American Experiment (72 page)

One of these was Fred Bailey; his escape indicated the possibilities and problems facing a black seeking to flee even from a border state with a large population of freedmen. Brought up by grandparents, he had never known his father and barely known his mother. He had luck enough to be sent to Baltimore, where his mistress, a kind and pious woman, began to teach him his letters, until her husband angrily told her to stop, for reading would “spoil the best nigger in the world.” A chip of fate, Frederick was thrust back and forth from plantation and household, but in the process he learned to read, to teach other blacks, to become expert as a ship’s caulker, and even to stand his master off physically to avoid a beating. The master hired him out to a Baltimore shipyard, where white workers tolerated him only because his wages went to his owner. Becoming increasingly independent, self-reliant, and proud, he borrowed papers given to free black seamen coming ashore in southern ports, donned sailor’s clothes, and boarded a train for Philadelphia and freedom. Abolitionists in New York helped him move on to New Bedford and its shipyards.

Frederick Douglass, as he now called himself, could not ply his trade there because white workers threatened to strike, so he had to pick up odd jobs as a common laborer. Finding the Methodist Church segregated, he
joined the Zion Methodists, where he became a class leader. Soon he was reading Garrison’s
Liberator
, attending abolitionist meetings, and talking with his friends at church.

In the summer of 1841, abolitionists held an antislavery convention on the island of Nantucket. Douglass attended—mainly for the holiday, he said later—and was invited to speak. How the crowd was electrified by this dynamic young man with his rich, commanding voice—how they were mesmerized by the story of his years in bondage—how he was hired on the spot to speak for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society—how he spent years on the abolitionist speaking circuit, with Garrison often sharing the platform—how he broke with Garrison and founded his own newspaper,
North Star
—how for years he gave other blacks a forum in his paper for their opinions—all this and much else became the stuff of one of the great personal histories of the nineteenth century.

Still, abolitionism was faltering even as Douglass, Garrison, and others were achieving their greatest renown. Nothing seemed to thwart Slave Power—not abolitionism or colonization or compromise or slave escapes or revolts. No single effort or strategy was enough to overcome the
system
of slavery. Could a united effort on the part of all major reformist and deprived elements overcome that system? Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Frederick Douglass, who might well have spent his life absorbed in the cause only of blacks, was that he reached out to other groups—especially to women and their rights.

At about the same time that the horn was sounding outside the slave quarters of Montevideo, women on millions of farms throughout the nation were starting their day’s chores in kitchens and outside. Despite the rise of the factory system, most American working women by mid-century were still farm women, and most farm women were still drudges. While their husbands bought steel plows, mowers, threshers, seed drills, and cultivators, farm wives shared little in labor-saving advances. The box stove that came into use in the late 1830s freed some city women of certain vexatious aspects of cooking, but stoves were not yet common in the country. While city women could import Frederic Tudor’s ice from Boston, the country woman had no refrigeration except perhaps a nearby spring or family icehouse. Meat was preserved by curing and smoking it for thirty or forty hours. Milking, churning, pickling, preserving, and sun-drying of vegetables were also the lot of the country woman. On the
frontier, women were scarce and hence highly valued but often had to shoulder men’s tasks. On wagon trains going west, they could be seen with ankle-length skirts often hanging in tatters as they yoked cattle, pitched tents, loaded wagons, lifted heavy iron pots onto crossbars over the campfires.

Along with the house and farm chores many country women still made clothes for their families, at least until ready-made clothing began to penetrate the more remote rural towns by the 1840s. Girls started weaving thread into cloth as early as their fifth year. An older and steadier hand was required to gauge the amount of flax to spin: if too thick, the thread would bunch up; if too thin, it would break. To spin enough for a single square yard of cloth required one full day. Weaving was faster, five or six square, yards a day. Women made sheets, blankets, towels, and rugs as well as the family clothing.

