War Of 1812: Business Analysis

In the modern world, the click of a button can send an entire document from Belgium to America in seconds. In contrast, the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, took six weeks to reach the United States. Surely, the British troops at the Battle of New Orleans would have been grateful for current technology to inform that the war was already over. Their loss at this historic battle serves as a basis for comparing the efficiency of the technological changes in transportation, industry and communication, of the following years. Although these changes connected the nation’s regions to each other, it concurrently intensified the differences of early American societies. To begin with, it is important to identify that the technology of the early nineteenth-century began improving upon

The large amounts of southern cotton shipped north to the textile factories developed them into the first American mechanized industries. Textile mills, which made cloth more efficiently than the homespun variety, grew in the North when America imposed tariffs on Britain after the war of 1812 (303). The growth of textile mills created a new system of employment where women worked away from home. This system, best elucidated by the Lowell system, employed young, unmarried women from farm families to work for one of the highest wages for women at the time: $2.50 per week. At Lowell, women had basic necessities such as food and shelter to compensate for the mundane work with quick, intricate weaving machines; yet, they eventually went on strike because their hours became longer and their wages decreased (306). The Lowell women’s’ labor represented a shift in Northern gender expectations because, previously, unmarried women mostly worked in childcare or the slow production of homemade textiles (86). For these women, wages were critical as they moved from farm families to be more independent at