Revolutions

Industrial Revolution.mp4

The Industrial Revolution.mp4

The Industrial Revolution for Middle School.mp4

12.mp4

Immigration.mp4

When the 1800s began, the United States was a young, growing nation. Most Americans lived in states along the Atlantic Coast. Most people lived and worked on farms, and most of their tools and other products were made by hand, often at home or by local craftspeople. But in both Europe and the United States, changes had begun that would transform people's lives.

How did new inventions reach the United States from Europe?

In the late 1700s, the United States had just won its independence, and Americans were eager to catch up with British technology. But there were laws against taking certain ideas out of Great Britain. So, people often secretly smuggled ideas out of Europe!

Samuel Slater worked in a cotton mill in England. He learned to use new inventions such as this water frame, which could spin many threads at once. When he was 21, Slater secretly memorized these ideas and moved to Rhode Island, where he helped build a successful mill.

Robert Fulton worked in Great Britain, France, and the United States building canals, submarines, and early steamboats. Fulton switched sides multiple times, taking knowledge with him as he went. This image shows plans for a submarine that he created for the U.S. government.

In the early 1800s, the United States experienced major changes to both transportation and the production of goods.

Before the 1800s, most boats were powered by oars, sails, or moving water. When those power sources were unavailable, boats could not travel.

In 1787, John Fitch sailed the first steamboat between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Then, in 1807, Robert Fulton improved the steamboat and created the first successful steamboat business, sailing from New York City up and down the Hudson River. This diagram shows the engine and paddlewheel of a steamboat.

Eight horses on a treadmill (and other failed inventions)

People often study the new inventions that transformed life during the early 1800s. But for each idea that succeeded, many others failed.

For example, an engineer in Rhode Island built a boat called The Experiment, powered by eight horses on a treadmill. The image below is from a ticket from its first voyage. Look closely, and you can see an image of a horse. The boat made the first half of its voyage successfully, but it crashed on the return trip when a gust of wind blew it into the mud.

What was it like to travel on the National Road?

In the late 1800s, some old men remembered their younger years spent traveling on the National Road. One person recalled, "There were enormous droves of sheep and herds of cattle, which raised the dust like a cloud along their path."

Some people had bought tickets west on horse-drawn carriages called coaches, similar to the one in the image below. One traveler remembered, "Sometimes two coaches [would race] and, as one passed the other, the passengers in the vehicle left behind would threaten and [wave their hands, and show] knives and pistols."

States spent millions of dollars in the race to build canals. But canals soon received competition from another new form of transportation—trains pulled by steam-powered locomotives. The first steam locomotive in the U.S. was used in 1830. The map below shows the canals and railroads that existed by 1860.

These transportation systems made it easier to travel and ship goods over long distances. So, they made it more likely that people in different parts of the country would buy things from each other. By 1860, the nation's system of railroads was much larger than its system of canals. Railroads were cheaper to build, and once completed, they transported goods and people much faster. They could also reach parts of the country where there weren't as many rivers. Both the canal and railroad systems were strongest in the northern part of the country.

All aboard the Tom Thumb!

In the 1820s, most railroad cars were pulled by horses, but in 1830, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tested a train that was pulled by the first steam-powered locomotive. Small in size, the locomotive was called the Tom Thumb, after a tiny character from English folktales.

This photograph shows a copy of the Tom Thumb made in the 1920s. How does it compare to other locomotives you have seen?

Racing a train?

While the Tom Thumb was still being tested, it got into a race with a horse-drawn train car. The locomotive took an early lead. But then, the locomotive's engine broke, and the horse-drawn car passed it by.

The horse won this race, but people could tell that the train would soon become the fastest form of long-distance transportation.

New forms of transportation helped move people and goods, but they also helped ideas travel faster. For example, the United States Post Office began using railroads to quickly transport letters and newspapers between different parts of the country. And a new invention called the telegraph allowed people to send messages over long distances using electrical wires. These messages could be transmitted almost instantly.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the United States experienced a major change that historians call the Industrial Revolution or industrialization. Before the Industrial Revolution, most products were made by hand, in homes, or by local craftspeople. After the Industrial Revolution, many products were made using machines in factories, on a much larger scale.

How did early factories work?

Some factories were powered by water! Water from a nearby river was channeled under the mill, where it turned a waterwheel. This moved a long belt, which stretched up into the building above.

Inside the building, the belt went around another wheel, causing that wheel to spin. More belts and wheels could then carry the spinning motion to different parts of the factory, where it could be used to power machines.

The United States was not the first country to experience an industrial revolution. In Great Britain, where these changes began, an important thinker named Adam Smith studied the effects of factories. Many of his observations were true of factories in both Great Britain and the United States. In the passage summarized below, Smith describes a visit to a factory that made straight pins, which are used when sewing clothes. Read the passage.

