Industrial Transformation in the North, 1800–1850

This is Unit Nine, part one, covering the industrial transformation of the North between eighteen hundred and eighteen fifty. Unit Eight closed with a war that opened the west and destroyed a political party. This unit is about what filled that opening — mills, canals, and a market economy that had not existed a generation earlier. Carry this idea through. The same machinery that produced abundance produced dependence, and the course insists you hold both at once. By the end you will be able to explain what the Rhode Island and Lowell systems each did to a worker's independence. To state both meanings the clock carried. To explain what caused the Panic of eighteen nineteen and who got relief. To say why the Erie Canal made the Old Northwest commercially northern. And to say where interchangeable parts appear first.

Four entries on the first mills, and where the technology came from.

The man who carried it over.

USH1 1201 Slater and the First Mill

Samuel Slater, a British migrant, understood the workings of the latest water-powered textile mills, which the British industrialist Richard Arkwright had pioneered. He worked with merchants including Moses Brown at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in the seventeen nineties. The first successful American cotton mill was built on British designs carried across the Atlantic in one man's memory.

How fast they spread.

USH1 1202 The Mills Multiply

Thirteen more mills had been built by eighteen oh seven in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and seventy-eight new textile mills by eighteen twelve, placed in rural New England communities rather than in cities. The average early mill employed about seventy workers, so this was a dispersal of small workplaces, not a concentration.

How those workers were hired.

USH1 1203 The Rhode Island System

Under the Rhode Island system, families were hired as units rather than as individuals, and fathers were paid in company credit rather than in wages. Payment in credit ties the whole family to the company store as well as to the mill, which is a second dependence beyond employment.

The rival system in Massachusetts.

USH1 1204 The Boston Associates

The Boston Manufacturing Company was founded in eighteen thirteen by Francis Cabot Lowell and the merchants known as the Boston Associates, who raised four hundred thousand dollars to build mills at Waltham. They went on to build the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, which gave the system its name.

Three entries on Lowell, and the arrangement is more interesting than either praise or condemnation of it.

Who worked there.

USH1 1205 The Mill Girls

The Lowell workforce was drawn primarily from young women of rural farming families, who came for wages of their own and toiled ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week. Wage work outside a father's household was new for these women, and so was the supervision that came with it.

What they were paid.

USH1 1206 Wages at Lowell

Weekly wages in eighteen thirty-three ran from about two dollars seventy-eight for picking and carding to four dollars for warping and sizing, with spinning at three dollars a week and weaving at about three dollars ten. The differences between tasks are small. Skill bought very little at these rates.

And the rules they lived under.

USH1 1207 Rules of Conduct

The Boston Associates governed the women's conduct as well as their hours. They woke at the sound of a bell and worked a twelve-hour day during which talking was forbidden, and they were forbidden to swear or drink alcohol and required to attend church. The company regulated behaviour outside working hours, which is what made the boarding-house arrangement a system.

Three entries on what the factory displaced, and one of them contains an idea that shows up later in metal.

The older arrangement.

USH1 1208 The Putting-Out System

Under the putting-out system merchants hired farming families to perform specific tasks in the production process for a set wage — a transitional stage standing between the artisan's workshop and the factory. It cut labour costs by removing the need for skilled craftspeople, which is the point of the whole arrangement.

The clearest example of it.

USH1 1209 Shoemaking as Division of Labour

In shoemaking, merchants used one group of workers to cut soles into standardised sizes, a different group to cut leather for the uppers, and a third to stitch the standardised parts together — three households making one shoe between them, none of them shoemakers. Standardisation is what allows the division. Interchangeable parts appear here before they appear in machinery.

What else farm families made.

USH1 1210 What Farm Families Made

Farm families made shoes, brooms, plaited hats, furniture, pottery, baskets and clock parts, the last particularly in Connecticut, with textiles the most common part-time occupation. This was supplementary income earned at home, alongside farming, and not yet a separate working life.

Two entries now, and the second holds the argument of the whole unit in one object.

What the factory changed about time.

USH1 1211 Time Discipline

Industrial work imposed a new relationship to time. Those who arrived late found their pay docked, and five minutes' tardiness was capable of costing several hours' worth of pay. The penalty is disproportionate on purpose. It is not compensation for lost work but enforcement of the schedule itself.

The object that made it possible.

