Economy Between 1790 And 1860 Essay

There are many factors that can be credited for the growth of the American economy between 1790 and 1860. Some of these factors include change in communication, change in agricultural production, and change in transportation. But there are two factors that played a huge role in that growth, they are: changes in transportation and changes in agricultural production.
Changes in Transportation
According to Meyer (n.d.), in the 1820s through the1830s government and private sources invested a lot of money into the railroad and into canals. Canals required a lot of commodities that weren’t worth a lot of money in order to pay operating expenses, cover interest on the bonds for construction, and to retire the bonds at maturity. This only happened in areas that had a lot of resources like the Erie and Champlain Canals in New York and the coal canals in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. But other than those, most of the other canals failed to produce any benefits and ended up costing more than they were worth. Then came the railroads, which in the beginning only carried passengers. But after …show more content…
The immigrants were willing and ready to work in fields and they didn’t care how much they were paid. This is what led to an increase in cheap labor and also led to agriculture becoming more popular because of the amount of people that were willing to work in the fields (North, 1960). According to Kravis (1970), most farmers were able to supply people who lived in the urban area with raw materials for industries, at a cheaper cost which were because of the cheap labor. The cheap labor over a course of time increase the availability of the raw materials which resulted in an increase in production. Since there was an increase in production, businesses started to make more money which resulted in markets being able to expand and exports increasing. This led to the economy growing (Kravis,