Market Revolution: Industrialization in two minutes
- Robert Fulton's steamboat (1807), the Erie Canal (1825), railroads such as the Baltimore and Ohio, and Samuel Morse's telegraph (1844) sped goods and news. The canal cut freight costs about 90 percent.
- Embargo and war cut off British cloth, so New England built mills. Samuel Slater began water-powered spinning in 1790, and the Waltham mill (1814) did spinning and weaving under one roof.
- Lowell's mills hired young farm women and housed them in company boardinghouses. Women struck in 1834 and 1836, and Sarah Bagley's association petitioned for a ten-hour day in the 1840s.
- Eli Whitney's cotton gin made short-staple cotton profitable, and by 1840 cotton was over half of U.S. exports. Whitney promoted interchangeable parts, but federal armories made them work in the 1820s.
- Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) gave Congress power over interstate commerce and ended a steamboat monopoly. Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837) favored new competition over old monopoly rights.
- Canals and railroads turned Western trade east, tying the Midwest more to the North than the South. John Deere's steel plow (1837) and McCormick's reaper let farmers grow wheat for distant markets.
- On the exam: expect causation and effects of the market revolution, linking technology, regional specialization and slavery, plus continuity and change in labor and in the government's role in transportation.
Topic 4.5 key terms
- Erie Canal (1825)
A 363-mile canal, built and paid for by New York State, from Buffalo on Lake Erie to Albany on the Hudson River. It cut the cost of shipping between the Great Lakes and New York City by about 90 percent.
- Internal improvements
Roads, canals and later railroads built to link markets inside the country. New York borrowed the money for the Erie Canal itself, and its tolls repaid the debt.
- Transportation revolution
The change, roughly 1807 to 1848, when steamboats, canals, better roads and later railroads made moving goods and people faster and cheaper. It tied distant markets together.
- Market revolution
The shift, roughly 1800 to 1848, from households and small shops making things mostly for their own use and their neighbors to producing for distant buyers, driven by canals, roads, machines, banks and wage work.
- Semi-subsistence farming
Farming in which a family grew and made most of what it needed and swapped or sold only a small surplus nearby. It's a historians' term. People at the time never used it.
- Evidence: two-thirds of country clothing was homemade (1810)
Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin estimated in 1810 that about two-thirds of the clothing worn outside cities was made by families at home. A dated, specific number like this can back up a claim about life before the market revolution.
- Steamboat (Fulton, 1807)
A boat driven by a steam engine turning paddle wheels, so it could go upstream and against the wind. Fulton's 1807 Hudson River run began paying steamboat service, and steamboat lines soon made river shipping faster and cheaper.
- Connection: Embargo and war → American factories
British cloth stopped coming in, so American merchants put money into mills that could make it at home. One development caused the next.
- Samuel Slater
British-trained mechanic who built the first successful water-powered cotton-spinning mill in the U.S. (Pawtucket, R.I., 1790), working from memory. He brought British textile technology to America.
- Factory system
Production in one building with machines, water or steam power, and hired workers doing set tasks, replacing work at home or in small shops. It sped up production and lowered prices.
- Interchangeable parts
Identical, machine-made parts that fit any copy of a product, so it can be mass-produced and repaired from spares.
- Evidence tip
A letter proves what its writer believed. Check it against other evidence.
- Connection: cheap Western grain by canal → New England hill farms struggle → farm daughters go to the mills
The Erie Canal made Western grain cheap. New England hill farms earned less. Farm daughters became the mills' ready supply of labor. (Skill 5.B: connect one change to the next.)
- Lowell system
Mills recruited young, unmarried New England farm women, housed them in company boardinghouses under strict rules, and paid them cash wages.
- Turn-out
The 1830s word for a strike: workers 'turned out' of the mill together. Lowell's women turned out in 1834 over a wage cut and in 1836 over higher board charges, among the earliest organized protests by working women in the U.S.
