C H A P T E R 81 7 9 0 - 1 8 5 0

NORTHERN TRANSFORMATIONS

THE BEGINNING OF CAPITALISMThe word economics comes from a Greek word that means “household management”—performance of the tasks and services that allow a family to survive and prosper. Thus economic functions are activities devoted to satisfying the primary needs of food, clothing, and shelter—needs that are common to all human beings. Economic functions also satisfy desires for goods and services that are not genuine needs but that people in a prosperous country want. Such goods and services are often called luxuries, but today some luxuries are considered necessities by many people: such things as automobiles, television sets, cell phones, and visits to the dentist.One of the ways goods and services are provided is through an economic system called capitalism. Other names for this system are free market economy and free enterprise. All three terms were coined in the late 19th and the early 20th century to describe economic arrangements that began developing in Europe several centuries ago.The word capital refers to what are called factors of production. These include the money, land, buildings, and machinery that it takes to operate a factory or farm. The capitalist is the individual—or group of individuals—who supplies the money to get the enterprise going—the entrepreneur.The other two terms, free market economy and free enterprise, put a slightly different slant on capitalism. They have in common the word free.

THE BEGINNING OF CAPITALISM (CONT’D)

The implication is that people have individual liberty and the right to own property. They also have the right to do what they wish with their property, as long as it does not harm anyone else. These freedoms set capitalism apart from all other kinds of economic arrangements: all others are top-down, command-and-control political systems in which personal freedom and the rights of property are sacrificed for the good of the state.In the context of capitalism, the term private property has a specific definition. It signifies the means of production. A farm as property is the means by which food is produced; and a factory as property is the means by which durable goods are produced. As an example of services, a physician’s office and equipment are the physician’s property and are used in the treatment of patients. The heart of capitalism is the producer’s right to make what he wants and the consumer’s right to choose what to buy.

CAPITALISM: OUR ECONOMYCapitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned. Business organizations produce goods for a market guided by the forces of supply and demand. Capitalism requires a financial system that enables business firms to borrow large sums of money, or capital, to maintain and expand production. Underlying capitalism is the presumption that private enterprise is the most efficient way to organize economic activity. Adam Smith expressed this idea in his Wealth of Nations (1776), extolling the free market in which the businessman is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."

The marketplace is the center of the capitalist system. It determines what will be produced, who will produce it, and how the rewards of the economic process will be distributed. From a political standpoint, the market system has two distinct advantages over other ways of organizing the economy: (a) no person or combination of persons can control the marketplace, which means that power is diffuse and cannot be monopolized by a party or a clique; (b) the market system tends to reward efficiency with profits and to punish inefficiency with losses. Economists often speak of capitalism as a free-market system ruled by competition. But capitalism in this ideal sense cannot be found anywhere in the world. The economic systems operating in Western countries today are mixtures of free competition and governmental controlled regulation, thus negating the spirit of the economy.

DEMOCRACY AND OUR REPUBLIC

An increase in popular participation in government has often come about because the ruling group sees political advantage in it. For example, when Cleisthenes created Athenian democracy about 510 BC, he was apparently packing the assembly with new voters. In the United States several major expansions of the electorate occurred for similar reasons: Jeffersonian Republicans eliminated property qualifications to win the votes of the very poor; Republicans passed (1870) the 15th Amendment (on black voting) to win blacks' votes in southern and border states; progressive reformers in the early 20th century pushed for women's suffrage, expecting that women, more frequently than men, would support humanitarian causes such as temperance; and Republicans and Democrats vied with each other in the 1950s and '60s to promote black voting in the South in order to win black votes. Not every expansion of the electorate is so consciously self-serving, however. In colonial America, participation widened almost by accident. Most colonies initially adopted the traditional English property qualification for voting: the 40-shilling freehold. This represented an income that was very high in late medieval times and still fairly high in the 17th century. By 1776, inflation and prosperity had enabled the vast majority of adult males to qualify as electors. In the 20th century some countries, such as Turkey and India, have greatly expanded their electorates as an incidental consequence of the decision to adopt democratic forms. In the latter cases, democracy was adopted because it represented an ideal.

Liberty Bell, Philadelphia

POSTCOLONIAL SOCIETY, 1790-1815

• Generally a nation of farmer householders in 1789• First goal was to provide sustenance for families• Second was attaining “competence”

• Living up to community standards and protecting long-term independence of their households

• Most farmers produced a variety of crops and animals

• Increase in foreign demand for American food, 1789–1815, helped to solidify sex segregation in farm work• Men increasingly worked fields• Women managed the household

POSTCOLONIAL SOCIETY (CONT)

• Some farm families took in outwork to supplement their incomes• Household industry• Reinforced patriarchal familial structures• Interdependence between farm families very

common• Barter rather than cash transactions• “Changing system” adopted in South and West

