Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (5 page)

This pre-industrial world could not survive the transportation revolution, which made possible a division of labor and specialization of production for ever larger and more distant markets. More and more farmers specialized in crops for which their soil and climate were most suitable. With the cash from sale of these crops they bought food and clothing and hardware previously made locally or by themselves but now grown, processed, or manufactured elsewhere and shipped in by canal or rail. To sow and reap these specialized crops, farmers bought newly invented seed drills, cultivators, mowers, and reapers that a burgeoning farm machinery industry turned out in ever-increasing numbers.

In towns and cities, entrepreneurs who became known as "merchant capitalists" or "industrialists" reorganized and standardized the production of a variety of goods for large-volume sale in regional and eventually national markets. Some of these new entrepreneurs came from the

8
. An enormous literature has grown up to describe and analyze these changes in transportation and communications; perhaps the most vivid account remains George Rogers Taylor,
The Transportation Revolution
, 1815–1860 (New York, 1951).

ranks of master craftsmen who now planned and directed the work of employees to whom they paid wages by the day or by the piece instead of sharing with them the work of fabricating a product and the proceeds of its sale. Other merchant capitalists and industrialists had little or no prior connection with the "trade" (shoemaking, tailoring, etc.). They were businessmen who provided capital and organizing skills to restructure an enterprise in a more efficient manner. This restructuring took various forms, but had one dominant feature in common: the process of making a product (shoes or furniture, for example), which had previously been performed by one or a few skilled craftsmen, was broken down into numerous steps each requiring limited skills and performed by a separate worker. Sometimes the worker did his task with hand tools, but increasingly with the aid of power-driven machinery.

Highly mechanized industries like textiles went early to the factory system, where all operations were housed under one roof with a single source of power (usually water, sometimes steam) to drive the machines. This system enabled the New England textile industry to increase its annual output of cotton cloth from 4 million yards in 1817 to 308 million in 1837. In less mechanized enterprises like garment-sewing, operations took place in smaller shops with part of the process being "put out" to semiskilled workers—often women and children—in their homes and returned to the shop for finishing. This remained true even after the invention in the 1840s of the sewing machine, which could be operated in the home as well as in a factory.

Whatever the precise mixture of power machinery and hand tools, of central shop and putting out, the main characteristics of this new mode of production were division and specialization of labor, standardization of product, greater discipline of the labor force, improved efficiency, higher volume, and lower costs. These factors reduced wholesale commodity prices by 45 percent from 1815 to 1860. During the same years consumer prices declined even more, by an estimated 50 percent.
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By 1860 the nascent outline of the modern American economy of mass consumption, mass production, and capital-intensive agriculture

9
. Adams, "Prices and Wages," in Porter, ed.,
Encyclopedia of American Economic History
, 234. The choice of 1815 as a base year for measurement distorts the picture somewhat, for prices in that year were still inflated from the War of 1812. Even if one chooses the depression year of 1819, however, the decline of wholesale and consumer prices over the next 40 years was an impressive 24 and 41 percent respectively.

was visible. Its development had been uneven across different regions and industries. It was far from complete even in the most advanced sections of the country like New England, where many village blacksmiths and old-time shoemakers could still be found. On the frontier west of the Mississippi and on many internal frontiers in the older sections where the transportation revolution had not yet penetrated—the upland and piney woods regions of the South, for example, or the forests of Maine and the Adirondacks—it had scarcely begun. Many Americans still lived in a nearly self-sufficient handicraft, premarket economy not much different from what their grandparents had known. But the more advanced sectors of the economy had already given the United States the world's highest standard of living and the second-highest industrial output, closing in fast on their British cousins despite the latter's half-century head start in the industrial revolution.
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Those cousins had begun to sit up and take notice. The victory of
America
over fourteen British yachts in the 1851 race of the Royal Yacht Squadron shocked the world's leading maritime power. The race occurred during the international industrial exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London, where the products of American industry evoked great curiosity. It was not so much the quality of American muskets, reapers, locks, and revolvers that impressed Britons, but the way in which they had been produced by machine-made interchangeable parts. The concept of interchangeability was not new in 1851. Nor was it exclusively American. The French arms industry had pioneered interchangeable parts for muskets as early as the 1780s. But most of those parts had been fashioned by skilled craftsmen working with hand tools. Their interchangeability was at best approximate. What was new to European observers in 1851 was the American technique of making each part by a special-purpose machine, which could reproduce an endless number of similar parts within finer tolerances than the most skilled of craftsmen could achieve. The British named this process "the American system of manufactures," and so it has been known ever since.
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The interchangeability of parts fabricated by this "system" was often

10
. Edgar Winfield Martin,
The Standard of Living in 1860: American Consumption on the Eve of the Civil War
(Chicago, 1942), 400–401.

11
. The best studies of the origins of the American system of manufacturers are Nathan Rosenberg, ed.,
The American System of Manufactures
(Edinburgh, 1969); David A. Hounshell,
From the American System to Mass Production 1800–1932
(Baltimore, 1984); and Otto Mayr and Robert C. Post, eds.,
Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures
(Washington, 1981).

less than advertised. Hand-filing was sometimes necessary to attain an exact fit. Precision machines and gauges with tolerances within a thousandth of an inch came a generation or two later. Nevertheless, a test of ten randomly selected muskets each made in a separate year from 1844 to 1853 at the Springfield (Massachusetts) armory convinced British skeptics. A workman disassembled the parts, jumbled them in a box, and reassembled ten muskets flawlessly.

