The United States was an agricultural nation when it entered the War of 1812. There were some substantial cities in America and also modest but growing manufacturing in the Northeast. The majority of Americans were 888-609- 888-609- 888-609- 888-609-

The United States had changed by the time of the Civil War. Americans were still rural. Most farmers were part of a national and international market economy. The United States was beginning to challenge Europe for supremacy in manufacturing. The beginning of the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the nation.

There were fights where demand for work was increasing.

The first 17 million were sent by Morse. The growth was caused by improvements in public telegraph message health.

The average number of children invented by the press was 6.14.

Slaves and free blacks had shorter lives than whites because of the poverty and harsh working conditions in which they lived.

In the first three decades of the 19th century, immigration was choked off by wars in Europe and economic crises in America. The foreign-born numbered less than 500,000 in the total population of 13 million.

The immigration boom was stimulated by reduced transportation costs and increased economic ties.

The cities of the Northeast received a lot of new European immigration. The growth of the city was a result of internal migration. As agriculture in New England and other areas grew less profitable, more and more people picked up stakes and moved to promising agricultural regions in the West.

Between 1840 and 1860, the growth of cities accelerated dramatically. Philadelphia's population grew from 220,000 to 565,000 in twenty years, while Boston's grew from 93,000 to 177,000.

By 1860, 26 percent of the population of the free states were living in towns, up from 14 percent in 1840. The urban population of the South increased from 6 percent in 1840 to 10 percent in 1860.

Significant urban growth was produced by the booming agricultural economy of the West.

St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville were major cities between 1820 and 1840. The growing carrying trade connected the farmers of the Midwest with New Orleans and the cities of the Northeast. Buffalo, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago became important new port cities after the Mississippi River moved to the Great Lakes.

Immigration from Europe increased. More than 1.5 million Europeans moved to America between 1840 and 1850. The number rose to 2.5 million in the 1850s. In the 1850s, almost half of New York City's residents were recent immigrants. In Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, the foreign-born outnumbered the natives. Immigrants rarely settled in the South.

The majority of the newcomers came from Ireland and Germany. The majority of the Irish stayed in the eastern cities where they were able to find unskilled labor. Young, single women who worked in factories or in domestic service were the largest group of Irish immigrants. Germans who arrived with at least some money and often came in family groups, moved on to the Northwest where they became farmers or small businessmen.

The new arrivals were courted by many politicians.

The foreign population was viewed with alarm by other older citizens. Some people argued that the immigrants were inferior and corrupted politics by selling their votes. Others said they were stealing jobs from the native work force. The growing Irish population was feared to increase the power of the Catholic Church. Immigrants were feared to be a radical force in politics.

The American Party was created by the Know-Nothings after the 1852 elections. The Know-Nothings won control of the state government in Massachusetts. Their progress outside the Northeast was more modest. The party disappeared after 1854 when the strength of the Know- Nothings declined.

The Industrial Revolution needed an efficient system of transportation and communications, just as it needed an expanding population. The first half of the 19th century saw dramatic changes.

The United States relied on roads for internal transportation from 1790 until the 1820s. The nation's expanding needs were not met by roads alone. In the 18th and 19th century, Americans began to use other means of transportation.

The larger rivers became more important as steamboats replaced slow barges. The corn and wheat of northwestern farmers and the cotton and tobacco of southwestern planters were taken to New Orleans by the oceangoing ships.

Neither western farmers nor eastern mer chants wanted a way to ship goods directly to the urban markets and ports of the Atlantic Coast. The costs of transporting goods overland were still too high even though they were cheaper than before. There was an increase in interest in building canals.

The job of financing canals was done by the states. New York acted first.

It had the advantage of a good land route between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. The engineering tasks were still difficult. The route was interrupted by high ridges and thick woods. After a long public debate, canal advocates prevailed and began digging.

Americans had never done a project like the Erie Canal.

The canal was a simple ditch of forty feet wide and four feet deep, with towpaths along the banks for the horses or mules that were to draw the canal boats. Hundreds of difficult cuts and fills, stone aqueducts, and eighty-eight locks of heavy masonry were used to build the canal. When the Erie Canal opened in October of 1824, traffic was so heavy that the tolls had to be paid within seven years. The canal gave New York access to Chicago and the growing markets of the west. The decline of agriculture in New England was caused by the Erie Canal. People farming marginal land in the Northeast were unable to compete with western farmers because it was cheaper to ship their crops east.

Water connections between Lake Erie and the Ohio River were provided by Ohio and Indiana, which were inspired by the success of the Erie Canal. It was possible to ship goods from New York to New Orleans through these canals.

Much of the produce from the west went to New Orleans, but more went to New York. The volume of manufactured goods moving from the East to the West via New York and the new water routes has grown.

Rival cities along the Atlantic seaboard took alarm at New York's access to a vast market, largely at their expense. They didn't have much success in catching up. Boston did not attempt to connect itself to the West by canal because it was blocked by the mountains. Philadelphia, Baltimore,Richmond, and Charleston wanted to build water routes to the Ohio Valley, but never did. There are opportunities in a different and newer means of transportation in some cities. The era of the railroad began before the canal age.

Railroads played a small role in the nation's transportation system in the 18th and 19th century, but railroad pioneers paved the way for the great surge of railroad building in the 20th century. Railroads became the primary transpor tation system for the United States, as well as critical sites of development for innovations in technology and corporate organization.

The invention of tracks, the creation of steam-powered locomotives, and the devel opment of trains as public carriers of passengers and freight are all part of the history of railroads. Both English and American inventors used steam engines for propelling land vehicles. John Stevens ran a locomotive and cars around a track on his New Jersey estate. The first line to carry general traffic was in England.

American entrepreneurs were interested in the English experiment. The Baltimore and Ohio opened a thirteen mile stretch of track in 1830. More than a thousand miles of track were laid in eleven states by 1836.

Railroads replaced canals and other forms of transport. The country's railroad trackage was less than 3000 miles in 1840. It was mostly in the Northeast by 1860. Railroads crossed the Mississippi by great iron bridges. Chicago became the rail center of the West and was the dominant city of that region.

The Erie Canal and the Mississippi River were diverted by the emergence of the great train lines. The railroads helped weaken the connection between the Northwest and the South by decreasing the dependence of the West on the Mississippi.