• Changes in inheritance system• Land left to all sons with cooperation among them

expected vs. primogeniture• Farm tenancy rose as land acquisition became

more difficult

POSTCOLONIAL SOCIETY (CONT)

• Standards of living varied• Poor families lived simple lives

• Couldn’t afford to paint their houses or landscape• Animals foraged near houses• Little furniture• Common bowl at meal times and communal sleeping

• The nation’s five largest cities in 1790 were all seaport cities (Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston)• Merchants amassed large fortunes• New institutions created to support

manufacturing and commerce• Masses of poverty remained in seaport

cities• Undemocratic distribution of wealth in society

• Erosion of position of skilled artisans• Increasing reliance on unskilled “slop” workers• Undercut patriarchal status of fathers and

husbands

FROM BACKCOUNTRY TO FRONTIER

• Indians in possession of almost all land granted to the United States in the Treaty of Paris

• White settlers adapted some Indian ways• Daniel Boone• High levels of violence and alcohol• White savages

• Indians pushed back in War of 1812• By 1790,100,000 settlers west of Appalachians• Land purchased from speculators• By 1820 it is called frontier

DECLINE OF PATRIARCHY

• Decline of patriarchal authority affected many aspects of everyday life• Affected courtship and marriage patterns• Young people marrying for love• Rise in number of pregnancies out of marriage

• Dramatic increase in alcohol consumption• Whiskey became the national drink during the fifty

years after the Revolution• Heavy drinking among almost all levels of society• Getting drunk became an outright goal

TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTION

• National Road completed in 1818• Linked Potomac River with Ohio River at Wheeling,

Virginia• Steamboat made commercial agriculture

possible in the West• Robert Fulton• By 1820, 69 steamboats operating on western

rivers• Erie Canal, 1825

• Stretched 364 miles from Buffalo to Albany• Funded by New York State• Encouraged other states to follow suit

TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTION (CONT)

• Time and cost of long-distance transport considerably diminished

• Foreign trade increased dramatically after 1840

• Unified national market uniting the industrial Northeast and mid-Atlantic and the commercial farms of the Old Northwest• South largely excluded

NORTHWESTERN FARMERS• Farms changed from subsistence to single cash

crops• Raised more livestock• City stores carried local produce and manufactured

products• Southern settlers kept southern folkways

• Northern farmers• Practiced intensive, market-oriented agriculture• Were receptive to improvements in farming

techniques• Iron plows• Grain cradles

• Others rejected improvements• Johnny Appleseed

• Households• Americans began to limit the size of their families• Fewer women doing farm work• Increase levels of cleanliness and home aesthetics

HOUSEHOLDS

• Declining size of families, especially in the North, but not the agrarian South or frontier West.

• Sharper distinction between “male work” and “female work”

• Increasing attention of women to childbearing

• Growing attention to appearance of houses and yards

• Search for privacy and comfort in the houses themselves

• Declining reliance on neighborliness

COUNTRY V. CITY LIFE

Backcountry/Agrarian Cities/Industrial Revolution

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What were the two goals of the farmer in America in the late 1700s?

2. The five largest towns in 1790 were seaports. What were they?

3. Name one of the most significant developments in transportation in the early 1800s?

4. What was the main difference between the Rhode Island and Waltham System?

BEGINNINGS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

• Rhode Island System• Sam Slater• “Family” system• Slatersville, Rhode Island

• Waltham System• Francis Cabot Lowell• Mills used heavy mechanization or hired single

women from farms as workers• Provided sober, well-maintained boardinghouses• Women of Lowell became housewives and social

reformers

METROPOLITAN INDUSTRIALIZATION

• Textiles were chief industries of cities• Handcrafts were farmed out to subcontractors

• High rents and water power limited large factories in cities• By 1830s, ready-made clothes available to the

middle class• Women did piece work, men did finish work

• Labor in most industries divided between skilled and time consuming• Divided by gender

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

• The Industrial Revolution was the major shift of technological, socioeconomic and cultural conditions in the late 18th and early 19th century that began in Britain and spread throughout the world.

A Watt steam engine in Madrid. The development of the steam engine propelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain. The steam engine was created to pump water from coal mines, enabling them to be deepened beyond groundwater levels.

EFFECTS

• The effects spread throughout Western Europe and North America during the 19th century, eventually affecting most of the world.

► During that time, an economy based on manual labor was replaced by one dominated by industry and the manufacture of machinery.

The first major technological innovation was the cotton gin.

The first innovation in cotton manufacture was the fly-shuttle, which greatly speeded up the process of weaving cotton threads into cloth.

• While the spinning jenny is frequently pointed to as the first, major technological innovation of the industrial revolution, the invention that really drove the revolution in the eighteenth century was invented several decades earlier: the steam engine. Along with the growth in the cotton industry, the steel industry began to grow by leaps and bounds. This was largely due to a quirk in English geography: England sits on vast quantities of coal, a carbon based mineral derived from ancient life forms.  

