hello everyone welcome back history 146 this is lecture number 14 and we are going to continue with consumerism section okay so last lecture we talked fairly extensively about mercantilism and its effect in creating the consumer revolution so let's talk about the period following the American Revolution early United States is trying to get on its feet at politically economically socially and they're struggling but they're trying some new things out making things work and economically they are trying to stay neutral they want to trade with England they don't want to cut their ties with England but at the same time France really helped them out in the revolution and they've been forging some very close ties to the French so they're been they've been trading with the French as well the problem here is that following the American Revolution the British and the French start fighting with each other and as tensions internationally rise between the English and the French they are going to try to force the Americans to pick a side whether they pick the British side whether they pick the French side that is what both of them are trying to force America into now France wasn't exactly being very nice in their trade policies but even they pale in comparison to what Britain was doing Britain was having some very hard times and we're starting to really put pressure on American ships basically saying anybody who has been at a trade a port in France is not allowed to trade in Britain they've been trying to force them into essentially picking aside and then the British will respond and the French will respond and the British will respond and they'll keep upping their pressure back and forth until finally the British will start conducting what are called impressment s-- impressment SAR basically where you're being forced into military service you're being drafted okay and so what would happen is the Royal Navy would say sail up on an American merchant man out on the open seas and board them and say you aren't actually Americans your runaway British sailors and so we are returning you to the service of the Royal Navy they'd grab them off the American ships put them on the Royal Navy ships in the world nape Royal Navy would then sail off and they were doing that on the high seas and then they start upping the aggressiveness by doing it inside of America's territorial waters which really is a full act of war at that point and the United States wasn't really equipped for a war they weren't ready for that so they decided instead to conduct economic sanctions against Britain in response to this and so under these conditions President Jefferson issues the second most restrictive trade policy in American history it was the the embargo of 1807 the embargo of 1807 basically said any Goods coming in from Britain we are not allowing to land and we are not going to ship anymore out to Britain until the British stopped doing what they're doing and the British economy was heavily impacted by this it was seriously crippled by this but at the same time the British kept doing it they were trying to force America away from France and so they were staying the course so while this was economically devastating to the United States it was equally economically devastating to Britain and the problem is that neither side was backing down the United States couldn't back down they were they had to keep the pressure on and Britain was at war with France and they needed that income but at the same time they didn't want the US trade with France helping France and hurting Britain so this is something that just kept on going and so despite the fact that this embargo reduced trade in America by 80 percent that's how much trade reduction was going on imagine if the economy today was crippled by 80 percent that would be absolutely devastating to the country well it was to them back then too and despite that Jefferson rode out the embargo and then after he got out of office his successor James Madison will come into office and he will also say you know what we got to keep the embargo in place the British have to stop doing this and so here it's moving past 1808 1809 1810 and the shortages start to mount now remember America is is addicted to their consumer goods and among the biggest trade products of Britain their largest trade product is textiles okay for the British their largest manufactured goods is the textile industry that is fabrics okay so anything made of fabric becomes a high shortage item and this is particularly problematic when it comes to clothing okay now when clothes were just coming into fashion or out of fashion then that was one thing but the clothes aren't just going in and out of fashion now you can't just pull something out of the closet and put it on anymore because those clothes are now wearing out it's been several years up to this point and people are running out of clothes that they can actually wear so the textile shortage is really the one that hits America the hardest so enterprising Americans start looking at how to get America off of the addiction to British consumer goods and start replacing it with American consumer goods they see the need to start building factories here in the United States the first attempt at a textile mill is actually back in 1789 by Samuel Slater it was a big innovator but it didn't make much profit and eventually he went out of business but during the shortage the first truly successful Factory in America was set up and it was set up by a man named Francis Cabot Lowell Francis Cabot Lowell went over to Britain in 1810 and he basically did a con job to get a tour of a British textile factory he went to the one that was renowned as being the most cutting-edge the one with the best machines the best quality fabric and everything and he flatters the factory owner up one side and down the other and says oh you're so brilliant I can't wait to see what you've got well let me show you and he takes him on a tour and Francis Cabot Lowell just kind of played dumb Wow how exactly does that work I don't get it and the guy said well here I'll show you any opens up the machine whoops yeah he basically revealed all of the technology that he uses to Francis Cabot Lowell and Lowell not only figured out how the British were making their their textiles so well and the secret to their machines but he also figured out how the machines could be improved and so then he takes all of that information back to the United States