AP U.S. History · Lesson 2

The market revolution and the age of reform

Know Know it

After 1815 a market revolution changed how Americans worked and lived. The National Road, the Erie Canal (finished in 1825), steamboats and then railroads cut the cost and time of moving goods, and the telegraph (1844) sped up news. More farm families grew crops for sale and bought goods they once made at home, and more people worked for wages.

The regions came to depend on one another. The Northeast built factories and cities. The Old Northwest (the Great Lakes states) sent grain and meat east along canals and rails. The South grew cotton with enslaved labor. The cotton gin made cotton profitable across the Deep South, so slavery spread west into Alabama, Mississippi and beyond, and a domestic slave trade moved enslaved people from the Upper South to the cotton states.

Factories changed work. Textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, hired young women from New England farms under the Lowell system, and when owners cut pay in the 1830s, workers walked out. Immigration rose sharply in the 1840s, led by Irish families fleeing famine and by Germans, and many found work in cities, on canals and in mills.

A religious revival, the Second Great Awakening, taught that people could choose salvation and should work to improve society. Reformers fought drinking (the temperance movement), built asylums and prisons meant to reform (Dorothea Dix pushed for better care of the mentally ill), and promoted tax-supported common schools (Horace Mann). Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and the Grimké sisters demanded an end to slavery, and women active in reform met at the Seneca Falls Convention (1848) to demand their own rights.

Trap Colonization is not immediate abolition

The American Colonization Society (1816) worked to send free Black Americans to Africa; some members hoped slavery would fade slowly, and many slaveholding members wanted no end to it at all. Garrison, Douglass and the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833) wanted slavery ended at once, in the United States, and most Black leaders rejected colonization. Do not file both under one label: they disagreed about whether Black Americans belonged in the nation.

Worked example Easy

Which development of the 1820s most cut the cost of shipping goods between the Great Lakes region and New York City?

  1. The transcontinental railroad
  2. The cotton gin
  3. The Lowell textile mills
  4. The Erie CanalAnswer

How to solve it

  1. The question is about transportation in the 1820s on a route from the Great Lakes to New York City.
  2. The Erie Canal opened in 1825 along exactly that route.

Why each choice is right or wrong

  • A. Incorrect. The transcontinental railroad was finished in 1869, decades later, and it ran west, not between the Great Lakes and New York.
  • B. Incorrect. The cotton gin cleaned cotton in the South and did nothing to lower shipping costs on a northern route.
  • C. Incorrect. The Lowell mills made cloth; they were factories, not a transportation link between the Great Lakes and New York.
  • D. Correct. The Erie Canal, finished in 1825, linked Lake Erie to the Hudson River and sharply cut the cost of moving goods to New York City.

Explain Explain it

Task verbs: explain, describe

Reform questions often ask you to connect causes. A strong link names the cause and the result and says why one led to the other: the Second Great Awakening taught that people could choose to be saved and perfect society, so believers organized to fight sins they saw around them, such as drunkenness and slavery.

Economic questions often ask how regions were linked. Follow the goods and the money: for example, wheat and pork from the Old Northwest moved east by canal and rail to feed workers in eastern cities, and eastern factories sold tools and cloth back to western farmers.

Worked example Medium

Which belief spread by the revivals of the Second Great Awakening most encouraged the reform movements of the 1820s to 1840s?

  1. Each person's fate is fixed in advance by God
  2. Churches should be supported by state taxes
  3. People can choose salvation and work to perfect societyAnswer
  4. Reason alone, not faith, is the guide to truth

How to solve it

  1. Reform needs a belief that people and society can change.
  2. Predestination says the opposite, and deism is not a revival idea.
  3. The revival message of choice and self-improvement is the one that fits.

Why each choice is right or wrong

  • A. Incorrect. A fate fixed in advance is predestination, the older idea that revival preachers like Charles Finney pushed back against.
  • B. Incorrect. Tax support for churches was fading in these years, and revivals depended on voluntary believers, not state money.
  • C. Correct. If people could choose to be saved and improve themselves, they could also join together to fight social evils, which drove temperance, abolition and other reforms.
  • D. Incorrect. Relying on reason alone is the Enlightenment deism of the 1700s, not the emotional, faith-centered message of the revivals.

Explain Your turn

Explain one way the market revolution linked the economies of the North and the South before 1848, and give one result of that link.

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A full answer does this

  • Names an accurate economic link between the North and the South before 1848
  • Gives an accurate result of that link for the North, the South or both

Model answer

Southern plantations grew cotton with enslaved labor, and much of it went to textile mills in New England, often shipped and financed by northern merchants. One result was that northern factories and ports grew on slave-grown cotton, so many northern businesses had a stake in slavery even though most northern states had ended it.

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