CHAPTER 15 FORGING THE NATIONAL ECONOMY 1790-1860 THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT • Andrew Jackson was the first president from beyond the Appalachian Mountains. o His election exemplified the inexorable westward march of the American people. • The West with its raw frontier, was the most typically American part of America. • The Republic was young, and so were the people –as late as 1850, half of Americans were under the age of thirty • By 1840, the demographic center of the American population has crossed the Alleghenies. • Contrary to legend, in reality, life was downright grim for most pioneer families. o They were poorly feed, ill clad, housed in hastily erected shanties and were perpetual victims of disease, depression, and premature death. Unbearable loneliness haunted them, especially among women. Breakdowns and madness were all too frequent. • Frontier life was also tough and crude for men as well. o No-holds-barred wrestling, which permitted such niceties as the biting off of noses and the gouging out of eyes, was a popular entertainment. • Pioneering Americans, marooned by geography, were often ill informed, superstitious, provincial, and fiercely individualistic. SHAPING THE WESTERN LANDSCAPE • The westward movement also molded the physical environment. Pioneers in a hurry often exhausted the land in the tobacco regions and then pushed on, leaving behind barren and rain-gutted fields. • By the 1820s American fur traders were setting their trap-lines all over the vast Rocky Mountain region. • The fur trapping empire was based on the “rendezvous” system. o Each summer, traders ventured from St. Louis to a verdant Rocky Mountain valley, made camp, and waited for the trappers and Indians to arrive with beaver pelts to swap for manufactured goods from the East. o This trade thrived for some two decades, until the beavers has all but disappeared. • Trade in buffalo robes also flourished, leading eventually to the virtually total annihilation of the massive bison heard that once blanked the western parries. • Still farther east, on the California coast, other traders brought up prodigious quantities of sea-otter pelts, driving them to the point of near extinction. • Yet Americans in this period also reverenced nature and admired its beauty. o Indeed the spirit of nationalism feed the growing appreciation of the uniqueness of the American wilderness. • Other countries might have impressive mountains or sparkling rivers, but none had the pristine, natural beauty of America, unspoiled by human hands. • George Catlin, a painter and student of Native American life, was among the first Americans to advocate the preservation of nature as a deliberate national policy. o In 1832, he observed Sioux Indians in South Dakota recklessly slaughtering buffalo in order to trade the animals’ tongues for the white man’s whiskey. o Catlin then proposed the creation of a national park. His idea later bore fruit, with the creation of a national park system, beginning with Yellowstone Park in 1872. THE MARCH OF THE MILLIONS • As the American people moved west, they also multiplied at an amazing rate. My midcentury the population was still doubling approximately every twenty-five years, as in fertile colonial days. • By 1860, the original thirteen states had more than doubled in number: thirty-three stars graced the American flag. • The United States was the fourth most populous nation in the western world, exceeded only by three European countries –Russia, France, and Austria. • Urban growth continued explosively. o In 1790, there had been only two American cities that could boast populations of 20,000 or more: Philadelphia and New York. o By 1860 there were forty-three; and about three hundred other places claimed over 5,000 inhabitants apiece. o New York was the metropolis; New Orleans, the “Queen of the South”; and Chicago, the swaggering lord of the Midwest, destined to be “hog butcher for the world” • Such overrapid urbanization unfortunately brought undesirable by products. It intensified the problems of smelly slums, feeble street lighting, inadequate policing, impure water, foul sewage, ravenous rats, and improper garbage disposal. • A continuing high birthrate accounted for most of the increase in population, but by the 1840s the tides of immigration were adding hundreds of thousands more. Before this decade, immigrants had been flowing in at a rate of 60,000 a year; but suddenly he influx was tripled in the 1840s and then quadrupled in the 1850s. o During these two feverish decades, over a million and a half Irish, and nearly as many Germans, swarmed down the gangplanks. • The immigrants came partly because Europe seemed to be running out of room. o Of the nearly 60 million people who left Europe in the century after 1840, about 25 million went somewhere other than the United States. • Yet America still beckoned most strongly to the struggling masses of Europe, and the majority of migrants headed from the “land of freedom and opportunity.” o There was freedom from aristocratic caste and state church; there was abundant opportunity to secure broad acres and better one’s condition. o “America Letters” were sent home by immigrants, often describing in glowing terms the richer life: lower taxes, no compulsory military service, and ”three meat meals a day.” • The introduction of transoceanic steamships also meant that the immigrants could come speedily. THE EMERALD ISLE MOVES WEST • Ireland, already groaning under the heavy hand of British overlords, was prostrated in the mid-1840s. • A terrible rot attacked the potato crop, on which the people had become dangerously dependent, and about one-fourth of them were swept away by disease and hunger. All told about 2 million perished. o Tens of thousands of destitute soils, fleeing the Land of Famine for the land of Plenty, flocked to America in the “Black Forties.” • Ireland’s greatest export has been population; and the Irish take their place beside the Jews and the Africans as a dispersed people. • These uprooted newcomers –too poor to mover west –swarmed into the larger seaboard cities. o Noteworthy were Boston and particularly New York, which rapidly became the largest Irish city in the world. • The luckless Irish were forced to live in squalor, rudely cramped into already-vile slums. • As wage-depressing competitors for jobs, the Irish were hated by native workers. “No Irish need Apply” o The Irish, for similar reasons fiercely resented the blacks, with whom they shared societies basement. • “Hands across the water, water, hands across the skyyyy” • The friendless “Famine Irish” were left to fend for themselves. • The Irish tended