and builds his own Factory the Lowell textile mill he constructs his new Factory in Waltham Massachusetts and this Factory will go on to really be the start of America's industrial revolution that's this factory is what's what kicks it off and this first embargo is kind of what gets the ball rolling but it will really kick into high gear with the second embargo that's coming now Francis Cabot Lowell starts making his fabrics shortly after he gets back and builds his textile mill but then right on the tail of his manufacturing starting to get on its feet America finally goes into a conflict with Britain and at this point now they are in the war of 1812 the war of 1812 is one that America really wasn't ready to fight and this is one where Britain is not is going to be able to focus on them alone they don't have France to folk anymore because France and Britain have finished their conflict and now Britain is focusing the entirety of their attention on the United States when the Revolution was happening the British had to split their focus between the French and the American colonists and so they couldn't really give America its full attention now they can't and so when the British come they are incredibly successful on their attacks they raise Washington DC they burn it to the ground you know they're they're landing all kinds of different invasion forces in various areas and yet the United States still keeps holding on but the problem is people are so short of goods that they need not just stuff that they want but the needed goods that when the British soldiers come up a lot of local people start trading with the soldiers for goods that they need and at that point James Madison steps in and says you know what I really feel for the American people I know people are having a hard time in the embargo but this is a time of war and we cannot give aid to an enemy during the time of war and so this leads to an even more restrictive trade embargo the embargo of 1813 remember how I said the 1807 embargo was the second most restrictive law ever passed for trade the 1813 embargo was the most restrictive these two embargoes back-to-back basically in 1813 1813 embargo said total lack of trade with Britain was absolutely mandatory and anybody who violated that would be held accountable on charges of treason and they could be executed for it so it carried a death penalty for violating it and that made this an incredibly brutal trade law that people said okay I just I can't afford to break this one and that really was the nail in the coffin for trying to trade with Britain at this point Americans are can the only way they are going to be able to stand on their own is by establishing their own factory system so while the 1807 embargo kind of started the ball rolling the 1813 embargo is the one that really kicks the Industrial Revolution into high gear these two embargoes are largely responsible for starting that American Revolution so Francis Cabot Lowell and his textile mill set up a model system that a lot of people will start to follow because he didn't like what he was seeing from industrialization back in England he didn't like the widespread poverty among the lower classes that was so extreme the wealth gap between the merchants up here and the workers down here had grown so large that the people at the bottom the working-class were really really squeezed to the point where they were having trouble making ends meet just with a single source of income and usually everybody in the family had to start working just just to make it you know be able to survive for the family and so Lowell doesn't like that he wants to create a system that will pay livable wages and so he starts recruiting a lot of women to work in his factory he figures well this is a good job for women because it's not heavy labour it's more focused labor you know it requires dexterity it requires attention it requires a certain amount of precision of work but it doesn't require heavy lifting and so he feels that it would be ideal to hire young women so he hires women basically from their teens to their mid-20s from New England since he set it up in Waltham Massachusetts that's that's where he's recruiting from and he also puts in a system where social regulation and moral codes are put in place to watch over the women while they are in their dormitories and whatnot to ensure the families that the women are being looked after and protected and not just exploited and his model system pays very good wages women here working for him had limited time in the factory they could work no more than 12 hours which actually at that particular point in time was a very reasonable day's work so a 12 hour shift that women would work nothing more and no more than 8 hours on Saturday and Sundays they didn't work at all so this was basically the system that was set up and the women were paid wages that were on par with what men made so Lowell really had a nice system in place the problem is when other other factory owners start creating their own rival textile mills they will start hiring workforces for the lowest common wages that they can possibly afford and this was fueled by a big influx of Irish immigrants now we talked in our first section the the race and immigrant race and ethnicity section where we were talking about the Irish and their big infusion into the United States in this period well these new factory owners rather than hiring local Americans like the ladies that Francis Cabot Lowell was was hiring they started hiring the Irish immigrants to work for far far less than what Lowell was paying and Lowell really had no choice if he wanted to compete he had to dismantle his system and start hiring immigrant labor for bargain-basement wages as well otherwise he simply would be run out of the market he wouldn't be able to produce fabrics that would sell and have enough profit other people would be able to undercut his production and he just wouldn't survive so he had to eventually dismantle his system and go with what everybody else was a very exploitative system where Irish immigrants were paid very very low wages there were another a couple of other things that are going on during the rise of the Industrial Revolution as well of the things that is fueling the rise of the textile industry was something that actually happened several years earlier in the late late 1700s now when America first formed as they are going through the 17 70s and 80s and they're working