- Evidence: a memory vs. the record
Robinson wrote in 1898, sixty-two years after the strike, and said it did no good. The record shows two companies dropped the board increase and a third dropped it for day workers. A memory is evidence; check it against other sources. (Skill 6.B)
- Connection: the speed-up → workers organize
When companies sped up the looms and cut pay, mill women organized to bargain and to petition, from the turn-outs of the 1830s to the Female Labor Reform Association of the 1840s. (Skill 5.B)
- Ten-hour movement
1840s campaign by mill workers, led in Lowell by the Female Labor Reform Association, to cut a workday of 12 hours or more to ten, mostly by petitioning the state legislature.
- Evidence: workers organizing
The 1834 and 1836 turn-outs and 5,000 ten-hour petition signatures in 1846 show workers organizing against pay cuts and long hours.
- Cotton gin (1793)
A machine that pulls the seeds out of short-staple cotton, the kind that grows inland. Eli Whitney patented it in 1794. Cleaning cotton took far less labor, so planters grew far more of it, and slavery spread west with the crop.
- Connection: Northern mills ↔ Southern slavery
Lowell’s mills ran on cotton that enslaved people grew and picked. Northern factories and Southern plantations depended on each other, even when the people in them never met.
- Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)
The Supreme Court ruled that Congress, not the states, regulates interstate commerce, including navigation. New York’s steamboat monopoly fell, and fares dropped.
- Packet ships
Ships that sailed on a fixed schedule, whether or not they were full. Merchants could plan around them, which made trade across the Atlantic faster and more predictable.
- Evidence: by 1840, cotton was 56% of U.S. domestic exports
Treasury figures for 1840 put raw cotton at $63.9 million of the $113.9 million the U.S. grew or made and sold abroad. A number from a dated government source lets you argue that cotton tied the North, the South and Britain together.
- Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (1827)
Chartered by Maryland on February 28, 1827, so Baltimore could compete with New York and the Erie Canal for Western trade. Its first stone was laid on July 4, 1828.
- Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837)
The Supreme Court ruled that an old charter did not give a company an implied monopoly, so new bridges and railroads could compete with old ones.
- Connection: canals and railroads → the North and Midwest bound together
Connection means linking two developments to show how one led to or shaped the other. Here, cheap transport tied Midwestern farms to Northeastern markets and factories.
- Telegraph
A machine that sent coded messages over wires as electric pulses. News could now travel faster than any train or rider.
- Regional interdependence
Canals and railroads tied Northeastern cities to Midwestern farms. The South, which relied on rivers, was tied in less.
- Steel plow (John Deere, 1837)
A self-scouring plow with a polished steel cutting edge that sliced the sticky prairie sod that clogged cast-iron plows.
- Mechanical reaper (Cyrus McCormick)
A horse-drawn machine that cut wheat. Demonstrated in Virginia in 1831, patented in 1834, built in Chicago from 1847.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
The Wedding of the Waters
1825 · 1836
Key terms: Erie Canal (1825), Internal improvements, Transportation revolution, Market revolution
October 26, 1825 Buffalo, New York
Ten o’clock in the morning.
At Buffalo, a cannon fires. The Erie Canal is finished.
Down the canal, a gunner hears it and fires his own. Then the next. Then the next.
About an hour and twenty minutes later, the news reaches New York City. New York fires back.
Nine days later, Governor DeWitt Clinton pours a keg of Lake Erie into the Atlantic.
A doctor adds bottles from the Ganges, the Nile, the Thames, the Amazon and nine other rivers. The canal itself was four feet deep.
In 1809, Joshua Forman pitched the canal to President Jefferson. He remembered the reply:
It is little short of madness to think of it at this day.
Eleven years later. At Lockport, the canal meets a sixty-foot cliff and climbs it in five stone steps. Your turn.
Shipping a ton of wheat from Buffalo to New York cost about a hundred dollars. Now: about ten.
That “madness” cost about seven million dollars. In 1836, its tolls finished paying it back.
On deck: a crate of printed cotton from Lowell, Massachusetts, bound for a store in Ohio. The cotton was picked in Mississippi, by people who were never paid.
Between 1807 and 1848, every step of that trip got faster and cheaper.
Many Americans stopped making what they needed, and started buying it. So who got rich, who got worn out, and who paid for the cotton?
