II

At the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 the United States was an insignificant nation on the European periphery. Its population was about the same as Ireland's. Thomas Jefferson thought that the empire for liberty he had bought from Napoleon was sufficient to absorb a hundred generations of America's population growth. By 1850, two generations later, Americans were not only filling up this empire but were spilling over into a new one on the Pacific coast. A few years after 1850 the United States surpassed Britain to become the most populous nation in the Western world save Russia and France. By 1860 the country contained nearly thirty-two million people, four million of them slaves. During the previous half-century the American population had grown four times faster than Europe's and six times the world average.¹

Three factors explained this phenomenon: a birth rate half again as high as Europe's; a death rate slightly lower; and immigration. All three were linked to the relative abundance of the American economy. The ratio of land to people was much greater than in Europe, making food supply more plentiful and enabling couples to marry earlier and to have more children. Though epidemics frequently ravaged North America, they took a lesser toll in its largely rural environment than among Europe's denser population. The land/people ratio in the United States raised wages and offered opportunities that attracted five million immigrants during that half-century.

Although the United States remained predominantly rural in this period, the urban population (defined as those living in towns or cities with 2,500 or more people) grew three times faster than the rural population from 1810 to 1860, going from 6 percent to 20 percent of the total. This was the highest rate of urbanization in American history. During those same decades the percentage of the labor force engaged in non-agricultural pursuits grew from 21 to 45 percent.² Meanwhile the rate of natural increase of the American population, while remaining higher than Europe's, began to slow as parents, desiring to provide their children with more nurture and education, decided to have fewer of them. From 1800 to 1850 the American birth rate declined by 23 percent.

1. Peter D. McClelland and Richard J. Zeckhauser, Demographic Dimensions of the New Republic (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 87.

2. Stanley Lebergott, "Labor Force and Employment, 1800–1960," in Dorothy Brady, ed., Output, Employment and Productivity in the U.S. after 1800, Studies in Income and Wealth (Princeton, 1966), 119.

The death rate also declined slightly—but probably no more than 5 percent.³ Yet the population continued to grow at the same pace through the whole period—about 35 percent each decade—because rising immigration offset the decline of the birth rate. For the half-century as a whole, the margin of births over deaths caused three-quarters of the population increase while immigration accounted for the rest.⁴

Economic growth fueled these demographic changes. The population doubled every twenty-three years; the gross national product doubled every fifteen. Economic historians do not agree when this "intensive" rate of growth began, for the data to measure it are fragmentary before 1840. What remains clear is that until the early nineteenth century economic growth was "extensive"—virtually the same as population growth. At some point after the War of 1812—probably following recovery from the depression of 1819–23—the economy began to grow faster than the population, producing an estimated per capita increase of national output and income averaging 1.7 percent annually from 1820 to 1860.⁵ The fastest rates of growth occurred in the 1830s and 1850s, interrupted by a major depression from 1837 to 1843 and a lesser one in 1857–58.

Although most Americans benefited from this rise of income, those at the top benefited more than those at the bottom. While average income rose 102 percent, real wages for workers increased by somewhere between 40 and 65 percent.⁶ This widening disparity between rich and

3. An improved diet and standard of living, which should have lowered the death rate more than this, were partly offset by urbanization and immigration. Mortality rates were always higher in cities before the twentieth century, and many immigrants suffered an initially higher death rate as they entered a new disease environment. Large numbers of Irish immigrants arrived with lowered resistance because of malnutrition; they also crowded into the poorest districts of cities.

4. McClelland and Zeckhauser, Demographic Dimensions, 101, 108–9; Robert V. Wells, Revolutions in Americans' Lives: A Demographic Perspective on the History of Americans, Their Families, and Their Society (Westport, Conn., 1982), 92–104.

5. For a summary of recent research on this question, see Susan Lee and Peter Passell, A New Economic View of American History (New York, 1979), 52–62; Robert E. Gallman, "Economic Growth," in Glenn Porter, ed., Encyclopedia of American Economic History, 3 vols. (New York, 1980), 133–50; and Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, "U.S. Economic Growth, 1783–1860,"Research in Economic History, 8 (1983), 1–46.