• Coal burns better and more efficiently than wood and, if you have lots of coal, its infinitely cheaper. The English figured out that they could substitute coal for wood in the melting of metals, including iron, and blissfully went about tearing coal from the ground while manufacturers in Europe looked on jealously.

• Mining coal, however, was not an easy task. As you drew more and more coal out of the ground, you had to mine deeper and deeper. The deeper the mine, the more it fills with water. In 1712, Thomas Newcomen built a simple steam engine that pumped water from the mines. It was a single piston engine, and so it used vast amounts of energy.

• Until a Scotsman named James Watt added a separate cooling chamber to the machine in 1763; this cooling chamber condensed the steam so the cylinder itself didn't have to be cooled. Patented in 1769, Watt's steam engine had the efficiency to be applied to all kinds of industries. He was not, however, good at doing business and it was only when he had teamed up with the businessman, Matthew Boulton, that the steam engine began to change the face of English manufacture. By 1800, Watt and Boulton sold 289 of these new engines; by the middle of the next century, the steam engine replaced water as the major source of motive power in England and Europe.

HOW IT BEGAN?

• The Continental movement and the British Agricultural Revolution made food production more efficient and less labor-intensive, encouraging the surplus population who could no longer find employment in agriculture into cottage industry, for example weaving, and in the longer term into the cities and the newly-developed factories. The colonial expansion of the 17th century with the accompanying development of international trade, creation of financial markets and accumulation of capital are also cited as factors.

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and Henry Bessemer, of England, both discovered the same method for converting iron to steel. They learned that a blast of air through molten pig iron burned out most of the impurities. The carbon contained in the molten iron acted as its own fuel. Kelly built his first converter in 1851. He received an American patent in 1857. The inventor went bankrupt the same year, however, and the method was to become known as the Bessemer process. Bessemer announced his vertical converter in 1856. In 1860, he patented a tilting converter. It could be tilted to receive molten iron from the furnace and again to pour out its load of liquid steel.The Bessemer process was able to make many tons of steel from iron in a relatively short time, but the metal was still brittle. This problem was caused by the sulfur and phosphorus impurities that remained and by the oxygen from the air blast. In 1856, Robert F. Mushet, an English metallurgist, discovered that adding spiegeleisen, an iron alloy containing manganese, would remove the phosphorus and most of the sulfur by adding limestone to the converter.

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Also, molten iron ran down ditches that had been previously formed in the floor of the furnace room (molding room) and into slots molded from pieces of wood. Early iron workers thought this arrangements looked like baby piglets sucking from the mother sow, so these bars were called 'Pig Iron' and the name stuck.

• The presence of a large domestic market should also be considered an important driver of the Industrial Revolution, particularly explaining why it occurred in Britain. In other nations, such as France, markets were split up by local regions, which often imposed tolls and tariffs on goods traded amongst them.

WHAT WERE THE SOCIAL EFFECTSOF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION?

• In terms of social structure, the Industrial Revolution witnessed the triumph of a middle class.

• Ordinary working people found increased opportunities for employment

• Industrial workers were better paid than those in agriculture.

• With more money, women ate better, had healthier babies, who were themselves better fed.

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The IR is when people stopped making goods at home and started making goods in factories.

COTTAGE INDUSTRY

FACTORY SYSTEM

STEAM ENGINE

• The steam engine was not just a transportation device. It ran entire factories the way rivers used to.

INVENTION AND INTERSTATE COMMERCE

Robert Fulton moved to France in 1797 and in the same year submitted proposals to the French government for a submarine. His submarine, the Nautilus, was launched in 1800; although it proved workable, neither the French, British, nor U.S. governments demonstrated support for the project, and in 1806, he abandoned it. In the meantime, Fulton agreed (1802) to design and build for Robert R. Livingston a steamboat that would operate on the Hudson River. His first steamboat was successfully tested on the Seine River in 1803. Fulton returned to the United States in 1806, and in 1807 his steamboat was launched in New York harbor. The boat, which eventually was called the Clermont, proved the commercial feasibility of steamboats. Fulton later constructed other steamboats, including a warship. Fulton is popularly considered the inventor of the steamship, but others had built steamships before him.

Drawing of Robert Fulton’s Submarine Nautilus

Picture of Robert Fulton’s Steamboat Clermont

CANALS

• Canals are manmade waterways dug between 2 large bodies of water.

• The Erie Canal was a short cut from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes.

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION FRAYER MODEL

Industrial Revolution

Reason for it to occur Leaders and Inventors

Inventions Results

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION QUIZ

1. What invention gave rise to factories being able to locate anywhere?

2. Name an inventor or leader and their invention of the Industrial Revolution.

3. Name a cause that led to the Industrial Revolution.

4. What was a result of the Industrial Revolution?5. Even though used for hundreds of years, what

were being constructed to improve transportation?