Okay, here we are. So another one of these infamous video recordings, this one over the year 1815, 1815. So kind of weird why the year 1815 is actually an interesting year. The War of 1812 is over.
And so America has begun recovering from the War of 1812. Also, the Napoleonic Wars are over. And so there's no longer the issue of America really having to. deal with trade underneath the shadow of this ongoing competition between England and France. And so that is all over. And in some ways, England is going to be rather benign presence on the Atlantic Ocean, allowing America now to just to change their look from the Atlantic to look from the Atlantic to the continent.
Do you like the way I move my face there to illustrate that. So 1815, 1815. Okay. So just. Just some things about 1850. The largest city in North America is Mexico City. It is still under Spanish control, 150,000 people.
The two largest American cities are Philadelphia and New York. Both have about 75,000 people each. In 1820, a scholar of the day named Jedediah Morse sorry, I got notes over here. This is what I'm looking at.
Jedediah Morse estimated there were 472,000 Native Americans living west of the Mississippi in the newly purchased Louisiana Territory. In the year 1600, estimates of maybe 5 to 10 million Native Americans lived there. So again, about 500,000 there in 1815 on the plains, living incredibly varied, diverse lives. Oftentimes, depending on the buffalo, following the buffalo herds nomadically. About five buffalo, five buffalo per person per year, I've read.
was needed to sustain a Native American following the buffalo herds, five buffalo per person per year. And already by 1840, overhunting was already becoming a problem for the buffalo. Thanks to the mobility of the horse, which also, along with allowing movement, was causing Native people to come into contact with white settlers, which was also spreading disease along with the trade.
For white Americans, life is dirty, smelly. painful, full of toil, kind of like this class. Most people go barefoot because in 1815, because shoes are really heavy and expensive and uncomfortable.
Most wore heavy fabric covering their bodies all year round, including summers, believing that sun was bad for their skin. And I myself can testify to this. Because I'm much older and my ears are still peeling right now, slightly peeling.
Because when I was in high school and college, I used to lifeguard and I would burn the back of my ears as I overshare about my life. And now I'm just waiting for the day that my doctor says, hey, listen, we're going to have to do something about that. So there you go.
If you're curious about my peeling ears, I just thought I would share that. Most people bathe about once a year. In 1832, a doctor said that 80% of his patients did not bathe from year to year.
Having an outhouse or an outdoor privy was considered a luxury, and most people just went in the fields or in the woods. You just went. There's no indoor light except from fire, and candles were smoky. Everyone slept in the same room near the fire, especially in winter. And there is almost no privacy at all, which brings me to the mysterious next.
thing I'm going to say. There is a very high birth rate. So there's got to be privacy somewhere, right? I don't know.
I don't know. People married earlier than in Europe and the American population is going to double about every 20 years. The average man is five foot eight inches tall, four inches taller than his European counterpart.
And this American average will remain about the same until World War II. Most Americans are healthier than the European counterpart thanks to a healthier... though monotonous diet, Americans moved west for land to tend to live in more isolated areas, which protected them from disease. And I was just thinking about this. There's a smallpox, massive smallpox outbreak in the American Revolution.
And of course, you have the bird flu in 1918. So between the American Revolution in the 1770s and the terrible bird flu of 1918, I can't think of a massive pandemic that swept the United States. And so people are tending to, and again, people are moving west, and so they're more isolated. And so they're not as apt to. to get sick.
In the North, most people eat wheat and beef. In the South, corn and pork. Fruit is eaten only in seasons, and no one eats salads. And I would like to say, I proudly continue the tradition today of not eating salads.
I really should. But instead, why eat salads when you can eat sugar? There were very few unmarried farmers because it was very hard to run a farm alone.
Husbands and wife both both worked very hard for survival. In 1800, 95% of Americans lived in rural areas with an average of seven children per household. By 1860, 80% of the population lived in rural areas with an average of five children per household. And of course, 2020, I just looked this up because I was curious about this.
1.93 children per household. I don't know where that other 0.07 child went. 1.93 children per household is under 18. And the rural population is about 17.3%.
So there it is for 2020. Technology is largely unchanged in 1815. You are using the same kind of plow that they used when the Norman invasion happened as early as 1066 in the Norman conquest. There's not enough animals for the land, so there's not enough fertilizer. Fences are put up to keep animals out. Not in.
And clearing land is incredibly hard. Many just left tree stumps there. It was too much work to dig them out.
In 1815, the median age is 16. Only one in eight is over 43. Childbirth is agony and dangerous. Forty five percent of children born in 1815 did not make it to five years old. Ownership of land is everything.
You cannot depend on the good. Ownership of land is everything. And you have to oftentimes depend upon the goodwill of other people. There is also no longer a system of hierarchy. Right.
Before this, oftentimes you would doff your cap or maybe bow. But now you shake your hands and you shake your hands like we shake hands still. I mean, still shaking hands is a symbol of of equality, of reciprocity. Right.
