The American Population, 1820–1840
Three trends characterized the American population between 1820 and 1840, all of them contributing in various ways to economic growth
The American population had stood at only 4 million in 1790. By 1820, it had reached 10 million; by 1830, nearly 13 million; and by 1840, 17 million.
The United States was growing much more rapidly in population than Britain or Europe.
Immigration, choked off by wars in Europe and economic crises in America, contributed little to the American population in the first three decades of the nineteenth century but rapidly revived beginning in the 1830s
Immigration, choked off by wars in Europe and economic crises in America, contributed little to the American population in the first three decades of the nineteenth century but rapidly revived beginning in the 1830s
Much of this new European immigration flowed into the rapidly growing cities of the Northeast
The rise of New York City was particularly dramatic.
By 1810, it was the largest city in the United States.
That was partly a result of its superior natural harbor.
It was also a result of the Erie Canal (completed in 1825), which gave the city unrivaled access to the interior, and of liberal state laws that made the city attractive for both foreign and domestic commerce.
Immigration and Urban Growth, 1840–1860
The growth of cities accelerated even more dramatically between 1840 and 1860
The booming agricultural economy of the western regions of the nation produced significant urban growth as well.
Between 1820 and 1840, communities that had once been small western villages or trading posts became major cities: St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville.
All of them benefited from strategic positions on the Mississippi River or one of its major tributaries
The enlarged urban population was in part a reflection of the growth of the national population as a whole, which rose by more than a third—from 23 million to over 31 million—in the decade of the 1850s alone.
The newcomers came from many different countries and regions: England, France, Italy, Scandinavia, Poland, and Holland.
More important was the greatest disaster in Ireland’s history: a catastrophic failure of the potato crop (and other food crops) that caused the devastating “potato famine” of 1845–1849.
The Rise of Nativism
Some native-born Americans welcomed the new immigration, which provided a large supply of cheap labor that they believed would help keep wage rates low.
Wisconsin, for example, permitted foreign-born residents to become voters as soon as they had declared their intention of seeking citizenship and had resided in the state for a year; other western states soon followed its lead.
Other Americans, however, viewed the growing foreign-born population with alarm.
Their fears led to the rise of what is known as “nativism,” a defense of native-born people and a hostility to the foreign-born, usually combined with a desire to stop or slow immigration.
The emerging nativism took many forms. Some of it was a result of simple racism.
Many nativists (conveniently overlooking their own immigrant heritage) argued that the new immigrants were inherently inferior to older-stock Americans
Whig politicians were outraged because so many of the newcomers voted Democratic.
Others complained that the immigrants corrupted politics by selling their votes.
Many older-stock Americans of both parties feared that immigrants would bring new, radical ideas into national life.
Out of these tensions and prejudices emerged a number of new secret societies created to combat what nativists had come to call the “alien menace.”
The order adopted a strict code of secrecy, which included the secret password, used in lodges across the country, “I know nothing.” Ultimately, members of the movement became known as the “Know-Nothings.
Gradually, the Know-Nothings turned their attention to party politics, and after the election of 1852 they created a new political organization that they called the American Party
After 1854, the strength of the Know-Nothings declined.
The Canal Age
From 1790 until the 1820s, the so-called turnpike era, Americans had relied largely on roads for internal transportation.
But in a country as large as the United States was becoming, roads alone (and the mostly horse-drawn vehicles that used them) were not adequate for the nation’s expanding needs.
And so, in the 1820s and 1830s, Americans began to turn to other means of transportation as well.
These rivers became vastly more important by the 1820s, as steamboats grew in number and improved in design.
Steamboats also developed a significant passenger traffic, and companies built increasingly lavish vessels to compete for this lucrative trade.
But neither the farmers of the West nor the merchants of the East were wholly satisfied with this pattern of trade.
