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CHAPTER 9 The Market Revolution, 1800–1840
This chapter concentrates on two of the three historical processes unleashed by the Revolution and accelerated after
the War of 1812: the spread of market relations and the westward movement of the population. Americans’
understanding of freedom was changing to include economic opportunity, physical mobility, and participation in the
democratic political system. The chapter chronicles the important advancements made in transportation and
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: The Marquis de Lafayette
II. A New Economy
1. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the market revolution changed the United States.
2. The market revolution represented an acceleration of developments already started during colonial
times.
A. Roads and Steamboats
1. Improvements in transportation lowered costs and linked farmers to markets.
2. Toll roads did little to help the economy.
3. Improved water transportation most dramatically increased the speed and lowered the expense of
commerce.
B. The Erie Canal
1. The canal was completed in 1825 and made New York City a major trade port.
2. The state-funded canal typified funding for internal improvements.
3. By 1837, 3,000 miles of canals had been built.
C. Railroads and the Telegraph
1. Railroads opened the frontier to settlement and linked markets.
2. The telegraph introduced a communication revolution.
a. Samuel F. B. Morse
b. By 1860, 50,000 miles of telegraph wires existed.
D. The Rise of the West
1. Improvements in transportation and communication made possible the rise of the West as a powerful,
self-conscious region of the new nation.
2. People traveled in groups and cooperated with each other to clear land, build houses and barns, and
establish communities.
3. Squatters set up farms on unoccupied land.
E. An Internal Borderland
1. The Ohio River became a boundary between free and slave societies because the Northwest Ordinance
of 1787 prohibited slavery in the Old Northwest.
2. The region immediately northward from the Ohio River retained much of the cultural flavor of the
Upper South.
3. The area had a large concentration of people of southern ancestry that would make Indiana and Illinois
key political battlegrounds in the developing controversy over slavery.
F. The Cotton Kingdom
1. The market revolution and westward expansion heightened the nation’s sectional divisions.
2. The rise of cotton production came with Eli Whitney’s cotton gin.
G. The Unfree Westward Movement
1. Historians estimate that between 1800 and 1860, around 1 million slaves were shifted from the older
slave states to the Deep South.
III. Market Society
A. Commercial Farmers
1. The North became a region with an integrated economy of commercial farms and manufacturing cities.
2. Farmers grew crops and raised livestock for sale.
3. The East provided a source of credit and a market.
4. Between 1840 and 1860, America’s output of wheat nearly tripled.
a. John Deere’s steel plow
b. Cyrus McCormick’s reaper
B. The Growth of Cities
1. Cities formed part of the western frontier.
a. Cincinnati
b. Chicago became the greatest of all western cities thanks to the railroad.
2. The nature of work shifted from that of the skilled artisan to that of the factory worker.
C. The Factory System
3. The American System of manufactures relied on the mass production of interchangeable parts that could
be rapidly assembled into standardized, finished products.
4. The South lagged in factory production.
D. The Industrial Worker
1. Americans became more aware of clock time.
2. Working for an hourly or daily wage seemed to violate the independence Americans considered an
essential element of freedom.
a. Few native-born American men were interested in factory jobs.
E. The “Mill Girls”
F. The Growth of Immigration
1. Economic expansion fueled a demand for labor, which was met, in part, by increased immigration from
abroad.
a. Ireland and Germany
b. Settled in the northern states
2. Numerous factors inspired this massive flow of population across the Atlantic.
G. Irish and German Newcomers
1. American religious and political freedoms also attracted many Europeans fleeing the failed revolutions
of 1848.
2. The Irish were refugees from disaster, fleeing the Irish potato famine.
a. They filled many low-wage unskilled jobs in America.
4. Whereas most Irish immigrants remained in the Northeast, many Germans established themselves in the
West, including in the cities of Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee.
H. The Rise of Nativism
1. The influx of Irish elevated the presence of the Catholic Church in America, which many native-born
Americans viewed with great suspicion.
2. Those who feared the impact of immigration on American political and social life were called nativists.
They blamed immigrants for:
3. In the 1840s, nativism found expression both in the streets and at the ballot box.
a. New York City and Philadelphia witnessed violent anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic riots.
I. The Transformation of Law
1. The corporate form of business organization became central to the new market economy.
a. It enjoyed special privileges and powers granted in a charter.
2. Many Americans distrusted corporate charters as a form of government-granted special privilege.
3. The Supreme Court ruled on many aspects of corporations and employer/employee rights.
a. Courts upheld the right of competition.
b. Gibbons v. Ogden
c. Charles River Bridge case
IV. The Free Individual
1. Westward migration and urban development created a mobile population.
A. The West and Freedom
B. The Transcendentalists
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that freedom was an open-ended process of self-realization by which
individuals could remake themselves and their own lives.
2. Henry David Thoreau echoed his call for individual self-reliance.
C. Individualism
1. Americans came to understand that no one person or government had the right to interfere with the
realm of the self.