through the early governmental policies coming up with how they're going to set up the Constitution there was a real push for people to get rid of slavery and the reason is because cotton prices had fallen to the point where cotton was no longer profitable to manufacture or to grow anymore and the reason is because the the cotton process had a bottleneck and that was removing all of the seeds Cotton's a plant you know they're like these fibrous blooms that grow on these bushes and so you pull these things off and then you got to get rid of all the seeds well people had to sit around for hours on end slaves sat around for hours on end combing the seeds out of the cotton it was slow tedious work that really affected their bottom line they couldn't produce enough cotton fast enough to make money at it and so a lot of people were saying well maybe we should get rid of slavery and there was a real push for that up until seventeen the 1790s and in 1794 a new invention hits the market the cotton gin Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin and what this does is it automates the process of removing the seeds from cotton by running it through a machine that very quickly will do the same work that would take up one person all day and it would just take a couple minutes for the machine to handle so this removed the bottleneck from the cotton production and cotton growing that the growers of the south cotton industry were we're facing as a result cotton suddenly becomes very profitable again and now people are so dedicated to their slave forces that they are unwilling to outlaw slavery so basically if you look at the significance of the cotton gin here the cotton gin really not only solidifies slave labor it pretty much is a major cause of the Civil War okay so we were looking at outlawing slavery and now the the coming of the cotton gin basically guarantees that the entire South will fight to keep the institution so slavery ends up continuing but cotton in the South starts growing in massive amounts and for several years as the textile industry in America is rising people in America enter what becomes known as the era of good feeling the era of good feeling where the north is producing these factories to manufacture stuff and the south is growing cotton and selling the cotton to these northern textile mills who turn it into fabric and then sell it to everybody and so here you have the agrarian south and the industrial north working together as a system so they're not having to pick one side or the other they're not an agrarian nation they're not an industrial nation they're both and both are living in harmony and they believe that both can live in harmony so this is a period of time where agriculture and Industry were friendly to each other they were mutually beneficial the South Korea the cotton the North turned the cotton in deficient in its finished goods and the rising factory system brought more and more immigrant labor into their factories which lowered overall wages throughout America as wages started to lower on average it lowered the standard of living across the board for everyone and so by the time the 1830s rolled around all wages in America were being smashed down there just isn't enough purchasing power among the people in America to provide products that are affordable enough for them to buy and so what this does actually is fuel industrialization even more because now people are looking for cheaper more fit more effective ways of delivering products to market and still be able to you know be able to provide these these consumer goods that people want for lower prices so the average income decline actually results in dropping prices of consumer goods but the profits still remain another thing that happens is artisans the people who make things by hand are being driven out of business now in the late 1700s during the Revolution artisans were the bread and butter of America seventy-five percent of American businesses were artisans okay but now they're being replaced by people who are mass producing products that they used to make by hand no more need for them to make them by hand as a result they end up going out of business and having to go to work for a factory or start a farm or go into something else something other than making whatever product it was that they were making before new changes in technology helped to contribute to the drop of prices and the rise of consumer goods even more first it was the rise of steam ships that made delivery of products along rivers and the ocean front a lot more efficient the whole idea here is if you can get products to market faster you can make more money it worked as a result of this wanting to increase the amount of coverage that steamships have they decide to build a 364 mile canal across the state of New York connecting up the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes they dig a trench that is passable by steamship they basically create a man-made river and it becomes known as the Erie Canal it takes some seven years to dig this by hand that's incredible especially if you think about how long it took them to build this freeway out here just the expansion it took them what nine years or so to make up the freeway expansion out here just on the the 215 and they had power tools for that you know they had bulldozers and and cranes and all kinds of industrial machinery these guys who made this big man-made canal did it with shovels by hand in seven years that's impressive and they connected up a trench between the Atlantic Ocean on the east and Lake Erie on the west and what this did was give a steamship access from the Atlantic Ocean all the way inland to Lake Erie and then from Lake Erie to the other Great Lakes which are connected and then from there to the headwaters of the Mississippi and then they could run the Mississippi all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico now that entire water route is fully connected so you can sail a steamship from the Atlantic Ocean inbound all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico that is one heck of a trade route and so by digging that 364 mile trench they greatly increase the amount of people that they can reach with their products as well that also makes some more money however eventually they realize that steamships because they require water are very inefficient in a lot of ways now they have waterways where they're running just fine but digging more and more canals