1814 - Early Industrial Production
A relative dearth of skilled labor in certain instances proved an incentive to substitute capital for labor, thus driving industrial development. Textile production in Lowell, Massachusetts, for example, necessarily took a highly mechanized form with a relative scarcity of weavers. In cities such as Philadelphia, where skilled labor was abundant, handicraft work persisted late into the century.
The high cost of skilled labor played an important (and well publicized) role in gun manufacture. Guns traditionally had been fashioned by hand with individually crafted parts. Assembling the pieces required great time and effort, and skilled fitters could demand high wages and control the pace and quality of production. At the federal arsenals in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, pressure emerged to assemble rifles faster and cheaper with standardized parts. The federal government subsidized innovations with new precision metalcutting devices.
Foreign visitors to these shores in the first decades of the 19th century were captivated by the adoption of standardized parts production techniques in the nation's public and private gunworks and dubbed what they saw the “American system of manufacture.” However, developments here did not unfold as smoothly as assumed by foreign reporters. For technical and other reasons, parts production remained imperfect for decades, and the skills of well-trained and paid assemblers were still required. Skilled mechanics also resisted attempts at regimenting their labor, and conflict marked such places as the arsenal at Harper's Ferry.
Samuel Slater immigrated to the United States in 1789, and his services were in immediate demand. Slater had just finished an apprenticeship in a cotton mill in his native England, and he possessed rare knowledge in cotton textile technologies. In the U.S., he soon found himself employed by the Brown family of Providence, Rhode Island, who were successful merchants. With the Browns' backing, Slater opened a cotton spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793, commonly designated as the first successful mechanized spinning operation in the country. Within a short period, Slater and the Browns established a score of other cotton mills in the countryside of Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts.
Francis Cabot Lowell did not rely on immigrants to learn of the new technologies. In 1810, he traveled to England to study industrial development first hand. Lowell was a member of an established Boston merchant family. The strain and uncertainties of commerce had forced him in search of new investment opportunities. Lowell returned to the U.S. with the grand notion of constructing an integrated spinning and weaving mill using state-of-the-art machinery. With $400,000 pooled from other Boston elite families, he opened a successful spinning and weaving factory in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814.
When waterpower at the site proved too limited for expansion, Lowell and his associates made plans to build a much larger industrial works at a new location, 25 miles north of Boston at the grand falls of the Merrimack River. Lowell would not live to see the awesome industrial city fashioned there from the 1820s to the 1850s that would bear his name.
Textile operations at Lowell, Massachusetts, represented a revolution in financial practices, organization of production, application of technology, and employment of labor. Use of the corporate form of ownership for an industrial enterprise was unique at the time, and staggering sums of money had been raised for investment. The consolidation of production also had no analog. Under the roofs of the Lowell mills, cotton was cleaned, carded, spun, woven, and finished. The entire process was mechanized, but especially noteworthy was the wholesale adoption of power loom equipment.
Finally, there was an extraordinary human story. More than 13,000 men and women came to labor in the Lowell mills by 1850. The managers of the mills could not meet their labor needs by hiring families. They developed a special system of recruiting Yankee farm girls to tend the machinery. Many of these young women saw employment in the mills as an escape from their rural homes, and they boarded in company dormitories.
The introduction of the industrial system, which often shifted production from the home to a separate manufacturing site, meant that workers lost power over their tools and equipment and lost the ability to set their own prices or sell their own goods. Instead, industrial workers sold their labor-power at prices set by factory owners. In this system, labor was coordinated under a single technical system, often under the same roof. This system involved minimizing the importance of craft skills on the part of laborers as compared to that of the artisan system and an emphasis on the techniques of labor and time discipline.
The new mode of manufacture saw the cheapening and regularization as well as the consolidation of control over labor regimes. Work and social life became disciplined to synchronize with the repetitive and rhythmic operations of increasingly mechanized processes. Mechanization increasingly displaced skilled labor. Machines also meant the loss of ability to sell acquired skills at the same rate of remuneration as prior to the introduction of the machine. Still, the process of deskilling the labor force was gradual and uneven across the different industries. On the whole, from the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, labor conditions generally deteriorated in the United States.
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