today we're going to take a break from looking at american history through the perspective of politics instead we're going to look at economic and social changes affecting america in the first half of the 19th century but america at this time is still a collection of regions and so the changes i'm going to spend time on today fall more heavily on the north and the western parts of the nation than they do the south these themes and terms cover economic cultural and religious changes in the first half of the 19th century america remains predominantly an agricultural economy throughout the 19th century but there are signs of change in the north and in the west in particular the older model of mainly subsistence farming with small local market sales of the excess gets replaced by larger farms in different areas specializing in different crops to serve and sell to the emerging internal markets inside the continental united states the expansion of the size of the farms brings on interactions with new kinds of credit that will stimulate even further growth that's different from the south which remains wedded to an economic agricultural model honed in the 18th century where the reliance is on much land supporting the yield of a single product to be sold largely overseas in exchange for cash and also the importation of finished goods the south is much less interested in the internal market it is also much less interested in developing the capacity to produce finished goods here inside the united states the north and west will make much more use of new technologies than will the south for the south the cotton gin is going to be the technology that ironically weds the south even more tightly to the older model and the growth of cotton there are two kinds of technology that affect economic growth the first is technology that directly impacts the production of something that allows you to produce more for less cost in a shorter amount of time the steel plow and the mechanical reaper fall into that category the second kind of technology is related to communication or the ability to create an economic network that can be widened that can expand your economic reach the telegraph is that kind of technology it allows for communication across vast spaces in short amounts of time now the communication is pretty rudimentary you send out pulse signals by holding down a telegraph key upper right for short or long bursts of time and each alphabet letter translates into a collection of short bursts and longer bursts you can spell out what you need to say if you are going to serve markets beyond your local reach this kind of communication is essential and as you can see in the first half of the 19th century it spreads very quickly even faster than does the ability to move actual product over long distances that we will see in the next slide technology also impacts transportation at the start of the republic the only game in town was a roadway to take wagons over land on roads that are carved out of the wilderness and there is some energy put in that direction early in the republic there's also a debate about whether the national government should be funding these kinds of things the national road was an experiment in federal funding but it was not replicated it was not repeated by the national government rather constructing roadways became private enterprises in conjunction with the states but that tech not there's no technology other than the wagon wheel involved here and it's pretty slow going to move your product water and moving across the waterway held greater promise and you see the roadway era give way to what we call the canal era in the premier canal that stimulated the growth of all the other ones on the upper slop upper image on this slide was the erie canal funded by the state of new york selling bonds which they redeemed for profit in a very short amount of time connecting albany to buffalo or the hudson river to lake erie and then down the hudson river to the port of new york the erie canal made new york state in the 19th century the economic powerhouse in the nation and as you can see other waterways other places tried to reproduce the magic to use the water to push product more quickly than it could be done by land but canals were limited obviously to where the waterways ran and you could build and add on to them and work with the geography but you simply could not build a canal from scratch there had to be some waterway access that you would manipulate to make a workable canal when technology comes along that allows you to build transportation routes anywhere you want that to happen we will abandon the canal era and move on to the railroad era the steam engine is important in all of this it's the steam engine that makes moving along the rivers quicker it is the steam engine that will allow you to construct a railroad a locomotive to pull cars full of product to market you can see between 1850 and 1860 the network of railroads built throughout the eastern half of the nation notice too that the density of the railroad construction is primarily in the north and what we call today the midwest yes there are railroads in the south but not anywhere near as many that's because the agricultural model in the south relied on using the coastline to load ships and then send your product overseas a growing economy has implications for where and how people live we're going to see the increased size of existing cities we're also going to see the development of new cities in the interior particularly as the railroad era takes hold and lines converge on a single site a hub site if you will which ends up becoming a significant new city chicago st louis cincinnati fall into that category the lower image in the slide illustrates again that change is more significant or denser in the north and west than it is in the south the number of new cities the the increase in population is felt more largely in those northern and western areas northeastern america also enters the industrial revolution that means the manufacturer of finished goods using machines to do some or all of the work this industrial production relies on the use of new technologies just like the transportation revolution here it's a reliance on