hi everybody this is part one of module five the market revolution and antebellum reform in part one we're going to talk and kind of general terms about what the market revolution is and then we'll focus on some of its specific effects on the workplace and the family as we move forward just in very general terms for now the market revolution took place between roughly 1815 and about 1860 so really the first half of the 1800s these are changes that were most heavily concentrated in the north as we'll see in a later unit the south is really not making a lot of evolution at this point in time and again just in very basic terms the market revolution is a transition away from a kind of local agricultural subsistence based economy where you're growing crops to support yourself and your family but probably not a whole lot more than that oftentimes a barter economy it's a shift away from that kind of scenario and towards an economy that's a lot more impersonal you know doing business with people that you don't necessarily know that well it's much more cash oriented so you're not getting paid in goods and services you're actually getting paid in currency and in economy that's a lot more commercialized so instead of just growing a little bit to support yourself you may be growing a surplus to sell on a market one aspect of the market revolution is the growth of commercial connections between the countryside and the cities in fact one element of the market revolution is the growth of cities where people are bringing goods and crops to be marketed and sold the the coal idea here is that people are increasingly connected to each other and connected over increasingly large distances simply through the act of doing business with each other it's these economic transactions that are really starting to tie people together and these changes don't just happen out of nowhere I think there have to be some conditions in place before this transformation can really kick off I think particularly improvements in transportation and improvements in manufacturing technology are going to help cause this revolution to start so let's perhaps start by focusing a little bit on transportation transportation developments are going to play a really key role in causing this whole economic transformation and I think the reason here is fairly obvious you need infrastructure to support economic growth the problem in the early 1800s as you can see from the slide is that transportation was pretty poor here on the left you see an example of a typical Road in in some of the interior regions of the country these are often nicknamed corduroy roads because they kind of resemble ordinary fabric and the idea here is that they've just made the road bed by chopping a path through the woods and then laying the trees down to form the base of the road well imagine traveling across a road like that you know how uncomfortable that's gonna be to travel across in a wagon just how bumpy and how jolting imagine trying to travel along a road like that if there's any kind of bad weather rain or snow you're gonna have mud you're gonna have trees down these roads are going to become just about impassable so what this means is if you're someone living in the interior parts of the country you're pretty isolated there's not good transportation into where you live and there's not a good way for you to really get out to the world around you so you're probably a subsistence farmer you know you're probably grown enough crops to feed yourself and your family maybe enough to sell in a local town but not a whole lot more than that because you just have no good way to ship stuff anywhere and your standard of living is probably pretty minimal pretty basic because there is no good way to get manufactured goods shipped into you you know trying to transport something across a road like this is going to be really expensive and you don't necessarily want to risk that investment because there's a chance that whatever you bought may get damaged or destroyed in transit so your style living is gonna be pretty limited here too and you can see just the pace of travel here in the other slide this is actually showing the rate of travel from New York City in 1800 each of these colors represents a difference by the time and can see that just to get from one end of New York to the other end of the state can take you as much as a week it can take as much as six weeks to get from New York City to st. Louis that's just how slow the pace of transportation is so that's at the beginning of the period that we're going to focus on but we're gonna see that improvements in manufacturing I'm sorry and transportation are gonna change all of this the spread of steamboats and canals and eventually railroads is going to make transportation a lot faster and easier and cheaper it's going to help open up whole sections of the country for economic development particularly the Midwest and the Great Lakes region um so if we look at the map here this is actually showing travel times at the end of the period in question again from New York City to other points well now you can see that to go from New York City to the end of the other side of the state you can do that in a day now to get from New York City to st. Louis it's only gonna take you about three days so your pace of travel has decreased from six weeks down to just three days to give you another example this is a map showing the spread of railroads so the lines that you see in green were the railroads in operation in 1850 the ones that you see in red are ones that have been added by about ten years later 1861 and just in looking at the map I think there's a couple things that we can see for one most of these railroads are being built in the north there's not nearly as much railroad construction happening in the south and if you look at where those railroads are going the ones being built in the north are increasingly connecting a lot of these East Coast cities with new cities that have started to emerge in the West places like Cincinnati or Indianapolis or Chicago you're building these railroad networks that are linking up these major urban centers we don't see the same kind of railroad networks being constructed in the south for one there's just not as many cities to begin with because this is much more of an agricultural society but I think what this really shows