258 LABOR. CHAPTER VII. 1789-1865. LABOR AND ITS PROBLEMS. The advent of the factory system New England States especially Massachusetts and Rhode Islandduring the first half of the Nineteenth century. It was true also of the Middle States, and, in a measure, of the South. As the younger States came into political and industrial existence, the factory system invaded their territory and became a great factor in their industrial life and prosperity. The new factory system seemed to meet perfectly the industrial situation existing in the North. Labor, which before had been more or less desultory and thus economically wasteful, was brought under conditions that favored the advantageous employment of capital, broadened the field of occupation, established new industries in a section meagre in agriculture and other natural resources, and founded industrial communities which grew in wealth and population. In large measure, that was the history of the Department reports of the secretary of the Treasury of the United States 1790-1849 (7 vols., Washington, 1837-51); E. W. Keyes, A History of Savings Banks in the United States 1816-74 (New York, 1878) and A History of Savings Banks in the State of New York 1819-69 (Albany, 1870); Davis Rich Dewey, State Banking Before the Civil War (1910); Samuel Breck, Historical Sketch of Continental Paper Money (Philadelphia, 1843); Alexander Hamilton, Report on the Subject of a National Bank. Read in the House of Representatives, Dec. 13, 1790 (New York, 1811) and Letter on the Banks and the Currency (New York, 1839); Daniel Webster, Speeches in Senate during 1832 (Washington and Boston, 1832), Speeches during 1834 (Washington, 1834) and Speech on the Currency, delivered at a merchants' meeting in Wall street, New York (New York, 1840); Charles Francis Adams, Reflections Upon consequent increased employment of the Present State of the Currency in the United States (Boston, 1837); Middleton, The Govern ment and the Currency (New York, 1850). As the textile manufacturing industry was the first to feel the impulse of machine production and to adopt the factory system, it was there that the results of the new system were for a long time most conspicuous. For a few years after 1793 Samuel Slater's machine-equipped mill in Providence was alone in the field. In 1799 Slater and his associates started a second mill in Massachusetts on the banks of the Pawtucket River. By this time the success of the Whitney cotton-gin, invented in 1793, was insuring an adequate supply of the desired fibre at a low price, and with this the development of cotton manufacturing and the labor progressed rapidly. Mills were built elsewhere in the country, notably in Pennsylvania and New York - the the first one in the latter State being erected in Utica as early as 1807. The invention of the power loom by Francis C. Lowell, of Boston, gave added impetus to the cotton industry in 1814, when this loom was started in a new mill located on the banks of the Charles River in Waltham, a suburb of Boston in Massachusetts; 1,700 spindles were there set at work, and this was practically the beginning of modern cotton manufacturing in America and of the factory system of labor generally. A writer has said that this factory 66 was the first in the world, so far as any record goes, in which all the processes involved in the manufacture of goods, from the raw material to the finished product, were carried on in one establishment by successive steps, mathematically considered, under one harmonious system."* In 1809 62 mills were in operation, working 31,000 spindles, principally in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, but also in the other New England States, in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and elsewhere. Factories sprang up on all the important streams of New England; and typical factory towns like Lowell, Lawrence, Holyoke, and Fall River in Massachusetts, Cohoes in New York, Paterson in New Jersey, and many others came into existence, with many * Carroll D. Wright, The Industrial Evolution of the United States, p. 131. important establishments on the banks of the Southern rivers. In 1815 Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had 165 factories and 119,510 spindles; in 1820 250,572 spindles were operated and 9,945,609 pounds of cotton were spun in 16 States. Although the factory system was thus conspicuously developed in the cotton manufacturing industry, it presently spread to other branches of employment and became the important labor factor of the century. Statistics of manufactures in the United States for the year ending June 30, 1840, give the number of workmen employed in 37 industries as 400,000. Cotton manufacture employed 72,000 persons, other industries where the factory system was adopted wholly or in partin part such as leather tanneries and factories, silk mills, paper mills, printing and binding, flour, grist, and saw mills, and iron manufactories employing over 150,000 more. other words, more than half the workers in the given 37 industries were involved in the factory system. Statistics gathered for the census of 1850, covering a larger number of industries, give the number of workers as nearly 1,000,000, more than 550,000 of whom were employed in factories. In 1860 the total value of all kinds of cotton goods manufactured in the United States was $115,681,774, of woolen goods, $61,895,217; and of clothing, $73,219,765. Practically all of this was the product of factory labor. In textile manufacturing alone there were In 194,082 employes, who received $40,353,462 in wages. By this time, too, the great boot and shoe industry was beginning