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The American Yawp, Volume 1, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 10 · pp. 304–338
Chapter 9 follows the United States after the War of 1812, when a drive to "get forward" remade the economy. New roads, canals, steamboats and factories linked regions into one market, changed family life and work, and strengthened slavery in the South. The chapter also covers Andrew Jackson's rise and democratic politics, religious revivals and reform, sectional conflict, westward expansion, and the Missouri Compromise. This part covers the postwar economy, the Market Revolution, transportation, early factories and middle-class ideals about family.
After the war, the national economy needed stability. Before 1816, many state banks issued their own money, so trading across long distances was risky. The Second Bank of the United States, chartered in 1816, helped by overseeing state banks and providing one national currency. A shared currency and some regulation made trade between states easier and encouraged growth. (p. 304)
The Market Revolution was the shift from a mostly local economy to a national commercial one. Water and steam power changed how goods were made and moved. Farmers increasingly grew crops to sell for profit instead of to eat or trade nearby, and more of daily life involved cash. (p. 304)
The change created winners and losers. Northern factories and cities grew, huge fortunes appeared, and the middle class expanded. For some people, working in the cash economy meant escaping servitude. But some free farmers became wage laborers who depended on markets and employers, and economic panics (depressions) hurt many people. (pp. 304–305)
The North's gains were tied to slavery. Busy textile mills needed more raw cotton. Planters met that demand by opening new cotton land in the Southwest, worked by enslaved people. So Northern industry did not weaken slavery. It pushed plantation slavery westward. (pp. 304–305)
Before the War of 1812, American farmers could sell food to Europe at a good profit. But moving goods inside the country was very costly because roads were bad or missing. In 1816, shipping a ton of goods across the Atlantic cost about 9 moved a ton only thirty miles over land. A Senate committee that year said land transport cost too much for manufacturing to be profitable. (p. 305)
So after the war Americans built internal improvements: roads, canals and, later, railroads. Together these projects are called the Transportation Revolution. President Madison urged Congress in 1815 to support national roads and canals. State governments paid for most projects, but federal spending still averaged about $1,323,000 a year during Jackson's presidency. (pp. 305–306)
Steamboats. Much of the change happened on water. Robert Fulton began commercial steamboat service on the Hudson River in 1807. Steam power let boats move upstream as well as downstream, so steamboats soon filled the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. By 1830, more than two hundred worked Western waterways. (p. 306)
The Erie Canal. New York State finished this 363-mile "artificial river" in 1825. It joined the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, New York harbor and the Atlantic. Midwestern crops could now reach eastern cities cheaply, and eastern goods could travel west to farmers. Its success started a canal boom. By 1840 Ohio had two all-water routes from Lake Erie to the Ohio River. (p. 306)
Two journeys. Better transport also brought settlers onto Native lands west of the Appalachians. Two women's trips show how fast travel improved:
These changes soon affected how people earned a living, their family relationships, their social standing and politics. (p. 307)
As roads and canals increased trade, a change in how goods were made became more important. New England merchants began using powered machines copied, or stolen, from Britain. (pp. 307–308)
Samuel Slater. In 1789 a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, mill hired Slater, a 21-year-old British immigrant, to build machines that cleaned, combined and spun yarn. He had apprenticed in an English mill and copied its machinery, even though Britain tried to ban exporting this technology. (p. 308)
Lowell and Moody. In 1813, Francis Cabot Lowell and Paul Moody recreated the British powered loom. Lowell had spent two years touring British mills and memorized the design, so customs searches found nothing. He also changed how work was organized. The Waltham-Lowell System put every step of making cloth under one roof. By 1821, this was fully realized in the planned mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, powered by the Merrimack River and staffed by local farm girls. This became the model of the American factory. (p. 308)
The "mill girls." About ten thousand people worked in Lowell. Sarah Rice, at a nearby mill, called her factory noisy and confining. Days ran from sunup to sundown, and one worker complained of servitude. Workers struck for shorter hours, yet new workers kept arriving. Steady wages and freedom from parental oversight attracted women who left millinery, dressmaking and teaching. With so many eager workers, money and entrepreneurs flowed into New England. (p. 308)
Craft work. Shoemaking shows the same trend. Shoemakers once made custom shoes in home workshops with live-in apprentices. Some began making ready-made sizes for city markets and hired unskilled wage workers instead. Factories slowly replaced shops. (p. 309)
As families joined the cash economy and industrial work left the home, ideas about work, womanhood, manhood and childhood changed. (p. 309)
Romantic childhood. In colonial America nearly all children worked in their parents' trade. Now middle-class families wanted a "romantic childhood": children sheltered at home and given primary schooling. Only families that could live without children's wages could afford it, so it was a class privilege. (pp. 309–310)