6. This is the range of estimates contained in three studies of the subject, all of them based on fragmentary data: Alvin H. Hansen, "Factors Affecting the Trend of Real Wages," American Economic Review, 15 (1925), 27–41; Donald R. Adams, Jr., "Prices and Wages," in Porter, ed., Encyclopedia of American Economic History, 229–46, which summarizes all relevant research up to the time of its writing; and Donald R. Adams, Jr., "The Standard of Living During American Industrialization: Evidence from the Brandywine Region, 1800–1860," Journal of Economic History, 42 (1982), 903–17.

poor appears to have characterized most capitalist economies during their early decades of intensive growth and industrialization. American workers probably fared better in this respect than those of most European countries. Indeed, a debate still rages over whether British workers suffered an absolute decline of real wages during the first half-century of the industrial revolution.⁷

Improved transportation was a prerequisite of economic development in a country as large as the United States. Before 1815 the only cost-efficient means of carrying freight long distances were sailing ships and downriver flatboats. Most American roads were rutted dirt paths all but impassable in wet weather. The cost of transporting a ton of goods thirty miles inland from an American port equalled the cost of carrying the same goods across the Atlantic. To travel from Cincinnati to New York took a minimum of three weeks; the only feasible way to ship freight between the same two cities was down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans and then by salt water along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts—a trip of at least seven weeks. It is not surprising, therefore, that America's transatlantic trade exceeded internal commerce, that most manufactured goods purchased in the United States came from Britain, that artisans sold mainly custom goods in local markets, that farmers living more than a short distance from navigable water consumed most of what they raised—and that the economy grew little if any faster than population.

All this changed after 1815 as a result of what historians, without exaggeration, have called a transportation revolution. Private companies, states, even the national government financed the construction of all-weather macadamized roads. More important, New York state pioneered the canal era by building the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo, linking New York City to the Northwest by water and setting off a frenzy of construction that produced 3,700 miles of canals by 1850.

7. For a summary of that debate for Britain and other countries, see John Komlos, "Stature and Nutrition in the Habsburg Monarchy: The Standard of Living and Economic Development in the Eighteenth Century," AHR, 90 (1985), 1149–51. See also Donald R. Adams, Jr., "Some Evidence on English and American Wage Rates, 1790–1830," Journal of Economic History, 30 (1970), 499–520.

During those same years, steamboats made Robert Fulton's dream come true by churning their way along every navigable river from Bangor to St. Joseph. The romance and economic importance of steamboats were eclipsed in both respects by the iron horse in the 1850s. The 9,000 miles of rail in the United States by 1850 led the world, but paled in comparison with the 21,000 additional miles laid during the next decade, which gave to the United States in 1860 a larger rail network than in the rest of the world combined. Iron ribbons breached the Appalachians and bridged the Mississippi. An even newer invention, the telegraph, sent instant messages along copper wires and leaped beyond the railheads to span the continent by 1861.

These marvels profoundly altered American life. They halved overland transport costs by road to 15 cents a ton-mile. But roads soon became unimportant except for short hauls and local travel. Canal rates dropped to less than one cent a ton-mile, river rates even lower, and rail charges to less than three cents by 1860. Despite higher rates, the railroad's greater speed and dependability (most canals froze in winter; rivers became unnavigable in low water or floods) gave it an edge. Towns bypassed by the tracks shriveled; those located on the iron boomed, especially if they also enjoyed water transport. Springing from the prairie shores of Lake Michigan, Chicago became the terminus for fifteen rail lines by 1860, its population having grown by 375 percent during the previous decade. Racing at breakneck speeds of thirty miles an hour, the iron horse cut travel time between New York and Chicago from three weeks to two days. Train wrecks soon exceeded steamboat explosions as a prime cause of accidental death. But together these modes of transport reduced the shipment time of freight between, for example, Cincinnati and New York from fifty days to five. Cincinnati became the meatpacking capital of the United States. The difference between the wholesale price of western pork in Cincinnati and New York declined from $9.53 to $1.18 a barrel; the difference in the wholesale price of western flour between the same two cities dropped from $2.48 to 28 cents.

