93.Not only were workers unable to vote but also the districts in which mills were located were vastly underrepresented in Parliament as a result of the way seats were apportioned. Aspin, First Industrial Society, 56–57, 153–54; Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1963), 18–19.
94.Pelling, History of British Trade Unionism, 24–29; Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 196.
95.Hobsbawm summarizes the major outbreaks of unrest in Britain between 1800 and 1850 in Labouring Men, 155. See also Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 287, 366–67; Pelling, History of British Trade Unionism, 29–33, 36–37, 43–44, 46–49; and Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 308, 706–08, 734–68.
96.Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 48–50, 62, 71. Walt Rostow made a similar claim in W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 33–34, 54.
97.See, for example, Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (Auburn, AL: Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 1998), 613–19. Von Mises writes of early factories, “The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job,” ignoring the fact that the state performed that function for them. On hanging Luddites, see Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 627–28, and Lord Byron’s eloquent speech in the House of Lords against making machine breaking a capital crime, http://www.luddites200.org.uk/LordByronspeech.html (accessed Oct. 7, 2016).
98.Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 55; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 194; Aspin, First Industrial Society, 15–17, 23–30; Mechanics’ magazine, Sept. 25, 1830, reprinted in Jennings, Pandemonium, 176–79; J. C. Jeaffreson and William Pole, The Life of Robert Stephenson, F.R.S., vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866), 141; Tony Judt, “The Glory of the Rails” and “Bring Back the Rails!,” The New York Review of Books, vol. 57, no. 20 (Dec. 23, 2010), and vol. 58, no. 1 (Jan. 13, 2011).
99.Timothy L. Alborn, Conceiving Companies; Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 182–83; Jennings, Pandemonium, 311–12; Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 121.
100.G. W. Hilton, “The Truck Act of 1831,” The Economic History Review, new series, vol. 10, no. 3 (1958): 470–79; Hutchins and Harrison, History of Factory Legislation, 43–70; Hunt, Marx’s General, 184–86.
101.Gray, Factory Question, 140, 163; Aspin, First Industrial Society, 185. On paternalism, see Joyce, Work, Society and Politics, esp. 135–53, 168–71, 185.
102.Brontë, Shirley, 487–88; Pelling, History of British Trade Unionism, 43–49; Carlisle, “Introduction,” in Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives, 63–65.
103.Engels, “Principles of Communism,” quoted in Hunt, Marx’s General, 144.
Chapter 2
“THE LIVING LIGHT”
1.Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842), 152–64 (quote on 164); [John Dix], Local Loiterings and Visits in the Vicinity of Boston (Boston: Redding & Co., 1845), 44; Michael Chevalier, Society, Manner and Politics in the United States: Being a Series of Letters on North America (Boston: Weeks, Jordan and Company, 1839), 128–44 (quotes on 136, 142, 143); Anthony Trollope, North America ([1862] New York: Knopf, 1951), 247–55 (quote on 250).
2.Marvin Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness; The European Response to American Industrialization, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 32–43, 92–95, 105–08; Dix, Local Loiterings, 48–49, 75, 79; Chevalier, Society, Manner and Politics in the United States, 133, 137.
3.Caroline F. Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in Industrial Beginnings ([1931] New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 17–18, 30. Three of the most important histories of the New England textile industry were written by women: Ware’s Early New England Cotton Manufacture; Vera Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town; A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts (Northampton, MA: Department of History of Smith College, 1936); and Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads; New England’s Mill Girls and Magnates (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949). At the time, economic history (and academic scholarship more generally) was almost exclusively a male enterprise. Perhaps they were drawn to the subject by the large number of female textile workers. In an appreciation of their contributions, Herbert Gutman and Donald Bell wrote that the three “extended the boundaries of American working-class history beyond those fixed by John R. Commons and others described as this subject’s founding fathers. Their books . . . offered new ways to think about working-class history. . . . Their perspectives differed, but all asked new questions about the early history of New England capitalism and wage labor.” Long before the current vogue in the history of capitalism, these extraordinary scholars were writing just that. Herbert G. Gutman and Donald H. Bell, eds., The New England Working Class and the New Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), xii.
4.George Rogers Taylor, “Introduction,” in Nathan Appleton and Samuel Batchelder, The Early Development of the American Cotton Textile Industry ([1858 and 1863] New York: Harper & Row, 1969), xiv.
