Economic+differences+-+North+and+South



Toward a National Economy

Until the Revolution, Americans imported most of their manufactured goods from England. After the war, however, America’s farming economy began to diversify. Textile mills led the American industrial revolution; Francis Cabot Lowell and his Boston Associates used the British model to establish the Boston Manufacturing Company and combining machine production, large-scale operation, efficient management, and centralized marketing under one roof. The success of Lowell and the industrial revolution was dependent on a number of interrelated factors: technology, cheap labor, dependable and abundant supplies of materials, financing, markets, and efficient transportation to market. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the invention of the steam engine and spinning machines as well as more-efficient water-power mechanisms, all of which made large factories possible. Furthermore, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin made the cultivation of upland cotton throughout the South profitable. Labor to staff these factories first was provided by young, single women (in Cabot’s “Waltham System”) and children, and, later, immigrants; the cotton gin essentially revived and entrenched the South’s dependence on slave labor. In addition, the early industrial revolution operated in a favorable regulatory climate: the Bank of the United States extended credit, corporations chartered by states helped raise capital, and the Supreme Court was friendly to business interests. Not only did this capital and governmental oversight help industrialists, it also fueled a transportation boom: Americans built roads and canals, and operated steamboats on rivers. This improved transportation allowed manufacturers to deliver their goods and farmers their crops to markets throughout the country. The demand was there: industrial growth helped to create wealth, but the United States’ population explosion of the era was no small boost itself.

Infrastructue Roads, railroads, canals, bridges transportation systems, communication systems, energy systems A strong well-developed infrastructure is one of the most important parts of a strong economy. A country will struggle to prosper with a weak infrastructure.

The Canal Boom

The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, was the first important national waterway built in the United States. The 363 mile canal crossed New York from Buffalo on Lake Erie to Albany on the Hudson River.

After the Civil War, the development of railroads made canals less important. Still, in 1918 the Erie Canal and three smaller canals were combined to form the New York State Barge Canal System. This system connects most of New York's principal waterways. It is used by commercial ships and barges and thousands of pleasure boats each year.

The Welland Canal is one of Canada's greatest engineering projects. There are eight locks on the 27 mile canal. The Welland Canal is part of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

The St. Lawrence Seaway was a cooperative project between the United States and Canada. It was begun in 1954 and completed in 1959. The Seaway extends from Lake Erie to Montreal and links the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Because of the Seaway, the cities of Detroit, Chicago and Duluth, although hundreds of miles inland, are major seaports.

1. The Erie Canal connects Lake Erie with the Hudson River. 2. The Welland Canal connects Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. 3. The development of railroads and other transportation systems have made Erie Canal less effective. However, the St. Lawrence Seaway has allowed cities hundreds of miles from the coast (Detroit, Chicago, Duluth) to be major seaports. 4. The Erie Canal helped unify the nation, connecting western farmers, lumberers, and other producers of raw materials with manufacturing centers on the East Coast.

