Choose one of the following topics

• America: A Narrative History notes Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency set the tone of “republican simplicity”. In what ways was this still true in 1850 following the “Market Revolution” and in what ways was it not? 
• Connect the technological improvements in water transportation of the early 19th century to the territory acquired in the LA Purchase.

The Market Revolution

In 1818, for example, Congress rejected a request from the NewYork Irish Emigrant Society to set aside land in Illinois for an Irish immigrant commu-nity. The congressional committee declared that it would be “undesirable to concentrate alien people geographically.” America was not to become “a patch-work nation of foreign settlements.”In the Midwest states— llinois,Indiana,Iowa,Michigan,Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin— large- scale commercial agriculture emerged as big farms raised corn, wheat, pigs, and cattle to be sold in distant markets and across the Atlantic. In the South, cotton became so profitable that it increasingly domi-nated the region’s economy, luring farmers and planters (wealthy farmers with hundreds or even thousands of acres worked by large numbers of slaves) into the new states of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.Cotton from the American South provided most of the clothing for people around the world. As the cotton economy expanded, it required more enslaved workers, many of whom were sold by professional slave traders and relocated from Virginia and the Carolinas to the Old Southwest— western Georgia and the Florida Panhandle, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

Meanwhile, the Northeast experienced a surge of industrial development. Labor- saving machines and water- and steam- powered industries reshaped the region’s economic and social life. Mills and factories began to transform the way people labored, dressed, ate, and lived. With the rise of the factory system, more and more economic activity occurred outside the home and off the farm. “The transition from mother- daughter power [in the home] to water and steam power” in the mills and factories, said a farmer, was producing a “complete revolution in social life and domestic manners.” An urban middle class began to emerge as Americans, including young women, moved to towns and cities, lured by jobs in new mills, factories, stores, and banks.By 1850, the United States boasted the world’s fastest- growing economy. The industrial economy changed politics, the legal system, family dynamics, and social values. These developments in turn helped expand prosperity and freedom for whites and free blacks.

They also sparked vigorous debates over economic policies, transportation improvements, and the extension of slavery into the new territories. In the pro-cess, the nation began to divide into three regions— North, South, and West— whose shifting alliances and disputes would shape political life until the Civil War

The Market Revolution, A market revolution that had begun before the war for independence accel-erated the transformation of the American economy into a global power-house. In the eighteenth century, most Americans were isolated farmers who produced just enough food, livestock, and clothing for their own family’s needs and perhaps a little more to barter (exchange) with their neighbors. Their lives revolved around a regular farmstead routine in a day- long cycle that started with the rooster crowing at dawn to the sleep of the chickens at night, punctu-ated by the changing seasons and unpredictable weather.As the nineteenth century unfolded, however, more and more farm families began engaging in commercial rather than subsistence agriculture, producing surplus crops and livestock to sell for cash in regional and even international markets. In 1851, the president of the NewYork Agricultural Society noted that until the nineteenth century, “‘production for consumption’ was the lead-ing purpose” of the farm economy. Now, however, “no farmer could find it profitable to do everything for himself. He now sells for money.” With the cash they earned, farm families were able to buy more land, better equipment, and the latest manufactured household goods.Such farming for sale rather than for consumption, the first stage of a “ market- based economy,” produced boom- and- bust cycles and was often built upon the backs of slave laborers, immigrant workers, and displaced Mexicans. Overall, however, the standard of living rose and Americans enjoyed unprecedented opportunities for economic gain and geographic mobility.

What the market economy most needed were “internal improvements”—deeper harbors, lighthouses, and a national network of canals, bridges, roads, and railroads— to improve the flow of goods. In 1817, for example, South Carolina congressman JohnC.Calhoun expressed his desire to “bind the Republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals.” As the world’s largest republic, the United States desperately needed a national transpor-tation system. “Let us conquer space,” he told the House of Representatives.Calhoun’s idea sparked a fierce debate over how to fund such improve-ments: Should it be the responsibility of the federal government, the individ-ual states, or private corporations? Since the Constitution said nothing about the federal government’s role in funding transportation improvements, many argued that such projects must be initiated by state and local governments. Others insisted that the Constitution gave the federal government broad pow-ers to promote the “general welfare,” which included enhancing transportation and communication. The debate over internal improvements would continue throughout the nineteenth century.

