Industrial Transformation in the North, 1800–1850

This is Unit Nine, part two, and it turns from the machines to the people the machines sorted into classes. Part one closed with a canal that laid down the economic alignment of the Civil War. This half opens with the railroad that ran beside it and eventually took its traffic. Then the unit does something worth watching for. It asks four different northern classes what they thought about slavery, and gets four different answers — and not one of the four is chiefly about the enslaved. The final entry assembles them, and it is the most useful thing in this unit. By the end you will be able to explain why the transportation revolution let the sections diverge rather than converge. To state what the northern elite's interest in slavery was. To state the middle class's reason for opposing it. To explain why wage workers opposed abolition hardest of all. And to give all four positions together.

Three entries to finish the transport story, and the first is a correction.

Which canal was longest.

USH1 1232 The Longest Canal

The Wabash and Erie Canal opened in the early eighteen forties and stretched over four hundred fifty miles, the longest in North America — nearly a hundred miles longer than the Erie, and far less consequential. The Erie is the most important canal, not the longest. Calling it the longest would be wrong in the anchor's own terms.

The technology that replaced canals.

USH1 1233 The Mohawk and Hudson

The Mohawk and Hudson Railroad was the first to begin service with a steam locomotive, its inaugural train running in eighteen thirty-one on a track outside Albany, covering twelve miles in twenty-five minutes. The first American railroad ran beside the canal that had opened six years earlier, and would eventually take its traffic.

What speed meant.

USH1 1234 Speed and Scale

By eighteen forty the journey from Boston to Providence took half a day by train, against four days previously, and thirty thousand miles of railroad track had been laid by the outbreak of the Civil War. A day's travel had been a fixed human quantity for all of previous history. Within one generation it stopped being one.

Two entries on what all of it changed, and the first contains the argument.

What transport changed.

USH1 1235 What Transport Changed

The transportation revolution made it easier and less expensive to ship agricultural products from the West to feed people in eastern cities, and to send manufactured goods from the East to people in the West. That exchange turned a collection of local economies into a national one. Regions could now specialise, because a region that specialises must be able to buy what it no longer makes, and until the canals and railroads that had not been possible at any price a farmer could pay. Specialisation is the hinge. Once the North could buy its food and the South could buy its manufactures, each could commit entirely to what it did best, and their economies diverged rather than converging. The transportation revolution did not knit the sections together. It let them become different enough to fight.

What reached the countryside.

USH1 1236 The End of Rural Isolation

Rural isolation broke down as travelling circuses, menageries, peddlers and itinerant painters could now reach remote communities, bringing entertainment and goods to villages that had seen neither. A national market carries a national culture with it, which is what makes the reform movements of Unit Thirteen possible.

Now the first of our four classes, and the one with the most money.

Who owned it all.

USH1 1237 The Economic Elite

Northern merchants consolidated in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, many descended from colonial trading families dealing in tea, sugar, pepper and enslaved Africans, with networks reaching Europe, the West Indies and the Far East. After the War of eighteen twelve they moved into industrial capitalism, adding factories to banking, insurance and shipping.

One of them.

USH1 1238 Junius Spencer Morgan

Junius Spencer Morgan worked in the import business in Boston in the eighteen thirties, then formed a partnership with the London banker George Peabody, the firm renamed J. S. Morgan and Company in eighteen sixty-four. His son became a prominent financier, which is how a Boston import house becomes an American banking dynasty.

How the elite kept itself closed.

USH1 1239 Elite Institutions

Elite families made strategic marriages to protect and expand their economic interests, and lived in neighbourhoods segregated by wealth. There were ten chambers of commerce by eighteen fifty-eight, and the Philadelphia Club of eighteen thirty-four, first of the social clubs. These are institutions for excluding people, and we will shortly meet a man they excluded.

And where they stood on slavery.

USH1 1240 The Elite and Slavery

The northern economic elite exercised considerable power in local and state elections, and their ties to the cotton trade made them strong supporters of slavery — northern merchants whose fortunes depended on southern cotton reaching British mills. The most powerful men in the free states had a direct financial interest in slavery. Unit Twelve shows what they were buying.

The second class, which told a story about itself that America still tells.

The rival class beneath them.

USH1 1241 The Self-Made Manufacturers

A distinct class rose from working-class origins, embodying the dream of upward social mobility through hard work and discipline, and celebrating that work against both the leisured southern planter and the inheriting northern merchant. This is an ideology as much as a biography, and it is the origin of a story America still tells about itself.

Its best example.

USH1 1242 Peter Cooper

Peter Cooper tried various moneymaking enterprises before succeeding in the glue business, opening a Manhattan glue factory in the eighteen twenties and expanding into iron, and he built a steam locomotive in eighteen twenty-seven. Despite his wealth Cooper lived modestly, holding that respectability came through hard work, not family pedigree.

What the old elite did about him.

USH1 1243 Excluded from the Clubs

The inheriting elite excluded men like Cooper from their social clubs, so the manufacturers built institutions of their own — the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers of seventeen eighty-nine, promoting industrial arts and education as a pathway to economic success. Wealth did not buy entry. The distinction being defended was origin, not money.

And what Cooper built instead.

USH1 1244 Cooper Union

Cooper founded the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in eighteen fifty-nine, dedicated to education in technology, with admission based solely on ability, and race, sex and family connections having no place in it. The institution remained tuition-free until twenty fourteen. Read that admission rule against the clubs that excluded him.

The third class, and everything about it follows from one fear.

Who they were.

