Explain how labor evolved from the putting-out system? to unskilled wage labor during the early Industrial Revolution? Describe industrializations impact on the nature of work Describ

Module 8 & 9 Industrial Transformation and Democracy

Early Industrialization

GUIDED READING QUESTIONS:

• 1. Explain how labor evolved from the “putting-out system” to unskilled wage labor during the early Industrial Revolution

• 2. Describe industrialization’s impact on the nature of work

Figure 1. Major milestones in industrialization (credit “1807 photo”: Project Gutenberg Archives).

Northern industrialization expanded rapidly following the War of 1812. Industrialized manufacturing began in New England, where wealthy merchants built water-powered textile mills (and centralized company towns to support them) along the rivers of the Northeast. These mills introduced new modes of production centralized in the confines of the mill itself. Production now relied on complex machinery powered by water, and later steam. In addition to the mechanization and concentration of work in the mills, specialized, repetitive tasks assigned to wage laborers replaced earlier modes of skilled handicraft production, which was done by artisans in their home. The operation of these mills irrevocably changed the nature of work by deskilling tasks and breaking down the process of production to its most basic elements. In return for their labor, the workers received hourly wages and sometimes a place to live in one of the mill town boarding houses. Many of these original unskilled laborers were young women from rural New England farming families. From its origin in New England, industrial manufacturing soon spread to other regions of the United States.

From Artisans to Wage Workers

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, artisans—skilled, experienced craft workers— produced goods by hand. The production of shoes provides a good example. In colonial times, people bought their shoes from master shoemakers, who achieved their status by living and working as apprentices under the rule of an older master artisan. After completing an apprenticeship, a young artisan would work as a journeyman (a skilled worker without his own shop). After sufficient time as a journeyman, a shoemaker could at last set up his own shop as a master artisan. People came to the shop, usually attached to the back of the master artisan’s house, and there the shoemaker measured their feet in order to cut and stitch together an individualized product for each customer.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, merchants in the Northeast and elsewhere turned their attention as never before to the benefits of using unskilled wage labor to make a greater profit by reducing labor costs. They used the putting-out system, which the British had employed at the beginning of their own Industrial Revolution, whereby they hired farming families to perform specific tasks in the production process for a set wage. This system of “piece work” divided much of production into discrete steps performed by different workers. In this new system, merchants or investors sent or “put-out” raw materials for goods, which individuals or families would then begin to make at home. These independent laborers then turned over the partially finished goods to another laborer to finish. In the case of shoes, for instance, American merchants hired one group of workers to cut soles into standardized sizes. A different group of families cut pieces of leather for the uppers, while still another was employed to stitch the standardized parts together.

This process proved attractive because it reduced production costs. The families who participated in the putting-out system were not skilled artisans. They had not spent years learning and perfecting their craft and did not have ambitious journeymen to pay. Therefore, they could not demand—and did not receive—high wages. Most of the year they tended fields and orchards, ate the food that they produced, and sold the surplus. Putting-out work provided a welcome source of extra income for New England farm families, who were beginning to see their profits dwindle due to competition from new Midwestern farms with higher-yield land.

Much of this part-time production was done under contract to merchants. Some farming families engaged in shoemaking (or shoe assemblage), as noted above. Many made brooms, plaited hats from straw or palm leaves (which merchants imported from Cuba and the West Indies), crafted furniture, made pottery, or wove baskets. Some, especially those who lived in Connecticut, made parts for clocks. The most common part-time occupation, however, was the manufacture of textiles. Farm women spun woolen thread and wove fabric. They also wove blankets, made rugs, and knit stockings. All this manufacturing took place in their homes, giving families control over the pace of their labor. Their domestic productivity increased the quantity of goods available for sale in country towns and nearby cities and drove further advances in manufacturing.

American Manufacturing and Changes in Labor

Figure 2. Authentic power looms at the Boott Cotton Mill and Museum in Lowell, MA.

