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Samuel Slater's Views Of The Industrial Revolution

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The North and the South stood as two distinct regions during the antebellum period in America. The North and the South were rapidly diverging in all aspects: cultural, economic, and technological. The Northern industrial sector was modernizing the North, and the economy was starting to become more dependent upon manufacturing. Culturally, the Women's Rights movement was advancing as more and more women fought against the Cult of Domesticity. Women entered the "man's sphere" and began to work in factories. In the South cotton became the cash crop and slavery was an integral part of their economy and culture. The views propounded by Southern elites of their home region and its way of life did not resemble those held by Northern observers of the …show more content…

The War of 1812 followed by the Treaty of Ghent spilled worthless British goods into the American economy. The economy began to feel the impact as more and more Americans stopped purchasing domestic goods. To prevent it from cracking, Congress passed The Tariff of 1816 which encouraged the growth of American industrialism. One of the sparks that began the Industrial Revolution was Samuel Slater. Samuel Slater was a factory worker in Britain. He stored plans of how British factories were built in his head when he came to America. Along with his investor Moses Brown, Slater built his first textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Other mills began to develop after the first mill was built. Also, the steamships fulfilled the requirement for large amounts of labor during the Industrial Revolution. Steamships allowed for a faster and safer travel across the Atlantic Ocean, which encouraged more immigrants to travel to America. The Irish were one of the largest early immigrant groups. In the 1840s, the Potato Famine killed two million people in Ireland. Thousands of Irish people crammed themselves into steamships and arrived on the shores of Boston and New York within ten to twelve days. Having little to no money they boarded in small port towns and took jobs in factories and railroad construction. They were one of the many types of people that fulfilled the need for manual …show more content…

The South considered agriculture, especially the production of cotton, to be the crux of their economy. The South was producing half of the world's cotton. Sprawling estates and plantations with hundreds of slaves running them dotted the southern region. Eli Whitney's cotton gin made cotton production easier, faster, and it revived the industry once again. Soon, tons of cotton was being traded in foreign countries and in the North. Cotton was a fast cash business, but it ruined the soil, leaving the plantation owners to constantly be looking for new land. In little to no time, the South had become a one-crop economy with everything becoming dependent on cotton sales, which were dependent on other factors such as demand for cotton goods. One of the most lucrative, horrifying, and large businesses was the slave trade. Many Southern whites considered slavery a necessity for their economy. The South was able to produce these enormous amounts of cotton because of the manual labor provided by slaves. In the beginning, during the era of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, slavery was considered a necessary evil. However, views of slavery were rapidly changing and by the Jacksonian era, many Southerners saw no other option than slavery. William Harper, a jurist in South Carolina, ventured to say, "The cultivation… of great staple crops cannot be

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