]
18. Louisiana Courier, 12 Feb 1840. [ ]
19. United States Census O ce 8th Census 1860 and James Madison Edmunds, Manufactures of the United States
in 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, Under the Direction of the Secretary of the
Interior (U.S. Government Printing O ce, 1865). [ ]
20. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2003), 168-169. [ ]
21. Sarah “Sally” Rice to her father, 23 Feb 1845, published in The New England Mill Village, 1790-1860 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1982), 390. [ ]
22. Factory Tracts. Factory Life As It Is, Number One, [(Lowell, MA, 1845)]. [ ]
23. Malenda M. Edwards to Sabrina Bennett, 4 Apr 1839, quoted in Thomas Dublin, ed., Farm to Factory Women’s
Letters, 1830-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 74. [ ]
24. “Apprentices No. 2,” New York Observer October 14, 1826. [ ]
25. Reverend Alonzo Potter, Political Economy: Its Objects, Uses, and Principles, 1840, 92. [ ]
26. Daniel Webster, “Lecture Before the Society for the Di usion of Useful Knowledge,” in The Writings and
Speeches of Daniel Webster: Writings and Speeches Hitherto Uncollected, v. 1. Addresses on Various Occasions,
ed. Edward Everett (Little, Brown, 1903); Carl Siracusa, A Mechanical People: Perceptions of the Industrial Or-
der in Massachusetts, 1815-1880 (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 157. [ ]
27. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men : The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford;
New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). [ ]
28. “Notice to House Carpenters in the Country,” Columbian Centinel, 23 Apr 1825. [ ]
29. John R. Commons, ed., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society (New York: Russell & Russell,
1958), VI: 79. [ ]
30. Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Kalamazoo, Michigan, Aug. 27, 1856, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 364. [ ]
31. Joseph Tuckerman, Mr. Tuckerman’s Eight Semiannual Report in his service as a Minister at Large in
Boston (Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1831), 21. [ ]
32. Warren Colburn, “Advertisement for Colburn’s school for young gentlemen preparing for mercantile and other
pursuits, 19 Sep 1820,” (Boston), Massachusetts Historical Society. [ ]
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33. Proceedings of the School Committee, of the Town of Boston, respecting an English Classical School (Boston:
The Committee, 1820). [ ]
34. William Davis to Elizabeth Davis, 21 Mar 1816, 23 Jun 1816, 17 No 1816, Davis Family Papers, MHS [ ]
35. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Chapter IX. [ ]
36. A Catalogue of the O cers, Teachers, and Pupils in Bristol Academy (Tauton, Mass.: Bradford & Amsbury,
1837). [ ]
37. Nancy Denison recommendation, May 1825; Titus Orcott Brown Papers, Maine Historical Society. [ ]
38. Indentures and Other Documents Binding Minor Wards of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents of the City of New York as apprentices to Sylvester Lusk of En eld, 1828-1838, Sylvester Lusk Papers,
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39. Advertisement in Providence Gazette, 1794. [ ]
40. Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard
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1990). [ ]
42. Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia:
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43. Anya Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal (Baltimore, Md: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). [ ]
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45. John Powell, Encyclopedia of North American Immigration (New York: Facts on File, 005), 154. [ ]
46. H.B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community in New York, 1654-1860 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 1945), 469. [ ]
47. Commonwealth v. Hunt, 45 Mass. 111 (1842). [ ]
48. The Artisan, 8 Mar 1832. [ ]
49. Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours’ Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1992). [ ]
50. [Sarah Bagley], “The Blindness of the Age,” Voice of Industry, 23 Apr 1847. [ ]
51. Legislative Documents, 1842, House, No. 4, p. 3, in Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis Otey, The Beginnings
of Child Labor Legislation in Certain States: a Comparative Study (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 78. [ ]
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