A farm woman typically was expected to rear six children on a two-and-one-half-year cycle of childbirth from her early twenties to her late thirties. The emotional and physical burden of repeated childbirth overwhelmed many women, resulting in ill health and premature aging if not in death. Although conscious family limitation was occasionally practiced, a historian noted, effective contraception was not available, and “custom, myth, religion, and men” acted to limit birth control. “I would it were not thus,” Millicent Leib Hunt, wife of a prominent Detroit settler, complained on the birth of still another child. “I love my liberty, my ease, my comfort and do not willingly endure the inconveniences and sufferings of pregnancy and childbirth,” but these were “God’s ways” and she reproached herself for daring to complain. Before the birth of each of her five children she expected that either she or the baby—or both—would die.

Mothers had constantly to confront illness and death in the home. Children by the thousands died in epidemics of scarlet fever, cholera, ague, bilious fevers: the younger they were, the more vulnerable. Of the deaths recorded in South Carolina one year, nearly one-half were children under the age of five, nearly one-fourth children under one year.

Some women managed to escape all this—at least for a time. The growing factories of the Northeast continued to recruit women. Immigrants and farm girls flocked to Lowell and other mill towns. The work they turned to liberated other women as well, for they could now replace a large part of their labor time with manufactured clothing. Every time a woman left home to work in the mills she expanded both the labor reserve and the market for the specific goods of her industry. Every worker who swelled the ranks of the mill dimmed the prospects of better working conditions
or even the success of the whole lot. By the 1840s, the bloom was off the social experiment that was to have been a shining example of the Yankee ideal of profit combined with virtue.

Alterations in the means and mode of production lay at the root of the change. As the owners faced sharpening competition, the pressure came to be unrelenting, forcing heavier workloads on women who were paid at piece rates. In the 1820s and 1830s, each operator was expected to handle two looms, allowing some relief and rest; later they were compelled to handle three or four. In 1834 the Lowell management, taking advantage of the labor pool, announced a 15 percent wage cut. Hours had always been long; but the speedup combined with wage cuts made conditions in the mills almost intolerable. The women worked amid an infernal racket, in rooms polluted by flying lint particles and fumes from whale-oil lamps and kept oppressively warm and humid because the threads had to be damp to prevent breakage. Although the mill girls had been vaccinated against smallpox, nevertheless typhoid, dysentery, and especially tuberculosis took their toll in the crowded factories.

As textile operations expanded, the repressive aspects of the old Yankee paternalism persisted while the more personal and benign elements faded. Mill owners could ignore women’s problems of illness, exhaustion, restlessness, simple desire for change, because all knew that many workers would sooner or later be returning to homes elsewhere and would take these sorts of problems back with them. The fact that the owners’ concept of factory labor ultimately turned on the basic premise that they were simply buying one more object—human labor—became increasingly blatant. Stepped-up mechanization and widening routinization within the factories were beginning to produce a class of proletarians far removed from the early image of the happy mill girl.

Would the mill workers become conscious of their altered status? The historian usually was left to speculate about the “short and simple annals of the poor.” But in this case the factory women left a superb legacy of writings—not only letters and diaries but a “literature of the mill.” The best side of Yankee paternalism—the concern for “enlightening” and “elevating” the mill girl—had a remarkable effect. The night-school classes, Improvement Societies, Lyceum lectures given by Emerson, Everett, Horace Mann, Robert Owen, and other notables, the subscriptions to circulating libraries, even the Sunday-school classes, all helped produce an outpouring of writing in the operatives’ own magazine, the
Lowell Offering
, and elsewhere. They were exposed to all kinds of socialist, democratic, and Utopian thought, the labor movement, abolition, poverty, budding class consciousness. The editor of the
Offering
, Harriet Farley, was expected by
management to maintain strict neutrality, but the feelings of the mill hands, and especially their rising consciousness of the nature of factory life, burst through.

Thus a “fictional” account of a mill girl’s first day at work:

“The next morning she went into the Mill, and at first the sight of so many bands, and wheels, and springs in constant motion, was very frightful. She felt afraid to touch the loom, and she was almost sure she could never learn to weave…the shuttle flew out, and made a new bump on her head; and the first time she tried to spring the lathe, she broke out a quarter of the treads.”