Railroad construction required a lot of money. Most of it came from government funding. Congress allotted over 30 million acres to eleven states for railroad construction by 1860.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the impact of the rails on the American economy, society and culture. Where railroads went, towns, ranches, and farms grew quickly. During the winter, areas were cut off from markets, but the railroad was still able to deliver goods to and from them year-round. The railroads reduced the time of shipment and travel. It took three weeks to travel from New York to Chicago. The trip took less than a day by the railroad in the 1850s.

The railroads were more than a form of trans portation. They were a key to the nation's economic growth and the birthplace of the modern corporate form of organization. They became a symbol of the nation's technological prowess. Railroads were the most visible sign of American advancement.

The telegraph was a symbol of national progress and technological expertise because it was to communication what the railroad was to transportation.

Communication over distances could only be achieved by physical contact.

There were obvious disadvantages to this system and one of them was the difficulty in knowing the railroad schedules. Experiments with many methods of long-distance communication, among them a procedure for using the sun and reflective devices to send light signals as far as 187 miles, were conducted by the 1830s.

A professor of art with an interest in science began experimenting with a different system. He was looking for a way to send signals along an electric cable. The use of electric wiring to send reproductions of the human voice was not yet possible. Electricity could become a kind of language because it could serve as a commu nication device.

He tried a numerical code in which each number represented a word on a list. Gradually, however, he became convinced of the need to find a more universal telegraphic "language," and he developed what became the Morse code, in which alternating long and short bursts of electric current would represent individual letters.

Congress appropriated $30,000 for the construction of an experimental telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington in 1843, and in May 1844 it was complete, and Morse transmitted the news of James K. Polk's nomination for the presi dency over the wires. The Pacific Telegraph, with 3,595 miles of wire, opened between New York and San Francisco a year later. The telegraph spread quickly across Europe, and the first cable was laid to connect America and Europe in 1865.

The growing system of rails was one of the first beneficiaries of the telegraph. telegraph offices were often located in railroad stations. Railroad operators could communicate directly with stations in cities, small towns, and even rural hamlets to alert them to schedule changes and warn them about delays. The new form of communication helped prevent accidents by alerting stations to problems that engineers in the past had to discover for themselves.

American journalism was a beneficiary of the telegraph. In the past, the wires delivered news in a matter of hours, not days, weeks, or months. The exchange of national and international news used to be done by mail, but now it is possible for papers to share their reporting. The Associated Press was formed by newspaper publishers to promote news gathering by wire.

The development of the American press was spurred by technological advances. The invention of the steam-powered cylinder rotary press by Richard Hoe made it possible to print newspapers much more quickly and cheaply than had been possible before. The growth of mass-circulation newspapers was spurred by the rotary press.

The circulation was 77,000 because of the speed and economies of production.

The United States developed an advanced industrial capacity and a modern capitalist economy by the mid-nineteenth century. The economy has developed along highly unequal lines, benefiting some classes more than others.

American business grew quickly in the 18th and 19th century because of innovations in management. The great merchant capitalists had sole ownership of their enterprises, and individuals or limited partnerships continued to operate most businesses.

When legal obsta cles to their formation were removed in the 1830s, corporations, which had the advantage of combining the resources of a large number of shareholders, began to develop rapidly. By the 1830s, states began passing general incorporation laws, which allowed a group to get a charter by paying a fee.

The laws allowed a system of limited liability in which individual stockholders risked losing the value of their own investment if the enterprise failed. The changes made it possible for larger manufacturing and business enterprises.

The rise of the factory was the most important economic development of the mid-nineteenth century. Before the War of 1812, most manufacturing took place in house holds or small workshops. New England textile manufacturers began using water-powered machines in the 19th century to bring their operations together.

The American industry experienced dramatic growth between 1840 and 1860.

Most of the larger enterprises were located in the Northeast. More than two-thirds of the manufactured goods were produced in the Northeast.

The most mature industries were still relatively immature. American cotton manufacturers produced goods of coarse grade, while England produced fine items. Significant advances were occurring by the 1840s.

The manufacturing of machine tools was one of the most important. Much of the research and development of machine tools was supported by the government. The precision grinder was designed in the 1850s to help the army produce standardized rifle parts. Machine tools used in the Northeast were better than those used in most European factories by the 1840s.

The principle of interchangeable parts spread because of better machine tools. Watch and clock making, the manufacturing of locomotives, the creation of steam engines, and the making of farm tools would all be changed by interchangeability. Bicycles, sewing machines, typewriters, cash register, and eventually the automobile would be made possible by it.

Industrialization made money from new sources of energy.

American inventors were responsible for much of the industrial advances. Several tries show how a technological innovation could change the economy. A major American rubber industry was created by the invention of a method of vulcanizing rubber by Charles Goodyear, a New England hardware merchant. The Howe-Singer sewing machine was made in Massachusetts and was used in the manufacture of ready-to-wear clothing.

The merchant capitalists were important in the 1840s. In New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, influential mercantile groups operated shipping lines to southern ports or dispatched fleets of trading vessels to Europe and Asia. By the middle of the century merchant capitalism was declining. British competitors were stealing a lot of America's export trade, but also because there were more opportunities for profit in manufacturing than in trade. An affluent merchant class with money and will to finance them already existed in the Northeast, which is why industries developed first there. They became the new aristocracy of the Northeast because of their support for the emerging industrial capitalists.

In the 18th and 19th century, the majority of factory labor came from natives.

The immigrant population became the most important source of workers after 1840.

In the early days of the factory system, it was hard to find a labor force.

In the 18th century, most of the American people still lived and worked on farms. Many urban residents were skilled artisans who owned and managed their own shops, and the available unskilled workers were not plentiful enough to meet industry's needs. Dramatic improvements in agricultural production in the Midwest made it possible for each region to import food it needed. Rural people from unprofitable farming areas of the East began leaving the land to work in the factories.

There is a new labor supply to the textile mills. In the mid-Atlantic states, one brought whole families from the farm to work together in the mill. Young women, mostly farmers' daughters, were enlisted in the second system. Many of these women saved their wages for several years and then returned home to marry and raise children. Some married men met in the factories. Domestic roles were taken up by most who stopped working in the mills.

Labor conditions in the early years of the factory system were better than they would become later. The factory owners maintained that the workers were well fed, supervised, and housed in clean boardinghouses and dormitories. Wages for the workers were generous at the time.