Separate spheres. This ideology placed men in the public world of work and politics and women in the home, domesticity and consumption. Middle-class women still worked hard, making food and clothing, cleaning, teaching children and buying household goods. But this work brought in no money, so it was not counted as economic production, even though the household needed it. (pp. 309–310)
Coverture. Law kept women unequal. Under coverture, a married couple counted as one legal person, represented by the husband. A wife's money and property generally belonged to him. Women shopped on their husbands' credit, and husbands could cut off that access at any time. Divorce was possible in a few states but costly, hard and rare. (p. 310)
Class limits. Poor women and children had to earn wages. Poor women worked in factories, taverns, inns and domestic service. Their tasks often matched those of richer women, but they did them for pay. Around age eleven or twelve, boys might work as office runners or waiters for about a dollar a week. Wealthier people often looked down on these young workers, as the minister Joseph Tuckerman did when he criticized poor children for lacking discipline. (p. 310)
Schooling. Middle-class education built future advantages. Schooling beyond basic literacy helped young men get apprenticeships in retail and commercial work, which is why Boston created its English High School. Education also prepared young women for respectable, genteel lives, and some became schoolteachers. Poor children, kept from school, were treated as economic assets by their families. (pp. 310–311)
The Market Revolution changed what women did, but it did not change their legal rank. Middle-class women spent their days making food and clothing, cleaning, teaching their children, and buying household goods. This work was real and kept the home running, yet it brought in no cash (p. 310).
Coverture was the legal doctrine behind women's weak position. It treated a husband and wife as one legal unit, and the husband represented that unit. In practice, a married woman's money and property usually belonged to her husband. She bought goods on his credit, and he could cut off her access to the market whenever he wished. A few states allowed divorce, but it was costly, hard to get, and rare. Marriage was a permanent contract, and men could break their side of it with less risk of punishment (p. 310). For example, a wife who ran up a bill at a shop depended entirely on her husband's willingness to back it.
Why class mattered. The ideals of a protected woman and a sheltered child fit only wealthier families. Poor families needed wages. Poor women worked in factories, ran taverns and inns, or served as domestic servants. Their tasks were often the same as a rich woman's housework. The difference was that they were paid in the market for doing them (p. 310).
Children followed the same pattern. Around age eleven or twelve, a boy from a working family might become an office runner or a waiter and earn about a dollar a week. That money helped make up for low adult wages. The wealthy often looked down on these young earners. The minister Joseph Tuckerman, for instance, complained that poor children lacked discipline and regular habits. Because they worked, they often could not attend school. To their families they were economic assets, and to the rich they were a source of worry (p. 310).
Schooling widened the gap between classes. Middle-class young men who wanted apprenticeships in retail or commerce needed schooling beyond basic reading and writing. Teachers opened schools for "young gentlemen" headed for business, such as the one Warren Colburn organized in Boston in 1820. Boston also created its English High School to prepare boys for a profession, whether in trade or in a mechanical field. Public common schools could not offer this level of training (p. 311).
Education also shaped middle-class girls' futures. When Elizabeth Davis left for school in 1816, her father said it would build her character and respectability. Alexis de Tocqueville, touring in the 1830s, admired how independent young American women were and noted that their education trained both reason and moral sense (p. 311). Many young women also used schooling to become teachers as common schools expanded. Bristol Academy in Massachusetts advertised lessons in the art of teaching, and Nancy Denison left Concord Academy in 1825 with references praising her ability to teach (pp. 311–312).
Poor children had a different path. Some received a little education through institutions like New York City's House of Refuge. They were then often indentured, or bound by contract, to wealthier families as field hands or household workers. The Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents sent children to farms like Sylvester Lusk's in Connecticut. There boys were to learn farming and girls housewifery, and they owed obedience in return for room, board, and a basic education. Others went into factories. Samuel Slater, for example, advertised for about fifteen-year-old boys to work as apprentices in his cotton mills (p. 312). The result was that manual labor marked poor youth as lower in status, while schooling opened respectable careers to the middle class (p. 312).
These changes in what it meant to be a man, woman, or child raised tensions over wealth and where prosperity came from. Those tensions help explain the rise of Andrew Jackson (p. 312).
On May 30, 1806, Jackson, then a 39-year-old Tennessee lawyer, was shot in the chest in a duel. He stayed on his feet, steadied his aim, and killed his opponent. He kept the bullet in his body for the rest of his life. The toughness and vengefulness he showed became part of his public image and shaped his later conduct in war and politics. Over time he came to stand for American-style democracy, with both its good and bad sides (pp. 312–313).