As early as the 1790s, merchants in New England began experimenting with machines to replace the “putting-out system.” To effect this transition, merchants and factory owners relied on British technological knowledge to build the machines they needed. In 1789, a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island contracted twenty-one-year-old British immigrant Samuel Slater to build a yarn-spinning machine and carding machine. Slater had apprenticed in an English mill and was familiar with the design of their machinery. American “industrial espionage” began to pay off in 1813 when Francis Cabot Lowell, a merchant from Boston, returned from a two-year trip to Britain. Lowell was desperate to find a way to allow the U.S. to keep up with England’s textile production, but British law prohibited the sale of manufacturing equipment to Americans. He had committed the design of the British power loom to memory during his trip so that he could smuggle England’s industrial know-how into Massachusetts. Lowell hired a machinist named Paul Moody to recreate the powered looms and in 1814 he opened the Boston Manufacturing Company, which used the Charles River to power the first integrated textile mill, a setup where all production steps from handling raw materials to presenting finished goods was combined under one roof.

Lowell’s contribution to American industrialism was not only technological but also organizational, helping to streamline and centralize the American manufacturing process. His new approach, the Waltham-Lowell System, created the textile mill that defined antebellum New England and American industrialism. This modern manufacturing process was fully realized in the planned mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts in 1821, four years after Francis Lowell died. Powered by the Merrimack River and operated by local farm girls, the mills of Lowell centralized the process of textile manufacturing under one roof. The modern American factory was born. Soon, ten thousand employees worked in Lowell alone. Sarah Rice, who worked at the nearby Millbury factory, found it “a noisy place” that was “more confined than I like to be.” Working conditions were harsh for the “mill girls” who operated the factories from sun-up to sun-down. One worker complained that “a large class of females are, and have been, destined to a state of servitude.” These women organized strikes and lobbied for better hours, but the appeal of wage labor was high. As another worker noted, “very many Ladies…have given up millinery, dressmaking & school keeping for work in the mill.” With a large supply of eager workers, Lowell’s vision brought a rush of capital and entrepreneurs into New England, resulting in the first manufacturing boom in the new republic.

Figure 3. Winslow Homer, “Bell-Time,” Harper’s Weekly vol. XII (July 1868): p. 472.

The Changing Nature of Work

The market revolution shook other industries as well. Craftsmen began to understand that new markets increased the demand for their products. Some shoemakers, for instance, abandoned the traditional method of producing custom-built shoes at their home workshop and instead began producing larger quantities of shoes in ready-made sizes to be shipped to urban centers. Manufacturers who wanted increased production abandoned the old personal approach of relying upon a single live-in apprentice for labor and instead hired unskilled wage laborers. These workers did not have to be trained in all aspects of making shoes but could simply be assigned a single repeatable aspect of the task. Factories slowly replaced shops. The old paternalistic apprentice system, which involved long-term obligations between apprentice and master, gave way to a more impersonal and more flexible labor system in which unskilled laborers could be hired and fired as the market dictated. A writer in the New York Observer in 1826 complained that “The master no longer lives among his apprentices [and] watches over their moral as well as mechanical improvement.” Such sentiments were an early indicator that the new labor arrangements were transforming both social relations and more impersonal economic hierarchies.

Masters-turned-employers now not only had fewer obligations to their workers but also less personal attachment. They no longer shared the bonds of their trade but were categorized into new class- based relationships: employers and employees, bosses and workers, capitalists and laborers. On the other hand, workers were freed from the long-term obligations of apprenticeship and the legal subjugation of indentured servitude. They could—theoretically—work when and where they wanted. When men or women made an agreement with an employer to work for wages, they were “left free to apportion among themselves their respective shares, untrammeled…by unwise laws,” as Reverend Alonzo Potter rosily proclaimed in 1840. But while the new labor system was celebrated throughout the northern United States by the captains of industry as “free labor,” it was simultaneously lamented by the growing class of powerless laborers who had no recourse against their employers to improve their conditions or their wages.

