Chinese Railroad Workers and the Golden Spike.These developments were hailed by some as “progress,” but the pace, scale, and reliance on slave labor on these developments instilled in others a great sense of anxiety and fear.Īlthough the economic and social problems of the first Industrial Revolution distressed many, these concerns were set aside during the nation’s bloody Civil War (1861-1865). After the invention of steam power and the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793, cotton could be shipped from the American South by New England ships to the vast textile factories of Great Britain, producing a reverse triangle trade around a single global commodity. 1750 to 1850 marked a century of heightened industrial activity centered around textiles. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans were forced to adjust to the implications of the First Industrial Revolution. Questions of this nature were not new in American history. Still, others believed the technological innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution were the unstoppable culmination of modern civilization propelling the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny. Questions abounded about the character this new American territory would take: would it be reliant on slave labor and fulfill Jefferson’s original vision of an agrarian republic? Would corporations or the federal government lay down the required infrastructure to ‘tame the West’? Still, others wondered if turning over the bison laden Plains to New York-based corporations would stifle the American dream for America’s second and third sons. The need for massive industry was obvious: in order to reach California’s burgeoning port cities like San Francisco and to expedite the extraction of gold from the mines, railroad tracks would need to be laid across the plains to reach the Pacific and open up trade networks.
Each change could have been traced back to the railroads.” 1 Need for Railroads “Illustrated History of the Railroads” Benjamin Outram’s Little Eaton Gangway in July 1908.
A land that had once run largely north-south now ran east-west. Population had increased across much of this vast region, and there were growing cities along its edges. Nation-states had conquered Indian peoples, slaughtering some of them and confining and controlling most of them. Great swaths of land that had once whispered grass now screamed corn and wheat. Bison had yielded to cattle mountains had been blasted and bored. “If a Western Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1869 and awakened in 1896, he would not have recognized the lands that the railroads had touched. Between the annexation of Texas (1845), the British retreat from Oregon country, and The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848) which cemented Mexican cession of the Southwest to the United States, territorial expansion exponentially rewrote the competing visions that free-soilers, European immigrants, industrial capitalists, and Native Americans held for the future of the American Empire. These changes mutually fueled the Second Industrial Revolution which peaked between 18. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)īetween 18, the visual map of the United States was transformed by unprecedented urbanization and rapid territorial expansion.Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window).
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