It was no coincidence that interchangeability was first perfected in small-arms manufacture. In wartime an army needs a large number of weapons in a hurry and must be able to replace damaged parts in an equal hurry. The U. S. government armories at Springfield and Harper's Ferry had gradually developed the process during the generation before 1850. The British imported American machinery to establish the En-field Armoury during the Crimean War. Samuel Colt also set up a revolver factory in London stocked with machinery from Connecticut. These events symbolized a transfer of world leadership in the machine-tool industry from Britain to the United States.

During the 1850s, delegations of British industrialists visiting America sent back reports on a wide variety of products manufactured by special-purpose machines: clocks and watches, furniture and a host of other wood products, nails and screws, nuts and bolts, railroad spikes, locks, plows, and so on. "There is nothing that cannot be produced by machinery," Samuel Colt told a committee of Parliament in 1854—and by then the British were ready to believe him.
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The principles of mass production in America extended to what seemed unlikely practices: for example, the building of houses. This was the era in which "balloon-frame" construction was invented. Today at least three-quarters of American houses are built this way. Before the 1830s, however, houses were generally built in one of three ways: of logs rough-hewn by axes; of brick or stone; or of heavy timbers shaped by carpenters and joined by mortoise and tenon fastened with wooden pegs. The first was cheap but drafty and hardly satisfactory for a growing middle class of rising affluence; the latter two were solid but expensive and slow to build, requiring skilled masons or carpenters who were in short supply in overnight cities, like Chicago, that required a great deal of housing in a hurry. To meet these needs the first balloon-frame buildings appeared during the 1830s in Chicago and in Rochester, a boom town on

12
. Eugene S. Ferguson, "Technology as Knowledge," in Edwin T. Layton, Jr., ed.,
Technology and Social Change in America
(New York, 1973), 23.

the Erie Canal. These houses were constructed with the now familiar combination of machine-sawed boards fastened together with factory-produced nails to form the skeleton of a frame house. Machine-sawed siding and shingles and factory-made doors and window parts filled in the frame. Skeptics scoffed that these "balloon frames" would blow away in the first high wind. But in fact they were remarkably strong, for the boards were nailed together in such a way that every strain went against the grain of the wood. These houses could be put up in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of houses built by traditional methods. So successful was this "Chicago construction" that it spread quickly to every part of the country.
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Balloon-frame houses illustrated four of the factors cited then and later to explain the emergence of the American system of manufactures. The first was what economists call demand and what social historians might call a democracy of consumption: the need or desire of a growing and mobile population for a variety of ready-made consumer goods at reasonable prices. Considering themselves members of the "middling classes," most Americans in the 1850s were willing and able to buy ready-made shoes, furniture, men's clothing, watches, rifles, even houses. If these products lacked the quality, finish, distinction, and durability of fine items made by craftsmen, they were nevertheless functional and affordable. A new institution, the "department store," sprang up to market the wares of mass production to a mass public. European visitors who commented (not always favorably) on the relationship between a political system of universal (white) manhood suffrage and a socioeconomic system of standardized consumption were right on the mark. Grinding poverty and luxurious wealth were by no means absent from the United States, but what impressed most observers was the broad middle.

Another factor that gave rise to the American system was the shortage and consequent high cost of labor. A deficiency of skilled carpenters, for example, spawned the balloon-frame house. "The labouring classes are comparatively few," reported a British industrial commission that visited the United States in 1854, "and to this very want . . . may be attributed the extraordinary ingenuity displayed in many of these labour-saving machines, whose automatic action so completely supplies the place of the more abundant hand labour of the older manufacturing

13
. Daniel J. Boorstin,
The Americans: The National Experience
(New York, 1965), 148–52.

countries." Europeans found surprisingly little opposition to mechanization among American workers. With labor scarce in the first place, new machines instead of displacing workers, as they often did elsewhere, tended rather to multiply each worker's productivity. American "workmen hail with satisfaction all mechanical improvements," reported a British industrialist (with exaggeration), "the importance and value of which, as releasing them from the drudgery of unskilled labour, they are enabled by education to understand and appreciate."
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While not rejecting this labor-scarcity thesis, some historians emphasize a third reason for the capital-intensive nature of the American system—the high resource endowment of the United States. Resources are a form of capital; three outstanding examples in this period were land, wood, and abundant water-power sites especially in New England. The high ratio of land to people encouraged a form of agriculture that would have been wasteful elsewhere but made economic sense in the United States, where the use of machinery achieved a modest yield per acre but a high yield per man-hour of labor. Wood was as plentiful in America as it was scarce in Europe; consequently it had a myriad uses in the new world—fuel for steamboats and locomotives, lumber for houses, frames and parts for machines, and so on. American machine tools were developed first in woodworking industries, where they shaped almost anything made of wood: furniture, musket stocks, axe handles, wheel spokes, doors, and hundreds of other items. Machined products were far more wasteful of wood than handcrafted items, but economically rational where wood was cheap and labor expensive. The American lead in woodworking machines laid the groundwork for an emerging superiority in metalworking machines after 1850. Fast-flowing streams provided a cheap source of energy for American mills that enabled water to retain its status as the principal source of industrial power in the United States until 1870.
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