The Factory Comes to America
After the American revolution the United States was
a third world country.
An industrial
revolution had started in England, and the U.S. was left behind.
Why was it difficult for the industrial revolution to
come to America?
1. Ideas:
Thomas Jefferson didn't think factories were a good
idea, even though he liked gadgets
- the new nation was to be a republic, which
required a balance of power, liberty, and virtue
- who makes a good voter? a yeoman
farmer--independent, self-respecting. You can't have
republic without a virtuous
citizenry. Jefferson
quotes.
- the workers in British factory cities were
clearly
degraded
- the trade embargo by the British in 1807
that
led eventually to the war of 1812 convinced Jefferson to change his mind
- the new nation couldn't afford to be
dependent on England for imported goods
- Jefferson tried to build a factory
on his plantation to be run by slaves
2. Lack of skills
Some people were trying to build factories anyway,
but not with much success
- Britian had laws prohibiting export of
machines and emigration of skilled artisans until 1824-25
- For example, in 1775 the United Company of
Philadelphia for Promoting American Manufactures built a large workshop
for spinning
and weaving by traditional methods. They even acquired and copied
Hargreave's spinning jenny. The organization was revived and
renamed in 1787 and they proudly displayed carding machines, jennies
and looms on a float in a
4th of July parade in 1787 but the workshop was destroyed by fire in
1790. (source: David Jeremy, Business History
Review 47 (1973): p. 24)
- a disassembled mule that was smuggled out of
England to Philadelphia in 1783 was never successfully assembled
- Oliver Evans built a
very sophisticated flour
mill in the 1780s
- Society for
Establishing Useful Manufactures was established in Paterson NJ
in 1791 with leadership from Alexander Hamilton and the expertise
of an English mechanic named William Pearce who was recruited by Thomas
Digges, "the disgraced son of a prominent Maryland family who
sublimated his kleptomania by pilfering technology." (Jeremy)
Failed by 1796 due to shady dealings and
undercapitalization.
- A 1795 spinning mill on the Brandywine River
just north of Wilmington Delaware was replaced in 1802 by a gunpowder
mill built by E. I. duPont, who said: "The greatest danger to my
business is that of attracting the attention of the English....
They employ all possible means to prevent the establishment of
manufactures here. They burned my predecessor's cotton mill, and
might easily try to do the same to my
mills."
- between 1793 and 1807 Britian exported a lot
of textiles to the US (because some European markets were closed
because of war)
and most attempts at U.S. manufacturer had trouble competing with
imported goods
3. Lack of capital:
If you were a citizen of the new United States and had some money to
invest, where would you put it?
- in the south: plantations
with slave labor were very profitable and gave you social status
- in the north, trade was
very profitable--part of what the revolution was fought about was to
remove restrictions on trade that were limiting American merchants
- factories were profitable
in England, but that increased trade
Summing up: Why is it
difficult for the industrial revolution to
come to America?
- people wanted to be farmers, plenty of land,
so shortage of workers
- had raw materials but not machines
- a lot of people had technological
ingenuity,
but very little specialized knowledge
- most people didn't have money or leisure to
worry about luxuries
- England wanted to prevent industrialization
in America
- negative attitude about impact of factories
on society
- people invested their money in trade
Slater
Mill
The first successful American textile factory was Slater Mill
- Samuel Slater
(1768-1835) was 21 years
old and had served a 7 year mill apprenticeship in England
- he emigrated secretly to American in 1789
with the knowledge in his head (no written designs) and went into
partnership with
a hardware merchant in Rhode Island named Moses Brown--the original
deal was that his pay
would
be all the profits for the first 6 months but later that was changed to
joint
ownership and 1/2 the profits
- Slater set up a water-powered spinning
factory with 100 spindles
- he understood not only how to build
Arkwright
water frames but also how to set up the business
- Slater broke from his partners in 1797 and
went on to build several other mills --by 1812 he controlled 12 mills
- Child labor:
initially employed 7 boys and 2 girls between
the ages of 7 and 12, who worked 12 hours a day in winter and 14 to 16
hours a day in summer. As he expanded he brought in impoverished
farm families from the surrounding countryside who lived in company
houses. By 1800 he had 100 employees
- by 1810 there were 54 textile mills in
Massachusetts, 26 in Rhode Island, 14 in Connecticut, all small scale,
