American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Returning to Boston in 1812, Lowell sought the help of an Amesbury mechanic, Paul Moody, to construct a power loom. Together they fashioned a successful one operated by a camshaft. There was nothing remarkable in their power loom—other manufacturers were close to building one as efficient as Lowell’s and later even superior to it; but none of the small partnership and family-owned enterprises of southern New England could match Lowell’s command of investment capital to establish new factories, power systems, and machines on a big scale.

  Lowell persuaded Jackson and Nathan Appleton, a wealthy Boston merchant, to join him in raising $400,000 for the venture, including purchase of the power rights on the Charles River in Waltham, with its ten-foot waterfall. An elbow of land jutting into the Charles River and linked by the Great Sudbury Road to Boston provided an excellent factory site. The Boston Associates, as they were called, eventually included the most prominent merchant families in the city—Jackson, Appleton, Lawrence, Cabot, Dwight, Amory, Lyman, and Lowell, all linked by marriage. Lowell designed the buildings for the Waltham mill, including a machine shop where the spinning, carding, and weaving machinery would be made, a small mill with about 2,000 spindles in operation by 1816 and a larger one of 3,500 spindles in operation a few years later.

  It was easier to buy machinery than to hire workers, but Lowell had the foresight to attract a new factory labor force of young women from the large New England farm families whose hilly land could not support all its young people. The Waltham system was to be different from the poverty and misery of the English system of labor, different also from the Slater mills that employed large families and put small children into the mills. Too complicated for children to operate, the power looms did not require strength so much as dexterity, and some women knew weaving from work at home. When young men became agricultural laborers, tenant farmers, or moved west, young farm women often went into the factories. Nowhere else could they make as much money. The “mill girls,” as they called themselves, were a temporary labor force. Expecting to work for three or four years and return to the farms or get married, they were not at first eager to demand better working rules.

  By 1826 the Waltham mills employed five hundred operatives, who were paid from two to four dollars a week, from which $1.25 for room and board was deducted. The power loom saved considerable labor cost over the hand-loom weaving method. In the machine shops, skilled machinists received fifty cents to two dollars a day, while the superintendent earned two dollars a day. One of the chief attractions of the Waltham mills was that they paid their workers in cash.

  The venture was an immediate financial success, paying dividends of from 8 to 13 percent on investments. Lowell and his associates were experienced merchandisers, having already shipped British and Indian cloth, and when the British dumped cotton goods in the United States after the War of 1812, the fine English cotton textiles did not drive out the coarse cotton products of Waltham. In 1816, Lowell had gone to Washington to lobby for a new tariff of 6¼ cents a square yard which would protect the Waltham product against cheap cotton goods from India but would not protect Rhode Island manufacturers of hand-woven calico from imports of fine English cottons.

  New England offered a more advantageous environment for factory development, for it had few craftsmen and skilled weavers to resist the machines turning out coarse, unbleached sheeting. With its big water supply and the ample labor force from the poor hill farms of Massachusetts, Waltham was an excellent site for the complete cotton factory. The only comparable locality for cotton mills was Philadelphia, the city to which skilled spinners and weavers had migrated during the colonial period, but unskilled workers were not plentiful there, as the farms of eastern Pennsylvania were fertile and migration to the West was easy.

  By 1820 Moody had harnessed the power of the Charles River, so the Boston Associates looked elsewhere for a new supply of power to build mills from the profits of Waltham. Appleton, Jackson, and Moody selected the community of East Chelmsford, where the Concord and Merrimack rivers came together at Pawtucket Falls—a falls of thirty-two feet from a large watershed that could provide over 3,000 potential horsepower, enough for fifty mills like the two in Waltham. Agents quickly bought four hundred acres from unsuspecting farmers in 1821 and gained control over the entire power of the Merrimack. The community was named Lowell in honor of the financial leader, who had died in 1817 at only forty-two. By 1839, nine textile companies were in operation. The population of Lowell expanded from 200 in 1820 to 30,000 by 1845.