Even 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 Forced to live among strangers, many women had trouble adjusting to the nature of factory work. Women who were uncomfortable may have found factory work. The only other option for returning to farms that could no longer support them was to work in the mills.

The factory system of Lowell did not last long. In the competitive textile market of the 1830s and 1840s, it was difficult for manufacturers to maintain high living standards and attractive working conditions. The hours of work increased and the conditions of the boardinghouses deteriorated.

The Factory Girls Association staged a strike in 1834 to protest a 25 percent wage cut. The association objected to a rent increase in the boardinghouses. The organization was almost destroyed by a recession in 1837. State governments were asked to investigate conditions in the mills. The factory workforce's character was changing again, making it less urgent for them to fulfill their demands. Mill girls were moving into other occupations. Immigrants were being used as a less demanding labor supply.

The increase in immigrant workers after 1840 was a boon to manufacturers. These new workers, because of their growing numbers and unfamiliarity with their new country, had less leverage than the women they were placed with, and thus they had worse working conditions. Poorly paid con struction gangs, made up increasingly of Irish immigrants, performed the unskilled work on railroads. Many of them lived in flimsy shanties, which made them vulnerable to health problems and reinforced native prejudices. Irish workers dominated the New England textile mills in the 1840s. Employers began paying piece rates rather than a daily wage and used other devices to speed up production and exploit the labor force more efficiently. The factories themselves were becoming large, noisy, unsanitary, and often dangerous places to work as the average workday was extended to twelve, often fourteen hours. Women and children earn less than men.

The girls worked and lived in the mill.

A physician will be at the counting-room once a month to give the vaccine free of charge.

The starting of the mill will be considered if the yard, cloth or other articles are always in the room longing to go to the company.

All those employed in their rooms board and wages will be paid monthly. In due season, the accounts will be in their places and kept up to the last Saturday, but one in every correct account of their time and work. They paid for leave of absence to those em ing week.

The regulations are considered part of the hands to supply their places and not the contract, except in cases of absolute necessity.

They are going to be a part of the company. The tenants of the boardinghouses of the company and give informa houses are not allowed to board or allow anyone to occupy their houses at the counting room when they begin, or whenever they son.

The boarders of those intending to leave the employ are not allowed to have unseasonable hours at the company.

The buildings and yards must be kept clean and in good order, and if they are injured, all necessary repairs will be made, and charged to the occupant.

If the sidewalks in front of the houses are not kept clean and free from snow, they will be removed by the company at the expense of the tenant.

It is desirable that the families of those who live in the houses, as well as the boarders who have not had the kine pox, should be vaccinations, which will be done at the expense of the company.

Why would the workers worship?

The trades of skilled artisans were being displaced by factories. The older, republican vision of America was that of sturdy yeoman farmers. The vision of economic life promoted by the new capitalist class was very different from that of the independent crafts men. Craftsmen valued their indepen dence, stability, and relative equality.

Some artisans transitioned into a small-scale industry. Others were unable to compete with the new goods. The skilled workers in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and New York formed societies for mutual aid in the face of this compe tition. The craft societies combined and formed trade unions during the 18th century. In 1834, delegates from six cities founded the National Trades' Union, and in 1836, printers and cordwainers set up their own national craft unions.

The unions were handicapped by Hostile laws and hostile courts. Some artisans were able to retain control over their lives.

Industrial workers worked to improve their lots. They tried to get state legislatures to pass laws that set a maximum workday and regulate child labor. Employers continued to resist the principles of the Massachusetts decision as other state courts gradually accepted them.

The early craft unions did not include women. In the 1850s, women began their own protective unions. The female unions were powerless in dealing with employers. They served an important role as mutual aid societies for women workers.

There are many factors that affect the growth of better working standards. Immigrants were usually willing to work for lower wages than native workers, so the flood into the country was one of the most important obstacles. Because they were so plentiful, manufacturers were able to replace disgruntled or striking workers with eager immigrants. Workers channel their resentments into internal squabbling among one another rather than into their shared grievances. The sheer strength of the industrial capitalists made them an obstacle.

The United States was becoming wealthier and less equal as a result of the Industrial Revolution. It was changing the way people interact with each other.

The increasing wealth was being distributed very differently. Slaves, Indians, landless farmers, and unskilled workers on the fringes of the manufacturing system did not share in the economic growth. The income gap was growing among the rest of the population. A culture of wealth began to emerge in the cities as merchants and industrialists accumulated enor mous fortunes.

In large cities, people of great wealth gathered together. They created elaborate social rituals. They were looking for ways to display their wealth, which included great mansions, showy carriages, lavish household goods, and elegant social establishments. New York has a high society. The members of high society wanted an elegant setting for their daily carriage rides so they pushed for the construction of Central Park.

In the growing urban centers, there was a significant population of genuinely poor people. People starve to death or die of exposure. Some of these people were recent immigrants. The family structures that allowed most working-class Americans to survive were stripped of some widows and orphans. Some people were unable to work because of alcoholism or mental illness. Others were victims of native prejudice, which prevented them from most menial employment. Irish people were victims of such prejudice.

Free blacks were the worst victims. Most major urban areas had black populations. Others were freed from their masters. Life in the North was not always better than it was in slavery.

Most of the time they had access to very menial jobs. In most parts of the North, blacks are not allowed to vote, attend public schools or use public services.

There was little class conflict in antebellum America despite the differences between wealth and poverty. It was better for factory workers to live in material terms than it was in Europe. Mobility within the working class helped limit discontent. A few workers were able to move from poverty to wealth by dint of work, ingenuity, and luck. A large number of workers were able to move up the ladder and become skilled, rather than unskilled.

geographical mobility was more important than social mobility. Some workers bought land and moved west to farm it. Few urban workers could afford to make such a move. The movement of laborers from one town to another was common. The migrants who were the victims of layoffs looked for better opportunities elsewhere. Their search did not lead to improvement in their circumstances. Effective organization and protest were difficult because of the rootlessness of this large and distressed segment of the workforce.

The middle class was the fastest growing group in America despite the fact that there were very rich and poor in antebellum society. When landownership was the only real basis of wealth, society was divided between those with little or no land and those with land. Many people could become prosperous without owning land, but by providing valuable services, as these rigid distinctions broke down once commerce and industry became a source of wealth.

