A History of the American People

average of seventy-seven registrations. By the 1830s it had jumped to 544 annually, by the 1840s
to 6,480 and in the 1850s over 28,000 every year. Americans were using steam widely in Rhode
Island and New Jersey even in the 1790s, and in 1803 were the first in the world to apply steam
to a sawmill, an important point since wood was universally used for power-fuel in the US until
the big coalmines began to come on stream in the 1850s. The steam engines were originally all
imported Boulton & Watts from Britain but after Oliver Evans (1755-1819) of Philadelphia
introduced a new high-pressure steam engine in 1802, Evans engines competed with imported
ones, being used west of the Alleghenies in 1812. Five years later, American engines were being
produced at Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Cincinnati, as well as on the coast. The census of 1830
showed that in Pennsylvania 57 out of 161 plants now used steam and 39 out of 169 in
Massachusetts-the rest used cheap water-power, which was still the norm in New York, New
Jersey, and elsewhere. You might say that, whereas mechanization in agriculture was accelerated
by the need to save labor, industry in America was, to some extent, held back by the sheer
abundance of nature-by ubiquitous water-power, easily harnessed, by seemingly inexhaustible
quantities of wood near by, and by the teeming fisheries of the northwest Atlantic which
continued to make sailing ships highly profitable.
It was not that America lacked instances of men operating at the limits of known technology in
the first half of the 19th century, or even beyond them. Francis Cabot Lowell (1775-1817),
having studied cotton technology in England, employed a mechanical genius called Paul Moddy
who designed machines, set up at Waltham in 1814, which for the first time brought together all
the processes of spinning and weaving in what became known as the Waltham System. There
were other major American innovations-the first sewing machine, made by Elias Howe (1819-
67), and the discovery in 1851 by William Kelly (1811-88) of how to decarbonize molten metal
by forcing air through it, the so-called Bessemer process. But in general the American
metallurgical industry remained basic for a long time because its main market was the do-it-
yourself farming population. What they wanted was simply bar-iron which blacksmiths could
work into machine parts for agricultural machinery and mills. Not until the late 1850s did iron-
producers switch the bulk of their business to serving industry directly. The Singer Sewing-
machine factory in New York, and others in Bridgeport and Boston were making 110,000
machines annually by 1860, but were exceptional. A more typical manufactured product was the
wood-burning stove, of which 300,000 were made annually in the 1850s, iron axes, springs,
bolts, wire, firearms, and locks. Processing foodstuffs soon became important in American
manufacturing industry Cincinnati was the chief town for meat-packing until Chicago took over,
and by 1850 tinning meat was conducted on a massive scale, with glue, fertilizers, bristles,
candles, and soaps forming byproducts. By 1850 Cincinnati was catering for the largest whiskey
market in the world-2 million gallons a year.
There was no doubt about Northern dominance. In terms of capita invested and still more in
numbers employed, by 1860 New England the Middle States and the West outclassed the South
by more than ten to one. But the sophistication of America's move into industry should not be
exaggerated. Products, ideas, news, and innovation were still essentially spread by peddlers. One
observer wrote in the 1820s: `I have seen them on the peninsula of Cape Cod, and in the
neighborhood of Lake Erie, distant from each other more than 600 miles. They make their way to
Detroit, 400 miles further, to Canada, to Kentucky and, if I mistake not, to New Orleans and St
Louis.' Until the 1850s, the United States was essentially a country of four occupational groups-
farmers, planters, fishermen and peddlers.