to remain in low-skill occupations but gradually improved their lot, usually by acquiring modest amounts of property. o The education of children was cut short as families struggled to save money to purchase a home. • Politics quickly attracted these gregarious Gaelic newcomers. They soon began to gain control of powerful city machines. • American politics made haste to cultivate the Irish vote o Politicians harness the Irish hatred of the British by firing verbal volleys at London. THE GERMAN FORTY-EIGHTERS • The influx of refugees from Germany between 1830 and 1860 was hardly less spectacular than that from Ireland. Over a million and a half Germans stepped onto American soil. • The bulk of them were uprooted farmers, displaced by crop failures and other hardships. • But a strong sprinkling were liberal political refugees, saddened by the collapse of the democratic revolutions of 1848, they had decided to flee to America. o Germany’s loss was America’s gain. Zealous German liberals, such as Carl Schurz, contributed richly to the elevation of American political life. • Many of the German newcomers possessed a modest amount of materials goods. Most pushed out to the Middle West, notably Wisconsin, where they settled and established model farms. o German contributions to American culture include the Conestoga wagon, the Christmas tree, and the Kentucky rifle. They supported public schools, including their kindergarten. • They became relentless enemies of slavery during the fevered years before the Civil War. • The Germans –often dubbed “damned Dutchmen” –were occasionally regarded with suspicion. o Seeking to preserve their language, they sometimes settled in compact colonies and kept aloof from the surrounding communities. o Accustomed to the “Continental Sunday” and uncurbed by Puritan tradition, they made merry on the Sabbath and drank large quantities of beer. FLARE-UPS OF ANTIFOREIGNISM • The invasion by this so-called immigrant “rabble: in the 1840s and 1850s inflamed the prejudices of American “nativists.” They feared these foreign hordes would outbreed, outvote, and overwhelm the old “native” stock. o Not only did they take jobs from other “native” Americans, but the bulk of the displaced Irish and a substantial minority of the Germans were Roman Catholics. • Roman Catholics were now on the move, seeking to protect their children from Protestant indoctrination in the public schools, they began in the 1840s to construct their own separate Catholic educational system. • With the influx of the Irish and Germans in the 1840s and 1850s, the Catholics became a powerful religious group. o In 1840, they ranked fifth. In 1850, with some 1.8 million, they had bounded into first place. A position they have never lost. • Older-stock Americans were alarmed by these mounting figures. In 1849 they formed the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which developed into the American, or “Know-Nothing,” party. o They promoted a lurid literature exposure, much of it pure fiction. • Even uglier was the occasional mass violence. As early as 1834 a Catholic convent near Boston was burned by a howling mob, and in ensuing years a few scattered attacks fell upon Catholic schools and churches. • Immigrants were undeniably making America a more pluralistic society –one of the most ethnically and racially varied in the history of the world. o Immigrants and the American economy, in short, needed one another. Without them, the United States may have just watched the Industrial Revolution in envy. THE MARCH OF MECHANIZATION • A group of gifted inventors, beginning about 1750, perfected a series of machines for the mass production of textiles. With the help of steam, human muscle power was multiplied some ten thousand fold and ushered in the modern factory system –and with it, the so-called Industrial Revolution. o This revolution was accompanied by a transformation in agriculture and in the methods of transportation and communication • The factory system gradually spread from England –“the world’s workshop” to other lands. It took a generation or so to reach western Europe, and then the United States. • Why did it take so long for the youthful republic destined to be an industrial giant to embrace the machine? o Soil in America was cheap. Descendants of land-starved peasants would rather till their own acres then coop themselves up in a smelly factory. o Labor was generally scarce, until immigrants began to push ashore in the 1840s. o Money for capital investment was not plentiful in pioneer America. o Raw materials lay undeveloped, undiscovered, or unsuspected. • Just as labor was scarce, so were consumers. The young country lacked a domestic market large enough to make factory-scale manufacturing profitable. • Long-established British factories, which provided competition and superiority poised another problem. • The British enjoyed a monopoly of the textile machinery, allowing nothing to be exported. WHITNEY ENDS THE FIBER FAMINE • Samuel Slater has been acclaimed the “Father of the Factory System” in America and seldom can the paternity of a movement more properly be ascribed to one person. • A skilled British mechanic of twenty-one, he was attracted by the bounties being offered to English workers familiar with the textile machines. o Slater memorized the plans for the machinery and escaped in disguise to America, where he won the backing of Moses Brown, a Quaker capitalist in Rhode Island. • In 1791, he put into operation the first efficient American machinery for spinning cotton thread. • Handpicking one pound of cotton fiber was a full day’s work for one slave. • Eli Whitney, within ten days, in 1793, built a crude machine called the cotton gin that was fifty times more effective than hand picking. o Few machines have ever wrought so wondrous a change. The gin affected not only the history of America, but that of the world. Almost overnight the raising of cotton became profitable . • The south and north both prospered . Slave-driving planters cleared more acres for cotton, pushing the Cotton Kingdom westward off the depleted tide water plains. • The American phase of the Industrial Revolution, was well on its way. • Factories at first flourished most actively in New England, though they branched out into the more populous areas of New York, New jersey, and Pennsylvania. • New England was favored because of its stony soil discouraged farming and hence made manufacturing more attractive than elsewhere, relatively dense population, accessible sea ports, and rapid rivers, able to provide water power. • By 1860, more than 400 million pounds of southern cotton poured annually into mostly New England.