American Experiment (54 page)

Eberhardt’s death in 1839 marked the end of an era of craftsmanship. He was the last clockmaker in Salem. Handmade clocks gave way to Eli Terry’s and Seth Thomas’ machine-made versions. Like Whitney, Terry began to use guides, patterns, templates, gauges, and jigs in the making of his wooden clocks in the Connecticut Valley. With the installation of machinery he was able to turn out clocks in lots of one to two hundred which he peddled about the countryside on horseback for fifteen dollars a clock. His thirty-hour shelf clock, patented in 1816, changed the business. By 1852, the year of his death, he was producing 10,000 to12,000 metal clocks a year which sold for five dollars apiece.

Industrialists Eli Terry, Eli Whitney, Samuel Colt, and Simeon North tirelessly experimented with machines to cut metal into precise shapes and produce interchangeable parts in clocks and small arms. The problems confronted by these manufacturers were similar technologically to those in a number of other industries, such as sewing machines and agricultural
implements. Unlike Eberhardt, who looked upon himself as responsible for a complete, one-of-a-kind product, the industrialists were flexible and experimental tinkerers who improved the manufacturing process by mechanizing it step by step. Their incentive to adopt labor-saving techniques to cut costs was heightened in an expanding economy and population. Farmers with land and a transportation network to market farm products could do well, but in spite of the scarcity of skilled and unskilled labor, workers, whether craftsmen, skilled workers, or common laborers, did not share in the profits of industrialization to the extent the manufacturer did.

With a new war starting in 1812, Whitney signed a bigger contract with the government to deliver 15,000 muskets. He was able to complete the contract in two years owing to his use of filing jigs, milling machines, and other devices. Little was new in the process. Interchangeable parts manufacture developed much earlier in Europe, but men like Whitney applied machines and methods to manufacture products in a nation where demand for machine-made goods and ability to buy were greater than in many countries in Europe. Whitney died a rich man, leaving an estate of more than $130,000 in savings and personal notes held by him. At this time a skilled millwright or carpenter earned eight dollars a week and a canal laborer four dollars a week, often paid partly in board.

The leader in industrial expansion between 1815 and 1860 was the cotton textile industry, and the leader in cotton textiles was the man who set up the first integrated cotton textile factory, Francis Cabot Lowell. Merchants in the carrying trade had grown rich, with profits during good times averaging $50 to $70 million dollars annually. But the carrying trade dwindled within a few years because of the Embargo Act of 1807 and the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, as the United States struck back at French and British attacks on American sea commerce. Some merchants began to look for more secure areas to invest their profits. The cotton gin had helped boost American consumption of cotton from 1,000 to 90,000 bales a year, as merchants with warehouses, easy access to credit, resources to purchase raw material in large lots, and experience in merchandising turned to cotton textile manufacture as a way of making large and steady profits.

Fifteen of Samuel Slater’s cotton mills had started up by 1807 in Rhode Island. Slater had been an apprentice in England to a partner of Richard Arkwright, an early inventor of cotton textile machinery. In his head Slater had carried the plans of the Arkwright machinery to New York in 1789; this memory feat, his friends claimed, outfoxed English customs officials
enforcing the law forbidding the export of machinery plans or apprentices. Slater came to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, at the invitation of the wealthy Providence merchant Moses Brown to build a cotton spinning frame of twenty-four spindles. Textile production took two steps—spinning, in which the spindle stretches and twists fibers into yarns, and weaving, by which fabric is made by the interlacement of groups of yarns at right angles to each other. Slater’s mills did only the first stage—spinning. The yarn from the mills went to hand weavers who wove the yarns into cloth in their farm homes.

Lowell, unlike Slater, saw the possibilities for profit in bringing the whole process for making cloth into the factory, where unskilled workers could produce by machinery. This would lower costs, for hand weaving was expensive. In 1810, overworked, ill, and exhausted from his ventures in real estate and commerce, he sailed for Edinburgh for a rest cure with his wife, Hannah Jackson Lowell, and his sons. Patrick Tracy Jackson, Lowell’s brother-in-law, managed his affairs and the trading fortune during his absence. Never able to stay idle long, Lowell toured the factory of a large iron manufacturer and then visited the Manchester, England, cotton mills for several weeks. There he observed the Horrocks and Johnson power loom, which incorporated a machine for “dressing” the warp with a starch coating to make it strong enough for power weaving.

