Events
1830sTranscendentalist movement begins
1837
Oberlin College opens as a coeducational institution
Mary Lyon establishes Mount Holyoke Seminary
1850
Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes The Scarlet
Letter
1851
Herman Melville publishes Moby-Dick
1854
Henry David Thoreau writes Walden
1855
Walt Whitman publishes Leaves of Grass
Key People
-
Martin Van Buren
Eighth U.S. president; set ten-hour workday for federal
employees
-
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essayist and philosopher; one of the foremost Transcendentalists
-
Henry David Thoreau
Essayist and philosopher; another major Transcendenalist
-
Walt Whitman
Poet
who espoused individualism; most famous for Leaves of Grass
-
Herman Melville
Novelist; wrote whaling epic Moby-Dick
Urbanization in the North
The Market Revolution caused major changes in northern
society, as more and more Americans moved to large cities.
New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and other
major cities tripled or even quadrupled in size from 1820 to 1860 as
people left their farms to find work in the cities.
Wage Labor
One byproduct of the increase in manufacturing and mass
migration to the cities was the development of wage labor.
As more factories sprang up in the North, more workers were needed
to tend to the machines. Rather than learn a trade skill, these
day laborers worked alongside scores of others for as many as sixteen
hours a day, six or seven days a week, for a meager hourly wage.
Though many early wage laborers were children,
often under the age of thirteen, most were men. Some factories,
such as the Lowell Mills in Massachusetts, employed only girls and
young women. These factories provided room and board and attempted
to “moralize” the women with heavy doses of religious preaching
and strict discipline.
Labor Strikes
Although wealthy business owners loved cheap
wage labor, workers suffered, and few had any recourse to redress
their grievances. Collective bargaining was illegal, and factory
owners could always hire replacement workers, or “scabs,” if employees
refused to work. Some workers, particularly women, risked prosecution
and initiated a series of strikes in the 1820s
and 1830s
to improve working conditions.
Labor Unions and Reforms
These labor strikes became more prominent in the national
news around the same time that the National Trades Union—one
of the nation’s first unions—formed in 1834.
Eventually, the government began to take action: in 1840,
President Martin Van Buren succeeded in establishing a ten-hour
working day for all federal employees engaged in public works
projects; in 1842,
the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized trade unions in Commonwealth
v. Hunt. Nevertheless, it would be decades before
unions gained any real power to bargain effectively.
German and Irish Immigration
In the 1840s
and 1850s,
urbanization in the North accelerated as millions of immigrants
from Europe settled in northern cities. Facing starvation from the
Potato Famine of the mid-1840s,
over 100,000Irish
immigrants came to the United States every year in
the late 1840s
and 1850s
to find new opportunities. Though most settled in New York, Boston,
and later in Chicago, Irish quarters sprang up in every major northern
city.