** Eli Whitney Changes the American Economy ** Of all the post-Revolutionary Americans, Eli Whitney had the most tortuous career. Yet more than any other one man, he shaped the opposing faces of both the North and South for a half-century to come. By 1790 slavery was a declining institution in America. Apart from tobacco, rice, and a special strain of cotton that could be grown only in very few places, the South really had no money crop to export. Sea Island cotton, so named because it grew only in very sandy soil along the coast, was a recent crop and within a short time was being cultivated wherever it found favorable conditions. Tobacco was a land waster, depleting the soil within very few years. Land was so cheap that tobacco planters never bothered to reclaim the soil by crop rotation -- they simply found new land farther west. The other crops -- rice, indigo, corn, and some wheat -- made for no great wealth. Slaves cost something, not only to buy but to maintain; and some Southern planters thought that conditions had reached a point where a slave's labor no longer paid for his maintenance. Jefferson and Washington were not untypical of their times in their attitude towards slavery; it was a cruel system, and the sooner the South was free of it, the better everyone would be. Some slaves were freed; and many masters, including the more humane, planned on manumission at their own deaths. Whitney came south in 1793, when the Southern planters were in their most desperate plight. In ten days he worked the most fateful revolution in a regional economy that ever occurred. Floods and earthquakes are cataclysmic; but their effects are forgotten and the scarred earth heals. Whitney's cataclysmic invention was the start of an avalanche. In the South, nothing was ever to be the same again. Shortly after he settled down, some neighbors visited the plantation and, as usual, fell to discussing the bad times. There was no money crop; the only variety of cotton that would grow in that neighborhood was the practically useless green seed variety. Ten hours of hand work was needed to separate one pint of lint from three pounds of the small tough seeds. Until some kind of machine could be devised to do the work, the green seed cotton was little better than a weed. Whitney watched the cotton cleaning and studied the hand movements. One hand held the seed while the other hand teased out the short strands of lint. The machine he designed simply duplicated this. To do the work of the fingers which pulled out the lint, Whitney had a drum rotate past the sieve, almost touching it. On the surface of the drum, fine, hook-shaped wires projected which caught at the lint from the seed. The restraining wires of the sieve held the seeds back while the lint was pulled away. A rotating brush which turned four times as fast as the hook-covered drum cleaned the lint off the hooks. Originally Whitney planned to use small circular saws instead of the hooks, but the saws were unobtainable. That was all there was to Whitney's cotton gin; and it never became any more complicated. Whitney gave a demonstration of his first model before a few friends. In one hour, he turned out the full day's work of several workers. With no more than the promise that Whitney would patent the machine and make a few more, the men who had witnessed the demonstration immediately ordered whole fields to be planted with green seed cotton. Word got around the district so rapidly that Whitney's workshop was broken open and his machine examined. Within a few weeks, more cotton was planted than Whitney could possible have ginned in a year of making new machines. The usual complaint of an inventor was that people were reluctant to give his machine a chance. Whitney's complaint was just the opposite. Before he had a chance to complete his patent model, or to secure protection, the prematurely planted cotton came to growth. With harvests pressing on them, the planters had no time for the fine points of law or ethics. Whitney's machine was pirated without a qualm. Cotton, one of the easiest growing crops, was coming up out of the ground in white floods that threatened to drown everyone. By 1803 the cotton crop earned close to ten million dollars for the planters. The price of slaves had doubled, and men's consciences no longer troubled them. There was no longer any talk of ending slavery for Southerners. In the early American republic, there was only a handful of skilled machinists. Better than anyone, Whitney knew how small that number was. He then proceeded to invent something far more important than a machine; he invented a system of manufacture which would permit an unskilled man to turn out a product that would be just as good as one made by a highly trained machinist. He put this system to work on the manufacture of rifles. Without a factory, without even a machine, he persuaded the U. S. government to give him an order of ten thousand muskets at $13.40 each, to be delivered within two years. Only Whitney's prestige as the inventor of the cotton gin could have swayed the government to make such a commitment. From anyone other than Whitney, the claim would have sounded insane. Until then, every rifle had been made by hand from stock to barrel; but the parts of one gun did not fit any other gun, nor did anyone expect them to. It was Whitney's idea to make all the parts of his rifles so nearly identical that the machines parts could be interchangeable from one gun to another. He did this by designing a rifle. For each part of the gun, a template was made. This was identical in principle to the dress pattern. A man would follow this pattern in cutting a piece of metal. Whitney then had to invent a machine that would allow a man to cut metal according to a pattern. The metal plate to be cut was clamped to a table, the template to be followed would be clamped on top of the metal, and a cutting tool would follow the outlines of the template. Ordinarily, a chisel would be such a tool. A chisel, however, required skill. Whitney took an iron wheel and cut teeth into the circumference so that it looked like a gear. However, the edge of each tooth curved slightly, sharpened to a cutting edge and then hardened. As the wheel rotated, one tooth after another came into play. Each tooth was then a separate chisel, but each chisel stroke was exactly the same, and the rotation of the wheel gave a steady cutting stroke. This wheel with its cutting teeth was then driven around the edge of the template. No great mechanical skill was needed. Almost eight years was required for Whitney to fill the order, because practice still showed many gaps in his system. The number of details seemed endless. However, most of the ten thousand were turned out in the last two years. In 1811, Whitney took an order for fifteen thousand, and these were turned out within only two years. Whitney did not despise the people who worked in his factories. He also invented a pattern for the relationship between factory owner and the working hands; but of all his inventions this was the shortest-lived. Within a decade after his death, the American factory began to turn into something quite different from Whitney's design. Eli Whitney Interchangeable Parts: Adopted largely in the North Factory System Generated more wealth for more people economy based on manufacturing growth of cities large population immigration desire for protective tariffs slavery NOT important
 * Eli Whitney changed the American economy in both the South and the North. Would you agree or disagree with this statement? Explain. **

Cotton gin used in the South cotton becomes very important economy based on agriculture smaller population plantations become center of population a small number of people become very rich - most are poor protective tariffs hurt slavery becomes VERY important