228 Chapter 8 Toward a National Economy
answer has been forthcoming. Some historians argue
that the existence of the frontier siphoned off dis-
placed and dissatisfied workers. The number of urban
laborers who went west could not have been large,
but the fact that the expanding economy created
many opportunities for laborers to rise out of the
working class was surely another reason why so few of
them developed strong class feelings.
Other historians believe that ethnic and racial dif-
ferences kept workers from seeing themselves as a dis-
tinct class with common needs and common enemies.
The influx of needy immigrants willing to accept almost
any wage was certainly resented by native-born work-
ers. The growing number of free blacks in Northern
cities—between 1800 and 1830 the number tripled in
Philadelphia and quadrupled in New York—also inhib-
ited the development of a self-identified working class.
These answers help explain the relative absence of
class conflict during the early stages of the industrial
revolution in America, but so does the fact that condi-
tions in the early shops and factories represented an
improvement for the people who worked in them.
This was the case with nearly all European immigrants,
though less so for urban free blacks, since in the South
many found work in the skilled trades.
Most workers in the early textile factories were
drawn from outside the regular labor market. Relatively
few artisan spinners and weavers became factory work-
ers; indeed, some of them continued to work as they
had, for it was many years before the factories could
even begin to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for
cloth. Nor did immigrants attend the new machines.
Instead, the mill owners relied chiefly on women and
children. They did so because machines lessened the
need for skill and strength and because the labor short-
age made it necessary to tap unexploited sources. By
the early 1820s about half the cotton textile workers in
the factories were under sixteen years of age.
Most people of that generation considered this a
good thing. They reasoned that the work was easy and
that it kept youngsters busy at useful tasks while provid-
ing their families with extra income. Roxanna Foote,
whose daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wroteUncle
Tom’s Cabin, came from a solid, middle-class family in
Guilford, Connecticut. Nevertheless, she worked full-
time before her marriage in her grandfather’s small
spinning mill. “This spinning-mill was a favorite spot,” a
relative recalled many years later. “Here the girls often
received visitors, or read or chatted while they spun.”
Roxanna explained her daily regimen as a mill girl
matter-of-factly: “I generally rise with the sun, and, after
breakfast, take my wheel, which is my daily companion,
and the evening is generally devoted to reading, writ-
ing, and knitting.”
This seems like an idealized picture, or perhaps
working for one’s grandfather made a difference.
Another young girl, Emily Chubbock, later a well-
known writer, had a less pleasant recollection of her
experience as an eleven-year-old factory hand earning
$1.25 a week: “My principal recollections... are of
noise and filth, bleeding hands and aching feet, and a
very sad heart.” In any case, a society accustomed to
seeing the children of fairly well-to-do farmers work-
ing full-time in the fields was not shocked by the sight
of children working all day in mills. In factories where
laborers were hired in family units, no member
earned very much, but with a couple of adolescent
daughters and perhaps a son of nine or ten helping
out, a family could take home enough to live
decently. For most working Americans, then as now,
that was success enough.Lowell’s Waltham System: Women as
Factory Workers
Instead of hiring children, the Boston Associates
developed the “Waltham System” of employing
young, unmarried women in their new textile mills.Slater’s Mill, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Source: N. Carter/North Wind Picture Archives.