Beginnings of industrialization
Economic, social, and cultural history cannot easily be separated. The creation of the “factory system” in the United States was the outcome of interaction between several characteristically American forces: faith in the future, a generally welcoming attitude toward immigrants, an abundance of resources linked to a shortage of labour, and a hospitable view of innovation. The pioneering textile industry, for example, sprang from an alliance of invention, investment, and philanthropy. Moses Brown (later benefactor of the College of Rhode Island, renamed Brown University in honour of his nephew Nicholas) was looking to invest some of his family’s mercantile fortune in the textile business. New England wool and southern cotton were readily available, as was water power from Rhode Island’s swiftly flowing rivers. All that was lacking to convert a handcraft industry into one that was machine-based was machinery itself; however, the new devices for spinning and weaving that were coming into use in England were jealously guarded there. But Samuel Slater, a young English mechanic who immigrated to the United States in 1790 carrying the designs for the necessary machinery in his prodigious memory, became aware of Brown’s ambitions and of the problems he was having with his machinery. Slater formed a partnership with Brown and others to reproduce the crucial equipment and build prosperous Rhode Island fabric factories.
One of the first U.S. patents granted was to Oliver Evans in 1790 for his automatic gristmill. The mill produced flour from grain in a continuous process that required only one labourer to set the mill in motion.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Sketch submitted to the Patent Office by Eli Whitney, showing the operation of the cotton gin.National Archives, Washington, D.C.Local American inventive talent embodied in sometimes self-taught engineers was available too. One conspicuous example was Delaware’s Oliver Evans, who built a totally automatic flour mill in the 1780s and later founded a factory that produced steam engines; another was the ultimate Connecticut Yankee, Eli Whitney, who not only fathered the cotton gin but built a factory for mass producing muskets by fitting together interchangeable parts on an assembly line. Whitney got help from a supportive U.S. Army, which sustained him with advances on large procurement contracts. Such governmental support of industrial development was rare, but, when it occurred, it was a crucial if often understated element in the industrializing of America.
Francis Cabot Lowell, who opened a textile factory in 1811 in the Massachusetts town later named for him, played a pathbreaking role as a paternalistic model employer. Whereas Slater and Brown used local families, living at home, to provide “hands” for their factories, Lowell brought in young women from the countryside and put them up in boardinghouses adjacent to the mills. The “girls”—most of them in or just out of their teens—were happy to be paid a few dollars for 60-hour workweeks that were less taxing than those they put in as farmers’ daughters. Their moral behaviour was supervised by matrons, and they themselves organized religious, dramatic, musical, and study groups. The idea was to create an American labour force that would not resemble the wretched proletarians of England and elsewhere in Europe.
Lowell was marveled at by foreign and domestic visitors alike but lost its idyllic character as competitive pressures within the industry resulted in larger workloads, longer hours, and smaller wages. When, in the 1840s and 1850s, Yankee young women formed embryonic unions and struck, they were replaced by French-Canadian and Irish immigrants. Nonetheless, early New England industrialism carried the imprint of a conscious sense of American exceptionalism.
Boott Cotton Mills, Lowell, Mass.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Bernard A. Weisberger
Social developments
In the decades before the American Civil War (1861–65), the civilization of the United States exerted an irresistible pull on visitors, hundreds of whom were assigned to report back to European audiences that were fascinated by the new society and insatiable for information on every facet of the “fabled republic.” What appeared to intrigue the travelers above all was the uniqueness of American society. In contrast to the relatively static and well-ordered civilization of the Old World, America seemed turbulent, dynamic, and in constant flux, its people crude but vital, awesomely ambitious, optimistic, and independent. Many well-bred Europeans were evidently taken aback by the self-assurance of lightly educated American common folk. Ordinary Americans seemed unwilling to defer to anyone on the basis of rank or status.
Birth of American Culture
“In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” asked an English satirist early in the 1800s. Had he looked beyond the limits of “high culture,” he would have found plenty of answers. As a matter of fact, the period between 1815 and 1860 produced an outpouring of traditional literary works now known to students of English-language prose and poetry everywhere—the verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, as well as the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson—all expressing distinctively American themes and depicting distinctly American characters such as Natty Bumppo, Hester Prynne, and Captain Ahab who now belong to the world.
Melville, HermanHerman Melville, etching after a portrait by Joseph O. Eaton.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital File Number: cph 3c35949)
A detail of a page from William Clark's expedition diary, including a sketch of evergreen shrub leaves.North Wind Picture Archives
Lewis and Clark ExpeditionMap of Lewis and Clark Expedition by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, 1804–06.Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.CBut setting these aside, Nathaniel Bowditch’s The New American Practical Navigator (1802), Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), and the reports from the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the various far Western explorations made by the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers, as well as those of U.S. Navy Antarctic explorer Charles Wilkes, were the American books on the desks of sea captains, naturalists, biologists, and geologists throughout the world. By 1860 the international scientific community knew that there was an American intellectual presence.
P.T. Barnum's mammoth tent housing his menagerie and exhibits.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Stephen Foster, 1859Courtesy of the Foster Hall Collection, University of Pittsburgh
Whitman, WaltWalt Whitman, photograph by Mathew Brady.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.At home Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) included hundreds of words of local origin to be incorporated in the former “King’s English.” Webster’s blue-backed “Speller,” published in 1783, the geography textbooks of Jedidiah Morse, and the Eclectic Readers of William Holmes McGuffey became staples in every 19th-century American classroom. Popular literature included the humorous works of writers such as Seba Smith, Joseph G. Baldwin, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Artemus Ward, which featured frontier tall tales and rural dialect. In the growing cities there were new varieties of mass entertainment, including the blatantly racist minstrel shows, for which ballads like those of Stephen Foster were composed. The “museums” and circuses of P.T. Barnum also entertained the middle-class audience, and the spread of literacy sustained a new kind of popular journalism, pioneered by James Gordon Bennett, whose New York Herald mingled its up-to-the-moment political and international news with sports, crime, gossip, and trivia. Popular magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and Godey’s Lady’s Book, edited by Sarah Josepha Hale with a keen eye toward women’s wishes, also made their mark in an emerging urban America. All these added up to a flourishing democratic culture that could be dismissed as vulgar by foreign and domestic snobs but reflected a vitality loudly sung by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass (1855).