Title: United States - The United States from 1816 to 1850 | Britannica
Headings: The United States from 1816 to 1850
The United States from 1816 to 1850
The Era of Mixed Feelings
Effects of the War of 1812
National disunity
The economy
Transportation revolution

Content: The economy
The American economy expanded and matured at a remarkable rate in the decades after the War of 1812. The rapid growth of the West created a great new centre for the production of grains and pork, permitting the country’s older sections to specialize in other crops. New processes of manufacture, particularly in textiles, not only accelerated an “industrial revolution” in the Northeast but also, by drastically enlarging the Northern market for raw materials, helped account for a boom in Southern cotton production. If by midcentury Southerners of European descent had come to regard slavery—on which the cotton economy relied—as a “positive good” rather than the “necessary evil” that they had earlier held the system to be, it was largely because of the increasingly central role played by cotton in earning profits for the region. Industrial workers organized the country’s first trade unions and even workingmen’s political parties early in the period. The corporate form thrived in an era of booming capital requirements, and older and simpler forms of attracting investment capital were rendered obsolete. Commerce became increasingly specialized, the division of labour in the disposal of goods for sale matching the increasingly sophisticated division of labour that had come to characterize production. Edward Pessen
The management of the growing economy was inseparable from political conflict in the emerging United States. At the start the issue was between agrarians (represented by Jeffersonian Republicans) wanting a decentralized system of easy credit and an investing community looking for stability and profit in financial markets. This latter group, championed by Hamilton and the Federalists, won the first round with the establishment of the first Bank of the United States (1791), jointly owned by the government and private stockholders.