Life in American cities changed rapidly between 1856 and 1868. The industrializing country was in a time of transition, as advancements in transportation, manufacturing, and the economy altered city landscapes dramatically. Factories attracted a growing number of immigrants, swelling the population of cities. Industrialization proceeded at a rapid rate, particularly following the Civil War, laying the foundation for America’s rise to international prominence and making cities such as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago some of the most important urban centers in the world.
Improvements in transportation during the Industrial Revolution provided the engine of urban expansion. The ability to move goods cheaply pushed manufacturing to increase its output. In the years leading up to the Civil War, canals and railroads progressively linked more cities together, creating larger markets for products. Most of these new transportation routes linked cities in the North and West, while the more agricultural South lagged behind in terms of economic development. The new connections between northern and western cities brought a more unified economic and political outlook to these regions, leaving the South isolated and aggravating the growing rift between North and South.
Cities expanded in land area. Before 1840 nearly all residents of a city lived within two miles of their place of work. New inventions, including a large horse-drawn carriage known as an omnibus, and expanding rail lines allowed people to move away from the center city and into suburbs. The new advances in public transportation were important because the population of American cities grew to dangerously high levels.
The first great wave of immigration from Europe to the United States began in the 1840s. Most of these immigrants came from Germany and Ireland, and they settled in cities in hopes of finding jobs in new factories. Throughout this period, an average of 2.4 million people immigrated to the United States per decade. By the 1870s, an increasing number of immigrants arrived from southern and eastern Europe, bringing new groups, such as Italians, Poles, and Russians, into the United States. Immigrants also came from Asia, with more than 300,000 Chinese immigrating to the western states. Many new Americans settled in ethnic neighborhoods, living in unsanitary tenement houses.
Engraving showing underground lodgings for the poor, Greenwich Street, New York City (Library of Congress)
Despite these problems, people flocked to the United States in the hope of finding work in the country’s exploding industrial economy.
The Industrial Revolution created new social classes in American cities. The middle-class and wealthy members of society could afford to move into larger houses in the suburbs and escape the growing congestion of the cities. Husbands could support a family by working in management or other professional jobs. Their income allowed their wives to shop for the latest goods well as hire servants to help manage the household. Working-class and immigrant families did not have the same advantages. In many cases, all members of the family had to work. Sometimes husbands, wives, and children worked together in the same factory. In other cases, women took jobs as household servants, seamstresses, or laundresses in order to supplement a family’s income.
Disposable income, for those who had it, meant manufacturers could produce and sell an ever-increasing number and variety of consumer goods. The first department stores were built in the late 1840s, and by the late 1860s and 1870s shoppers could go to one store and find a wide assortment of goods at reasonable prices. The continued demand for department-store goods helped fuel the pace of industrialization throughout the 19th century.
As cities became larger, intellectuals and city planners worried that urban residents might lose touch with the natural world. Some cities built large parks in an attempt to preserve some contact with nature as well as to beautify the landscape and give people a place to enjoy outdoor activities. The most famous, New York’s Central Park, inspired other American cities to enact their own park-building programs. The creator of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, designed many other parks around the nation, including San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Some people disliked the rowdy working-class sports that emerged, but the idea of a small bit of nature in the midst of the expanding city remained popular.
U. S. cities had a seamy underside. Civil War-era America saw rising crime rates make cities even more dangerous places to live. Philadelphia, for example, saw murder rates, indictments, and convictions rise steadily from the 1850s to the 1880s, with the exception of the war years (1861-65). The rise of crime rates was accompanied by a rise in gun ownership and alcohol use. Ethnic tensions between new and old immigrant groups and racial tensions between blacks and whites complicated efforts to unionize workers and accounted for an increase in violent confrontations.
Increasingly professionalized police departments helped to counter crimes committed against both individuals and property. As early as the 1830s and 1840s, cities like Boston, Philadelphia and New York were pushing for efficient and reformed police forces. The London Metropolitan Model was considered a good example for U. S. cities to follow. The London model advocated police to be paid regularly, to be uniformed and organized into a hierarchy, and to be responsible to city officials. From the 1850s onward, the rise in property-based crime generally drove reform in America’s urban police departments. Reform was driven by different events, issues, and constituencies in each city across the country. For instance, in Buffalo, New York, the business community began that city’s push for a professional police force in 1866 and successfully instituted important changes.
Across urban America, fire departments benefited from the drive to professionalize the police. Indeed, urban businesspeople and concerned property owners were behind many of the drives to professionalize both police and fire services in U. S. cities. Fire fighters changed from volunteer forces to professional forces due largely to two factors: first, consistent pressure from businesspeople, merchants, and insurance companies for stricter protection (including crime prevention, building codes, and fire fighting) of all forms of property interests; and, second, the rise of expensive, steam-powered equipment that demanded fewer personnel to manage but that required more training to operate. Necessarily, the impulse for professionalization of all urban services, including sanitary collection and welfare and hospital institutions, continued to dominate the agenda of urban reformers at this time.
Throughout the Civil War era, economic, political, and social events shaped and were in turn shaped by a remarkable spurt in U. S. urban growth. New immigrant streams, the establishment of shopping centers, the rise of a manufacturing economy, crime and fire prevention, and developments in recreation and transportation all altered the fabric of daily life in American cities.
See also race and racial tensions.
Further reading: Howard F. Chudacoff and Judith E. Smith, The Evolution of American Urban Society (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 2000); Sidney L. Har-ring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983); Roger Lane, Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident, and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Wilbur R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830-1870 (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Eric H. Monk-konen, America Becomes Urban: The Development of U. S. Cities and Towns, 1780-1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Sara E. Wermiel, The Fireproof
Building: Technology and Public Safety in the Nineteenth-Century American City (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
—Mathew G. McCoy
World History
