AP United States History

## Learning Outcomes

- Explain how the **Market Revolution** encouraged migration to northern cities and to the West
- Identify how transportation changes such as the **Erie Canal (1825)** and the **National Road** reshaped settlement
- Distinguish between **urbanization** in the North and **westward migration** into the Old Northwest and beyond
- Understand how migration changed work, family life, class structure, and gender roles
- Recall the impact of **Irish** and **German** immigration in the **1840s**
- Analyze the costs of migration, including nativism, class conflict, poor urban conditions, and Native American displacement
- Use this topic in APUSH causation, comparison, and continuity-and-change arguments

## AP United States History Syllabus

For the AP United States History, you are expected to understand migration patterns during the **Market Revolution** in **Period 4 (1800–1848)**, with a focus on the following syllabus points:

![Market Revolution migration patterns connecting northern urbanization, western settlement, the Erie Canal, the National Road, and regional economic specialization.](https://static.pastpaperhero.com/images/ap-us-history-market-revolution-society-and-culture-migration-to-northern-cities-and-west_00.png)

_Transportation improvements, factory labor, and commercial farming directed population movement toward northern cities and the Old Northwest._

- Know that the **Market Revolution** linked regions through transportation, commercial farming, and industrial growth
- Identify how the **Transportation Revolution** encouraged both city growth in the North and settlement in the West
- Explain why northern cities grew through both **rural-to-urban migration** and foreign immigration
- Understand the **Waltham-Lowell system** as an example of factory labor, women’s wage work, and urban industrialization
- Identify major western destinations, including the **Old Northwest**, **Oregon Territory**, and **Texas**
- Explain how migration strengthened **regional specialization**: Northeast manufacturing, West commercial agriculture, South cotton
- Understand that westward migration depended in part on **Indian Removal**, especially after the **Indian Removal Act (1830)**
- Recognise that the **Panic of 1837** revealed the instability of the new market economy

## Test Your Knowledge

_Attempt these questions before reading this article. If you find some difficult or cannot remember the answers, look more closely at that area during your revision._

1. How did the Market Revolution encourage migration both to northern cities and to the West?
2. Why is the **Erie Canal (1825)** such an important example for APUSH?
3. What is the difference between northern urbanization and westward settlement?
4. Why did many Irish immigrants settle in northern cities while many German immigrants moved farther west?
5. How was westward migration connected to Native American displacement?

## Introduction

Between **1800 and 1848**, the United States changed from a society where most people produced mainly for local use into one increasingly tied together by markets, transport, and wage labor. That shift is called the **Market Revolution**, and one of its clearest effects was movement: people moved to northern cities for jobs, and they moved west for land and new opportunities.

For APUSH, this topic matters because it connects several themes at once: **Migration and Settlement**, **Work, Exchange, and Technology**, **Geography and the Environment**, and **American and Regional Culture**. Strong answers do not treat city growth and westward movement as separate stories. They were linked results of the same economic changes.

> **Key Term: Market Revolution**
> The expansion of a national commercial economy in the early 19th century through improved transportation, communication, manufacturing, and market exchange.

### Why the Market Revolution pushed people to move

Migration in this period was not random. People moved because the economy was changing where work could be found and how money could be made.

Before the Market Revolution, many Americans lived in largely **subsistence** households. Families produced much of what they needed themselves. As transportation improved and goods moved more cheaply, it became easier to specialize. Northern manufacturers could make textiles and finished goods. Western farmers could raise grain and livestock for distant markets. Southern planters could expand cotton production. Once regions became specialized in this way, people followed the opportunity.

> **Key Term: Transportation Revolution**
> The major improvements in roads, canals, steamboats, and early railroads that lowered travel time and shipping costs in the first half of the 19th century.

The basic cause-and-effect chain is important:

- better transportation
- cheaper movement of goods and people
- larger national markets
- growth of factories and commercial farming
- migration to places where those opportunities existed

The **National Road**, begun in **1811**, made east-west travel easier. The **Erie Canal**, completed in **1825**, linked the Hudson River to Lake Erie and connected the Great Lakes region to New York City. Steamboats, especially after **Robert Fulton’s Clermont (1807)**, made river traffic faster and more reliable on the Hudson, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers. Early railroads expanded in the 1830s and 1840s, though they were still less important than canals and rivers for much of this period.

These changes helped create two different migration patterns.

First, many people moved to **northern cities**, where factories, mills, docks, and commercial offices offered wage labor.

Second, many people moved **west**, especially into the **Old Northwest** such as **Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan**, where cheap land and better transport made commercial agriculture profitable.