Better Roads Until the nineteenth century, travel had been slow, tedious, uncomfortable, and expensive. It took a horse- drawn coach, for example, four days to go from NewYork City to Boston. Because of long travel times, many farm products could be sold only locally before they spoiled. That soon changed, as an array of innovations— larger horse- drawn wagons (called Conestogas), new roads, canals, steamboats, and railroads— knit together the expanding national market for goods and services and greatly accelerated the pace of life.As more settlers moved west, people expressed a “passion for improv-ing roads.” In 1795, the Wilderness Road, along the trail first blazed by Daniel Boone, was opened to wagon and stagecoach traffic, thereby eas-ing the over- the- mountains route from North Carolina into Kentucky and Tennessee.In 1803, when Ohio became a state, Congress ordered that 5percent of the money from land sales in the state should go toward building a National Road from the Atlantic coast across Ohio and westward. Construction finally began in 1811. Originally called the Cumberland Road, it was the first interstate roadway financed by the federal government. By 1818, the road was open from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), where it crossed the Ohio River. By 1838, the National Road extended 600miles farther westward to Vandalia, Illinois.

The National Road quickened the settlement of the West and the emergence of a truly national market economy by reducing transportation costs, opening up new markets, and stimulating the growth of towns. Farmers increasingly took their produce and livestock to sell in distant markets. To the northeast, a movement for paved roads gathered momentum after the Philadelphia- Lancaster Turnpike opened in 1794. (The term turnpike derived from a pole, or pike, at the tollgate, which was turned to admit the traffic in exchange for a small fee, or toll.) By 1821, some 4,000miles of turn-pikes had been built, and stagecoach and freight companies emerged to move more people and cargo at lower rates.

Waterways, By the early 1820s, the turnpike boom was giving way to advances in water transportation. Steamboats, flatboats (barges driven by men using long poles and mules), and canal barges carried people and goods far more cheaply than did horse- drawn wagons. Hundreds of flatboats floated goods, farm produce, livestock, and people from Tennessee, Kentucky, Indi-ana, Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and other states down the Ohio and Mis-sissippi Rivers. Flatboats, however, went in only one direction: downstream. Once unloaded in Natchez, Mississippi, or New Orleans, Louisiana, they were sold and dismantled to provide lumber for construction.The difficulties of getting back upriver were solved when Robert Fulton and RobertR.Livingston sent the Clermont, the first commercial steamboat, up the Hudson River from NewYork City in 1807. Thereafter, the use of wood- fired steamboats spread rapidly, opening nearly half the continent to water traffic along the major rivers.By bringing two- way travel to the Mississippi Valley, steamboats created a transcontinental market and a commercial agricultural empire that produced much of the nation’s cotton, timber, wheat, corn, cattle, and hogs. By 1836, there were 750 steamboats operating on American rivers. As steamboat use increased, the price for shipping goods plunged, thus increasing profits and stimulating demand.

The use of steamboats transformed St.Louis, Missouri, from a sleepy fron-tier village into a booming river port. New Orleans developed even faster. Its population had grown over tenfold since it was acquired from France in 1803. By 1840, it was perhaps the wealthiest American city, having developed a thriving trade with the Caribbean islands and the new Latin American repub-lics that had overthrown Spanish rule. A thousand steamboats a year visited New Orleans. The annual amount of trade shipped through the river city dou-bled that of NewYork City by 1843, in large part because of the explosion in cotton production.

Wood- burning steamboats were a risky form of transportation. Accidents, explosions, and fires were common, and sanitation was poor. Passengers crowded on board along with pigs and cattle. There were no toilets on steam-boats until the 1850s; passengers shared the same two washbasins and towels. Despite the inconveniences, however, steamboats were the fastest and most convenient form of transportation in the first half of the nineteenth century.Canals also sped the market revolution. The Erie Canal in central NewYork connected the Great Lakes and the Midwest to the Hudson River and NewYork City. NewYork Governor DeWitt Clinton took the lead in pro-moting the risky project, which Thomas Jefferson dismissed as “little short of madness.” Clinton, however, boasted that his state of NewYork had the oppor-tunity to “create a new era in history, and to erect a work more stupendous, more magnificent, and more beneficial, than has hitherto been achieved by the human race.”It was not an idle boast. After the Erie Canal opened in 1825, having taken eight years to build, it drew eastward much of the midwestern trade (furs, lumber, textiles) that earlier had been forced to go to Canada or make the long journey down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. Thanks to the Erie Canal, the backwoods village of Chicago developed into a bustling city because of its commercial connection via the Great Lakes to NewYork City, and eventually to Europe.

