There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Back in Boston in 1812, he joined his brother-in-law, banker and former seaman Patrick Tracy Jackson, known as “P.T.,” and financier Nathan Appleton, a New Hampshire native and one-term United States congressman, to form the Boston Manufacturing Company; by 1814, with the help of mechanic Paul Moody, they had opened the nation’s first fully integrated textile mill on the Charles River at Waltham. All manufacturing processes—from bale to loom to fabric bolt—took place under one roof, with every mechanical device in the plant driven by water power.

  Never in good health, Lowell died in 1817, and in 1821, with three mills at Waltham using the available water force, the remaining “Boston Associates” sought a larger site with river access. They found it at East Chelmsford, a village at the meeting of the Merrimack and Concord rivers, twenty-seven miles northwest of Boston. The site boasted the dynamic Merrimack Falls, which fell thirty-two feet over the course of a mile, as well as two useful canals, the modest Pawtucket Canal, and the larger Middlesex, dug in 1804 to link the East Chelmsford area with Boston and the first man-made waterway in the United States to carry both goods and people. The Merrimack and the Concord were meandering streams compared with the great inland seas of American destiny—the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Ohio—but it was in these New England backwaters that the country’s industrial revolution began.19

  To supervise construction of a mill at East Chelmsford, renamed Lowell by the partners, they chose Kirk Boott, an American engineer, surveyor, and Anglophile who had bought a commission in the British army and served in the Napoleonic Wars under the Duke of Wellington. Soon the Merrimack Valley rang with work sounds, as the Irish immigrant crews Boott assembled from Boston and marched out to Lowell dredged and widened the Middlesex Canal and constructed the first large mill, called the Merrimack. Boott was feared by the locals. “Though not an Englishman,” recalled Harriet Robinson, “he had … imbibed the autocratic ideas of the mill owners of the mother country, and many stories were told of his tyranny. The boys were so afraid of him that they would not go near him willingly.”20 He had apparently bought neighboring farmlands for transformation into mill property without revealing the true nature of his interest, and the victimized East Chelmsford farmers who’d sold cheap thereafter nursed a warm hatred for him. The mill workers likewise were displeased with the 37½ cents he deducted from their pay packet each month to support an Episcopalian church he had built and insisted they attend, regardless of their faith.21 The only recorded thwarting of his iron will came when he raised both the British and American flags on July Fourth, with the Stars and Stripes beneath the Union Jack. So great was the outcry, the mill owners commanded Boott to reverse the banners at once.22

  The new industrial town grew swiftly. East Chelmsford had been little more than a hamlet in 1820, with two hundred residents; by 1836 the city of Lowell boasted a population of eighteen thousand and was on its way to becoming the largest manufacturing center in the United States. In the shadows of the Merrimack Mill soon rose nine other mill complexes, including the Hamilton, the Appleton, the Lowell, the Middlesex, the Tremont, the Boott, and the Massachusetts. Citywide, about ten thousand young men and women were employed, sequestered in no fewer than 550 local boardinghouses, constituting an industrial workforce unprecedented in America.23

  As historian Thomas Dublin reports of one of the large Lowell mills, about 95 percent of the workers were native-born; and as many as 75 percent were women between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Men tended to be supervisors or had skilled jobs, while women worked the looms and other machines, or toiled in the carding room. Workrooms typically had two male supervisors, eighty women workers, and two children who served as helpers.24 The entry point for the least experienced girls was the carding room, where the cotton was “roved,” turning it into a thick strand that was wound around wooden cylinders. In the next chamber, the spinning room, a worker spun the roving into warp, a workable thread ready for the looms. The material was then further cleaned and refined before entering the weaving room, where the thread was made into cloth. In the final stage the finished cloth was trimmed, perhaps printed, then baled and made ready for shipment.25 By the 1840s Lowell was producing tens of millions of yards of cloth annually and was the nation’s undisputed capital of textile manufacture, while the Boston Manufacturing Company made a small fortune selling the patent rights to the loom and machine processes it used.

