Newspaper journalists reported by the hour, and magazines sent their reporters to the catastrophe. Harper’s Weekly said the mill proprietors were “before God and man guilty of the deaths of some two hundred innocent creatures.” Soon it was also claimed that the local residents, workers, and even engineers had long regarded the building, constructed in 1853, as poorly made. Presumably even before the machinery had been installed, the walls had begun to crack so badly that they had to be patched up with twenty-two tons of iron plates to prevent them from folding, which they did anyway.
“Of course, nobody will be hanged,” George Templeton Strong noted glumly when he read of the disaster. “Somebody has murdered about two hundred people, many of them with hideous torture, in order to save money, but society has no avenging gibbet for the respectable millionaire and homicide.” Long gone were the days of benevolent capitalism for which the textile factories of the Merrimack River Valley were known; Charles Dickens had heard so much about them he couldn’t wait to see them, and after he had, during his American tour, he was so pleased that he suggested that comparing these Massachusetts factories with England’s was like comparing “Good and Evil, the living light and deepest shadow.”
Dickens had visited Lowell, the industrial city named for Francis Cabot Lowell, who had converted the family importing business into a lucrative manufacturer of textiles and created, along with Boston Associates (his holding company), a labor force of young, virtuous country women attracted to his eponymous city by high wages—more than they could earn as school teachers or unpaid domestic help but low enough to keep factory overhead down. These young women, girls frequently, would be kindly provided with wholesome lodging run by virtuous matrons in the long rows of brick boardinghouses not far from the mills.
Their wages (minus what they had to pay for the boardinghouse) were sent home to support their families or were used for their dowries; any money left over was theirs to spend as they saw fit. They were, in a way, independent. And nobody came to the mill, recalled Union general Benjamin F. Butler (whose mother ran a boardinghouse there), “to become a resident operative as a life business.” It was a temporary stop on the road to marriage. Or, in some few but significant cases, life in the mills led to a life in literature.
The farmers’ daughters turned mill hands produced their own periodical, The Lowell Offering, in which they wrote poetry, translated novels, and celebrated the nature they glimpsed from factory windows and remembered from home. The poet Lucy Larcom, formerly a Lowell Offering contributor, said, “The girls there were just such girls as are knocking at the doors of young women’s colleges to-day.” She had started working at the factory at the age of eleven.
Benevolent capitalism had seemed to succeed. No more, or not for long, if it ever really had. In the 1850s, costs rose and wages fell. The hours were long, the job hard. If an employee took ill, she had to pay for the privilege of the company hospital. Soon fewer girls were coming to the mills. Life in the boardinghouse had changed. The girls who continued to work from dawn until dark were now packed together in overcrowded rooms, three in a bed; their private lives were constantly monitored. “They are bell’d from bed, bell’d to the mill, bell’d home, bell’d everywhere,” sniped one observer. If they were dismissed without an honorable discharge, they could not be hired again in any factory.
These girls were soon replaced by the rising tide of immigrants who, unlike the country girls, could not return to a family farm. Mostly the immigrants were huddled together in wooden shanty towns on the edge of the city where their safety or virtue was of little concern to the overseers. And the number of factories continued to grow.
Swooping down on the Merrimack River Valley to build yet another industrial city was the manufacturer Abbott Lawrence. Yet despite the early success of the city of Lawrence, which doubled in population in the 1850s, and of the Essex Company, of which the Pemberton Mill was a part, in the later 1850s, and especially after the Panic of 1857, unemployment skyrocketed, textile corporations went bankrupt, and the city lost a large chunk of its population. The Pemberton was then sold at auction to George Howe, an entrepreneur, and David Nevins, a banker, and with the price of cotton goods depressed at the time, they aimed to increase output by adding more heavy machinery: the Pemberton had more than 600 looms and some 30,000 spindles.
Yet the owners failed to notice that the upper floors of the structure simply could not support the extra weight and that the cast-iron pillars supporting the floor beams were of shoddy construction. Three years later, on January 10, the pillars snapped, said the Boston Herald, “like so many damnable sticks of sugar candy.” When the columns crumbled, the upper two floors crashed, and in less than a minute the entire five-story building had toppled inward.