is kind of counterproductive so they come up with a new type of machine that starts running over the land instead and basically it's a steamship it's just this steamship travels on Rails instead of on water but it has the same basic principle it runs on a steam engine to provide artificial power to carry those goods this was a railroad now they built the railroads a whole lot faster than they could dig canals the problem with railroads as they do cost a lot of money but the benefit is they're fast even the early railroads the trains move 25 to 30 miles per hour steam ships moved 8 to 12 knots 8 to 12 miles per hour roughly so even the early railroads that were very quickly or the early locomotives that were very quickly replaced by newer locomotives better designs faster stronger designs they still moved twice as fast as the steamships and eventually when the locomotives become faster and far more powerful where they can carry a whole lot more Goods than any steamship can they start being able to travel 40 to 50 miles per hour that is a huge boost in speed and the amount of goods that can travel around so transportation makes industry a lot more efficient a lot more competitive and the more competitive that is the more prices will drop because if you're competing against other people you're trying to undercut their prices in increments so they can get products to market faster cheaper more efficiently and the competition is driving prices down the social reaction was from a consumer standpoint and increase materialism but also there was a certain component of America that is doing worse okay there's the poor the number of poor in America are rising and there is a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots and this growing class division is creating a lot of tensions especially since the people at the top are gaining a lot more political voice the people at the bottom are losing a lot of political voice and so this will give rise to what becomes known as the the democracy movement the movement toward democracy will be fueled largely out of the consumerism that's going on and the people on the bottom the have-nots are going to be insisting to have more power politically than they had before so by the 1820s and 30s this moved toward democratic democratization is on track it's moving forward now America became known as the land of opportunity early on but by the 1840 he's a lot of people are saying well yeah technically it's the land of opportunity but good luck it's hard to chase that opportunity and actually make it happen thirty forty years earlier yeah there were plenty of opportunities but now they talk about opportunity but really opportunity is a little bit more limited people are having trouble with this idea of opportunity abounding in America they see a lot of limits to that nonetheless there is still a movement to push forward toward a more consumer driven production economy now part of what's going on also is the movement of people in the east toward the West so a lot of land settlement a lot of wagon trains are heading out and people were settling even out in Spanish territory in Alta California basically this area and up in Northern California in the 1840s there was a thriving locale that was growing and more and more settlers were coming in and it was flourishing and it was known as Sutter's Fort it had been started by a man named James by excuse me John Center not James Center John Sutter and his business partner James Wilson Marshall and between Sutter and Marshall they made a good pair Sutter was a money man he was an administrator he was somebody who handled the books he organized he he was he was a good boss okay whereas Marshall was sort of a hands-on kind of guy he was the guy who got down and dirty and in the mud and and oversaw the building of things so excuse me together they made a good team and as more and more people are coming in through the 1840s tensions start to rise between Mexico and California and the people who settling out there which gives rise to the Bear Flag Revolt by the mid-1840s meanwhile America has basically fallen into a war with Mexico as a whole so while the Bear Flag Revolt is going on locally in California this bigger war ends up merging with it eventually and so the whole thing gets united in this big war with Mexico now despite all of this James Wilson Marshall and John Sutter are convinced that a whole bunch more Americans are gonna flood into this area and so they said we need to prepare for this we need to get positioned for this big increase of migration who will come in in the 1840s and so they get this idea of building a new sawmill out on the American River outside of Sutter's Mill there are outside of Sutter's Fort excuse me so Sutter's Mill is being overseen by James Wilson Marshall and it was in the process of being built on the shore side of this of this river and the reason was so that they can use the water power of the river to power the sawmill it was being built largely by two groups of laborers one local Indians okay there's a lot of local Indians that were good sources of labor and John Sutter actually had good relations with a lot of the local Indians and gave a lot of them jobs another was Mormons who had migrated now we talked in the religious section about the Morgan the Mormons who migrated out to Utah but there was some dissension and others will continue on to California this is where those Mormons came from and this is where they went to a lot of them moved into Sutter's Fort and set up shop so they're building this mill out on the side of the river and they have to do something called flushing the mill race as it's being constructed you need to increase the pace of water going through a small channel that you put the wheel in otherwise it won't have enough force to power the wheel so what you do is you create kind of a nozzle a channel that takes a wide amount of the river and channels it into a very narrow passageway to make it speed up so it's like putting a nozzle on a hose you take a slower flow and force it into a narrow area to speed up the force of it and so while you are building that you keep a barrier on there so you're not having to deal with the current and the water stays nice and smooth in there but right before you install the wheel you flush out the millrace you pull up the barrier that is keeping the flow out and you let the water hit it full force and let it flow for a while what this does is it