Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I—
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Oh! I cannot be a slave,
I will not be a slave,
For I’m so fond of liberty
That I cannot be a slave.
There was something light-hearted in this—the verse parodied the song “I won’t be a nun,” which went “I’m so fond of pleasure that I cannot be a nun”—but something serious, too.49
In Lowell, the walkout movement proved short-lived. But worker criticism of the factory system, if anything, became more common during the 1840s. As in England, reformers focused on the long hours of labor. “The great master evil in operation in Lowell, and too generally in American factories,” the New-York Daily Tribune wrote, “is that of Excessive Hours of Labor.” New England factories rarely operated around the clock, but the workday was very long. In Lowell, in the mid-1840s it generally lasted between 11½ and 13½ hours on weekdays, with somewhat shorter hours on Saturdays, with Sundays off. 50
Following the same path as in England, New England textile workers sought legislative restriction of working hours—to ten hours—first for children and then for workers generally. Mill workers petitioned legislatures, formed organizations, including Female Labor Reform Associations in Lowell and Manchester, held picnics and parades, and published appeals in an effort to reduce the hours of work. Massachusetts and Connecticut did pass laws limiting working time for children, but unlike in Britain, American mill workers did not win meaningful legislation covering adult workers. Some Lowell mills reduced working time slightly, but despite an impressive organizational effort, the ten-hour movement effectively failed.51
Paradise or Paradise Lost?
The dissatisfaction of mill workers with their jobs, employers, and what they perceived as an unrepublican disparity in wealth and power made little impression on the stream of visitors who came to see the mills.52 Davy Crockett, then a Whig congressman from Tennessee, visited Lowell just months after the 1834 strike (less than two years before his death at the Alamo). Crockett wrote that he “wanted to see the power of machinery . . . . [and] how it was that these northerners could buy our cotton, and carry it home, manufacture it, bring it back, and sell it for half nothing; and, in the mean time, be well to live; and make money besides.” Like so many others, he was fascinated by the manufacturing processes and charmed by the “girls” who “looked as if they were coming from a quilting frolic.” “Not one,” he reported, “expressed herself as tired of her employment or oppressed with work,” not surprising given that Crockett was accompanied by Abbott Lawrence, one of the most prominent mill owners. “I could not help reflecting,” Crockett continued, “on the difference of condition between these females, thus employed, and those of other populous countries, where female character is degraded to abject slavery.”
Though a bitter opponent of Andrew Jackson, Crockett’s view of Lowell resembled that of the president, who had visited a year earlier. (Jackson was not the first president to visit a textile mill; James Monroe toured Waltham in 1817.) Leading Lowell investors hoped to charm Jackson at a moment of intense debate over tariffs, a matter in which they had great interest. They largely succeeded, organizing a procession of thousands of female workers in white dresses carrying parasols and wearing sashes reading “Protection to American Industry” and taking the president on a tour of the Merrimack mills.53
By the mid-1830s, it was not surprising for political opponents to be in agreement about Lowell-style manufacturing. In the era of the American Revolution, many leaders, like Thomas Jefferson, worried that manufacturing would threaten the agrarian nature of the country, on which, they believed, liberty, virtue, and republicanism rested. Industry, they feared, would bring the social ills and divisions it bred in Britain. But by the War of 1812 a broad consensus jelled that the United States needed its own manufacturing industries to ensure its strength and independence. Furthermore, even many critics of industrial development came to believe that the physical and political setting of the United States would shape a system of manufacturing shorn of the evils that accompanied it in Europe. Using water power rather than steam meant that American mills were dispersed in towns and small cities, avoiding the congestion and urban ills of Manchester and other British mill cities. Using young, country women as short-term workers avoided the creation of a debased proletariat. What was wrong with Old World manufacturing, American political and intellectual leaders came to believe, was not manufacturing but the Old World. Lowell, many contended, demonstrated that manufacturing in the New World could coexist with democratic values, moral purity, and pastoral harmony.54
