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During the 1780s George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jerffereson , had a hope that slavery would start fading. They thought that a shift from tobacco to wheat would slowly decrease the slave system. They were able to see some evidence of the trend in virginia and maryland, many slaves were freed. However this did not affect the deep south region. Slavery became more profitable as cotton became the leading crop in the south.
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History of the cotton gin
Eli Whitneyinvented the cotton gin while working in Georgia.This machine helped reduce the time and cost it took on seperating seeds fron cotton. The cottin gin made cottoncultivation more profitable and cotton became rhe south leading product. -
Growing cotton required land as well as workers, because cotton was so profitable, the demand for slaves rose. Southern planters met the need with inslaved african americans. A ferderal law abolished the over seas slave trade in 1808 , were illegal trade interstate filled the gap. Many slaves came from the fading tobacco plantations of virginia to the cotton plantations in the south.
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The industrialization helped and hurted americans. With this the middle class extended, men worked as bankers and lawyers. in the social scale the middle class was ranked above the working class of common labors. They began to set up homes in the surban areas away from the crowds. For the middle class work created different gender rules wives and mothers stayed at home while the men went of to work and returned with money
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The srike of Lowell girls
lowell mill girls held strikes when their employers cut their wages and icreased their charges for boarding. They left their jobs and temporarily shut down their factories. Their strikes apparently failed to achieve their goal and the woman had to return to work and accept her low pay -
buissness and factory owners sometimes turned to the courts for their protection in 1835 a new york city court convicted 20 tailors a conspiracy of forming a union, this conviction angered the workers but nor the union movement or the working men party prospered
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in the 1840s most of the middle class and nations farmers and had been born in the united states. However the rates of imigrant workers was starting to rise. Imigration consisted mainly from England or Scotland. It doubled each decade leading to in the 1840s having about 1,500,000 imigrants, this search came primarily from Ireland and Germany two suffering lands from economic depression and rural famines.
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In the 1840s a mass starvation occurd as a result of a fungus that destoryed a potato crop. hundreds of thousands of irish were straving to death becuase the primary food source for the irish poor was potatos. More than a million peiople died of starvation, another million left Ireland imigrating to Australia and North America.
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Wave of German immigrants
Germans fled from their home lands in the same period when the political revolution failed . Most imgriants coming from Germnay tended to be catholic or jewish. They arrived in small sea ports of the North East. A very small minority could afford to set up or move to the west and buy farmland. Most imigrants found work in factories at construction sites or servants at domestic homes -
Catholic imigrants faced descrimination from american born protestants. They distrusted the catholic church, thought it use to be hostile to republican government. Riots between protestants and catholics occured in Philadelphia in 1844.
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Imigration boosted the Nations population, it promoted urban growth. Imigrants compromised more than 40% of the population and New York city. Many imigrants move to new cities like cincinnati , chicago, and detroit. A very few went to the south where there was a lack of factory jobs.
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a spread out population of slavery affected the culture of the south. Planters denied education for the slaves and carried very little of them. Slavery was central to life in the south. Slave holders were a minority, about 1/4 of white men owned slaves in the 1860. Typical slave holder lived in a farm house and owned only 4 to 5 slaves