  Women made up by far the larger part of this population explosion. A long, low black wagon, called a “slaver,” cruised along Vermont and New Hampshire farm roads in charge of a “commander” who received a dollar a head for any girl he could “bring to the market.” Lowell and the other mill towns made factory work respectable by providing strictly chaperoned boardinghouses and requiring church attendance on Sunday. Female labor constituted over two-thirds of the factory labor force.

  The mills of the paternalistic Boston Associates instituted a set of regulations to protect the young women and ensure discipline and compliance. An employee had to remain with the company for at least twelve months once she began work, and to give the company at least two weeks’ notice before she could quit, or her name would go on a blacklist. She was to work fourteen hours a day, six days a week. While she could attend the church of her choice in Lowell, Sunday school was often taught by her overseers.

  Lucy Larcom, one of five thousand Lowell girls, began work in 1835, changing the bobbins on the spinning frames when she was eleven years old. After her mother had been widowed and left alone with nine children, she too came to Lowell to work as a boardinghouse matron. During or after work, it was a life without privacy. In the boardinghouses the girls ate in a large communal dining room and slept six to a room, two to a bed. The inmates were locked in their boardinghouses at ten o’clock. In the factory Lucy worked from five in the morning to seven at night, with thirty minutes allowed for lunch and for dinner. Lucy found the work tedious, but there were moments of relief. While the girls could not read on company time—literature in the mills was strictly forbidden—they enjoyed a good deal of camaraderie. And an overseer allowed Lucy to sit in the window and watch the flow of the Merrimack River.

  The mill owners were proud of their productive mills, constantly improved machinery, efficient labor force. They conceived of Lowell as a social experiment “that would be a shining example of those ultimate Yankee ideals: profit and virtue, doing good and doing well.” Visitors were impressed by the boardinghouse system, the chattering, vivacious mill girls, and especially by the educational opportunities of Lowell—by the Lowell Library, begun in 1825 with five hundred dollars from the company, and the Lyceum, also built by the company, which offered twenty-five lectures a year for fifty cents each, as well as night courses. Visitors wrote glowing—and often misleading—reports of busy mills and happy mill girls.

  As the success of the Lowell and Waltham mills attracted new investors, the Boston Associates built mills on eight of New England’s best water-power sites—Chicopee, Holyoke, and Lawrence in Massachusetts; Dover, Manchester, and Nashua in New Hampshire; Biddeford and Saco in Maine—eventually comprising one-fifth of America’s cotton textile industry, all centrally controlled with other ventures in finance, insurance, and railroads. The protective tariff of 1816 allowed American industrialists to monopolize the market for the mass-produced, inexpensive, low-grade cotton cloth so much in demand by western settlers. The gin had lowered the price of cotton far below that of flax or wool, so the industrialist could buy cheap raw cotton, manufacture it into cloth, and sell it in a rapidly expanding internal market. The American standard of living was rising faster in this period than that of any other nation in the world.

  Other industries such as firearms, woolens, iron, agricultural machinery, shoes and leather products expanded also, but no other industry rose so fast in the early years of 1816 through 1830 as did the cotton texti
le industry. The total number of factory spindles reached 1,750,000 by 1835. By 1840 mills employed 100,000 people, compared with 5,000 in 1816. The pioneering methods of the cotton textile industry influenced the methods of other industries. Men employed in developing machinery for the cotton textile industry supplied the skills and know-how for other mechanizing industries.

  The innovating leaders needed more than machines and manpower; they needed money. Lack of capital was the principal problem of businessmen in the early nineteenth century. As the Napoleonic wars made the United States the major neutral carrier with a corresponding rise in mercantile fortunes, northeastern states with competing seaports promoted their cities and tried to attract capital in various ways, such as awarding charters to businesses to incorporate. Savings banks arose rapidly in the northern and middle states and became capital suppliers to commercial banks either by redepositing deposits or by stock investments and loans to rising industries.