Not everyone was so sanguine. Poet and abolitionist John G. Whittier was often quoted for his smile-inducing 1846 description of “The Factory Girls of Lowell”: “Acres of girlhood—beauty reckoned by the square rod, or miles by long measure!—The young, the graceful, the gay—flowers gathered from a thousand hill-sides and green vallies of New England.” Whittier praised the Lowell workers for their “hope-stimulated industry,” teaching “the lessons of Free Labor,” a sharp contrast to the “whip-driven labor” of the slave plantation. But later in the same article he chastised the “good many foolish essays written upon the beauty and divinity of labor by those who have never known what it really is to earn one’s livelihood by the sweat of the brow—who have never, from year to year, bent over the bench or loom, shut out from the blue skies, the green grass, and the sweet waters, and felt the head reel, and the heart faint, and the limbs tremble with the exhaustion of unremitted toil.” Whittier acknowledged “much that is wearisome and irksome in the life of the factory operative.”55
Labor reformer Seth Luther sharply took to task politicians who praised the cotton mills based on whirlwind tours: “For an hour or more (not fourteen hours) he seems to be in the regions described in Oriental song, his feelings are overpowered. . . . His mind being filled with sensations, which from their novelty, are without a name, he explains, ’tis a paradise.” But for Luther, “if a cotton mill is a ‘paradise,’ it is ‘Paradise Lost,’” a site of unhealthy long hours, poorly paid workers, and tyrannical overseers.56
Critics of New England mill conditions, unlike in England, rarely claimed that factory conditions were as bad as or worse than slavery. Ralph Waldo Emerson was something of an exception when, in a bitter commentary on Lowell, he equated black slaves in the South with female mill worker “slaves” and criticized mill owners for wanting to live in luxury without working, “enjoyment without the sweat.”57 But critics still turned to slavery for metaphors of oppression. An 1844 letter in the Manchester Operative, for instance, likened the mill bell calling workers to their tasks to “a slave driver’s whip,” while for a New Hampshire worker the unrestrained power of overseers was equivalent to that of slave drivers. A few critics—though not many—acknowledged that while the mills were not a form of slavery themselves, they were deeply embedded in the slave system, dependent on slave labor to grow the cotton they used and producing textiles sold to slave owners to clothe their chattel.58
Though supporters and critics generally agreed that New England mills were not as bad as those in Britain, some argued that the difference might be temporary. Seth Luther declared that the “misery in horrid forms . . . in the manufacturing districts of England” was “directly produced by manufacturing operations” and that the United States was “following with a fearful rapidity the ‘Splendid Example of England.’” Luther highlighted the employment of children, very common in the Rhode Island–style mills, a harsh reality usually elided by the focus of contemporary observers and later historians on the Lowell-style mills. Luther decried the lack of education that inevitably resulted from toiling long hours in the “palaces of the poor.” To the cry of manufacturers that “it is not so bad as it is in England yet,” he responded that one might as well “say the Cholera is not so severe in Boston yet as it has been in New York.”59
Anthony Trollope came to similar conclusions. The superior conditions and paternalist institutions of Lowell, he suggested, were made possible by its comparatively small size by English standards. (On the eve of the Civil War, there were nearly four times as many cotton workers in Britain as in the United States.) Scaling up, Trollope envisioned, would require moving from water to steam power. If Lowell made the switch and “spread itself widely,” he wrote, “it will lose its Utopian characteristics.” John Robert Godley made a similar point in his 1844 Letters from America, questioning whether Lowell could be used to demonstrate that “the evils which have in Europe universally attended the manufacturing system are not inevitable in it.” Lowell, he noted, was set up and developed “under eminently favorable circumstances.” Over time, as the population of the United States grew, wages fell, and manufacturing increased in importance, he doubted that “the favourable contrast which the New England factories now present to those of England, France, and Germany, can possibly continue.” A quarter century later, Edward Bellamy, a lifelong resident of Chicopee Falls and author of the blockbuster utopian novel Looking Backward, also saw European conditions of poverty and social division coming to the United States. He had “no difficulty,” he wrote, “in recognizing in America, and even in my comparatively prosperous village, the same conditions in course of progressive development.”60
