Week 10: Societal Changes and Beliefs During the Market Revolution

The Changes in the United States because of the Market Revolution were somewhat minor. "It's catalyst was a series of innovations in transportation and communication. American technology had hardly changed during the colonial era. No Important alterations were made in sailing ships, no major canals were built, and manufacturing continued to be done by hand, with skills passed on from artisan to journeyman and apprentice" (Liberty 313). "The Market Revolution represented an acceleration of developments already under way in the colonial era. Southern planters were marketing the products of slave labor in the international market as early as the seventeenth century" (Liberty 314). "Many Americans devoted their energies to solving the technological problems that inhabited commerce within the country. Thomas Paine spent the 1780's and 1790's no only promoting democracy in America and Europe but also developing a design for an iron bridge, so that rivers could be crossed in all seasons of the year without impeding river traffic" (Liberty 315). The Market Revolution opened new opportunities for economic freedom for many Americans, but some feared that the traditional economic independence would be compromised.

Transcendentalism is the Philosophy of a small group of mid-nineteenth-century New England writers and thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller; they stressed personal and intellectual self reliance. Individualism is the language in the 1820s to describe the increasing emphasis on the pursuit of personal advancement and private fulfillment free of outside interference. "Americans increasingly understood the realm of the self-which came to be called "privacy" as on ewith which reither other individuals nor government had a right to interfere" (Liberty 338). The people were now awair that they had the right to have their own priavacy, they no longer and the fear that they could not have their own thoughts and beleifs.

Each, Emerson and Walden expressed their beleif that Transcendentalism and Individualism is the key to happiness and true freedom. Emerson states, “ I learned that know man in God’s wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man. Help must come from the bosom alone” (Freedom179). Thoreau felt that modern society stifled individual judgments by making men “tools of their tools” trappeed by their jobs due to obsession with acquiring wealth.