2. Thoreau worried that the market revolution actually stifled individual judgment; genuine freedom lay
within the individual.
a. Thoreau retreated to Walden Pond for two years.
b. He turned his experiences into Walden, a critique of the market revolution.
D. The Second Great Awakening
1. The Second Great Awakening added a religious underpinning to the celebration of personal self-
improvement, self-reliance, and self-determination.
2. The Reverend Charles Grandison Finney became a national celebrity for his preaching in upstate New
York.
3. The Second Great Awakening democratized American Christianity.
a. Proliferation of ministers
b. Evangelical denominations (e.g., Methodists and Baptists) grew tremendously.
E. The Awakening’s Impact
1. It promoted the doctrine of human free will.
2. Revivalist ministers seized the opportunities offered by the market revolution to spread their message.
3. But many ministers criticized greed.
F. The Emergence of Mormonism
1. Competition among religious groups kept religion vibrant and promoted the emergence of new
denominations.
2. Joseph Smith founded the Mormons in the 1820s.
a. He claimed to have been led by an angel to plates that had writing on them.
V. The Limits of Prosperity
A. Liberty and Prosperity
1. Official imagery linked the goddess of liberty ever more closely to emblems of material wealth.
2. Opportunities for the self-made man abounded.
a. John Jacob Astor accrued great wealth from the fur trade.
3. The market revolution produced a new middle class.
B. Race and Opportunity
1. Free blacks were excluded from the new economic opportunities.
2. Barred from schools and other public facilities, free blacks laboriously constructed their own
institutional life.
a. African Methodist Episcopal Church
3. Free blacks were confined to the lowest ranks of the labor market.
4. Free blacks were not allowed access to public land in the West.
C. The Cult of Domesticity
1. Women were closed off from most market revolution opportunities.
D. Women and Work
1. Only low-paying jobs were available to women.
a. They could be domestic servants, factory workers, or seamstresses.
2. Not working outside the home became a badge of respectability for women.
a. Freedom was freedom from labor.
3. Although middle-class women did not work outside the home, they did much work as wives and
mothers.
4. Men wanted a “family wage,” which was seen as a form of social justice.
E. The Early Labor Movement
1. Some felt the market revolution reduced their freedom.
a. Economic swings widened the gap between classes.
2. The first Workingman’s Parties were established in the 1820s.
a. By the 1830s, strikes had become commonplace.
F. The “Liberty of Living”
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• Discuss how Americans’ understandings of freedom were changing to include economic opportunity, physical
mobility, and participation in the democratic system.
• Discuss transcendentalism and its impact on defining freedom. Who were the major transcendentalists?
• Compare the experiences of the Irish and German immigrants. What was nativism? Why were many Americans
so suspicious of newcomers?
• What were the major aspects of the market revolution?
respond?
• Explain the major economic, transportation, and technological developments of the era.
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
Catholicism, the Irish, and Nativism
www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/nromcath.htm
Part of the National Humanities Center’s Teacher Serve: An Interactive Curriculum Enrichment Service for Teachers. This page
takes you to the section on Roman Catholics in the nineteenth century.
Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, 2 hrs. 48 mins. 2002).
This film focuses on the plight of the immigrant Irish in New York City during the mid-nineteenth century.
Women
Little Women (Gillian Armstrong, 2 hrs. 1994).
This film is an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel that focuses on the middle-class family life of white Americans
in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts.
The Lowell Offering
https://libguides.uml.edu/c.php?g=492497&p=3369421
This website maintained by the University of Massachusetts archives many issues of a periodical produced by female workers
in the Lowell mills.
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Bernstein, Peter. Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2005.
Deyle, Steven. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade In American Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Eisler, Benita, ed. The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1840–1845). New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1997.
Field, Peter. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Making of a Democratic Intellectual. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.
Hankin, Barry. The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2004.
Horton, James Oliver, and Lois Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks,
1700–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Sheriff, Carol. The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862. New York: Hill & Wang, 1996.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. Transform the class into a group of “mill girls” who work at the Lowell Mills in Massachusetts during the mid-1800s. As you do
this, put on the screen a series of images of the Lowell Offering, provided by the University of Massachusetts at
https://libguides.uml.edu/c.php?g492497&p3369421. Ask the students a series of questions regarding their working conditions.
2. Ask your students to select one of five “interest groups” representing the social and racial divisions of antebellum America:
free blacks, white nativists/working-class laborers, Irish immigrants, middle-class white women, and Mormons. Place the
students in separate groups while they discuss key aspects of their group’s historical background. Then, generate a lively class
discussion by asking questions such as:
• Which group has the hardest life? The easiest? Why?
• What jobs do you perform and why?
• What social activities do you participate in?
• What do you think of other social groups in America?
• What is the true meaning of freedom from your perspective?
• What limitations on freedom do you experience?
