Toward a National EconomyToward a National Economy 8

CONTENTS

■A view of Samuel Slater’s cotton textile mill at Pawtucket Falls in Rhode

Island; the fast-running water turned the wheels that powered the machinery.

223

But by the early 1800s the “Age of Homespun” was

waning. Manufactured products, often produced in dis-

tant factories, increasingly supplanted home-made

goods. Slater’s mill, pictured on page 228, was among

the first such factories. Historians still debate whether

the shift from rural self-sufficiency to a specialized mar-

ket economy occurred over a few pivotal decades during

the early 1800s or whether it evolved slowly, over a

longer period of time.

Nearly all agree, though, that after 1810 a cluster of

changes imparted a new dynamism to the American

economy: the growing demand for high-quality, store-

bought goods; the rise of the factory system; the recruit-

ment and training of a cheap labor force; the emergence

of corporations; the revival of the Southern economy

based on slavery and cotton production; the develop-

ment of improved transportation that facilitated the

exchange of farm and factory goods; and the creation of

legal structures that promoted economic growth.

By the mid-nineteenth century, most Americans had

been contributors to and consumers of an economic sys-

tem that, while not yet fully global, had become national

in scope. Most Americans wore socks that were manufac-

tured in a handful of cities in Massachusetts, New York,

and Pennsylvania. Thus while political tendencies tended

to pull the nation apart, especially the growing dispute

over the future of slavery in the territories, Americans

were becoming more interdependent economically. ■

■Gentility and the Consumer

Revolution

■Birth of the Factory

■An Industrial Proletariat?

■Lowell’s Waltham System:

Women as Factory Workers

■Irish and German Immigrants

■The Persistence of the

Household System

■Rise of Corporations

■Cotton Revolutionizes

the South

■Revival of Slavery

■Roads to Market

■Transportation and the

Government

■Development of Steamboats

■The Canal Boom

■New York City: Emporium of

the Western World

■The Marshall Court

■Mapping the Past:

The Making of the

Working Class

■Debating the Past:

Was There a “Market

Revolution” in the Early

1800s?

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