Jacksonian Democracy and the Age of Reform

No single development more profoundly altered the texture of American life in the early nineteenth century than what historians have termed the Market Revolution. This was not a sudden rupture but a gradual, accelerating transformation in which American households shifted from largely self-sufficient patterns of production and consumption to active participation in an interconnected, cash-based national economy. The Market Revolution had its roots in the late eighteenth century and gained irresistible momentum between roughly 1800 and 1850, reshaping the social structure of the North and South alike, redefining the meaning of work and family life, and generating both unprecedented prosperity and grinding poverty. The historian Charles Sellers, in his influential study of this period, described the Market Revolution as the central and organizing event of the antebellum era, arguing that nearly every major political and cultural development of the period — Jacksonian democracy, evangelical revivalism, the reform movements, the growing sectional crisis — was in some fundamental sense a response to the dislocations and opportunities created by the shift to a market economy.

In the colonial era and the early republic, most American families — particularly in the rural North and South — produced the majority of what they consumed: growing their own food, making their own cloth, building their own tools, and bartering with neighbors for goods they could not make themselves. Money was scarce, markets were local, and economic life was organized primarily around the household. The Market Revolution systematically dismantled this world. Improved transportation, technological innovation, the spread of commercial banking, and the explosive growth of cotton agriculture in the South combined to draw millions of Americans into a national and international market economy where goods were produced not for personal use but for sale. Cash replaced barter; wage labor replaced household production; impersonal market relationships replaced the face-to-face exchanges of neighborhood and community.

Before examining the specific engines of economic change, it is worth pausing to consider what the transition to a market economy meant in human terms. For the farm family that had previously grown most of its own food, spun its own wool, and traded surplus produce with nearby neighbors, participation in the market economy could mean both liberation and vulnerability. Cash income brought access to goods — manufactured cloth, iron tools, store-bought shoes — that previously had required enormous domestic labor to produce. But cash income also meant dependence: dependence on commodity prices set in distant markets, on the availability of credit from local banks or merchants, on transportation systems that the family could not control. A farmer who borrowed money to buy land and plant cotton was now subject to the fluctuations of the Liverpool cotton market in ways that a self-sufficient subsistence farmer had never been. This new vulnerability was one of the deep sources of the populist resentments that Jacksonian politics exploited — the sense among ordinary Americans that the market economy, for all its benefits, had delivered them into the hands of powerful forces over which they had no control.

The transportation revolution was the essential infrastructure of the Market Revolution. Without reliable, affordable means of moving goods across long distances, regional specialization and national markets were impossible. The construction of turnpikes and toll roads in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries began to improve land travel, but it was water transportation that made the first decisive breakthroughs. The invention and rapid proliferation of the steamboat transformed river commerce. Robert Fulton's Clermont made its famous voyage up the Hudson River in 1807, and within two decades steamboats crowded every major American waterway, dramatically reducing travel times and freight costs. On the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, steamboats opened the interior of the continent to commercial agriculture, allowing farmers in the Ohio Valley and beyond to ship their produce to New Orleans and from there to markets around the world. The steamboat transformed New Orleans into one of the world's great commercial ports and made the Mississippi River the central artery of the American continental economy.

The construction of canals represented an equally momentous development. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825 after eight years of herculean construction effort, was the engineering wonder of its age. Stretching 363 miles across upstate New York and connecting the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo, the Erie Canal linked the agricultural interior of the continent to the port of New York City. The economic effects were staggering. Freight costs on the route from Buffalo to New York City fell by more than ninety percent. Travel time shrank from weeks to days. Farmers in Ohio, Indiana, and beyond could suddenly ship their grain eastward at prices that made commercial farming profitable. New York City exploded in commercial importance, rapidly overtaking Philadelphia and Boston as the nation's dominant port. The success of the Erie Canal sparked a canal-building boom across the Northeast and Midwest, with Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois all undertaking major canal projects in the late 1820s and 1830s. These canals tied together regional markets, encouraged agricultural specialization, and drew increasing numbers of farm families into the cash economy.

The coming of the railroad added yet another transformative element to the transportation revolution. Although American railroads were in their infancy in the 1820s and 1830s — the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad began operations in 1830 — they rapidly demonstrated their superiority over canals in speed and in their freedom from the constraints of terrain and winter weather. By the late 1840s and 1850s, railroad mileage in the United States was expanding at a breathtaking pace, and the railroad had become the defining technology of the age, knitting together a continental market economy and altering the possibilities of commercial life for millions of Americans. The United States had roughly 3,000 miles of track in 1840 and more than 30,000 miles by 1860, more than all of Europe combined. The railroad shrank distances, integrated regional markets, and transformed the geography of economic activity. Cities along railroad routes boomed; those bypassed by the iron road stagnated or died. The railroad was both a cause and a consequence of the Market Revolution, simultaneously enabling and accelerating the economic transformation of the country, and its extension across the continent in the decades after the Civil War would complete the creation of the national market economy whose outlines were drawn in the antebellum period.

The industrial transformation of the North accompanied the transportation revolution. Beginning in the late eighteenth century and accelerating through the antebellum era, New England and the Middle Atlantic states saw the rise of factory production in textiles, iron, shoes, clocks, and a host of other goods. The textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts — established in the 1820s by a group of Boston merchants who had observed British textile manufacturing during a visit to England — became emblematic of the new industrial order. Drawing on the labor of young women from New England farm families, the Lowell system represented a conscious departure from the British factory model, presenting itself as a morally respectable form of manufacturing that would not recreate the degraded industrial slums of Manchester or Birmingham. The "mill girls" of Lowell lived in company boarding houses supervised by house mothers, attended lectures and formed literary clubs, and sent their wages home to their families. For some of these young women, the mill offered a measure of economic independence and intellectual stimulation that their lives on New England farms had not provided. Yet for all the paternalistic rhetoric of its founders, Lowell nonetheless subjected workers to long hours, strict regimentation, and conditions that deteriorated as competition intensified through the 1830s and 1840s, as mill owners sought to reduce costs by cutting wages, lengthening the working day, and increasing the number of machines each worker was required to tend.