As the northern United States rushed headlong toward commercialization and an early capitalist economy, many Americans grew uneasy about the growing gap between wealthy businessmen and impoverished wage laborers. Elites like Daniel Webster defended their wealth and privilege by insisting that all workers could achieve “a career of usefulness and enterprise” if they were “industrious and sober,” but labor activist Seth Luther countered that capitalism created “a cruel system of extraction on the bodies and minds of the producing classes…for no other object than to enable the ‘rich’ to ‘take care of themselves’ while the poor must work or starve.”

Americans embarked upon their industrial revolution with the expectation that all men could start their careers as humble wage workers but eventually participate in property ownership and financial stability if they only worked hard enough. Wage work had traditionally been looked down upon as a state of dependence, suitable only as a temporary waypoint for young men without resources on their path toward the economic success necessary to comfortably support a middle-class family. Children’s magazines – such as Juvenile Miscellany and Parley’s Magazine – glorified the prospect of moving up the economic ladder. This “free labor ideology,” where hard work, thrift and a suitably aspirational orientation meant personal advancement, had a darker side too, as mobile workers seeking opportunities would move to the same cities only to face reduced prospects and unenployment due to the sudden oversupply of labor.

The new commercial economy often failed in its promise of social mobility. Depressions and downturns might destroy businesses and reduce their owners to wage work, but even in times of prosperity, unskilled workers perpetually lacked economic security and therefore had to depend upon

supplemental income from their wives and young children. This combination of low wages, job competition, deskilling, economic uncertainty, and a lack of workers’ rights led to such atrocities as widespread child labor and crowded urban centers with poor sanitation and unsafe living conditions. With the rise of industrialization and cramped living quarters also came a rise in diseases like cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis. Workers poured into cities looking for jobs and were often housed in crowded tenement buildings with no running water and entire families living in a single room. In New York City, the death rate rose from 21 in 1000 to 37 in 1000 between 1810 and 1837, an increase of almost 80% in less than 50 years.

The Rise of Manufacturing

GUIDED READING QUESTION:

• 3. Describe the rise of industrial manufacturing in the early-mid 19th century and the nature of factory labor

In the late 1790s and early 1800s, Great Britain boasted the most advanced textile mills and machines in the world, and the United States continued to rely on Great Britain for finished goods. Great Britain hoped to maintain its economic advantage over its former colonies in North America. In an effort to prevent the knowledge of advanced manufacturing from leaving England, the British banned the emigration of mechanics and skilled workers who knew how to build and repair the latest textile machines.

Despite their best efforts, some British mechanics, including Samuel Slater, managed to travel to the United States in the hopes of profiting from their experience with advanced textile machinery. Slater understood the workings of the latest water-powered textile mills, which British industrialist Richard Arkwright had pioneered. In the 1790s in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Slater convinced several American merchants, including the wealthy industrialist Moses Brown, to finance and build a water- powered cotton mill based on the British models. Slater’s knowledge of both technology and mill organization made him the founder of the first truly successful cotton mill in the United States.

Figure 1. Samuel Slater (a) was a British migrant who brought plans for English textile mills to the United States and built the

nation’s first successful water-powered mill in Pawtucket, Massachusetts (b).

The success of Slater and his partners, Smith Brown and William Almy (relatives of Moses Brown), inspired others to build additional mills in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. By 1807, thirteen more

water-powered mills had been established. President Thomas Jefferson’s embargo on British manufactured goods from late 1807 to early 1809 spurred more New England merchants to invest in industrial enterprises because Americans were desperate for domestic goods. By 1812, seventy-eight new textile mills had been built in rural New England towns. More than half turned out woolen goods, while the rest produced cotton cloth.

