The Age of Jackson and the Art of American Power, 1815-1848

16. The Industrial and Cultural Revolutions

189 16 The Industrial and Cultural Revolutions America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings , of projects, of vast designs and expectations. Ralph Waldo Emerson I do not know a country where the love of money holds a larger place in the heart of man and where they profess a more profound scorn for the theory of equality of goods. Alexis de Tocqueville America’s industrial revolution began during the age of Jackson despite Jacksonian policies that rewarded speculation, corruption, and insider trading and fought protective tariffs, internal improvements, and the Second Bank of the United States, which nurtured industrialization.¹ These were only the latest challenges that industrialists had to overcome. The worst constraint was America’s colonial legacy. Britain’s navigation acts kept the colonists from producing a lengthening list of manufactured goods. Even after winning political independence, the United States remained economically dependent on Britain for more than half of its trade. For decades, America exported raw and semirefined goods to Britain in return for sophisticated goods and credit; the value of The Industrial and Cultural Revolutions 190 imports was twice that of the exports so that much more hard coin left than entered the United States. Paradoxically, as if all this were not hobbling enough, America’s industrial revolution was further inhibited by the nation’s seemingly endless cornucopia of natural resources. For centuries, labor and money were relatively scarce, whereas water, soil, timber, game, and eventually coal, iron ore, and precious minerals were either free or cheap for the taking. When producers exhausted a farm’s soil or mine’s vein, they simply abandoned it for a lode as rich or richer elsewhere. This was not just extremely wasteful; it also retarded the nation’s economic development as people lived off producing crude commodities rather than refined goods. During the 1790s Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton freed America from some of its economic fetters with policies that promoted finance, infrastructure, innovation, industry, and education. The resulting economic renaissance was short lived. The Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800 sacrificed these initiatives on the altar of minimal government, market purity, and trade embargoes. Enterprising individuals were left to sink or swim with their innovations; mostly they sank. Yet some inventers and entrepreneurs succeeded despite the odds against them. The best known exception in the early republic was Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin in 1793. This simple yet profound devise ignited not just an economic but also a political revolution . Before the gin, cotton seeds were laboriously picked by hand, a time-devouring process that limited cotton’s supply and thus kept its price high. Now a slave with a gin could clean fifty times more cotton. Prices fell, demand rose, and plantations spread across the cotton belt, a swath of rich soil in central Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and across stretches of northern Louisiana and east Texas. The white and slave populations soared in these states along with the planter elite’s wealth and power. Between 1800 and 1820 American cotton production surged ten times and surpassed that of India. The halls of Congress reverberated with the swelling chorus of shrill Senate and House voices defending slavery and demanding its expansion.² The South’s cotton revolution combined with Jefferson’s embargo of 1807 to stimulate a New England textile boom. With English textiles scarce and expensive, demand grew for the American-made version. The The Industrial and Cultural Revolutions 191 number of spindles soared from 8,000 in 1807 to 80,000 by 1811, 191,000 by 1820, and 1.25 million by 1831. This expansion preceded, stimulated, and was in turn stimulated by the Cotton Kingdom’s growth across the Deep South. New England cotton cloth production soared from 4 million pieces in 1817 to 323 million in 1840. This industrial revolution also fed and was fed by expanding wool production, which rose from 400,000 pounds in 1810 to 15 million in 1830. Carpets skyrocketed from 9,948 square yards in 1810 to 1,147,500 in 1831.³ An earlier innovation lacked the cotton gin’s political punch but eventually stirred economic tsunamis. Oliver Evans is not a household name but should be. In 1782 he quietly introduced both standardized interchangeable parts and assembly line production to his flour mill. These techniques remained a local wonder for decades until one by one other entrepreneurs emulated them, thus forcing their...