Returning to Boston in 1812, Lowell sought the help of an Amesbury mechanic, Paul Moody, to construct a power loom. Together they fashioned a successful one operated by a camshaft. There was nothing remarkable in their power loom—other manufacturers were close to building one as efficient as Lowell’s and later even superior to it; but none of the small partnership and family-owned enterprises of southern New England could match Lowell’s command of investment capital to establish new factories, power systems, and machines on a big scale.

Lowell persuaded Jackson and Nathan Appleton, a wealthy Boston merchant, to join him in raising $400,000 for the venture, including purchase of the power rights on the Charles River in Waltham, with its ten-foot waterfall. An elbow of land jutting into the Charles River and linked by the Great Sudbury Road to Boston provided an excellent factory site. The Boston Associates, as they were called, eventually included the most prominent merchant families in the city—Jackson, Appleton, Lawrence, Cabot, Dwight, Amory, Lyman, and Lowell, all linked by marriage. Lowell designed the buildings for the Waltham mill, including a machine shop where the spinning, carding, and weaving machinery would be made, a small mill with about 2,000 spindles in operation by 1816 and a larger one of 3,500 spindles in operation a few years later.

It was easier to buy machinery than to hire workers, but Lowell had the foresight to attract a new factory labor force of young women from the large New England farm families whose hilly land could not support all its young people. The Waltham system was to be different from the poverty and misery of the English system of labor, different also from the Slater mills that employed large families and put small children into the mills. Too complicated for children to operate, the power looms did not require strength so much as dexterity, and some women knew weaving from work at home. When young men became agricultural laborers, tenant farmers, or moved west, young farm women often went into the factories. Nowhere else could they make as much money. The “mill girls,” as they called themselves, were a temporary labor force. Expecting to work for three or four years and return to the farms or get married, they were not at first eager to demand better working rules.

By 1826 the Waltham mills employed five hundred operatives, who were paid from two to four dollars a week, from which $1.25 for room and board was deducted. The power loom saved considerable labor cost over the hand-loom weaving method. In the machine shops, skilled machinists received fifty cents to two dollars a day, while the superintendent earned two dollars a day. One of the chief attractions of the Waltham mills was that they paid their workers in cash.

The venture was an immediate financial success, paying dividends of from 8 to 13 percent on investments. Lowell and his associates were experienced merchandisers, having already shipped British and Indian cloth, and when the British dumped cotton goods in the United States after the War of 1812, the fine English cotton textiles did not drive out the coarse cotton products of Waltham. In 1816, Lowell had gone to Washington to lobby for a new tariff of 6¼ cents a square yard which would protect the Waltham product against cheap cotton goods from India but would not protect Rhode Island manufacturers of hand-woven calico from imports of fine English cottons.

New England offered a more advantageous environment for factory development, for it had few craftsmen and skilled weavers to resist the machines turning out coarse, unbleached sheeting. With its big water supply and the ample labor force from the poor hill farms of Massachusetts, Waltham was an excellent site for the complete cotton factory. The only comparable locality for cotton mills was Philadelphia, the city to which skilled spinners and weavers had migrated during the colonial period, but unskilled workers were not plentiful there, as the farms of eastern Pennsylvania were fertile and migration to the West was easy.

By 1820 Moody had harnessed the power of the Charles River, so the
Boston Associates looked elsewhere for a new supply of power to build mills from the profits of Waltham. Appleton, Jackson, and Moody selected the community of East Chelmsford, where the Concord and Merrimack rivers came together at Pawtucket Falls—a falls of thirty-two feet from a large watershed that could provide over 3,000 potential horsepower, enough for fifty mills like the two in Waltham. Agents quickly bought four hundred acres from unsuspecting farmers in 1821 and gained control over the entire power of the Merrimack. The community was named Lowell in honor of the financial leader, who had died in 1817 at only forty-two. By 1839, nine textile companies were in operation. The population of Lowell expanded from 200 in 1820 to 30,000 by 1845.