It's it's it's it's it's not. where one person is better than someone else, I'm shaking someone's hand because they're like me in some ways. People usually lived in smaller communities or near small communities with other individuals and did try to enter into the market economy as much as they could, but it was challenging, very challenging. The further west you got, because roads are terrible, all long distances are traveled by water to transfer goods nine miles in 1850, nine miles.
could cost $9, the same amount of money to send your goods to Europe. Most people live near the coastline in the West. Because of the difficulty of moving crops to market, many would distill their corn into whiskey, which I'm actually doing in the other room right now. I'm just kidding. I'm not actually doing that at all.
My wife would never let me do that. But let me just say this about this. Whiskey became so important in early America before the temperance movement that whiskey was actually used as a barter good. And it actually led to a growth of alcoholism on especially in the frontier.
Women play an important role, of course, in families. They are often the ones who establish the contacts with peddlers. Oftentimes, the way you would enter into a market economy is someone would come to your house and sell different goods to you.
And that's how goods slowly made their way into the house. And it was very simple. Maybe a new cup or a book.
or a clock, very kind of simple things, not ostentatious. But everyone looks to engage in the market economy in some ways. Everyone is looking to buy something and sell something that extra. Everyone wants to do this.
And few live 100% lives of isolation and pure subsistence. Most people are entering into cooperation economically with other people around them as much as they're able to. By 1815, Of the 8.4 million Americans, 1.4 million are slaves. Except for the South, few in the North continue to justify slavery.
And most in the North began to see slavery as regrettable and against Christian decency. Pennsylvania and the New England states had already gotten rid of slavery. Completely. And New Jersey and Delaware had gradually emancipated the slaves, which meant that once a slave had basically reached a certain age, they would be emancipated. But by the 1840s, New Jersey still had New Jersey still had a few hundred slaves.
And the line between free and slave state was also not as sharply drawn. Cities were far better places for slaves, and many slaves in cities were allowed to hire out their free time, which meant that they would work for their master, their owner. And then in their free time, they would work for someone else on their own, and that money they would actually use to buy their freedom.
By 1830, 80% of the African-American population in Baltimore is free, while in New Orleans, it's only about 20%, 20 to 40%. And you can see this when we're about in reading Frederick Douglass. Because Douglass is in and around Baltimore, and you can see how his life in Baltimore is different than his life on the rural plantation.
By 1815, there are as many, there are about 200,000 free African-Americans, most of these living in cities. 20% of the merchant marine and whaling fleet is made up of African-Americans. You can also see this in Melville. If you've read Moby Dick, there goes the white whale.
Sorry, I don't know what's happening. Slavery endures in the South because of the profitability of cotton. One in three families owned at least one slave.
One in eight families owned at least 20 slaves. Well, over one half, and the people that owned the families, one in eight families owning over 20 slaves or more, that is one half of the slave population. And everything is going to be transformed after 1815 because of cotton.
The end of the War of 1812 opens up British... textile markets to American cotton, just as the industrial revolution is exploding. And it really takes off fast. So all of a sudden, you have this market waiting for this cotton.
And by the way, cotton was transformed, especially by the invention in 1793 of the cotton gin by Elap Whitney, a very simple device, very small, where you can make it much bigger on scale, where you literally turn this wheel and these teeth. are able to bring the seed from the cotton and you can do you can basically process cotton in a much much quicker way also around 1813 american textile factories are starting so the north is also complicit in the slavery that's going to expand and slavery does indeed expand because of cotton it is a highly profitable good and will become america's leading export because these different places use cotton to make these textiles the average the Slave owner is 43. The average slave is under 18. Oftentimes this created this idea of paternalism and what Americans in the South began to call the peculiar institution. It was a way of justifying slavery. But oftentimes there was there was in large plantations. There was always an overseer that was the middleman between the owner and the slave.
And it was easy for the owner to believe that they were trying to help these poor slaves. when they didn't see the incredible cruelty of the overseer. It was oftentimes not necessarily the owner in these large plantations that inflicted terrible violence. It was the overseer who inflicted this violence on behalf of the owner.
Most slaves actually had relatively good health, not because of any kindness towards the slave. Obviously slavery is a life of just death, right? It's utterly terrible and brutal and just, incomprehensibly bad, but their diets weren't terrible because the owners needed them to work.
And so there was an incentive to basically have slaves that were fed well enough that they could go out and do these works, especially out on the cotton, on these large cotton plantations, as the land in Mississippi and Alabama opened up. About one half of slaves lived on plantations with at least 30, about one half of slaves lived on plantations with at least 30 slaves. And it's about 1815 as well that the ideas of slavery start to change.
It begins to move from discomfort. In 1820, Thomas Jefferson says about slavery, it's like having a wolf by the ears. You don't like it, but you don't know what to do with it. But really about after 1815 and the explosion of cotton in America and the incredible profitability of cotton, suddenly people in the South are not really justified, not not nearly as troubled by it.
but began to find new means of justifying it as a peculiar institution as they seriously create their entire life and wealth based on the backs of these slaves, especially making cotton. It is cotton that explodes the slavery that already existed, but causes slavery to explode in the South after 1850. So there we go. 1850. Thanks for watching. Hope you're doing well.
Thanks.