The telegraph provided instant quotations on these and other price changes all over the country. Along with the railroad and with technological innovations in printing and paper-making, the telegraph vastly increased the influence of newspapers, the country's principal medium of communication. The price of a single issue dropped from six cents in 1830 to one or two cents by 1850. Circulation increased twice as fast as population. The "latest news" became hours rather than days old. Fast trains carried weekly editions of metropolitan newspapers (like Horace Greeley's New York Tribune) to farmers a thousand miles away, where they shaped political sentiments. In 1848 several major newspapers pooled resources to form the Associated Press for the handling of telegraphic dispatches.⁸

The transportation revolution refashioned the economy. As late as 1815, Americans produced on their farms or in their homes most of the things they consumed, used, or wore. Most clothing was sewn by mothers and daughters, made from cloth that in many cases they had spun and woven themselves by the light of candles they had dipped or by natural light coming through windows in houses built of local materials from a nearby sawmill or brickyard by local carpenters or masons or by the male members of the household. Shoes were made by members of the family or by the village cordwainer from leather cured at a local tannery. Blacksmiths forged the tools and farm implements used in the community. Even firearms were built with handicraft skill and pride by a nearby craftsman. In larger towns and cities, master tailors or shoemakers or cabinetmakers or wheelwrights presided over small shops where they worked with a few journeymen and an apprentice or two who turned out fine custom or "bespoke" goods for wealthier purchasers. In an age of slow and expensive overland transport, few of these items were sold more than twenty miles from where they were made.

This pre-industrial world could not survive the transportation revolution, which made possible a division of labor and specialization of production for ever larger and more distant markets. More and more farmers specialized in crops for which their soil and climate were most suitable. With the cash from sale of these crops they bought food and clothing and hardware previously made locally or by themselves but now grown, processed, or manufactured elsewhere and shipped in by canal or rail. To sow and reap these specialized crops, farmers bought newly invented seed drills, cultivators, mowers, and reapers that a burgeoning farm machinery industry turned out in ever-increasing numbers.

In towns and cities, entrepreneurs who became known as "merchant capitalists" or "industrialists" reorganized and standardized the production of a variety of goods for large-volume sale in regional and eventually national markets. Some of these new entrepreneurs came from the

8. An enormous literature has grown up to describe and analyze these changes in transportation and communications; perhaps the most vivid account remains George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York, 1951).

ranks of master craftsmen who now planned and directed the work of employees to whom they paid wages by the day or by the piece instead of sharing with them the work of fabricating a product and the proceeds of its sale. Other merchant capitalists and industrialists had little or no prior connection with the "trade" (shoemaking, tailoring, etc.). They were businessmen who provided capital and organizing skills to restructure an enterprise in a more efficient manner. This restructuring took various forms, but had one dominant feature in common: the process of making a product (shoes or furniture, for example), which had previously been performed by one or a few skilled craftsmen, was broken down into numerous steps each requiring limited skills and performed by a separate worker. Sometimes the worker did his task with hand tools, but increasingly with the aid of power-driven machinery.

Highly mechanized industries like textiles went early to the factory system, where all operations were housed under one roof with a single source of power (usually water, sometimes steam) to drive the machines. This system enabled the New England textile industry to increase its annual output of cotton cloth from 4 million yards in 1817 to 308 million in 1837. In less mechanized enterprises like garment-sewing, operations took place in smaller shops with part of the process being "put out" to semiskilled workers—often women and children—in their homes and returned to the shop for finishing. This remained true even after the invention in the 1840s of the sewing machine, which could be operated in the home as well as in a factory.

Whatever the precise mixture of power machinery and hand tools, of central shop and putting out, the main characteristics of this new mode of production were division and specialization of labor, standardization of product, greater discipline of the labor force, improved efficiency, higher volume, and lower costs. These factors reduced wholesale commodity prices by 45 percent from 1815 to 1860. During the same years consumer prices declined even more, by an estimated 50 percent.⁹

By 1860 the nascent outline of the modern American economy of mass consumption, mass production, and capital-intensive agriculture

9. Adams, "Prices and Wages," in Porter, ed., Encyclopedia of American Economic History, 234. The choice of 1815 as a base year for measurement distorts the picture somewhat, for prices in that year were still inflated from the War of 1812. Even if one chooses the depression year of 1819, however, the decline of wholesale and consumer prices over the next 40 years was an impressive 24 and 41 percent respectively.