us is that the south is simply not investing in infrastructure in the way that the north is as we'll see the South is still a largely agricultural society a slave society a cash crop economy and so they're just not putting the same level of importance on this kind of infrastructure the way that the north is so again we see these two regions kind of moving along different directions well let's just focus on one of these transportation routes for a moment so we can get a sense of the kinds of transformation that can happen when one of these transportation routes opens up so let's just take the Erie Canal here for a few minutes the Erie Canal if you look at the map it's the very top one running through upstate New York it's connecting up the city of Albany on the eastern end with Buffalo or on the western end well that's one of the the first of these major transportation routes to open open for business in 1825 and it runs for about 350 miles but I think it's significance goes beyond this because it's not just connecting these two points on a map I think we need to consider the geography here for a second if you take Albany consider where Albany is located Albany is on the Hudson River well this is a major coastal River you can navigate the Hudson River all the way up to Albany so from Albany if you can get on the Hudson you can take that all the way down to New York City to the Atlantic Ocean you can potentially go anywhere up and down the East Coast so on the eastern end it's not just connecting Albany it's really connecting this whole eastern seaboard and the same thing is true on the western end look at where Buffalo is Buffalo is out on Lake Erie you can get to Buffalo get out on Lake Erie you can potentially get to this whole Great Lakes region in Ohio Michigan Indiana this whole Great Lakes region is now getting opened up for economic settlement and development so it's really linking not just these two points but these two whole region's and really facilitating at development out in the Great Lakes region it's also gonna have a really dramatic effect on this whole region's economy in society it's opening up full new markets for farmers living out in western New York before the canal came through they were probably just subsistence farmers you know growing enough to feed themselves and their families but not much more because they had no good way to ship it anywhere well now that the canal comes through everything changes because now these farmers have a cheap and easy way to transport things so they're gonna start growing surpluses of this crop most of these folks are wheat farmers so they're growing surplus of wheat that they can then sell on external markets they can ship this to New York City or Philadelphia or Baltimore on sell it a places far beyond their own local community so they're producing for external markets now and this time when they get paid they're not getting paid and barrels of whiskey or hogs or goods and services like that now they're actually getting paid in cash money that in itself is going to be transforming because these folks now have money to spend and they're going to start buying a lot of those manufactured items that they may have wanted for a long time but they either couldn't afford or they had no way to get it shipped to them now they have both and so we're gonna see these farmers quality of life starting to improve because they now have access to manufactured goods that they simply couldn't get before all along this whole Erie Canal route we start to see cities like Rochester and Syracuse just taking off we see manufacturing starting to develop in these cities because farmers who live in this region start thinking well why am i paying all this money to have stuff shipped to me from New York City why don't we have industry right here in our own local area so that I could buy these products locally so we start to see factories and other types of manufacturing emerging in this whole region so just the face of these societies is transforming so to kind of sum this up transportation improvements and manufacturing improvements are really going to kick off this whole market revolution this is essentially an expanding web of economic connections people doing business with each other over greater and greater distances producing not just for their own local market but for external markets and there is a lot of impersonality in this you know you're doing business with people that you don't necessarily know all that well there's a lot of opportunity here to do well but there's also a lot of risk because you can't always be sure if this broker in Philadelphia if he's giving you a good deal or if he's just trying to screw you over it's a lot harder to gauge that now we see the spread of industry in many of these communities that have been predominantly rural communities before as well as the growth of cities and increasingly the growth of a cash based economy people getting paid in actual currency rather than goods and services and that's going to help improve their standard of living as they can finally afford to buy these things that they might have wanted for a long time you know I think as a result of all of these changes people are increasingly connected to each other through the act of doing business with each other the family's whole economic livelihood is now becoming more and more dependent on these kinds of impersonal uncontrollable market relations you're no longer just this self-sufficient farmer growing crops for yourself now you're part of these much larger webs of interaction that stretch far beyond your own community again there's a lot of opportunity there but there's also a lot of risk and this may not seem that unusual to us because this is how our economy operates in the 21st century you think about what's happening at the moment the fact that we may have meat shortages because our supply chains are getting disrupted you know halfway around the country that to us makes sense we understand how we have this ripple effect that's what's new to people in the 19th century the fact that the the family they could lose everything through factors that are completely out of their hands and things they have no control over that's something that they really are struggling to get their head around on so we'll talk about how they cope with this kind of uncertainty in later module