Slater’s mills and those built in imitation of his were fairly small, employing only seventy people on average. Workers were organized in family units, the way that they had been in English factories. Under the Rhode Island system families were hired together, with the father being placed in charge of the family unit and directing the labor of his wife and children. Instead of being paid in cash, the workers were given credit equal to the value of the family’s labor, which could be redeemed towards rent for company-owned housing or goods from the company-owned store.

The Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812 played a pivotal role in spurring industrial development in the United States. Jefferson’s embargo prevented American merchants from engaging in the Atlantic trade, severely cutting into their profits. The War of 1812 further compounded the financial woes of American merchants. The acute economic problems led some New England merchants, including Francis Cabot Lowell, to cast their gaze on manufacturing. Lowell, having memorized the designs for the advanced textile machines he had seen in his travels to England, convinced other merchant families to invest in the creation of new mill towns. In 1813, Lowell and these wealthy investors, known as the Boston Associates, created the Boston Manufacturing Company. Together they raised $400,000 and, in 1814, established two water-powered textile mills in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Figure 2. The Boston Manufacturing Company, shown in this engraving made in 1813–1816, was headquartered in Waltham,

Massachusetts. The company started the northeastern textile industry by building water-powered textile mills along suitable rivers

and developing mill towns around them.

At Waltham, cotton was carded and drawn into coarse strands of fibers called rovings. The rovings were then spun into yarn, and the yarn woven into cotton cloth. Yarn no longer had to be put out to farm families for further processing. All the work was now performed at a central location—the factory.

The work in Lowell’s mills was both mechanized and specialized. Specialization meant the work was broken down into specific tasks, and workers steadily repeatedly the one task assigned to them. As

machines took over labor from humans and people increasingly found themselves confined to the same repetitive jobs, the process of deskilling began, wherein there was no longer a need to hire trained, professional laborers. Any worker could perform any job with minimal instruction or training, making now interchangeable employees less valuable and more easily replaceable.

The Boston Associates’ mills, which each employed hundreds of workers, were located in company towns, where the factories and worker housing were owned by the employer. This gave the owners and their agents more direct control over their workers. The most famous of these company towns was Lowell, Massachusetts. The new town was built on land the Boston Associates purchased in 1821 from the village of East Chelmsford at the falls of the Merrimack River, north of Boston. The mill buildings themselves were constructed of red brick with large windows to let in light. Company-owned boarding houses to shelter employees were constructed near the mills. The mill owners planted flowers and trees to maintain the appearance of a rural New England town and to forestall arguments, made by many, that factory work was unnatural and unwholesome.

In contrast to many smaller mills, the Boston Associates’ enterprises avoided the Rhode Island system, preferring individual workers to families. These employees were not difficult to find. The competition New England farmers faced from farmers now settling in the Midwest, and the growing scarcity of land in population-dense New England, had implications for farmers’ children. Realizing their chances of inheriting a profitable farm or receiving a substantial dowry were remote, these teenagers sought other employment opportunities, often at the urging of their parents. While young men could work in a variety of occupations, young women had more limited options. The textile mills provided suitable employment for the daughters of New England farm families.

Anxious parents were concerned about their daughters’ moral upkeep while they worked away from home. Families hoped to avoid what they viewed as common problems of industrialization—filth and vice, so the Boston Associates established strict rules governing the lives of these young female workers. The women lived in company-owned boarding houses to which they paid a portion of their wages. They woke early at the sound of a bell and worked twelve-hour shifts during which talking was forbidden. They could not swear or drink alcohol, and they were required to attend church on Sunday. Overseers at the mills and boarding-house keepers kept a close eye on the young women’s behavior; workers who associated themselves with people of questionable reputation or behaved immorally lost their jobs and were evicted.

MICHEL CHEVALIER ON MILL WORKER RULES AND WAGES

In the 1830s, the French government sent engineer and economist Michel Chevalier to study industrial and

financial affairs in Mexico and the United States. In 1839, he published Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States, in which he recorded his impressions of the Lowell textile mills. In the excerpt below, Chevalier describes the rules and wages of the Lawrence Company in 1833.