USH1 1245 The Middle Class

The middle class comprised artisans and small merchants owning small factories and stores — a class that agonised over the fear that they might slip into the ranks of wage labourers. Middle-class identity is defined by that anxiety. It explains the emphasis on respectability that follows.

What they valued.

USH1 1246 Middle-Class Values

The middle class prized cleanliness, discipline, morality, hard work, education and good manners above all, holding a settled conviction that hard work and education enabled them to rise in life. Each of those qualities is observable by neighbours, which is what makes them useful as markers of class position.

How they raised children.

USH1 1247 Middle-Class Children

Middle-class children did not work in factories. They attended school and in their free time engaged in self-improving activities such as reading or playing the piano, with toys and games chosen to teach the skills and values they would need. Families began limiting the number of children they had, because children no longer contributed economically and raising them correctly required money.

And the mother's role.

USH1 1248 The Cult of Domesticity

Middle-class women did not work for wages. Their job was to care for the children and keep the house in a state of order and cleanliness, often with a servant's help, cultivating manners and buying the consumer goods that displayed a family's success. Consumption became a woman's responsibility and a public statement about her household's standing.

Now the first of the four answers, and listen to the grounds it rests on.

Where the middle class stood on slavery.

USH1 1249 The Middle Class on Slavery

Northern business elites viewed slavery with ambivalence, because their fortunes ran through the cotton trade. Most members of the middle class took a dim view of it, and the anchor gives their reason precisely. Slavery promoted a culture of leisure, which was the antithesis of the middle-class view that dignity and respectability were achieved through work. Many became active in efforts to end it. That is opposition to slavery on grounds that have nothing to do with the enslaved. The objection is that slaveholding produces idle masters, not that it produces suffering. Unit Thirteen's abolitionists argue very differently, and the distinction explains why antislavery sentiment was widespread in the North while abolitionism stayed a minority.

The religion behind it.

USH1 1250 Temperance and Finney

The middle class promoted temperance, meaning abstinence from alcohol, and followed Protestant ministers such as Charles Grandison Finney, who preached that all people possessed free moral agency and could bring about their own salvation. A doctrine that a person makes their own fate matched the economic experience of a class that believed it had risen by effort.

The fourth class, which got least out of all of this.

Who they were.

USH1 1251 The Working Class

Industrialisation created a new class of wage workers with its own culture and neighbourhoods, who benefited least from it and continued to live what the anchor calls an often precarious existence. They suffered greatly during economic slumps such as the Panic of eighteen nineteen, which part one covered.

Who in the family worked.

USH1 1252 Family Labour

Working-class men aspired to keep their families out of employment, but often needed others besides the male head to contribute. Children attended school a few years or learned to read at Sunday school, education sacrificed when income was needed. Wives usually did not work for wages outside the home, but many took in laundry or piecework inside it.

What they did for relief.

USH1 1253 Taverns and Popular Culture

Workers built a festive public culture of release and escape from the drudgery of factory work, with taverns serving as places to forget the long hours and uncertain wages of the factories. Alcohol consumption was high among the working class, which is what the temperance campaign you heard about a moment ago was aimed at.

The showman who sold to them.

USH1 1254 P. T. Barnum

Phineas Taylor Barnum opened his American Museum in New York City in eighteen forty-one and achieved great success, with millions attending exhibits of human and animal oddities, almost all of which were hoaxes. The Feejee Mermaid was a half-monkey and half-fish stitched together, presented as authentic.

One entry now, and it corrects the assumption most people bring to it.

Where workers stood on abolition.

USH1 1255 Workers, Abolition and Immigration

Wage workers in the North were largely hostile to the abolition of slavery, fearing it would unleash more competition for jobs from free Black people, and they were hostile to immigration for the same reason. The pace of immigration accelerated in the eighteen forties and fifties as Europeans were drawn to the promise of employment and land, and the Roman Catholic population, fairly small before this period, began to swell with the arrival of the Irish and the Germans. The people with the least to lose economically from slavery's end were the most opposed to it, because they had the most to lose from competition. That calculation, not indifference, is what abolitionists had to argue against in the North.

And the last entry, which is what the whole unit has been assembling.

Four classes, four views.

USH1 1256 Four Classes, Four Views of Slavery

The anchor organises the whole section around one question, and the answers do not line up the way a student expects. The economic elite supported slavery because the cotton trade paid them. The self-made manufacturers celebrated work against the planter's leisure. The middle class opposed slavery because it promoted idleness and offended their theory of merit. And the wage workers, who owned nothing, opposed abolition hardest of all, because free Black labour would compete with theirs. Four positions on one institution, each following from where the holder stood in the northern economy. Not one of the four is primarily about the enslaved. Each is about what slavery meant for the person holding the opinion. This is the most useful frame in the unit for the exam's social-developments band, and it is the reason the North's opposition to slavery was so much narrower than its later reputation suggests. Unit Thirteen introduces the people who argued on entirely different grounds.

Look at what you can now do. You can explain why the transportation revolution let the sections diverge: specialisation is the hinge, and once each section could buy what it no longer made, each committed entirely to what it did best. You can state the northern elite's interest in slavery, which was a direct financial one through the cotton trade. You can state the middle class's reason for opposing slavery — that it promoted a culture of leisure against their theory that dignity is earned through work — and you can say what that reason is not about. You can explain why wage workers opposed abolition hardest of all, which was a calculation about competition rather than indifference. And you can give all four positions together, and name what they share: not one of them is chiefly about the enslaved.