Women made up by far the larger part of this population explosion. A long, low black wagon, called a “slaver,” cruised along Vermont and New Hampshire farm roads in charge of a “commander” who received a dollar a head for any girl he could “bring to the market.” Lowell and the other mill towns made factory work respectable by providing strictly chaperoned boardinghouses and requiring church attendance on Sunday. Female labor constituted over two-thirds of the factory labor force.

The mills of the paternalistic Boston Associates instituted a set of regulations to protect the young women and ensure discipline and compliance. An employee had to remain with the company for at least twelve months once she began work, and to give the company at least two weeks’ notice before she could quit, or her name would go on a blacklist. She was to work fourteen hours a day, six days a week. While she could attend the church of her choice in Lowell, Sunday school was often taught by her overseers.

Lucy Larcom, one of five thousand Lowell girls, began work in 1835, changing the bobbins on the spinning frames when she was eleven years old. After her mother had been widowed and left alone with nine children, she too came to Lowell to work as a boardinghouse matron. During or after work, it was a life without privacy. In the boardinghouses the girls ate in a large communal dining room and slept six to a room, two to a bed. The inmates were locked in their boardinghouses at ten o’clock. In the factory Lucy worked from five in the morning to seven at night, with thirty minutes allowed for lunch and for dinner. Lucy found the work tedious, but there were moments of relief. While the girls could not read on company time—literature in the mills was strictly forbidden—they enjoyed a good deal of camaraderie. And an overseer allowed Lucy to sit in the window and watch the flow of the Merrimack River.

The mill owners were proud of their productive mills, constantly improved machinery, efficient labor force. They conceived of Lowell as a social experiment “that would be a shining example of those ultimate
Yankee ideals: profit and virtue, doing good and doing well.” Visitors were impressed by the boardinghouse system, the chattering, vivacious mill girls, and especially by the educational opportunities of Lowell—by the Lowell Library, begun in 1825 with five hundred dollars from the company, and the Lyceum, also built by the company, which offered twenty-five lectures a year for fifty cents each, as well as night courses. Visitors wrote glowing—and often misleading—reports of busy mills and happy mill girls.

As the success of the Lowell and Waltham mills attracted new investors, the Boston Associates built mills on eight of New England’s best water-power sites—Chicopee, Holyoke, and Lawrence in Massachusetts; Dover, Manchester, and Nashua in New Hampshire; Biddeford and Saco in Maine—eventually comprising one-fifth of America’s cotton textile industry, all centrally controlled with other ventures in finance, insurance, and railroads. The protective tariff of 1816 allowed American industrialists to monopolize the market for the mass-produced, inexpensive, low-grade cotton cloth so much in demand by western settlers. The gin had lowered the price of cotton far below that of flax or wool, so the industrialist could buy cheap raw cotton, manufacture it into cloth, and sell it in a rapidly expanding internal market. The American standard of living was rising faster in this period than that of any other nation in the world.

Other industries such as firearms, woolens, iron, agricultural machinery, shoes and leather products expanded also, but no other industry rose so fast in the early years of 1816 through 1830 as did the cotton textile industry. The total number of factory spindles reached 1,750,000 by 1835. By 1840 mills employed 100,000 people, compared with 5,000 in 1816. The pioneering methods of the cotton textile industry influenced the methods of other industries. Men employed in developing machinery for the cotton textile industry supplied the skills and know-how for other mechanizing industries.

The innovating leaders needed more than machines and manpower; they needed money. Lack of capital was the principal problem of businessmen in the early nineteenth century. As the Napoleonic wars made the United States the major neutral carrier with a corresponding rise in mercantile fortunes, northeastern states with competing seaports promoted their cities and tried to attract capital in various ways, such as awarding charters to businesses to incorporate. Savings banks arose rapidly in the northern and middle states and became capital suppliers to commercial banks either by redepositing deposits or by stock investments and loans to rising industries.