The Erie Canal was a triumph of engineering audacity. Forty feet wide and four feet deep, it was the longest canal in the world, extending 363miles across NewYork from Albany in the east to Buffalo and Lake Erie in the west and rising some 675feet in elevation. The canal was built by thousands of labor-ers, mostly German and Irish immigrants who were paid less than a dollar a day to drain swamps, clear forests, build stone bridges and aqueducts, and blast through solid rock. It brought a “river of gold” to NewYork City in the form of an unending stream of lumber, grain, flour, and other goods, and it unlocked the floodgates of western settlement. The canal also reduced the cost of moving a ton of freight from $100 to $5. It was so profitable that it paid off its construction costs in just seven years.The Erie Canal also had enormous economic and political conse-quences, as it tied together the regional economies of the Midwest and the East while further isolating the Deep South. The Genesee Valley in western NewYork became one of the most productive grain- growing regions in the world; Rochester became a boom town, processing wheat and corn into flour and meal. The writer Nathaniel Hawthorne said “the town had sprung up like amushroom.” Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo experienced similarly dramatic growth.The business of moving goods and people along the canal involved some 4,000 boats and more than 25,000 workers. Canal boats, usually eleven feet wide and seventy feet long, were pulled by teams of horses or mules walking along a towpath adjacent to the canal. Painted in bright colors and given colorful names, the “packet” boats carrying passengers traveled seven days a week at between two and four miles an hour. Much time was lost waiting at one of the eighty- eight locks, where boats would enter one at a time to be raised or lowered to match the changing water level of the canal. Often, the boat captains took their families with them. Most boatmen, however, were single— and rough. One trav-eler called them “a coarse and untaught set of vagabonds whose chief delight is to carouse and fight.”The success of the Erie Canal and the entire New York canal system inspired other states to build some 3,000miles of waterways by 1837. Canals spurred the economy by enabling speedier and less expensive transport of goods andpeople. They also boosted real estate prices for the lands bordering them and transformed sleepy villages into booming cities.

Railroads, The canal era was short- lived, however. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a much more efficient and versatile form of transportation emerged: the railroad. Its speed made it eventually a more desirable form of transporting freight and people.In 1825, the year the Erie Canal was completed, the world’s first steam- powered railway began operating in England. Soon thereafter, a railroad- building “epidemic” infected the United States. In 1830, the nation had only twenty- three miles of railroad track. Over the next twenty years, railroad cov-erage grew to 30,626miles.The railroad quickly surpassed other forms of transportation because trains could move people and freight faster, farther, and cheaper than could wagons or boats. The early railroads averaged ten miles per hour, more than twice the speed of stagecoaches and four times that of boats and barges. That locomotives were able to operate year- round gave rail travel a huge advan-tage over canals that froze in winter and dirt roads that became rivers of mud during rainstorms.Railroads also provided indirect benefits by encouraging western settlement and the expansion of commercial agriculture. A westerner reported that the opening of a new rail line resulted in the emergence of three new villages along the line. The depot or rail station became the cen-tral building in every town, a public place where people from all walks of life converged.Building railroads stimulated the national economy not only by improv-ing transportation but by creating a huge demand for iron, wooden crossties, bridges, locomotives, freight cars, and other equipment. Railroads also became the nation’s largest corporations and employers.

Perhaps most important, railroads enabled towns and cities not served by canals or turnpikes to compete economically. By transforming what had once been a cluster of mostly local markets into an interconnected national marketplace for goods and services, railroads expanded the geography of cap-italism, making possible larger industrial and commercial enterprises from coast to coast. Railroads were also the first “big” businesses, huge corporations employing thousands of people while exercising extraordinary influence over the life of the regions they served.Railroad mania, however, had negative effects as well. Its quick and shady profits frequently led to political corruption. Railroad titans often bribed leg-islators. By facilitating access to the trans- Appalachian West, the railroads also accelerated the decline of Native American culture. In addition, they dramati-cally increased the tempo, mobility, and noise of everyday life. Writer Nathaniel Hawthorne spoke for many when he said that the locomotive, with its startling whistle, brought “the noisy world into the midst of our slumberous space.”

