Unit 4 1800-1848 Antebellum America

You have two days off this unit – make sure that you use them to stay caught up on your reading. If you get behind,

our class activities will not work!

Documents for Unit 4The New Democracy

Date Homework Due Class ActivitiesBlock 10/2

910/3

0

Ch 9 284-301 I am responsible for section

______

Peer teaching of the Market Revolution SEE ATTACHED INSTRUCTIONS TO GUIDE YOUR

HOMEWORK

Mon 11/3

Ch10 314-326 Document 1

The New Democracy Tues 11/4

Ch10 326-340 Document 2

Block 11/5 11/6

Ch9 301-311 Ch11 344-357

Social Issues in the North

Transcendentalism Utopian Societies Antebellum Reform Movements

Fri11/7

Document 3

Mon 11/1

0 Ch11 357-373

Block 11/1

2 11/1

3

Ch12 383-395 Southern White Society and Culture The South Moves West

Fri 11/1

4

Ch12 376-383 Ch12 395-403

Slavery in the Antebellum Period African American Society and Culture

Mon 11/1

7

Review (Ch 9-12) and Notebook

Test

1. Background of the New Democracy: A Disgusting Spirit of Equality (1807), A Plea for Nonproperty Suffrage (1841), AND Davy Crockett Advises Politicians (1836)

2. SFAH Vol 1 Document 10-5 King Andrew the First (1833) Pages 256-258Religion and Reform

3. SFAH Vol 1 Document 11-2 Mormon Leader’s Vision of Religious Community – Joseph Smith Pages 264-269

Section Break Down for Block Day 10/29-10/30Section Overview Pages Headings in Book Primary Source

1. Industrialization 286-291

The American Industrial Revolution; The Division of

Labor and Factory; The Textile Industry and British

Competition; American Mechanics and Technological

Innovation

A. Lowell Mills Time Sheet

B. Regulations of the Lewiston Mills

2. Transportation Revolution

293-297The Market Revolution; The Transportation Revolution

Forges Regional Ties

A. The Impact of the Erie Canal

B. Steamboats Lose to Railroads

3. Agricultural Revolution

HAMER

4. Social Issues

291-293 AND

297+300-301

Wageworkers and the Labor Movement; The Growth of Cities

and Towns

A. The Abuse of Female Workers

B. Disaster in a Massachusetts Mill

C. Green Book p232-233 Contrasting Images of Urban Life

Instructions for Homework Due Block Day 10/29-10/30:1. Your team will produce a newscast on your section of the Market Revolution on Block Day2. We have limited time so you need to make sure that ALL reading for your section is

completed and thorough notes are taken before coming to class a. You are also responsible for the primary sources assigned to your section and

incorporating them into your presentation3. To alleviate your reading pressure, you are only required to take book notes on your

section and you can get the rest from class notes4. Because you will be the sole teacher for your classmates – make sure to include all the

vocabulary terms for your section in your presentation5. You are not required to take notes on the GREEN pages in this section of the book

Section 1 Reading (A)

Section 1 Reading (B)

Section 2 Reading (A)

Section 2 Reading (B)

Section 4 Reading (A)The Abuses of Female Workers

The factory girls of Lowell, Massachusetts, were a showpiece for visitors, notably Charles Dickens in 1842. Having seen the miserable working conditions in England, Dickens wrote almost ecstatically of the fresh air, the cheerful faces, and the blooming health of the “Lowell girls.” He also took favorable note of the girls’ cleanliness, clothes, thrift, morals, and educational and recreational facilities. Perhaps he was unduly impressed by the contrast with English factories; certainly he did not investigate as carefully the less savory mills. Six years earlier, a reformist writer in a contemporary American journal presented a striking different view. How, in the following account, does this writer evaluate the early factory system?

We have lately visited the cities of Lowell [Mass.] and Manchester [N.H.] and have had an opportunity of examining the factory system more closely than before. We had distrusted the accounts which we had heard from persons engaged in the labor reform now beginning to agitate New England. We could scarcely credit the statements made in relation to the exhausting nature of the labor in the mills, and to the manner in which the young women - the operatives - lived in their boardinghouses, six sleeping in a room, poorly ventilated.

We went through many of the mills, talked particularly to a large number of operatives, and ate at their boardinghouses, on purpose to ascertain by personal inspection the facts of the case. We assure our readers that very little information is possessed, and no correct judgments formed, by the public at large, of the factory system, which is the first germ of the industrial or commercial feudalism that is to spread over our land. . . .

In Lowell live between seven and eight thousand young women, who are generally daughters of farmers of different states of New England. Some of them are members of families that were rich in the generation before. . . .