was visible. Its development had been uneven across different regions and industries. It was far from complete even in the most advanced sections of the country like New England, where many village blacksmiths and old-time shoemakers could still be found. On the frontier west of the Mississippi and on many internal frontiers in the older sections where the transportation revolution had not yet penetrated—the upland and piney woods regions of the South, for example, or the forests of Maine and the Adirondacks—it had scarcely begun. Many Americans still lived in a nearly self-sufficient handicraft, premarket economy not much different from what their grandparents had known. But the more advanced sectors of the economy had already given the United States the world's highest standard of living and the second-highest industrial output, closing in fast on their British cousins despite the latter's half-century head start in the industrial revolution.¹⁰

Those cousins had begun to sit up and take notice. The victory of America over fourteen British yachts in the 1851 race of the Royal Yacht Squadron shocked the world's leading maritime power. The race occurred during the international industrial exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London, where the products of American industry evoked great curiosity. It was not so much the quality of American muskets, reapers, locks, and revolvers that impressed Britons, but the way in which they had been produced by machine-made interchangeable parts. The concept of interchangeability was not new in 1851. Nor was it exclusively American. The French arms industry had pioneered interchangeable parts for muskets as early as the 1780s. But most of those parts had been fashioned by skilled craftsmen working with hand tools. Their interchangeability was at best approximate. What was new to European observers in 1851 was the American technique of making each part by a special-purpose machine, which could reproduce an endless number of similar parts within finer tolerances than the most skilled of craftsmen could achieve. The British named this process "the American system of manufactures," and so it has been known ever since.¹¹

The interchangeability of parts fabricated by this "system" was often

10. Edgar Winfield Martin, The Standard of Living in 1860: American Consumption on the Eve of the Civil War (Chicago, 1942), 400–401.

11. The best studies of the origins of the American system of manufacturers are Nathan Rosenberg, ed., The American System of Manufactures (Edinburgh, 1969); David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production 1800–1932 (Baltimore, 1984); and Otto Mayr and Robert C. Post, eds., Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures (Washington, 1981).

less than advertised. Hand-filing was sometimes necessary to attain an exact fit. Precision machines and gauges with tolerances within a thousandth of an inch came a generation or two later. Nevertheless, a test of ten randomly selected muskets each made in a separate year from 1844 to 1853 at the Springfield (Massachusetts) armory convinced British skeptics. A workman disassembled the parts, jumbled them in a box, and reassembled ten muskets flawlessly.

It was no coincidence that interchangeability was first perfected in small-arms manufacture. In wartime an army needs a large number of weapons in a hurry and must be able to replace damaged parts in an equal hurry. The U. S. government armories at Springfield and Harper's Ferry had gradually developed the process during the generation before 1850. The British imported American machinery to establish the En-field Armoury during the Crimean War. Samuel Colt also set up a revolver factory in London stocked with machinery from Connecticut. These events symbolized a transfer of world leadership in the machine-tool industry from Britain to the United States.

During the 1850s, delegations of British industrialists visiting America sent back reports on a wide variety of products manufactured by special-purpose machines: clocks and watches, furniture and a host of other wood products, nails and screws, nuts and bolts, railroad spikes, locks, plows, and so on. "There is nothing that cannot be produced by machinery," Samuel Colt told a committee of Parliament in 1854—and by then the British were ready to believe him.¹²

The principles of mass production in America extended to what seemed unlikely practices: for example, the building of houses. This was the era in which "balloon-frame" construction was invented. Today at least three-quarters of American houses are built this way. Before the 1830s, however, houses were generally built in one of three ways: of logs rough-hewn by axes; of brick or stone; or of heavy timbers shaped by carpenters and joined by mortoise and tenon fastened with wooden pegs. The first was cheap but drafty and hardly satisfactory for a growing middle class of rising affluence; the latter two were solid but expensive and slow to build, requiring skilled masons or carpenters who were in short supply in overnight cities, like Chicago, that required a great deal of housing in a hurry. To meet these needs the first balloon-frame buildings appeared during the 1830s in Chicago and in Rochester, a boom town on

12. Eugene S. Ferguson, "Technology as Knowledge," in Edwin T. Layton, Jr., ed., Technology and Social Change in America (New York, 1973), 23.

