To start off today, we have five words that you need to define. You can put them in your notebook or somewhere on your iPad. You're choice. Feel free to email in any answers to work.
-urbanization
-famine
-state rights
-compromise
-popular sovereignty
Next, your task is to read through the following excerpt and pick out three major improvements in American living (work, play, manufacturing, etc) and explain how it made life better, or working more efficient.
In the 1820s and 1830s, America became the world's leader in adopting mechanization, standardization, and mass production. Manufacturers began to adopt labor-saving machinery that allowed workers to produce more goods at lower costs. So impressed were foreigners with these methods of manufacture that they called them the "American system of production."
The single most important figure in the development of the American system was Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin. In 1798, Whitney persuaded the U.S. government to award him a contract for 10,000 muskets to be delivered within two years. Until then, rifles had been manufactured by skilled artisans, who made individual parts by hand, and then carefully fitted the pieces together. At the time Whitney made his offer, the federal arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts, was capable of producing only 245 muskets in two years. Whitney's idea was to develop precision machinery that would allow a worker with little manual skill to manufacture identical gun parts that would be interchangeable from one gun to another. The first year he produced 500 muskets.
In 1801, in order to get an extension on his contract, Whitney demonstrated his new system of interchangeable parts to President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson. He disassembled ten muskets and put ten new muskets together out of the individual pieces. His system was a success. (In fact, the muskets used in the demonstration were not assembly line models; they had been carefully hand-fitted beforehand).
Other industries soon adopted the "American system of manufacturing." As early as 1800 manufacturers of wooden clocks began to use interchangeable parts. Makers of sewing machines used mass production techniques as early as 1846, and the next year, manufacturers mechanized the production of farm machinery.
Innovation was not confined to manufacturing. During the years following the War of 1812, American agriculture underwent a transformation nearly as profound and far-reaching as the revolution taking place in industry. During the 18th century, most farm families were largely self-sufficient. They raised their own food, made their own clothes and shoes, and built their own furniture. Cut off from markets by the high cost of transportation, farmers sold only a few items, like whiskey, corn, and hogs, in exchange for such necessities as salt and iron goods. Farming methods were primitive. With the exception of plowing and furrowing, most farm work was performed by hand. European travelers deplored the backwardness of American farmers, their ignorance of the principles of scientific farming, their lack of labor-saving machinery, and their wastefulness of natural resources. Few farmers applied manure to their fields as fertilizer or practiced crop rotation. As a result, soil erosion and soil exhaustion were commonplace. Commented one observer: "Agriculture in the South does not consist so much in cultivating land as in killing it."
Beginning in the last decade of the 18th century, agriculture underwent profound changes. Some farmers began to grow larger crop surpluses and to specialize in cash crops. A growing demand for cotton for England's textile mills led to the introduction of long-staple cotton from the West Indies into the islands and lowlands of Georgia and South Carolina. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793--which permitted an individual to clean 50 pounds of short-staple cotton in a single day, 50 times more than could be cleaned by hand--made it practical to produce short-staple cotton in the South (which was much more difficult to clean and process than long-staple cotton). Other cash crops raised by southern farmers included rice, sugar, flax for linen, and hemp for rope fibers. In the Northeast, the growth of mill towns and urban centers created a growing demand for hogs, cattle, sheep, corn, wheat, wool, butter, milk, cheese, fruit, vegetables, and hay to feed horses.
As production for the market increased, farmers began to demand improved farm technology. In 1793 Charles Newbold, a New Jersey farmer, spent his entire fortune of $30,000 developing an efficient cast-iron plow. Farmers refused to use it, fearing that iron would poison the soil and cause weeds to grow. Twenty years later, a Scipio, New York, farmer named Jethro Wood patented an improved iron plow made out of interchangeable parts. Unlike wooden plows, which required two men and four oxen to plow an acre in a day, Wood's cast-iron plow allowed one man and one yoke of oxen to plow the same area. Demand was so great that manufacturers infringed on Wood's patents and produced thousands of copies of this new plow yearly.
