Market revolution: industrialization

Early American industrialization

The industrial revolution began in Great Britain in the 18th century, rapidly transforming the British economy and fueling significant sustained economic growth. While the British government and manufacturers sought to maintain their advantages by prohibiting the export of factory and mechanical blueprints and related documents, British emigrant Samuel Slater memorized the schema for the spinning jenny and related mechanized weaving technologies and imported those concepts to Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1789. Slater initially worked with Moses Brown and his family to modify existing British technologies to local conditions and later opened his own mill in Massachusetts. While Slater became famous within the United States for his importing of , and innovations on, British mechanical technologies, as well as his Rhode Island system that incorporated whole villages into the emerging factory system, and establishing the first company towns in the United States, Slater was viewed by many Britons as a traitor.

The growth of the early factory system in the United States depended enormously on the milling and refining of cotton grown in southern states and handpicked by tens of thousands of enslaved persons. While cotton grew in large quantities in the south, the laborious process of separating the seeds from the valuable fibers and lint by hand limited the utility and economic impact of cotton production until the patenting of a new cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1794. Whitney did not invent the cotton gin itself as this technology had been imported into the United States from India decades earlier, but the new cotton gin dramatically increased the volume of cotton lint that could be milled into textiles, the primary industrial activity of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Within a few years of Whitney’s patenting of the cotton gin, cotton production in the south soared and southern plantation owners demanded even more enslaved persons for labor. During the first half of the 19th century, the enslaved population of the United States quadrupled, rising from approximately 900,000 in 1800 to over 3.6 million in 1850.

Communications and transportation revolutions

During the first half of the 19th century, American industrial and agricultural production rapidly expanded, increasing demands for improved communications and transportation technologies. Beginning in the late 1780s, and culminating in the early 1800s with Robert Fulton’s improvements on John Fitch’s earlier ventures, steamboats literally and figuratively propelled American shipping and transportation advances throughout the first half of the 19th century. Within 10 years of Fulton’s successful steamboat launches on the Hudson River in New York, steamboats had been successfully adapted for shallower waters, including those of the Mississippi River, providing greater opportunities for both freight and passenger travel.

Beginning in 1830, another transformational transportation technology debuted with the opening of the Baltimore and Ohio (B & O) railroad line. In the 1820s, the Erie Canal opened, connecting New York City to Buffalo in the western part of New York state and reducing travel and transportation costs for passengers, farmers, and manufacturers. With the opening of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad** line, the mid-Atlantic states were now connected to the growing states of what is today the midwestern United States, providing farmers, miners, and industrialists with expanded, integrated transportation networks for crops, livestock, raw materials, and finished products. Rapidly expanding railroad and steamboat networks also fueled the growth of American cities and towns; Chicago, today the 3rd largest city in the United States by population, had fewer than 5,000 residents in 1840 but had grown more than sixfold by 1850, hosting approximately 30,000 residents, fueled primarily by its location as a vital railroad hub.

:::Image 016/ Canals and railroad map 1840s:::

To further connect the growing American population and economy, Samuel F. B, Morse and Alfred Vail improved upon existing French and British telegraph technologies and patented Morse code, an efficient system for rapidly transmitting messages over long distances; in 1844, Morse sent the first telegraphic message between Baltimore and Washington DC, encapsulating his own, and the country’s, wonderment in just 4 words - “What hath God wrought.” The telegraph increasingly connected the country as governments, militaries, newspapers, business owners, and residents sent and received millions of messages faster and more reliably than before.

The United States was profoundly transformed in the first half of the 19th century by powerful new technologies, including the steamboat, railroad, and telegraph.

These technologies dramatically increased demands for labor, including large-scale use of enslaved labor for cotton production in the south.