How did the expansion and increased importance of cotton production influence the development of the commercial economy in the United States?
What new opportunities and difficulties did it create for northern workers?
Answer: An ideal answer will:
1. Discuss how northern entrepreneurs invested in giant looms and mills for the domestic factory production of cotton in New England, particularly to meet the growing worldwide demand for cotton.
2. Discuss how the expansion of cotton production required the expansion of banking, insurance, and investment houses, including the creation of a New York Stock Exchange in 1817 to support large-scale commerce that could finance and support the cotton industry.
3. Discuss how the expansion of cotton production required a transportation revolution involving several innovationsâ€"steamboats, packet ships, canals, and paved roads (e.g., the National Road)â€"to transport the raw materials, milled cotton, finished clothes and other cotton goods necessary to sustain a cost-efficient national and international commercial economy in the United States.
4. Discuss and analyze how the labor requirements of mass industrial production of cotton required mill owners to seek out and employ young, single women from New England farms.
5. Discuss how these new jobs for young, single women offered an escape from the subservient positions in the depressed New England farm economy and a measure of independence to earn money on their own. In addition, these women were promised protective company housing and opportunities for religious and educational activities.
6. Discuss and evaluate how, as working conditions deteriorated and wages were reduced over time, these female workers lacked the option of returning to their New England farming towns, where the agricultural economy remained depressed.
7. Assert how the staging of strikes by female workers against their cotton industrial employers proved to be unsuccessful and their working conditions remained harsh and their wages very low.
8. Discuss how the inability of these young female workers to improve their working and economic conditions drove many of these women to personal depression, despair, and prayer, often discussing their challenges and hopes in biblical terms.
9. Write a concise and persuasive conclusion.
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