churns up all the junk on the bottom any debris that's left in there will be forced down flush down by all of the incoming force of the water flow and then once it does you put the barrier back in place install the water wheel and then pull the barrier out permanently and so that's how the mill race works so Marshall flushes the mill race he pulls up the barrier it all starts flowing through there churning up all the the dirt and junk from the bottom flushing it down and then he puts the barrier back in place and when they look down at the mill race all of the dirt and top silt has been washed away and what are they looking at a bed of solid gold and they go okay let's not jump to conclusions this might not be gold it might be pyrite but one thing is everybody here needs to keep this secret we can't go talking about it meanwhile Marshall takes a sample of it and goes out to San Francisco to have it assayed and check to see if this is pyrite or if it's gold sure enough it's gold and so he comes back and tells everybody okay look this is the real thing this is gold so what we need to do is keep secret if word gets out that there's gold out here it will no longer be our gold it'll be everybody's gold so we have to keep it quiet so he says I'll tell you what we have to keep up the appearance that we're working on the mill and so we're going to come we're going to do some work and then we'll cut off after just a couple hours and then you can go and pan for gold all you want out in the river and whatever you get you keep it's your gold and everybody goes okay yeah that's a good idea and so they cut off early everybody's out there panning for gold the problem is these guys are being paid really low wages and when you get close to payday sometimes you start running a little short of money so the Mormon workers who were there at the mill went to a fellow Mormon who was basically the one who stood up to Brigham Young Brigham Young said we want to set up the settlement here on the Salt Lake and the man who who challenged him was a man named Sam Brannan he was the treasurer of the Mormon Church he was the one who basically held on to the Mormon funds and Sam Brannan says this is a lousy place to settle we shouldn't be settling here you want to settle here this is out in the middle of a desert there's a mud flat out there that goes for miles and we're right here on the next on the shore of a Salt River or a Salt Lake you know what what good is this entire area this this is a terrible area well it basically ratcheted up and Brigham Young kicked him out of the church and Brannan said fine I'm leaving I'm going to California any of you guys who want to go with me you can go and so they did what Brigham Young hadn't counted on though is that Sam Brannan kept the Treasury he took it with him and when he got out to California he didn't feel need to tell anybody else that he had it so he basically used the Poorman Treasury to set up a number of business interests he set up a little print shop out in Sanford go where he published a newspaper newspaper every couple weeks and then out in Sutter's Fort he set up a mercantile store basically a common goods store they sell all sorts of things that people need and it's the big store for the town everybody who needs something they go buy it from Sam and so here Sam Brannan is he's got a store and his friends who are getting short on money come to Sam and say hey you know I wonder if he'll take a little bit of this gold in exchange for some some goods that we need and one guy says yeah you know what I'm gonna try it so he brings a little a little bit of gold to Sam and says hey Sam you know I'm a little low on cash but I got some gold here I mean it's not much I just found a little bit out there wandering around there wasn't a whole lot but I was wondering if you might be willing to trade this for some of the goods and Sam looks at the golden says yeah okay I'll do that I'll help you out and so the first guy comes in Sam doesn't really think much of it then his friend comes in and says hey Sam I heard you made that deal with with that guy will you make it with me too and Sam just smiles and says sure I'll help you out meanwhile what is Sam Brannan thinking where's this gold coming from so he sneaks out and follows everybody the next day and sees them working he's going okay wait a minute they're just building the mill this this can't be and then everybody stops working and then they start panning in the river for gold and he's going so that's where they're getting it from now Sam Brannan at this point has a choice he can get out there in the river with them and start panning for gold viable he could make some extra money that way but he comes up with an idea that becomes far more profitable he starts researching everything there is to know about gold mining and he makes a little guidebook he goes to his print house out in san san francisco yeah San Francisco and starts publishing these out for very little money and then he collects all of the different things that people are going to need for mining and panning for gold he fills his store up to the rafters I mean he spends everything he has to fill his store completely full of these goods and then he goes back to San Francisco and starts publishing flyers on his print shop again and starts distributing I'm running through San Francisco saying gold gold gold they found gold out by Sutter's Fort go get your gold and then he races back to his store and waits for the flood to come it does it comes big Sam Brannan starts the gold rush he was the guy who did it yes you could say that the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill did but it really didn't Sam Brannan and his strategy to make money is really what starts the gold rush so he sets this store up he gets it stocked up and also another thing that's kind of an interesting side note there was a new kind of fabric that some people were experimenting with as being a good fabric for work clothes and it is during this period of time that this new fabric starts getting put into action and Sam Brannan actually stocks some of it it is denim okay this is when some of the early blue jeans starts coming out that will later convince two to Jewish textile manufacturers out in New York Levi and Strauss to start mate making Levi Strauss jeans so this is where blue jeans basically come around so the gold rush is on and sure enough people in San Francisco hear that there's gold out there