the Erie Canal. These houses were constructed with the now familiar combination of machine-sawed boards fastened together with factory-produced nails to form the skeleton of a frame house. Machine-sawed siding and shingles and factory-made doors and window parts filled in the frame. Skeptics scoffed that these "balloon frames" would blow away in the first high wind. But in fact they were remarkably strong, for the boards were nailed together in such a way that every strain went against the grain of the wood. These houses could be put up in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of houses built by traditional methods. So successful was this "Chicago construction" that it spread quickly to every part of the country.¹³

Balloon-frame houses illustrated four of the factors cited then and later to explain the emergence of the American system of manufactures. The first was what economists call demand and what social historians might call a democracy of consumption: the need or desire of a growing and mobile population for a variety of ready-made consumer goods at reasonable prices. Considering themselves members of the "middling classes," most Americans in the 1850s were willing and able to buy ready-made shoes, furniture, men's clothing, watches, rifles, even houses. If these products lacked the quality, finish, distinction, and durability of fine items made by craftsmen, they were nevertheless functional and affordable. A new institution, the "department store," sprang up to market the wares of mass production to a mass public. European visitors who commented (not always favorably) on the relationship between a political system of universal (white) manhood suffrage and a socioeconomic system of standardized consumption were right on the mark. Grinding poverty and luxurious wealth were by no means absent from the United States, but what impressed most observers was the broad middle.

Another factor that gave rise to the American system was the shortage and consequent high cost of labor. A deficiency of skilled carpenters, for example, spawned the balloon-frame house. "The labouring classes are comparatively few," reported a British industrial commission that visited the United States in 1854, "and to this very want . . . may be attributed the extraordinary ingenuity displayed in many of these labour-saving machines, whose automatic action so completely supplies the place of the more abundant hand labour of the older manufacturing

13. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York, 1965), 148–52.

countries." Europeans found surprisingly little opposition to mechanization among American workers. With labor scarce in the first place, new machines instead of displacing workers, as they often did elsewhere, tended rather to multiply each worker's productivity. American "workmen hail with satisfaction all mechanical improvements," reported a British industrialist (with exaggeration), "the importance and value of which, as releasing them from the drudgery of unskilled labour, they are enabled by education to understand and appreciate."¹⁴

While not rejecting this labor-scarcity thesis, some historians emphasize a third reason for the capital-intensive nature of the American system—the high resource endowment of the United States. Resources are a form of capital; three outstanding examples in this period were land, wood, and abundant water-power sites especially in New England. The high ratio of land to people encouraged a form of agriculture that would have been wasteful elsewhere but made economic sense in the United States, where the use of machinery achieved a modest yield per acre but a high yield per man-hour of labor. Wood was as plentiful in America as it was scarce in Europe; consequently it had a myriad uses in the new world—fuel for steamboats and locomotives, lumber for houses, frames and parts for machines, and so on. American machine tools were developed first in woodworking industries, where they shaped almost anything made of wood: furniture, musket stocks, axe handles, wheel spokes, doors, and hundreds of other items. Machined products were far more wasteful of wood than handcrafted items, but economically rational where wood was cheap and labor expensive. The American lead in woodworking machines laid the groundwork for an emerging superiority in metalworking machines after 1850. Fast-flowing streams provided a cheap source of energy for American mills that enabled water to retain its status as the principal source of industrial power in the United States until 1870.¹⁵

A fourth reason offered by British observers to explain American economic efficiency was an educational system that had produced widespread

14. Quotations from H. J. Habbakuk, American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1967), 6–7, and Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, 1961), 173.

15. Paul A. David, Technical Choice, Innovation and Economic Growth: Essays on American and British Experience in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975), 87–90; Rosenbereg, ed., American System, 58–59; Dolores Greenberg, "Reassessing the Power Patterns of the Industrial Revolution: An Anglo-American Comparison," AHR, 87(1982), 1237—61.

literacy and "adaptative versatility" among American workers. By contrast a British workman trained by long apprenticeship "in the trade" rather than in schools lacked "the ductility of mind and the readiness of apprehension for a new thing" and was "unwilling to change the methods which he has been used to," according to an English manufacturer. The craft apprenticeship system was breaking down in the United States, where most children in the Northeast went to school until age fourteen or fifteen. "Educated up to a far higher standard than those of a much superior social grade in the Old World . . . every [American] workman seems to be continually devising some new thing to assist him in his work, and there is a strong desire . . . to be 'posted up' in every new improvement."¹⁶

