1. Industrializing Great Britain and the newly revolutionized France under Napoleon stood as the world’s two leading powers. Britain was dominant in naval forces and led in per capita income; France was dominant in land forces, strong in total output, and larger in population.
2. War broke out between Britain and France in 1793 and lasted until 1815. To help finance his war, Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803, doubling the land size of the new nation. Trade and commerce soared in American ports as U. S. shippers served as neutrals to the belligerents. The suppression of U. S. shipping entangled the United States in a second war with Britain in 1812.
3. The Northwest Land Ordinances of 1785 and 1787 ensured that new U. S. territories could progress toward statehood and enter the Union having full equality with the older states.
4. The U. S. Constitution, adopted in 1789, is a landmark document, historically unprecedented for its scope and simplicity, for its constraint on government power, and as a model of political compromise. It provided assurances of protection of property consistent with individual freedoms (with the telling exception of slavery, which persisted in the South).
5. The cotton gin, invented in 1793 by Eli Whitney, allowed the seeds of short staple cotton to be economically removed. Thereafter, U. S. cotton production as a share of world production increased from 0.5 percent in 1791 to 68 percent in 1850. Southern slavery became increasingly entrenched and a growing threat to the Union as western migrations brought the proslavery and antislavery forces into continual dispute.
6. As the Industrial Revolution spread from England to the United States in the early nineteenth century, a transportation revolution also unfolded to create a strong national market linking the industrializing Northeast with the agrarian Midwest and the southern cotton kingdom.
7. By 1860, the United States was the second-leading industrial power in the world.
World History