A common misconception. Many people assume the founders were eager democrats who saw the Revolution as a victory for democracy. Many of them in fact feared it. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton warned of the "vices of democracy." Elbridge Gerry said the nation's problems came from "an excess of democracy." They believed too much popular participation would damage order and block a stable, united republic (pp. 313–314).
Ordinary Americans kept pushing anyway. Between the 1790s and 1830s, voters turned out in large numbers, and people protested, petitioned Congress, gave partisan speeches on patriotic holidays, and criticized the president openly. Many believed the people were sovereign every day, not just on election day. As a result, even skeptics like Hamilton admitted leaders needed "popular favour." Elites in every state and party learned to listen to the public, or at least to look as though they did. The presidency, the office closest to a king's, came to symbolize democratizing politics (p. 314).
Jackson was born in 1767 on the North Carolina–South Carolina border. At thirteen he joined a militia in the Revolutionary War, was captured, and was slashed by a British officer. Disease killed his brothers and mother, leaving him an orphan with a lasting hatred of Britain (p. 314). He moved to Tennessee and, despite little schooling, prospered as a lawyer and landowner. He eventually enslaved about 150 people at his plantation, the Hermitage. He served briefly in the House and Senate and resigned over money troubles. Political connections won him a general's commission in 1812 despite no combat experience (pp. 314–315).
His troops nicknamed him "Old Hickory" after a tough tree. He won the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814 during the Creek War. In 1815 he won the Battle of New Orleans, where a mixed force of militiamen, free Black men, Native Americans, and others inflicted over 2,000 British casualties and took about 300. The battle came after a peace treaty was signed, yet it made him a national hero (pp. 315–316).
In 1818 Jackson invaded Spanish Florida to break Seminole resistance. The Seminoles sheltered people escaping slavery and raided American settlers. His troops took Pensacola and he executed two British subjects. Two years earlier, on his orders, the "Negro Fort" had been destroyed, killing about 270 people. The invasion caused a diplomatic crisis, and most of President Monroe's officials wanted Jackson censured. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams defended him and used the pressure on Spain to win the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, which gave Florida to the US (p. 316).
In 1824, four candidates ran, and Jackson won the most popular votes. No one won an Electoral College majority, so the House decided. Henry Clay backed Adams, who won and then made Clay secretary of state. Jackson's supporters called it a "corrupt bargain" that overrode the people's will, and Jackson never forgave Adams (pp. 316–317).
The 1828 rematch was bitter, with personal attacks on both sides, including on Jackson's wife Rachel, who died before his inauguration. Jackson won easily by posing as the champion of plain white frontier Americans against the Northeastern elite. His politics expanded freedoms for poor white people while shrinking them for African Americans and Native Americans (p. 317).
Wage work used to be seen as a temporary, dependent stage for young men on the way to supporting a family. It now became permanent for many people. Daniel Webster said industrious, sober workers could succeed. The activist Seth Luther called the system a cruel extraction from working people. Employers held the financial and political power, and downturns like the Panic of 1819 could push even business owners into wage work. Many men also relied on income from wives and children (pp. 318–319).
Workers formed unions to win better pay and the respect due a breadwinner and citizen. In 1825, Boston journeymen carpenters formed a union, saying they could not support a family on usual wages. Owners replied that unions caused needless conflict between capital and labor. They promoted social mobility, claiming hard work and good character would let workers rise. That claim did not always match what wage earners lived through (p. 319).
During the Transportation Revolution, building canals, roads and railroads cost a great deal and carried real risk. State legislatures helped by granting corporate charters. A charter let a company's investors and directors avoid personal liability for its debts. If the company failed, they lost what they had put in, but creditors could not take their homes and savings. Legislatures often added monopoly rights to the charter to make risky projects more attractive (p. 320).
Banks were a main target of this policy. Only one state-chartered bank existed in 1783. There were 266 in 1820, 702 in 1840 and 1,371 in 1860. Foreign money also mattered. A British traveler said in 1844 that English capital had paid for American railroads, canals, steamships and banks (p. 320).
Most Americans of the time had little experience with business corporations. Many saw them as strange, impersonal and possibly foreign. Officers of a corporation, critics said, did not answer personally for what the company did. Worse, they held power that belonged only to elected representatives. Some people suspected a plot to gather power outside the control of voters (p. 321).
The worry reached the top. In 1816, Thomas Jefferson urged Americans to stop the "aristocracy of our monied corporations" before it grew strong. In 1835, a group of New Jersey journeymen shoemakers objected to incorporating companies for manual trades. They believed such companies would create monopolies and hurt independent small producers (p. 321).