Middle-class life in the antebellum years was the most influen tial cultural form of urban America. Solid, substantial middle-class houses lined city streets, larger in size and more elaborate in design than the cramped, functional rowhouses in working-class neighborhoods--but also less lavish than the great houses of the very rich. Middle-class people owned their homes for the first time. Most of the workers and artisans were renters.

Middle-class women usually remained in the household, although they were also able to hire servants. Middle-class women wanted to escape from some of the drudgery of housework in an age when doing the family's laundry could take an entire day.

The invention of the cast-iron stove, which replaced fireplaces as the main vehicle for cook ing in the 1840s, was perhaps the most important. The wood- or coal-burning devices were hot, clumsy, and dirty, but compared to cooking on an open fire, they were a great luxury. Cooks were able to cook several things at once with the help of the stove.

The range of cooking that the stove made possible was not the only reason that the middle-class diet was changing rapidly.

Fruits and vegetables were difficult to ship over long distances in an age with little refrigeration, but families had access to a greater variety of meats, grains, and dairy products than in the past. Iceboxes allowed wealthy households to keep meat and dairy products fresh for several days. Most families did not have any refrig eration. They preserved their food by curing meat with salt and preserving fruits in sugar. Middle class people tended to be stouter than they would be if they were healthy today, and Diets were generally heavier than they are today.

Middle-class homes were different from those of workers and artisans. The spare, simple styles of eighteenth-century homes gave way to the much more elaborate, even baroque household styles of the Victorian era--styles increasingly characterized by crowded, even cluttered rooms, dark colors, lush fabrics, and heavy furniture and draperies. Middle-class homes became larger.

It was less common for children to share beds and for everyone in the family to sleep in the same room. The middle class used to have parlors and dining rooms separate from the kitchen. By the 1850s, some urban middle-class homes had indoor plumbing and indoor toilets.

The nature of the family changed as a result of the new industrializing society.

Families moved from farms to urban areas. The shift of income-earning work out of the home was the reason for this. The family was the main unit of economic activity in the early 20th century. Most income earner leave home each day to work in a shop, mill or factory. The private world of the family was different from the public world of the workplace. The world of the family was dominated by domestic issues and not by production.

There was a decline in the birthrate in urban areas and middle-class families. The average American woman was expected to give birth to seven children in the 19th century. The average woman had five children by 1860.

The social roles of men and women have changed because of the separation between the workplace and home. Members of the growing middle class were affected by those distinctions.

With less legal and political rights than men, most women remained under the authority of their husbands. They were not encouraged to pursue educa tion above the primary level. Until 1836, women students were not accepted to any college or university.

In the preindustrial era, the positions of men and women were not always equal, but they had been defined within the context of a household in which all members played important economic roles. The husband was assumed to be the principal in the middle-class family of the new industrial society. Middle-class women placed a higher value on keeping a clean, comfortable, and well-appointed home, entertaining, and dressing well.

There was a "lady's" literature. Romantic novels written for female readers focused on the private sphere that middle-class women now inhabited, as did women's magazines that focused on fashions, shopping, and other purely domestic concerns.

It left women more detached from the public world, with fewer outlets for their interests and energies. Work by women outside the household became seen as a lower-class preserve.

Working-class women continued to work in factories and mills, but under worse conditions than those they had experienced in the past. Female employment used to come from domestic service.

Leisure time was hard to find for most Americans. Most people worked long hours. Sundays were usually reserved for religion and rest for most people, and Sunday was the only respite from work. The celebrations were a way of enjoying one of the few non religious holidays available to most Americans.

The erratic pattern of farmwork provided some relief to people in rural America. Men like to drink, talk, and play after work.

Women gathered in one another's homes for card games. One of the main leisure activities for educated people was reading. Books became a staple of affluent homes as newspapers and magazines spread rapidly.

In larger cities, a vigorous culture of public leisure emerged. Audiences that crossed class lines were attracted to theaters.

The melodramas of the time were based on novels or American myths. Shakespeare's plays were reworked to appeal to American audiences. Tragedies were given happy endings, comedies were interlaced with regional humor, lines were rewritten with American dialect, and scenes were abbreviated or cut so that the play could be one of several in an evening's program.

Minstrel shows in which white actors wore blackface mimicked African American culture became popular. Boxing, horse racing, cockfighting, and other public sporting events often draw large audiences. Large crowds were starting to show up when baseball was played in city parks. The circus arrived in many communities.

The bizarre and the fantastic were popular tastes in public spectacle. In the absence of film, radio, television, or even much photog raphy, Americans hungered for visions of unusual phenomena. People going to the theater, the circus, or the museum wanted to see things that scared them.

The American Museum in New York opened in 1842 and featured people with dwarfism, Siamese twins and other curiosities. Barnum was a genius in publicizing his ventures.

He launched the famous circus in the 1870s.

In the 19th century, lectures were one of the most popular forms of entertainment. In order to hear about the latest advances in science, to see exotic places, or to rail against the evils of slavery, large numbers of men and women went to lyceums, churches, schools, and auditoriums. Rapt audiences were attracted to the messages of social reform.

In what is now called the Northwest, most people remained tied to the world of agriculture. Agriculture was becoming a part of the new capitalist economy.

The story of agriculture in the Northeast after 1840 is a decline and transformation.

The new and richer soil of the Northwest made it impossible for farmers in this section of the country to compete. They were Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan in 1860. New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia were replaced by Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri as growers of corn. New York, Pennsylvania, and New England were the most important cattle-raising areas in the 1840s. Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Iowa were the leading cattle states by the 1850s.

Some eastern farmers moved west to establish new farms. Others became laborers after moving to mill towns. Truck farming was where some farmers stayed on the land and supplied food to the growing cities. Farmers in central New York, southeastern Pennsylvania, and various parts of New England were attracted by the supply of milk, butter, and cheese.

The states of the Old Northwest were known as the Midwest. Chicago was emerging as the national center of the agricultural machinery and meatpacking industries.

Most of the Old Northwest's major industrial activities relied on agricultural products, such as flour milling, meatpacking, whiskey distilling, and the making of leather goods.

The Old Northwest was not yet dominated by whites. The majority of Indians in the upper third of the Great Lakes states were killed in the Civil War. Hunting and fishing were the main economic activities in those areas.

