Market Revolution, Reform and Sectionalism

The Market Revolution

Canals, roads, steamboats, railroads and the telegraph knit regional economies into a national market. The Lowell mills pioneered factory labour drawn from farm daughters; the cotton gin (1793) made short-staple cotton profitable and — crucially — made slavery more entrenched, not less.

The regions specialised and became interdependent but divergent: Northern manufacturing, Western grain, Southern cotton. Interdependence did not produce unity; it produced a fight over whose interests federal policy would serve.

Reform movements

The Second Great Awakening supplied the moral energy for an era of reform:

• Abolition — Garrison's Liberator, Frederick Douglass, and the split over whether to work within politics.
• Women's rights — Seneca Falls (1848) and its Declaration of Sentiments, which deliberately echoed the Declaration of Independence.
• Temperance, prison and asylum reform, and public schooling.

Note the connection the exam rewards: many women entered public life through abolitionism, and were then excluded from its leadership — which is precisely what produced Seneca Falls.

Sectional crisis begins

The Missouri Compromise (1820) admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as free, and drew the 36°30′ line across the remaining Louisiana Purchase.

The mechanism worked only while there was a balanced supply of territory. Every subsequent acquisition — Texas, the Mexican Cession — reopened the question, because the dispute was never about existing states. It was about new land.