• 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

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

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

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.

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Farm laborers who had been replaced by machines went to work in city factories and shops.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The telegraph worked by sending electrical signals over a wire.

Messages could be sent quickly over long distances.

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.

In 1807, Robert Fulton invented the steamboat created a better steamboat called the Clermont.

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.

John Griffiths was the first to use the fast clipper ships

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Section Review

Know It, Show It QuizQuickTake Quiz

• Explain the significance of cotton and the cotton gin to the South.

• Describe what life was like for free and enslaved African Americans in the South.

Objectives

Terms and People

• cotton gin – a machine that used a spiked cylinder to remove seeds from cotton fibers

• slave code – laws that controlled every aspect of the lives of enslaved African Americans

• spiritual – a religious folk song that blended biblical themes with the realities of slavery

• Nat Turner – a slave who led a famous slave revolt in 1831

How did cotton affect the social and economic life of the South?

A boom in textiles caused by the Industrial Revolution created a huge demand for cotton.

The South’s economy became dependent on cotton, and cotton plantations became dependent on slave labor.

The South remained largely rural as its plantations grew wealthy from the cotton trade.

In the North, the Industrial Revolution caused industry, immigration, and cities to grow.

In 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.

Before the introduction of the cotton gin, laborers had to pick seeds out of the cotton by hand, which was a very slow process.

The cotton gin greatly sped up the processing of cotton and made it much more profitable.

In 1790, planters grew 1.5 million pounds of cotton, but by 1820, they grew ten times as much.

Cotton became the greatest source of wealth for the United States, enriching:

Southern planters

Northern bankers and ship owners

To keep up with the demand for cotton and the new ability to process it quickly, planters used more slave labor.

From 1790 to 1860, the price of a slave increased ten or twenty times.

Enslaved African Americans had no rights at all, and their lives were controlled by slave codes.

Lives of EnslavedAfrican Americans in the South

Tasks • Some enslaved African Americans worked in their owners’ homes.

• Most did heavy farm labor.

Working conditions

• Some slave holders worked slaves almost to death and whipped them as punishment for many offenses.

• Most owners saw their slaves as valuable property and tried to keep them healthy so they would be productive.

Families • Owners often broke apart slave families by selling family members.

Many African Americans found messages of hope in the Bible, and they composed spirituals.

Enslaved African Americans passed on African customs, music, and dance to their children.

In 1831, Nat Turner said he was told to kill whites in a vision. He led a famous, but doomed, slave revolt.

Many enslaved African Americans resisted slave holders by working slowly, breaking equipment, fleeing to freedom in the north, and rebelling.

Whites retaliated by killing many innocent African Americans.

By the 1830s, some northerners were pushing for slavery to be banned.

After 1808, it was illegal to import enslaved Africans to the United States.

Supporters of slavery said that it was more humane than the free labor system of the North.

Critics of slavery said that slaves suffered abuse from white owners.

Most southern whites accepted the system of slavery, fearing violent uprisings would follow if control over slaves was weakened.

About 6 percent of the 4 million African Americans in the South were free.

• Norbert Rillieux improved sugar refining.

Many of the free African Americans made valuable contributions to southern life:

• Henry Blair invented a seed-planting device.

Obstacles Faced by Free African Americans in the South

Jobs • Free African Americans were given only the most menial jobs.

Travel • They were discouraged from traveling.

Education • Their children could not attend public schools.

Political Rights

• They could not vote, serve on juries, or testify against white defendants in court.

Liberty • Slave catchers often kidnapped them and sold them into slavery.

But more than half of all southern farmers did not have slaves.

In the southern “Cotton Kingdom,” society was dominated by a small group of wealthy plantation owners.

Instead of growing cotton, these people often grew corn and raised hogs and chickens.

Differences Between Southern States

Alabama, Mississippi, and Like States

• States that depended heavily on cotton had large populations of enslaved people.

Kentucky and Like States

• States that grew less cotton had smaller populations of enslaved people.

Section Review

Know It, Show It QuizQuickTake Quiz