Multiple choice

SHORT ANSWER
Answer each question with three or four sentences.
1. How did American textile manufacturers compete with British manufacturers? How successful were they?

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• British Advantages: Due to low transatlantic shipping and low interest rates, British manufacturers could import raw cotton from the United States, make it into cloth, and resell it at bargain prices. The British also had cheap labor, which made it possible for them to undersell American competitors and drive them out of business.
• American Advantages: Americans improved on British technology, making it possible to produce more cloth in a shorter amount of time using fewer workers. Americans had the advantage of abundant natural resources of cotton and wool, and efficient transportation and energy provided by fast-moving rivers. The U.S. federal government passed high tariffs on imported goods, giving American products an advantage in the American marketplace. American manufacturers also recruited thousands of young farm women as a cheap source of labor.
• Americans’ Success: By the 1820s, American textile factories were at the cutting edge of technological innovation. Tariff protection, improved technology, and cheap female labor allowed American operations to undersell their British rivals and to make a higher-quality cloth.

PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution

2. Why was the development of machine tools so important to the Industrial Revolution in the United States?

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• Role of Machine Tools in American Industrial Revolution: Machine tools accelerated the rate of industrialization by creating machines that made parts for other machines and pioneering interchangeable parts. Machine tools produced machinery so rapidly, precisely, and cheaply that mechanization spread easily throughout the United States. The machinery that Americans produced operated at higher speeds that British equipment and it could make more elaborate fabrics. Making and using these parts made American firms like Remington and Singer into multinational businesses.

PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution

3. In what ways did the emerging industrial economy conflict with artisan republicanism?

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• Summary of Artisan Republicanism: Following the American Revolution, craft workers saw themselves as small-scale producers who were equal to one another and free to work for themselves.
• Impact of Industrialization on Artisan Republicanism: The outwork and factory systems that came with industrialization led to a decrease in workers’ standard of living and diminished their independence, their ability to control their labor conditions, and their sense of social equality. Working men bridled at their new status, refused to allow masters to control their private lives, and joined their mates in building a robust plebian culture.

PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution

4. How did wage laborers respond to the new economy in the 1820s and 1830s?

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• Unions: Wageworkers responded to industrialization by forming unions and mutual benefit societies to protect their rights. Collective action gave them more ability to exert pressure on their employers. Union leaders expanded artisan republicanism to include wageworkers, suggesting that the price of goods should reflect the labor required to make them, and that the income from their sale should go to the workers, not the factory owners.
• Strikes: When workers felt seriously threatened by their employers’ policies, they sometimes organized strikes. Two thousand female factory operatives in Lowell, for example, organized strikes to protest wage cuts.

PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution

5. What roles did state and national governments play in the development of America’s transportation networks?

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• State Governments: State governments chartered private companies to build roads and turnpikes. The New York legislature funded the Erie Canal in 1817. Governments also passed taxes, sold bonds, and charged tolls to pay for such projects.
• National Government: Congress funded large improvements such as the National Road in 1811. The national postal system, established in 1791, facilitated networks for the exchange of information. The U.S. Supreme Court encouraged interstate trade by establishing federal authority over interstate commerce. These developments facilitated a massive migration of people to the Greater Mississippi River basin and, by 1860, nearly one-third of Americans lived in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota.

PTS: 1 REF: The Market Revolution

6. Why was the construction of the Erie Canal one of the critical economic events of the first half of the nineteenth century?

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• Canal’s Scope: Construction of the Erie Canal was the central economic event of the first half of the nineteenth century because of its unprecedented size (364 miles), scope, and cost in comparison to any other single economic venture before the transcontinental railroad of the 1860s.
• Canal’s Impact: The regional impact of the Erie Canal was profound in terms of unifying the nation culturally and physically. It improved the economy of the northeastern and northwestern sectors and brought migrants westward to settle the Midwest on lands obtained from Indians. The Erie Canal’s success also caused a canal-building boom that connected Philadelphia and Baltimore to the Great Lakes region.

PTS: 1 REF: The Market Revolution

7. Describe the different types of cities that emerged in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. How do you explain the differences in their development?

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:

• New Industrial Towns: These cities sprouted up in the areas where rivers descended rapidly from the Appalachian Mountains to the coastal plain. The falls in these areas were useful for mills, and towns like Lowell, Massachusetts; Hartford, Connecticut; Trenton, New Jersey; and Wilmington, Delaware became urban centers.

