American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Planters sold their cotton directly to resident New York factors who, as agents of New York banks, could advance them long-term credit to buy more land and slaves. “The system of credit in this country is peculiar,” a New England journalist observed. “From new-year’s to new-year’s is the customary extension of this accommodation, and the first of January, as planters have then usually disposed of their crops, is a season for a general settlement throughout every branch of business. The planters have their commission merchants in New Orleans and Natchez, who receive and ship their cotton for them, and make advances, if required, upon succeeding crops. Some planters export direct to Liverpool and other ports, though generally they sell or consign to the commission merchants in Natchez, who turn cotton into gold so readily, that one verily would be inclined to think that the philosopher’s stone might be concealed within the bales.”

  The system fostered careless business methods. The planter, having sold his crop at the port, did not have to check on shipping, the price of imported goods, insurance, or freight. He left these concerns to New Yorkers, who dominated the financial life of the South. Planters even developed a certain disdain for business and for the labor that maintained it. Factors made loans to keep them in funds until the next crop, at an interest rate of 8 to 12 percent, to which they added a brokerage fee of 1 to 2.5 percent. Cotton profits flowed to the Northeast for services and manufactured goods and to the West for food, leaving little investment capital in the South. Southern banks, which were usually controlled by powerful planters, largely financed the extension of the slavery system, as did Britons who invested in the Southwest to increase the cotton trade.

  The southern agricultural system was inherently wasteful. Large amounts of land were controlled by absentee planters and worked by forced, unwilling slaves driven by overseers intent on extracting as much as possible from the worker and the land. Instead of crop rotation or fertilization, planters abandoned worn-out land to weeds and cleared more until it too was sterile. Overseers made few efforts to restore fertility to the soil by plowing clover or peas; instead they plowed up and down on slopes for cotton rows and cultivated them, leading to serious soil erosion. By 1839, one writer in Georgia observed that thousands of acres of Georgia land were nothing but “sterile red clay, full of gullies.” Cotton growing rested on exploitation—of both soil and slaves.

  No transportation system went into the interior, where yeomen farmers remained isolated, self-sufficient, and backward. Canals, turnpikes, and local roads would transform northern agriculture from subsistence to commercial farming. In the South, where planters dominated the state legislatures as well as the banks, expanding income had little multiplier effect. It flowed instead to the North and West for services, manufactures, and foodstuffs.

  By 1830, American agriculture had not changed significantly from what it was in 1800. Heavy farm machinery, university agricultural schools, and experiment stations would come later in the century. But improvements were taking place almost daily under the leadership of gentlemen farmers like Livingston who had the capital and the time to diversify crop production, experiment with fertilizers, improve livestock through better breeding, and import new stock such as the merino sheep. In the North, the iron plow of Jethro Wood came into widespread use through the leadership of the gentlemen farmers. Wood perfected a plow in 1819 with both wooden and cast-iron parts, and sold it for a modest price. The iron plow, according to one historian, reduced the labor required in plowing by about half. In 1844, a Southerner visiting the New York State Agricultural Fair wrote that “the best models of the plow, perhaps in the world,” were there, enabling northern farmers to plow more deeply and raise crops in “greater abundance…in comparison with ours.”

  In the South, improvements in processing took place largely through applying horsepower and later steam power to cotton gins on large plantations. Steam presses also increased the amount of cotton made into bales on plantations. Once settlers had migrated over the mountains into the Southwest to raise cotton, demand for farm products increased, while laborers moving into the factories of the cities also expanded the market for farm products.

  The general rise in demand, coming after long decades of nearly constant markets, stimulated the research and experimentation that eventually bore fruit in the agricultural inventions of the 1840s and 1850s. As improved transportation began to link the nation’s sections, farmers had an incentive to produce for a growing national market.