The courts moved the other way. In Dartmouth v. Woodward (1819), the Supreme Court protected the rights of private corporations. New Hampshire had tried to reorganize Dartmouth College, and the Court blocked the attempt. The case showed that a charter was a lasting legal protection that a state government could not easily undo (p. 321).
Andrew Jackson's supporters included many people who blamed "monied corporations," especially state-chartered banks, for the uneven spread of prosperity. Their main charge was that banks encouraged dangerous speculation, which means buying something in hope of a quick rise in price. Serious depressions hit in 1819, 1837 and 1857. Each followed a boom in a different asset:
To ordinary people, banks looked like privileged institutions that gained when times were good and left others to suffer when the boom collapsed (p. 321).
Banks also issued bank notes. These were paper certificates that circulated like money, passing from buyer to seller to worker. In fact they were only promises that the bank would pay in coins when the note was presented. Private firms printed them in huge quantities, and critics felt this cut the economy loose from solid wealth. Many Americans trusted "cold, hard" gold, silver or copper more than paper. The risks were real. A note became worthless if its bank failed. Many notes were counterfeit, and some carried the name of a bank that never issued them (p. 321).
This fear of fake money spread to a fear of fake people. Americans began to watch for the "confidence man," or "con man," who could win the trust of honest people. A counterfeit note could pass as real in the national market. In the same way, a con man could move from community to community and fool people. Middle-class culture, already uneasy about the morals of commerce, reacted with alarm. It produced advice literature that taught young people how to avoid hypocrisy. It also put more value on the intimate, trustworthy home as deceit seemed to spread in public life. Even while people kept trying to "get forward," many also looked for spiritual renewal (pp. 321–322).
The Second Great Awakening was a series of Protestant revival movements in the early 1800s that changed American religion. Preachers rode on horseback and spoke to large outdoor crowds about spiritual and moral renewal. People from towns, farms and frontier areas came to huge revival meetings. There, strong physical and emotional excitement went with evangelical conversion, the experience of being spiritually reborn (p. 322).
By the 1820s revivals had spread across the country. They increased church membership, produced new Protestant denominations and inspired social reform (p. 323).
Camp meetings drew people of every class, which matched the democratic spirit of the American Revolution. They also gave a shared moral order and a sense of spiritual community to people who felt shaken by rapid change. Meetings often took place close to nature, sometimes under forest trees, and converts might seal their faith by being baptized in a river. This setting reflected unease about urban industrial life (p. 323).
Several changes were loosening traditional authority: the Market Revolution, westward expansion and immigration, especially of Catholics. Evangelicalism offered both excitement and order in response (p. 323).
Older churches required ministers to have formal theological education. Methodists, who organized their American denomination in 1784, asked only for a conversion experience and a supernatural "call to preach." A twenty-year-old mill worker could therefore become a full-time circuit-riding preacher almost overnight. Evangelical denominations thus found many new preachers. Because these preachers had no divinity degree, they could be paid much less. These groups sometimes made room for enslaved and free Black preachers too, though in a separate place. Evangelical religion became more and more important to African American communities in these decades (p. 323).
The revivals fed reform movements that sometimes lasted long after the meetings ended. Led by preachers and ministers, reform societies took on many problems (pp. 322–323):
Voluntary associations also worked to change bankruptcy laws, prisons, mental hospitals, labor laws and schools. They built orphanages and free medical dispensaries. They also set up social work, job placement and day camps for children in city slums (p. 323).
Church leaders from different sects often cooperated in nondenominational societies despite deep theological disagreements. Together these societies formed a strong cultural force known as the benevolent empire (p. 324).
The Market Revolution made many middle-class Americans more comfortable. Those who were caught up in religious revivals now had spare time and money, and they put both into reform campaigns. Most of these campaigns aimed to build and protect a respectable middle-class culture across the country (p. 324).
Women played a leading part. Evangelical women were active in the revivals, and they took on more responsibility for the moral health of their homes and neighborhoods. Earlier generations would have found such a public role for ordinary women almost unthinkable (p. 324).
Protestant denominations disagreed sharply about doctrine. Even so, their leaders often cooperated across denominational lines to create benevolent societies. Historians sometimes call this web of nondenominational Christian groups the "benevolent empire." It became a strong cultural force that pulled ordinary church members into social reform (p. 324).
Temperance was probably the most successful of these causes. After the Revolution, cheap whiskey became common, sometimes costing less than milk or beer and seeming safer than water. Adult drinking soared, and by the 1820s alcoholism was a widespread problem (p. 324). Reformers stopped asking for moderation and began demanding total abstinence. They linked alcohol to other vices and, above all, to danger for family life (p. 324).
