Market Revolution: Society and Culture in two minutes
- Work moved from the household into shops, offices and mills, and wages replaced home production. Families that once made most of what they used began buying it.
- A small business elite of mill owners, merchants and bankers held much of the new wealth. Lowell's owners also controlled banks, insurance companies and railroads.
- A growing middle class of clerks, storekeepers and professionals put men's work in offices and women's work in the home, and displayed status with parlors and pianos.
- The cult of domesticity, or separate spheres, made mothers the moral guides of children, as in Catharine Beecher's Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841). Women still had no vote and little legal independence.
- Immigration rose from about 60,000 in 1832 to nearly 235,000 in 1847, mostly Irish and German. Most settled in the North, while native-born families moved west to the Ohio and Mississippi valleys.
- The laboring poor earned little; in 1833 a Philadelphia seamstress might make 12½ cents a shirt. Skilled workers formed unions, and Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842) ruled unions were not illegal in themselves.
- On the exam: expect effects of the market revolution on class, gender and immigration, and continuity and change in women's roles and labor, with links to reform movements and to Southern slavery.
Topic 4.6 key terms
- 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.
- Business elite
A small group of very rich owners and investors. Historians call Lowell's founders the 'Boston Associates.' They also owned banks, insurance companies and railroads.
- Middle class
A growing group whose income came from office, shop or professional work rather than manual labor: clerks, storekeepers, lawyers, ministers and prosperous farmers. They earned enough to run a comfortable household.
- Separate spheres / cult of domesticity
The ideal that men belonged in the public world of work and politics, and women in the home as its moral guardians.
- Connection: work leaves the home → separate spheres
Connection means linking two developments to show how one led to the other. Once paid work moved out of the house, the household stopped being a workplace for everyone, and the idea that women's sphere was the home followed.
- Laboring poor
A large and growing class of wage workers, many of them women and immigrants, who earned barely enough to live and had little chance to rise.
- Irish and German immigration
From the 1830s, hundreds of thousands of Irish and German immigrants arrived, mostly through Northern ports. Many took low-wage labor in cities, canals and railroads. Few settled in the South, where slavery limited work for free labor.
- Working Men's Party
Political parties of skilled workers that began in Philadelphia in 1828 and New York in 1829. The first labor party in the United States elected a few city council members.
- Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842)
Massachusetts's highest court ruled that a union was not in itself a criminal conspiracy. What mattered was its purpose and its methods.
- Evidence: Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842); Carey's 12½-cent shirts (1833)
Two dated, specific sources let you argue that workers gained legal ground while many still lived on very little. Cite the court's holding for the first claim and Carey's shirt rate for the second.
- Connection: cloth, pork and cotton → one national market
Northern mills bought Southern cotton, Western farmers sold pork to feed the South, and mill cloth went west. A change on one link moved the others.
- Argumentation (skill 6.B)
Make a claim, back it with specific evidence, and say where the claim stops holding true.
- Evidence 1: cash wages at Lowell
Mary Paul, 15, wrote her father in 1845 that the mill paid her in cash and told other girls to come.
- Evidence 2: machines for a market
Deere's steel plow broke prairie sod and McCormick's reaper sped the harvest, so Midwestern farms could grow wheat to sell far away.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Parlors and Piecework
1828–1848
Key terms: Business elite, Middle class, Separate spheres / cult of domesticity, Connection: work leaves the home → separate spheres, Laboring poor, Irish and German immigration, Working Men's Party, Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), Evidence: Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842); Carey's 12½-cent shirts (1833)
At the top sat a small business elite. Lowell's owners also held banks, insurance companies and railroads.
Below them grew a middle class of clerks and storekeepers. Father's work moved to an office. The parlor got a piano.
Catharine Beecher wrote the rulebook.
Catharine Beecher
…the formation of the moral and intellectual character of the young is committed mainly to the female hand.
Only a family on one good income could afford that ideal. Everyone else saved every scrap.
In Philadelphia, Black families kept parlors and pianos too. Willson noted they rarely went out for pleasure, a careful nod to white hostility.
Not every household matched the ideal. In Vermont, two women lived together for forty years, in a union sacred to them as marriage.
Beneath the parlors grew the laboring poor. In 1833 a Philadelphia seamstress earned twelve and a half cents a shirt, at best.
Nine shirts a week paid a dollar twelve. Lodging took fifty cents. Mathew Carey said others made immense fortunes from such work.
Arrivals leapt from sixty thousand in 1832 to nearly 235,000 in 1847.
They landed in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Few went South. Nearly half were Irish.
Irish crews cut the railroad beds. Fifty-seven died at Duffy's Cut in 1832, in a cholera summer. Researchers say some were killed.
Skilled workers watched machines undercut their trades. They formed unions, then a Working Men's Party.
The Panic of 1837 broke many unions. In 1842 Massachusetts's highest court ruled that a union was not, by itself, a criminal conspiracy.
The Knot
1848
Key terms: Connection: cloth, pork and cotton → one national market, Argumentation (skill 6.B), Market revolution, Evidence 1: cash wages at Lowell, Evidence 2: machines for a market
Follow the thread one last time. The store's pork went to Cincinnati, then down the Ohio to the Mississippi.
Cloth went west. Pork went south. Cotton came north.
New York to Cincinnati: about three weeks in 1800, one week by 1830, two days by 1857.
Claim: a great deal. It moved work out of the home and tied Americans to distant markets.
Mary Paul left a Vermont farm for wages.
Mary Paul
If any girl wants employment I advise them to come to Lowell.
Deere's plow and McCormick's reaper let Midwestern farmers grow wheat for distant cities.
Mill owners, merchants and bankers got rich. A growing middle class bought pianos.
Women at the looms wore out. So did the men in the canal ditches, and the seamstress by her candle.
The people who picked the cotton paid for it first. They were never paid at all.
Horace Bushnell
This transition from mother and daughter power, to water and steam power, is a great one,
Horace Bushnell
greater by far than many have as yet begun to conceive…
By 1848, canals and railroads had bound the West to the North. The river still ran south.
In thirteen years, that would matter more than anything.