A History of the American People

Improved Plough, labor equivalent of one horse in three is saved. By means of drills, two
bushells of seeds will go as far as three scattered broadcast, while the yield is increased six to
eight bushells an acre. The plants come up in rows and may be tended by horse-roes ... The
reaping machine is a saving of more than one third the labor when it cuts and rakes ... The
threshing machine is a saving of two-thirds on the old hand-flail mode ... The saving in the labor
of handling hay in the field and barn by means of horserakes and horse-hayforks is equal to one
half.' And American inventors and farmers were the first to power farm-machinery with steam.
This mechanical impulse to labor-saving and scientific farming was backed by an intellectual
thrust by no means confined to the Smithsonian. Washington had set the pattern of experimental
farming, founding America's mule-raising industry with the help of high-quality asses sent him
by Lafayette and the King of Spain. While he was still president, New York's Columbia College,
a go-ahead place which had set up a medical school as early as 1767, created a professorial chair
of Agriculture, Natural History, and Chemistry (1792). The first true agricultural college, the
Dariner Lyceum, was established in Gardfiner, Maine, in 1822, and in 1857 Michigan opened the
earliest State College of Agriculture, the first of many. These in turn were backed up by New
York's Society for Promoting Agriculture, Commerce, and the Arts (1781), and by the country
fairs movement of Elkanah Watson (1758-1842), started in 1807 and inspiring the Berkshire
Agricultural Society, the first of hundreds. New York was underwriting fairs with state money
($20,000) as early as 1819. And finally there were the specialist publications of which the most
important were the Baltimore weekly, the American Farmer (1819), the Albany Cultivator
(1834), and, for the West, the Prairie Farmer of 1840. By mid-century, American farming was,
next to Britain's, the most advanced technically in the world, and already overtaking Britain in
mechanization.
It is important to realize that, with this successful introduction of capital-intensive farming in
the United States, and with the gigantic annual additions of land under cultivation-unprecedented
in world history-America remained primarily an agricultural country almost till the end of the
1850s. A number of factors were against industrialization: poor banking facilities, hampered (as
we have seen) by political problems; a federal government which, between 1830 and 1860, was
heavily influenced by Southern plantation owners who opposed further protection, a central
bank, any idea of transcontinental transit systems-roads or rail-built for the North, and free land.
After Marshall's death, the Supreme Court was also dominated by Southern interests who tended
to be anti-capitalist. On the other hand, a number of factors pushed industrialization. The quarrel
with Britain and the War of 1812 in the first two decades of the century gave native
manufactures a start, reinforced by the early tariffs. Those of 1816, 1828, 1832-3, and 1842 were
in varying degrees strongly protectionist, and undoubtedly benefited US manufactures greatly.
Tariffs were scaled down in 1846 and still more in 18S7, which put America in the front rank of
the free-trading nations. But by then home manufactures were firmly established and an
increasingly sophisticated and resourceful capital market had come into being. However, the
main forces which industrialized America were the arrival of skilled labor from Europe and,
above all, the rapid expansion of a huge domestic market.
It was Samuel Slater, an immigrant, induced to come to America by state bounties, who
erected the first Arkwright-type cottom-mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, financed by Moses
Brown, a Quaker merchant of Providence. Slater had been an apprentice of Arkwright and his
arrival is the perfect example of the personal transfer of technology from Britain to the United
States, repeated hundreds of times. But, as we have already seen, Americans were from the start
highly inventive themselves. From 1790 to 1811 the US Patent Office reported an annual