An Industrial Proletariat? 225Moses Brown brought Slater to Rhode Island to help
run his textile-manufacturing operation. Slater
insisted on scrapping the crude machinery Brown’s
company had assembled. Then, working in secrecy
with a carpenter who was “under bond not to steal
the patterns nor disclose the nature of the work,”
Slater built and installed his machinery. In December
1790 the first American factory began production.
It was a humble beginning indeed. Slater’s
machines made only cotton thread, which Brown’s
company sold in its Providence store and “put out”
to individual artisans, who, working for wages, wove
it into cloth in their homes. The machines were
tended by a labor force of nine children, for the work
was simple and the pace slow. The young operatives’
pay ranged from thirty-three to sixty-seven cents a
week, about what a youngster could earn in other
occupations.^1 The factory was profitable from the
start. Slater soon branched out on his own, and oth-
ers trained by him opened their own establishments.
By 1800 seven mills possessing 2,000 spindles were in
operation; by 1815, after production had been stimu-
lated by the War of 1812, there were 130,000 spin-
dles turning in 213 factories. Many of the new
factories were inefficient, but the well-managed ones
earned large profits. Slater began with almost noth-
ing. When he died in 1835 he owned mill properties
in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and
New Hampshire in addition to other interests. By the
standards of the day he was a rich man.
Before long the Boston Associates, a group of
merchants headed by Francis Cabot Lowell, added a
new dimension to factory production. Beginning at
Waltham, Massachusetts, where the Charles River
provided the necessary waterpower, between 1813
and 1850 they revolutionized textile production.
Some early factory owners had set up hand looms in
their plants, but the weavers could not keep pace with
the whirring, spinning jennies. Lowell, after an exten-
sive study of British mills, smuggled the plans for an
efficient power loom into America. His Boston
Manufacturing Company at Waltham, capitalized at
$300,000, combined machine production, large-scale
operation, efficient management, and centralized
marketing procedures. It concentrated on the mass
production of a standardized product.
Coming of Age in 1833 (a great period of
change/reinvention in the world)atmyhistorylab.comLowell’s cloth, though plain and rather coarse,
was durable and cheap. His profits averaged almost
20 percent a year during the Era of Good Feelings. In
1823 the Boston Associates began to harness the
power of the Merrimack River, setting up a new
$600,000 corporation at the sleepy village of East
Chelmsford, Massachusetts (population 300), where
there was a fall of thirty-two feet in the river. Within
three years the town, appropriately renamed Lowell,
had 2,000 inhabitants.An Industrial Proletariat?
As machines displaced skilled labor, the ability of
laborers to influence working conditions declined.
If skilled, they either became employers and devel-
oped entrepreneurial and managerial skills, or
they descended into the mass of wage earners.
Simultaneously, the changing structure of produc-
tion widened the gap between owners and workers
and blurred the distinction between skilled and
unskilled labor.
These trends might have been expected to gener-
ate hostility between workers and employers. To some
extent they did. There were strikes for higher wages
and to protest work speedups throughout the 1830s
and again in the 1850s. (For more on “The Making of
a Working Class,” see Mapping the Past, pp. 226–227.)
Efforts to found unions and to create political organi-
zations dedicated to advancing the interests of workers
were also undertaken. But well into the 1850s
Americans displayed less evidence of the class solidarity
common among European workers.
Why America did not produce a self-conscious
working class is a question that has long intrigued his-
torians. As with most such large questions, no singleThese hand-knitted socks from the early 1800s were owned by John WatchtheVideo
Geer of Preston, Connecticut.
Source: Collection of the Litchfield Historical Society. Litchfield, Connecticut.
(^1) This labor pattern persisted for several decades. In 1813 a cotton
manufacturer placed the following advertisement in the Utica(NY)
Patriot: “A few sober and industrious families of at least five children
each, over the age of eight years are wanted at the Cotton Factory.
Widows with large families would do well to attend this notice.”