Letters also revealed feelings.

“Dear Friend,” wrote a mill worker to a confidante back home, “according to my promise I take my pen in hand to Write to you to let you no that i am A Factory girl and i wish you Was one i dont no But thaire Will be aplace For you in a fortnigh or three Weeks and as Soon as thaire is iwill let you no and as soon as you Can board With me We will have first rate fun getting up mornings in the Snow Storms.…Elisebeth is a lot of hansome fellows here….for pitty Sake dond Show this letter to any body for the girls are talking So that idont no What iWrite.”

“Dear Harriet,” wrote H. E. Back to a friend in New Hampshire. “With a feeling which you can better imagine than I can describe do I announce to you the horrible tidings that I am
once more a factory girl!
yes; once more a factory girl, seated in the short attic of a Lowell boarding house with a half dozen of girls seated around me talking and reading.…I almost envy you happy Sundays at home. A feeling of loneliness comes over me when I think of
my home
, now far away; you remember perhaps how I used to tell you how I spent my hours in the mill—in imagining myself rich and that the rattle of machinery was the rumbling of my charriot wheels but now alas, that happy tact has fled from me and my mind no longer takes such airy and visionary flights for the wings of my imagination have folded themselves to rest.…”

The writings of the mill girls mirrored their mounting unrest. Their feelings were often too strong for the
Offering.
An outspoken mill worker, Sarah Bagley, attacked the magazine for accepting corporation subsidies and presenting a rosy picture of life at Lowell. “One would suppose,” she wrote, “that the Lowell mills were filled with farmers’ daughters who could live without labor and who go there merely as a resort for health and recreation, instead of a large portion of poverty’s daughters whose fathers do not possess one foot of land, but work day by day for the bread that feeds their families.”

Workers complained more and more of the denial of their liberty. “The
evils and abuses of the present system of factory labor,” Mehitable Eastman told her fellow workers in 1846, “have accumulated too rapidly to be passed by in silence. I have been employed by a manufacturing company, for eight years,—have been subject to its increasing heartlessness and cruelty, and from bitter experience can affirm that a change cannot be effected too soon.…We have witnessed from time to time the cruelties practiced by brutal Overseers and selfish agents upon defenceless operatives, while they dare not speak in self-defence lest they should be deprived of the means of earning their daily bread.…”

A poem, “The Factory Bell,” published in the
Factory Girl’s Garland
in Exeter, New Hampshire, remarks on the relentless ringing of the factory bell calling the workers, as it sometimes seemed, up to death’s door, which was equated with the factory gate:

… Sisters, haste, the bell is tolling, Soon will close the dreadful gate.…

The poem continues with a comment on the relentless ding-dong-ding all day long: bells for meals; bells for return to work; and, finally, “our toil is ended, Joyous bell, good night, good night.”

Lucy Larcom had loved her factory life at first—“even the familiar, unremitting clatter of the mill, because it indicated that something was going on. I liked to feel the people around me…I felt that I belonged to the world, that there was something for me to do in it, though I had not yet found out what….” But later she would put her feelings about the routine and the crowdedness into verse.

The persons who uttered their grievances, in prose and poetry, were the more articulate women, potential leaders of their sisters. Much depended on whether the Sarah Bagleys, Lucy Larcoms, and the like could arouse their fellow-operatives to full consciousness of their lack of liberty and equality. And here the owners’ system itself played into the militants’ hands. The homogeneity of the women—the great majority were native-born New Englanders—their segregation from the rest of the population, their closeness in age, their communal housing, and above all their mutual dependence on one another for social and psychological support—all strengthened the bonds of sisterhood. Although this closeness had its drawbacks in lack of privacy and tranquillity, and conformity was often the price of acceptance, “much of our happiness, nay,
everything
,” as Sarah Bagley said, “depends on our social existence.…Our
whole
life is interwoven, with each other, in a greater or lesser degree.…”