5.George S. White, Memoir of Samuel Slater: The Father of American Manufactures: Connected with a History of the Rise and Progress of the Cotton Manufacture in England and America (Philadelphia: Printed at No. 46, Carpenter Street, 1836), 33–42; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), 152–54; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 19–23; Betsy W. Bahr, “New England Mill Engineering: Rationalization and Reform in Textile Mill Design, 1790–1920,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware, 1987, 13–16.
6.Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 26–27, 29–30, 60, 82, 227.
7.Following the English example, Slater and other southern New England mill owners set up Sunday schools for their child workers. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 22–23, 28, 30–32, 245–47, 284–85; Samuel Batchelder, Introduction and Early Progress of the Cotton Manufacture in the United States (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1863), in Appleton and Batchelder, Early Development of the American Cotton Textile Industry, 46, 74.
8.Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 17, 28, 50–55.
9.Nathan Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, and Origin of Lowell (Lowell, MA: Proprietors of the Locks and Canals on Merrimack River, 1858), in Appleton and Batchelder, Early Development of the American Cotton Textile Industry, 7; Robert Brook Zevin, “The Growth of Cotton Textile Production After 1815,” in Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 139; Taylor, “Introduction,” in Appleton and Batchelder, Early Development of the American Cotton Textile Industry, 9. Lowell also was in contact with machinists in Rhode Island who could build spinning equipment. See, for example, Wm. Blackburns to Francis Cabot Lowell, June 2, 1814, Loose Manuscripts, box 6, Old B7 F7.19, Francis Cabot Lowell (1775–1817) Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts.
10.Director’s Records, Volume 1, MSS:442, 1–2, Boston Manufacturing Company Records, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Allston, Massachusetts; Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 8–10, 26; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 63, 138, 147–48.
11.Carding was done on the first floor, spinning on the second, and weaving on the third and fourth. In 1820, after it built a second mill, Boston Manufacturing employed about 230 to 265 workers, of whom roughly 85 percent were women and only 5 percent “boys.” Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 1; Richard M. Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” in Robert Weible, Essays from the Lowell Conference on Industrial History 1982 and 1983:
The Arts and Industrialism, The Industrial City (North Andover, MA: Museum of American Textile History, 1985), 19, 24, 26; U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service, “National Register of Historical Places Inventory—Nomination Form,” Boston Manufacturing Company (accessed Jan. 16. 2015), http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NHLS/Text/77001412.pdf; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 64.
12.Peter Temin, “Product Quality and Vertical Integration in the Early Cotton Textile Industry,” Journal of Economic History XVIII (1988), 893, 897; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 9–12; Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 147; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 65, 70–72; Zevin, “The Growth of Cotton Textile Production,” 126–27.
13.The original two Waltham mills are still standing, but in altered form, having had their pitched roofs replaced by flat ones and the space between them filled in by subsequent construction. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 66; Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” 24–25; “National Register of Historical Places Inventory—Nomination Form,” Boston Manufacturing Company.
14.While the first mill established the basic framework for production, the second mill established the physical template for future mills. Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” 29, 34; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 14.
15.Batchelder, Introduction and Early Progress of the Cotton Manufacture, 81; Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, 30–31, 50; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 9; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 83; Laurence Gross, The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Mass., 1835–1955 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 12; Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 59; Betsy Hunter Bradley, The Works: The Industrial Architecture of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93.
16.Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 63, 139, 145, 184; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 6–7, 229.
17.Recent accounts that stress the global nature of the cotton industry include Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello, eds., The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Beckert, Empire of Cotton. On U.S. cotton exports, see Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 189–91.
18.Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 4–5; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 23–24; Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, shelf number 1, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records, Baker Library, HBS, 5, 15; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 36.
19.Mills of this design still can be seen across large parts of New England, many now converted to condominiums, office space, warehouses, artists’ studios, museums, or cultural centers or sitting abandoned.
20.Merrimack purchased from Boston Manufacturing the right to use machinery it had designed and patented. All the space in the five mill buildings was not initially filled with equipment, but the company soon purchased additional machinery. Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, shelf number 1, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records, 5, 51–54; Bradley, The Works, 93, 113–14, 125–28, 133–35, 139; Bahr, “New England Mill Engineering,” 13, 21, 27, 40–41, 44–45; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 7. For an example of the concern about fire, see the 1829 report by a committee of the Merrimack Board of Directors about measures “to render the mills at Lowell more secure from fire,” in Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, shelf number 1, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records, 61, 63–65.
