Early Mills
During the first half of the 19th century, unmarried
women made up a majority of the work force in
cotton textile mills and a substantial minority of
In 1789 the Pennsylvania legislature placed an
workers in factories manufacturing ready-made
advertisement in English newspapers offering a
clothing, furs, hats, shoes, and umbrellas. Women
cash bounty to any English textile worker who
would migrate to the state. Samuel Slater, who was were also employed in significant numbers in the
manufacture of buttons, furniture, gloves,
just finishing an apprenticeship in a Derbyshire
textile mill, read the ad. He went to London, booked gunpowder, shovels, and tobacco.
passage to America, and landed in Philadelphia.
Many women found the new opportunities
There he learned that Moses Brown, a Quaker
exhilarating. Eleven-year-old Lucy Larcom went off
merchant, had just completed a mill in Pawtucket,
to the Lowell textile mill enthusiastically: "The
Rhode Island, and needed a manager. Slater
novelty of it made it seem easy, and it really was
applied for the job and received it, along with a
not hard, just to change the bobbins on the
promise that if he made the factory a success he
spinning-frames every three quarters of an hour or
would receive all the business's profits, less the
so.... The intervals were spent frolicking around
cost and interest on the machinery.
among the spinning-frames, teasing and talking to
the older girls, or entertaining ourselves with games
On December 21, 1790, the mill opened. Seven
boys and 2 girls, all between the ages of 7 and 12, and stories in a corner."
operated the little factory's 72 spindles. Slater soon
Unlike farm work or domestic service, employment
discovered that these children, "constantly
in a mill offered female companionship and an
employed under the immediate inspection of a
independent income. Wages were twice what a
[supervisor]," could produce three times as much
woman could make as a seamstress, tailor, or
as whole families working in their homes. To keep
the children awake and alert, Slater whipped them schoolteacher. Furthermore, most mill girls viewed
the work as only temporary before marriage. Most
with a leather strap or sprinkled them with water.
On Sundays the children attended a special school worked in the mills fewer than four years, and
frequently interrupted their stints in the mill for
Slater founded for their education.
several months at a time with trips back home.
The opening of Slater's mill marked the beginning
By the 1830s, increasing competition among textile
of a widespread movement to consolidate
manufacturers caused deteriorating working
manufacturing operations under a single roof.
conditions that drove native-born women out of the
During the last years of the 18th century,
mills. Employers cut wages, lengthened the
merchants and master craftspeople who were
workday, and required mill workers to tend four
discontented with the inefficiencies of their work
looms instead of just two. Hannah Borden, a Fall
force created the nation's first modern factories.
River, Massachusetts, textile worker, was required
Within these centralized workshops, employers
closely supervised employees, synchronized work to have her loom running at 5 A.M. She was given
an hour for breakfast and half an hour for lunch.
to the clock, and punished infractions of rules with
Her workday ended at 7:30 P.M., 14.5 hours after
heavy fines or dismissal. In 1820, just 350,000
her workday had begun. For a 6-day work week,
Americans worked in factories or mills. Four
she received between $2.50 and $3.50.
decades later, on the eve of the Civil War, the
number had soared to 2 million.
The mill girls militantly protested the wage cuts. In
1834 and again in 1836, the mill girls went out on
For an inexpensive and reliable labor force, many
strike. An open letter spelled out the workers'
factory owners turned to child labor. During the
complaints: "sixteen females [crowded] into the
early phases of industrialization, textile mills and
same hot, ill-ventilated attic"; a workday "two or
agricultural tool, metal goods, nail, and rubber
three hours longer a day than is done in Europe";
factories had a ravenous appetite for cheap
teenage laborers. In many mechanized industries, and workers compelled to "stand so long at the
machinery ... that varicose veins, dropsical swelling
from a quarter to over half of the work force was
made up of young men or women under the age of of the feet and limbs, and prolepsis uter[us],
diseases that end only with life, are not rare but
20.
common occurrences."
During the 1840s, fewer and fewer native-born
women were willing to work in the mills. "Slavers,"
which were long, black wagons that criss-crossed
the Vermont and New Hampshire countryside in
search of mill hands, arrived in Rhode Island and
Massachusetts milltowns empty. Increasingly,
employers replaced the native-born mill girls with a
new class of permanent factory operatives:
immigrant women from Ireland.
In larger eastern cities like Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia, as well as in smaller western cities
like Cincinnati, Louisville, and Pittsburgh, they
formed local trade unions and city trades'
assemblies. House carpenters, handloom weavers,
combmakers, shoemakers, and printers formed
national societies to uphold uniform wage
standards. In 1834 journeymen established the
National Trades' Union, the first organization of
American wage earners on a national scale. By
1836 union membership had climbed to 300,000.
Early Labor Unions
These early unions encountered bitter employer
opposition. To counter the influence of the newly
formed unions, employers banded together in
employers' associations, which claimed that union
methods were "most obnoxious, coercive, and
detrimental to the peace, prosperity and best
interests of the community." Employers also
requested prosecution of unions as criminal
combinations. In 1806, in a case involving
Philadelphia shoemakers, a Pennsylvania court
established an important precedent by ruling that a
labor union was guilty of criminal conspiracy if
workers struck to obtain wages higher than those
set by custom. Other court decisions declared
union’s illegal constraints on trade. In 1842, in the
landmark case Commonwealth v. Hunt, the
Massachusetts Supreme Court established a new
precedent by recognizing the right of unions to exist
and restricting the use of the criminal conspiracy
doctrine.
In 1806 journeymen shoemakers in New York City
organized one of the nation's first labor strikes. The
workers' chief demands were not higher wages and
shorter hours. Instead, they protested the changing
conditions of work. They staged a "turn-out" or
"stand-out," as a strike was then called, to protest
the use of cheap unskilled and apprentice labor and
the subdivision and subcontracting of work. To
ensure that journeymen did not resume work, a
"tramping committee" patrolled the shops. The
strike ended when the city's largest shoe employers
asked municipal authorities to criminally prosecute
the shoemakers for conspiracy to obstruct trade. A
court found the journeymen shoemakers guilty and
fined them $1 plus court costs.
By the 1820s, a growing number of journeymen
were organizing to protest employer practices that
were undermining the independence of workers,
reducing them to the status of "a humiliating servile
dependency, incompatible with the inherent natural
equality of men." Unlike their counterparts in
Britain, American journeymen did not protest
against the introduction of machinery into the
workplace. Instead, they vehemently protested
wage reductions, declining standards of
workmanship, and the increased use of unskilled
and semiskilled workers. Journeymen charged that
manufacturers had reduced "them to degradation
and the loss of that self-respect which had made
the mechanics and laborers the pride of the world."
They insisted that they were the true producers of
wealth and that manufacturers, who did not engage
in manual labor, were unjust expropriators of
wealth.
In an attempt to raise wages, restrict hours, and
reduce competition from unskilled workers, skilled
journeymen formed the nation's first labor unions.
In addition to establishing the nation's first labor
unions, journeymen also formed political
organizations, known as Working Men's parties, as
well as mutual benefit societies, libraries,
educational institutions, and producers' and
consumers' cooperatives. Working men and
women published at least 68 labor papers, and they
agitated for free public education, reduction of the
work day, and abolition of capital punishment, state
militias, and imprisonment for debt. Following the
Panic of 1837, land reform was one of labor's chief
demands. One hundred sixty acres of free public
land for those who would actually settle the land
was the demand and "Vote Yourself a Farm"
became the popular slogan.