  States had no requirements for reserves, so clearinghouses for interbank claims were developed through the leadership of the Boston Associates. They were the directors of the Suffolk Bank of Boston, which in 1822 began to clear notes from country banks for the city banks of Boston, requiring country banks to maintain a five-thousand-dollar deposit in the Suffolk Bank and enough besides to redeem each of its notes. Lowell had received a corporate charter from the Massachusetts legislature and was able to draw on the profits of the Boston mercantile community. These merchants, with profits from the overseas trade, were people to look to for capital when banks would not take the risk.

  Many of his friends and relatives had thought the plan of Francis Cabot Lowell for a cotton textile mill “a visionary and dangerous scheme.” Lowell’s leadership had convinced them otherwise.

  FREIGHT: THE BIG DITCHES

  The August day was hot and sultry when the extraordinary contraption, appearing to be a raft topped by a furnace, fired up in the Hudson River at New York City. On board were forty passengers—all members of the Livingston clan—who huddled together trying to avoid sparks and soot from the steamboat’s engine. Undercurrents of “I told you so; it is a foolish scheme; I wish we were well out of it,” grew louder. The steamboat’s inventor, Robert Fulton, later wrote, “There were not perhaps thirty persons in the city who believed that the boat would ever move one mile an hour….” Two men had no doubts: Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, an avid student of steam navigation, Fulton’s mentor and financier, and Fulton himself, mechanical genius and inventor.

  Fulton had no time for talk, being too busy trying to find out why his steamboat was steaming but not moving. Soon he solved the problem, and the boat left New York City bound for the chancellor’s Clermont estate. As news of the boat’s voyage moved up the Hudson faster than its speed of five miles per hour, people lined the shore to gape at the clanking, splashing craft, shooting a fiery shower of sparks as it panted its way. It was a frightening spectacle to some who watched from shore—the coming of the end. A few ran to their homes and locked the doors in fright, but the North River Steamboat of Clermont, later known as just the Clermont, roared on to Livingston’s Hudson River estate, finishing the distance of 110 miles in twenty-four hours. The steamboat traveled forty miles to Albany on the following day.

  “The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved,” the elated inventor wrote of his triumph. “…It will give a cheap and quick conveyance to the merchandise on the Mississippi, Missouri, and other great rivers, which are now laying open the treasures to the enterprise of our countrymen.” Fulton intended to use his steamboat on western waters and make upstream navigation possible on the Mississippi. His experiment was but one in a long string of successes. Tall, handsome, and forty-one, with curly black hair and dark eyes, he looked like an English gentleman who had married into the Livingston clan and been accepted, as indeed he had. Nothing if not confident, Fulton had a talent for persuading wealthy investors to finance his imaginative adventures. His first patron, Joel Barlow, a radical and cosmopolitan poet living in France, had introduced him to Livingston.

  Fulton had traveled to Europe in 1787 to study miniature painting and did not return to the United States for twenty years. In Europe he came to be fascinated by transportation and the building of steamboats. Soon he was corresponding with Boulton and Watt in England about the purchase of a suitable steam engine for boat propulsion. A voracious reader of studies about steam navigation—especially the work of John Fitch, John Stevens, and Oliver Evans, all of whom had launched workable steamboats—as well as theoretical works on hull design, Fulton wrote a treatise of his own on the improvement of canal navigation. He moved to France in 1799 to confer with the French Directory about another dream of his, submarines. Encouraged by the French government, at war with England, Fulton perfected a submersible in which he and a crew of three, aided by a compressed-air tank, could submerge as deep as twenty-five feet and stay under for four and one-half hours. The French government agreed to reward him handsomely if he destroyed one of the British warships blockading the French coast, but Fulton never engaged a British ship. The French lost interest, and Fulton turned to his other pursuits.