Homespun
1807–1815
Key terms: Semi-subsistence farming, Evidence: two-thirds of country clothing was homemade (1810), Steamboat (Fulton, 1807), Connection: Embargo and war → American factories
In 1807, a New England farm family made most of what it used. They spun the thread, wove the cloth, dipped the candles, salted the pork.
What they couldn't make, they swapped with neighbors, and wrote it down. Historians call this semi-subsistence farming. Nobody then used the phrase.
In 1810, the Treasury reckoned two-thirds of country people's clothing was homemade.
Three in four working Americans farmed in 1800. By 1850, just over half.
Distance kept life local. In 1800, Cincinnati was three weeks from New York. Freight took over seven weeks, before steamboats and canals.
That August, Robert Fulton's steamboat went 150 miles up the Hudson in 32 hours under steam.
Everybody calls it the Clermont. Fulton called it the North River Steam Boat.
Jefferson's Embargo kept ships in port. Then came the War of 1812. British cloth stopped coming.
About 8,000 cotton spindles turned in 1808. By 1815, three New England states had over 119,000. The machines were British. Exporting them was against British law.
Machines in a Man's Head
1789–1826
Key terms: Samuel Slater, Factory system, Interchangeable parts, Evidence tip
Britain banned exporting its cotton machines. So, the story goes, 21-year-old Samuel Slater memorized them. In 1789 he sailed for New York.
Samuel Slater
A few days ago I was informed that you wanted a manager of cotton spinning, &c. in which business I flatter myself that I can give the greatest satisfaction…
In 1790, his water-powered mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, began spinning cotton thread. His first workers were nine children, aged seven to twelve.
In 1810, Boston merchant Francis Cabot Lowell toured British mills as a polite visitor. The story goes he memorized their secret power loom.
Back home, he built his own loom. In 1814 his company opened a mill at Waltham. Raw cotton in, finished cloth out, all under one roof.
Lowell died in 1817. His partners took the idea to a waterfall on the Merrimack. Thirty Irish laborers came in 1822 to widen a canal. In 1826 the town took his name.
The crate from the canal boat was printed here. On the thread map, Lowell lights up.
Factories needed one more idea: parts that fit any copy. In January 1801, the story goes, Eli Whitney showed Adams and Jefferson a table of musket parts.
Jefferson was thrilled.
Thomas Jefferson
…take 100 locks to pieces & mingle their parts, and the hundred locks may be put together as well by taking the first pieces which come to hand.
That letter is evidence. Of what? Historians who took Whitney's muskets apart found hand-filed parts that didn't swap.
He had promised 10,000 muskets by September 1800. He finished in January 1809.
The letter proves what Jefferson believed. The real thing came from a federal armory in the 1820s.
John H. Hall
I have succeeded in establishing methods for fabricating arms exactly alike, & with economy, by the hands of common workmen.
The exam still credits Whitney with the idea. Now you know the evidence.
The Turn-Out
1834–1846
Key terms: Connection: cheap Western grain by canal → New England hill farms struggle → farm daughters go to the mills, Lowell system, Turn-out, Evidence: a memory vs. the record, Connection: the speed-up → workers organize, Ten-hour movement, Evidence: workers organizing
Lowell's founders had seen English mill towns, and they didn't like what they saw.
Nathan Appleton
The operatives in the manufacturing cities of Europe, were notoriously of the lowest character, for intelligence and morals.
Their plan: hire farmers' daughters for a few years. Canal boats brought cheap Western grain, and New England's hill farms struggled.
Young women wanted cash: to pay a mortgage, send a brother to college, or keep it themselves. The company housed them, shut the doors at ten, and expected them in church.
Charles Dickens visited in 1842 and couldn't get over it.
Charles Dickens
Firstly, there is a joint-stock piano in a great many of the boarding-houses.
Charles Dickens
Secondly, nearly all these young ladies subscribe to circulating libraries.
Dickens imagined his English readers crying, 'How very preposterous!'
Charles Dickens
It is their station to work. And they do work.
That's what the visitors saw. Now look closer.