and they just pick up and leave no preparation they just went it was only maybe a day day and a half ride so it wasn't that big of a deal they hunt they head on out to Sutter's Fort and they get out there but as they're going they realize as they're on their way you know we don't know anything about mining and panning for gold and then they get the idea well you know I bet if we get out there there's gonna be somebody who knows what they're doing what we'll figure it out as we go and so they get over to Sutter's Fort and the first place they go to look for information the local store so there's Sam Brannan and people come in hey what do you know about gold what do I know about gold you came to the right place I've got this handy dandy guidebook here you go yeah we'll get you that and you're gonna need all sorts of equipment will get you equipment let's see there's three of you here's three of these three of these three of these three of these three of these three of these and the stocks just go up go up go up and they're going hey we came to the right place and Sam Brannan is gone yeah just raking in the Bucks and so Sam Brannan doesn't make money by mining and panning for gold himself instead he makes money selling stuff to the people who do and he becomes California's very first self-made millionaire during the gold rush he also becomes one of the very very famous rags to riches to rags story of California that is he makes over a million dollars and then by the time he dies he is completely out of money he has blown it all so fortunes are made and lost in California in the gold rush and the aftermath and Sam Brannan is a good example of that happening so are John Sutter and James Wilson Marshall both of those guys also become fabulously wealthy during the gold rush and they also lose just about everything and die more or less dead broke okay so the news of the gold starts to spread very quickly Northern California was the area that hears about it first but then it's spread south down to Southern California the Greater Los Angeles and San Diego areas as well as North upward into oregon territory from san diego news will spread down into mexico and so the next areas that you're going to get a lot of people coming in is from Southern California and Mexico as well as the Oregon Territory people are going to start flooding in from those areas by the end of or actually just a couple months later there's news that has reached Hawaii by boat it really is easier to get to Hawaii than it is to get to anywhere on the East Coast as a matter of fact it's easier to get all the way to Asia than it is to get to the East Coast for people in California and so the next place that really starts getting a lot of people flooding in is Hawaii Hawaii sees something the immigration from Hawaii exposes America to something that they really haven't had a lot of up to this point and that is the big and big inclusion of Asian immigrants you get some Chinese and some other Asian groups coming in from Hawaii they were largely there for the sugar plantations that that were growing out there and they decided to try their hand at gold some of the early people who come in fairly early in the gold rush in 1848 make a whole bunch of money in gold pack up get on a boat and go home and for people who are Chinese a lot of them go back to China relatively well-off and pretty soon stories start to spread about these people who had been over on the other side of the ocean where there was gold available and the stories grew and pretty much it it led to what becomes known as the legend of gold mountain where there is this mountain of solid gold over on the other side of the ocean and if you have the courage if you have the commitment you challenge the waters you get all the way over there all you have to do is find gold mountain put your shovel in and your family is wealthy forever you can guarantee future generations of wealth and so the legend of gold mountain started to spread throughout China the eastern part of the United States it was actually very difficult to get to the west coast from because most of those people had to go by wagon train the railroads only went just so far and the wagon trains are dangerous for any number of reasons Indians are part of the problem they go through a lot of hostile country another part of the problem is that a lot of the people see this is an opportunity to weed out competition so the fellow gold hunters sometimes sabotage the people who are migrating across so oftentimes the gold hunters are the biggest danger and there is also the chance of illness injury what not I mean you just a slip of an axe while you're cutting firewood slash your leg with it that's enough to get it infected and kill you keep in mind this is pre penicillin days this is you know medicine in the mid 1800s was not reliable so it was really really easy to die migrating across it was actually far easier to get on a ship bound all the way down around South America and then back up the west coast all the way up to California so sailing this big long route became actually the fastest and easiest way to get to California those were the two primary routes that people took if they came in from the east coast and the flood of people coming in from the East Coast really didn't happen until 18-49 this is where the 18-49 the the forty niners of the Gold Rush become famous and once the flood from the East Coast starts two-thirds of the people who end up mining gold in California are Yankees that is they're not just from the East Coast they're from the Northeast okay but keep in mind what that means it also affects their views on slavery it basically convinces them that California should be more industrial than agricultural now they recognize they need agriculture but they want to build up industry in California so these attitudes that are Yankee based that is those northeasterners the people who are more trade and Merchants minded economically minded consumerism minded they are the ones who are really the driving force behind this settlement that comes over from the East Coast they bring with them their customs their attitudes and their prejudices the first to suffer abuses in California from these people are Indians and Mexicans and then people from Mexico for the most part are mestizo they're part Indian and part Spanish blood and as a result when people get over to California they don't really distinguish between mixed Bloods or Spaniards or