If one worker had to make the whole pin by himself, he could barely make one pin in a day. He certainly could not make twenty.

But in the pin factory, the work is divided into many parts. One man pulls the chunk of metal into a thin wire. A second man straightens the wire. A third cuts it into pieces. A fourth makes a point at the end of each pin. A fifth prepares the top, so the pinhead can be attached. Other people make the pinhead, paint the pins white, and stick the pin in paper to be sold. When I visited, ten workers divided up all these jobs, and the group made 48,000 pins in a day. So, it was as if each person made 4,800 pins.

Adapted from Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776.

According to the passage, each worker in a pin factory mastered one or two steps in the process of pin making. They were able to work very quickly, so they made many more pins in the same amount of time. Based on that information, you can infer that the factory system made each pin cheaper to produce. So, pins also became cheaper for people to buy.

Was the factory system better for everyone?

No. For some skilled workers, the factory system had serious negative effects. For example, before factories, skilled shoemakers learned every part of the shoemaking process. They cut and stitched each piece and took great pride in their work. When shoemaking moved to factories, workers only learned one part of the process, so their work became less valuable.

Why did goods become so affordable?

Factories could produce goods cheaply, but goods also became less expensive for another reason: they became much cheaper to ship. Using riverboats, highways, canals, and trains, people could transport goods quickly and affordably.

The Industrial Revolution forced craftsmen to change the way that they did their work. Skilled craftsmen, such as shoemakers, needed to produce lower-cost goods in order to compete with factories.

As a result, some skilled craftsmen became the masters of large shops where they divided up the work of production. The master of the shop would assign different tasks to different workers. Many of these workers had previously learned all parts of the production process. The passage below describes how one worker felt about the change. Read the passage.

These little stuck up, self-conceited [masters]. . . . You must do as they wish . . . or you are off their [payment] books; they have no more employment for you.

self-conceited: prideful

According to the passage, workers now had to do whatever the master told them. He complains that the master could refuse to hire and pay people who disagreed with the new system.

What was it like to work in a factory?

Factory work was not very pleasant:

People typically worked about 12 to 14 hours each day.
In many jobs, workers had to stand all day long. Workers had to buy larger shoes because their feet became so swollen.
The machines clanged loudly, and there were often hundreds of machines in a room. After work, the sound still rang in their ears.
The air in some rooms became thick with cotton dust, making it difficult to breathe.

The largest early factories were textile mills, which produced cloth. Textile-making involved complicated machines, such as machines for spinning cotton into yarn and others for weaving yarn into fabric. The first textile mills were built near rivers. The moving water of the river would turn waterwheels, which powered the machines inside the mills. But factories could also be powered by new steam engines.

How did the Industrial and Transportation Revolutions affect the environment?

To power steam engines, Americans burned increasing amounts of coal and wood. This burning polluted the environment and released gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, beginning the process of climate change that affects the world today.

As forests were cleared, settlers cultivated the land, growing crops and grazing livestock. These abundant new food sources greatly reduced the chance of starvation. But the changes also transformed the continent and led to the near extinction of animal species such as the American bison.

Before the Industrial Revolution, when tools were made by hand, each individual tool was slightly different from the rest. So, if a tool broke, people couldn't simply order a replacement part. If a musket broke, for example, the owner needed to find a skilled gunsmith to make a new part for that unique firearm.

Inventor Eli Whitney had an idea for a better system. To learn about Whitney's system, read the passage below.

In 1801, Eli Whitney wanted to sell the United States government a new type of gun that could be made in factories. In a presentation on the floor of Congress, Whitney took ten identical guns and placed them on a table. Next, Whitney took apart each of the guns and mixed the parts from all ten guns together in a pile. Then Whitney and his assistants took the parts from the pile and assembled them back into ten guns. Each of the new guns had parts from many of the guns he had first laid out. This was called the system of interchangeable parts.

Could Eli Whitney really make identical guns for a whole army?

No. After seeing Whitney's sales pitch, Congress ordered 10,000 of his guns. Whitney said he could fill the order, but he was making a promise he couldn't keep. He could make ten identical guns, but not ten thousand. Whitney's company did not complete the order until decades later, after Whitney had died.

What other inventions did Eli Whitney create?

Whitney is best known for inventing the cotton gin, which transformed the economy of the American South. The cotton gin used rotating brushes to clean seeds and dirt out of cotton from the fields.

Cotton was grown on plantations, mostly through the forced labor of enslaved people. Since the cotton gin made cotton production more profitable, slaveholders expanded the system of slavery.

