Jackson to Manifest Destiny

The Market Revolution

• Improvements in transportation (first roads & canals, then steamboats & RR’s)
• allows for expansion of manufacturing – early factories (textiles, shoes, etc.)
• Workingwomen - seek autonomy & new opportunity
• start of wage labor system, workers subject to fluctuations in labor market
• Boom in banking, banks key to business development, bank notes become key part of money supply
• accompanying boom in commercial & corporate law, lawyers become central to economy
• Economic growth increases susceptibility to booms and busts (business cycle)

Cultural and Religious Shifts

• The Family and Separate Spheres
• Push for greater public education
• The Second Great Awakening
• The Temperance Movement and Moral Reform (protecting the home)
• Growth of abolition (most northerners anti-black, free labor)

The Spread of Democracy

• 1828 (Jackson vs. John Q. Adams): voters now involved in selection of presidential electors
• Partisan Identity grows (newspapers)
• Character issues dominate Election of 1828 (Jackson’s temper & toughness vs. Adams piety & intellect)

Jackson’s Democratic Agenda

• Spoils system: party loyalists throughout bureaucracy
• Limited government, & limited support for transportation & other things favored by big business
• Tax $$ for general benefit

Jackson & the Democrats

• Indian Policy and the Trail of Tears
• SC tries to nullify the Tariff of Abominations, Jackson uses force to make them comply
• Refuses to renew bank charter on argument that it only favors the elite
• Wins reelection on class antagonism created by Bank War
• Unregulated economy booms but then inflation goes crazy (unregulated money supply)
• Jackson tries to regulate, Banks respond with contraction & economy collapses in 1837
• Van Buren serves one term in panic conditions

Westward Movement

• Manifest Destiny - white culture destines to control all land from sea to shining sea
• Oregon Trail start of first push to far west - clash with Plains Indians
• The Mormon Exodus
• American settlers push into the Mexican Borderlands (grow cotton in TX, etc.)
• TX wins its independence

Mexican-American War

• Politics of Expansion driven by slavery
• Polk big expansionist, provokes war with Mexico
• Conditions are difficult but U.S. wins big, pays Mexico $15m for territory (CA, AZ, NV, UT, NM)
• Finishes Manifest Destiny, gold discovered in CA sets off settlement boom

Economic & Industrial Evolution

• MW easier to farm than NE
• Improvements in Ag technology also help
• Land Policy encouraged speculation but did make land more available to poor (land rich & labor poor)
• Mechanization makes manufacturing more efficient

Railroads

• develop key industries (coal, iron, lumber, etc.)
• make industrialization & settlement possible
• Massive government aid & land grants to RR companies (private but had big government help)

Free Labor

• The Free-Labor Ideal: work to buy own land tools, prosper for self, hire another beginner to help him along
• Many pursue this ideal, creates mobile society
• Slavery threatens this notion
• Economic Inequality tough to explain with free labor model
• Immigrants from Germany & Ireland pursue this ideal

Reforming Society & Self

• The Pursuit of Perfection: Transcendentalists (look to self) and Utopians (build perfect societies
• Women’s Rights Activists (Senenca Falls – start of suffrage movement)
• Abolitionists continued to push for emancipation throughout the 1840’s & 1850sand the American Ideal