  FACTORIES: THE LOOMS OF LOWELL

  Eli Whitney’s financial losses in 1796 with the cotton gin were a heavy blow. He was still looking, at thirty-one years of age, for a way to make a good living. “Bankruptcy & ruin were constantly staring me in the face & disappointment trip’d me up every step I attempted to take.…Loaded with a Debt of 3 or 4000 Dollars, without resources and without any business that would ever furnish me a support, I knew not which way to turn.” Troubles multiplied. His workshop in New Haven where he was making cotton gins had burned to the ground. And all the while, the image of Catherine Greene “so possessed him” that “he was unable to give himself to another woman.” She was remarried in 1796—to Whitney’s partner in the cotton gin manufacture, Phineas Miller. It would be twenty years—Whitney would be fifty-one and Catherine in her grave—before he could bring himself to marry another woman.

  But Whitney’s tenacity never lessened, nor did his initiative and enterprise. After analyzing his financial problems he turned from Mulberry Grove to the federal government, from making cotton gins to manufacturing small arms. He had no experience in producing guns and no gun factory, but no matter. He knew that he could solve his financial problems if the Treasury would pay for his workshop. He also knew that the outbreak of war in Europe in the 1790s made it essential for the American government to acquire guns for defense.

  Whitney sent Secretary of the Treasury Wolcott a bold proposal to manufacture on a “new principle” 10,000 muskets—a fantastic number in those days—to be delivered to Washington within twenty-eight months. Granted a contract for $134,000, Whitney used an advance of $10,000 to start building an armory. He already had the workers, having recruited them from Massachusetts to make cotton gins. After buying a suitable water-power site on the Mill River outside New Haven, consisting of two hundred acres with three old houses, he added a new barn, five stone dwellings for workmen, a stone store, plus a dam and bridge. Since mills and armories had to rely on water for power, Whitney like other early industrialists located his mill in a rural area and purchased a “mill privilege”—the right to control all or part of the available power.

  Whitney worked closely with his men, who in turn were dependent on him for their jobs and houses. Somewhat isolated in their environments, workers generally found it hard to move away when employers like the ironmasters in Pennsylvania and the mill operators of Rhode Island paid wages not in cash but in credit at the company store. “My intention is to employ steady, sober people and learn them the business,” Whitney wrote. “I shall make it a point to employ persons who have family connections and perhaps some little property to fix them to the place.”

  Westward settlement was already tightening the scarce labor supply of the northeastern states. From the rugged hill farms of western New England, the abundance of western land drew away many potential workers who might otherwise have migrated into the towns or cities to form a more abundant labor force. Whitney had gone for his labor supply to his home area of western Massachusetts, the area of southern New England called “the northern hive,” from which youngest sons and then whole families migrated to western New York and Pennsylvania. Manufacturing had to attract labor from the farming frontier or else draw new hands such as women and children into the labor market.

  Whitney sought young, unskilled workers for training but he found that he must “be present during the formation of every Pattern, Model, Mold, etc.,” as he wrote to explain why he could not fulfill the government contract for guns in the specified lime.
To mechanize the manufacturing process, Whitney had to invent an elaborate system of guides, patterns, templates, gauges, and jigs so that his unskilled workers could produce, in large numbers, a musket from a model that skilled craftsmen had previously made. It took him ten years to deliver 10,000 arms.

  Armorers averaged thirty-two dollars a month, the skilled iron workers in Pennsylvania, twenty to twenty-four dollars. Unskilled workers such as the coal miners of Pennsylvania made five to 10 ten dollars a week, whereas laborers working in construction work, woodcutting, and road building, where the demand for unskilled labor was low, earned from sixty to ninety cents a day. Work in the mines or on construction was intermittent, however, so unskilled laborers seldom earned a full month’s wages. Arms making generally paid armorers by piece rates according to the skill required by the job.

  A man’s working day depended on the speed he could apply to his individual task. At the Harpers Ferry Armory in Virginia, many diversions interrupted the working day. Armorers quit work to share a cup of whiskey, or they might move to the armory yard to watch dogfights, cockfights, and bloody matches between co-workers, usually placing bets on the outcome. Evangelists, orators, and peddlers drew armorers away from work, as did holidays, barbecues, and celebrations.

