The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [17]
There was in fact no one “America” to be reached in the mid-nineteenth century. The eastern, populated, half of the country was sharply divided into two separate social and economic spheres, soon to be at war with each other. The northeastern states had the largest cities and held most of the country’s industrial development. European immigrants could usually find work in northern factories, which offered jobs, albeit usually for paltry wages, especially for children. The South was dominated by a vast agricultural system that was sustained in large part by the work of slaves. Neither region held great opportunities for self-starting entrepreneurs; to start a business usually required capital, which few immigrants had in sufficient quantity, or land, which proved surprisingly difficult to acquire and farm.
The economic hazards of the immigrant’s “fresh start” were usually matched by prejudices that hemmed in new arrivals no matter where they landed. Racism ran deep, coupled with a class prejudice that, at least in the South, stigmatized a man who engaged in trade, or the farmer who worked his own land, without slaves. Often illiterate and malnourished, small planters were derided by the plantation elite and endured conditions which, while certainly better than those of black field hands, were worse than those of house slaves in the stately homes of the plantation owners. Ironically, in the 1830s less than one-third of the white population in the South owned a single slave.
Although immigrants might find greater opportunities in the New World than in their own lands, those who came expecting an easy life and quick riches would be sorely disappointed. Statistics paint an often grim picture of life in mid-nineteenth-century America for both citizens and new arrivals. The life expectancy there was not much higher than in China, and in certain populations it was significantly lower. A white person born in the United States in 1850 could expect to live, on average, to age thirty-nine-only about four years longer than the typical Chinese man in Beijing. For a black American, it was about a decade and a half less, twenty-three. Infant mortality rates were so high that, looking back, we wonder how families of that time could bear so painful a loss with such regularity: white families buried one infant for every five born; black families, one in three. Only half of all black babies survived their first year of life. Epidemics regularly swept through American cities, due to poor sanitation, drainage, and hygiene—sometimes as simple a matter as having no source of fresh water.
American industrial working conditions were also harsher than those experienced in many parts of the world. In New England factory towns, dark clouds billowed incessantly from tall chimneys, with layers of gray smoke hovering over the towns and surrounding countryside day and night. In metal- and wood-product manufacturing plants, workers choked on air filled with soot and sawdust. Northeastern businessmen built hundreds of textile mills, where low-paid, mostly female spinners, or “spinsters,” as they were called, transformed southern cotton into cloth for curtains, bed linens, and garments. Breathing lint and dust through ten- and twelve-hour shifts, many never married and died early from bronchitis and tuberculosis.
Eager for more land, and with it, they hoped, opportunity, Americans moved deeper into the interior of the great continent. The migration westward gathered its greatest steam in the early nineteenth century as settlers began to strike out through the Ohio and Missouri valleys, settling a region now called the Midwest but then considered the edge of civilization.
Gradually, these Americans adjusted to their new lives “out west.” Dotting a landscape of tree stumps were a few whitewashed cabins faced with rough-hewn shingles. Some dwellings were even more simple: a hastily constructed