In 1826 evangelical ministers founded the American Temperance Society (ATS). It sponsored lectures, printed pamphlets, and held revivals meant to persuade people to give up drink. Within ten years it had five thousand branches and over a million members. Members signed pledges, went door to door, and urged others to join a "Cold Water Army." They also pressed several state legislatures to ban liquor sales (pp. 324–325).
Middle-class women were prominent in the movement because they associated heavy drinking with men who abused or abandoned their families. But the campaign meddled in the private lives of poorer workers, many of them Irish Catholic immigrants, so it deepened class, ethnic and religious tensions. Still, it worked: Americans drank about half as much in the 1840s as in the 1820s, and the decline continued afterward (p. 325).
Reformers also looked west. The American Bible Society sent thousands of Bibles to places with few churches or ministers. The American Home Missionary Society gave money to frontier congregations so they could support themselves. Missionaries translated the Bible into Native American languages in hopes of converting Indigenous people (p. 326).
While reformers felt that no problem was too big to solve, slavery was the exception. Politics were turning "sectional." The North was gradually ending slavery, while the South depended on it more and more. Northerners feared that the South's shared interest in slavery would create a voting bloc in Congress that free states could not match. So trade linked the regions, but ideas about slavery pushed them apart (pp. 326–327).
Until the 1820s, most Southern markets were local and rarely crossed state lines. Even on the Mississippi, boats mostly drifted downstream. In 1812 the steamboat New Orleans traveled from Pittsburgh to New Orleans and could return upriver by steam power. It later sank, but it proved that river trade could flow in both directions (pp. 327–328). Growth was rapid: seventeen steamboats ran upriver lines five years later, over 700 by the mid-1840s, and 3,500 arrived at New Orleans in 1860. They carried about 160,000 tons of goods worth nearly $220 million, and over 80 percent of that was cotton. Gins, wagons and mills were adapted to steam, and rivers became the South's "roads" (p. 328).
Southern cities grew faster than Northern ones from 1820 to 1860. But Northern cities mostly became manufacturing centers using wage labor, while Southern cities served the cotton trade and helped slavery thrive (p. 328).
By 1860 nearly four million people were enslaved in the South, more than 45 percent of its population (p. 328). Within slavery they built their own culture: kin networks, trading systems, religious congregations and aid societies. Family organized daily life. Passing names down to honor the dead and sharing ideas between plantations gave people identity and eased loneliness (pp. 328–329).
As American-born people replaced African-born generations, marriage became the key institution for preserving traditions, linking people to their past and offering some protection for the future (p. 329). About two-thirds of enslaved people lived in nuclear households averaging six members, often with a grandparent or in-laws. Others lived with a single parent or siblings (p. 329).
Families were never safe, though. The internal slave trade grew after the 1808 ban on importing enslaved people and with the cotton boom. Hundreds of thousands were sold "downriver" to the Southwest. Between one-fifth and one-third of marriages were broken up. Enslavers also controlled whether marriages were allowed and used threats against them to dominate people (p. 330).
Cotton needed land, and the Panic of 1819 pushed indebted farmers farther west. The federal government made land easier to buy by lowering the minimum purchase, which brought more settlers into conflict with Native Americans (p. 330).
Abroad, the Monroe Doctrine (1821), shaped by John Quincy Adams, opposed British and Russian involvement in the Americas. The main worry was competing with Britain commercially in Latin America and the Caribbean, not losing territory (p. 331).
The Missouri Crisis began in 1819, when Missouri, with over ten thousand enslaved people, sought statehood. Representative James Tallmadge proposed banning the entry of more enslaved people and freeing children born there at age twenty-five. The House, with a Northern majority, passed it. The Senate defeated it, since the amendment threatened the balance of power (p. 331).
In 1820 Jesse Thomas and Henry Clay promoted the Missouri Compromise: Missouri would enter as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and slavery would be banned in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of but allowed south of it (pp. 331–332).
The deal ended the crisis peacefully, but it made sectional conflict impossible to ignore. Southerners argued that the framers had backed slavery, and the debate produced the first long argument over Black citizenship, with Missouri's right to deny it reaffirmed. Jefferson compared the quarrel to a "fire bell in the night" (p. 332).
The first great age of emancipation ended around 1817, when New York passed the North's last gradual manumission law. The Market Revolution deepened the white South's reliance on slavery, and middle-class ideals could not hide that contradiction. In the 1830s a new, religiously inspired antislavery radicalism arose (pp. 332–333).