The Old Northwest was an agricultural region for settlers who populated the lands farther south. Farming was lucrative because of its rich lands. The owner of a reasonably prosperous family farm was the typical citizen of the Old Northwest.

The greatest boost to agriculture was provided by industrialization. The domestic market for farm goods increased dramatically as a result of the growth of factories and cities in the Northeast. The rising demand for farm products resulted in rising farm prices. The 1840s and early 1850s were prosperous for most farmers.

The sectional alignments in the United States were affected by the expansion of agricultural markets. A strong economic relationship was emerging between the two sections that was profitable to both and that was increasing the isolation of the South within the Union.

The western white population moved into the prairie regions on both sides of the Mississippi by 1850. The Indians had cleared forest lands many years before these farmers did. The remaining forests were developed into a timber industry. Corn, potatoes, and oats were important crops in the region, even though wheat was the main crop.

New agricultural techniques were adopted by the Old Northwest.

Tools and farm machines were the most important. The replaceable parts of the plow made it popular. John Deere established a factory in Illinois in 1847 to make steel plows, which were more durable than those made of iron.

There was a coming revolution in grain production. It was pulled by a team of horses and had a row of horizontal knives on one side for cutting wheat; the wheels drove a paddle that bent the stalks over the knives, which fell onto a moving belt and into the back of the vehicle. The reaper enabled a crew of six or seven men to harvest in a day as much wheat as fifteen men could. The Chicago factory was established in 1847 by the inventor of the device. More than 100,000 reapers were used by 1860. The thresher, a machine that separated the grain from the wheat stalks, was important to the growers.

Most of the threshers were manufactured in a case factory.

The Old Northwest was the most democratic part of the country.

Its democracy was conservative and middle-class. Many of the people in Lincoln's section were optimistic about the economy. Lincoln said that it was best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he could.

Farming people lived in different regions of the world. In the more densely populated areas east of the Appalachians and in the easternmost areas of the Old Northwest, farmers used the institutions of the communities. Farmers were more isolated as white settlement moved farther west, and had to find ways to get in touch with people outside their families.

Religion drew farm communities together more than any other force. In areas with no organized churches, farm families and women gathered in one home for prayer meetings and other religious activities. Community came together during weddings,baptisms, and funerals.

Religion was not the only reason for interaction. People on the farm shared tasks such as barn raising. Many families gathered at harvest time to help bring in crops. Women came together to share domestic tasks, holding "bees" in which groups of women madequilts, baked goods, preserves, and other products.

People who lived in towns and cities had more contact with popular culture and public life. Most rural people treasure their links to the outside world--letters from distant places, newspapers and magazines from cities they had never seen, catalogs advertising merchandise that their local stores never had. Many valued the freedom that a farm life gave them. One reason many rural Americans looked back on country life after moving to the city was that they felt like they had lost control over their daily lives in the city.

Between the 1820s and the 1850s, the American economy experienced the beginnings of an industrial revolution that changed almost every area of life.

Population growth, advances in transportation and communication, new technologies that spurred the develop ment of factories and mass production, the recruiting of a large industrial labor force, and the creation of corporate bodies capable of managing large enterprises are some of the things that led to the American Industrial Revolution. The new economy expanded the ranks of the wealthy, helped create a large new middle class, and introduced high levels of inequality.

The structure and behavior of the family, the role of women, and the way people used their leisure time and encountered popular culture all changed in the industrializing areas of the North. The changes widened the gap between the generation of the Revolution and the generation of the mid-nineteenth century. The gap between North and South was widened by them.

The south experienced growth in the middle years of the 19th century. People from the South went into the Southwest. The agricultural economy in the south grew more prosperous. The South was a major force in international commerce due to its trade in sugar, rice, tobacco, and cotton. The South was tied to the emerging capitalist world of the United States and its European trading partners.

It was mostly an agricultural region in the 19th century. The century began with few important cities and little industry. The plantation system that depended on slave labor dominated the southern economy in the 1800's, but by 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266

Cotton is banned in the southern economy.

Tobacco prices began to fall in the upper South.

Tobacco quickly exhausted the land on which it grew in the Southwest due to high cotton production.

The south of Nat Turner continued to rely on rice, a more stable and lucrative crop.

John Randolph needed an extremely long growing sea frees 400 slaves son, so his cultivation remained restricted to a relatively small area.

Cotton prices plummet intensive labor and a long growing time, only relatively wealthy planters could afford to grow it.

The PA is 400 km long and has 200 slaves.

Carolina had also grown.

It was a harder strain of cotton that could grow well in a variety of climates and soils. It was more difficult to process than long-staple cotton because it was hard to remove the seeds. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 solved the problem.

In the 18th and 19th century, demand for cotton increased in Britain and New England. From the western areas of South Carolina and Georgia, production moved into Alabama and Mississippi. Cotton was the linchpin of the southern economy.

Cotton made up two-thirds of the United States' total export trade by the time of the Civil War.

Cotton production boomed in the lower South. Thousands of settlers moved to the lower South because of the prospect of huge profits. Some were wealthy planters from the older states, but most were small slaveholders or slaveless farmers who wanted to move into the planter class.

The shift occurred in the slave population. Hundreds of thousands of slaves were moved from the upper South to the cotton states in the 19th century.

The "second middle passage" was a traumatic experience for a million African Americans, according to the historian Ira Berlin. The slave ships that came from Africa were tied together in "coffles" and traveled over hundreds of miles before arriving in forbidding territory where they were made to build new plantations and work in cotton fields. The sale of slaves to the lower South was an important economic activity for whites in the upper South.

Other forms of economic activity were slow to develop in the South in the face of this booming agricultural expansion. Textile and iron manufacturing grew in the upper South, but industry remained a relatively insignificant force in comparison with the agricultural economy. The total value of textile goods in the south in 1860 was three times that of the previous year. The exports had a value of $200 million.

The purpose of the limited commercial sector in the South was to serve the needs of the plantation economy. In the absence of banks, the "factors" who marketed the planters' crops and provided them with credit were important. The South's inadequate transportation system was one of the obstacles to economic development. Railroads, which expanded substantially in the 1840s and 1850s, failed to tie the region together effectively. The principal means of transportation was still water. Most of the manufacturing was in or near port towns.

