Foreign Commerce 335Foreign Commerce
Changes in the pattern of foreign commerce were less
noticeable than those in manufacturing but were nev-
ertheless significant. After increasing erratically during
the 1820s and 1830s, both imports and exports leapt
forward in the next twenty years. The nation remained
primarily an exporter of raw materials and an importer
of manufactured goods, and in most years it imported
more than it exported. Cotton continued to be the
most valuable export, in 1860 accounting for a record
$191 million of total exports of $333 million. Despite
America’s own thriving industry, textiles still held the
lead among imports, with iron products second. As in
earlier days, Great Britain was both the best customer
of the United States and its leading supplier.
The success of sailing packets, those “square-
riggers on schedule,” greatly facilitated the movement
of passengers and freight. Fifty-two packets were operat-
ing between New York and Europe by 1845, and many
more plied between New York and other American
ports. The packets accelerated the tendency for trade to
concentrate in New York and to a lesser extent in
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans. The com-
merce of Boston and smaller New England towns like
Providence and New Haven, which had flourished in
earlier days, now languished.
New Bedford and a few other southern New
England towns shrewdly saved their prosperity by con-
centrating on whaling, which boomed between 1830
and 1860. The supply of whales seemed unlimited—as
indeed it was, given the primitive hunting techniques
of the age of sail. By the mid-1850s, with sperm oil
selling at more than $1.75 a gallon and the country
exporting an average of $2.7 million worth of whale oil
and whalebone a year, New Bedford boasted a whaling
fleet of well over 300 vessels and a population
approaching 25,000.
The increase in the volume and value of trade and
its concentration at larger ports had a marked effect
on the construction of ships. By the 1850s the aver-
age vessel was three times the size of those built thirtyA strike by 800 women shoemakers in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1860. In 1851 a Lynn shoemaker had adapted a Howe sewing machine so that it could
pierce and sew leather, work normally performed by married women in their homes. Because these large machines required women to leave their
homes and children to work at the shoe-stitching factories, few married women would do so; here they are protesting their displacement.