USH1 1212 The Clock, Two Ways

In the same decades that the clock became an instrument of factory discipline, it became an ordinary household possession. The anchor records that clocks, which had once been quite expensive, were now within the reach of most ordinary people. Clock parts were among the goods farm families made under the putting-out system, so the same process that put clocks in parlours put them on factory walls. Hold both meanings at once. The clock is evidence of industrial abundance and an instrument of industrial control, in the same decade, for the same people. Teach only the abundance and you get a story about rising living standards; teach only the control and you get a story about exploitation. The anchor supplies both, and the exam rewards seeing that they are the same fact.

Four entries on the response, and note who is doing the organising.

The first strikes.

USH1 1213 The First Strikes

Young women at the Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham went on strike for two days in eighteen twenty-one when their wages were cut. Pawtucket workers struck in eighteen twenty-four against reduced pay rates and longer hours. Women at Dover, New Hampshire, ceased working in December eighteen twenty-eight after their wages were reduced.

The organisations that followed.

USH1 1214 The Lowell Associations

Female mill operatives at Lowell formed the Lowell Factory Girls Association in the eighteen thirties to organise strike activities, and the later Lowell Female Labor Reform Association formed to protest the twelve-hour workday. These are among the earliest sustained labour organisations in the United States, and their members were women.

The party that took up their cause.

USH1 1215 The Working Men's Party

Thomas Skidmore organised the Working Men's Party, and his eighteen twenty-nine treatise called for the abolition of inheritance and the redistribution of property, and for an end to imprisonment for debt, under which a debtor was jailed and his tools seized. Skidmore's vision extended to all. Women and men, whatever their race, should vote and receive property.

The economic idea behind it.

USH1 1216 The Labour Theory of Value

The labour theory of value held that the value of a product should accurately reflect the labour needed to produce it, with profits distributed to workers in proportion to their contribution rather than concentrated among owners. This is an argument from within the market, not against it. It concerns who gets the surplus, not whether there should be one.

Now the economy the whole thing ran inside, and the credit holding it up.

What the country had become.

USH1 1217 The Market Economy

By the eighteen forties the United States had become a market economy, one in which the production of goods, and their prices, were unregulated by the government — an economy in which businesses and farmers default, wage workers lose employment and investors lose assets. The anchor names the vulnerability in the same breath as the achievement.

How fast the cities grew.

USH1 1218 New York's Growth

New York City's population rose from thirty-three thousand in seventeen ninety to two hundred seventy thousand by eighteen twenty-five — better than an eightfold increase in thirty-five years. The Erie Canal opened in the last of those years, and the final entry of this lecture covers what it did to that number.

Where the credit came from.

USH1 1219 Banks and Paper

State legislatures chartered banks to meet the demand for credit, Kentucky chartered forty-six in a single session, and banks issued paper notes in excess of their specie reserves. The Bank of the United States suspended specie payments during the War of eighteen twelve and continued to issue only paper banknotes.

The bank chartered to fix it.

USH1 1220 The Second Bank

The Second Bank of the United States was chartered in eighteen sixteen to bring order to a chaotic currency. It instead made risky loans and opened branches in the South and West where land fever was highest. The anchor says it only compounded the problem. Remember that when Jackson attacks it in Unit Ten.

Four entries on the first great American depression, and the first of them is the one to learn properly.

What built the bubble.

USH1 1221 Causes of the Panic of 1819

British textile mills consumed American cotton at high prices, and European reliance on American agricultural commodities drove prices up further. Land speculation drove borrowing, and borrowing drove inflation, so banks lent against land whose price depended on the borrowing. The Second Bank compounded it by lending freely in exactly the regions where speculation ran hottest. Now notice that the causes are largely foreign demand. When European agriculture recovered after the Napoleonic Wars, the demand that had supported American prices fell away, and everything built on it fell with it. The first great American depression was made by a boom nobody in America controlled.

The moment it broke.

USH1 1222 The Panic Breaks

The inflated economic bubble burst in eighteen nineteen, producing a prolonged economic depression called the Panic of eighteen nineteen, with crop prices tumbling by as much as seventy-five percent. The word panic understates it. The anchor calls it a prolonged depression, not a moment of alarm.

Who it ruined.