Farmers would pay less to transport their goods (and eastern consumers would pay less to consume them) if they could ship them directly eastward to market, rather than by the roundabout river-sea route; and northeastern merchants, too, could sell larger quantities of their manufactured goods if they could transport their merchandise more directly and economically to the West.
New highways across the mountains provided a partial solution to the problem. But the costs of hauling goods overland, although lower than before, were still too high for anything except the most compact and valuable merchandise.
The thoughts of some merchants and entrepreneurs began, therefore, to turn to an alternative: canals.
Canal building was too expensive for private enterprise, and the job of digging canals fell largely to the states.
The ambitious state governments of the Northeast took the lead in constructing them.
New York was the first to act.
It had the natural advantage of a good land route between the Hudson River and Lake Erie through the only real break in the Appalachian chain.
But the engineering tasks were still imposing.
The distance was more than 350 miles, several times the length of any of the existing canals in America.
The route was interrupted by high ridges and a wilderness of woods.
After a long public debate over whether the scheme was practical, canal advocates prevailed when De Witt Clinton, a late but ardent convert to the cause, became governor in 1817.
Digging began on July 4, 1817.
The building of the Erie Canal was the greatest construction project the United States had ever undertaken.
The canal itself was simple: a ditch forty feet wide and four feet deep
The Erie Canal was not just an engineering triumph, but an immediate financial success as well.
It opened in October 1825, amid elaborate ceremonies and celebrations, and traffic was soon so heavy that within about seven years tolls had repaid the entire cost of construction
The system of water transportation—and the primacy of New York City—extended farther when the states of Ohio and Indiana, inspired by the success of the Erie Canal
The Early Railroads
Eventually, railroads became the primary transportation system for the United States, and they remained so until the construction of the interstate highway system in the mid-twentieth century.
Railroads emerged from a combination of technological and entrepreneurial innovations.
The technological breakthroughs included the invention of tracks, the creation of steam-powered locomotives, and the development of railroad cars that could serve as public carriers of passengers and freight.
By 1836, more than a thousand miles of track had been laid in eleven states.
The Triumph of the Rails
After 1840, railroads gradually supplanted canals and all other modes of transport.
In 1840, there were 2,818 miles of railroad tracks in the United States; by 1850, there were 9,021
Innovations in Communications and Journalism
Critical to the railroads was an important innovation in communications: the magnetic telegraph.
Telegraph lines extended along the tracks, connecting one station with another and aiding the scheduling and routing of trains.
But the telegraph also permitted instant communication between distant cities, tying the nation together as never before
Like railroads, telegraph lines were far more extensive in the North than in the South, and they helped similarly to link the North to the Northwest (and thus to separate the Northwest further from the South).
In the long run, journalism would become an important unifying factor in American life.
In the 1840s and 1850s, however, the rise of the new journalism helped to feed sectional discord.
Most of the major magazines and newspapers were in the North, reinforcing the South’s sense of subjugation. Southern newspapers tended to have smaller budgets and reported largely local news.
The Expansion of Business, 1820–1840
American business grew rapidly in the 1820s and 1830s, partly because of population growth and the transportation revolution, but also because of the daring, imagination, and ruthlessness of a new generation of entrepreneurs whose enormous wealth allowed for lifestyles of “conspicuous consumption.”
One important change came in the retail distribution of goods.
In the larger cities, stores specializing in groceries, dry goods, hardware, and other lines appeared, although residents of smaller towns and villages still depended on general stores (stores that did not specialize).
In these less populous areas, many people did much of their business by barter.
The organization of business was also changing.
Individuals or limited partnerships continued to operate most businesses, and the dominating figures were still the great merchant capitalists, who generally had sole ownership of their enterprises.
In some larger businesses, however, the individual merchant capitalist was giving way to the corporation.
Corporations began to develop particularly rapidly in the 1830s, when some legal obstacles to their formation were removed.
Previously, a corporation could obtain a charter only by a special act of the state legislature—a cumbersome process that stifled corporate growth.