The operatives work thirteen hours a day in the summer time, and from daylight to dark in the winter. At half past four in the morning the factory bell rings, and at five the girls must be in the mills. A clerk, placed as a watch, observes those who are a few minutes behind the time, and effectual means are taken to stimulate to punctuality. This is the morning commencement of the industrial discipline (should we not rather say industrial tyranny?) which is established in these associations of this moral and Christian community.

At seven the girls are allowed thirty minutes for breakfast, and at noon thirty minutes more for dinner, except during the first quarter of the year, when the time is extended to forty-five minutes. But within this time they must hurry to their boardinghouses and return to the factory, and that through the hot sun or the rain or the cold. A meal eaten under such circumstances must be quite unfavorable to digestion and health, as any medical man will inform us. At seven o’clock in the evening the factory bell sounds the close of the day’s work.

Thus thirteen hours per day of close attention and monotonous labor are exacted from the young women in these manufactories. . . . So fatigued - we should say, exhausted and worn out, but we wish to speak of the system in the simplest language - are numbers of girls that they go to bed soon after their evening meal, and endeavor by a comparatively long sleep to resuscitate their weakened frames for the toil of the coming day.

When capital has got thirteen hours of labor daily our of a being, it can get nothing more. It would be a poor speculation in an industrial point of view to own the operative; for the trouble and expense of providing for times of sickness and old age would more than counterbalance the difference between the price of wages and the expense of board and clothing. The far greater number of fortunes accumulated by the North in comparison with the South shows that hireling labor is more profitable for capital than slave labor.

Now let us examine the nature of the labor itself, and the conditions under which it is performed. Enter with us into the large rooms, when the looms are at work. The largest that we saw is in the Amoskeag Mills at Manchester. . . . The din and clatter of these five hundred looms, under full operation, struck us on first entering as something frightful and infernal, for it seemed such an atrocious violation of one of the faculties of the human soul, the sense of hearing. After a while we became somewhat inured to it, and by speaking quite close to the ear of an operative and quite loud, we could hold a conversation and make the inquiries we wished.

The girls attend upon an average three looms; many attend four, but this requires a very active person, and the most unremitting care. However, a great many do it. Attention to two is as much as should be demanded of an operative. This gives us some idea of the application required during the thirteen hours of daily labor. The atmosphere of such a room cannot of course be pure; on the contrary, it is charged with cotton filaments and dust, which, we are told, are very injurious to the lungs.

On entering the room, although the day was warm, we remarked that the windows were down. We asked the reason, and a young woman answered very naively, and without seeming to be in the least aware that this privation of fresh air was anything else than perfectly natural, that “when the wind blew, the threads did not work well.” After we had been in the room for fifteen or twenty minutes, we found ourselves, as did the persons who accompanied us, in quite a perspiration, produced by a certain moisture which we observed in the air, as well as by the heat. . . .

The young women sleep upon an average six in a room, three beds to a room. There is no privacy, no retirement, here. It is almost impossible to read or write alone, as the parlor is full and so many sleep in the same chamber. A young woman remarked to us that if she had a letter to write, she did it on the head of a bandbox, sitting on a trunk, as there was no space for a table.

So live and toil the young women of our country in the boardinghouses and manufactories which the rich and influential of our land have built for them.

Section 4 Reading (B)Disaster in a Massachusetts Mill (1860)

The lot of women factory workers in New England seemed less idyllic after an appalling accident in the five-story Pemberton textile mill, described next. George T. Strong, a prominent New York lawyer and public-spirited citizen, poured his indignation into his diary. Who was at fault? Why might the South have taken some secret satisfaction in the tragedy?

January 11 [1860]. News today of a fearful tragedy at Lawrence, Massachusetts, one of the wholesale murders commonly known in newspaper literature as accident or catastrophe. A huge factory, long notoriously insecure and ill-built, requiring to be patched and bandaged up with iron plates and braces to stand the introduction of its machinery, suddenly collapsed into a heap of ruins yesterday afternoon without the smallest provocation. Some five or six hundred operatives went down with it - young girls and women mostly. An hour or two later, while people were working frantically to dig out some two hundred still under the ruins, many of them alive and calling for help, some quite unhurt, fire caught in the great pile of debris, and these prisoners were roasted. It is too atrocious and horrible to think of.

