Market revolution: society and culture
Demographic trends
During the first half of the 19th century, the US population more than quadrupled from just over 5 million people in 1800 to over 23 million people in 1850 as a result of both significant natural increases and immigration. This rapidly growing population sought out new vistas, physically and culturally transforming the landscapes of the country. By the end of 1848, with the exception of the approximately 30,000 square miles of the Gadsden Purchase completed in the early 1850s, the United States had achieved its continental dimensions, stretching from “sea to shining sea” and fulfilling, at least for some, its manifest destiny.
From 1800-1848, the United States admitted 14 new states to the union, beginning with **Ohio **in 1803 and ending with Wisconsin in 1848. In addition, as was highlighted in an earlier lesson, the United States added hundreds of thousands of square miles in the west and southwest, fueling the entrance of additional states, led by California in 1850. These profound demographic and territorial increases opened up hundreds of millions of acres of land for agriculture, mining, and later industrial pursuits, all too frequently, though, at the expense of indigenous societies and, primarily south of the 36th parallel, often through the forced labor of millions of enslaved persons. Newly arrived immigrants, including tens of thousands of Irish, German and Chinese immigrants, embraced new economic opportunities while simultaneously confronting nativist backlashes against the new arrival.
Economic changes
In the previous lesson, you learned about early American industrialization and the concomitant communications and transportation revolutions that transformed much of the United States. With industrialization came rapid urbanization in many areas of the northern and western, now midwestern, United States and significant changes in labor patterns and organization. Samuel Slater’s Rhode Island system would soon be supplemented, or perhaps surpassed by, the Lowell factory system in Massachusetts where young, mostly unmarried, women worked in textile mills, lived in dormitories owned and supervised by their employer, and attended lessons about education, morality and religion. While this system was criticized during the first half of the 19th century, and is often criticized today as being paternalistic and discriminatory, the Lowell factory system made a substantial impact in early American industrialization and labor organization; when mill owners reduced wages by 25% in the early 1830s, women organized the Factory Girls Association to protest their deteriorating wages, housing, and work conditions, serving as an important example of early, albeit mostly unsuccessful, union activity. Ultimately, large-scale immigration in the 1840s displaced many of these young women from factory work.
A Factory Girl, Lowell Offering, December 1840
Agricultural expansion was also a prominent feature of the first half of the 19th century as vast new lands were cleared and cultivated, particularly in southern and western regions of the country. The volume of cotton production increased fiftyfold in the first half of the 19th century, enriching southern planters who forced nearly 2 million enslaved persons to pick cotton under increasingly brutal conditions and laws. In states that now form the midwestern United States, large numbers of European immigrants, including from Germany and Scandinavian countries, including Norway and Sweden, cultivated wheat and corn and raised livestock such as cattle and pigs. With the development of larger, connected networks of railroads and steamships, this increased agricultural production reached New York City as well as foreign markets faster and more reliably.