Economic, social, and cultural history cannot easily be separated. The creation of the “factory system” in the United States was the outcome of interaction between several characteristically American forces: faith in the future, a generally welcoming attitude toward immigrants, an abundance of resources linked to a shortage of labor, and a hospitable view of innovation. The pioneering textile industry, for example, sprang from an alliance of invention, investment, and philanthropy. Moses Brown (later benefactor of the College of Rhode Island, renamed Brown University in honor of his nephew Nicholas) was looking to invest some of his family’s mercantile fortune in the textile business. New England wool and southern cotton were readily available, as was water power from Rhode Island’s swiftly flowing rivers. All that was lacking to convert a handcraft industry into one that was machine-based was machinery itself; however, the new devices for spinning and weaving that were coming into use in England were jealously guarded there. But Samuel Slater, a young English mechanic who immigrated to the United States in 1790 carrying the designs for the necessary machinery in his prodigious memory, became aware of Brown’s ambitions and of the problems he was having with his machinery. Slater formed a partnership with Brown and others to reproduce the crucial equipment and build prosperous Rhode Island fabric factories.

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Local American inventive talent embodied in sometimes self-taught engineers was available too. One conspicuous example was Delaware’s Oliver Evans, who built a totally automatic flour mill in the 1780s and later founded a factory that produced steam engines; another was the ultimate Connecticut Yankee, Eli Whitney, who not only fathered the cotton gin but built a factory for mass producing muskets by fitting together interchangeable parts on an assembly line. Whitney got help from a supportive U.S. Army, which sustained him with advances on large procurement contracts. Such governmental support of industrial development was rare, but, when it occurred, it was a crucial if often understated element in the industrializing of America.

Francis Cabot Lowell, who opened a textile factory in 1811 in the Massachusetts town later named for him, played a pathbreaking role as a paternalistic model employer. Whereas Slater and Brown used local families, living at home, to provide “hands” for their factories, Lowell brought in young women from the countryside and put them up in boardinghouses adjacent to the mills. The “girls”—most of them in or just out of their teens—were happy to be paid a few dollars for 60-hour workweeks that were less taxing than those they put in as farmers’ daughters. Their moral behavior was supervised by matrons, and they themselves organized religious, dramatic, musical, and study groups. The idea was to create an American labor force that would not resemble the wretched proletarians of England and elsewhere in Europe.

Lowell was marveled at by foreign and domestic visitors alike but lost its idyllic character as competitive pressures within the industry resulted in larger workloads, longer hours, and smaller wages. When, in the 1840s and 1850s, Yankee young women formed embryonic unions and struck, they were replaced by French-Canadian and Irish immigrants. Nonetheless, early New England industrialism carried the imprint of a conscious sense of American exceptionalism.

Birth of American Culture

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“In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” asked an English satirist early in the 1800s. Had he looked beyond the limits of “high culture,” he would have found plenty of answers. As a matter of fact, the period between 1815 and 1860 produced an outpouring of traditional literary works now known to students of English-language prose and poetry everywhere—the verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, as well as the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson—all expressing distinctively American themes and depicting distinctly American characters such as Natty Bumppo, Hester Prynne, and Captain Ahab who now belong to the world.

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But setting these aside, Nathaniel Bowditch’s The New American Practical Navigator (1802), Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), and the reports from the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the various far Western explorations made by the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers, as well as those of U.S. Navy Antarctic explorer Charles Wilkes, were the American books on the desks of sea captains, naturalists, biologists, and geologists throughout the world. By 1860 the international scientific community knew that there was an American intellectual presence.

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At home Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) included hundreds of words of local origin to be incorporated in the former “King’s English.” Webster’s blue-backed “Speller,” published in 1783, the geography textbooks of Jedidiah Morse, and the Eclectic Readers of William Holmes McGuffey became staples in every 19th-century American classroom. Popular literature included the humorous works of writers such as Seba Smith, Joseph G. Baldwin, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Artemus Ward, which featured frontier tall tales and rural dialect. In the growing cities there were new varieties of mass entertainment, including the blatantly racist minstrel shows, for which ballads like those of Stephen Foster were composed. The “museums” and circuses of P.T. Barnum also entertained the middle-class audience, and the spread of literacy sustained a new kind of popular journalism, pioneered by James Gordon Bennett, whose New York Herald mingled its up-to-the-moment political and international news with sports, crime, gossip, and trivia. Popular magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and Godey’s Lady’s Book, edited by Sarah Josepha Hale with a keen eye toward women’s wishes, also made their mark in an emerging urban America. All these added up to a flourishing democratic culture that could be dismissed as vulgar by foreign and domestic snobs but reflected a vitality loudly sung by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass (1855).

