Key Terms
- artisan
- skilled, experienced worker who produces specialized goods by hand
- Cumberland Road
- a national highway that provided thousands with a route from Maryland to Illinois
- deskilling
- breaking an artisanal production process into smaller steps that unskilled workers can perform
- Erie Canal
- a canal that connected the Hudson River to Lake Erie and markets in the West
- free moral agency
- the freedom to change one’s own life and bring about one’s own salvation
- labor theory of value
- an economic theory holding that profits from the sale of the goods produced by workers should be equitably distributed to those workers
- land offices
- sites where prospective landowners could buy public land from the government
- machine tools
- machines that cut and shape metal to produce standardized, interchangeable parts for mechanical devices such as clocks or guns
- Mohawk and Hudson Railroad
- the first steam-powered locomotive railroad in the United States
- putting-out system
- a labor system whereby a merchant hired different families to perform specific tasks in a production process
- specie
- “hard” money, usually in the form of gold and silver coins
- Working Men’s Party
- a political group that radically opposed what they viewed as the exploitation of workers