A shortage of farm labor encouraged many farmers to adopt labor-saving machinery. Prior to the introduction in 1803 of the cradle scythe--a rake used to cut and gather up grain and deposit it in even piles--a farmer could not harvest more than half an acre a day. The horse rake--a device introduced in 1820 to mow hay--allowed a single farmer to perform the work of eight to ten men. The invention in 1836 of a mechanical thresher, used to separate the wheat from the chaff, helped to cut in half the man-hours required to produce an acre of wheat.
By 1830 the roots of America's future industrial growth had been firmly planted. Back in 1807, the nation had just 15 or 20 cotton mills, containing approximately 8,000 spindles. By 1831 the number of spindles in use totaled nearly a million and a quarter. By 1830 Pittsburgh produced 100 steam engines a year; Cincinnati, 150. Factory production had made household manufacture of shoes, clothing, textiles, and farm implement obsolete. The United States was well on its way to becoming one of the world's leading manufacturing nations.
But what about the South?
Although slavery was highly profitable, it had a negative impact on the southern economy. It impeded the development of industry and cities and contributed to high debts, soil exhaustion, and a lack of technological innovation.
The philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mail-bag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.” There appears to be a large element of truth in Emerson’s observation.
The South, like other slave societies, did not develop urban centers for commerce, finance, and industry on a scale equal to those found in the North. Virginia’s largest city, Richmond, had a population of just 15,274 in 1850. That same year, Wilmington, North Carolina’s largest city, had only 7,264 inhabitants, while Natchez and Vicksburg, the two largest cities in Mississippi, had fewer than 3,000 white inhabitants.
Southern cities were small because they failed to develop diversified economies. Unlike the cities of the North, southern cities rarely became processing or finishing centers and southern ports rarely engaged in international trade. Their primary functions were to market and transport cotton or other agricultural crops, supply local planters and farmers with such necessities as agricultural implements, and produce the small number of manufactured goods, such as cotton gins, needed by farmers.
An overemphasis on slave-based agriculture led Southerners to neglect industry and transportation improvements. As a result, manufacturing and transportation lagged far behind in comparison to the North. In 1860 the North had approximately 1.3 million industrial workers, whereas the South had 110,000, and northern factories manufactured nine-tenths of the industrial goods produced in the United States.
The South’s transportation network was primitive by northern standards. Traveling the 1,460 overland miles from Baltimore to New Orleans in 1850 meant riding five different railroads, two stagecoaches, and two steamboats. Most southern railroads served primarily to transport cotton to southern ports, where the crop could be shipped on northern vessels to northern or British factories for processing.
Because of high rates of personal debt, Southern states kept taxation and government spending at much lower levels than did the states in the North. As a result, Southerners lagged far behind Northerners in their support for public education. Illiteracy was widespread. In 1850, 20 percent of all southern white adults could not read or write, while the illiteracy rate in New England was less than half of 1 percent.
Because large slaveholders owned most of the region’s slaves, wealth tended to stay with the wealthy more than in the North. In the Deep South, the middle class held a relatively small proportion of the region’s property, while wealthy planters owned a very large portion of the tillable lands and slave labor. In 1850, 17 percent of the farming population held two-thirds of all acres in the rich cotton-growing regions of the South. In other words, those that were rich held most of the land.
There are indications that during the last decade before the Civil War slave ownership became increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. As soil erosion and exhaustion diminished the availability of cotton land, scarcity and heavy demand forced the price of land and slaves to rise beyond the reach of most, and in newer cotton-growing regions, yeomen farmers were pushed off the land as planters expanded their holdings. In Louisiana, for example, nearly half of all rural white families owned no land. During the 1850s, the percentage of the total white population owning slaves declined significantly. By 1860, the proportion of whites holding slaves had fallen from about one-third to one-fourth. As slave and land ownership grew more concentrated, a growing number of whites were forced by economic pressure to leave the land and move to urban centers.
If you'd like more of an explanation of the economy in the South you can watch this video:
Now that you have a context for the North and the South, in regards to economy, prepare to discuss the following questions:
1. From a purely economic standpoint, does slavery cause more problems than it solves?
2. Aside from slavery, how might a Northerner view a Southerner and vice versa?
3. How could the North try to help the South improve themselves, and how would Southerners feel about this?