Of course, nobody will be hanged. Somebody has murdered about two hundred people, many of them with hideous torture, in order to save money, but society has no avenging gibbet (gallows) for the respectable millionaire and homicide. Of course not. He did not want to or mean to do this massacre; on the whole, he would have preferred to let these people live. His intent was not homicidal. He merely thought a great deal about making a large profit and very little about the security of human life. He did not compel these poor girls and children to enter his accursed mantrap. They could judge and decide for themselves whether they would be employed there. It was a matter of contract between capital and labor; they were to receive cash payment for their services.

No doubt the legal representatives of those who have perished will be duly paid the fractional part of their week’s wages up to the date when they became incapacitated by crushing or combustion, as the case may be, from rendering further service. Very probably the wealthy and liberal proprietor will add (in deserving cases) a gratuity of defray funeral charges. It becomes us to prate (talk at great length) about the horrors of slavery! What Southern capitalist trifles with the lives of his operatives as do our philanthropes of the North?

Document 1:A Disgusting Spirit of Equality

1807–––––––––––––––––––– C.W. Janson –––––––––––––––––

Freedom of opportunity in America weakened class barriers and caused the "lower orders" to be freer and easier with their "betters. " Such behavior was highly offensive to English visitors from a class-ridden society, especially to those who came in the 1830s and 1840s. C. W Janson emigrated to America from England to make his fortune, lost his money, and vented his spleen in an ill-natured book that contained numerous unpleasant truths.

THINK THROUGH HISTORY: What specific American traits did he find annoying, and which one the most annoying? Do universal manhood suffrage and bad manners necessarily go together?

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Arrived at your [New England] inn, let me suppose, like myself, you had fallen in with a landlord who at the moment would condescend to take the trouble to procure you refreshment after the family hour… He will sit by your side and enter in the most familiar manner into conversation; which is prefaced, of course, with a demand of your business, and so forth. He will then start a political question (for here every individual is a politician), force your answer, contradict, deny, and, finally, be ripe for a quarrel, should you not acquiesce in all his opinions.

When the homely meal is served up, he will often place himself opposite to you at the table at the same time declaring that "though he thought he had eaten a hearty dinner, yet he will pick a bit with you."

Thus he will sit, drinking out of your glass, and of the liquor you are to pay for, belching in your face, and committing other excesses still more indelicate and disgusting. Perfectly inattentive to your accommodation, and regardless of your appetite, he will dart his fork into the best of the dish, and leave you to take the next cut.

If you arrive at the dinner hour, you are seated with "mine hostess" and her dirty children, with whom you have often to scramble for a plate. and even the servants of the inn. For liberty and equality level all ranks upon the road, from the host to the hostler.

The children, imitative of their free and polite papa, will also seize your drink, slobber in it, and often snatch a dainty bit from your plate. This is esteemed wit, and consequently provokes a laugh, at the expense of those who are paying for the board. . . .

The arrogance of domestics [servants] in this land of republican liberty and equality is particularly calculated to excite the astonishment of strangers. To call persons of this description servants, or to speak of their master or mistress, is a grievous affront.

Having called one day at the house of a gentleman of my acquaintance, on knocking at the door, it was opened by a servant-maid, whom I had never before seen, as she had not been long in his family. The following is the dialogue, word for word, which took place on this occasion:

"Is your master at home?""I have no master.""Don't you live here?""I stay here.""And who are you then?""Why, I am Mr. -'s help. I'd have you to know, man, that I am no sarvant. None but negers are

sarvants."

A Plea for Nonproperty Suffrage 1841

–––––––––––––––––––– George S. Camp –––––––––––––––––Until the days of Jacksonian democracy, property qualifications were generally demanded of all voters. In Virginia, where such restrictions discouraged immigration and encouraged emigration, a memorable convention met at Richmond in 1829-1830 to revise the state constitution. The result was a widening of the suffrage, in accord with the New Democracy, but a retention of certain property qualifications. One of the strongest arguments against change— an argument repeated in other conservative states-was that possession of property provided the surest guarantee of a permanent stake in the community. Grave dangers would presumably be courted if political power were put into the hands of the irresponsible, propertyless "bipeds of the forest. " A popular author, George S. Camp, took sharp issue with the advocates of property qualifications in a long-lived book on democracy.

THINK THROUGH HISTORY: In the light of Camp’s argument, is it true that the propertyless have as much of a stake in the community as the propertied?––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

All should have an equal voice in the public deliberations of the state, however unequal in point of circumstances, since human rights, by virtue of which alone we are entitled to vote at all, are the attributes of the man, not of his circumstances.

