Adjustment to independence

Independence gravely imperiled Boston’s maritime trade, for, at the close of the Revolution, Boston merchants automatically became foreigners in the ports of the British Empire. Thus, survival depended on finding new channels of trade. Sending ships to distant and hitherto unfamiliar ports solved the crisis. The development of the China trade and other new routes, such as those to India, raised Boston to greater prosperity than ever before.

Throughout the first half of the 19th century, maritime commerce produced substantial fortunes in the city, which were supplemented by others achieved in mercantile and manufacturing pursuits. Bostonians in the 1810s began to establish textile mills, first at Waltham in 1813 and then in new towns to the north of the city along the Merrimack River, where waterpower was plentiful. The advent of railroads in the 1830s brought these once-distant towns suddenly closer. The burgeoning of Boston’s population was the result not only of maritime commerce and manufacturing but also of the unanticipated arrival of immigrants from Europe in such numbers that the city grew more than 20-fold during the 19th century. By 1822 the traditional form of government—in which a board of selectmen administered the decisions reached by the vote of all citizens at an annual town meeting—had become unmanageable, and the Massachusetts legislature granted a city charter.

The era of culture

During the early 19th century Boston also assumed a focal position in the religious and educational life of the new nation. The rapid and large-scale infusion of immigrant groups and the loss of dominance by the Congregational descendants of the Puritan settlers were major factors in the change.

By the end of the 19th century Roman Catholics outnumbered Protestants in Boston. Meanwhile, during the early 19th century, reform movements within the dominant Congregational church gave rise to the new, more-liberal denomination of Unitarianism. Unitarians were among the leading figures in the philosophy of Transcendentalism, which affected a great part of the region’s artistic output and thought for much of the century; in the abolitionist movement championed by the outspoken writer and editor William Lloyd Garrison and others; and in liberal high-mindedness in social causes, which preoccupied many 19th-century Bostonians at a time when others were simply making money with great Yankee diligence. In the second half of the 19th century, the city was also the place where Christian Science was founded by Mary Baker Eddy. It remains the site of The Mother Church and the international headquarters of the faith.

Educational and cultural institutions had a similarly rapid growth. Across the Charles River in present-day Cambridge, a college had been founded in 1636 to provide the infant colony with religious scholars and ministers. It was named for the Charlestown minister John Harvard, who bequeathed his library to the institution in 1638, and was the sole college in the area until the third quarter of the 19th century. Though Harvard University retained the most prestigious position throughout the century, a host of other major institutions of higher learning were founded, and Boston became synonymous nationally with scholarship and cultural refinement. It also became the mecca for persons—from abroad or from the “less civilized” parts of the country outside New England—who sought these qualities amid the bustling commercialism and rambunctious growth that characterized much of the United States in the 19th century.

Financial growth

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The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which gave New York City easy access to the North American interior, and later the American Civil War (1861–65), which cut off Boston’s access to Southern cotton, put an end to shipping as a major consideration in the life of Boston. Banking and investment in manufacturing, railroads, and the development of the rapidly expanding frontier superseded maritime commerce as the principal occupation of Boston in the second half of the 19th century. In the early 20th century, however, the business horizons contracted. Though large sums of money continued to be invested outside of New England, fewer distant companies were controlled from Boston. The city’s financial capital was still strong, but the rising strength of New York City and Chicago and of the developing states of the American West gradually reduced the proportion of capital that Boston could muster. Nevertheless, Boston’s financial management firms showed a skill in investment that caused them to be well regarded in other parts of the country. This led eventually to a major growth of those Boston companies that administered what are now called mutual funds. Thus, the “prudent man,” whether in a private trustee’s office or an investment company, survived as a Boston asset, whereas the textile mills and railroads proved to be less permanent. The textile industry passed into crisis in the 1920s, and the region’s industrial centres, created by Boston investment, entered on decades of hardship. Some mills went out of business entirely, while others moved to the South in search of cheaper labour and raw materials.