Herman Melville at least implicitly suggested that the United States already had the same kind of class division that manufacturing had brought to England in his 1855 story, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” The first part of the story portrays a group of well-fed, self-indulgent London lawyers, while the latter part recounts a winter visit to a paper factory in an isolated New England valley, apparently based on Melville’s visit to a paper mill in Dalton, Massachusetts (which is still operating). The narrator expresses his awe at the ingenuity and operation of the papermaking machine, “this inflexible iron animal,” “a miracle of inscrutable intricacy.” But he is horrified by the pale, unhealthy looking, silent “girls,” the unmarried women who come from “far-off villages” who operate the machinery, “mere cogs to the wheels,” a far cry from the way Lowell workers usually were portrayed. Rather than in a “commercial Utopia,” Melville’s young women were trapped in “Tartarus,” a province of the underworld, while far away the wealthy barristers fed and liquored themselves.61
New England reformer Orestes Brownson was more explicit in seeing the nation divided into “two classes,” laborers and capitalists. In a widely debated essay on “The Laboring Classes,” Brownson used Lowell as an example in decrying the effect of factory labor on workers and the growing gap between industrialists and their employees, suggesting that only a radical recasting of society could re-create true community.62 Seth Luther concurred: “The whole system of labor in New England, more especially in cotton mills, is a cruel system of exaction on the bodies and minds of the producing classes, destroying the energies of both, and for no other object than to enable the ‘rich’ to ‘take care of themselves,’ while ‘the poor must work or starve.’ ”63
Alexis de Tocqueville, too, saw a growing class division in the United States, brought about by factory production. The efficiencies of large factory production, he predicted, would enrich manufacturers to the extent that they would become a new aristocracy, threatening democracy, while workers were physically and mentally disadvantaged by the narrow, repetitive nature of factory tasks. “Whereas the workman concentrates his faculties more and more upon the study of a single detail, the master surveys a more extensive whole, and the mind of the latter is enlarged in proportion as that of the former is narrowed.” The industrial class divide, the concentration of workers, and the cyclical nature of the economy might well endanger “public tranquility,” a problem, in Tocqueville’s view, that would require more government regulation to avoid.64
Faded Visions
The debate over Lowell raised what already had become a recurring question: Was the factory system inherently oppressive to workers and threatening to social cohesion or did its nature change with its environment? Over time, the critical views of Brownson, Tocqueville, and Luther became more widely shared. In England, the cotton mill quickly brought a broad acceptance of the idea that it was creating a new type of class society. In the United States, there was an interregnum during which the large factory was associated with the idea that industry and republican community could coexist. But by the time of the Civil War, changes in the factory system itself, evident in Lowell and other cotton centers, faded visions of “commercial Utopia.”
Above all, it was the transformation of the workforce that changed the public perception of the New England mills. By the late 1840s, fewer young New Englanders were coming to the mill towns as a result of growing displeasure with the pay, hours, and increased workload, evident in the strikes of the 1830s and the ten-hour movement. Also, for young women other alternatives to staying in rural homes opened up. Railroads made it easier to move to urban centers or out West. With the spread of public education, the number of jobs for teachers swelled and salaries improved.65
Fortunately for the mills, in the mid-1840s, just as the influx from the countryside diminished, a new labor pool materialized with mass migration from famine-gripped Ireland. Between 1846 and 1847 alone, immigration from Ireland more than doubled, and by 1851 it more than doubled again. There were always Irish workers in Lowell and other mill towns; Irish men dug the canals and helped build the factories. But before 1840, the textile companies generally spurned Irish women; in 1845, only 7 percent of the Lowell mill workforce was Irish. Necessity ended the discrimination; by the early 1850s, about half the textile workers in Lowell and other mill towns were Irish. At the Hamilton mill, by 1860 over 60 percent of the employees had been born abroad.66
The increasing number of immigrant workers brought other changes. More children began being hired in Lowell-style mills, especially boys, as whole families needed to work to support themselves, a reversion to the pattern in the early Slater-type mills. The gendered division of labor broke down as male immigrants accepted jobs once reserved for women, paid wages that in the past only women would take. At Hamilton, in 1860, 30 percent of the workforce consisted of adult men.