  Lowell’s rapid growth and output were remarkable, but equally notable was the company’s determination—in keeping with the vows made in the era of Tench Coxe and Alexander Hamilton—to limit the nefarious effects of industrial labor on workers. “God forbid that there ever may arise a counterpart of Manchester in the New World!” an American who had returned from that bleak, crowded English industrial city had written:26 Hamilton had suggested as early as 1791 that this might be assured by enlisting as laborers the women and girls who were not otherwise engaged in any but home crafts, and whose ability for the first time to earn a salary would be welcomed by their families. “The husbandman … experiences a new source of profit and support from the increased industry of his wife and daughters,” Hamilton advised. “In general, women and children are rendered more useful, and the latter more early useful, by manufacturing establishments, than they would otherwise be.”27

  Women mill workers received an average of between $2.25 and $4.00 per week, as compared to the men, who got $4.00 to $12.00, with the mills deducting $1.25 per week from all for room and board. This left some female workers clearing about a dollar a week, or less than two cents an hour for seventy-two hours of labor, but even this represented a substantial leap in women’s earning power in rural areas. “Since I have wrote you,” as one mill hand informed her sister, “another pay day has come around. I earned 14 dollars and a half, nine and a half dollars beside my board. The folks think I get along just first-rate, they say. I like it well as ever and Sarah don’t I feel independent of everyone! The thought that I am living on no one is a happy one indeed to me.”28

  UNLIKE MILLS THAT COMPENSATED workers in scrip redeemable only at a company store, the Boston Associates paid cash wages, giving girls off the farm the first real spending money they’d ever had. Most of the young women spent a portion of this initial income in the dry goods stores and dress shops of Lowell, making themselves over from bumpkins into fashionable belles, a transformation much commented upon by visiting dignitaries. “After the first pay-day came,” recalled Robinson, “and they felt the jingle of silver in their pockets … their bowed heads were lifted, their necks seemed braced with steel, they looked you in the face, sang blithely among their looms or frames, and walked with elastic step to and from their work.” Having come to Lowell in homespun, possibly barefoot, speaking queer rural dialects and introducing themselves as “Samantha, Triphena, Plumy, Kezia, Aseneth, Elgardy, Leafy, Ruhamah, Almaretta, Sarpeta, and Florilla,” some switched to more citified names like Jane or Susan. They purchased new bonnets (known as “scooters”), began applying rouge to their faces, and even adopted a more urban style of speech. A few were emboldened to buy company stock.29

  Nathan Appleton of the Boston Associates is credited with drafting Lowell’s policy of paternalistic concern and humane treatment for workers. The good motives of Appleton and the other managers toward the girls were genuine, although it was apparent that maintaining a workers’ society free of squalor was also sound business policy. Conveniently, the farm girls of New England came to the mills already inured to long hours of toil, and having been trained from the cradle to spin and weave, most were to some degree conversant with the techniques of textile manufacture.30 The bosses also lived up to their commitment to safeguard the young women’s moral life, controlling the boardinghouses where carefully screened managers, “mature Christian women,” served as surrogate parents to homesick mill girls. The houses were often crowded, with women sleeping six or eight in a room and often three in a bed, but workers could select the house where they would live and th
us house managers’ livelihoods were reliant on their maintaining a quality environment. Some houses had fancy parlors, well-stocked bookcases, and other special amenities; all provided substantial meals of biscuits, potatoes, puddings, and, as one impressed English visitor, the novelist Anthony Trollope, recorded, “hot meat.”31 Strict rules monitored the women’s social lives, while “the habit of profanity and Sabbath breaking” were strongly discouraged.32

  The women were, by most reports, adamant themselves about maintaining their reputations, for in an age when the question of how an independent young woman would support herself led easily to speculation of sexual compromise, there was distinct pride in a pay envelope gained through honest labor. The female editors of the Lowell Offering made quick work of the Boston cleric Orestes Brownson when, despite his other good words and works on behalf of labor, he recklessly suggested that life in a factory demeaned the virtue of young women.33 The mill workers knew better. Their character remained flawless at Lowell, nurtured by “a moral atmosphere as clear and bracing as that of the mountains from whose breezy slopes” they had come.34

