The northern United States was no longer on the colonial periphery of the world market economy. It was taking its place as part of the financial and industrial center.This internal market revolution would have been impossible without dramatic improvements in transportation. After 1815 Congress repeatedly considered nationally planned and funded internal improvements. But these plans were voted down by congressmen who favored states' rights and a strict construction of the Constitution-the notion that Congress could legislate only in areas explicitly granted to it by the Constitution. State governments took up the slack by building roads and canals themselves and by subsidizing private corporations that built them. The result was a system of roads, canals, and-by the 1840s and 1850s-railroads that reflected no single vision of a national system. Instead, the transportation map reflected the ambitions of the most prosperous and active states. The first and most spectacular example was the Erie Canal, completed by the state of New York in 1825. It connected the Hudson River at Albany with Lake Erie at Buffalo. The canal provided farmers in western New York and in the sections of the Northwest that drained into the Great Lakes with a continuous water route east to New York City-and from there to national and international markets. Steamboats provided a similar service for farms in areas that drained into the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The upriver trip from New Orleans to Louisville, Kentucky, had taken three to four months via keelboat before 1815. Steamboats cut that time to one month. In the 1850s railroads, though more expensive than water routes, brought the manufacturing towns and the food-producing farmers even closer together. These improvements quickly reduced the cost of transportation. The cost of moving farm produce and manufactured goods over long distances fell 95 percent between 1815 and 1860. With that drop, farmers could grow wheat in Indiana and sell it at a profit in New York City, while New England manufacturers could make work shoes and sell them to the farmers of Indiana. Transportation had transformed the old Northeast and the new Northwest into an integrated market society. BThe Growth of Cities In the 1820s the urban population of the United States began growing faster than the rural population, and from 1820 to 1870 American cities grew faster than they ever had or ever would again. For the most part, that explosive urban growth was driven by the commercialization of agriculture. In the early republic every American city was an Atlantic seaport engaged in international trade. After 1820 new inland towns and cities rose up to serve farmers' commercial operations. The fastest growing urban area in the country in the 1820s, for instance, was Rochester, New York, a flour-milling and shipping center serving the farmers of western New York. In subsequent decades western cities such as Cincinnati and Chicago grew quickly. At the same time, towns devoted to manufacturing for rural markets across the nation-towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts-grew at an almost equal rate. Even in the old seaports, the fastest growing sectors of the economy were not in the docks and warehouses of the old mercantile economy but in neighborhoods devoted to manufacturing for the American market, or among wholesalers who served that market. The huge internal market provided by northern and western farm families was by far the biggest source of urban growth in these years. CStandards of Living The commercial and industrial transformation of the North and West increased standards of living. Food was abundant, and manufactured goods found their way into even the poorest homes. Yet the bounty of progress was distributed much more unevenly than in the past, and thousands made the transition to commercial-urban society at the expense of economic independence. As American cities grew, the nature of work and society in the city changed in fundamental ways. In 1800 nearly all manufacturing was performed by master artisans who owned their own workshops and hired at most a few journeymen and apprentices. After 1815 the nature of manufacturing work changed. As production speeded up, many masters stopped performing manual work and spent their time dealing with customers and suppliers and keeping records. The number of journeymen increased, and they often worked in workshops separate from the store. Increasingly, less-skilled work was farmed out to women who worked in their homes. Thus successful masters became businessmen, while most skilled men and thousands of semiskilled women became members of a permanent working class. Though there had been rich and poor neighborhoods in early seaport towns, class segregation and stark contrasts between rich and poor became much more prevalent after 1820. In the northern and western countryside were signs of prosperity. Wallpaper, manufactured dishes and furniture, and other finished goods were finding their way into most farmhouses, and paint, ornamental trees, and flowers were dressing up the outside. Yet even in the countryside, the distance between rich and poor increased, and the old neighborhood relationships through which much of the local economy had been transacted became weaker. Debt, for instance, had always been a local, informal relationship between neighbors. After 1830 a farmer's most important and pressing debts were to banks, which required annual payments in cash. Commercial society also demanded good roads to transport products, and public schools to teach literacy and arithmetic; local taxes rose accordingly. Farmers spent less effort maintaining necessary relations with neighbors and more effort earning cash income to pay taxes and debts. Those who could not establish or maintain themselves as farmers tended to move out of agriculture and into towns and cities. Women and men who left rural communities to take up wage labor experienced the transition in different ways.
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