This was perhaps putting it a bit strongly. But many American technological innovations were indeed contributed by workers themselves. Elias Howe, a journeyman machinist in Boston who invented a sewing machine, was one of many examples. This was what contemporaries meant when they spoke of Yankee ingenuity. They used "Yankee" in all three senses of the word: Americans; residents of northern states in particular; and New Englanders especially. Of 143 important inventions patented in the United States from 1790 to 1860, 93 percent came out of the free states and nearly half from New England alone—more than twice that region's proportion of the free population. Much of the machine-tool industry and most of the factories with the most advanced forms of the American system of manufactures were located in New England. An Argentine visitor to the United States in 1847 reported that New England migrants to other regions had carried "to the rest of the Union the . . . moral and intellectual aptitude [and] . . . manual aptitude which makes an American a walking workshop. . . . The great colonial and railroad enterprises, the banks, and the corporations are founded and developed by them."¹⁷

The connection made by British observers between Yankee "adaptative versatility" and education was accurate. New England led the world in educational facilities and literacy at midcentury. More than 95 percent

16. Rosenberg, ed., American System, 203; John E. Sawyer, "The Social Basis of the American System of Manufacturing," Journal of Economic History, 14 (1954), 377–78.

17. Roger Burlingame, March of the Iron Men: A Social History of Union Through Invention (New York, 1938), 469–76; Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Sarmiento's Travels in the United States in 1847, trans. Michael A. Rockland (Princeton, 1970), 198.

of its adults could read and write; three-fourths of the children aged five to nineteen were enrolled in school, which they attended for an average of six months a year. The rest of the North was not far behind. The South lagged with only 80 percent of its white population literate and one-third of the white children enrolled in school for an average of three months a year. The slaves, of course, did not attend school and only about one-tenth of them could read and write. Even counting the slaves, nearly four-fifths of the American population was literate in the 1850s, compared with two-thirds in Britain and northwest Europe and one-fourth in southern and eastern Europe. Counting only the free population, the literacy rate of 90 percent in the United States was equaled only by Sweden and Denmark.¹⁸

The rise of schooling in these countries since the seventeenth century had grown out of the Protestant Reformation. The priesthood of all believers needed to know how to read and understand God's word. In the nineteenth century, religion continued to play an important role in American education. Most colleges and many secondary schools were supported by church denominations. Even the public schools still reflected their Protestant auspices. Since 1830 a rapid expansion and rationalization of the public school system had spread westward and southward from New England—though it had not yet penetrated very far below the Ohio. As secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and a tireless publicist, Horace Mann presided over reforms which included the establishment of normal schools to train teachers, the introduction of standardized graded curricula, the evolution of various kinds of rural district schools and urban charity schools into a public school system, and extension of public education to the secondary level.

An important purpose of these schools remained the inculcation of Protestant ethic values "of regularity, punctuality, constancy and industry" by "moral and religious instruction daily given," according to the Massachusetts superintendent of schools in 1857. These values, along

18. Albert Fishlow, "The Common School Revival: Fact or Fancy?" in Henry Rosov-sky, ed., Industrialization in Two Systems (New York, 1966), 40–67; A Compendium of the Seventh Census of the United States (Washington, 1854), 141–51; Carlo M. Cippolla, Literacy and Development in the West (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1969); Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schooling and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York, 1983), 13–74; Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870 (Chicago, 1981), 89–142.

with cognitive skills and knowledge, also served the needs of a growing capitalist economy. Schools were "the grand agent for the development or augmentation of national resources," wrote Horace Mann in 1848, "more powerful in the production and gainful employment of the total wealth of a country than all the other things mentioned in the books of the political economists."¹⁹ Textile magnate Abbott Lawrence advised a Virginia friend who wanted his state to emulate New England's industrial progress that "you cannot expect to develop your resources without a general system of popular education; it is the lever to all permanent improvement." "Intelligent laborers," added another Yankee businessman in 1853 as if in echo of British visitors, "can add much more to the capital employed in a business than those who are ignorant."²⁰