The South was becoming more and more dependent on the North.

An important question about antebellum southern history is why the region did not develop a larger industrial and commercial economy of its own.

The profitability of the region's agricultural system was a part of the reason. As the agricultural economy of the Northeast declined, many people turned to manufacturing. In the South, the agricultural economy was booming, and ambitious capital ists had little incentive to look elsewhere. Wealthy southerners had so much capital invested in land and slaves that they had little left for other investments.

Historians believe that the climate of the south was less suitable for industrial development than the climate of the north.

A set of values distinct to the South was to blame for the southern failure.

Many white southerners thought of themselves as representative of a special way of life. They said grace and refinement were more important than growth and development. It conformed to the reality of southern society even though it was appealing to southern whites.

The majority of whites in the South owned slaves. When the white popu lation was less than 8 million, the number of slaveholders was less than 400,000. Even with all members of slaveowning families included in the figures, those living in slaveowning house holds still amounted to no more than 25% of the white population. Only a small percentage of slaveowners owned slaves in large numbers. White supporters of cotton argued for a ruling planter class and slave class in the late 1850s.

The planter aristocracy exercised power and influence far in excess of its numbers.

White southerners liked to compare their planter class to the old aristocracies of England and Europe, but the comparison was not sound. In some areas of the upper South, the great aristocracy were people whose families had held positions of wealth and power for generations. In most of the South, many of the great landowning families were still first generation settlers, who had only recently started to live in the comfort and luxury for which they became famous. At the time of the Civil War, large areas of the South had been established.

The world of the planter was not as genteel as the myth would suggest. It was difficult to grow staple crops. The planters and industrialists were both petitive capitalists. Many planters lived modestly, their wealth heavily invested in land and slaves, and there was little left for personal comfort. White planters moved frequently as new areas opened up to cultivation.

Wealthy southern whites were seen as aristocracy in many ways. White men were obligated to defend their honor through dueling. Those who did not become planters tended to gravitate toward the military, while those who did become planters tended to avoid trade and commerce.

According to the South's social ideal, they served as companions to and hostesses for their husbands and as nurturing mothers for their children in the home. "Genteel" southern white women were rarely employed or engaged in public activities.

The life of the "southern lady" was very different from that of her northern counterpart.

Women have the same right to protection as children, wrote Fitzhugh in the 1850s.

The role of southern white women was determined by the fact that most of them lived on farms with little access to the public world and thus few opportunities to look beyond their roles as wives and mothers. Middle-class women in the North tend to be less engaged in the economic life of the family than white women are. The women were involved in spinning, weaving, and other production and helped supervise the slave workforce.

"Cotton Is King" is a speech.

If we don't get another foot of territory war. She has drawn her sword for the South many times. It has been on the point of honor for eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles. Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and loyalty to her sister colonies and sister Spain have been the main points of honor.

Without firing thousand miles of continental shore line, so a gun, without drawing a sword, should bays with indented and crowded with they make war on us, we can bring the islands, that, when their shore lines are whole world to our feet. We have twelve thousand miles.

Three years without planting a seed of Mississippi into cotton is what runs through the heart of our country. It would be an advantage to her if she were to plant but with her bosom full of cotton for three years, it would sand miles of streams.

We have a better chance of entering upon her million of militia after our muster-rolls. Every one of them would topple and carry the whole able. The civilized world can be saved by the South at any time.

Power on earth is capable of making war on her, no matter what the Power of the earth does.

There must be in all social systems. It appears that by going to the reports class to do the menial duties, they will be able to perform the Secretary of the Treasury. A class requirauthentic, that last year the United States ing but a low order of intellect and but exported in round numbers of $279,000,000 little skill. It requires vigor, docility, worth of domestic produce, and gold fidelity. A race inferior to her own but clear produce of the South is the one adapted to that amount.

We call them slaves when we use them. What is Nature's law?

White women in the south have less access to education than their northern counterparts. The few female "academies" in the South were trained to be suitable wives.

There were other special burdens for Southern white women. White women were impacted by the slave labor system. Many of them were spared from certain types of labor, but it also damaged their relationships with their husbands. The children of slaveowners' unions served as a constant reminder to white women of their husbands' infidelities, as Male slaveowners had frequent forced sexual relationships with the female slaves on their plantations. White women were also victims of such practices, but black women were the most impor tant.

The typical white southerner was a yeoman farmer. The "plain folk," as they became known, owned a few slaves, with whom they worked and lived more closely than the larger planters. Some plain folk, most of whom owned their own land, devoted themselves largely to subsistence farming, while others grew cotton or other crops for the market but could not produce enough to expand their operations or even get out of debt.

The southern educational system was one of the reasons. The sons of wealthy planters were able to get an education in the region. There were 260 southern colleges and universities in 1860, with 25,000 students.

In the United States, universities were only accessible to the upper class. The elementary and secondary schools in the South were not as good as those in the Northeast. The South had half the nation's total of uneducated whites.

The "hill people" lived in the east of the Mississippi, in the west of the river, and in other "hill country" or "backcountry" areas. They practiced a simple form of agriculture that was unrelated to the cotton economy.

The whites were against the planter aristocracy. In the early 1860s, the mountain regions were the only parts of the South that did not want to leave. Many people refused to support the Confederacy during the Civil War.

The non slaveowning whites lived in the midst of the plantation system. Many of them accepted the system because they were tied to it. Small farmers depended on the local plantation aristocracy for access to cotton gins, markets for their modest crops and their livestock, and credit or other financial assistance in times of need. The poor resident of a county might be related to the richest person in the area. The cotton boom allowed many small farmers to improve their economic fortunes. Some moved into the fringes of plantation society after buying more land. The 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217

They lived in squalor in the infertile lands of the pine barrens, red hills, and swamps. Others were common laborers for their neighbors. Their degradation was caused by diet and disease. They were forced to resort to eating clay at times, and suffered from pellagra, hookworm, and Malaria. They were held in contempt by both planters and small farmers.

There was no opposition to the plantation system or slavery among the southerners. The southern white population's perception of race was the unifying factor. Poor and miserable white southerners could still feel a kinship with their fellow whites and feel a sense of racial supremacy, even though they are poor and miserable.

Slavery was often referred to as the "peculiar institution" by white southerners. The South in the mid-nineteenth century was the only place in the Western world where slavery still existed. Slavery isolated the South from the rest of American society and the world.

