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Originally Posted by Crawford
New Orleans was the second or third largest city in the U.S. in 1840. Really only NYC was considerably bigger.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Centropolis
i am suprised to see that new orleans was larger than philadelphia (proper) in 1840. philly hadnt annexed northern liberties yet, though. still an impressive stat for both a southern AND "western" city at the time.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Yeah, Philly, by current standards, was likely bigger than New Orleans, but by city limits New Orleans was #2 or #3. Pretty impressive for what was still a raw frontier city, far from established centers.
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New York and Philadelphia were far and away the largest cities in the US back then. Philadelphia was much larger than New Orleans at that time -- likely
double the size of New Orleans. Northern Liberties/Kensington/Spring Garden, and Southwark/Moymensing were all urban industrial neighborhoods immediately contiguous with "Philadelphia proper" back then. They were basically part of the city, even though they were technically their own townships "separated" from Philadelphia only by former estate boundaries. For all practical purposes, they were Philadelphia neighborhoods... and they also happened to be among the largest "cities" in the US at the time.
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Originally Posted by xzmattzx
Some of it has been mentioned before, but almost all of it has to do with the Industrial Revolution.
Charleston and Savannah are not on the Fall Line. Philadelphia and Boston are, or are close enough, and so in the mid-1800s, these cities took off as finished goods from the mills were sent to the big city and then shipped off around the world. Charleston and Savannah didn't have many mills close enough to provide for more than the surrounding region.
There is one Southern city near the coast that is on the Fall Line and was comparatively big back then. Richmond is on the Fall Line and had many factories, similar to how Philadelphia and Boston did back then. Richmond was important enough to become the capital of the Confederacy.
In addition to that, there was a network of canals and railroads that provided links to Boston and Philadelphia, particularly Philadelphia. And of course, New York City outgrew Philadelphia because of the Erie Canal, which linked it up with a very large area providing raw materials to the factories in the NYC area.
What happened in the 20th century, with highways and all, is irrelevant because the groundwork had already been laid in the past several decades. Similarly, the highways didn't create Houston or Los Angeles, which grew in the 20th century; the highways were built to accommodate demand, because other factors were driving the local economy at the time.
The bottom line is that Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, and Savannah all had what cities needed in the 1700s, but Boston and Philadelphia had what cities needed in the 1800s. From there, Boston and Philadelphia stayed ahead.
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Yes, this was basically along the lines of my response.
And in even broader terms... in the mid-19th century, the North was industrial with many cities, the South was agricultural with few cities. Factories developed around nodes of materials and transportation networks. This brought the demand for workers... immigration. 5 million Irish alone came to the US in the mid 1800s before the Civil War... and most of them settled in Northern industrial cities. And the accelerator was only pushed down from there.