The new laws also permitted a system of limited liability, which meant that individual stockholders risked losing only the value of their own investment if a corporation should fail, and that they were not liable (as they had been in the past) for the corporation’s larger losses
Investment alone, however, still provided too little capital to meet the demands of the most ambitious businesses.
Such businesses relied heavily on credit, and their borrowing often created dangerous instability.
Bank failures were frequent, and bank deposits were often insecure
The Emergence of the Factory
Men and women built or made products by hand, or with simple machines such as hand-operated looms.
Gradually, however, improved technology and increasing demand produced a fundamental change.
It came first in the New England textile industry.
There, entrepreneurs were beginning to make use of new and larger machines driven by water power that allowed them to bring textile operations together under a single roof.
This factory system, as it came to be known, spread rapidly in the 1820s and began to make serious inroads intothe old home-based system of spinning thread and weaving cloth.
Factories also penetrated the shoe industry, concentrated in eastern Massachusetts.
Shoes were still largely handmade, but manufacturers were beginning to employ workers who specialized in one or another of the various tasks involved in production.
Some factories began producing large numbers of identical shoes in ungraded sizes and without distinction as to rights and lefts.
Between 1840 and 1860, American industry experienced even more dramatic growth as the factory system spread rapidly.
In 1840, the total value of manufactured goods produced in the United States stood at $483 million; ten years later the figure had climbed to over $1 billion; and in 1860 it reached close to $2 billion.
For the first time, the value of manufactured goods was approximately equal to that of agricultural products.
Advances in Technology
Even the most highly developed industries were still immature by later standards.
American cotton manufacturers, for example, produced goods of coarse grade; fi ne items continued to come from England.
But machine technology advanced more rapidly in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century than in any other country in the world.
The American economy was growing so rapidly that the rewards of technological innovation were very great.
Change was so rapid, in fact, that some manufacturers built their new machinery out of wood; by the time the wood wore out, they reasoned, improved technology would have made the machine obsolete.
By the beginning of the 1830s, American technology had become so advanced—particularly in textile manufacturing—that industrialists in Britain and Europe were beginning to travel to the United States to learn new techniques, instead of the other way around.
The manufacturing of machine tools—the tools used to make machinery parts—was an important contribution to manufacturing.
The government supported much of the research and development of machine tools, often in connection with supplying the military
Interchangeable parts, which Eli Whitney and Simeon North had tried to introduce into gun factories, now found their way into many industries
Industrialization was also profiting from the introduction of new sources of energy. Coal was replacing wood and water power as fuel for many factories
Most American industry remained dependent on the most traditional source of power: water.
Recruiting a Native Workforce
Recruiting a labor force was not an easy task in the early years of the factory system.
Ninety percent of Americans in the 1820s still lived and worked on farms, and many urban residents were skilled artisans—independent crafts workers who owned and managed their own shops as small businessmen; they were not likely to flock to factory jobs.
The available unskilled workers were not numerous enough to form a reservoir from which the new industries could draw.
Parents tended looms alongside their children, some of whom were no more than four or five years old.
Many of these women worked for several years in the factories, saved their wages, and returned home to marry and raise children.
Others married men they met in the factories or in town and remained part of the industrial world, but often stopped working in the mills to take up domestic roles instead.
The employment of young children created undeniable hardships.
In 1834, mill workers in Lowell organized a union—the Factory Girls Association—which staged a strike to protest a 25 percent wage cut.
The Immigrant Workforce
The rapidly increasing supply of immigrant workers after 1840 was a boon to manufacturers and other entrepreneurs.
At last they had access to a source of labor that was both large and inexpensive.
These new workers, because of their vast numbers and unfamiliarity with their new country, had less leverage than the women they at times displaced
The average workday was extending to twelve, often fourteen hours.
Wages were declining, so that even skilled male workers could hope to earn only from $4 to $10 per week, while unskilled laborers were likely to earn only about $1 to $6 per week.
