The America in the 19th Century How the America Change

By Lukas Budiono

History 141

Section 71154

Instructor: Dr. Arguello

About the 19th Century

• Everyday live had a little change since year 1000. Yet, by 1900 the Industrial Revolution had transformed the world's economy. The United States was still new and making its way to becoming a world power.

• The capital moved from Philadelphia to Washington | Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in the famous duel | West Point established  |  Louisiana purchased  |  Money from many countries circulated throughout America  |  80% of Americans worked on a farm  |  Boarding houses and tenements were popular in the cities, and one room log cabins in the country |  Travel from Charleston to Philadelphia took 15 days by stage | The importation of slaves to the United States was banned | Johnny Appleseed arrived in the Ohio Valley with seeds from Philadelphia | Robert Fulton's paddle steamer navigated the Hudson River.

Art and Architecture

• Early 19th century American furniture included Sheraton and Directories styles, classical yet simple. Duncan Phyfe of NYC turned out fine examples of furniture. The broad name for American furniture of these styles was Federal. This furniture is extremely valuable today. During this decade Paul Revere continued to create silver and, in 1804, he created a copper mill - and crafted his beautiful church bells!

• American artists would have come to a sad end if it had not been for the commissions of wealthy. There was widespread demand for portraiture. Gilbert Stuart was one of the most successful and prolific of the portrait artists. Stuart studied under another important period artist, Benjamin West who also painted historical and religious subjects. Generally considered the finest painter of colonial America, John Singleton painted portraits and historical subjects. Joshua Johnson was the first known African American portrait painter in the United States. The American Academy of the Fine Arts in New York was the first major American art academy, established in 1802. Charles Wilson (the patriarch of a large family of artists) founded the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1805.

Business and Economy

• After Revolution, American merchants went from exporting 75 percent of goods to England and exporting only 10 percent of American goods to those same markets. Congress had initially not been given power to impose taxes. In 1787, a Congressional meeting in Philadelphia gave Congress the sole power to tax imports, regulate international trade and trade between the states, and forbade the states from repudiating debts, voiding contracts, coining money or issuing paper money, giving the Federal power to make commercial policy for the entire country. When the British and French continued to threaten American commerce, President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison responded with the Embargo of 1807 banning American trade with foreign nations. This embargo was a failure, but it did have one important result. Americans were forced to begin manufacturing goods they could not import. Woonsocket, Rhode Island and Lowell Massachusetts Lowell, were early settings for factories and the resulting industrialization was the start of major U.S. economic development.

Business and Economy• In 1800 a movement to reduce the influence of the Bank of United States

(which had opened in 1791) resulted in the creation of state banks throughout the country.  There were 29 of these state Chartered banks state at the beginning of the century. In April of 1801, Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin submitted a report to Congress, calling for the federal government to build better roads and canals. Gallatin succeeded in establishing a standing committee on finance for the federal government.  This eventually became the House Ways and Means Committee. In1802, Eluethère Irénée du Pont started a powder mill on Brandywine Creek in southern Pennsylvania; within ten years it became the largest industrial business in the nation. The Intercourse Act of 1802 was established to try to regulate the trade of whiskey for furs and land from Native Americans. The government instituted trading posts which were supposed to fairly regulate the trade and act as outposts for civilization but failed to meet these goals.

• In 1803 the Louisiana Territory was purchased from France for $15 million dollars. The price works out to three cents per acre for the 512 million acres.  American growers supplied 45 percent of exported cotton sent to England. Congress passed legislation ending the importation of slaves in 1807. By the time of the Civil War, most slaves were native-born. The law took effect in 1808.  In 1808 John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company created the first American monopoly on fur trade in the U.S. territories. In March of 1809, The Non-Intercourse Act replaced the Embargo Act and opened American shipping to all nations except France and England.

Migration & Immigration

• In 1800 Congress created the Indiana Territory from the western half of the Northwest Territory. The population of the United States had increased more than 30% since the 1790 census, and these people were pushing into new areas in search of land.  In order to accommodate the new settlers,  the Harrison Land Act established for the first time land offices near the sale lands  in the Northwest Territory. 

• The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 added nearly a million square miles to the United States, and the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery traversed this new acquisition from 1804 to 1806. 

• Farmers continued to move into the area between the settled coast and the Mississippi River, displacing the native peoples living there.  For example, the state of Georgia distributed land inhabited by the Creek and Cherokee Indians in seven different land lotteries.

• In the north Tecumseh and his younger brother, Tenskwatawa, tried to unify the different Indian tribes in the region in order to stop the expansion of the white settlers into western Ohio and Indiana. 

Migration & Immigration

• The number of immigrants arriving in U. S. ports prior to 1819 is not recorded, but the historian, William J. Bromwell, estimated that from the early 1780's until 1819 250,000 immigrants came to the United States. 

• The largest group of people to arrive were the Scotch Irish.  A lot of them came as indentured servants, but this method of paying for passage was brought to a halt by the British Passenger Vessels Act of 1803.  

• Hard times in Europe, however, continued to lure people to the new country.  In the years 1801 and 1802 there may have been as many as 20,000 Irish and Germans who came to the U.S. 

• The Naturalization Act of 1802 set the requirements for citizenship that are essentially still in effect today.  The Napoleonic Wars in Europe slowed the influx of immigrants after 1803 as the disruption of trade made it extremely difficult to attempt the transatlantic voyage to America.

THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMIN THE 19TH CENTURY

• American schools changed little from the schools in the late eighteenth century.  Education was still considered mainly a family or local responsibility, not an obligation of the state.  In the Land Ordinance of 1785, Congress decreed that a section of every township surveyed in the public lands in the western territories be set aside for the maintenance of public schools.  The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided land for education in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions.  However, neither ordinance was fully implemented.  Some leaders were already calling out for educating the citizenry of the new nation

• Schooling was conducted in the home or in small, one-room school houses. In more urban areas, Lancasterian methods of teaching might be used, where the more advanced students taught those who were less advanced. The curriculum centered on the "3 r's" along with moral and religious training.  The purpose of learning to read was to be able to read the Bible for oneself.  Dame schools provided for a fee by women in their homes, taught the alphabet on a "hornbook”.  Sometimes citizens of a local community would band together to hire a teacher to instruct their children.  The teacher usually a man, would be paid little, often have only a rudimentary education himself, and be boarded at a home in the community.

THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMIN THE 19TH CENTURY

• Education in the late 19th Cen tury was either a short-lived moment in a person’s life or a multi-year luxury that few in the general populace could afford. Whites had an eas ier path to it, but African-Americans had an even harder road toward it. But it wasn’t for trying. Booker T. Washington, the famous proponent of education for freed men in the post-Reconstruction South, founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute to help edu cate African-Americans. He realized that in modern society African-Americans would have to be edu cated, and edu cated well, in order to excel. It was a belief that was shared by many African-Americans at the time: that education could help set them on an equal footing with their white counter parts in both jobs and social stature.

• Educational reform in the United States was just gaining momentum in the late 19th century. Before that time educating enslaved African-Americans in the South was forbidden by law in many states, but in the North, where schools for African Americans did exist, they were generally housed in crowded build ings staffed by teachers of low qualification.

SOURCE LIST

• WWW.LONESTART.EDU

• WWW.BLOGSPOT.COM

• WWW.EARLYAMERICA.COM

• WWW.WIKIPEDIA.ORG

• WWW.GLENNVANCE.COM

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The America in the 19th Century How the America Change