The North Transformed

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Objectives

• Explain why American cities grew in the 1800s.
• List the new inventions and advances in
  agriculture and manufacturing.
• Describe the improvements in transportation
  during the early 1800s.
• Discuss the wave of immigration to the United
  States in the 1840s and 1850s.
• Describe the problems African Americans faced in
  the North.

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Terms and People

• urbanization the growth of cities due to the
  movement of people from rural areas to cities
• telegraph a device that used electrical signals
  to send messages
• Samuel F. B. Morse the inventor of the telegraph

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Terms and People (continued)

• famine widespread starvation
• nativists people who wanted to preserve the
  country for white, American-born Protestants
• discrimination the denial of equal rights or
  equal treatment to certain groups of people

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How did urbanization, technology, and social
change affect the North?
During the Industrial Revolution, the differences
between the North and South widened.
Northern cities, industries, and transportation
technologies grew rapidly, with both benefits and
drawbacks for citizens.
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Early American cities were small by todays
standards, but in the 1800s, U.S. cities grew
larger.
The Industrial Revolution spurred urbanization,
as agricultural workers moved to the cities for
jobs.
Farm laborers who had been replaced by machines
went to work in city factories and shops.
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As cities grew, a variety of problems emerged.
filthy streets
structures made mostly of wood
a lack of clean drinking water
poorly trained fire fighters
the absence of good sewage systems
rival fire companies fought each other instead of
fires
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The Industrial Revolution also provided many
benefits. New inventions and technological
advances affected many industries and caused many
changes in peoples ways of life, in the
following areas.

• Agriculture
• Clothing and manufactured goods
• Communication
• Transportation

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Agriculture
Inventions made it easier for farmers to cultivate more land and harvest their crops with fewer workers.
Cyrus McCormicks mechanical reaper cut stalks of wheat.
Threshers separated grains of wheat from their stalks.
The reaper and the thresher were put together into one machine called a combine.
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Clothing and Manufactured Goods
Sewing machines made it much more efficient to produce clothing in quantity.
By 1860, factories in New England and the middle Atlantic states were producing most of the nations manufactured goods.
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Communications
Samuel F. B. Morse began working on the telegraph in 1835.
Morse code used shorter (dots) and longer (dashes) bursts of electricity to represent the letters of the alphabet.
Soon, thousands of telegraph wires were strung across the nation.
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The telegraph worked by sending electrical
signals over a wire. Messages could be sent
quickly over long distances.
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Transportation
Improvements in transportation spurred the growth of American industry.
Factories could make use of raw materials that were farther away.
Factory owners could ship their goods to distant markets.
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In 1807, Robert Fulton invented the steamboat.
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Side-paddle steamboats traveled well on rivers,
but not on oceans.
In 1850, American-built clipper shipsthe fastest
ships in the world at the timewere introduced.
But by the 1850s, Britain was producing
ocean-going steamships that were faster than and
could carry more cargo than clipper ships.
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Railroads tied together raw materials,
manufacturers, and markets better than any other
form of transportation.
Railroads could be built almost anywhere.
Steamboats had to follow the paths of rivers,
which sometimes froze in winter.
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Cars were drawn along the track by horses on
Americas first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio,
which was begun in 1828.
In 1830, Peter Cooper built the first
American-made steam locomotive.
By 1840, about 3,000 miles of railway track had
been built in the United States.
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Not only was Americas way of life changing,
immigrants were changing who Americans were.
The American population grew rapidly in the 1840s
because millions of immigrants, mostly from
Western Europe, entered the United States.
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Some immigrants came for land, others for
opportunity, and still others because they could
not survive in their home countries.
As cities along the eastern coast became crowded,
newly arrived immigrants headed west.
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In 1845, a fungus destroyed the potato crop in
Ireland, which led to a famine.
During the Great Hunger, more than a million
people starved to death, and a million more left
Ireland.
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Most of the Irish immigrants who came to the
United States during this period found work

• laying railroad track in the East and Midwest.

• as household workers.

• in construction.

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Germans also came to America during this period,
many to escape political persecution.
Unlike the Irish, German immigrants came from
many different levels of society.
Many Germans settled in the Ohio Valley and the
Great Lakes region.
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Some Americans, called nativists, worried about
the growing foreign population.
Nativists especially opposed Irish immigration
because most Irish were Roman Catholic.
One New York nativist group became the powerful
Know-Nothing political party, but the party
eventually dissolved over the issue of slavery.
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Even more so than immigrants, African Americans
in the North faced discrimination.
Slavery had largely ended in the North by the
early 1800s, but free African Americans did not
receive the same treatment as whites.
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Discrimination in the North Discrimination in the North
Suffrage African Americans were often denied the right to vote.
Job Market African Americans were not allowed to work in factories or in skilled trades. Many employers preferred to hire whites.
Segregation Schools, public facilities, and churches were segregated, so African Americans formed their own churches.
The Media White newspapers often portrayed African Americans as inferior, so African Americans started their own newspapers.
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