Slavery produced different results in the South. On the other hand, it separated blacks from whites. African Americans under slavery developed a culture of their own. Slavery created a unique bond between blacks and whites in the South. The two groups kept their spheres separate, but each sphere was influenced by the other. Slavery profoundly affected all aspects of southern and American society.

Whites were not allowed to teach slaves to read or write. Slave marriages and divorces were not legalized in the laws. The act of killing a slave while punishing him was not considered a crime. Slaves were sentenced to death for killing or resisting a white person and for inciting revolt. The codes had very strict provisions for defining a person's race.

Anyone with a trace of African ancestry was considered black.

There was spotty enforcement of the codes. Some slaves got property, became literate, and assembled with other slaves. White owners inflicted varying punishments on their slaves. The slave system was different despite the rigid provisions of law. Slaves lived in conditions that were almost prisonlike. Many others had a lot of flexibility and independence.

The relationship between masters and slaves was dependent on the size of the plantation. The relationship between the masters and their slaves could be warm or cruel. African Americans preferred to live on larger plantations where they had a chance for a social world of their own.

The majority of slaves lived on large plantations with large slave workforces, even though the majority of slaveowners were small farmers. The relation ship between master and slave was less intimate for the typical slave than for the typical slaveowner. overseers and assistant overseers were often hired to represent the planters. "Head drivers," trusted and responsible slaves often assisted by several subdrivers, acted under the overseer as foremen.

Most, but not all, slaves received an adequate if rude diet, consisting mainly of cornmeal, salt pork, molasses, and on rare occasions fresh meat or poultry. Many slaves cultivated gardens of their own. Their masters gave them cheap clothes and shoes. Slave quarters are rough cabins where they lived. Slave women were often more important sources of medical attention than the plantation mistress or doctor who was retained by the owner.

As children, slaves worked hard. At harvest time, their workdays were the longest. Slave women worked hard. There were many slave families. One spouse of a husband or father would be sold to a plantation owner far away. Black women found themselves acting as single parents.

Slaves were not as healthy as southern whites. As a result of the high black death rate, the proportion of blacks to whites in the nation declined after the importation of slaves became illegal.

No issue in American history has given rise to a more spirited debate than the nature of social and cultural lives. The plantation slavery was compared by Elkins.

The emphasis on slavery was shifted in the early 1970s by an explosion of new depictions of it as a benevolent and paternalistic scholarship. By the late 19th century, the northern and southern parts of the country began to accept a culture of slavery. The most remarkable the Old South and its peculiar institution was argued by John Blassingame in 1973.

Gutman argued that the authoritative work on the black family survived slavery for nearly thirty years.

The white family was disputed by Melville J. Herskovits. Herbert Aptheker wanted to build a large cultural space of slave revolts as a way of refuting the claim that blacks were submissive to their family life.

Slavery was portrayed as a moral system.

The trade was dehumanizing and produced a storm of criticism.

She showed that slave women were defined by their dual roles as whatever white slaveowners might say, and that they were less a social system than the black family.

New Orleans is the largest slave market in the South.

The average white person dies at a younger age than those who survive.

Household servants had a better life than field hands. The same slaves might do both field work and housework on a small plantation.

Nursemaids, housemaids, cooks, butlers, coachmen are some of the domestic staff on a large estate. The people were eating the leftovers from the family table. Between the blacks and whites of such households, affectionate, almost family relationships might develop. House servants resented their isolation from their fellow slaves and the lack of privacy and increased discipline that came with living in close proximity to the master's family.

After the Civil War, house servants were the first to leave the plantations of their former owners.

Female slaves were often treated differently by white women than they were by white men. The mistresses resented the sexual liaisons between their husbands and female slaves.

Punishing their husbands was not usually possible, so they punished the slaves with arbitrary beatings, increased workload, and various forms of psychological torment.

The conditions of urban slavery were different from those in the countryside. Slaves had little contact with free blacks and lower-class whites on the plantations, and masters maintained a fairly direct and effective control. They did not sleep at night in the backyard barracks, but they did move about during the day.

Since there were few European immigrants to perform menial chores in the North, there was a market for common laborers in the South. Slaves were often hired to do such tasks. Slaves on contract worked in mining and lumbering, but others worked on the docks and on construction sites, drove wagons, and did unskilled jobs in cities and towns. Slave women and children worked in textile mills. Craftsmen such as blacksmiths or carpenters were often hired out. Urban slaves were able to mingle with free blacks and whites after working hours. The line between slavery and freedom was less distinct in the cities.

More than half of the free African Americans who lived in the slaveholding states by the start of the Civil War lived in Virginia and Maryland. They were slaves who had earned money to buy their own freedom. Urban blacks had greater freedom of movement and activity and were more likely to take that route. She was a companion to Mary Todd Lincoln in the White House.

This route was open to relatively few people because few masters were willing to give up their slaves.

Some slaves were set free by a master who had moral qualms about slavery, or by a master's will after his death, for example, the more than 400 slaves belonging to John Randolph of Roanoke were freed in 1833.

A few free blacks achieved wealth and prominence. Some slaves were bought by their relatives to ensure their ultimate freedom. In New Orleans, Natchez, and Charleston, free black communities flourished with little interference from whites and some economic stability. Most free blacks lived in poverty. Blacks preferred slavery over freedom as a result of the hardship of freedom.

One of the worst consequences of slavery was the transfer of slaves from one part of the South to another. The slaves moved to the new cotton lands with their original owners. Professional slave traders are more likely to have the transfer occur. The traders took slaves to central markets such as New Orleans, Mobile, and Charleston, where they were sold. Depending on the health and age of the slaves, the price of a sound young field hand could range from $500 to $1,700 in the 1840s and 1850s.

The domestic slave trade was one of the worst aspects of the system. The trade made everyone dehumanized. Children were separated from parents. Families kept together by scrupu lous owners might be broken up in the division of the estate after the master's death. The traders were held in contempt by the planters, even though they deplored the trade.

The foreign slave trade was not good. Slaves were smuggled into the United States as late as the 1850s despite federal law prohibiting the importation of slaves from 1808. The legal reopening of the trade was discussed at the annual southern commercial convention. The government never acted on the repeal of the slave import laws that the convention voted to do.