The Industrial Revolution also affected farmers' production of food. One important advance happened in the 1830s, when Cyrus McCormick developed a machine called the mechanical reaper, or machine harvester.

With the Industrial Revolution, the United States became much wealthier overall. Between 1820 and 1860, the average person's income doubled. But different people's lives changed in different ways, and not everyone did equally well.

A transformation in American life

The Industrial Revolution brought vast changes for people living in the United States:

- The average income per person doubled between 1820 and 1860.
- People could buy goods more cheaply and buy new products that weren't available in the past.
- People could visit or send messages to other parts of the country in days or hours instead of weeks.

But the Industrial Revolution also had some negative consequences:

- Working conditions in factories were often bad.
- Wealth became more unequally distributed since some people benefited more than others.
- People began to change the environment in ways that had negative effects later on.

Today, the effects of industrialization are everywhere you look. Think about your day so far. Have you used any forms of transportation that didn't exist before this period? What objects around you were made in factories? A car on an assembly line, Rolls of fabric, A high-speed train, Etc.

Free and slave states

The map below shows the free states and slave states in 1860. In the questions that follow,

the word South refers to the slave states shown on this map, and
the word North refers to the free states shown on this map. Slavery had once been legal in some Northern states, but by 1860 slavery was banned in all the Northern states.

By 1860, the United States also included territory and states in the West. Northerners and Southerners disagreed about whether slavery should be legal or illegal in the West.

Over the 1800s, the United States became more urbanized. In other words, cities, or urban areas, grew larger as people moved away from rural areas. The map below shows cities with more than 35,000 people in 1860.

In the mid-1800s, the North was urbanizing more rapidly than the South. Although a majority of Northerners still lived on farms, more and more people were moving to cities. Cities usually had these characteristics:

- many people living in each square mile of land
- people from many different places
- enough people to support different forms of entertainment

Pigs in the city

Imagine how much garbage the 800,000 people of New York City made every day! In the first half of the 1800s, the city did not have garbage trucks, so trash piled up in the streets. About 20,000 pigs roamed the streets, eating scraps of food that had been thrown into the gutters. People in other American cities used pigs in the same way.

During the 1800s, both the North and the South went through what historians call the Transportation Revolution. In the early 1800s, Americans often traveled long distances using horse-drawn wagons called stagecoaches. Around 1830, people began building railroads to improve transportation between cities. Four of these cities are shown on the map below.

The table below shows travel times between these cities in 1800 and in 1859.

Throughout the 1800s, immigration helped the American population grow quickly in both rural and urban areas. Immigrants are people who voluntarily move from one country to another to settle permanently. The following map shows the percentage of people in each state who were immigrants in 1860.

Over the course of the 1800s, millions of immigrants moved to the United States. Most of these immigrants arrived in Northern cities such as Boston or New York City.

The table below is a record of the occupations of people who arrived in New York City in the summer of 1848.

During the summer of 1848, more than 10,000 laborers immigrated to New York City. They did jobs that required strength but no special skills. Fewer than 20 immigrants were physicians. Their occupation required many special skills. People in low-skill occupations usually make less money than people in high-skill occupations, so most immigrants to New York City did not make much money.

What were immigrant women's occupations?

New York City immigration records also included female immigrants. Below is a view of the table from 1848 in its original form. Notice how the women were classified.

This record says that 23,057 women immigrated to New York City that summer, and none of them had any occupation!

In reality, many of the immigrant women did work. The largest group of immigrants was Irish, and in Ireland, young women were often shopgirls, or sales clerks. Many others worked on farms or as domestic servants, doing jobs such as cooking and cleaning. Married women ran their households and did jobs at home to make extra money. They made products such as buttons, lace, and clothing, which they then sold.

In the United States, most young Irish-American women worked, especially as domestic servants. Many sent money back to Ireland to support their families.

The North and South had very different economies. The map below shows where some important goods were produced in 1860.

A tale of two regions

The two regions of the United States had very different economies. The North's economy was balanced between agriculture and industry. Its farms produced milk and grains, and its growing factory system produced fabrics, tools, and firearms.

The South's economy was mostly agricultural, specializing in cash crops such as cotton, sugar, and tobacco. These cash crops were sold for a profit, often to Northerners and Europeans.

Throughout the first half of the 1800s, the economy of the South was based around large farms called plantations that were generally farmed by enslaved people. At the beginning of the 19th century, Southern plantations grew wheat, corn, sugar, and tobacco, but they did not produce much cotton.

To increase cotton production, white Southerners expanded the plantation system into new territories, bringing enslaved people with them. The following maps show how the enslaved population changed between 1800 and 1860.

