19th Century America: Market Revolution & Westward Expansion - Prof. Pividori, Ejercicios de Idioma Inglés

¡Descarga 19th Century America: Market Revolution & Westward Expansion - Prof. Pividori y más Ejercicios en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity! The West (1) The Market Revolution: Roads and Steamboats In the first half of the nineteenth century, economic changes called by historians “the market revolution” transformed the United States. Innovations in transportation and communication sparked these changes. In the colonial era, technology had barely advanced—ships did not become faster, no canals were built, and manufacturing was done by hand. Roads were scarce and slow. In 1800, most farm families were not tied to the marketplace, used little cash, and produced much of what they needed at home. It was nearly impossible for farmers far from cities or waterways to get their produce to market. The first advance in overland transportation was the construction of toll roads, called turnpikes, by private companies and state and local governments. But improved water transportation more effectively sped up and lowered the costs of commerce. In 1807, on the Hudson River in New York, the first steamboat, built by Robert Fulton, went into operation. Steamboats made possible upstream navigation and rapid transport across the Great Lakes, and eventually the Atlantic Ocean. The Erie Canal In 1825, the Erie Canal in upstate New York was completed. The canal facilitated the settlement of upstate New York and the Old Northwest, and helped foster trade between farmers in the West and manufacturers in the East. The Erie Canal also inspired a craze of canal building by state and local governments, many of which became bankrupt when the canals were unprofitable. Railroads and the Telegraph While canals only connected existing waterways, railroads opened vast new areas of the interior, while stimulating coal mining, for fuel, and iron manufacturing, for locomotives and rail. Work on the first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, began in 1828. By 1860, the nation’s rail network was 30,000 miles long, more than the total in the rest of the world combined. At the same time, the invention of the telegraph in the 1830s by Samuel F. B. Morse allowed for instantaneous communication. First used commercially in 1844, the telegraph served businesses and newspapers by helping speed information flow and bringing uniformity to prices. The Rise of the West Transportation and communication improvements fostered the growth of the West as a new region. Between 1790 and 1840, around 4.5 million people crossed the Appalachian Mountains—much of it after the War of 1812, when land-hungry easterners moved west. Between 1815 and 1821, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, and Maine became states. Three different streams of settlers moved West: small farmers and planters with slaves in the South, who created the Cotton Kingdom of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas; farm families from the Upper South who moved to southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; and New Englanders who moved across New York to northern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. National boundaries did not prevent American settlement. In Florida, and later in Texas and Oregon, American settlers claimed land ruled by foreign countries (Spain, Mexico, and Britain) or Indian tribes. They were confident that American sovereignty would follow. American settlers and military incursions, some led by Andrew Jackson, led to the acquisition of Spanish Florida by 1819. By 1840, 7 million Americans—about two-fifths of the total population—lived west of the Appalachian Mountains. The Cotton Kingdom The market revolution and westward expansion, which occurred simultaneously in the North and South, increased divisions between these sections. Perhaps the most dynamic characteristic of America’s economy in the early nineteenth century was the birth of the Cotton Kingdom. The early industrial revolution in England was based in cotton textile factories, which demanded a huge amount of cotton. The Deep South was suited to growing cotton, and once Eli Whitney, in 1793, invented the cotton gin, which quickly separated cotton from seeds, cotton production quickened, became very profitable, and spread. Whitney’s invention, along with new western lands and factory demand for cotton, revolutionized American slavery. Once expected to die out with tobacco, slavery was expanded by cotton. The Unfree Westward Movement When Congress outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, a massive internal trade in slaves grew in the United States, in which slaves in the older slave states of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina were sold to the newer slave areas of the Deep South. Between 1800 and 1860, about 1 million slaves were sold and forcibly moved West in the internal slave trade. Though Jefferson imagined the West would secure the future of an American republic populated by independent small farmers, slave plantations producing cotton for export became the basis of the empire of liberty. Commercial Farmers Even though cotton agriculture in some sense commercialized the South, it did not create a dynamic and diversified economy. Cotton plantation slavery simply spread the agrarian, slave-based social order of the eastern states westward. The Cotton Kingdom remained rural, and the South's transportation and banking systems were underdeveloped arms of the plantation economy. Manufacturing and technological development here lagged, compared to the North. In the North, the market revolution and westward expansion spurred changes that transformed the region into an integrated economy of commercial farms and manufacturing cities. Once isolated farmers, now connected to distant markets by new transportation routes and credit, sold more goods and acquired more cash, which they used to purchase more goods they once made at home. Western farmers sold their goods and found credit in growing eastern cities. Credit allowed them to purchase land, fertilizers, and new agricultural machines, such as the steel plow and the reaper, which greatly increased agricultural productivity in goods such as wheat. The Growth of Cities Cities were part of the West from its beginning. Cities that stood at the intersection of interregional trade, such as Cincinnati, a center of pig slaughterhouses, and St. Louis, grew enormously and quickly. Chicago was the West’s greatest city. Thanks to the railroad and its location on the Great Lakes, Chicago by 1860 was the fourth-largest city in the nation, serving as a center where western farm products were collected and shipped east. Urban centers in the West and East experienced great changes wrought by the market revolution. The number of people in cities increased dramatically. Urban merchants, bankers, and master craftsmen exploited the expanding market among commercial farmers. Their efforts to increase production and reduce labor costs transformed work. Skilled artisans who once made an entire product at home, where they controlled their own work, were now gathered in large workshops, where entrepreneurs supervised them, subdivided their tasks, and paid them a wage to perform only one process in production. These workers faced relentless pressure from employers to make more goods faster and at lower wages. The Factory System In some industries, particularly textiles, factories entirely replaced traditional craft production. Factories gathered large groups of workers under central supervision and replaced hand tools with power-driven machinery. The first factory in America was established in 1790 at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, by Samuel Slater, an English immigrant, who built from memory a spinning-jenny in order to evade laws making it illegal to export plans for industrial machines. These early spinning factories produced yarn which, through the “outwork” system, was sent out to rural farm families, who wove it into cloth. The same outwork system characterized early shoe production, in which parts were sent out to families, who assembled them and gave them back to merchants, who finally sold the shoe. But shoemaking and textiles were eventually brought under one factory roof. The first large American factory that used power looms to weave cotton cloth was built in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814. Beginning in the 1820s, other manufacturers established factories in Lowell and other small towns, creating small industrial towns and cities across New England. The first factories, powered by waterfalls and river rapids, were matched by the 1840s by factories using steam power, which could be located anywhere. In 1850, factories