THE ARGUMENT
The first industrial revolution was based on the steam engine, which James Watt transformed into a revolutionary source of power that could be used in factories, locomotives, and steamships. During the first industrial era, knowledge and skills flowed from the modernizing British economy to the less developed United States and other countries that struggled to make the new technologies their own.
Like Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay understood the potential of machine-based technology to transform the American economy. Clay’s American System was a comprehensive plan by which the federal government would sponsor industrial capitalism in the United States, permitting the country to catch up with and surpass Britain, the first industrial nation. But Andrew Jackson and his allies, invoking the rhetoric of Jeffersonianism, thwarted Clay’s plan for national development by destroying the Bank of the United States and blocking plans for federally financed infrastructure.
In the aftermath of Jackson’s victory, the industrialization of the United States caused the North and the South to grow apart. The southern economy became a specialized adjunct of the British industrial economy, exporting cotton to the textile mills of the British Midlands. Threatened by the success of the antislavery Republican Party led by Abraham Lincoln, the southern slaveowner elite tried to form its own smaller union, the Confederate States of America. But when Britain did not intervene, both the South’s bid for independence and the institution of slavery were doomed.
The period between the Civil War and Reconstruction and the 1890s witnessed the maturation of the steam-based technological system of the first industrial revolution. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the railroad companies dwarfed all other private businesses and rivaled the state and federal governments in their scale and revenues. The disruption of older ways of living and working by the railroads and steam-powered machinery inspired protests by farmers and strikes by industrial workers that were frequently and violently suppressed by the government.
But even as steam-age America took shape, it was doomed by new technologies—the electric motor and the internal combustion engine—that began emerging in the 1860s in the next wave of innovation in the laboratories of Britain, continental Europe, and the United States.