> **Test Tip:** In an SAQ or LEQ, do not just say “people moved because of jobs.” Name the mechanism. For example: “The Erie Canal lowered shipping costs, which made western farming profitable and encouraged settlement.”

### Migration to northern cities: wage labor, factories, and urban growth

Northern cities expanded because the North was becoming the nation’s main center of **manufacturing and commerce**. That meant more jobs in places such as **New York**, **Philadelphia**, **Boston**, and smaller industrial towns such as **Lowell, Massachusetts**.

Some migrants were immigrants from abroad. But students often miss an equally important point: many were native-born rural Americans. Northern farmers who could not compete with cheaper grain and produce from the West often left the countryside and sought work in cities. Artisans also faced pressure. A shoemaker, tailor, or blacksmith who once worked independently could find that factory production and larger urban markets undercut old forms of skilled craft work.

> **Key Term: urbanization**
> The growth of cities as population and economic activity become more concentrated in urban areas.

A major example is the **Waltham-Lowell system**.

> **Key Term: Waltham-Lowell system**
> A factory labor system in New England that employed mainly young unmarried women in textile mills, often housing them in company boardinghouses under close supervision.

This system matters because it shows several changes at once:

- the shift from household production to factory production
- the rise of **wage labor**
- the movement of young women from farms into mill towns
- new social tensions over discipline, independence, and gender roles

For some women, mill work offered opportunity. They could earn cash wages and experience life outside the farm household. But that freedom had limits. Employers imposed strict rules, close supervision, and long working hours. The Lowell mills were not a simple story of liberation. They offered new options, but within a tightly controlled industrial setting.

The growth of northern cities also encouraged a sharper class structure. A wealthy urban elite controlled much of the commerce and capital. Beneath them was a growing middle class of merchants, brokers, and professionals. Beneath that was a working class of laborers, factory workers, servants, and poor immigrants. Migration therefore increased opportunity for some, but it also widened visible inequalities.

Urban life brought serious problems:

- overcrowded housing
- poor sanitation
- disease
- unsafe work
- class conflict
- ethnic and religious tension

Cities could offer jobs and mobility, but they could also trap families close to poverty. A lost job, illness, or injury could ruin a household.

The **1840s** added a new layer: immigration from **Ireland** and **Germany**. Many **Irish immigrants**, often poor and Catholic, settled in northern cities and took unskilled work on canals, railroads, docks, and in textile mills. Many **German immigrants** also entered the country in large numbers, though more of them tended to move into the West where land was available.

This helps explain why northern cities became centers of **nativism**.

> **Key Term: nativism**
> Hostility toward immigrants, especially toward groups seen as culturally or religiously different from the native-born population.

Native-born workers often feared immigrant competition for low-paying jobs. Anti-Catholic feeling was also strong. By the 1850s, this hostility would help fuel the **Know-Nothing Party**, but the social roots were already visible in the 1840s.

> **Test Tip:** Do not explain northern city growth only through immigration. AP examiners like students who note both foreign immigration and internal migration from farms to cities.

### Migration to the West: land, commercial farming, and frontier opportunity

If northern migration was driven mainly by factories and wage labor, westward migration was driven mainly by **landownership** and **commercial agriculture**.

> **Key Term: commercial agriculture**
> Farming aimed at producing crops or livestock for sale in markets rather than mainly for family use.

The same transportation improvements that fed city growth also made western settlement more attractive. A farmer in the Old Northwest could now grow wheat or corn and send it east at far lower cost than before. This transformed land that had once seemed remote into land that could produce profit.

The **Erie Canal** is the best single example. By linking western farmers to eastern and Atlantic markets, it made settlement more rewarding and helped make **New York City** the leading trade center of the nation. It also tied the West economically to the Northeast. Western grain fed eastern cities, while eastern manufacturers sold goods into the West.

The **Old Northwest** became the nation’s grain-producing region. This was not empty land waiting for settlement. It was land taken and claimed through earlier wars, treaties, and continuing Native American displacement. But from the settler point of view, it offered room, relative independence, and the possibility of moving up economically.

New western towns grew because they sat on transport links and market routes. **Cincinnati**, on the Ohio River, became an important commercial city and meatpacking center. **Chicago** grew rapidly because of its location between the Great Lakes and the interior; by **1848**, the **Illinois and Michigan Canal** strengthened its position as a trade hub.

Western migration was not limited to the Old Northwest. In the **1840s**, thousands of settlers travelled the **Oregon Trail** to the **Willamette Valley**. The **1843 Great Migration** is a useful marker for this trend. Others moved to **Texas**, where American settlers had entered Mexican territory in large numbers during the 1820s and 1830s. Some migration was heavily economic; other migrations, such as the **Mormon** movement beginning in **1846**, were shaped strongly by religious persecution.