• Western Commercial Cities: These cities included Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, and New Orleans, which became regional hubs for transshipment of goods to the American West. These cities quickly became industrial centers as well.

• Atlantic Seaport Cities: Because of industrial growth, large urban Atlantic coastal cities, such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston, grew as ports for the shipping and financial industry, and as centers of new arrivals of immigrants. New York became particularly important because of its harbor and its proximity to the Erie Canal, the best gateway to the Midwest.

• Small, Internal Cities: Smaller, internal cities grew as regional hubs for local farmers who shipped surplus grain and other goods for market resale abroad.

• Differences in Development: Some cities grew large because of their location on water routes of communication, including inland cities on the fall line where rivers descended to the coast.

PTS: 1 REF: The Market Revolution
8. Why might a middle-class manager join a revivalist church?

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• Middle-Class Characteristics: Middle-class culture stressed moral and mental discipline and celebrated work as the key to individual social mobility and national prosperity. Middle-class Americans were alarmed by the conditions and culture of workers, which featured dilapidated and overcrowded neighborhoods, pollution, crime, and drinking.
• Revivalist Churches’ Message: Revivalist preachers like Charles Finney emphasized individuals’ moral free agency. This message was attractive to middle-class men and women who had already accepted personal responsibility for their lives and improved their material condition. Finney and others like him inspired many middle-class Americans to join revivalist churches.
• Middle-Class Managers’ Motives for Joining Revivalist Churches: Middle-class managers might join revivalist churches for a variety of reasons, including a personal desire for salvation, the desire to please an employer, an interest in religious education for children, the desire for social support, or the desire to find a community of like-minded people.

PTS: 1 REF: New Social Classes and Cultures

9. Identify the social classes created by the economic revolution, and describe their defining characteristics.

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• Business Elite: This group was wealthy and was removed physically and ideologically from lower social classes. Managers and owners of industry, they inhabited separate residential neighborhoods in large cities and exploited cheap immigrant laborers.
• Middle Class: This group engaged in ordinary economic transactions of society, including conspicuous consumption for material comfort as their incomes rose during the Market Revolution. They viewed themselves as self-made men, based on a hard work ethic and moral and mental discipline. They possessed a strong belief in public education.
• Urban Workers and the Poor: Urban workers depended on the upper classes for work and engaged in manual or skilled labor. They believed in artisan republican ideology, joined unions and went on strike, and inhabited working-class neighborhoods. The poor suffered terribly from disease; inhabited substandard housing in slums; had a high rate of alcoholism, crime, fighting, and unemployment; and lacked government social services.

PTS: 1 REF: New Social Classes and Cultures

10. What were the possible solutions to the problem of the high cost of labor for American manufacturers?

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• Identifying and Hiring Cheaper Workers: Manufacturers could employ young farm women who were available because of poor agriculture in New England and a shortage of men, who often moved west to farm. Women traditionally appeared docile and easy to manage, and their families needed the additional income. Many textile manufacturers hired women in the 1820s and 1830s. By the 1840s and 1850s, they turned to European immigrants who worked for even lower wages. In the mid-nineteenth century, manufacturers focused primarily on Irish immigrants for cheap labor.
• Relocation: Industries could relocate to the South and use slave labor. However, the immature transportation networks in the South meant that higher transportation costs often negated any labor savings.
• Technological improvements: Manufacturers could cut costs by utilizing more advanced machinery that turned out more of their product in less time and with less human involvement. American industrialists constantly sought new technology to automate and organize factory processes.

PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution

ESSAY
Answer each of the following questions with an essay. Be sure to include specific examples that support your thesis and conclusions.
1. Did the Industrial and Market Revolutions make America more of a republican society or less of one? Support your interpretation by reference to specific events and developments.

