Market Revolution & American Citizenship

 

 

How did the Market Revolution challenge the existing ideas about American citizenship during the antebellum period? - a discussion of wage labor and citizenship, shifting concepts of independence, and how such changes are connected to reform efforts during this period.

     Before the Market Revolution independence meant being a landowner (most likely white, always male). The argument was that if you owned land, you had a stake in the nation’s future, and so you were entitled to a vote. Those who did not own land (women, poor white men, most blacks) were considered dependent, therefore did not get to vote. The division was along class lines. By the time the Market Revolution was in full swing, the dividing line had shifted from class to gender and race. 

     Poor white men who had moved to the cities in search of wage labor in factories began to see themselves as independent individuals. Living away from their families, they were looking after themselves, paying their own way, and feeling just as entitled to vote as any farmer who owned land. Working white men began to get involved in the politics that was going on around them, and demanded their right to participate in it. They started to equate their citizenship with the right to vote, and claimed that ownership of land should not be a requirement for voting rights – just ownership of yourself. This was the principle behind Dorr’s War, which eventually resulted in the granting of voting rights to white men whether they owned land or not. 

Dorr inciting a crowd of supporters

     These same rights were not extended to non-whites or to women. Blacks were not considered citizens at all, and enslaved blacks were not even considered men, but property. Women had very few rights, and once married, had practically none – their entire civic identities vanished under those of their husbands. As democracy was expanding for poor white men, it was shrinking for women and non-whites. Intellectual arguments began to be made, justifying the exclusion of these groups based on “scientific” facts. White Anglo-Saxon men were just naturally more intelligent than women and non-whites, and that was that.

"scientific proof" 

    This new concept of the right to vote being related to ownership of self was a reflection of society’s new concept of the importance of the self. The Second Great Awakening was reminding people of their importance in the eyes of God.  People began to feel that the self had a great power and significance, and that individuals could change the world if they tried hard enough. Many still remembered, firsthand, the American Revolution, and they knew that people had the power to effect change. People began to question old rules and values. Radical utopias sprang up all over the nation – communities of people who wanted to radically change the rules of society.

Many focused on changing the accepted norms of gender, and property rights (e.g. the Shakers, pictured above)  – both of which kept personal control out of the hands of non-whites and women. Other attempts to reform society included moral reform movements, institutional reform movements, and human rights movements, such as abolitionism and women’s rights.

     The abolitionist movement of the 1830s demanded immediate emancipation and full inclusion for enslaved blacks – this challenged the deep-rooted idea that America was a white nation, and that blacks could never be citizens.  Abolitionists claimed the right of blacks to be citizens and to enjoy all the rights that went along with being free citizens, including the right to vote. It was a movement made up mostly of women, free blacks and escaped slaves. These were the people in society who had no political voice, but they had a strong conviction that they deserved to be heard just as much as any white man. From the abolitionist movement came the women’s rights movement, as women realized they were just as powerless as blacks in the eyes of the law. Both of these groups fought hard for equal rights to citizenship and suffrage, inspired by the spirit of individualism that thrived during the Market Revolution. 

signed by Frederick Douglass