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The period from 1800 through the Civil War many American historians characterize as "the first era of urban surprises". It was a time of the nation's fastest rates of urbanization, the unrealistic growth of regional centers to unprecedented sizes, the reorganization
of ways of working, and the flooding of young immigrant from Great Britain, Ireland and Germany. Such changes brought fresh conflicts and new political issues.
The US followed the advanced industrial changes of England. Cities and states sponsored the construction of canals and other means of river and lake transportation, which by 1850 stretched from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River. Such public works stimulated the development and growth of such cities as Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis, Chicago and Cincinnati. In 1828 the construction of the Baltimore and Ohio railroads began which added demands for public transportation. Together with the parallel developments of the electric telegraph and the horse-drawn street railway these constructions expanded urban markets and sponsored an explosive urban growth. These decades became the years of the nation's most rapid urbanization. New York, favored by its port, river, and canal, was chosen to be the prime financial and transportation center and grew from 135,000 in 1820 to 1,330,000 in 1870. By 1870 the former British colonies boasted six cities the size of Europe's largest 18th century capitals.
The enlargement of urban markets encouraged the reorganization of work. Workers were organized into groups of mutual support, which took form of mutual societies for payments against sickness and death, craft-based trade unions, local political parties.
Industrial growth opened access to the Old Northwest Territory where the land was in abundance. The two streams from New England and the South now began following westwards. The emigrants from the South came as individuals or small armed parties, while those from the North traveled in organized groups either as congregations or shareholders in a stock company that owned the land on which they would build their town. At the end of the journey the two strains converged, mixed with the inhabitants of the Middle Atlantic States. While the Congregationalist meetinghouse had been the central establishment in New England, the plantation dominated in the South, in the Old Northwest it was the courthouse. Legal institutions were among the first erected in the West. The young pioneer towns fought fiercely with each other to become county seats, because with that designation came a modest ckage ????? of patronage and a greater likelihood of becoming a trading center of the area.
The first were towns sprouted at crossroads taverns, along wilderness trails, or on the site of a t ????? built during the Indian wars. A few appeared near deposits of coal and iron ore d carried on a rudimentary form of manufacturing. From the beginning the symbic ????? connection was established between the farmers producing for a local market and trading and the merchants who gave credits and charged what the traffic would bear. At first merchants were half-farmers, but gradually economic interests of town and country began to diverge, and merchants and bankers became specialized entrepreneur. One of the grounds for new settlements was speculation with land. Many early peculators were farmers who purchased more land than they could farm, hoping to take some money by creating a town. Real estate speculation became finally a fulltime profession. Some towns, born to be future glorious metropolises, vanished into the mists, like Gallipolis, Ohio, and Cairo, Illinois. Others, like Chicago, grew very rapidly. The speculators' towns were laid out functionally with a square or simply a junction of Main Street and Main Cross in the heart of the town. Here the business district was located, along with a governmental building, usually an imposing country courthouse. The most stable towns were those founded by the Northern groups. But the homogeneous New England style couldn't accommodate the heterogeneous tide of immigrants.
In the second half of the 19th century changes in European agriculture dramatically altered American city population. The enclosure of common land in Europe, the substitution of cattle for crops and several famines drove millions off the land. As a consequence, thousands of young people came to America to dig canals, build railroads and cities. In 1820—1870s most immigrants came from Germany, England, Scotland and Ireland. The presence of a cluster of immigrants, often poor and often Catholic created strong antagonisms between old and new immigrants in large cities and smaller towns.
