In January 1815, so the traditional narrative goes, General Andrew Jackson's motley army of coonskin capped frontier sharpshooters, on a Mississippi River levee outside New Orleans held their fire until they saw the whites of the advancing British invaders' eyes. Then with their Kentucky long rifles shouldered, they bravely gunned down the startled, smartly dressed and wonderfully visible red coats to end the war of 1812. Nevermind that, unbeknownst to the combatants, a peace treaty with England had been signed two weeks previously. The image of a band of rugged, self-reliant frontier sharp shooters saving the Republic at New Orleans was to be permanently fixed in the American imagination. A more accurate reading of the battle's significance holds that the victory at New Orleans, like the American Naval triumphs in the same war, was won by artillery and skilled gunnery, not hardy hardscrabble sharpshooters aiming at the whites of redcoats' eyes. New Orleans marks a symbolic turning point in a transitional era. The Historian Daniel Walker Howe puts it this way. Quote, where did America's future lie? With the individualistic expansionist values exemplified by frontier marksmen or with the industrial technological values exemplified by the artillery, which would better serve American society and prosperity? The extension of agriculture across the continent, or the intensive improvement and diversification of the economy and its infrastructure? To those questions, the rival political parties of the coming decades, Democrats and Whigs, offered sharply divergent answers. >> The Whig party was founded in 1833, though its antecedents were present in the old Democratic-Republican party of Thomas Jefferson. In the 1820s, a group within the older Jeffersonian Party called National Republicans, who were led by President John Quincy Adams formed a separate wing that championed federal and state legislation to advance the market economy. The National Republicans formed the Whig party of the 1830s and 1840s, which stood for federal tariff protections for manufacturers, a national bank, a national economic planning. Whigs advocated State and Federal funding for internal improvements that would strengthen interstate trade and open new markets as the Nation moved west. The Democratic Party, newly formed by Andrew Jackson and his allies, in opposition to the Whigs vigorously opposed an expanded role for the Federal Government even as it championed the country's westward expansion as well. >> What were the major internal improvements that opened new markets and strengthened old ones? New and improved turnpikes, especially those with pavement and iron bridges heralded the national period's transportation revolution. Some turnpikes such as Pennsylvania's Lancaster Turnpike antedated the War of 1812. Begun in 1811 with construction continuing into the 1820s, the Gravel National Road, controversially built with funds from the sale of public lands, crossed the Appalachian Range and connected Wheeling, West Virginia and the city of Baltimore. Canal building in the Mid-Atlantic region was a signal development of the two decades after the War of 1812. Lacking federal funding, the New York legislature, prodded by Governor Dewitt Clinton, financed the nation's largest canal from Albany on the Hudson River to Buffalo on Lake Erie. Constructed between 1817 and 1825, the completed canal ran 363 miles, and included 83 locks. The Erie canal and it's linkage of lakes and rivers opened up competitive markets for cheap agricultural and artisan goods produced in the upper midwest states along the great lakes, and floated them south along the canal to New York City. Construction of canals continued in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states until they were supplanted by railroads in the 1840s and 1850s. The railroads marked the apex of the national period's transportation revolution and full throttle acceleration of regional and national markets by the 1850s. >> The market economy took its first significant industrial turn in the 1810s and 1820s, with the growth of textile factories in the north. The largest of which was at Lowell, on Massachusetts' Merrimack River, west of Boston. Here young women operated river powered looms to transform Southern cotton into yarn and clothing. By the 1830s, the North was mass producing shoes and textiles. In the 1840s and 50s the railroads and the related industries would catalyze a full scale industrial revolution in the North. This expanding market economy had signficant social consequences. Northeastern wheat farmers and artisans, bound to small local markets, were unable to compete in the expanded economy, as more and more cheap goods flooded in the, into the hinterlands. Small farms and workshops disappeared along the waterways and new transportation routes. They were displaced by businesses that produced for regional or national markets. The families of once independent farmers and artisans left the hinterlands for new or expanding cities. >> In addition to internal migrations, immigration from northern Europe spurred urban growth in the north. From the 1820s to the 1850s, more than 4.9 million people immigrated from Northern Europe to the US, with a heavy infusion from Germany and Ireland. The Irish arrived in droves after 1845 in the wake of the potato plight and the Great Irish Famine. Places with populations of 2,500 or more quintipled their size between 1820 and 1850. The transportation revolution catalyzed the development of new cities on the nation's waterways, Cincinnati, Chicago and Buffalo for instance. By 1840, with 17 million people, the US population almost matched Great Britain's. >> Hm. By contrast, and the contrast was great. The South, it's economy, agricultural and dependent on black slavery and the fortunes of king cotton, stood far behind the North in terms of population, urban growth, manufacturing, and economic diversification. Tensions and anxieties unleashed by the accelerating National Market Economy, at all levels of US society, gave increase impetus to the great religious formulation of the decades after the War of 1812, the second great awakening. And figured prominently in the growth of the common school movement in the mid 19th century. We turn now to the second great awakening, and the social innovations it's moral energy infused. The greatest of these social innovations was the common school. [MUSIC]