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• Impact on American Culture and Society: The Industrial and Market Revolutions worked against the persistence of a republican society based on social equality, participation in government, and public spiritedness. The revolutions created strong class differences that decreased all Americans’ sense of social equality. An increase of individualism and economic self-interest decreased a sense of public spiritedness, reducing the effectiveness of government and private reforms of social ills. Industrialization made American society increasingly urban and diverse, which led to social, religious, and ethnic tensions.
• Economic Impact: The industrial and commercial revolutions of the nineteenth century increased economic equality. Economic transformations created a class-divided society that posed a momentous challenge to republican ideals. Elite and middle-class American subscribed to the new ideology of the self-made man. But the yeoman farmer and artisan-republican ideal—the social order of independent producers—was no longer possible and this was especially clear for the working class. By 1840, half of the white adult workers in the United States were working for someone else and, if they were lucky, earning subsistence wages. Wage earners’ efforts to assert independent status through unions and strikes had little impact, even though they called on republican ideology to justify their actions.
• Impact on African Americans and Native Americans: The industrial and market revolutions required cotton as a key product for U.S. and British mass production in factories and for resale. Lands were taken from Indians and labor from Africans, resulting in an increase of Indian genocide and land loss, and an African holocaust of slavery and erosion of rights as free people.

PTS: 1 REF: Entire chapter

2. What was the impact of the economic revolution on the lives of women in various social groups and classes?

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• Elite Women: The elite class gained wealth, led increasingly reclusive lives, possessed servants and performed no labor, increasingly took part in the social reform movement, feared the lower classes, and experienced a decrease in the birthrate.
• Middle-Class Women: Middle-class women, influenced by the ideology of republican motherhood, became the purveyors of genteel culture responsible for purchasing the products that made their homes attractive and comfortable. They had fewer children in order to invest more time and resources into them, thus ensuring their future success in the industrial world. While they often had domestic servants to perform the difficult work of cooking, cleaning, and caring for children, middle-class women guarded the mental and moral discipline of their families and ensured that the home functioned as a haven away from the disorders of the public sphere. Their priorities made participation in church and social reform movements of the Benevolent Empire appealing.
• Working-Class Women: For working-class women, working conditions became worse as a result of an urban location, long hours, low pay, and the harsh environment of factory employment. They increasingly entered the industrial workforce, joined unions, and went on strike. Disease and alcoholism increased, while life expectancy decreased. Some women enjoyed work life because it provided a sisterhood with female workers, larger living quarters, distance from a patriarchal family, and delayed marriage.
• Poor Women: Poor women found that their housing and work conditions became worse as cycles of unemployment increased from the Market Revolution and industrial growth.

PTS: 1 REF: New Social Classes and Cultures

3. What were the main goals of the Benevolent Empire? To what extent were they achieved?

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• Goals: The primary goal of the Benevolent Empire was conservative social reform, which took the form of moral discipline against vice; the temperance movement; the Sabbath movement; the religious Christian movement; and movements against poverty, adultery, and prostitution. New secular, charitable institutions were created, and churches were used to combat social problems.
• Extent of Success: There was a popular resistance to moral reform, especially among the laboring and poor classes, as well as a lack of strong government support. The class bias of reformers limited the effectiveness of some reforms, such as the teaching of Christianity to slaves or persuading working-class men to stop drinking alcohol and attend church on their only day off each week. Nevertheless, temperance was the most successful of the reformers’ efforts. The American Temperance Society grew quickly and its nationwide campaign, which employed the methods of revivalism, cut Americans’ average per capita alcohol consumption by more than 50 percent between 1830 and 1845.

PTS: 1 REF: New Social Classes and Cultures

4. Weigh the relative importance of the Industrial and Market Revolutions in changing the American economy. In what ways was the economy different in 1860 from what it had been in 1800? How would you explain those differences?

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• U.S. Economy in 1800: The 1800 economy was preindustrial and dependent on Atlantic seaport trade with Europe. The United States was a nation of independent farm families disconnected from a larger market economy.
• U.S. Economy in 1860: The 1860 economy was an industrial and manufacturing economy based on privately owned factories that engaged in mass production using cheap urban labor. Geographical regions were more interdependent, and there was increased agricultural output because of improvements in transportation systems and an increase of exports to Europe. Rather than a nation of independent producers, by 1860, the United States consisted of industrialists, managers, and workers who acquired commodities through the market economy.
• Analysis of Change: American private and government interests employed a neomercantilist program to fund and encourage transportation improvements and a manufacturing industrial infrastructure based on mass production. Government tax policies, which did not include federal taxes on individual or corporate income, facilitated the accumulation of wealth. The U.S. Treasury’s reliance on tariffs also discouraged imports and favored domestic production. The removal of Native Americans from the Southeast enabled the increase of cotton production, the key export fueling American industrial growth before 1860.

PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution | The Market Revolution

5. Why didn’t the South take a different course and choose to become involved in the Industrial Revolution in the 1820s and 1830s?

ANS:

Answer would ideally include:
• Planters’ Economic Priorities: Transportation improvements linked southern planters to northeastern textile plans and foreign markets, which made it possible for them to continue to accumulate wealth through cotton cultivation. Planters chose to use their wealth to support extravagant lifestyles and to add slaves and land to their holdings, and not to invest in manufacturing. They believed that a plantation economy was superior to a factory-based economy in part because they did not believe that slaves would make effective industrial workers.
• Immigrants’ Choices: Immigrants coming to the United States from Germany, Ireland, and other regions of northern and western Europe avoided the South because they feared competition from enslaved workers. Lack of immigration hindered major population growth in the South and ensured that the region’s culture was not diversified. While northern society became increasingly multiethnic, southern society remained white Anglo-American and African American.

PTS: 1 REF: Entire chapter

MATCHING
Select the word or phrase from the Terms section that best matches the definition or example provided in the Definitions section.


Terms

a.	Industrial Revolution
b.	division of labor
c.	mineral-based economy
d.	mechanics
e.	Waltham-Lowell System
f.	machine tools
g.	artisan republicanism
h.	unions
i.	labor theory of value
j.	Market Revolution
k.	Erie Canal
l.	middle class
m.	self-made man
n.	Benevolent Empire
o.	Sabbatarian movement
p.	moral free agency
q.	American Temperance Society
r.	nativism

1. A broad-ranging campaign of moral and institutional reforms inspired by evangelical Christian ideals and endorsed by upper-middle-class men and women in the 1820s and 1830s.

2. A system of manufacture that divides production into a series of distinct and repetitive tasks performed by machines or workers.
3. Antiforeign sentiment in the United States that fueled anti-immigrant and immigration-restriction policies against the Irish and Germans in the 1840s and the 1850s and other ethnic immigrants in subsequent decades.
4. A movement to preserve the Sunday as a holy day. These reformers believed that declining observance by Christians of the holy day was the greatest threat to religion in the United States.
5. Cutting, boring, and drilling machines used to produce standardized metal parts, which were then assembled into products such as textile looms and sewing machines. The rapid development of these machines by American inventors in the early nineteenth century was a factor in the rapid spread of industrialization.
6. A 364-mile waterway connecting the Hudson River and the Great Lake bordering New York State. This waterway brought prosperity to the entire Great Lakes region, and its benefits prompted civic and business leaders in Philadelphia and Baltimore to propose similar projects to link their cities to the Midwest.
7. A system of labor using young women recruited from farm families to work in factories in Lowell, Chicopee, and other sites in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The women lived in company boardinghouses with strict rules and curfews and were often required to attend church.
8. A society invigorated by evangelical Protestants in 1832 that set out to curb the consumption of alcoholic beverages.
9. An ideology that celebrated small-scale producers, men and women who owned their own shops (or farms). It defined the ideal society as one constituted by, and dedicated to the welfare of, independent workers and citizens.
10. A burst of major inventions and economic expansion based on water and steam power and the use of machine technology that transformed certain industries, such as cotton textiles and iron, between 1790 and 1860.
11. An economic group of prosperous farmers, artisans, and traders that emerged in the early nineteenth century. Its rise reflected a dramatic increase in prosperity. This surge in income, along with an abundance of inexpensive mass-produced goods, fostered a distinct middle-class urban culture.
12. A term used in the nineteenth century to refer to skilled craftsmen and inventors who built and improved machinery and machine tools for industry.
13. An economy based on coal and metal that began to emerge in the 1830s, as manufacturers increasingly ran machinery fashioned from metal with coal-burning stationary steam engines rather than with water power.
14. The doctrine of free will that was the central message of Presbyterian minister Charles Grandison Finney. It was particularly attractive to members of the new middle class, who had accepted personal responsibility for their lives, improved their material condition, and welcomed Finney’s assurance that heaven was also within their grasp.
15. The dramatic increase between 1820 and 1850 in the exchange of goods and services in market transactions. It reflected the increased output of farms and factories; the entrepreneurial activities of traders and merchants; and the creation of a transportation network of roads, canals, and railroads.
16. Organizations of workers that began during the Industrial Revolution to bargain with employers over wages, hours, benefits, and control of the workplace.
17. A nineteenth-century ideal that celebrated men who rose to wealth or social prominence from humble origins through self-discipline, hard work, and temperate habits.
18. The belief that human labor produces economic value. Adherents argued that the price of a product should be determined not by the market (supply and demand), but by the amount of work required to make it, and that most of the price should be paid to the person who produced it.
1. ANS: N PTS: 1 REF: New Social Classes and Cultures
2. ANS: B PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution
3. ANS: R PTS: 1 REF: New Social Classes and Cultures
4. ANS: O PTS: 1 REF: New Social Classes and Cultures
5. ANS: F PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution
6. ANS: K PTS: 1 REF: The Market Revolution
7. ANS: E PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution
8. ANS: Q PTS: 1 REF: New Social Classes and Cultures
9. ANS: G PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution
10. ANS: A PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution
11. ANS: L PTS: 1 REF: New Social Classes and Cultures
12. ANS: D PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution
13. ANS: C PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution
14. ANS: P PTS: 1 REF: New Social Classes and Cultures
15. ANS: J PTS: 1 REF: The Market Revolution
16. ANS: H PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution
17. ANS: M PTS: 1 REF: New Social Classes and Cultures
18. ANS: I PTS: 1 REF: The American Industrial Revolution
Map Activity