The night after the Pemberton fell to the ground, the New England Society for the Promotion of Manufacture and the Mechanic Arts deferentially postponed its annual dinner. The day after that, John Lowell, who had once owned the Pemberton, politely distanced himself from the disaster, declaring in a letter published in the Boston Daily Advertiser that he bore no responsibility for any of it. And in February the coroner’s jury that had been instructed to investigate the reasons for the collapse eliminated natural causes, such as an earthquake, which everyone knew hadn’t caused it anyway. A huge relief fund was immediately set up for Pemberton victims and their families.
The only person held accountable for the disaster was the architect Charles Henry Bigelow. A veteran of the Army Corps of Engineers, Bigelow was the former vice president of the New England Emigrant Aid Society, which had delivered antislavery settlers, along with Sharpe’s rifles, into Kansas with the help of Abbott Lawrence’s nephew Amos. But the merchants were closing ranks. Considered a rabid abolitionist by the proslavery press, Bigelow was a perfect scapegoat even if he had in fact been only partly responsible for not having inspected the pillars. George Howe and David Nevins were not held liable. As Vanity Fair proclaimed, there was “no one to blame” for a “Rotten old Factory, founded on sand.”
The employees at the nearby Duck Mill briefly refused to go to work until their building was deemed safe, and Horace Greeley at the New-York Tribune called for more building inspections. Even Greeley’s newspaper rival, James Gordon Bennett, called the textile industry soulless. But there was no legislation proposed, much less passed, that protected the safety of a worker. And why should there be? “Mankind has not yet learned,” rationalized a writer for Scientific American, “that laws are not omnipotent.”
In 1862, though no criminal charges against him had been filed, Charles Henry Bigelow died distraught. By then another Pemberton Mill, rebuilt by David Nevins, had already risen out of the ashes—and from the insurance payouts—of the first.
WHEN THE CORONER’S jury exonerated the owners of the Pemberton, the New York Herald called for Massachusetts to rise to the defense of its “white slaves.” The Democratic press, especially in the South, excoriated the pious New England factory lords—the Lords of the Loom. To prevent workers from leaving the mill, they ritually padlocked the doors of the factory every morning, it was said. “That several hundred human beings have to be locked up in a great manufacturing establishment like the Pemberton Mills,” sneered an Alabama writer, “is certainly the most convincing evidence of slavery—a slavery that we candidly believe a Southern negro would not submit to.”
A Georgia writer wondered why the likes of the outspoken Lydia Maria Child did not raise her abolitionist voice either in protest of Pemberton or in human sympathy with its victims. There had probably been no “traitors taken red-handed in the act of inciting to civil and servile war among the victims of this appalling catastrophe. Perhaps not even a fragment [sic], intellectual, ideal Negro,” the author sniped, referring to John Brown and Frederick Douglass. To him, Lydia Maria Child was a cold-blooded white racist. “Can she not for once forget her partialities and bear with the afflicted, whose only fault to her is their white complexion!”
In Congress, disgust over Pemberton crept into the battle being waged over the election of the Speaker of the House. With the Thirty-sixth Congress convening three days after John Brown’s execution and about a month before the Pemberton disaster, the already irascible men of the House—101 Republicans, 109 Democrats, 26 Know-Nothings, and 1 lonely Whig—were edgy enough to wrangle for months over the Speaker’s seat. Republicans were backing the thin, good-looking, tall Ohioan John Sherman (a brother of William Tecumseh Sherman), whom Southern congressmen regarded as neither conservative enough nor disinterested enough—which is to say he was a Republican. Far worse, along with sixty-seven other Republicans, Sherman had endorsed a shortened version of a highly controversial antislavery book, The Impending Crisis of the South.
Originally published in 1857, The Impending Crisis was a racist diatribe against slavery that argued that slavery was disastrous for the nonplanter, the non-slaveholding white men and women of the South. Dedicating the book to “my countrymen”—Hinton Helper, the author, was a native North Carolinian—and to “those of them who are non-slaveholders,” Helper said slavery depleted natural resources, prevented free labor, impeded industrial growth, and advanced nothing more than illiteracy, poverty, and ignorance. Non-slaveholding Southern whites needed to overthrow the system that robbed them of prosperity and progress, which was their due.
