Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

• 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.

Objectives

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

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

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

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

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

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.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

Early American cities were small by today’s 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Farm laborers who had been replaced by machines went to work in city factories and shops.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

a lack of clean drinking water

disease

As cities grew, a variety of problems emerged.

filthy streets

the absence of good sewage

systems

structures made mostly of wood

poorly trained fire fighters

rival fire companies fought each other

instead of fires

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

The Industrial Revolution also provided many benefits.

New inventions and technological advances affected many industries and caused many changes in people’s ways of life, in the following areas.

• Agriculture

• Clothing and manufactured goods

• Communication

• Transportation

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

Agriculture

Inventions made it easier for farmers to cultivate more land and harvest their crops with fewer workers.

Cyrus McCormick’s 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.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

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 nation’s manufactured goods.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

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.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

The telegraph worked by sending electrical signals over a wire.

Messages could be sent quickly over long distances.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

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.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

In 1807, Robert Fulton invented the steamboat.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

Side-paddle steamboats traveled well on rivers, but not on oceans.

In 1850, American-built clipper ships—the fastest ships in the world at the time—were introduced.

But by the 1850s, Britain was producing ocean-going steamships that were faster than and could carry more cargo than clipper ships.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

Railroads tied together raw materials, manufacturers, and markets better than any other form of transportation.

Steamboats had to follow the paths of rivers, which sometimes

froze in winter.

Railroads could be

built almost

anywhere.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

Cars were drawn along the track by horses on America’s 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.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

The American population grew rapidly in the 1840s because millions of immigrants, mostly from Western Europe, entered the United States.

Not only was America’s way of life changing, immigrants were changing who Americans were.

UnitedStates

Population

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

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.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

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.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

Most of the Irish immigrants who came to the United States during this period found work:

• laying railroad track in the East and Midwest.

• in construction.

• as household workers.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

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.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

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.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

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.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

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.

Chapter 11 Section 2

The North Transformed

Section Review

Know It, Show It QuizQuickTake Quiz