hello and welcome to our market revolution lecture so we're going to kind of take a little break from electoral politics and who the president is and talk about some of the economic changes going on in the 1830s and some of the social changes triggered by these economic changes in this lecture and the next our focus questions today what changes in innovations comprised the market revolution and how did americans respond to the changes of the market revolution so let's dive in in 1820 80 percent of free labor forces people who work and aren't enslaved worked in agriculture it's an overwhelmingly agricultural nation but over the next 30 years by 1850 the us joined england as a world leader in industrialization largely due to increased consumption of american-made goods within the united states itself so the us is now making more products more of its people earn a living by making products and it's consuming more of its own products historians call the combined effects of economic growth and innovations in transportation and technology during the early 19th century the market revolution the market revolution it's all of these changes in the 1830s through 50s the increasing industrialization of the united states changes in technology and especially transportation and communication wage earning gradually replaced family labor or indentured servitude as the dominant labor system in the north so this is the rise of wage labor uh the cash economy began to eclipse the older informal systems of barter and trade where you know you grew one thing and you traded that for you know eggs from the farmer next door now you're going to sell those things for cash right so we have a cash economy we have a wage labor system that emerges during the market revolution so the market revolution where people worked for wages and bought goods was driven both by private and public investment states and towns used money from taxpayers and private investors to build turnpikes which we would call toll roads and later to finance both canals and railroads and that's going to make it easier to get those products around the united states to make them cheaper once they get there so that people can actually afford them and just kind of keep this system going the transportation revolution was part of the market revolution and it dramatically reduced transportation costs and shipping times it opened new markets for farmers and manufacturers and incentivized expanding production that is making more stuff now if you're a farmer and you know your product's gonna rot or go bad and i don't know three or four weeks well then that limits how far away you can send it you've got to be able to get it there within three to four weeks but as transportation becomes faster you can move it into further markets from yourself so you've got more opportunities to sell your goods in 1815 the cost of over land transportation was prohibitively high you could ship heavy goods by horse-drawn wagons 30 miles for the same price as shipping those goods 3000 miles across the atlantic it just takes a lot more time and effort to ship something over land water transportation was much cheaper but it was limited to oceans and navigable rivers so only farmers living somewhat close to a city or river could grow surplus crops for sales in outside markets outside just their kind of local gathering of the farmers that live in that region the transportation revolution changed that so if we take a look at the slide here we've got a couple of different routes new york city to chicago is a big one new york city to new orleans probably something we're more familiar with being in texas in 1800 that would take four weeks four weeks is a long time and a lot of goods are gonna go bad in that four weeks remember they don't have refrigeration yet eighteen thirty it's cut in half two weeks so if you've got a product that's good for three weeks you can now make this trip whereas you couldn't before and by 1860 takes less than a week right so we're still not amazon priming it here but we're getting much much closer and new york city to chicago or to charleston you really are within prime new york city to philadelphia even better so both the federal and state governments promoted and paid for the transportation revolution state governments furnished 70 of the funding for canals and about 50 percent of the funding for railroads so the fact that these are largely built by the government is also going to lead to some arguments later that they should you know be set up so that they really serve the public in a way that maybe a regular business wouldn't have to do because the public in large part pays for these things the federal government provided engineers for railroad surveys they lowered tariffs on iron to encourage this type of construction they granted subsidies to the railroads and what's a subsidy again oh when the government gives you money to go do something so the type of subsidy they give to most of these railroad companies is free public land if you want to build a railroad through taxes we will give you the land to come do it and we'll give you several miles on either side of the railroad so that not only do you own the railroad itself you own the best farmland next to the railroad and you own basically storage depots where you're going to store crops before they get on the railroad so plenty of opportunities to make money there if you have the ability to invest and build those railroads more than 1.3 million acres of federal land were just given to railroad companies to do this and the idea is that it will improve the american economy and it does there's a massive benefit here but like i said there's also going to be an argument down the road that these railroads are you know not treating farmers maybe the way they should and shouldn't they because they were created basically through public investment uh be treating americans a little better but that will come later in 1807 an entrepreneur named robert fulton piloted the claremont a new kind of boat powered by steam so he sends this thing 150 miles up the hudson river from new york city to albany now steamboats traveled upriver 10 times faster than keel boats which were basically pulled by men or mules so the river current is going one way if you want to go against that current you've gotta physically move against that current so they would tie ropes to it and have men or mules on the side of the river moving it now we have steamboats they can move much much faster by the 1820s steamboats had reduced the cost and time of upriver shipments by 90 percent so farmers began exporting agricultural products via steamship but they still couldn't go east because the navigable waterways didn't reach the atlantic ocean so in 1825 new york funded the erie canal the first and most successful artificial waterway basically in the world it stretched 364 miles from albany to buffalo a small port on lake erie and of course all of the great lakes do connect so if you can get from the great lakes over to the hudson river and then down and out to the atlantic you've just basically connected much of the eastern united states so it connects the great lakes to albany then to the hudson river south to new york city and out to the atlantic ocean by the 1840s it was pulling more western trade than new orleans so if you get you know out beyond where this map ends most farmers have been shipping goods down the mississippi river you're actually going to get more people going east through this the great lakes and the erie canal with their products after this thing opens so it just opens them up to much larger markets than they've ever had before we've also got some pictures of the canals and such the canal boom will take a hit with the panic of 1837 but most of them are already built by then in the 1830s railroads changed traditional notions of time and space because they moved so much faster than anything people were used to if i asked you how far how far it is from let's say dallas to houston you'd probably say four and a half five hours how far from houston to corpus four hours now we're not talking about how many hundreds of miles that is we're talking about how long it takes us to get there based on the most you know normal way of travel which is driving and that's why railroads change notions of time and space they change that most common way of travel and they drastically change the speed of that travel railroads moved at 15 to 20 miles per hour that's four times faster than canal boats and they are efficient effective and reliable now construction of railroads in the us began in the 1820s in the east and they kind of grow west so they'll always always start in the east and then grow into the west and you can see this a bit on the maps here we've got 1830 40 and 50. many many more lines in 1850 than in 1820 and they're kind of spreading out into what then was the west so these rail networks alter the north-south regional balance all of this movement between the old northeast and the old northwest made them more of a connected economic and cultural unit and you can also see here this is 1860 just before the civil war and which section of the country has more railroads and a greater ability to move men and material around the united states right the north bit uh so the south will really suffer with that during the civil war which we'll talk about a little bit more when we get there the transportation revolution was followed by a communications revolution which is all part of the market revolution we've got lots of revolutions going on the telegraph redefined the limits of human communication in the 1830s and 40s so proceed to the next part of the lecture page to learn about the invention of morse code