<P> New England and areas settled from New England, like Upstate New York, Ohio's Western Reserve and the upper midwestern states of Michigan and Wisconsin, proved to be the center of the strongest abolitionist sentiment in the country . Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips were New Englanders, and the region was home to anti-slavery politicians like John Quincy Adams, Charles Sumner, and John P. Hale . When the anti-slavery Republican Party was formed in the 1850s, all of New England, including areas that had previously been strongholds for both the Whig and the Democratic Parties, became strongly Republican, as it would remain until the early 20th century, when immigration turned the formerly solidly Republican states of Lower New England towards the Democrats . </P> <P> New England was distinct becoming the most urbanized part of the country (the 1860 Census showed that 32 of the 100 largest cities in the country were in New England), as well as the most educated . Notable literary and intellectual figures produced by the United States in the Antebellum period were New Englanders, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, George Bancroft, William H. Prescott, and others . </P> <P> New England was an early center of the industrial revolution . In Beverly, Massachusetts the first cotton mill in America was founded in 1787, the Beverly Cotton Manufactory . The Manufactory was also considered the largest cotton mill of its time . Technological developments and achievements from the Manufactory led to the development of other, more advanced cotton mills later, including Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island . Several textile mills were already underway during the time . Towns like Lawrence, Massachusetts, Lowell, Massachusetts, Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and Lewiston, Maine became famed as centers of the textile industry following models from Slater Mill and the Beverly Cotton Manufactory . The textile manufacturing in New England was growing rapidly, which caused a shortage of workers . Recruiters were hired by mill agents to bring young women and children from the countryside to work in the factories . Between 1830 and 1860, thousands of farm girls came from their rural homes in New England to work in the mills . Farmers' daughters left their homes to aid their families financially, save for marriage, and widen their horizons . They also left their homes due to population pressures to look for opportunities in expanding New England cities . Stagecoach and railroad services made it easier for the rapid flow of workers to travel from the country to the city . The majority of female workers came from rural farming towns in northern New England . As the textile industry grew, immigration grew as well . As the number of Irish workers in the mills increased, the number of young women working in the mills decreased . At first the mills employed young Yankee farm women; they then used Irish and French immigrants . </P> <P> As New England's urban, industrial economy transformed from the beginning of the early national period (~ 1790) to the middle of the nineteenth century, so too did its agricultural economy . At the beginning of this period, when the United States was just emerging from its colonial past, the agricultural landscape of New England was defined overwhelmingly by subsistence farming . The primary crops produced were wheat, barley, rye, oats, turnips, parsnips, carrots, onions, cucumbers, beets, corn, beans, pumpkins, squashes, and melons . Because there was not a sufficiently large New England - based home market for agricultural products due to the absence of a large nonagricultural population, New England farmers by and large had no incentive to commercialize their farms . Thus, as farmers could not find very many markets nearby to sell to, they generally could not earn enough income with which to buy many new products for themselves . This not only meant that farmers would largely produce their own food, but also that they tended to produce their own furniture, clothing, and soap, among other household items . Hence, according to historian Percy Bidwell, at the onset of the early national period, much of the New England agricultural economy was characterized by a "lack of exchange; lack of differentiation of employments or division of labor; the absence of progress in agricultural methods; a relatively low standard of living; emigration and social stagnation ." As Bidwell writes, the farming in New England at this time was "practically uniform" with many farmers distributing their land "in about the same proportions into pasturage, woodland, and tillage, and raised about the same crops and kept about the same kind and quantity of stock" as other farmers . This situation would, however, be radically different by 1850, by which time a highly specialized agricultural economy producing a host of new and differentiated products had emerged . There were two factors that were primarily responsible for the revolutionary changes in the agricultural economy of New England during the period from 1790 to 1850: (1) The rise of the manufacturing industry in New England (industrialization), and (2) agricultural competition from the western states . </P>

One result of the glorious revolution was that new england colonists