Industrial Revolution

  • Enabled industry to grow rapidly
  • Mills and factories
  • Abundant natural resources
  • Eli whitny developed the cotton gin
  • States allowed companies to sell stock

Life in Industrial North

  • Artisans struggle to compete with factories
    • Artisan republicanism: independence of small scale producers
  • Trade unions born out of frustrations of low wages
  • Urbanization
    • Canals built to connect waterways
    • Transportation
      • Steamboats, railways
  • Market revolution:
    • Manufactured goods cheaper and more widely available
    • Farms become more commercial
    • Trains and steam boats faster transport of goods

Cotton King of Antebellum (pre-civil war) South

  • Invention of cotton gin lets planters efficiently make cotton
  • New plantations meant demand of slaves was high
    • Profitable slave trade
  • Southern society had classes
    • Planter elite: 20+ slaves, large plantations, 50% of cotton output, dominate politics
      • Desperately want the expansion of slavery
      • Slaves are an asset
    • Small Planters: 1-5 slaves, few hundred acres of land
    • Yeoman Farmers: Landowning small farmers, majority of population
    • Landless whites: Laborers, poor, rural, farmed less productive land
    • Free Blacks: Worked as skilled artisans, faced discrimination
    • Slaves: subject to slave codes, worked in fields, no control over own lives