  The craft ethic caused many armorers to resist mechanization of the industry, on the grounds that an armorer’s task was to make a complete product—lock, stock, and barrel. To learn the craft, a son worked with his father or an apprentice with his master for at least five years to learn such arts as barrel making, lock forging, or filing, stocking, and finishing a musket. The center of the craft tradition in arms making was Philadelphia, where German-born craftsmen served apprenticeships in Pennsylvania gun shops, often migrating to Harpers Ferry at later times. The push for interchangeable parts came not only from gifted arms contractors like Whitney who were eager to cut costs and replace craft skills with machinery, but also from the government, which wanted soldiers to be able to replace broken parts of a musket in the field. Whitney never mastered complete interchangeability before his death, but his methods were adopted and improved upon by other independent arms makers such as John Hall at Harpers Ferry and Simeon North, who were able to assemble rifle components in a case-hardened state as early as 1824.

  The system of interchangeable parts manufacture begun by Whitney and others in the small-arms industry changed the life and work of many craftsmen, such as Johann Ludwig Eberhardt, a clockmaker of Salem, North Carolina. Members of the Moravian Church migrating from Germany had settled first in Pennsylvania and then, after receiving a grant of 100,000 acres in 1766 in the North Carolina piedmont, moved on to the area to be called Salem. Their settlement was never to be a frontier farming settlement but a center for trades and crafts. They drew up plans for a gristmill and sawmill, brewery and distillery, a store, apothecary shop, tanyard, pottery, gunsmith, blacksmith, gunstock maker, tailor shop, shoemaker, linen weaver, saddlery, bakery and carpenter, joiners, masons, and a tavern. The people of Salem, a town of two hundred people, also needed a clockmaker, and on November 29, 1799, the community imported Johann Ludwig Eberhardt, a strong-willed, impetuous, impatient forty-one-year-old clockmaker from Germany.

  In Salem, all admitted had to conform with rules about morals, religion, and behavior established by the Board of Elders. The Elders objected to Eberhardt’s excessive indulgence “in the use of spiritous drink,” but he had come to Salem to settle down and at age forty-one approached the Elders for permission to marry. The Elders Conference rejected the first woman Eberhardt proposed to; his second choice was put to the Lot, a small wooden bowl containing three paper cartridges: “Ja” or “Nein” or a blank, which meant the question required further consideration. The Lot said “Nein” to Eberhardt’s second choice, requiring him to choose a third woman, favored at last by the Elders Conference and the Lot.

  A supervisory committee exercised as much control over business and property as did the Elders Conference over morals. The committee decided which crafts and trades should function, how many craftsmen could do business in each, what prices should be charged, what wages paid. Eberhardt had to ask permission to buy a house for his residence and his shop, and the committee assigned him other duties such as winding and tending the town clocks in the church, ringing the noon bell, and repairing broken clocks. Eberhardt’s business was typical of clock shops of the early nineteenth century, requiring a variety of other skills such as working in metals, smithing, and casting. After importing most parts from England via Philadelphia, Eberhardt filed, scraped, and polished plates and wheel blanks for his clocks, assembling the final individual, handcrafted clock. He made an average of eight clocks per year, charging forty to sixty dollars apiece. His business was an exacting, one-man operation. Though he had apprentices, he could not get along with them and eventually let all of them go.

  Eberhardt’s death in 1839 marked the end of an era of craftsmanship. He was the last clockmaker in Salem. Handmade clocks gave way to Eli Terry’s and Seth Thomas’ machine-made versions. Like Whitney, Terry began to use guides, patterns, templates, gauges, and jigs in the making of his wooden clocks in the Connecticut Valley. With the installation of machinery he was able to turn out clocks in lots of one to two hundred which he peddled about the countryside on horseback for fifteen dollars a clock. His thirty-hour shelf clock, patented in 1816, changed the business. By 1852, the year of his death, he was producing 10,000 to12,000 metal clocks a year which sold for five dollars apiece.