In 1834, about 800 mill women had walked out over a wage cut. Now the companies raised the price of board.
Harriet Hanson Robinson
Then, when the girls in my room stood irresolute, uncertain what to do, asking each other, 'Would you?' or 'Shall we turn out?' and not one of them having the courage to lead off,
Harriet Hanson Robinson
I, who began to think they would not go out, after all their talk, became impatient, and started on ahead, saying, with childish bravado,
Harriet Hanson Robinson
'I don't care what you do, I am going to turn out, whether any one else does or not;' and I marched out, and was followed by the others.
Harriet Hanson Robinson
As I looked back at the long line that followed me, I was more proud than I have ever been since at any success I may have achieved,
Harriet Hanson Robinson
and more proud than I shall ever be again until my own beloved State gives to its women citizens the right of suffrage.
Lowell mill women
Oh! isn't it a pity, such a pretty girl as I
Lowell mill women
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Lowell mill women
Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,
Lowell mill women
For I'm so fond of liberty that I cannot be a slave.
They paid for it.
Harriet Hanson Robinson
My mother was turned away from her boarding-house, that functionary saying, 'Mrs. Hanson, you could not prevent the older girls from turning out, but your daughter is a child, and her you could control.'
Harriet remembered the strike as a failure. In fact, Boott and Merrimack dropped the charge, and Hamilton partly did. Memory is evidence too. Check it.
In the 1840s the companies sped up the machines. Weavers went from two looms to three or four.
A weaver named Sarah Bagley led the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. By 1846 its petitions for a ten-hour day carried five thousand signatures.
A committee of the legislature listened, and decided it wasn't the legislature's problem.
The chairman, William Schouler, put it in writing.
The women couldn't vote, but they campaigned against Schouler anyway. When he lost that fall, they thanked the voters.
Lowell mill women
For I'm so fond of liberty that I cannot be a slave.
Downriver
1793–1840s
Key terms: Cotton gin (1793), Connection: Northern mills ↔ Southern slavery, Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Packet ships, Evidence: by 1840, cotton was 56% of U.S. domestic exports
Lowell mill women
That I cannot be a slave.
The cotton on their looms was picked by people who were.
Some Lowell women did fight slavery. In 1845 they signed a petition against making Texas a slave state. It didn’t change where the cotton came from.
Eli Whitney’s gin, patented in 1794, cleaned inland cotton fast. Planters carried the crop west, onto land the Choctaw and Chickasaw were forced to give up.
Between 1800 and 1840, the cotton crop grew eighteen times over. The number of enslaved people nearly tripled.
By 1840, cotton was more than half of what Americans grew or made and sold abroad.
Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped into slavery, described the end of each day.
Solomon Northup
No matter how fatigued and weary he may be—no matter how much he longs for sleep and rest—a slave never approaches the gin-house with his basket of cotton but with fear.
Solomon Northup
If it falls short in weight—if he has not performed the full task appointed him, he knows that he must suffer.
Solomon Northup
And if he has exceeded it by ten or twenty pounds, in all probability his master will measure the next day’s task accordingly.
Solomon Northup
So, whether he has too little or too much, his approach to the gin-house is always with fear and trembling.
Every bale of cotton began at a press like this. Pressed, roped and marked, each one went down to the river.
Steam carried it downriver.
In 1811, the first steamboat on the western rivers sailed under a comet, with a baby on board. In December, an earthquake shook the river.
John H. B. Latrobe
there were those who insisted that the comet of 1811 had fallen into the Ohio and had produced the hubbub!
Upstream by keelboat, New Orleans to Louisville often took four months. By the 1830s, the fastest steamboats did it in about a week.
Boilers burst. Between 1816 and 1848, 233 explosions killed 2,563 people.
New York had given one company a monopoly on steamboats in its waters. In Gibbons v. Ogden, the Supreme Court said only Congress regulates trade between states.
Chief Justice John Marshall
Commerce, undoubtedly, is traffic, but it is something more: it is intercourse.
The monopoly died, and fares fell. The rival’s young captain was Cornelius Vanderbilt.
In 1818, New York’s Black Ball Line began sailing to Liverpool on a fixed schedule, full or not.