All persons employed by the Company must devote themselves assiduously to their duty during working- hours. They must be capable of doing the work which they undertake, or use all their efforts to this effect. They must on all occasions, both in their words and in their actions, show that they are penetrated by a laudable love of temperance and virtue, and animated by a sense of their moral and social obligations. The Agent of the Company shall endeavour to set to all a good example in this respect. Every individual who shall be notoriously dissolute, idle, dishonest, or intemperate, who shall be in the practice of absenting himself from divine service, or shall violate the Sabbath, or shall be addicted to gaming, shall be dismissed from the service of the Company. . . . All ardent spirits are banished from the Company’s grounds, except when prescribed by a physician. All games of hazard and cards are prohibited within their limits and in the boarding-houses.

Weekly wages were as follows: For picking and carding, $2.78 to $3.10

For spinning, $3.00 For weaving, $3.10 to $3.12 For warping and sizing, $3.45 to $4.00 For measuring and folding, $3.12

The mechanization of formerly handcrafted goods and the movement of production from the home to the factory dramatically increased the output of goods. For example, in one nine-month period, the numerous Rhode Island women who spun yarn into cloth on handlooms in their homes produced a total of thirty-four thousand yards of fabrics of different types. In 1855, the women working in just one of Lowell’s mechanized mills produced more than forty-three thousand yards.

Figure 3. A plan of the hopper boy and bucket elevator used in Evans-style flour mills, from the Young Mill-wright and Miller’s

Guide, 1834 edition.

The Boston Associates’ cotton mills quickly gained a competitive edge over the smaller mills established by Samuel Slater and those who had imitated him. Their success prompted the Boston Associates to expand. In Massachusetts, in addition to Lowell, new mill towns were built in Chicopee, Lawrence, and Holyoke. In New Hampshire, Lowell-style mills popped up in Manchester, Dover, and Nashua. In Maine, a large mill was built on the Saco River. Other entrepreneurs copied the Boston Associates’ business plan. By the time of the Civil War, 878 new textile factories had been built in New England. Altogether, these factories employed more than 100,000 people and produced more than 940 million yards of cloth per year.

Figure 4. Oliver Evans was an American engineer and inventor, best known for developing ways to automate the flour milling

process, which is illustrated here in a drawing from a 1785 instructional book called The Young Mill-Wright & Miller’s Guide.

Industrial success in New England was replicated elsewhere. Small mills, more like those in Rhode Island, were built in New York, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. By the mid-19th century, 300 textile mills were located in and around Philadelphia. Many produced specialty goods, such as silks and printed fabrics, and employed skilled workers, including those who worked in their own homes. In the South, the region that otherwise relied on slave labor to produce the cotton that fed the northern factories, more than 200 textile mills were built. Most textiles, however, continued to be produced in New England in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

Alongside the production of cotton and woolen cloth, which formed the backbone of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, production of other goods increasingly became mechanized and centralized in factories in the first half of the nineteenth century. The production of shoes, leather, paper, hats, clocks, and firearms had all become mechanized to one degree or another by the time of the Civil War. Flour milling had also become almost completely automated by the early decades of the nineteenth century, thanks to the inventions of Oliver Evans, such as the gravity-assisted bucket elevator and the flour processing hopper boy. So efficient were Evans-style mills that two employees were able to do work that had originally required five, and mills using Evans’s system spread throughout the mid-Atlantic states.

The Decline of Northern Slavery and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom

GUIDED READING QUESTION:

• 4. Discuss the critical role slavery played in the early Southern economy

The market revolution economy depended upon both free-market labor factories in the North and slave-labor plantations in the South. By 1832, textile companies made up more than 80% of American corporations valued at over $100,000. These textile mills, worked by free-market laborers, depended upon southern cotton and the vast new market economy spurred the expansion of Southern

plantation operations, including an increase in the number of enslaved people being sold to cotton- producing plantations.

