Analysis of the Market Revolution's Impact on America (1790-1850)

Some have thus cleared off mortgages from their father's farms; others have educated the hope of the family at college; and many are rapidly accumulating an independence.  I saw a whole street of houses built with the earnings of the girls, some with piazzas and green Venetian blinds, and all neat and sufficiently spacious... ...The minister's salary (eight hundred dollars last year) is raised by a tax on the pews.  The corporation gave them a building for a lyceum, which they have furnished with a good library, and where they have lectures every winter--the best that money can procure.  The girls have, in many instances, private libraries of some merit and value

Needlework and crafts were also approved activities which kept women in the home, busy about her tasks of wifely duties and childcare, keeping the home a cheerful place which would attract men away from the evils of the outer world.

In the name of the Carpenters, Masons, and Stone Cutters [we] do respectfully represent-- We are contending for the recognition of the natural right to dispose of our own time in such quantities as we deem and believe to be most conducive to our own happiness and the welfare of all those engaged in manual labor. We have been too long subjected to the odious, cruel, unjust, and tyrannical system which compels the operative mechanic to exhaust his physical and mental powers by excessive toil, until he has no desire to eat and sleep, and in many cases he has no power to do either from extreme debility. . . . It is for the rights of humanity we contend. Our opposers resort to the most degrading obloquy to injure us. They tell us, 'We shall spend all our hours of leisure in drunkenness and debauchery if the hours of labor are reduced.' We hurl from us the base, ungenerous, ungrateful, detestable, cruel, malicious slander, with scorn and indignation.

That the manufacturing States, even in their own opinion, bear no share of the burden of the Tariff (of 1828) in reality, we may infer with the greatest certainty from their conduct. The fact that they urgently demand an increase, and consider every addition as a blessing, and a failure to obtain one as a curse, is the strongest confession that, whatever burden it imposes, in reality falls, not on them, but on [the Southern States].