Cotton sailed from New Orleans to Liverpool, and to New York. New York’s merchants, banks and insurers took a share of the trade.
Some went on to Boston. The last miles to Lowell ran on a railroad the mill owners backed.
The Horse Won
1827–1850
Key terms: Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (1827), Transportation revolution, Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837), Connection: canals and railroads → the North and Midwest bound together, Telegraph
Baltimore watched New York win the West's trade. In 1827 Maryland chartered a railroad in reply.
On July 4, 1828, Charles Carroll, the last living signer of the Declaration, laid the first stone. Later books have him ranking it second only to signing the Declaration.
That same day, President John Quincy Adams broke ground for a rival, the C&O Canal. His spade hit a stump.
John Quincy Adams
after repeating the stroke three or four times without making any impression, I threw off my coat,
John Quincy Adams
and resuming the Spade, raised a shovel full of the Earth, at which a general shout burst forth from the surrounding multitude.
The canal stopped at Cumberland in 1850. The railroad reached the Ohio in 1852.
The B&O's cars ran on horses. Then Peter Cooper brought a tiny engine, Tom Thumb.
John H. B. LatrobeDramatized
A gallant gray of great beauty and power.
John H. B. LatrobeDramatized
The pace increased, the passengers shouted, the engine gained on the horse.
John H. B. LatrobeDramatized
The race was neck and neck, nose and nose.
John H. B. LatrobeDramatized
Then the engine passed the horse, and a great hurrah hailed the victory.
John H. B. LatrobeDramatized
The band which drove the pulley, which drove the blower, slipped from the drum.
John H. B. LatrobeDramatized
The engine for want of breath began to wheeze and pant.
John H. B. LatrobeDramatized
In vain Mr. Cooper, who was his own engineman and fireman, lacerated his hands.
John H. B. LatrobeDramatized
The horse gained on the machine, and passed it.
The horse won. The railroad won everything else.
No 1830 newspaper reported a race. Latrobe told it 38 years later.
Canals still led in 1840. Ten years later, railroads had 9,021 miles.
A Boston toll bridge sued a rival. The Supreme Court said no.
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney
We shall be thrown back to the improvements of the last century, and obliged to stand still, until the claims of the old turnpike corporations shall be satisfied…
By 1850 tracks crowded the Northeast and Ohio. The South had far fewer.
In 1846 Sarah Bagley, a former weaver, took charge of Lowell's telegraph office.
The Store in Ohio
1817–1848
Key terms: Transportation revolution, Regional interdependence, Steel plow (John Deere, 1837), Mechanical reaper (Cyrus McCormick), Market revolution
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I was inclined to be poetical about the Grand Canal. In my imagination, De Witt Clinton was an enchanter…
Nathaniel Hawthorne
…our adventurous navigation of an interminable mud-puddle.
The Erie paid for itself so fast that every state wanted a canal. By 1840 Americans had dug more than 3,300 miles of canals. The National Road ran west from Cumberland.
Before the canals, a Western farmer's crop floated south to New Orleans.
After them, more and more of it went east, to New York. Erie Canal wheat and flour from the lakes grew thirteenfold in sixteen years.
The North and the Midwest got tied together. The South, less so. Remember that in 1861.
Cincinnati grew from 2,500 people in 1810 to 115,000 in 1850.
It packed so much pork, people called it Porkopolis.
Frances Trollope
I am sure I should have liked Cincinnati much better if the people had not dealt so very largely in hogs.
By the 1830s, almost a third of Americans lived west of the Alleghenies.
Rebecca Burlend
The time occupied in passing from New Orleans to St. Louis was about twelve days.
Prairie soil stuck to iron plows. In 1837 a blacksmith named John Deere gave one a steel cutting edge, cut from a broken saw blade.
Cyrus McCormick's reaper cut at least five times as much wheat as one man with a scythe. Jo Anderson, a man the McCormicks enslaved, helped build the first one.
Now farmers grew wheat and pork for people they would never meet. Then they went shopping.
That's the market revolution in one room: a family that made less, and bought more.