The Introduction of the Factory System
Source: University of Houston, 2014
(1) In 1789 the Pennsylvania legislature placed an advertisement in English newspapers
offering a cash bounty to any English textile worker who would migrate to the state.
Samuel Slater, who was just finishing an apprenticeship in a Derbyshire textile mill,
read the ad. He went to London, booked passage to America, and landed in
Philadelphia. There he learned that Moses Brown, a Quaker merchant, had just
completed a mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and needed a manager. Slater applied
for the job and received it, along with a promise that if he made the factory a
success he would receive all the business's profits, less the cost and interest on the
machinery.
(2) On December 21, 1790, the mill opened. Seven boys and 2 girls, all between the
ages of 7 and 12, operated the little factory's 72 spindles. Slater soon discovered
that these children, "constantly employed under the immediate inspection of a
[supervisor]," could produce three times as much as whole families working in their
homes. To keep the children awake and alert, Slater whipped them with a leather
strap or sprinkled them with water. On Sundays the children attended a special
school Slater founded for their education.
(3) The opening of Slater's mill marked the beginning of a widespread movement to
consolidate manufacturing operations under a single roof. During the last years of
the 18th century, merchants and master craftspeople who were discontented with
the inefficiencies of their work force created the nation's first modern factories.
Within these centralized workshops, employers closely supervised employees,
synchronized work to the clock, and punished infractions of rules with heavy fines or
dismissal. In 1820, just 350,000 Americans worked in factories or mills. Four
decades later, on the eve of the Civil War, the number had soared to 2 million.
(4) For an inexpensive and reliable labor force, many factory owners turned to child
labor. During the early phases of industrialization, textile mills and agricultural tool,
metal goods, nail, and rubber factories had a ravenous appetite for cheap teenage
laborers. In many mechanized industries, from a quarter to over half of the work
force was made up of young men or women under the age of 20.
(5) 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 workers in
factories manufacturing ready-made clothing, furs, hats, shoes, and umbrellas.
Women were also employed in significant numbers in the manufacture of buttons,
furniture, gloves, gunpowder, shovels, and tobacco.
(6) Many women found the new opportunities exhilarating. Eleven-year-old Lucy Larcom
went off to the Lowell textile mill enthusiastically: "The novelty of it made it seem
easy, and it really was not hard, just to change the bobbins on the spinning-frames
every three quarters of an hour or so.... The intervals were spent frolicking around
among the spinning-frames, teasing and talking to the older girls, or entertaining
ourselves with games and stories in a corner."
(7) Unlike farm work or domestic service, employment in a mill offered female
companionship and an independent income. Wages were twice what a woman could
make as a seamstress, tailor, or schoolteacher. Furthermore, most mill girls viewed
the work as only temporary before marriage. Most worked in the mills fewer than
four years, and frequently interrupted their stints in the mill for several months at a
time with trips back home.
(8) By the 1830s, increasing competition among textile manufacturers caused
deteriorating working conditions that drove native-born women out of the mills.
Employers cut wages, lengthened the workday, and required mill workers to tend
four looms instead of just two. Hannah Borden, a Fall River, Massachusetts, textile
worker, was required to have her loom running at 5 A.M. She was given an hour for
breakfast and half an hour for lunch. Her workday ended at 7:30 P.M., 14.5 hours
after her workday had begun. For a 6-day work week, she received between $2.50
and $3.50.
(9) The mill girls militantly protested the wage cuts. In 1834 and again in 1836, the mill
girls went out on strike. An open letter spelled out the workers' complaints: "sixteen
females [crowded] into the same hot, ill-ventilated attic"; a workday "two or three
hours longer a day than is done in Europe"; and workers compelled to "stand so long
at the machinery ... that varicose veins, dropsical swelling of the feet and limbs, and
prolepsis uter[us], diseases that end only with life, are not rare but common
occurrences."
(10)
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.
(11)
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.
(12)
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.
(13)
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.
Questions
Directions: Refer to the paragraph in each question to find the answer.
1 – In Paragraphs 1-2, what did Samuel Slater find out about child workers and how did he
keep them motivated?
2 – In Paragraph 3, describe the first “modern” factories.
3 – In Paragraphs 4-7, why did many mill and factory owners turn to children and
unmarried women for workers?
4 - In Paragraphs 8-10, why did many native-born women refuse to work in mills and
factories? How did the mill and factory owners solve this problem?
5 – In Paragraph 11, what is a “tramping committee,” and how did the 1806 journeymen
shoemaker’s strike end?
6 – In Paragraph 12, what did the journeymen protest about the factories and the factory
owners?
7 – In Paragraph 13, what did the two state court cases (Pennsylvania and Massachusetts)
decide about striking workers?