  Fulton became acquainted with Livingston while in France. The improvement of transportation through steam-powered vessels was a lifelong obsession of Livingston, as it was with other landowners of the period. In 1798, the Hudson grandee had a bill presented to the New York Assembly repealing an act of 1787 that gave John Fitch the sole right to use steamboats on the Hudson River and now awarding Livingston the privilege for twenty years, provided he could build within a year a boat of twenty tons and propel it by steam at the rate of four miles an hour.

  Financed by Livingston, Fulton set to work late in 1802 to build an experimental boat to navigate on the Seine River of France. Since the inland navigation of American waters was their purpose, however, they both agreed to shift the experiments to the United States. After buying and shipping home a steam engine and boiler made by Boulton and Watt of England, Fulton designed a vessel for it in the shipyards at Paulus Hook Ferry. It was a long and narrow boat—150 feet by 13 feet—with a flat deck and open machinery, planned for eventual use on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

  Since a steamboat, in comparison with a textile factory, required little capital to build—$900 to $1,200 for the smaller boats and later $5,000 to $40,000 for the ferries—competition was stiff. Rivals sought advantages in state monopoly grants and expensive patent suits. Livingston won a second and third extension of the New York state monopoly, thus gaining the exclusive privilege to operate steamboats in New York waters and to have the privilege extended by five years for each additional boat built—the whole time not to exceed thirty years. Livingston felt he had every right to the monopoly since he had supplied leadership and capital, through the sale of some of his lands, to a project which would eventually benefit the nation as a whole. He supplied the inventor with a state monopoly and commercial advantage, for Livingston brought the steamboat to the attention of his merchant friends in New York City who would want to use a steamboat service. Livingston also brought stability and direction to the partnership, constantly summoning Fulton back from his other canal and submarine interests to the completion of the steamboat in 1807. “Mechanicks is my hobby horse,” he wrote.

  Fulton, in turn, gave his engineering talents and inventiveness to the partnership. The North River Steamboat was by no means original, for many others had built workable steam vessels (though none had lasted). Fulton approached the problem by studying the errors and successes of others, keeping careful records of his readings and experiments, and constructing trial models before going full-scale. Although his European training had taught him to study all aspects of a subject scientifically rather than tinkering, he wanted a practical and commercial success more than he wanted the claim of originality. Expanding his factory at Paulus Hook Ferry, he built another steamboat in 1810 and was offering ferry service from New York to Albany twice a week. He also tu
rned to the area which had always been his object—the Mississippi River. Here the steamboat would transform the inland transportation system of the United States.

  Walled off by the Appalachian Mountains, the Northwest was not easily accessible to manufactured goods from Europe and the Northeast, and the Northwest in turn could not profitably export to the East because of the high cost of wagon transport. As migrants poured over the Appalachians after the War of 1812 to settle and farm, they began to produce a surplus of heavy staples—grain, meat, whiskey, lumber, and livestock. How to market and transport this surplus? Heavy farm items such as wheat and flour could not absorb the freight charge of thirteen dollars a barrel to move from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia when the flour itself sold for ten dollars. Horses could draw loaded wagons about twenty miles a day, or two miles an hour.

  Highways were still primitive, even though states had awarded monopolies to turnpike builders to encourage the construction of better roads. The national government itself built a highway partially from the sale of Ohio public lands to connect Ohio with the Atlantic. In 1818 this “National Road” opened for traffic from Cumberland on the Potomac River through the lower western corner of Pennsylvania, to Wheeling. Although the new highway boasted a fine-stone surface and heavy bridges, traffic was so heavy as to wear it out in places. Maintained for the most part by local authorities, state roads were poor; only the best were comparable to the improved backcountry roads of today. The traveler could expect anything on local ways, even the building of fences across them. As late as 1841 one traveler found that a settler needing clay for his house chimney had dug a big hole in the middle of an Illinois state road used by the mail stage. The few improved highways such as the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the National Road did not lower the cost of freight transportation, which, to be at all profitable, had to go by water.