USH1 1223 What the Panic Did

Three-quarters of the work force in Philadelphia was unemployed, and Thomas Jefferson nearly lost Monticello — a former president facing the loss of his house in the same crisis that idled a city. The working class suffered most and had least to fall back on, which part two of this unit returns to.

And what Congress did.

USH1 1224 Relief

Congress answered the depression with the Land Law of eighteen twenty and the Relief Act of eighteen twenty-one, federal legislation easing the terms on which western land had been bought. Relief went to landholders in debt. There was no comparable measure for the unemployed workers of the previous entry.

Five inventors, and the first belongs to a story this unit does not tell.

The inventor who changed the South.

USH1 1225 Eli Whitney

Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin in seventeen ninety-four, which cleaned seeds from raw cotton far faster than enslaved workers could by hand — a machine that multiplied what a plantation could process. The gin sits in the chapter on northern industry, and its consequence is in Unit Twelve. It made short-staple cotton profitable and slavery more valuable.

His second invention.

USH1 1226 Interchangeable Parts

Whitney also developed machine tools for producing standardised, interchangeable parts for manufacture — components made to a common specification rather than fitted individually by a craftsman. This is the same principle as the standardised shoe soles you met earlier, now applied to metal instead of leather.

The man who put an engine on a boat.

USH1 1227 Fulton's Clermont

Robert Fulton created a steamship engine in eighteen oh seven, and his vessel the Clermont ran a hundred fifty miles from New York City to Albany in a record time of only thirty-two hours. Steam on rivers reverses the economics of upstream travel, which had always cost more than travel down.

Two inventors who changed farming.

USH1 1228 McCormick and Deere

Cyrus McCormick tested a mechanical reaper in eighteen thirty-one which by the eighteen fifties enabled farmers to vastly increase their output, and John Deere improved the plough so that it could cut prairie sod. Both made the western prairies farmable at scale, which is what the transportation revolution then carried east.

And the invention that beat the trains.

USH1 1229 Morse and the Telegraph

Samuel Morse developed the telegraph and Morse code, demonstrating it publicly in eighteen thirty-eight, and Congress funded thirty thousand dollars for a Washington to Baltimore line, completed in eighteen forty-four. For the first time a message could travel faster than the person carrying it. Note that the anchor files this with the inventors, not with transport.

Two entries to close, and the last of them redrew the map of the country.

The roads.

USH1 1230 Roads and Turnpikes

The Cumberland Road, a national highway providing thousands with a route from Maryland to Illinois, was begun in eighteen eleven with federal funding, and New York State road mileage rose from one thousand in eighteen ten to four thousand by eighteen twenty. The Cumberland Road is federally funded, which is the constitutional fight Unit Ten picks up.

And the canal that changed everything.

USH1 1231 The Erie Canal

The Erie Canal was chartered in eighteen seventeen, took seven years to complete, and opened in eighteen twenty-five, running three hundred sixty-three miles. It joined the Hudson River, and therefore New York City and the Atlantic seaboard, to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Valley, and soon fifteen million dollars worth of goods was being transported on it every year. Before the canal, moving bulk freight overland from the interior to the coast cost more than the freight was worth, which is why western farmers shipped down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans instead. The canal reversed that geography and made New York the port through which the interior reached the Atlantic. Now take the cautions. The Erie is not the longest canal in North America, and part two covers the one that is. The canal is the reason the Old Northwest became commercially northern rather than southern: grain that would have floated to New Orleans now moved east, and the economic alignment that produced the Civil War's free-state bloc was laid down by a ditch. And watch the timing. The first American steam railroad ran six years after the canal opened, on a track beside it, and railroads eventually took the traffic the canal had captured. The Erie's dominance was total and brief, which is the ordinary fate of a transport monopoly.

Look at what you can now do. You can explain what each system did to a worker's independence — Rhode Island hiring families as units and paying fathers in company credit, Lowell paying young women wages of their own while governing their conduct off the clock. You can state both meanings of the clock: an ordinary household possession and an instrument of factory discipline, in the same decade, for the same people, made by the same process. You can explain what caused the Panic of eighteen nineteen — foreign demand America did not control, and credit lent against land whose price depended on the lending — and say that relief went to landholders in debt, not the unemployed. You can say why the Erie Canal made the Old Northwest commercially northern: grain that would have gone to New Orleans went east instead. And you can say where interchangeable parts appear first: in standardised shoe soles, before Whitney applied the principle to metal.