Ocean Transportation, The year 1845 brought a great innova-tion in ocean transport with the launch of the first clipper ship, the Rainbow. Built for speed, the clipper ships were the nineteenth- century equivalent of the supersonic jetliner. They were twice as fast as the older merchant ships. Long and lean, with taller masts and larger sails than conventional ships, they cut dashing figures during their brief but colorful career, which lasted less than two decades. The American thirst for Chinese tea prompted the clipper boom. Asian tea leaves had to reach markets quickly after harvest, and the fast clipper ships made this possible.The discovery of gold in California in 1848 lured thousands of prospectors and entrepreneurs. When the would- be miners generated an urgent demand for goods on the West Coast, the clippers met it. In 1854, the Flying Cloud took eighty- nine days and eight hours to travel from NewYork to San Francisco, around South America, less than half as long as the trip would have taken in a conventional ship. But clippers, while fast, lacked ample space for cargo or passengers. After the Civil War, the clippers would give way to the steamship

Communications, Innovations in transportation also helped spark improvements in communications, which knit the nation even closer together. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, traveling was slow and difficult. It often took days or weeks for news to travel along the Atlantic Seaboard. For example, after George Washington died in 1798 in Virginia, word of his death did not appear in NewYork City newspapers until a week later. By 1829, however, it was possible to deliver Andrew Jackson’s inaugural address from Washington,D.C., to NewYork City by relay horse riders in less than twenty hours.Mail deliveries also improved. The number of post offices soared from 75 in 1790 to 28,498 in 1860. In addition, new steam- powered printing presses enabled the mass production of newspapers, reducing their cost from 6¢ to a penny each.In the new western states, however, postal service was scarce and slow. To address the problem, two entrepreneurs, Henry Wells and WilliamG.Fargo, formed an express delivery service called Wells Fargo & Company in 1852. Within a few years, Wells Fargo stagecoaches pulled by six horses were deliv-ering passengers, mail, and “strongboxes” filled with gold across California and eventually from coast to coast. In 1857, Wells Fargo joined other express companies to form the Overland Mail Company, establishing regular twice- a- week mail service operating night and day between St.Louis and San Fran-cisco.Prior to that innovation, mail service was twice a month by steamship.Still, people sought even faster delivery. In 1860, the Pony Express Com-pany was founded to deliver mail cross country between St.Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. It established some 150 relay stations from Missouri west to California, enabling riders to change horses every ten to fifteen miles. The Pony Express riders set their fastest time delivering Abraham Lincoln’s presidential inaugural address in 1861, which arrived in California in eight days.But the most important advance in communications was the national elec-tromagnetic telegraph system, invented by SamuelF.B.Morse. In May1844, Morse sent the first intercity telegraph message from Washington,D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland. It read: “What Hath God Wrought?”By the end of the decade, most major cities benefited from telegraph lines. By allowing people to communicate faster and more easily across long dis-tances, the telegraph system triggered many changes, not the least of which was helping railroad operators schedule trains more precisely and thus avoid collisions. A New Orleans newspaper claimed that, with the invention of the telegraph, “scarcely anything now will appear to be impossible.”

The Role of Government, Steamboats, canals, and railroads connected the western areas of the country with the East, boosted trade, helped open the Far West for settlement, and spurred dramatic growth in cit-ies. Between 1800 and 1860, an undeveloped nation of scattered farms, primi-tive roads, and modest local markets became an engine of capitalist expansion, urban energy, and global reach.The transportation improvements were financed by both state govern-ments and private investors. The federal government helped, too, despite intense political debates over whether it was constitutional to use federal funds to finance such “internal improvements.”The national government also bought stock in turnpike and canal com-panies and, after the success of the Erie Canal, awarded land grants to sev-eral western states to support canal and railroad projects. In 1850, Stephen A.Douglas, a powerful Democratic senator from Illinois, convinced Congress to provide a major land grant to support a north– south rail line connecting Chicago and Mobile, Alabama. The 1850 congressional land grant set a prece-dent for other bounties that totaled about 20million acres by 1860. However, this would prove to be a small amount when compared to the land grants that Congress would award transcontinental railroads during the 1860s and after. The national government also sent federal cavalry troops to “pacify” the Indians along the route of the railroads.