4.6 Market Revolution: Society and Culture

Before the market revolution, many goods were made by artisans, skilled craftsmen who owned their tools, often worked in small shops and trained apprentices who could one day run their own shops. As factories and larger workshops spread, more workers became wage laborers who sold their time to an employer and had little chance of becoming owners.

Workers formed early unions and pushed for a ten-hour workday. In Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that unions were not illegal conspiracies, an important step for organized labor. Still, unions were small and often collapsed during depressions like the Panic of 1837.

The gap between rich and poor widened, especially in growing cities like New York, where wealthy merchants lived near crowded neighborhoods of laborers and immigrants.

A new middle class of clerks, shopkeepers, managers, lawyers and other professionals grew in Northern towns and cities. Middle-class men increasingly worked away from home, in offices and stores.

This change helped produce the ideology of separate spheres: men belonged in the public sphere of work and politics, and women in the private sphere of home and family. Historians call the related ideal the cult of domesticity, which praised women as naturally pure, pious and nurturing and responsible for making the home a moral refuge. Magazines and advice books, such as those by Catharine Beecher, spread these ideas.

Separate spheres were an ideal, not reality for most women. Working-class and immigrant women worked for wages as servants, seamstresses or mill workers, and enslaved women were forced to work in fields and households. Ironically, the idea that women were morally superior also gave middle-class women a reason to enter public life through reform movements (4.11).

Immigration rose sharply, from about 600,000 arrivals in the 1830s to about 1.7 million in the 1840s. Two groups stood out:

The Irish came in especially large numbers during and after the Great Famine (1845–1852), when a disease destroyed the potato crop. Most were poor, Catholic and settled in Eastern cities, where they took low-paying jobs building canals and railroads, working on docks and in factories, and as servants. Many joined the Democratic Party.

Germans came for economic reasons and, after 1848, to escape failed revolutions. Many had some money or skills and settled on Midwestern farms or in cities like Cincinnati, Milwaukee and St. Louis. They included Catholics, Protestants and Jews.

Native-born Americans were on the move too. Many crossed the Appalachians and built new farms and towns in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, where river cities such as Cincinnati and St. Louis grew quickly.

Nativism is hostility toward immigrants by native-born people. Many Protestant Americans feared that Catholic immigrants would obey the pope rather than American law, compete for jobs and bring drinking and crime. Anti-Catholic mobs burned a convent near Boston in 1834, and riots in Philadelphia in 1844 left people dead and Catholic churches burned. Nativism grew into a political party, the Know-Nothings, in the 1850s (5.5).