  Industrialists Eli Terry, Eli Whitney, Samuel Colt, and Simeon North tirelessly experimented with machines to cut metal into precise shapes and produce interchangeable parts in clocks and small arms. The problems confronted by these manufacturers were similar technologically to those in a number of other industries, such as sewing machines and agricultural implements. Unlike Eberhardt, who looked upon himself as responsible for a complete, one-of-a-kind product, the industrialists were flexible and experimental tinkerers who improved the manufacturing process by mechanizing it step by step. Their incentive to adopt labor-saving techniques to cut costs was heightened in an expanding economy and population. Farmers with land and a transportation network to market farm products could do well, but in spite of the scarcity of skilled and unskilled labor, workers, whether craftsmen, skilled workers, or common laborers, did not share in the profits of industrialization to the extent the manufacturer did.

  With a new war starting in 1812, Whitney signed a bigger contract with the government to deliver 15,000 muskets. He was able to complete the contract in two years owing to his use of filing jigs, milling machines, and other devices. Little was new in the process. Interchangeable parts manufacture developed much earlier in Europe, but men like Whitney applied machines and methods to manufacture products in a nation where demand for machine-made goods and ability to buy were greater than in many countries in Europe. Whitney died a rich man, leaving an estate of more than $130,000 in savings and personal notes held by him. At this time a skilled millwright or carpenter earned eight dollars a week and a canal laborer four dollars a week, often paid partly in board.

  The leader in industrial expansion between 1815 and 1860 was the cotton textile industry, and the leader in cotton textiles was the man who set up the first integrated cotton textile factory, Francis Cabot Lowell. Merchants in the carrying trade had grown rich, with profits during good times averaging $50 to $70 million dollars annually. But the carrying trade dwindled within a few years because of the Embargo Act of 1807 and the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, as the United States struck back at French and British attacks on American sea commerce. Some merchants began to look for more secure areas to invest their profits. The cotton gin had helped boost American consumption of cotton from 1,000 to 90,000 bales a year, as merchants with warehouses, easy access to credit, resources to purchase raw material in large lots, and experience in merchandising turned to cotton textile manufacture as a way of making large and steady profits.

  F
ifteen of Samuel Slater’s cotton mills had started up by 1807 in Rhode Island. Slater had been an apprentice in England to a partner of Richard Arkwright, an early inventor of cotton textile machinery. In his head Slater had carried the plans of the Arkwright machinery to New York in 1789; this memory feat, his friends claimed, outfoxed English customs officials enforcing the law forbidding the export of machinery plans or apprentices. Slater came to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, at the invitation of the wealthy Providence merchant Moses Brown to build a cotton spinning frame of twenty-four spindles. Textile production took two steps—spinning, in which the spindle stretches and twists fibers into yarns, and weaving, by which fabric is made by the interlacement of groups of yarns at right angles to each other. Slater’s mills did only the first stage—spinning. The yarn from the mills went to hand weavers who wove the yarns into cloth in their farm homes.

  Lowell, unlike Slater, saw the possibilities for profit in bringing the whole process for making cloth into the factory, where unskilled workers could produce by machinery. This would lower costs, for hand weaving was expensive. In 1810, overworked, ill, and exhausted from his ventures in real estate and commerce, he sailed for Edinburgh for a rest cure with his wife, Hannah Jackson Lowell, and his sons. Patrick Tracy Jackson, Lowell’s brother-in-law, managed his affairs and the trading fortune during his absence. Never able to stay idle long, Lowell toured the factory of a large iron manufacturer and then visited the Manchester, England, cotton mills for several weeks. There he observed the Horrocks and Johnson power loom, which incorporated a machine for “dressing” the warp with a starch coating to make it strong enough for power weaving.