the steam engine so the earliest factories are the ones are clustered near water power sources large factories with many machines incentivize people to locate near to those machines and this also creates the nucleus or the building blocks for cities and that's why we saw so much dense city growth in the northeast on the prior slide the wage labor system replaces the peace labor system and by that i mean people used to be paid for something they produced a piece a good often by hand now people who work in the manufacturing of mostly textiles that's the earliest kind of manufacturing but the people who work in this industry are paid by the length of time they are at work so they are given wages wages are calculated by the hour so labor in america is changing it's going from someone who produces an entire product to someone who is part of a process that produces a finished good this is also the beginning of the need for less skilled labor machines taking on part or all of the production process simply requires someone to operate the machine not to have the expertise to produce the good itself early on most of the workers in this new industry in new england the textile industry are native born and i'll talk about that more on the next slide people who are already in the united states as this industrial sector grows however immigrants will increasingly represent the industrial workforce and they will serve as competitors to the native born for these jobs by the time you get to the middle of the 19th century you are going to have tension between immigrants and native born over things like economic competition there will actually be a short-lived political party called the american party or the know-nothings that that rises in the 1850s and it's really an anti-immigrant party it doesn't get much traction because as we're going to see later on the 1850s becomes all about sectionalism and conflicts over slavery an anti-immigrant party doesn't really have a place in that issue the story of the lowell mill girls gives a glimpse into how the emerging industrial revolution played out in new england these early textile factories were positioned in places by rivers the owners of the factories were looking for an available workforce among the native born that availability was really a small cohort of young unmarried females they were too old to go to school too young to be married they were also less essential on the home farm parents agreed to allow their young daughters to work in this new industry provided the owners of the factories agreed to serve in loco parentis which means in place of the parents the factory owner committed to creating an environment where the owner and staff functioned as parents watching over the young girls these girls left home stayed in boarding houses near to the factories they were chaperoned whenever they went into the local town for the young women it was a trade-off it was a chance to get away from home see something of the world for the owners it was a small price to pay for a ready-made workforce however as more people got into the textile industry as more factories were built competition lowered prices and as the nation also fell into a depression or panic in the late 1830s owners looked for ways to cut costs workers salaries were one such way young low mill girls experienced cut pay and work extensions being forced to work longer hours for the same pay or less pay these girls story also illustrates how workers try to respond and workers besides young women will take this path as well going forward they tried to organize into what we would call a union in 1836 the young ladies created the factory girl association and they went out on strike over these issues for the young ladies there were too many things working against them for their strikes to be successful the owners had all the cards they could fire the young women and hire someone else they also knew that the young girls were not making a career in the factory so the likelihood that they would persist in these work actions wasn't high and then finally the new immigrant workforce came in and was willing to work for wages lower than native born workers were willing to work low girls were priced out of the competitive market the difficulties of the lowell mill girls reflected what we would call an unstable economy overall the economy was growing but it grew in peaks and valleys like a roller coaster and the economic problems are listed for you on the slide when periods of downturn came they were called panics and you can see that before the civil war there were three such panics remember the bank controversy from the jackson era that stimulated the panic of 1837. so there were lots of forces creating an unstable economy some of them were the basic infrastructure of finance some of them were political manipulations finally some of it was the problem of oversaturated markets of too many people jumping in to an industrial area too quickly over saturating the market causing ruinous competition among those that were in that industrial sector lowering the wages of the workers as it did for the old girls the lowell girls represented a segment of the economy that comes to be called the working class there is another group in american society that actually emerges during this period and does phenomenally well it becomes representative of what most americans hope the country will be like and how the people in the country will comport themselves this segment of the population we're going to call the middle class it didn't exist before there had always been the very wealthy going back to the early days of the republic in the landed gentry there had always been workers but here we have a segment of the population that is different yet again it is well off yet not elite and so the middle class can be defined in a couple of different ways but take as the nucleus of the middle class the family unit if we define the middle class economically we are going to look at the bread winner in that unit typically the male almost exclusively the male and that becomes important later with cultural definition but economically the male makes a good living enough to take care of his family comfortably nor does he labor by the hour