  IT DID NOT TAKE LONG for the curious world to ride a Middlesex Canal boat up from Boston to see the “Lowell Miracle” for itself. One of the greatest successes of the mill operators was in selling the concept of Lowell and its mill girls. Images or silhouettes of tidy women at their looms often appeared on labels of Lowell cotton goods, and their reputation was widely promoted. So dynamic was the phenomenon that the young female operatives became themselves admired “products” of the Lowell system, returning home after a few years of fruitful work enriched monetarily, spiritually, and intellectually, and “daily carrying gladness to the firesides where [they] were reared,” as Massachusetts congressman Edward Everett put it in a July Fourth oration at Lowell in 1830. Everett’s speech was warm praise for Nathan Appleton and the other Boston Associates who had poured heart and muscle into Lowell’s success. Responding to the anxieties of an earlier generation, and to Jefferson specifically, Everett recalled how “reflecting persons, on this side of the ocean, contemplated with uneasiness the introduction, into this country, of a system which had disclosed such hideous features in Europe; but it must be frankly owned that these apprehensions have proved wholly unfounded.”35

  One of the first visitors to Lowell was Basil Hall, a British naval officer, whose Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828 found the factories’ “discipline, ventilation, and other arrangements … excellent,” and the mill workers “healthy and cheerful.” Awakened at dawn by the beckoning bells of the mill, he glanced from his window to see

  the whole space between the factories and the village speckled over with girls, nicely dressed, and glittering with bright shawls and showy-colored gowns and gay bonnets, all streaming along to their business, with an air of lightness, and an elasticity of step, implying an obvious desire to get to their work.36

  In June 1833 President Andrew Jackson arrived, walking among the beaming mill workers for almost a mile, congratulating them and inquiring their names. “The exhilarating experience of being made the target of thousands of dazzling smiles and arch glances shot out from under the green-fringed parasols moved the chivalrous old hero almost as much as the barrage of British bullets that shrilled past his head at the Battle of New Orleans,” according to a contemporary account. “By the Eternal,” Old Hickory was heard to exclaim after his perambulations around the town, “they are very pretty women!”37

  Frontiersman and Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett also beat a path to Lowell to see for himself how “these Northerners could buy our cotton and carry it home, manufacture it, bring it back, and sell it half for nothing; and in the meantime, be well to live and make money besides.” In his popular book, Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East, he reported,

  the dinner-bells were ringing and the folks pouring out of the houses like bees out of gum. I looked at them as they passed, all well-dressed, lively and genteel in their appearance, indeed the girls looked as if they were coming from a quilting frolic…. I went in among the young girls, and talked with many of them. Not one expressed herself as tired of her employment, or oppressed with work; all talked well, and looked healthy.38

  Such impressions ensured Lowell’s reputation as a model for industrialization. But the opinion that they “all talked well, and looked healthy” represented only the beginning of the repute the mill girls of Lowell were to enjoy. Abel C. Thomas, a young Universalist minister who led an “improvement club,” a reading and discussion circle for the women, had noticed that some hesitated to speak up in the club’s meetings. He began providing a box into which they could anonymously place their stories, poems, and articles; the literary quality of some of these “offerings” led him to suggest they be published. In October 1840 he and the women launched The Lowell Offering: A Repository of Original Articles, Written Exclusively by Females Actively Employed in the Mills. Just as the improvement clubs were among the first women’s literary gatherings in America, so the Offering was, in turn, the first magazine in America edited by women.39 Recognizing the journal’s significance, the mill workers reminded subscribers,

  Other nations can look upon the relics of a glory come and gone, upon their magnificent ruins…. We have other and better things. Let us look upon … our Lyceums, our Common Schools … the Periodical of Our Laboring Females; upon all that is indigenous to our Republic, and say, with the spirit of the Roman Cornelia, “these, these are our jewels.”40

