Reform+Summary

The market revolution was a huge economic transformation that took place in America. The new jobs in the growing amount of factories and more land being acquired in the west caused an increase of immigration. Overtime the amount of immigrants grew and the natives of America, who were actually immigrants themselves at one point, began to see the growing amount of immigrants as a threat. This resulted in an increase of tension between the American’s and the immigrants. This is called **Nativism**, which is a favoring native inhabitants of a land and a fear of immigrants among the natives of that land. This happens during great times of stresses for a country. America during this time was adjusting to a new national government and rapidly growing economy. During the market revolution, most of the hatred of immigrants was directed towards the Irish who where blamed for taking the jobs of native born workers and were accused of being lazy and non-deserving of the freedom America had to offer. Americans held riots other public demonstrations to express their dislike of the rapidly growing immigrant population and later, Nativism would be a much larger political movement. All of this happened despite the words in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal."

Another reform response during the market revolution was **temperance**. Temperance was the restriction of products, mainly alcohol and laws banning forms of entertainment and postal servies on Sundays. Temperance was mainly supported by the Protestants living in America so once the idea started so spread, people of different faiths like Irish and German immigrants, who were Catholic, did not agree or want to be forced to agree by the government to go along with Protestant ideas. The temperance movement was not only for the ban of alcohol and certain activities on Sundays, but also included the improvement and the working conditions in prisons and laborers. Conditions in the many factories built during the market revolution were unsafe and miserable working environments with cramped spaces, many people, and new machines. In 1826 the American Temperance Society was formed. They convinced a large amount of people to stop drinking liquor and by 1830 the average alcohol intake per year was seven gallons when people used to drink up to two gallons each day. The society held public talks saying how not drinking alcohol would better their lives and get rid of their sins but others thought that not drinking didn't better prove their religious devotion or make them better people.

Alcohol wasn't the only thing the public wanted to get rid of during the market revolution but they also wanted to get rid of whole institutions. This is called **abolitionism**. The biggest abolition movement during this time was the abolition of slavery. With America's factories producing products at an even faster rate the demands for raw materials from the south grew as well. This was helped with the invention of the cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney in 1793. This revived the cotton market, which was thought to eventually die out. The abolitionist movement for slavery started with the distribution of writings that spread the message to the greater population. One of the first of these was //An Apeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World// written by the free black David Walker in 1829. It called for a movement for the abolition of slavery. But the message that cought the attention of all antislavery groups in America was //The Liberator// written by William Lloyd Garrison in the a Boston journal in 1831. This was thought to be the beginning of the abolisionist movement. New machines that made printing easier was key to distributing these and many other abolisionist papers. By 1840 the Liberty party was formed in favor of abolitionism. James G. Birney ran for president twice for this party but failed both times. At the same time, slaves on plantations had their own ways of protesting by not working as hard as they could, saying they were sick, or anything that would make the production of crops go slower and make it harder for plantation owners. In general, there were more people in favor for abolition in the north than in the south because the south was more dependant on slaves for farming than the north, which mainly had factories were immigrants worked instead of slaves.