United States

Swedish immigrants en route to the western United States in the mid-19th century.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Frances Wright.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

American Progress, chromolithograph print, c. 1873American Progress, chromolithograph print, c. 1873, after an 1872 painting of the same title by John Gast.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital id: ppmsca 09855)Mention must also be made of utopian immigrant colonies planted by thinkers who wanted to create a new society in a New World. Examples include Nashoba, Tennessee, and New Harmony, Indiana, by two British newcomers, Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, respectively. There also were German planned settlements at Amana, Iowa, and in New Ulm and New Braunfels, Texas. If the growth of materialistic and expansionist bumptiousness represented by the Manifest Destiny movement was fueled in part by the immigration-fed expansion of the American populace, these experiments in communal living added to the less materialistic forces driving American thought. They fit the pattern of searching for heaven on earth that marked the age of reform.

Bernard A. Weisberger

Most African Americans in the North possessed theoretical freedom and little else. Confined to menial occupations for the most part, they fought a losing battle against the inroads of Irish competition in northeastern cities. The struggle between the two groups erupted spasmodically into ugly street riots. The hostility shown to free African Americans by the general community was less violent but equally unremitting. Discrimination in politics, employment, education, housing, religion, and even cemeteries resulted in a cruelly oppressive system. Unlike slaves, free African Americans in the North could criticize and petition against their subjugation, but this proved fruitless in preventing the continued deterioration of their situation.

Most Americans continued to live in the country. Although improved machinery had resulted in expanded farm production and had given further impetus to the commercialization of agriculture, the way of life of independent agriculturists had changed little by midcentury. The public journals put out by some farmers insisted that their efforts were unappreciated by the larger community. The actuality was complex. Many farmers led lives marked by unremitting toil, cash shortage, and little leisure. Farm workers received minuscule wages. In all sections of the country, much of the best land was concentrated in the hands of a small number of wealthy farmers. The proportion of farm families who owned their own land, however, was far greater in the United States than in Europe, and varied evidence points to a steady improvement in the standard and style of living of agriculturalists as midcentury approached.

Cities

Cities, both old and new, thrived during the era, their growth in population outstripping the spectacular growth rate of the country as a whole and their importance and influence far transcending the relatively small proportions of citizens living in them. Whether on the “urban frontier” or in the older seaboard region, antebellum cities were the centres of wealth and political influence for their outlying hinterlands. New York City, with a population approaching 500,000 by midcentury, faced problems of a different order of magnitude from those confronting such cities as Poughkeepsie, New York, and Newark, New Jersey. Yet the pattern of change during the era was amazingly similar for eastern cities or western, old cities or new, great cities or small. The lifeblood of them all was commerce. Old ideals of economy in town government were grudgingly abandoned by the merchant, professional, and landowning elites who typically ruled. Taxes were increased in order to deal with pressing new problems and to enable the urban community of midcentury to realize new opportunities. Harbours were improved, police forces professionalized, services expanded, waste more reliably removed, streets improved, and welfare activities broadened, all as the result of the statesmanship and the self-interest of property owners who were convinced that amelioration was socially beneficial.

New York City in the 1850s.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Edward Pessen

Education and the role of women

Olympia Brown.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; neg. no. LC USZ 62 53513