Events
1793
Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin
1797
Whitney invents interchangeable parts for firearms
1807
Robert Fulton invents the steamboat
1823
Lowell Mills opens in Massachusetts
1825
Erie Canal is completed
1828
First U.S. railroad appears
1834
Cyrus McCormick invents the mechanical mower-reaper
National Trades Union forms
1835Samuel F. B. Morse invents the telegraph
1837
Cumberland road (National Road) is completed
1838
John Deere invents the steel plow
1842
Massachusetts legalizes labor unions in Commonwealth
v. Hunt
1844
New England Female Labor Reform Association forms
1846
Elias Howe invents the sewing machine
1858
First transatlantic telegraph cable unites Europe
and the Americas
Key People
-
Eli Whitney
Inventor
of the cotton gin and interchangeable parts, which revolutionized both
southern agriculture and northern manufacturing
-
Cyrus McCormick
Inventor of the mechanical mower-reaper, which enabled
profitable wheat farming in the West
The Market Revolution
The antebellum era was a time not only of profound political
change but also of great technological and economic innovation.
The Industrial Revolution, which began in Europe in
the 1700s,
had produced new inventions and methods of production. American
inventors transformed the U.S. economy with new innovations of their
own. This rapid development of manufacturing and improved farming had
such a profound effect on American society that historians often
refer to it as the Market Revolution.
Eli Whitney and the Cotton Gin
The first major innovation in the Market Revolution was Eli
Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793.
For most of the 1700s, Americans
had lacked cotton, despite the fact that they had waterways for
transport and the ability to construct textile factories. Southern
planters had tried to grow cotton, but they had abandoned it for
rice and tobacco because cotton had proved too labor-intensive:
it took one slave an entire day to separate just one pound of cottonseeds
from the fibers.
The cotton gin revolutionized cotton harvesting by separating the
cottonseeds and fibers automatically—it allowed one slave to produce fifty pounds
of cotton in one day. Within several years of the cotton gin’s invention,
cotton had become a major crop in the South, and factories in the
North were producing cotton cloth.
The New Cotton Economy
The cotton gin had profound, wide-reaching effects on
American history and society. Southern planters abandoned almost
all other crops in favor of the newly profitable cotton. In addition,
planters required enormous increases in slave labor to
plant enough cotton to take advantage of their new production capacity.
As a result, thousands more slaves from Africa and the West Indies
were purchased before the slave trade was banned in 1808.
The size of individual plantations increased, from
relatively small plots to huge farms with as many as several hundred
slaves each.
The cotton industry in turn spurred enterprising
northerners to build factories: southern farmers supplied
the cotton, northern factories spun it into cloth, and the finished
cloth was then either used at home or shipped abroad. The development
of factories produced a larger, richer merchant class and
helped create the wage worker, who was paid by the
hour to tend to the machinery or cloth in the factory.
Interchangeable Parts
Several years later, Whitney also perfected a system of
producing muskets with interchangeable parts. Prior
to Whitney’s invention, most muskets—and all other goods—had been
handmade with parts especially designed for each particular musket.
The trigger of one musket, for example, could not be used to replace
a broken trigger on another musket. With interchangeable parts,
however, all triggers fit the same model of musket, as did all ramrods,
all flash pans, all hammers, and all bullets. Manufacturers in many
different industries soon took advantage of Whitney’s invention
to make a variety of goods with interchangeable parts.
