In this video, John Green teaches you about the Market Revolution. In the first half of the 19th century, the way people lived and worked in the United States changed drastically. At play was the classic (if anything in a 30 year old nation can be called classic) American struggle between the Jeffersonian ideal of individuals sustaining themselves on small farms vs. the Hamiltonian vision of an economy based on manufacturing and trade. I’ll give you one guess who won. Too late! It was Hamilton, which is why if you live in the United States, you probably live in a city, and are unlikely to be a farmer. In the early 19th century, new technologies in transportation and communication helped remake the economic system of the country. Railroads and telegraphs changed the way people moved goods and information around. The long and short of it is, the Market Revolution meant that people now went somewhere to work rather than working at home. Often, that somewhere was a factory where they worked for an hourly wage rather than getting paid for the volume of goods they manufactured. This shift in the way people work has repercussions in our daily lives right down to today. Watch as John teaches you how the Market Revolution sowed the seeds of change in the way Americans thought about the roles of women, slavery, and labor rights.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, Americans’ endless commercial ambition—what one Baltimore paper in 1815 called an “almost universal ambition to get forward”—remade the nation.1 Between the Revolution and the Civil War, an old subsistence world died and a new more-commercial nation was born. Americans integrated the technologies of the Industrial Revolution into a new commercial economy. Steam power, the technology that moved steamboats and railroads, fueled the rise of American industry by powering mills and sparking new national transportation networks. A “market revolution” was busy remaking the nation. The revolution reverberated across the country. More and more farmers grew crops for profit, not self-sufficiency. Vast factories and cities arose in the North. Enormous fortunes materialized. A new middle class ballooned. And as more men and women worked in the cash economy, they were freed from the bound dependence of servitude. But there were costs to this revolution. As northern textile factories boomed, the demand for southern cotton swelled and the institution of American slavery accelerated. Northern subsistence farmers became laborers bound to the whims of markets and bosses. The market revolution sparked not only explosive economic growth and new personal wealth but also devastating depressions—“panics”—and a growing lower class of property-less workers. Many Americans labored for low wages and became trapped in endless cycles of poverty. Some workers—often immigrant women—worked thirteen hours a day, six days a week. Others labored in slavery. Massive northern textile mills turned southern cotton into cheap cloth. And although northern states washed their hands of slavery, their factories fueled the demand for slave-grown southern cotton that ensured the profitability and continued existence of the American slave system. And so, as the economy advanced, the market revolution wrenched the United States in new directions as it became a nation of free labor and slavery, of wealth and inequality, and of endless promise and untold perils. Read the rest of Chapter 8 from the American Yawp. America's economic transformation story really got started in the first half of the 19th century. After all and first off, big cities are much more likely to thrive if there's a way to get to them. And better transportation meant easier movement of people and goods, improved trade, and solidification of the North's role as the commercial center of the nation. Since we were still centuries away from hoverboards, transportation looked more like feet and horses, so you can imagine the novelty of paved roads and canals. Historians called this era of establishing better connectedness the "market revolution." Basically, it included the expansion of the marketplace that occurred in early 19th-century America, prompted mainly by the construction of these new roads and canals to connect distant communities together for the first time. Turnpikes, the oldest version of the paved toll road, made transportation much easier, and people were willing to pay the tolls that corporations charged for the maintenance of these roads. On top of roads, the Erie Canal—we promise it wasn't as sinister as it sounds—was an engineering marvel that had a dramatic effect on the growth of the economy. It also made canal building crazy popular. Turnpikes, canals, and last but not least, railroads linked the North to the rest of the country and, uh, paved the way for a nation-wide transportation, communication, and economic makeover. In fact, the market revolution also refers to a new approach adopted by farmers and manufacturers to their work. With distant but lucrative markets now accessible, they now produced "for the market," rather than for personal consumption, and they engaged in elaborate calculations designed to maximize their profits in these markets. On the flip side, the market revolution meant merchants needed to be more savvy about "working the market"—how to secure capital, arrange transportation, advertise and distribute goods—so the market revolution diminished the economic fortunes of others. Small craftsmen were driven out of business by "merchant capitalists," and skilled workers and small shop owners were reduced to wage earners with little hope for occupational mobility. Even among those who succeeded under the new conditions, the rapid and sweeping changes that occurred in American labor relations and gender roles caused a great deal of anxiety. This anxiety inspired a wave of experimentation in areas as diverse as labor organization, health, and religion. Hey, can't win 'em all, right? Have you ever been ripped off on eBay? Or misrepresented an item on Craigslist? The internet has turned our homes into global marketplaces, so millions of buyers and sellers are just a click away. But can we always trust them, or even trust ourselves?What if you could only sell goods to people that you knew? Would that ruin your chances of selling fake handbags? Would you find this sort of marketplace limiting or reassuring? Until the early-19th century, most Americans participated in markets that were local and familiar. They did business with people they knew and every exchange was embedded within a larger web of relationships. For instance, your buyer belonged to your church or your seller's daughter was married to your cousin. The basic rule governing these local markets was simple: be fair. If you ripped somebody off, it would be talked about by your neighbors for a long while. But during the market revolution, new roads and canals allowed people to exchange goods in distant markets with complete strangers. It wasn't exactly eBay, but for people accustomed to markets that were familiar and local, it was just about the same—both exciting and unnerving. While many embraced the new opportunities provided by the new market conditions, others sought refuge from the chaos in new religions. While some abandoned their old markets and old ways and began to think like businessmen, others tried to slow the forces of change. It's tough to tell how we'd respond since there are many buffers—anonymity, delivery trucks, and huge corporations that don't have your number memorized (or do they?)—but if you'd been kickin' it in 1820, would you become an entrepreneur or would you become a Shaker? Robert Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (1980) Paul Gilje, Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic (1997) Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989) Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (1978) Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (1991) ImagesIndustrial Spy, Entrepreneurial Genius Modern Technology Henry Clay "The Marriage of the Waters" The Erie Canal Charles Finney Religious Enthusiasm Father of the Erie Canal Movies & TVThe Mormons (2007) The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984) WebsitesThe Erie Canal Religion and the Republic 19th-Century American Religion Video & Audio"Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal" Power Loom Demo Historical DocumentsMill Life in Lowell Charles Finney Sylvester Graham Clay's American System Lowell Offering |
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