he is not tied to his work for a set number of hours rather he's what we call salaried he is compensated for his expertise and for for his general ability to fulfill a set of tasks which we he can organize on his own time examples of the salaried middle class family member mail that develops in this period would be the manager of the factory the emerging professions that go along with in a more complicated economy like an accountant or a bookkeeper or a lawyer and then the professionals become part of this middle class cohort that's an economic definition it's based on what the breadwinner does for a living and how his compensation is structured culturally it covers the entire family and this will bring in the female in the family there is a division of labor bigender male and female that is very very clear the roles are crystal in their articulation and they are very separate the next slide will emphasize that there are also a set of behaviors proper ways to appear in public to speak with each other that signify gentility that signify that middle class status the gender roles were so clearly divided in the middle class that they were referred to as separate spheres that there was a male world and a female world and it was in the marriage in the family that was created where these separate spheres overlapped in a kind of venn diagram shaded area the male world was the world of work of commerce of public life the female world was the private world home religion in the system theoretically operated according to the best qualities of both men and women that women's nature men's nature made them suitable for their spheres that a woman's nature made her unsuited to go out into the rough and tumble world and a man's aggressive nature made him unsuited to raise the children this system was broadly accepted across the culture it permeated down to the working class there were expectations even there that the poor should aspire to be like the middle class it permeated upward into the elite who were expected to practice this world order on their own and to practice the kind of attitudes and virtues associated with the middle class all the good things of the middle class the illustration on the slide represents sort of how this was supposed to operate in the upper right the male and female get married they create a family and as you can see there are separate locations the upper left is only an area for the mother with her children teaching them educating them giving them moral guidance the lower left is where the husband comes home and retreats into the sanctuary of the home that the wife has made where he can recharge he can also get some of her moral energy so that when he goes back out into the world he is not going to become greedy or he's not going to break the law now there are places in the marriage where husbands and wives interact together and we see in the center the meal time and in the lower right some edifying social time after the meal this is largely how american life was expected to operate this is the outline as opposed to the reality in reality there are always exceptions and things that did and did not work well but the power of the outline was very very strong lots of changes taking place in america at this time there were those economic changes cultural redefinitions and finally an enormous religious awakening the second great awakening lasts roughly from 1800 to 1840 it has a much broader and deeper impact on american life than did the first great awakening of the 1700s it begins tightly focused on the issue of religious salvation the message carried by the preachers was that every individual person had the ability to ensure his own personal salvation he simply needed to commit to it and commit to living a religious and moral life many people attended religious revivals took this to heart and and committed to a life of salvation but beyond that people started to look around them and felt compelled to carry their message of salvation to others to uplift others religiously to where they were but also to uplift them in every other way at the same time and so what was intensely personal and religious becomes more community-based and reform oriented over time the long-lasting impact of the second grade awakening is the are the creation of reform organizations taking on reform issues and making them national issues most specifically the abolition movement stems in many ways or is re-energized in the 19th century because of the second great awakening women were the source of religion and morality within the home as such they were able to be a huge part of the second great awakening and then the reform movements that come out of that awakening the awakening's emphasis religiously was on personal salvation one's voluntary commitment to god the reform movements that come out of the religious side of things begin by seeking people's voluntary commitment to change to changing behavior or whatever over time as the movements grow and the number of people whose behavior has to change grows the movements will embrace coercive methods of reform not just voluntary reform by individuals but blanket injunctions that x and such behavior must either be abandoned or followed the example that i'm going to give you is of the american temperance society the reform of alcohol consumption and that was indeed a huge problem a growing problem in the 19th century people drank too much too often and it interfered with their lives the american temperance society was an early reform organization that spread largely across the east and northeast it goal was to get people to understand that their drinking had bad consequences if someone was educated then they would voluntarily commit to abstinence to stop drinking over time as reaching everyone who drank became problematic and more and more people drank simply because the population was growing the reform movement would shift tactics it would move towards getting local laws state sanctions and ultimately the federal government to pass laws regulating alcohol consumption by the time we get to the 20th century that regulation is going to be called prohibition and america from 1920 to 1943 will flirt with trying to make that happen it will be a failure