Indians basically if you speak Spanish you are an Indian that is how they view things so even full-blooded Spaniards from Europe who are European and not Indian are being treated as Indians which is to say very very badly they suffer floggings threats intimidation some of them are lynched some have their gold stolen from them and the Indians get out of the Gold Rush fairly quickly the Mexicans a little slower to get out but eventually they will get out as well and the Spanish get out almost immediately the local people who are of mestizo heritage but were born and raised in California and California's home many of them came in early in on the Gold Rush but they have vineyards and farms and whatnot up in Northern California and a lot of them that came in for the Gold Rush start facing this abuse and say okay we're out of here you know we're just gonna go back grow some grapes that's fine we don't need the gold and so they get out as well those people are called California's so the Yankees tended to lump all people that they considered Hispanic altogether the Spanish the Mexicans the California's and the Indians that had been mission eyes by the Spanish and spoke Spanish and they treated them all as Indians which is to say the people that they oftentimes faced attacks from as they were migrating across they don't distinguish one group of Indians from another so let's say the Cheyenne may be attacked him or the Utes may be attacked him on the way over but they survived it they get out here and the first thing they see is Indians digging up gold well that does not stick well with them and they will start acting out against them so the Indians are gonna get out pretty quick now California suffered from a serious lack of money they needed some real resources in order to keep keep social order they didn't have enough to pay for the kind of police that it would take to police all of the people coming in and so the crime that was running rampant brilli was unchecked they just don't have the resources for it so California attempts to make money by convincing others basically to get out of the gold rush at the same time they pass what's known as the foreign miners tax this is a tax that basically taxes miners who are not from America $20 per month so if you are foreigner and they exclude african-americans african-americans don't have to pay pay the tax but if you are a foreigner you have to pay the tax so Mexicans Chinese these are really who they are targeting the most the Mexicans and Chinese they are the ones that are intended for this to get them out of California but it's also hitting the Europeans and the Europeans take offense to it the Europeans will stage a rebellion and they will be joined mainly by about four to five thousand Mexicans and together they join forces and this uprising becomes known derisively has the French Revolution all of them are eventually rounded up and arrested and they are brought before a Board of Governors basically to judge them and they say ok if you are a European you don't have to pay the tax however for this civil disobedience this uprising that you staged you're being fined $5 each they grumbled they paid their $5 fine and they go back to digging gold the Mexicans however they say you guys have to pay it however if you want to leave now you don't have to pay anything and we will let you go even without a fine if you leave immediately but you can't come back and most of the four thousand Mexicans involved at this point go back to Mexico so this is where the Mexicans largely leave but the two groups that from Europe that really were at the heart of this were both French and German miners so the interesting thing is it gives a certain flavor to San Francisco that becomes known as the bohemian community that is this German artists community that will rise up in San Francisco that is largely based out of these these German gold miners who came in and to some extent the French gold miners as well now the other group that faces an enormous amount of hostility and really after the Mexicans leave the brunt of the hostility are the Chinese the Chinese saw roughly less than a thousand gold miners in California by 1850 but by 1852 the number of Chinese that had hit California was up to 25,000 and more were pouring in everyday people in California don't want the Chinese coming in by 1852 most of the easy to get gold has already been depleted anyway so now they're dealing with all of these Chinese coming in looking for gold but there's no gold to be had at least not without blasting and doing heavy mining work underground and so they want these Chinese to leave the problem is most of them indentured themselves to get here in the first place and they can't leave without paying off that debt and paying for passage to get back so now they're trapped they can't make enough digging gold and they can't pay off their indentured servants status without either going into forced labor for someone or buying it buying their way out with gold so it becomes a very difficult situation for them hostility towards the Chinese starts ramping up and California Supreme Court comes in with a very significant ruling in 1854 they say based on the latest scientific evidence people who have studied migration patterns the Chinese are actually the same people as Native Americans if you look at Native Americans people are saying they migrated from China now that's a little inaccurate but still they got the general idea that outer mongolia area where people were migrating over the land bridge this is what they based that ruling on and said therefore the Chinese and Native Americans are essentially the same people and because they are the same people they had the same rights under California law which is to say none so this basically opens the door for any kind of constructive abuse that people might want to levy against California against the Chinese in California so if you are a white you can pretty much beat up kill a Chinese person and face absolutely no punishment for it so long as there isn't a white person who is willing to testify on behalf of the Chinese and at that particular point it was very hard to find anybody who would stand up for the Chinese so the anti Chinese hostility would start to grow even worse and there are the abuses that they will face will be increasing over time an interesting group of people to look at during the goldrush also are the black miners the while the Chinese faced a lot of hostilities