There was resistance to the continued transportation of slaves. They wanted to sail back to Africa. The slaves tried to get the crew to steer them across the Atlantic.

The ship was captured by the United States Revenue Service after it sailed up the Atlantic Coast. The slaves should be returned to Cuba, according to President Van Buren. John Quincy Adams went before the Supreme Court to argue that they should be freed. Most of the former slaves were returned to Africa after the Court accepted his argument.

Two years later, another group of slaves revolted on board a ship and took control of it--this time an American vessel bound from Norfolk, Virginia, to New Orleans, Louisiana--and steered it to the British Bahamas, where slavery was illegal. The shipboard revolts were symbolic of the continued effort by Africans to resist slavery.

The vast majority of southern blacks yearned for freedom and hated the institution. Evidence for that can be found in the slaves' reaction to being freed. Most of the whites who owned them before the Civil War chose not to remain in the service of them.

The dominant response of African Americans to slavery was a combination of resistance and adaptation. Slavery produced two very different reactions, each of which served as the basis for a powerful stereotype in white society. The shuffling, grinning, head-scratching, deferential slave who acted out what the white world expected of him became known as the "Sambo." The Sambo pattern of behavior was put on by blacks, a facade assumed in the presence of whites.

The slave rebel was the African American who resisted both accep tance and accommodation.

Two African Americans gave away the plot and the Virginia militia stopped the uprising before it could start. Thirty-five people were executed. In 1822, the Charleston free black Denmark Vesey and his followers--rumored to total 9,000--made preparations for revolt, but again word leaked out and suppression and retribution followed. Nat Turner, a slave preacher, led a group of African Americans armed with guns and axes from house to house in Virginia in the summer of 1831. They killed sixty white men, women, and children before being taken down by state and federal troops. More than a hundred blacks were executed.

Resistance to slavery took other, less violent forms. Some blacks ran away. After sympathetic whites and free blacks began organizing secret escape routes, a small number were able to escape to the North or to Canada. The odds of a successful escape were very high. The white "slave patrols," which stopped wandering blacks on sight and demanded to see travel permits, were one of the serious obstacles. Blacks ran away from their masters in large numbers despite all the obstacles.

A pattern of everyday behavior by blacks was the most important method of resistance. Slaves stole from their masters. Others sabotaged themselves by losing or breaking tools. Blacks can make themselves useless by cutting off their fingers. Some turned on their masters and killed them. The extremes were very rare. Blacks resisted building methods of rebellion into their normal behavior.

The slave response to slavery was only part of resistance. An elaborate pro cess of adaptation was another. Blacks were able to sustain a sense of racial pride and unity by developing their own culture.

By the early 19th century, most African Americans were Christians. Some had converted in response to being coerced by their masters and Protestant missionaries. Under the supervision of white ministers, slaves were expected to join their denominations. Slave religion was not supposed to exist. Black churches were banned by law.

Blacks in the South developed their own version of Christianity, at times incorporating it into other religions. They bent religion to the special circumstances of bondage.

The influence of African customs and practices was reflected in African American religion. Black religion was more joyful and affirming than many white denominations. The dream of freedom and deliverance was emphasized by African American religion. In Maryland, he was born into slavery.

When her master died, she escaped to Philadelphia to avoid being sold out of state. Many blacks used the images of Christian salvation to express their own dreams of freedom in the present world, despite the fact that whites generally chose to interpret such language as the expression of hopes for life after death.

Slaves retained a language of their own. Having arrived in America speaking many different African languages, the first generations of slaves had as much difficulty communicating with one another as they did with white people. They learned a simple, common language to overcome the barriers. Blacks spent more time in America and slave language became more sophisticated, but some features of the early pidgin remained in black speech for many generations.

In slave society, music was important. The African heritage was influential again. African and black music used a lot of rhythm. Slaves used whatever materials were at hand to create their instruments. The banjo was important to slave music. Voice and song were more important.

Field workers usually attached relatively innocuous words to the songs they used to pass the time, since they sang them in the presence of the whites. African Americans created more politically challenging music in the privacy of their own religious services. The tradition of the spiritual emerged there. Africans in America expressed their religious faith and lamented their bondage through the spiritual.

Slave songs were rarely written down and often seemed completely random; but the majority of slave music was derived from African and Caribbean traditions. Performers made their own variations on songs they had heard.

African Americans danced to their music in a different way than whites did. They also used music to tell stories.

The slave family was an important part of black culture in the South. Like religion, it was subject to legal restrictions. The nuclear family was the dominant kinship model among African Americans.

Black women began having children as young as fourteen or fifteen, sometimes as a result of unwanted sexual relations with their masters. Slave communities did not condemn premarital pregnancies in the same way white society did, and black couples would often begin living together before marrying.

Sometimes husbands and wives on the same planta tions would visit each other with the permission of their masters, but often the visit had to be kept a secret. The family ties between slaves and whites were very strong.

Blacks had no control over the circumstances that led to marriages not surviving. Up to a third of black families were broken apart by the slave trade. The kinship networks were important and helped compensate for the break up of nuclear families. A slave who is forced to move to a new area far from his or her family can create fictional kinship ties and become adopted by a family in the new community. The impulse to keep in touch with a spouse and children after a family separation remained strong. A slave's desire to find a husband, wife, or child who had been sent elsewhere was one of the most frequent causes of flight from the plantation. After the Civil War, white and black newspapers were filled with notices from former slaves who wanted to connect with family who were separated during bondage.

It was difficult for blacks to maintain a hostile attitude towards their owners because they resented their lack of freedom. They depended on whites for food, clothing, and shelter, as well as for security and protection.

White control became dependent on paternalism. Whites helped minimize resistance to an institution that served only the interests of the ruling race by creating a sense of mutual dependence.

While the North was creating a complex and rapidly developing commercial-industrial economy, the South was expanding its agrarian economy without making many mental changes in the region's character. There were many great fortunes created by the cotton economy. It made the planter class the dominant force in southern society, both as owners of slaves and patrons, as well as politicians, landlords, and marketers for the large number of poor whites who lived on the edge of the planter world.

Natural resources, social structure, climate, and culture are some of the differences between the North and the South. They were the result of an unfree labor system in the South that prevented the kind of social fluidity that an industrializing society usually requires. In the face of white subjugation, slaves created a vital, independent culture and religion.