21.Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, 47–50, 47–50; Thomas Dublin, Farm to Factory: Women’s Letters, 1830–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 5–8; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 28–29; Samuel Batchelder to Nathan Appleton, Sept. 25, 1824, and William Appleton to Samuel Batchelder, Oct. 8, 1824, in Minute Books, v.a – Directors, 1824–1857; Proprietors, 1824–64, Hamilton Manufacturing Company Records, Baker Library; F-1 Records 1828–1858, 26–27, Bigelow Stanford Carpet Co. collection, Lowell Manufacturing Company records, Baker Library; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 38, 42. A list of the various Lowell textile firms, their officers, and principal stockholders appears in Shlakman, 39–42.
22.Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” 25–30.
23.Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records, 23, 25–26, 81; Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” 38–39; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 24; Lowell Manufacturing Company Records, 1828–1858, 66–68; Dublin, Farm to Factory, 5–8; U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1840,” June 15, 1998, https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab07.txt.
24.Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 25–26, 36–37, 39–42.
25.Local workers were hired for construction work associated with the mills. But even for that, some outside workers—like Irish canal diggers—were brought in. Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, x, xi, 56, Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 24–25, 49, 64–65; Tamara K. Hareven and Randolph Lanenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory City (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 16.
26.The Lowell Machine Shop, separated from Canals and Locks in 1845, employed 550 workers, making it a giant among machine shops, turning out not only textile equipment but also planning machines, steam boilers, mill shafting, and even locomotives. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 60; United States Census Office, Manufacturers of the United States in 1860 (Washington, DC: 1865), 729; “Statistics of Lowell Manufactures. January, 1857. Compiled from authentic sources.” [Lowell, 1857], Library of Congress (accessed Jan. 28, 2015), http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/rbpebib:@field(NUMBER+@band[rbpe+0620280a]); David R. Meyer, Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 205.
27.Some companies did introduce new types of spinning machines, which could operate at higher speeds. Dublin, Farm to Factory, 5–8; Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, 55, 69–71; Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: The Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 6; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 37, 42; Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” 34, 38.
28.The companies eventually replaced their original waterwheels with more efficient water turbines. Even after the Civil War, they only gradually installed steam engines. As late as the 1890s, the Boott mills were getting half their power from water. Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 19–20, 42–43; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 144–45. For a comparison of the cost of steam and water power, see “Difference between the cost of power to be used at Dover the next 15 years and a full supply of water,” Box 6, Vol. III–IX, Nov. 1847, Amos Lawrence Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
29.Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 37; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 86–87; “Statistics of Lowell Manufactures. January, 1857.”
30.Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 30–31, 37, 42, 50–53; David A. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers & The Mechanized Factory System, 1815–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 69–70; Chandler, The Visible Hand, 68–71.
31.Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 9–10, 13–16.
32.Even after it ballooned in size, Amoskeag continued to be run by a single treasurer, working out of Boston. Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 16. The best overview of the development of American management remains Chandler, The Visible Hand.
33.New-York Daily Tribune, Jan. 17, 1844. For the experience of young women in Br
itish cotton mills, see Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 103–11.
34.Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, 31–34; Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 13; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 12–13, 198–99, 203. Slave labor also was used in the cotton industry in Egypt, where the first mechanized equipment was introduced at the same time as the Waltham mills were being built. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 166–68.
35.Dublin, Women at Work, 5, 31–34, 141; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 131, 270–71, 276; Dublin, Farm to Factory, 13–14; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 217–18.
36.Dublin, Women at Work, 26, 31, 64–65; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 130, 138–40. When in 1826 Merrimack Manufacturing was planning to print calicoes, it sent its treasurer, Kirk Boott, to England “for the purpose of procuring a first rate Engraver, or such as he can get,” as well as to gather information “which he may think will be useful in manufacturing, printing or machine building.” Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, shelf number 1, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records, 32–33. 1857 percentage calculated from “Statistics of Lowell Manufactures. January, 1857.”
37.Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 212–15, 220–21; Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 82–83, 89; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 49; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 163–64, 166–68.
38.Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 224–25; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 256–57. Thomas Dublin found among a sample of workers at the Hamilton mill in Lowell that those who never married worked on average 3.9 years; those who did, 2.4. Dublin, Farm to Factory, 110.
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