Immigrant family labor contributed to the decline of the boardinghouse system and company paternalism. Lowell firms put up mills at a faster pace than they built housing, and after 1848 they stopped building housing entirely. Institutional arrangements once needed to attract rural young women and reassure their parents became increasingly superfluous, as the companies acknowledged in the 1850s when they dropped requirements for church attendance and boardinghouse residence for single women. A growing proportion of the workforce—including more and more single women—lived in non-company-owned boardinghouses or in rented tenement apartments. The company boardinghouses lingered on—between 1888 and 1891 a quarter of the workers at the Boott mills were still living in company-owned housing—but they declined in importance as the immigrant workforce grew.67
Figure 2.3 Winslow Homer’s 1868 engraving of New England factory life, Bell-Time.
As the novelty of the mills wore off, the “acres of girlhood”—or at least of native-born girlhood—shriveled, and company paternalism diminished, travelers, politicians, and writers lost interest in Lowell. But even as public attention moved away, the mills continued to expand. The Civil War stimulated growth. With cotton all but unobtainable and raw cotton prices soaring, many Lowell mills sold off their cotton inventories for windfall profits, reducing or stopping their own operations. Some took advantage of the hiatus to expand and modernize. The Boott mill added two buildings and replaced much of its machinery. In the postwar years, it built yet another mill and began supplementing water power with steam. By 1890 it employed over 2,000 workers, large but nowhere nearly as large as the Merrimack mills, with over 3,000 workers, and the Lawrence mills, with over 4,500.
In nearby Lawrence, the economic downtu
rn in 1857 drove three mills into bankruptcy, but the war brought a boom. Unlike in Lowell, the Lawrence mills generally held on to their cotton to continue production. Old mills expanded and new ones shot up and continued to grow after the war, on a scale surpassing anything in Lowell. To hedge against cotton goods’ booms and busts, most Lawrence mills also produced woolens or worsteds. One Lawrence factory, the Wood Mill, controlled by the American Woolen Company, in the early twentieth century had more than seven thousand workers. Altogether, Massachusetts employment in the cotton textile industry soared from 135,000 in 1870 to 310,000 in 1905. In New Hampshire, Amoskeag Manufacturing Company expanded until it was the largest textile factory complex in the world.68
As the New England mills kept growing, Irish workers were joined and partially replaced by an influx of French Canadians. In the early twentieth century, other immigrant groups began working in the mills, too, largely Southern and Eastern Europeans but smaller groups, like Syrians, as well. For some of the newcomers, the experience of mill work felt not much different than it had for the early New Englanders. Cora Pellerin, a French Canadian who began working at Amoskeag in 1912 at age eleven, thought “It was paradise here because you got your money, and you did whatever you wanted to with it.” But for many others, the experience of mill work and mill-town life was far less positive, as working conditions deteriorated and widespread poverty came to characterize the factory towns. “By 1910,” according to historian Ardis Cameron, “readers of Charles Dickens would have found Lawrence’s dull streets and cluttered alleys, its black canals and purple ill-smelling river, its vast piles of soot-covered brick buildings, its flimsy, damp privies whose waste oozed down open sewers and meandered through the city’s shaded backyards a familiar landscape.”69
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