Counterfeit bills were endemic during this early period of banking. The spread of paper currency untethered the economy from the physical signifiers of wealth familiar to the colonial generation, namely land. Each followed rampant speculation in various commodities: land in 1819, land and enslaved laborers in 1837, and railroad bonds in 1857. Depressions devastated the economy in 1819, 1837, and 1857. By 1844, one British traveler declared that “the prosperity of America, her railroads, canals, steam navigation, and banks, are the fruit of English capital.” 6Įconomic growth, however, proceeded unevenly. 5 European capital also helped build American infrastructure. The number of state-chartered banks skyrocketed from 1 in 1783, 266 in 1820, and 702 in 1840 to 1,371 in 1860. State legislatures meanwhile pumped capital into the economy by chartering banks. Trial Trip of the “Stourbridge Lion,” 1916. 4.Ĭlyde Osmer DeLand, “The First Locomotive. 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. But in the wake of the War of 1812, Americans rushed to build a new national infrastructure, new networks of roads, canals, and railroads. An 1816 Senate Committee Report lamented that “the price of land carriage is too great” to allow the profitable production of American manufactures. In 1816, for instance, $9 could move one ton of goods across the Atlantic Ocean, but only thirty miles across land. 2 But while exports rose, exorbitant internal transportation costs hindered substantial economic development within the United States. America’s exports rose in value from $20.2 million in 1790 to $108.3 million by 1807. American farmers increasingly exported foodstuffs to Europe as the French Revolutionary Wars devastated the continent between 17. These strains required new family arrangements and transformed American cities.Īmerican commerce had proceeded haltingly during the eighteenth century. Class conflict, child labor, accelerated immigration, and the expansion of slavery followed. The market revolution fulfilled the revolutionary generation’s expectations of progress but introduced troubling new trends. Labor-saving technology improved efficiency and enabled the separation of the public and domestic spheres. Improved transportation enabled a larger exchange network. Americans increasingly produced goods for sale, not for consumption. The growth of the American economy reshaped American life in the decades before the Civil War. 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. And although northern states washed their hands of slavery, their factories fueled the demand for slave-grown southern cotton and their banks provided the financing that ensured the profitability and continued existence of the American slave system. Massive northern textile mills turned southern cotton into cheap cloth. Some workers, often immigrant women, worked thirteen hours a day, six days a week. 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. Northern subsistence farmers became laborers bound to the whims of markets and bosses. As northern textile factories boomed, the demand for southern cotton swelled, and American slavery accelerated. And as more men and women worked in the cash economy, they were freed from the bound dependence of servitude. Vast factories and cities arose in the North. More and more farmers grew crops for profit, not self-sufficiency. The revolution reverberated across the country. Steam power, the technology that moved steamboats and railroads, fueled the rise of American industry by powering mills and sparking new national transportation networks. Americans integrated the technologies of the Industrial Revolution into a new commercial economy. 1 Between the Revolution and the Civil War, an old subsistence world died and a new more-commercial nation was born. 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. The Rise of Industrial Labor in Antebellum America The Decline of Northern Slavery and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom
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