The Transportation Revolution: Roads and Canals, 1820–1850

Choose the letter on the map that correctly identifies each of the following.

19. Erie Canal
20. National Road
21. Ohio River
22. Missouri River
23. James River Canal
19. ANS: A PTS: 1
20. ANS: B PTS: 1
21. ANS: F PTS: 1
22. ANS: D PTS: 1
23. ANS: E PTS: 1
OTHER
Source-based Multiple Choice
Choose the letter of the best answer.
The following questions refer to the following song lyrics.
Come all ye bold wagoners turn out man by man

That’s opposed to the railroad or any such a plan;

’Tis once I made money by driving my team

But the goods are now hauled on the railroad by steam. . . .

 If we go to Philadelphia, inquiring for a load,

They’ll tell us quite directly it’s gone out on the railroad.

The rich folks, the plan they may justly admire,

But it ruins us poor wag’ners and it makes our taxes higher . . .

It ruins wheelwrights, blacksmiths, and every other trade,

So damned be all the railroads that ever was made.

It ruins our mechanics, what think you of it, then?

And it fills our country full of just a lot of great rich men.

The ships they will be coming with Irishmen by loads,

All with their picks and shovels, to work on the railroads;

When they get on the railroad, it is then that they are fixed

They’ll fight just like the devil with their cudgels and their sticks.

The American with safety can scarcely ever pass,

For they will blacken both his eyes for one word of his sass

If it wasn’t for the torment I as life would be in hell,

As upon the cursed railroad, or upon the canal.

[[POSITION SOURCE LINE AS SHOWN BELOW, INDENTED WITH HANGING INDENT]]

“The Waggoner’s Curse,” c. 1850.

1. Which of the following groups would be most likely to agree with the theme of this song?

a. Whigs

b. Abolitionists

c. The emerging urban middle class

d. Members of the nativist movement

ANS:

D

PTS: 1
2. The ideas expressed by the lyrics above most clearly show the influence of

a. the philosophy and ideals of the emerging working classes.

b. the theories of laissez faire free-market economics.

c. the moral and religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening.

d. a belief in natural laws as articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

ANS:

A

PTS: 1

3. Which of the following groups in the twentieth century shared most closely the sentiments of the author of the lyrics above?

a. The lost generation

b. The civil rights movement

c. The American Federation of Labor

d. The National Association of Manufacturers

ANS:

C

PTS: 1
The following questions refer to the following 1846 cartoon, The Drunkard’s Progress: From the First Glass to the Grave.

Library of Congress

4. Which of the following events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries most represents a continuation of the message depicted in the cartoon above?

a.	Passage of the Keating Owen Child Labor Act in 1916
b.	The growth of the settlement house movement in the early twentieth century
c.	Passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920
d.	The establishment of the Salvation Army in the United States in 1879

ANS:

C

PTS: 1
5. Which of the following groups would most likely support the perspective of this cartoonist?

a. Members of the Democratic Party

b. Migrants from Europe

c. Urban entrepreneurs

d. Low-skilled working-class males

ANS:

C

PTS: 1