After all, hadn’t Abbott Lawrence come to Richmond with the “noble purpose” of erecting cotton mills and machine shops? asked Helper. “His mission was one of peace and promise,” Helper explained; “others were to share the benefits of his laudable and concerted scheme; thousands of poor boys and girls in Virginia, instead of growing up in extreme poverty and ignorance, or of having to emigrate to the free States of the West, were to have avenues of profitable employment opened to them at home; thus they would be enabled to earn an honest and reputable living, to establish and sustain free schools, free libraries, free lectures, and free presses, to become useful and exemplary members of society, and to die fit candidates for heaven.” What had happened? The South itself had sent Lawrence and his dream of an industrial utopia packing.
According to Helper, newspapers such as the Richmond Enquirer had destroyed the deal. “That negro-worshipping sheet, whose hireling policy, for the last four and twenty years, has been to support the worthless black slave and his tyrannical master at the expense of the free white laborer, wrote down the enterprise!” Helper fumed. Lawrence delicately apologized, saying he hadn’t realized his plan would be “interfering with the beloved institutions of the South,” or so Helper quoted him as saying. The “abused, insulted and disgusted” Lawrence then went home to New England, where, as Helper raged on, he constructed “the cities of Lowell and Lawrence, either of which, in all those elements of material and social prosperity that make up the greatness of States, is already far in advance of the most important of all the seedy and squalid niggervilles in the Old Dominion.”
Abolitionists and Republicans alike praised Helper’s denunciation of the South, of slavery, and of blacks—and its tribute to Northern capitalism. Republicans also regarded the book as an opportunity. By distributing a shortened version of The Impending Crisis, they hoped to tip the coming presidential election in 1860 to their side: “Testimony of a Southern man, born and reared under the influence of slavery,” claimed a promotional circular, “will be more generally listened to and profoundly heeded, whether in the Slave or in the Free States, than an equally able and conclusive work written by a Northern man.”
Democrats fought back, almost as if they had not read the book. Helper’s volume was labeled a “John Brown text-book.” “The Republican Party Abolitionized” ran a headline in the New York Herald. In early 1860, less than two weeks after Pemberton, Representative Thomas C. Hindman of Arkansas said the Republican Party was synonymous with “sectionalism, with hostility to State rights, with disloyalty to the Constitution, with treason to the Government, and with civil war, bloodshed, murder, and rapine.” His peevishness was typical.
And so Hilton Helper as well as the specter of John Brown entered the House chamber although, as the historian Allan Nevins has noted, Helper’s book was about “as exciting as Euclid, and as fiery as a ledger.” No matter. Like Harpers Ferry, The Impending Crisis helped rally Southern Democrats. Representative Hindman continued his speech: fanaticism blinded Republicans from seeing the very real wrongs on their own doorstep. Take the treatment of the Pemberton Mill operatives. “Judge between the slaveholders of the South,” Hindman admonished, “who hold the negro in that subordination for which nature and nature’s God intended him, and the false philanthropists of the North, who inflict, or consent to the infliction, on the white men and women of such intolerable outrages and grievances.”
Hindman’s racism notwithstanding, the Pemberton collapse had been preventable, and though most of the Lords of the Loom were pro-Southern or mildly conservative, some of them were pious, antislavery Republicans. Was the Free North, then, really so free? Wasn’t its labor system a system of bondage, with the worker subjected to conditions far more horrible than that of the Southern slave, who was cared for, protected, even loved? (“What a glorious thing to man is slavery,” the proslavery author George Fitzhugh had cried, “when want, misfortune, old age, debility and sickness overtake him.”) What would happen to the Northern “free” worker when he or she could no longer work? So, like Seward, although from the opposite point of view, Hindman reminded Congress that the source of the conflict between North and South was the conflict between capital and labor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said the Stars and Stripes was sewn with threads of cotton—cotton and complaisance held the Union together.