  No less an authority than the British writer Charles Dickens soon came to pass judgment. His visit to Lowell in 1842 was much anticipated, as he was not merely a famous personage but had spent part of his childhood working in a factory and had written of the corrosive effect of industrial society’s evils on the young. In American Notes, the memoir Dickens wrote of his journey, he did not hesitate to criticize what he found in the United States; he was particularly disgusted by the institution of slavery, and reprinted numerous slave auction advertisements and notices about runaway slaves. Thus his wholehearted praise for Lowell—he crowed that the operatives had pianos in their boardinghouses, subscribed to circulating libraries, and had started their own literary magazine—was seen as hard-won approval from the toughest of critics. Dickens went so far as to insist that the Lowell Offering was as good as comparable English literary periodicals; he was no doubt being gracious, but his fellow British writer Harriet Martineau was sufficiently moved to see that the magazine was shown to Queen Victoria and to arrange for the publication of an English anthology of its contents, produced in 1844 under the title Mind Among the Spindles. In Paris the novelist George Sand performed a similar role, hailing the Offering as an example of how enlightened industrialism in the United States made possible intellectual endeavors among workingwomen. Perhaps it was Sand who sent a copy to the French Chamber of Deputies. There, one official was sufficiently impressed to assure a visiting American, “Sir, yours will be the greatest country in the world!”41

  IF ANYTHING VOUCHED FOR the editorial independence of the Lowell Offering, it was the occasional appearance in its pages of bursts of worker unhappiness. The most common complaint had to do with the punishing hours of work in the mills, which allowed inadequate time for meals and rest. With no preexisting American industrial model available, management had fixed the workers’ hours to resemble those associated with farm labor, basically dawn to dusk. In summer this could mean standing at a loom or carding machine twelve to fourteen hours per day, six days a week; in the winter for eleven hours a day. The midday dinner break was thirty minutes. “The time we are required to labor is altogether too long,” explained an operative. “If anyone doubts it, let them come into our mills of a summer’s day, at four or five o’clock in the afternoon, and see the drooping, weary persons moving about, as though their legs were hardly able to support their bodies.”42 Wrote “Ellen” in the Offering:

  I object to the constant hurry of everything. We cannot hav
e time to eat, drink, or sleep; we have only thirty minutes, or at most three quarters of an hour, allowed us, to go from our work, partake of our food, and return to the noisy clatter of the machinery. Up before day, at the clang of the bell—and out of the mill by the clang of the bell—into the mill, and at work, in obedience to that ding-dong of a bell—just as though we were living machines. I will give my notice tomorrow: go I will—I won’t stay here and be a white slave.

  With abolitionist fervor on the rise in New England by the early 1830s, the analogy between downtrodden mill girls and Southern Negro field hands was heard frequently. But in the case of “Ellen,” her bitter outburst is answered by a trusted friend, who convinces her to stay in the mills by reminding her that the farmyard at home, with its animal smells, noise, and drudgery, also offers no picnic of a working life, and that a job in Lowell will at least promote her independence and develop her intellect.43

  Of more serious consequence to the workers were company production innovations such as the “stretch-out,” an increase in the number of machines for which a worker was responsible; the “speedup,” foremen running the machines at a faster pace; and “the premium system,” by which supervisors whose workers were most productive were rewarded with substantial cash awards. The unsurprising result of the premium system was a tyrannical attitude on the part of some floor-bosses, leading, according to worker Josephine Baker, to “many occurrences that send the warm blood mantling to the cheek when they must be borne in silence, and many harsh words and acts that are not called for.”44

  At the same time the workers’ health often appeared at risk. The factories’ poor ventilation, the cotton lint that floated in the air, stifling temperatures in summer, and the acrid smoke from whale-oil lamps in winter made breathing difficult. Some workers chewed tobacco snuff as a means of limiting the ill effects of the airborne lint, but many suffered from a persistent grippe the women called “mill fever.”45 It was never proven that the Lowell mills were unhealthy, nor was a comprehensive medical inquiry ever conducted. By and large the girls were youthful and robust enough to convince observers that “probably no town since the Amazons had presented so uniform a population of sturdy young women.”46 But as early as the 1830s a New York labor newspaper beseeched “the farmers of our country not to permit their daughters to go into the mills at all, in any place under the present regulations, if they value the life and health of their children,”47 and there was no shortage of cautionary anecdotes. “Malvina was brot home dead from Manchester, N.H. where she had been at work at a factory,” a farmer’s wife wrote in 1851. “She was sick of Typhoid fever only eight days. Her sister Columbia has also been very sick at the same place…. Seven years ago Amanda the sister next older was bro’t home a corpse from Lowell.”48