to show the effects of the factory system and the extensive application of machinery. Small shops with a few workers had been the unit of the industry heretofore. Now nearly all these had disappeared, and in their place had sprung up the big shoe factories, equipped with labor-saving machinery and employing many workers. In no other industry was there a more perfect adoption of the new method. of manufacturing. Under the stimulus of the factory system, this industry exhibited a notable development in the decade 1850-1860. The census for 1850 reported 11,305 establishments, with manufactures valued at $53,967,408 and employes numbering 105,254. By 1860 the product of the industry had reached a value of $91,891,498. Of this amount New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania claimed $75,674,946. In 1860 New England alone had 81,017 workers in the shoe industry. During the colonial and much of the State period, women and children were not important factors in economic activity, their labor being almost exclusively domestic. Their entrance into the economic field began with the introduction of machinery in the latter half of the Eighteenth century, but their presence there did not assume sufficient importance materially to affect labor conditions before the establishment of the factory system. At first there was a strong prejudice against the employment of women and children in factories, and it was not much before the close of the second decade of the Nineteenth century that they, abandoning their home spinning and other household crafts, followed the textile industries into the factories. But once the step was taken, the invasion of the other branches of industry followed naturally. Still there were not many such employments open to them before the middle of the century. An English writer (Harriet Martineau) traveling in America in 1840 found them in only seven-teaching, household service, needle-work, boarding-house keeping, type-setting, cotton-milling, and bookbinding. Only the last two were factory occupations. Within another decade, however, they had made some advance as independent wage-earners in what was to them an entirely new sphere of industrial activity. According to the census of 1850, there were 225,298 females and 741,671 males employed in the manufacturing industries of the country. The principal contingents of female workers were 32,919 in boot and shoe factories, 61,500 as clothiers and tailors, 62,001 in cotton and woolen mills, and 14,976 in carding and fulling woolens. Compared with the North, the South was little affected by the introduction of machinery and the installation of the factory system. The main dependence of that section of the country was LABOR. still upon its plantation products chiefly cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar. The invention of the cotton-gin, which made the cotton fibre of improved workable quality and therefore in greater demand, encouraged the system of slave-labor and broadened the field of its employment, especially in the new Southwest. Before the Civil War nearly all cotton was produced by negro slaves. After 1800 there was a steady increase in negro population, decade by decade, from 1,002,000 in that year to 1,380,000 in 1810, 1,777,000 in 1820, 2,328,000 in 1830, 2,873,000 in 1840, 3,638,000 in 1850 and 4,441,000 in 1860. The increase was much more notable in the cotton States than in the upper South, and the change was coincident with the shifting of the cotton belt. In 1800 three-fourths of the cotton was produced in Virginia and the Carolinas, while in 1860 two-thirds of it came from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. But the slave-labor system, while predominant, was not exclusive. Free contract-labor also prevailed in the South as it did in the North; in the former employed chiefly in agriculture, very little of it figuring in manufacturing. In 1790 there were, in 261 round numbers, 700,000 slaves in the United States and 60,000 free negroes. In 1860 there were 3,950,000 slaves and 488,000 free negroes, of which number 215,000 were in the slave-holding States. In 1850 the whites of the slave-holding States numbered 6,222, 418. It has been estimated that at that time" considerably more than 1,250,000 of Southern whites [were] engaged in earning a living by some form of manual labor."* * Alfred Holt Stone, Free Contract Labor in the Ante-Bellum South, in The South in the Building of the Nation, vol. v., p. 134. For other works on the labor question, see Horace G. Wadlin, Labor Chronology, in Reports of the Massachusetts Labor Statistics Bureau (Boston, 189394); Carroll D. Wright, Industrial Evolution of the United States; Talcott Williams, Labor One Hundred Years Ago (New York, 1888); Economic Tracts, no. xxiv., in Publications of the New York Society for Political Education; J. W. Alexander, The American Mechanic and Working Man (New York, 1847); Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. xxxiii. (Philadelphia, 1909); annual reports and publications of the labor bureaus of the several States; annual reports of the United States Commerce and Labor Department; annual reports of the United States Commissioner of Labor; R. T. Ely, The Labor Movement in America (New York, 1886); J. J. Lalor (ed.), Cyclopedia of Political Science, Political Economy and of the Political History of the United States (3 vols., Chicago and New York, 1881-84). For white servitude and slavery in the South, see also Johns Hopkins University Studies, series xiii., nos. vi..-vii., series xiv., no, v., series xvii., nos. vii.-viii., and series xxii., nos. iii.-iv. (Baltimore, 1895-96-99-1904). |