Howe - What Hath God Wrought

American farmers and planters—and most Americans then earned a living through agriculture—increasingly produced food and fiber for distant markets.

The electric telegraph then helped integrate this continental empire.

As Morse later commented, the message "baptized the American Telegraph with the name of its author": God.

This noble invention is to be the means of extending civilization, republicanism, and Christianity over the earth. It must and will be extended to nations half-civilized, and hence to those now savage and barbarous.

However, no such parties with mass followings could have come into existence without the revolution in communication.

The early national period witnessed now and controversial ideas being formulated, publicized, and even in many cases implemented.

All such reforms were created, discussed, and propagated through the enormously expanded media of print and wire.

A severe winter all Europe, these were large armies for North America. transportation over the Atlantic world slowed communication and made transportation difficult. Neither army knew that across the ocean, representatives of their respective countries had signed a treaty of peace eight days earlier.

Perhaps Mullins’s suspicions were justified: Because his troops were Irish, they might have been thought expendable.

Besides twenty-four dollars cash, each soldier was supposed to receive 160 acres of public land, but forty years later, the black veterans were still trying to get their land claims honored.

When Congress declared war on Great Britain, June 18, 1812, its members did not know that two days earlier Foreign Secretary Castlereagh had announced in Parliament that the Orders in Council restricting American commerce would be suspended.

Neither did they celebrate the technological know-how that enabled their artillery to perform so well. Instead the public seized upon the notion that western riflemen, untrained but sharp-eyes, had defeated the arrogant British.

It also manifested a failure to foresee how much the future of the United States would owe to mechanization and government-sponsored enterprises like the federal armories that made cannons.

Technology represented a type of federalism (government sponsored technological development), instead of the success of the "husbandmen" individuals coming to fight.