Still, for this subtopic, the exam usually wants you to stress that most westward migration in the Market Revolution was tied to land and markets. Better transport made western land valuable because it could now produce for distant buyers.

### Costs and limits of migration: instability, nativism, and Native displacement

A weak answer treats migration as a success story. A strong answer explains the costs.

For northern cities, the costs included:

- overcrowding
- poverty
- labor exploitation
- nativism
- urban violence
- class inequality

For western migration, the costs fell especially on **Native Americans** and on settlers caught in unstable market conditions.

> **Key Term: Indian Removal**
> The federal policy of forcing Native peoples east of the Mississippi River to move west, especially after the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

The federal government did not merely “allow” westward migration. It actively cleared the way for it. The **Indian Removal Act (1830)** helped force Native peoples from the Southeast so that white settlement and plantation expansion could continue. The **Cherokee Trail of Tears** in the 1830s is the clearest example. More broadly, between **1830 and 1850**, around **100,000** Native Americans were removed west by coercion or military force. So westward migration was not just about opportunity. It also depended on dispossession.

Students should also be careful with **Manifest Destiny**. It became a powerful idea in the **1840s**, especially during the Polk years, but the subtopic here is social and cultural effects of the Market Revolution. Use Manifest Destiny as supporting context, not as your whole explanation.

The market economy itself was unstable. The **Panic of 1837** revealed that commercial expansion could collapse suddenly.

> **Key Term: Panic of 1837**
> A major financial crisis linked to speculation, banking weakness, and unstable credit that caused widespread unemployment, foreclosures, and hardship.

Western farmers often borrowed money for land and equipment. When prices fell or credit tightened, they could lose everything. Urban workers also suffered from downturns, layoffs, and falling wages. So both city migrants and western migrants entered a more connected economy, but also a more fragile one.

This is a useful APUSH distinction: the Market Revolution increased **mobility** and **opportunity**, but also increased **dependence on markets**. People had more ways to earn cash, but they were less self-sufficient than before.

### How to use this topic in APUSH arguments

This subtopic works especially well in **causation**, **comparison**, and **continuity and change over time** essays.

For **causation**, explain how transport improvements caused migration by making western farming profitable and urban industry larger.

For **comparison**, contrast:

- northern cities = factory work, wage labor, immigrants, overcrowding
- the West = landownership, farming, new towns, Native displacement

For **continuity and change**, note that:

- **change:** more people moved, cities expanded, western towns grew, wage labor increased
- **continuity:** most Americans still lived in rural settings through much of the period, and older inequalities remained or deepened

You can also link this topic to reform. Social strains from urban growth helped inspire reform movements in the antebellum era, including those connected to the **Second Great Awakening**. And changes in women’s work, especially through the Lowell mills, fed into later activism including **Seneca Falls (1848)**.

> **Test Tip:** For an LEQ, a strong thesis usually links migration to both opportunity and conflict. Example: “The Market Revolution encouraged migration to northern cities and the West by expanding factory work and commercial farming, but it also produced urban poverty, nativism, and Native American displacement.”

## Key Point Checklist

_This article has covered the following key knowledge points:_

- The **Market Revolution** encouraged migration by creating a national commercial economy
- The **Transportation Revolution** linked regions through roads, canals, steamboats, and early railroads
- The **Erie Canal (1825)** was crucial because it connected the Great Lakes to the Hudson River and New York City
- Northern cities grew through both **rural-to-urban migration** and foreign immigration
- The **Waltham-Lowell system** shows factory labor, women’s wage work, and controlled urban industrial life
- Northern urbanization brought jobs and mobility, but also overcrowding, poverty, and class tension
- **Irish immigrants** often settled in northern cities, while many **German immigrants** moved farther west
- Westward migration was driven by cheap land, better transport, and the growth of **commercial agriculture**
- Western towns such as **Cincinnati** and **Chicago** grew because they were tied to trade networks
- Migration increased **regional specialization**: Northeast manufacturing, West grain and livestock, South cotton
- Westward settlement depended in part on **Indian Removal** and Native dispossession
- The **Panic of 1837** showed that the new market economy created instability as well as opportunity

## Key Terms and Concepts

- Market Revolution
- Transportation Revolution
- urbanization
- Waltham-Lowell system
- nativism
- commercial agriculture
- Indian Removal
- Panic of 1837


Market Revolution: Society and Culture - Migration to northern cities and West