Emergence of America

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Emergence of Americas Market Economy
Presentation created by Robert Martinez Primary
Content Source The New Nation by Joy
Hakim Images as cited.
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• Back in colonial times. Americans raised most
  of the food they ate and made most of what they
  wore. They spun their own yarn, wove their own
  cloth, and stitched their own clothes.

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ing-Spinner-th.jpg
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• They dipped candles and built tables and
  chairs. Wealthy colonists who wanted fancy
  dishes, fine cloth, elegant furniture, or
  handsome books sent to England for them.

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• Most manufactured goods were made in England,
  raw materials came from the colonies.

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• It was a system that worked well. America
  provided lumber, pitch, tobacco, cotton, and
  grains. England took those raw materials and
  turned them into usable products that could be
  sold around the world.

Drying Tobacco Leaves
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• During the American Revolution the system
  stopped. Suddenly there was no place to send raw
  materials and no supply of fine goods. What did
  the colonists do? They used their heads.

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• They looked for new markets for their raw
  materials. Their ships sailed to faraway places
  to Spain, to China, to India, to Turkey.

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• After the war the new United States began
  trading with England again. But American society
  was changing. We were now a democracy with a
  strong and growing middle class.

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• It wasnt only the very rich who wanted to buy
  things. Ordinary people wanted them, too. In
  England something was happening that could make
  that possible. That something was an industrial
  revolution.

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• An industrial revolution was a new system of
  organizing work, based on new ideas in science
  and technology and business. Things once made at
  home were being made faster, and sometimes
  better, in factories.

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• Tasks were divided in new ways. People began
  working in teams, and that was much more
  productive than working alone. It was machinery
  that made it all possible. Americans wanted some
  of those machines.

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• The English werent about to share their new
  knowledge. They wanted to keep the Industrial
  Revolution in England. They wouldnt let anyone
  who worked in a cotton factory leave England.

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• Samuel Slater, a young apprentice in a cotton
  factory in England had a remarkable memory. He
  memorized the way the machines were built. Then
  he ran off to London.

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• In London he pretended to be a farm worker. He
  didnt tell anyone he had worked in a cotton
  mill. It was 1790 when he sailed for America. He
  brought the key to the Industrial Revolution with
  him.

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• Slater built a small factory next to a
  waterfall in the Blackstone River at Pawtucket,
  Rhode Island. Waterpower turned the machines that
  spun cotton fibers into yarn.

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20That/Old20slater20mill.jpg
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• Soon there were spinning mills besides many
  New England streams. Now that factories could
  turn cotton into yarn- quickly and easily- you
  can see there would be a great demand for raw
  cotton.

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d/slater.jpg
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• Anyone who could grow cotton would make a lot
  of money. Cotton grew very well in the southern
  states.

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• The cotton that grew in the coastal region was
  easy to use. It was called long-staple cotton
  and it had seeds that fell right off the cotton
  bolls. But the tidewater coastal lands were in
  poor shape. There wasnt much good land left.

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• People didnt practice scientific farming.
  They often destroyed land by growing the same
  crops year after year. Then, when the land was no
  longer productive, they moved on.

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• Short-staple cotton was the only cotton that
  would grow inland. However, short-staple cotton
  has lots of dark seeds, and those seeds stick to
  the cotton bolls.

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20and20fibre.jpg
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• You cant spin cotton that is full of black
  seeds. It took a worker all day to remove the
  seeds from just one pound of cotton. If only
  there were an easy way to get rid of those seeds

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• Eli Whitney heard all about that problem when
  he came to Savannah, Georgia, to take a job as a
  teacher. Whitney had just graduated from Yale
  College. It took him very little time to come up
  with a simple machine that removed seeds from
  cotton.

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• He called it a cotton engine the name was
  soon shortened to cotton gin. Instead of taking
  all day to remove seeds from a pound of cotton, a
  worker with a cotton gin could clean 50 pounds of
  cotton in a day, and clean it better than he ever
  could by hand.

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• The invention of the cotton gin, in 1793, did
  something that no one expected. It encouraged
  slavery.

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• If you could grow a lot of cotton you could
  get rich. So Southerners looked for land to grow
  cotton and workers to plant and harvest it.
  Slaves became a valuable part of their operation.

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• Whitney didnt mean it, but his invention
  helped turn the American South into a slave
  empire. It made the South into a land of cotton.
  It kept it rural.

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• At the same time, the North was becoming urban
  and industrial. It began in earnest after 1810,
  when a Boston businessman named Francis Cabot
  Lowell took a trip to view textile factories in
  England.

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• When he came home to America he built a
  factory that was even better than those in
  England. Lowells factory had machines for both
  spinning and weaving. He took cotton fibers and
  turned them into finished cloth, all in the same
  building.

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answork/Factory/Merrimack.jpg
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• Once you get started with machines and
  technology, one invention seems to lead to
  another. There were big advantages to the system,
  but disadvantages, too.

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• Factory goods cost much less than handcrafted
  goods. That meant that ordinary people could
  afford things they never been able to buy before.
  That made life better for most people. But not
  for everyone.

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• Work in the factories was mind-dulling.
  Workers did the same task, over and over. The air
  in the cotton mills was full of tiny, almost
  invisible cotton fibers that got into your lungs
  (and sometimes led to cancer.)

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earch/industrialrevolution.htm
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• Some of the workers in the factories were
  children. Some were as young as seven years of
  age. Children often worked 10 or more hours a day.

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• Those new spinning machines and looms were big
  and powerful and had no safety devices. If a
  workers hand slipped, she might lose it.

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• Francis Lowell hired young farm women for his
  factory. Lowell housed them in dormitories and
  saw that they lived well and got fair salaries.

Lowell factory, Boston, Ma.
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• But other factory owners took advantage of
  workers, especially women and children. They paid
  them poorly and made them work long hours.

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• The factory workers were taking part in two
  revolutions. The first was the Industrial
  Revolution. The second was a market revolution.
  That means the U.S. was going from a farm economy
  to a market economy.

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• A market economy is based on jobs and money,
  where people earned wages and bought goods in
  markets and stores.

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and/textiles/lowell/boottloom06sm.jpg