Abolitionism

By the early nineteenth century, states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had taken steps to abolish slavery. Vermont included abolition as a provision of its 1777 state constitution. In 1804 New Jersey became the last of the northern states to adopt gradual emancipation plans. There was no immediate moment of jubilee for northern enslaved persons, however, as many states only promised to liberate future children born to enslaved mothers. Such laws also stipulated that children remain in indentured servitude to their mother’s master in order to compensate the enslaver’s loss. James Mars, a young man indentured under this system in Connecticut, risked being thrown in jail when he protested the arrangement that kept him bound to his mother’s master until age twenty-five. Pennsylvania’s Emancipation Act of 1780 stipulated that freed children serve an indenture term of twenty-eight years. Gradual emancipation still defended the interests of Northern slave-holders and kept another generation of Black Americans under the control of White citizens.

Manumission

Quicker routes to freedom included escape or direct emancipation by masters. But escape was dangerous and the voluntary liberation of enslaved persons by slave-holders, known as manumission, was rare. Congress, for instance, made the harboring of a fugitive enslaved person a federal crime by 1793. Hopes for manumission were even slimmer, as few Northern enslavers emancipated their own enslaved workers. For example, roughly one-fifth of the White families in New York City owned enslaved persons and yet fewer than 80 enslavers in the city voluntarily manumitted enslaved workers between 1783 and 1800. By 1830, census data suggests that at least 3,500 people were still enslaved in the North. Elderly Connecticut enslaved people remained in bondage as late as 1848 and in New Jersey until after the Civil War.

Emancipation proceeded slowly, but proceeded nonetheless. A free Black population of fewer than 10,000 at the time of the Revolution increased to 200,000 by 1810. Growing communities of free Black Americans fought for their civil rights. In a number of New England cities, free Black Americans could vote and send their children to public schools. Most northern states granted Black citizens property rights and trial by jury. Black Americans in the North also owned land and businesses, founded mutual aid societies, established churches, promoted education, developed print culture, and voted.

The Cotton Boom

Nationally, however, the enslaved population continued to grow to a total of 700,000 in the early years of the nineteenth century. The growth of abolitionism in the North and the acceleration of slavery in the South created deep divisions between the two regions. Slavery declined in the North but became more deeply entrenched in the South, owing in part to the development of a profitable new staple crop: cotton. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, a simple hand-cranked device designed to mechanically remove sticky green seeds from raw cotton, allowed southern planters to dramatically expand cotton production for the national and international markets. Technological innovations elsewhere—water-powered textile factories in England and the American northeast, which could rapidly turn raw cotton into cloth—increased demand for southern cotton and encouraged White Southerners to expand cultivation farther west, to the Mississippi River and beyond. Slavery’s

profitability had lagged in the tobacco economy, but cotton gave it new life. Eager cotton planters invested their new profits in more slaves.

The cotton boom fueled speculation in slavery. Many slave owners leveraged potential profits into loans used to purchase ever-increasing numbers of slaves. For example, one 1840 Louisiana Courier ad warned “it is very difficult now to find persons willing to buy slaves from Mississippi or Alabama on account of the fears entertained that such property may be already mortgaged to the banks of the above named states.”

Figure 1. Sidney & Neff, Detail from “Plan of the City of Lowell, Massachusetts,” 1850.

New national and international markets fueled the plantation boom. American cotton exports rose from 150,000 bales in 1815 to 4,541,000 bales in 1859. The Census Bureau’s 1860 Census of Manufactures stated that “the manufacture of cotton constitutes the most striking feature of the industrial history of the last fifty years.” Enslavers shipped their cotton to textile manufacturers in the North as well as overseas. Northern insurance brokers, merchants, and exporters profited greatly f

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