Women and children, whatever their skills, also earned less than most men.
The Factory System and the Artisan Tradition
It was not only the mill workers who suffered from the transition to the modern factory system.
It was also the skilled artisans whose trades the factories were displacing
Skilled artisans valued their independence; they also valued the stability and relative equality within their economic world
Fighting for Control
Workers at all levels of the emerging industrial economy attempted to improve their lot.
They tried, with little success, to persuade state legislatures to pass laws setting a maximum workday
The laws simply limited the workday to ten hours for children unless their parents agreed to something longer; employers had little difficulty persuading parents to consent to additional hours.
“Free Labor”
By the mid-nineteenth century, most white Americans identified themselves as free individuals, no matter what their occupations or means.
For most northern workers, freedom meant the absence of slavery
Many of the free blacks in the North were people who had been skilled crafts workers as slaves and who bought or were given their freedom.
The Rich and the Poor
The commercial and industrial growth of the United States greatly elevated the average income of the American people
Social Mobility
There was also a significant amount of mobility within the working class, which helped to limit discontent
Opportunities for social mobility, for working one’s way up the economic ladder, were relatively modest.
A few workers did manage to move from poverty to riches by dint of work, ingenuity, and luck—a very small number, but enough to support the dreams of those who watched them
Middle-Class Life
For all the visibility of the very rich and the very poor in antebellum society, the fastest-growing group in America was the middle class
Economic development opened many more opportunities for people to own or work in businesses, to own shops, to engage in trade, to enter professions, and administer organizations
Middle-class life in the years before the Civil War rapidly established itself as the most influential cultural form of urban America.
Middle-class families lived in solid and often substantial homes, which, like the wealthy, they tended to own.
Workers and artisans were increasingly becoming renters—a relatively new phenomenon in American cities that spread widely in the early nineteenth century.
Middle-class women tended to remain in the home and care for the children and the household, although increasingly they were also able to hire servants—usually young, unmarried immigrant women who put in long hours of arduous work for very little money.
New household inventions altered, and greatly improved, the character of life in middle-class homes.
Perhaps the most important was the invention of the castiron stove, which began to replace fireplaces as the principal vehicle for cooking and also as an important source of heat.
These wood- or coal-burning devices were hot, clumsy, and dirty by the standards of the twenty-first century; but compared to the inconvenience and danger of cooking on an open hearth, they seemed a great luxury.
Stoves gave cooks more control over the preparation of food and allowed them to cook several things at once.
Middle-class diets were changing rapidly in the antebellum years, and not just because of the wider range of cooking the stove made possible
Preserving food for them meant curing meat with salt and preserving fruits in sugar
Houses that had once had bare walls and floors now had carpeting, wallpaper, and curtains
The Changing Family
Sons and daughters were much more likely to leave the family in search of work than they had been in the rural world
Farm owners in need of labor began to rely less on their families (which often were not large enough to satisfy the demand) and more on hired male workers
In the industrial economy of the rapidly growing cities, there was an even more significant decline in the traditional economic function of the family.
The urban household became less important as a center of production.
Instead, most income earners left home each day to work elsewhere
The birth rate fell most quickly in urban areas and among middle-class women.
Mid-nineteenth-century Americans had access to some birth-control devices, which undoubtedly contributed in part to the change.
There was also a signifi cant rise in abortions, which remained legal in some states until after the Civil War and which, according to some estimates, may have terminated as many as 20 percent of all pregnancies in the 1850s.
But the most important cause of the declining birth rate was change in sexual behavior—including increased abstinence
Women and the “Cult of Domesticity”
The emerging distinction between the public and private worlds, between the workplace and the home, led to increasingly sharp distinctions between the social roles of men and women.
Those distinctions affected not only factory workers and farmers, but members of the growing middle class as well.
Women had long been denied many legal and political rights enjoyed by men; within the family, the husband and father had traditionally ruled, and the wife and mother had generally bowed to his demands and desires.