spinning only
PEM photo: Factory Floor at Slater Mill Historic Site
Next step: larger factories
Waltham
- three Boston shipping merchants--Nathan
Appleton,
Patrick Tracy Jackson, and Francis Cabot Lowell--decided that war was
interfering with business too much and they should try diversifying
into manufacturing. Established the Boston Manufacturing Company
- Lowell toured England and studied the
textile factories, memorizing the machines. He was also concerned
by the miserable conditions of workers and wanted to develop a
different system in America
- Lowell wanted better conditions for workers
but
also had to make conditions better in order to have enough workers
- the Boston Manufacturing Company set up the
first
larger factory doing
spinning and weaving under one
roof in Waltham Mass. in 1814
- hired an English mechanic named Paul Moody
to build
them a
power loom
- capitalized at $400,000, which was about ten
times
more than Slater Mill
- Lowell also persuaded the federal government
to
put in place a tariff on imported cloth
PEM photo--power loom, Slater Mill NHS
PEM photo of image at
Lowell NHP
Lowell
PEM photo--Lowell Dam
- to go to an even larger scale they needed
more waterpower
- they also wanted to build factories away
from the
city to avoid the problems of England
- the partners chose a site where the
Merrimack river
went over a 33 foot drop
- by 1822 they had put up over $1 million in
capital
- the first mill opened in 1823
- the investors not only built their own mills
but
also sold land and waterpower to other companies to build mills in
Lowell
Lowell population
| 1820 |
1830 |
1840 |
1850 |
1860 |
1870 |
| 200 |
6,000 |
|
33,000 |
|
41,000 |
PEM photo of image at Lowell
NHP
The Lowell labor system
- where were they going to get the workers for
these
big factories out in the middle of nowhere?
- the mills were built by Irish laborers but
prejudice
was so strong they weren't allowed to work in the mills
- hired young women between the ages of 15 and
25
from farm families all over New England
- lived in company-built
boarding-houses under the supervision of a matron, were required to
go to church and observe many detailed factory rules
PEM
photo--Lowell boarding house
- in the 1830s and 1840s they averaged
73 hours of work a week (12-14 hour day, 5 1/2 days a week)--see
timetable
- worked at the mill an average of 3 years,
then
many returned to their home towns to marry
- in the early years they generally found it
an adventure--see Harriet Robinson's
Lowell Mill Girls and
more links
- as competition increased wages were lowered
and
the work speeded up (see information on
slavery vs. factory work
). Women workers did organize strikes and other
protests
.
Winslow
Homer: Bell Time
Immigrant workers
- immigration increased in the mid-19th
century, particularly after the Irish potato famine began in 1845
- immigrant workers replace the women workers,
generally with the whole family working in the mill
Percentage of Lowell workers who were
immigrants:
| 1845 |
1850 |
1860 |
| 8% |
33% |
60% |
immigration
to the U.S>
- other work was slowly opening for women
1829
schooteacher
- in the 20th century mills closed because
they couldn't compete with southern textile mills--see for example
Boott Cotton Mills
.
Sidelight:
textile mills in the south
A few textile
mills were built before the Civil War, for
example in Graniteville
- In 1860 there were three mills in Greenville
County
- But since the invention of the cotton gin
growing cotton
was a better investment than a mill
- slave owners didn't want the men and women
they owned
crippled by mill work, which was very dangerous
Child
workers, textile mill. Photo by Lewis Hine
After the civil war there was a lot of chaos, but
when
things settled down many townspeople saw mills as the new way to make
money
- the early mills after the civil war were still
powered
by water power so were built where there were fast moving rivers
- many of the workers came from the
mountains--families
who could no longer support themselves on small farms
Worker
in Carolina Mill, Louise Hine, 1908
- the whole family including children over 8
usually worked
in the mill
The
Doffer (Hine?)
- southern mill towns were complete
communities--families rented
a house with a number of rooms equal to the number of family members
who
worked in the mill, shopped in the company store. Many mills even
had baseball teams.
Mill House in Newry, Oconee County (PEM photo)
- African-Americans weren't
allowed to work in most mill jobs, only in construction and in the
first step of opening the cotton bales.
African
American workers unload cotton bales
- After about 1910 mills ran on electricity and
were built
on the outskirts of cities and towns
- workers had more choice of where to shop but
they were
usually scorned by the townspeople as "lintheads"
this page written and copyright © Pamela E. Mack
History
323
last updated 1/09/2008
