Rise of Corporations 231The Persistence of the Household System
Since technology affected American industry unevenly,
contemporaries found the changes difficult to evaluate.
Interchangeable firing pins for rifles did not lead at once
even to matching pairs of shoes. More than fifteen years
passed after John Fitch built and launched the world’s
first regularly scheduled steamboat in 1790 before it was
widely accepted. Few people in the 1820s appreciated
how profound the impact of the factory system would
be. The city of Lowell seemed remarkable and impor-
tant but not necessarily a herald of future trends.
Yet in nearly every field apparently minor changes
were being made. Beginning around 1815, small
improvements in the design of waterwheels, such as the
use of leather transmission belts and metal gears, made
possible larger and more efficient machinery in mills and
factories. The woolen industry gradually became as
mechanized as the cotton. Iron production advanced
beyond the stage of the blacksmith’s forge and the small
foundry only slowly; nevertheless, by 1810 machines
were stamping out nails at a third of the cost of the
hand-forged type, and a few years later sheet iron, for-
merly hammered out laboriously by hand, was being
produced in efficient rolling mills. At about this time the
puddling process for refining pig iron made it possible
to use coal for fuel instead of expensive charcoal.
Key improvements were made soon after the War of
1812 in the manufacture of paper, glass, and pottery.
The commercial canning of sterilized foods in airtight
containers began about 1820. The invention in that year
of a machine for cutting ice, which
reduced the cost by over 50 percent,
had equally important effects on
urban eating habits.
Rise of Corporations
Mechanization required substantial
capital investment, and capital was
chronically in short supply. The mod-
ern method of organizing large enter-
prises, the corporation, was slow to
develop. Between 1781 and 1801
only 326 corporations were chartered
by the states, and only a few of them
were engaged in manufacturing.
The general opinion was that
only quasi-public projects, such as
roads and waterworks, were entitled
to the privilege of incorporation.
Anyone interested in organizing a
corporation had to obtain a special
act of a state legislature. And even
among businessmen there was a tendency to associate
corporations with monopoly, with corruption, and
with the undermining of individual enterprise. In 1820
the economist Daniel Raymond wrote, “The very
object... of the act of incorporation is to produce
inequality, either in rights, or in the division of prop-
erty. Prima facie, therefore all money corporations are
detrimental to national wealth. They are always created
for the benefit of the rich... .” Such feelings help
explain why as late as the 1860s most manufacturing
was being done by unincorporated companies.
While the growth of industry did not suddenly
revolutionize American life, it reshaped society in var-
ious ways. For a time it lessened the importance of
foreign commerce. Some relative decline from the
lush years immediately preceding Jefferson’s embargo
was no doubt inevitable, especially in the fabulously
profitable reexport trade. But American industrial
growth reduced the need for foreign products and
thus the business of merchants. Only in the 1850s,
when the wealth and population of the United States
were more than three times what they had been in the
first years of the century, did the value of American
exports climb back to the levels of 1807. As the coun-
try moved closer to self-sufficiency (a point it never
reached), nationalistic and isolationist sentiments
were subtly augmented. During the embargo and the
War of 1812 a great deal of capital had been trans-
ferred from commerce to industry; afterward new
capital continued to prefer industry, attracted by the
high profits and growing prestige of manufacturing.
The rise of manufacturing affected farmers too, for asThe Gun Foundryin Cold Spring, New York, by John Ferguson Weir conveys how much the
machines of the Industrial Revolution dominated workers’ lives.
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase Lyman G. Bloomingdale Gift, 1901 (01.7.1) Photograph ©1983.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.