you would think due to racism and whatnot that black miners would find themselves in a situation where they would find overwhelming hostility against him but that wasn't really the case now there was resentment that they were there but at the same time keep in mind the time period of this this is roughly ten years before the Civil War tensions between North and South are really heating up and the heart of that issue slavery and so because roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of the people in California are from the north what's their mindset they are anti-slavery now if they are somebody who comes out openly abusing an african-american now keep in mind they have no rights african-americans they have zero rights they most of them are either on freedom papers which really are hardly worth the ink that they're written on or their runaway slaves so people could grab them and return them to slavery but the problem here is if you harass somebody who is black in California you face harassment yourself as being a sympathizer with the south and people automatically say oh look at him he's he's a southern sympathizer and so people will go out of their way to avoid the african-american miners who are digging up gold and as a result either even though the slaves are neither citizens or slave at this point these former slaves or people with their freedom papers they're either escapees or they have their papers they're in this legal limbo where they don't really have rights but they're not really fully equal either and because of this you'd think that they would have a hard time but in truth most people just leave them alone they figure it's just not worth the headaches I'll get from all of those people if I bug them and so they leave him alone as a result of this by 1850 there's roughly two thousand blacks mining gold in California and most of them do pretty well as a group the black miners do just about as well as whites do in the gold rush one group of miners that really faced hardships were the Indian miners now the Spanish had already come up with a very derisive name for the Indians when they first got there and that name had kind of stuck and translated into English as America took over and that label was diggers they were called diggers and the reason is because the Spanish when they first encountered the Indians they were digging in the ground for roots and things that they use to augment their their diets you know and really that's not so weird think about it yams or root vegetables carrots are root vegetables potatoes or root vegetables so these are not so unusual for us either but back then the Spanish looked down on the Indians for not having organized cultivation but going out and just digging up roots here and there and everywhere and so they called them diggers well by the time we move into this phase the Americans who have settled out here have picked up on that term and they've translated into English and it very conveniently rhymes with another derisive term that is very common in the United States and one that they will label the Indians with diggers becomes a very very common insult for Indians they call them diggers the Indians over half of the gold miners in 1848 the early gold rush 5000 of them were Indians over half were Indians but by 18-49 most of the Indians were completely out of the gold rush they just washed their hands of the whole thing and left the Indians first off don't know the value of gold so they are often cheated when they go to sell their gold they are offered far less for the gold than it's actually worth others will be beaten up have it stolen from them they will constantly face harassment and they will face attacks from other people who come in and faced attacks on the route to get to California most of the Indians who don't just automatically leave are labeled vagrant by the local governments and turned into indentured servants and basically put into forced labor there in California and so when the United States first starts setting up reservations out in the West California gets some of those early reservations very very quickly because they are pushing the federal government to do something about the Indians that they want out of their way and so the Indians oftentimes are put onto reservations fairly early on in the reservation period and the army is brought out to enforce that they are the ones putting the Indians into this reservation system so the gold rush really had a lot of social impact but it also fueled a massive rise of consumerism as well because a lot of the people who are digging up that gold starts spending money in lavish amounts so the gold rush becomes very very famous and it over almost instantly populates California far faster than anybody imagined possible in 1847 when California is obtained from Mexico in the mexican-american war people think it's going to be 15-20 years before California will have a sizable enough population to even think about starting to talk about statehood and instead California becomes a state in 1853 well really two and a half years after after it is acquired by the United States they're already applying for statehood as a free state so California enters the United States very very fast and it gets populated virtually overnight so the gold rush was very important for the west coast but it also will fuel the the coming consumer demand as now there is a demand to easily link-up California with the East Coast and so the railroads are going to start pushing towards each other and throughout the 1860s that push toward will join up the Transcontinental Railroad linking up Sacramento with the East Coast and eventually it will be extended from Sacramento all the way out to San Francisco when that happens America now becomes nationally linked in a unified economy and that will increase consumerism on a national scale to a whole different level we're pretty good wealth turns into big business this is the rise of the robber barons that we're talking about okay so this is basically how we transition out of the mercantilist period from the colonial era into the capitalist period of the early United States pre Civil War period ok so in the next lecture we'll talk a bit more about the post-civil war and the rise of the Second Industrial Revolution as well as some of the new businesses that the connecting up of east and west make possible but for lecture 14 that's it I will see you again in lecture number 15 have a good one