MARKET REVOLUTION EXHIBIT By Michael Bonito: 3D Gallery

President Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson was the 7th president of the United States, as well as a general in the US army. He sparked a major change in American politics when elected in 1829. Jackson was called the "self-made man," for he raised himself through orphanage, participated in many wars, helped annex Florida, and even attended law school. Despite living through a difficult childhood, Jackson worked his whole life and eventually became one of the most powerful people in the country. He believed in democratization and the "people's power," despite manifesting a rather executive authority during his presidency. Jackson used "veto power" to get what he wanted and even barred women and non-whites from voting.

Fun Facts:

Jackson can be found on the $20 bill.
He was the target of the first ever attempted presidential assassination.
He killed a man and was nearly killed during a duel.

Henry Clay

Henry Clay was a congressman, the Secretary of State of John Quincy Adams, and the leader of a young generation of republicans later known as the Whigs. He was also a Speaker of the House and a leading public figure who reflected western movement and coined the term, "American System." Clay's American System promoted economic development, for he believed agriculture must be complimented by manufacturing and infant industries deserved national protection from cheap imported goods.

Clay's American System blueprint called for:

a new national bank, or the Second Bank of the US, which would help bring back the banking system
a tariff on imported manufactured goods to protect US industry
federal funded roads and canals, known as internal improvements, which aimed to help interlock the nation and bring unity

Robert Fulton

Robert Fulton was a Pennsylvania born artist and engineer known for the creation of the steamboat. He had experimented with steamboat designs while in France and launched a steamboat on the Seine River in Paris in 1803. It wasn't until 1807 when he navigated his ship, the Clermont, on the Hudson River from New York to Albany. Fulton's invention of the steamboat was very important to the Market Revolution because it made possible upstream commerce, or moving against the current, on rivers. It also allowed for rapid transportation across the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, making it way easier and faster to transport goods and people.

Eli Whitney

Eli Whitney was a Yale graduate who found work in Georgia as a private tutor before inventing the cotton gin in 1793. The cotton gin is an agricultural tool used to efficiently and quickly separate the seed from the cotton plant. This new device was very important to the market revolution because it increased the marketing of cotton by allowing for its mass production. With large amounts of cotton being easily produced and easily transported due to the new roads, canals, and infrastructures, growing cotton grew into a large scale industry and helped boost exports to Britain. This cotton gin also resulted in the expansion of slavery and the rise of the Cotton Kingdom in the South.

Lowell Mill Girl

This is a depiction of a "Mill Girl" working in the Waltham-Lowell Factory System. This factory system was the first large scale American factory constructed in 1814 in Waltham by a group of merchants known as the Boston Associates. This group later expanded the industry by creating a factory town in the 1820s in the city of Lowell. This factory system used power looms for weaving cotton into cloth and depended on the supply of cotton from the Cotton Kingdom's farming industry. Together, the farming and factory industries fueled the Market Revolution. It was very common for women to find work at these factories, resulting in the term, "Mill Girls." These Mill Girls would leave their families at a young age to live and work at the factories, making their own wages. This resulted in the expansion of opportunities for women as they could now work independently and or their own economic interests.

Fun Fact:

Massachusetts became the second most industrialized part of the world, second to Great Britain, and fully ignited the new market economy and industrialization through manufacturing.

Juliann Jane Tillman

Juliann Jane Tillman was an African American woman who became a preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. At this time, free blacks were barred from many aspects of public life including schools, so they created their own institutional life. Unfortunately, the majority of free blacks lived in the most unhealthy sections of major cities like Cincinnati, New York City, and Philadelphia. Despite the hardships free blacks and women had to face, becoming a preacher as an African American women was a major step in women's rights. Many other churches of Protestant denominations also allowed women to preach although their presence aroused a lot of criticism.

Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith was a farmer in upstate New York who began experiencing religious visions at a very young age, ultimately leading to his founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons, in the 1820s. Smith claimed he was led by an angel to a set of golden plates covered in foreign writing, which he then translated and published as, The Book of Mormon. This new religion became one of the most successful of the new denominations and emerged in upstate New York, the center of the Second Great Awakening. Over time, Smith began having more visions leading to new, and more controversial ideals like polygamy, which allows one man to have multiple wives. Despite much controversy over the years, Smith's creation of Mormonism had a very positive impact on religion in America, for it encouraged the rise of many new denominations, expanding the ideals of the Second Great Awakening. Today the Church of Jesus Christ of Later-Day Saints is the fourth largest church in the US.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a philosopher and the most prominent member of the transcendentalists, a group of New Englanders who believed freedom was an open-ended process of self-realization. In this ideology of "individualism," the "sovereign individual" could remake themselves and their own lives by using individual judgment instead of existing traditions of society. Emerson's 1837 address known as "The American Scholar," revealed his ideals of individualism and was widely reprinted and spread across America. Although the market revolution encourages commercial connections between people, individualism supports one's personal persuits towards success through sovereign decisions and hard work in the new market economy.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was a transcendentalist writer and Ralph Waldo Emerson's neighbor in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau supported Emerson's ideals of individual self-reliance and illustrated them in his own writings. Thoreau believed that the new market society caused people to become lost in following the crowd and obsessed in obtaining wealth. He believed that everyone was so caught up in money and material possessions that they missed out on appreciating the beauty of nature. To avoid this, Thoreau retreated to a cabin on Walden Pond for two years to enjoy the freedom of isolation, where he wrote and published Walden in 1854. Walden recounted Thoreau's experiences on the pond and critiqued the market revolution's negative affect on people's lives. He believed that Americans could enjoy "absolute freedom" by escaping the market society and taking life into the wilderness to preserve their personal independence and nature.

The Industrious Man

The Industrious man, as displayed above, is a lithograph from a children's book created by the American Sunday School Union in the 1840s. This image shows a typical scene from the life of a laboring man's family as he arrives home to his pleasant wife and kids. This lithograph also depicts a new ideology of a woman's role in the family known as the "cult of domesticity." This new ideology expanded from "republican motherhood," in which the mothers' job is to teach the children, and future citizens, so that they will be prepared for school and the outside world. On the other hand, the cult of domesticity revolved more around "virtue" and strictly confined women to family and household affairs. Women exemplified their beauty, frailty, and dependence by refraining from activity in the market revolution, for it was the man's job to leave the house for work. Meanwhile, the mothers were expected to raise their children at home, giving them the freedom to make most decisions involving the family and even the house, when the father was away. Despite the large contrast between a Mill Girl and a "republican mother" during the cult of domesticity, in both situations women learned to question their position in society and their rights, resulting in women's rights movements to come.

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MARKET REVOLUTION EXHIBIT By Michael Bonito