The people

American society was rapidly changing. Population grew at what to Europeans was an amazing rate—although it was the normal pace of American population growth for the antebellum decades—of between three-tenths and one-third per decade. After 1820 the rate of growth was not uniform throughout the country. New England and the Southern Atlantic states languished—the former region because it was losing settlers to the superior farmlands of the Western Reserve, the latter because its economy offered too few places to newcomers.

The special feature of the population increase of the 1830s and ’40s was the extent to which it was composed of immigrants. Whereas about 250,000 Europeans had arrived in the first three decades of the 19th century, there were 10 times as many between 1830 and 1850. The newcomers were overwhelmingly Irish and German. Traveling in family groups rather than as individuals, they were attracted by the dazzling opportunities of American life: abundant work, land, food, and freedom on the one hand and the absence of compulsory military service on the other.

The mere statistics of immigration do not, however, tell the whole story of its vital role in pre-Civil War America. The intermingling of technology, politics, and accident produced yet another “great migration.” By the 1840s the beginnings of steam transportation on the Atlantic and improvements in the sailing speed of the last generation of windjammers made oceanic passages more frequent and regular. It became easier for hungry Europeans to answer the call of America to take up the farmlands and build the cities. Irish migration would have taken place in any case, but the catastrophe of the Great Famine (Irish Potato Famine) of 1845–49 turned a stream into a torrent. Meanwhile, the steady growth of the democratic idea in Europe produced the Revolutions of 1848 in France, Italy, Hungary, and Germany. The uprisings in the last three countries were brutally suppressed, creating a wave of political refugees. Hence, many of the Germans who traveled over in the wake of the revolutions—the Forty-Eighters—were refugees who took liberal ideals, professional educations, and other intellectual capital to the American West. Overall German contributions to American musical, educational, and business life simply cannot be measured in statistics. Neither can one quantify the impact of the Irish politicians, policemen, and priests on American urban life or the impact of the Irish in general on Roman Catholicism in the United States.

Besides the Irish and Germans, there were thousands of Norwegians and Swedes who immigrated, driven by agricultural depression in the 1850s, to take up new land on the yet-unbroken Great Plains. And there was a much smaller migration to California in the 1850s of Chinese seeking to exchange hard times for new opportunities in the gold fields. These people too indelibly flavoured the culture of the United States.

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Mention must also be made of utopian immigrant colonies planted by thinkers who wanted to create a new society in a New World. Examples include Nashoba, Tennessee, and New Harmony, Indiana, by two British newcomers, Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, respectively. There also were German planned settlements at Amana, Iowa, and in New Ulm and New Braunfels, Texas. If the growth of materialistic and expansionist bumptiousness represented by the Manifest Destiny movement was fueled in part by the immigration-fed expansion of the American populace, these experiments in communal living added to the less materialistic forces driving American thought. They fit the pattern of searching for heaven on earth that marked the age of reform.

Most African Americans in the North possessed theoretical freedom and little else. Confined to menial occupations for the most part, they fought a losing battle against the inroads of Irish competition in northeastern cities. The struggle between the two groups erupted spasmodically into ugly street riots. The hostility shown to free African Americans by the general community was less violent but equally unremitting. Discrimination in politics, employment, education, housing, religion, and even cemeteries resulted in a cruelly oppressive system. Unlike enslaved persons, free African Americans in the North could criticize and petition against their subjugation, but this proved fruitless in preventing the continued deterioration of their situation.

Most Americans continued to live in the country. Although improved machinery had resulted in expanded farm production and had given further impetus to the commercialization of agriculture, the way of life of independent agriculturists had changed little by midcentury. The public journals put out by some farmers insisted that their efforts were unappreciated by the larger community. The actuality was complex. Many farmers led lives marked by unremitting toil, cash shortage, and little leisure. Farm workers received minuscule wages. In all sections of the country, much of the best land was concentrated in the hands of a small number of wealthy farmers. The proportion of farm families who owned their own land, however, was far greater in the United States than in Europe, and varied evidence points to a steady improvement in the standard and style of living of agriculturalists as midcentury approached.