White Southerners fell into four main social groups, each with varying levels of wealth and power. A person's social group helped shape the way that he or she saw the world. But, even within a group, each individual person was different. People's attitudes toward slavery were especially affected by whether or not they owned enslaved people or land.

Large slaveholders typically managed their plantations with help from white overseers—employees who were put in charge of field work. The owners and overseers developed a new system that pushed enslaved people to work harder and harder from sunup to sundown.

Did enslaved people ever get time off?

Usually, enslaved people got half a day off on Sundays. They often used this time to raise extra food for their families or to make furniture and decorations for their cabins. Sometimes, they did outside jobs to earn a bit of money.

In both the North and the South, most people lived on farms, but the two regions had very different approaches to farming.

"Go West, young man"

During the 1800s, Northern farmers pushed westward, first into the Great Lakes region and then to the Great Plains and West Coast. Many young adults moved west, hoping to claim land, build farms, and create better lives for themselves.

As in the South, Northern settlers expanded into lands where Native Americans lived, often creating conflict. Over time, Native Americans were restricted to lands that were separate from where settlers lived.

Southerners sold millions of bales of cotton to factories in the North and the United Kingdom. In these factories, called textile mills, cotton was made into products to be sold.

Who benefitted from Southern cotton?

In 1860, 75% of the world's cotton was grown in the Southern United States, and this cotton was shipped far and wide. It was sold to factory owners in the United Kingdom and in Northern states such as New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. So, many people profited from this trade in cotton—factory owners, bankers, people in the shipping trade, and numerous others.

These factories turned Southern cotton into yarn and then fabric. Finally, the fabric was made into sheets and clothing. As a result, Europeans and North Americans became dependent upon cotton grown by enslaved people.

Some of the largest Northern textile mills were built in Lowell, Massachusetts. Most workers at the Lowell mills were young women between 15 and 30 years old. Some were even younger! Most of them came from farms in the New England countryside. In Lowell, they lived together in boarding houses owned by the mills. The mills ran according to strict schedules. Look at this sample schedule from the 1830s.

Some millworkers operated spinning machines. These machines took loosely wound strips of cotton, pulled them tight, and twisted them to form yarn. This yarn was then wound around spools. When the spools were full, workers called bobbin girls or doffers removed the full spools and replaced them with empty ones.

Unfortunately, doffers did the same task over and over, all day long. Because they worked all day, they had no time to go to school, and because their work was so repetitive, they did not learn many new skills. Most doffers were children between the ages of 10 and 15 years old. Mill owners chose children to work as doffers for several reasons. First, the children were shorter than adults, so they could reach the spools easily. Second, doffing was simple, so children could master the task quickly.

What other jobs did mill workers do?

Each spinning machine wound 128 different spools of yarn at once. In addition to the very young doffers, each machine was tended by a slightly older woman who fixed any broken yarns.

More experienced workers operated weaving machines called power looms. One woman could operate up to four looms at once. By tending more looms, a worker could make more money.

These machines made a huge clatter. One employee wrote that after work, the sound still rang in her ears. To work the machines, the women also stood most of the day. Their feet became so swollen that some had to buy larger shoes!

In 1836, factory owners in Lowell threatened to raise the rents for workers who lived in the mills' boarding houses. The workers used a variety of strategies to protest that plan.

Did the workers' strategies work?

In 1836, the workers' efforts succeeded. About 1,500 workers refused to work, and members of the public strongly supported them. Mill owners agreed not to raise rents.

Over the years, the workers won some battles and lost others. One year, the workers' strike failed, and factory owners cut wages. At other times, workers convinced mill owners to reduce the length of their workdays, from 13 hours to 11 hours.

In 1836, the Lowell mill workers went on strike, refusing to work unless the mill owners agreed to their requests. As they marched out of the factories, the young women sang the song below. Read the song lyrics. Then answer the question below.

Oh! isn't it a pity, such a pretty girl as I—

Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?

Oh! I cannot be a slave,

I will not be a slave,

For I'm so fond of liberty

That I cannot be a slave.

pine away: become thin and weak

Free labor

The workers' song was an exaggeration. Their lives were difficult, but they had far more freedom than enslaved people. Their song was powerful because many Northerners wanted a world where workers were free and independent, not controlled by others. This was a philosophy called free labor. When the women of Lowell went on strike, they insisted that women could be free laborers, just like men.

Many Northerners opposed slavery because slavery went against the idea of free labor. Some people disliked that Northern manufacturing depended on crops that were grown with enslaved labor. These people decided they would only buy goods produced with free labor. They boycotted, or refused to buy, products made by enslaved workers.

In some cities, people could buy clothes made from free cotton, or cotton that had been grown by free workers.

Some critics of Northern factories said that the lives of textile mill workers were similar to the lives of enslaved people.

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