It had long been practically impossible for most women to obtain divorces, although divorces initiated by men were often easier to arrange
Most women also had much less access to education than men, a situation that survived into the mid-nineteenth century.
Their role as mothers, entrusted with the nurturing of the young, seemed more central to the family than it had in the past
Friendships among women became increasingly intense; women began to form their own social networks (and, ultimately, to form female clubs and associations that were of great importance to the advancement of various reforms)
It was women’s responsibility to provide religious and moral instruction to their children and to counterbalance the acquisitive, secular impulses of their husbands.
In other words, now that production had moved outside the household, women who needed to earn money had to move outside their own households to do so.
Leisure Activities
Leisure time was scarce for all but the wealthiest Americans in the mid-nineteenth century.
Most people worked long hours.
Saturday was a normal working day.
Vacations—paid or unpaid—were rare.
For most people, Sunday was the only respite from work and was generally reserved for religion and rest
Almost no commercial establishments did any business on Sunday, and even within the home many families frowned upon playing games or engaging in other kinds of entertainment on the Sabbath.
For working-class and middle-class people, therefore, holidays took on a special importance.
That was one reason for the strikingly elaborate Fourth of July celebrations throughout the country.
The celebrations were not just expressions of patriotism.
They were also a way of enjoying one of the few holidays from work available to virtually all Americans.
In rural America, where most people still lived, the erratic pattern of farmwork gave many people some relief from the relentless work schedules of city residents.
For urban people, however, leisure was something to be seized in what few free moments they had.
Men gravitated to taverns for drinking, talking, and game-playing.
Women gathered in one another’s homes for conversation or card games or to share work on such household tasks as sewing.
For educated people, whose numbers were rapidly expanding, reading became one of the principal leisure activities.
Newspapers and magazines proliferated rapidly, and books—novels, histories, autobiographies, biographies, travelogues, and others—became staples of affluent homes.
Women were particularly avid readers, and women writers created a new genre of fiction specifically for females
In larger cities, theaters were becoming increasingly popular
People going to the theater or the circus or the museum wanted to see things that amazed and even frightened them
Northeastern Agriculture
The story of agriculture in the Northeast after 1840 is one of decline and transformation.
The reason for the decline was simple: the farmers of the section could no longer compete with the new and richer soil of the Northwest
Some eastern farmers responded to these changes by moving west themselves and establishing new farms.
Still others moved to mill towns and became laborers. Some farmers, however, remained on the land and managed to hold their own
The Old Northwest
Most of the major industrial activities of the West either served agriculture (as in the case of farm machinery) or relied on agricultural products (as in fl our milling, meatpacking, whiskey distilling, and the making of leather goods).
For the white (and occasionally black) settlers who populated the lands farther south, the Northwest was primarily an agricultural region.
Its rich and plentiful lands made farming a lucrative and expanding activity there, in contrast to the declining agrarian Northeast.
Thus the typical citizen of the Northwest was not an industrial worker or poor, marginal farmer, but the owner of a reasonably prosperous family farm.
The average size of western farms was 200 acres, the majority-owned by the people who worked them
To meet the increasing demand for its farm products, residents of the Northwest worked strenuously, and often frantically, to increase their productive capacities.
The Northwest increased production not only by expanding the area of settlement, but also by adopting new agricultural technologies that greatly reduced the labor necessary for producing a crop and slowed the exhaustion of the region’s rich soil.
The Northwest considered itself the most democratic section of the country.
But its democracy was based on a defense of economic freedom and the rights of property
Rural Life
Life for farming people was very different from life in towns and cities.
It also varied greatly from one farming region to another
Women came together to share domestic tasks as well, holding “bees” in which groups of women joined together to make quilts, baked goods, preserves, and other products.
But despite the many social gatherings farm families managed to create, they lived in a world with much less contact with popular culture and public social life than people who lived in towns and cities