Cities

Cities, both old and new, thrived during the era, their growth in population outstripping the spectacular growth rate of the country as a whole and their importance and influence far transcending the relatively small proportions of citizens living in them. Whether on the “urban frontier” or in the older seaboard region, antebellum cities were the centers of wealth and political influence for their outlying hinterlands. New York City, with a population approaching 500,000 by midcentury, faced problems of a different order of magnitude from those confronting such cities as Poughkeepsie, New York, and Newark, New Jersey. Yet the pattern of change during the era was amazingly similar for eastern cities or western, old cities or new, great cities or small. The lifeblood of them all was commerce. Old ideals of economy in town government were grudgingly abandoned by the merchant, professional, and landowning elites who typically ruled. Taxes were increased in order to deal with pressing new problems and to enable the urban community of midcentury to realize new opportunities. Harbors were improved, police forces professionalized, services expanded, waste more reliably removed, streets improved, and welfare activities broadened, all as the result of the statesmanship and the self-interest of property owners who were convinced that amelioration was socially beneficial.

Education and the role of women

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Cities were also centers of educational and intellectual progress. The emergence of a relatively well-financed public educational system, free of the stigma of “pauper” or “charity” schools, and the emergence of a lively “penny press,” made possible by a technological revolution, were among the most important developments. The role of women in America’s expanding society was intriguingly shaped by conflicting forces. On one hand, there were factors that abetted emancipation. For example, the growing cities offered new job opportunities as clerks and shop assistants for girls and young women with elementary educations furnished by the public schools. And the need for trained teachers for those schools offered another avenue to female independence. At higher levels, new rungs on the ladder of upward mobility were provided by the creation of women’s colleges, such as Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, Massachusetts (1837), and by the admission of women to a very few coeducational colleges, such as Oberlin (1833) and Antioch (1852), both in Ohio. A rare woman or two even broke into professional ranks, including Elizabeth Blackwell, considered the first woman physician of modern times, and the Rev. Olympia Brown, one of the first American women whose ordination was sanctioned by a full denomination.

On the other hand, traditionally educated women from genteel families remained bound by silken cords of expectation. The “duties of womanhood” expounded by popular media included, to the exclusion of all else, the conservation of a husband’s resources, the religious and moral education of children and servants, and the cultivation of higher sensibilities through the proper selection of decorative objects and reading matter. The “true woman” made the home an island of tranquility and uplift to which the busy male could retreat after a day’s struggle in the hard world of the marketplace. In so doing, she was venerated but kept in a clearly noncompetitive role.

Bernard A. Weisberger

Wealth

The brilliant French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, in common with most contemporary observers, believed American society to be remarkably egalitarian. Most rich American men were thought to have been born poor; “self-made” was the term Henry Clay popularized for them. The society was allegedly a very fluid one, marked by the rapid rise and fall of fortunes, with room at the top accessible to all but the most humble; opportunity for success seemed freely available to all, and, although material possessions were not distributed perfectly equally, they were, in theory, dispersed so fairly that only a few poor and a few rich men existed at either end of the social spectrum.

The actuality, however, was far different. While the rich were inevitably not numerous, America by 1850 had more millionaires than all of Europe. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia each had perhaps1,000 individuals admitting to assets of $100,000 or more, at a time when wealthy taxpayers kept secret from assessors the bulk of their wealth. Because an annual income of $4,000 or $5,000 enabled a person to live luxuriously, these were great fortunes indeed. Typically, the wealthiest 1 percent of urban citizens owned approximately one-half the wealth of the great cities of the Northeast, while the great bulk of their populations possessed little or nothing. In what has long been called the “Age of the Common Man,” rich men were almost invariably born not into humble or poor families but into wealthy and prestigious ones. In western cities too, class lines increasingly hardened after 1830. The common man lived in the age, but he did not dominate it. It appears that contemporaries, overimpressed with the absence of a titled aristocracy and with the democratic tone and manner of American life, failed to see the extent to which money, family, and status exerted power in the New World even as they did in the Old.