In the 1820s and 1830s, a market revolution was transforming American business and global trade. Factories and mass production increasingly displaced independent artisans. Farms grew and produced goods for distant, not local, markets, shipping them via inexpensive transportation like the Erie Canal. Government policies fostered the growth of capitalism. Cotton, produced by enslaved African Americans, was becoming America’s most profitable global product. Show  Illustration of workers spinning cotton, 1840 Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery Eli Terry Mantel Clock, around 1824 Eli Terry and
his associates developed ways to mass produce quality, low-cost clocks using waterpower and interchangeable parts. Their techniques transformed clock making from a craft to a factory process. Other industries soon copied the technique. Patent Model, 1837 The American government promoted innovation and protected inventions with patents, which helped inventors profit
from their creativity. To secure this protection, inventors had to submit working models to the Patent Office. This model illustrated new ideas for silk spinning and twisting. Commemorative Plates, 1824–1825 Keepsakes like these plates reminded Americans of heroes and national
achievements. Decanter, 1828 Lauded on this decanter, “The American System” was a controversial program of fostering American industry by stimulating internal improvements and charging high tariffs on imported goods. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Americans’ endless commercial ambition—what one Baltimore paper in 1815 called an “almost universal ambition to get forward”—remade the nation.1 Between the Revolution and the Civil War, an old subsistence world died and a new more-commercial nation was born. Americans integrated the technologies of the Industrial Revolution into a new commercial economy. Steam power, the technology that moved steamboats and railroads, fueled the rise of American industry by powering mills and sparking new national transportation networks. A “market revolution” was busy remaking the nation. The revolution reverberated across the country. More and more farmers grew crops for profit, not self-sufficiency. Vast factories and cities arose in the North. Enormous fortunes materialized. A new middle class ballooned. And as more men and women worked in the cash economy, they were freed from the bound dependence of servitude. But there were costs to this revolution. As northern textile factories boomed, the demand for southern cotton swelled and the institution of American slavery accelerated. Northern subsistence farmers became laborers bound to the whims of markets and bosses. The market revolution sparked not only explosive economic growth and new personal wealth but also devastating depressions—“panics”—and a growing lower class of property-less workers. Many Americans labored for low wages and became trapped in endless cycles of poverty. Some workers—often immigrant women—worked thirteen hours a day, six days a week. Others labored in slavery. Massive northern textile mills turned southern cotton into cheap cloth. And although northern states washed their hands of slavery, their factories fueled the demand for slave-grown southern cotton that ensured the profitability and continued existence of the American slave system. And so, as the economy advanced, the market revolution wrenched the United States in new directions as it became a nation of free labor and slavery, of wealth and inequality, and of endless promise and untold perils. Read the rest of Chapter 8 from the American Yawp. Who was affected by the market revolution?Most visibly, the market revolution encouraged the growth of cities and reshaped the lives of urban workers. In 1820, only New York had over one hundred thousand inhabitants. By 1850, six American cities met that threshold, including Chicago, which had been founded fewer than two decades earlier.
How did the market revolution affect the North?Northern subsistence farmers became laborers bound to the whims of markets and bosses. The market revolution sparked not only explosive economic growth and new personal wealth but also devastating depressions—“panics”—and a growing lower class of property-less workers.
How did the market revolution affect urban areas?-The Market Revolution sparked social change in many ways. Cities grew, factories sprouted along with "the clock" and the "mill girls", and immigration increased. With the new inventions like steamboats and canals, there was a growth of "slave-based cotton plantations in the South.
What are the 3 major effects of the market revolution?In this video, I want to talk about three major effects of the Market Revolution, and those were changes in labor, entry into a national and international market system and the Second Great Awakening.
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