Though Thomas Hindman’s argument was not original or unique, it was effective, especially coming from a man so well versed in politics. Born in Tennessee, raised in Mississippi, and from a politically minded family, Hindman was the son of Thomas, Sr., a prosperous slaveholder who once enjoyed a lucrative post as agent to the Cherokee nation. The younger Hindman, a diminutive and dapper man (five foot one), once derided as “sweet-smelling,” was always ready to brawl. After the man who would be William Faulkner’s great-grandfather stabbed Hindman’s brother (albeit in self-defense), Hindman trailed this William Falkner (as the name was then spelled), hoping to kill him, but fortunately for both men, a friend intervened. And when the resolute Hindman wanted to marry a woman whose father, in protest, had dispatched her to a convent, Hindman simply scaled the convent wall.
None of that encumbered Hindman’s political fortunes; likely his derring-do had helped him. Elected in 1853 to the Mississippi house as the protégé of John Quitman and Jefferson Davis, at the end of his term Hindman moved to Helena, Arkansas, a booming Mississippi River port and a better theater for his ambition. A diehard Democrat, an aggressive soldier during the Mexican War, and a virulent opponent of the Compromise of 1850, Hindman was also a ferocious opponent of the Know-Nothings and their xenophobia (to say nothing of their position on slavery). And he was enthralled by Quitman, who in 1855 had proposed yet again another filibustering expedition to Cuba which he wanted to staff, or at least finance, with gentlemen, not thugs. Ready to risk “reputation and life in the enterprise,” as he declared with a flourish, Hindman rounded up a hundred men in Helena for the mission.
Hindman never boarded any of Quitman’s ships, which were never launched in any case after Franklin Pierce shut the operation down. By that time, Hindman was already out of the picture. Brought to trial for a barroom brawl and a shooting, he had to forgo the filibuster. If he had joined up, he explained, he would be “a fugitive from justice.” The distinction between manslaughter and barging his way into Cuba (both illegal acts) was lost on him.
The court found him innocent.
Borne on the tide of his eloquence—he was regarded as a brilliant speaker—and on his crusade against members of the Know-Nothing party, whom he considered Northerners, Hindman was elected to Congress from Arkansas in 18
58. A secessionist, he loathed Hinton Helper, John Brown, and William Seward, whose “irrepressible conflict” speech in Rochester had been praised in The Impending Crisis. “Sewardism, Helperism, and Shermanism are identical,” railed Hindman. “The black mantle of Republicanism covers them all.”
That meant that John Sherman was not going to be elected Speaker of the House. Accused of endorsing Helper’s book, Sherman disingenuously claimed not to remember. Just as lamely, he said he hadn’t even read the book. After two months of wrangling during which time House members began arming themselves with revolvers and bowie knives—some congressmen said they would rather wade in blood than seat Representative Sherman—Sherman withdrew his name. Sales of The Impending Crisis soared. You could purchase the book and even receive, along with it, a picture of John Brown—though Brown would have despised Hinton’s bigoted brand of abolition.
A compromise figure was elected Speaker by a narrow margin almost a month after Pemberton. He was New Jersey’s freshman congressman but an old-time Whig, the sixty-three-year-old moderate Republican William Pennington, who had been a supporter of the Fugitive Slave Act.
THE MONTH OF MARCH was raw and cold in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but the lanky man from the West waiting at the depot didn’t seem to mind. Like everyone else, Abraham Lincoln had heard about the Pemberton disaster, and during his four-hour layover may even have gone to see the mill’s scorched ruin. But the main object of his trip was to deliver speeches in Concord and Manchester, New Hampshire, before returning to Exeter, where his son Robert was in school.
After his enormous success just a week earlier, on February 27, in the Great Hall of New York City’s Cooper Institute (as Cooper Union was then called), Abraham Lincoln had been riding the rails to Providence, Rhode Island, and up to Massachusetts, for he was not one to squander an opportunity, and this was his chance to meet with New Englanders and capitalize on his spectacular triumph in New York. After all, 1,500 New Yorkers, including the Republican kingmakers in the East, had sat under 168 flickering crystal chandeliers and listened, rapt, to the ungainly Republican lawyer with the bristly hair speak for ninety minutes about politics, slavery, and the Republican mission.
Ecstatic Nation Page 17