Should the right to vote, the characteristic and the highest prerogative of a freeman, be at the mercy of a casualty? I am rich today, worth my hundred thousands. But my wealth consists in stock and merchandise; it may be in storehouses, it may be upon the ocean. I have been unable to effect an insurance, or there is some concealed legal defect in my policy. The fire or the storms devour my wealth in an hour: am I the less competent to vote? Have I less of the capacity of a moral and in-telligent being? Am I the less a good citizen? Is it not enough that I have been deprived of my fortune-must I be disfranchised by community?

My having a greater or less amount of property does not alter my rights. Property is merely the subject on which rights are exercised; its amount does not alter rights themselves. If it were otherwise, every one of us would be in some degree subject to some wealthier neighbor. And, if the representation of property were consistently carried out, the affairs of every community, instead of being governed by the majority of rational and intelligent beings, would be governed by a preponderance of houses, lands, stocks, plate, jewelry, merchandise, and money!

It is not true that one man has more at stake in the commonwealth than another. We all have our rights, and no man has anything more. If we look at the subject philosophically, and consider how much superior man is by nature to what he is by external condition, how much superior his real attributes are to what he acquires from the accidents of fortune, we shall then view the distinctions of rank and wealth in their true comparative insignificance, and make as little difference on these accounts with the political as with the moral man.

Davy Crockett Advises Politicians1836

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––David Crockett-notorious Tennessee frontiersman, Indian scout, rifleman, bear hunter, and braggart-was a homespun product of the New Democracy. His scanty six: months of schooling led him to scorn both grammar and "book larnin', " although he became a justice of the peace, an elected militia colonel, and a member of the state legislature. When a joking remark prompted him to campaign for Congress, he overwhelmed his two opponents with a barrage of ridicule and humorous stories. Reelected for two additional terms, he attracted wide attention in Washington with his backwoods dress, racy language, homely wit, shrewd common sense, and pre-sumed naiveté regarding the aristocratic East. Ruggedly independent, he delighted eastern conservatives by refusing to follow President Jackson on all issues. His advice to aspiring politicians, though offered in a jocular vein, reveals the debased tone of the new manhood-suffrage democracy.THINK THROUGH HISTORY: Which of his recommended devices are still employed by politicians today?

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"Attend all public meetings," says I, "and get some friend to move that you take the chair. If you fail in this attempt, make a push to be appointed secretary. The proceedings of course will be published, and your name is introduced to the public. But should you fail in both undertakings, get two or three acquaintances, over a bottle of whisky, to pass some resolutions, no matter on what subject. Publish them, even if you pay the printer. It will answer the purpose of breaking the ice, which is the main point in these matters.

"Intrigue until you are elected an officer of the militia. This is the second step toward promotion, and can be accomplished with ease, as I know an instance of an election being advertised, and no one attending, the innkeeper at whose house it was to be held, having a military turn, elected himself colonel of his regiment." Says I, "You may not accomplish your ends with as little difficulty, but do not be discouraged-Rome wasn't built in a day.

"When the day of election approaches, visit your constituents far and wide. Treat liberally, and drink freely, in order to rise in their estimation, though you fall in your own. True, you may be called a drunken dog by some of the clean-shirt and silk-stocking gentry, but the real roughnecks will style you a jovial fellow. Their votes are certain, and frequently count double.

"Do all you can to appear to advantage in the eyes of the women. That's easily done. You have but to kiss and slabber [slobber over] their children, wipe their noses, and pat them on the head. This cannot fail to please their mothers, and you may rely on your business being done in that quarter.

"Promise all that is asked," said I, "'and more if you can think of anything. Offer to build a bridge or a church, to divide a county, create a batch of new offices, make a turnpike, or anything they like. Promises cost nothing; therefore, deny nobody who has a vote or sufficient influence to obtain one.

"Get up on all occasions, and sometimes on no occasion at all, and make long winded speeches, though composed of nothing else than wind. Talk of your devotion to your country, your modesty. and disinterestedness, or on any such fanciful subject. Rail against taxes of all kinds, officeholders, and bad harvest weather; and wind up with a flourish about the heroes who fought and bled for our liberties in the times that tried men's souls. To be sure, you run the risk of being considered a bladder of wind, or an empty barrel. But never mind that; you will find enough of the same fraternity to keep you in countenance.

"If any charity be going forward, be at the top of it, provided it is to be advertised publicly. If not, it isn't worth your while. None but a fool would place his candle under a bushel on such an occasion.

"These few directions," said I, "if properly attended to, will do your business. And when once elected-why, a fig for the dirty children, the promises, the bridges, the churches, the taxes, the offices, and the subscriptions. For it is absolutely necessary to forget all these before you can become a thoroughgoing politician, and a patriot of the first water."