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The Intellectual Origins and New-Worldliness of American Industry*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Charles L. Sanford
Charles L. Sanford
Affiliation:
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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Extract

The revolutionary technological changes that have come to typify our modern industrial society were first felt in the New England textile industry. The American zeal for useful improvements that greeted the industrial revolution was counterbalanced by a patriotic fear that the ill consequences of European manufacturing would be repeated here. The textile manufacturers who introduced the factory system into the United States early in the nineteenth century found it necessary, in order to win a full measure of public support and secure workers in a land where labor was dear, to demonstrate that “the moral standards of the community would not be impaired.”

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 1958 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1958

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References

1 Ware, Caroline F., The Early New England Cotton Manufactures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931), p. 8.Google Scholar

2 The evidence of such foreign observers as Charles Murray, David Thomas, Harriet Martineau, Anthony Trollope, James Montgomery, and William Scoresby would seem to be conclusive. The kind of materialism that Charles Dickens attacked was essentially a moral materialism. A work emphasizing the element of exploitation in this early period of the industrial revolution is Sullivan, William A., The Industrial Worker in Pennsylvania, 1800–1840 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1955).Google Scholar

3 Sanford, Charles L., “The Garden of America,” Modern Review, XCII (July 1952), 23–32.Google Scholar

4 Compare the foregoing analysis, for instance, with that in my article “The Concept of the Sublime in the Works of Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant,” American Literature, XXVIII (Jan. 1957), 434–48.Google Scholar

5 I have compiled this listing primarily from The Dictionary of American Biography and checked it against the many cross references in the source materials examined. But see also the list of original promoters in Caroline F. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufactures, pp. 320–21. Other members of the group who are occasionally referred to in this paper include Israel Thorndike, Samuel Batchelder, and Edmund Dwight, as well as close family relatives who may be assumed to share their basic attitudes.

6 Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufactures, pp. 7–8.

7 For Dr. Logan see Rezneck, Samuel, “The Rise and Early Development of Industrial Consciousness in the United States, 1760–1830,” Journal of Economic and Business History, IV (Aug. 1932), 798Google Scholar; Gregory, Frances W., “Nathan Appleton, Yankee Merchant, 1779–1861” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Radcliffe College, 1949), pp. 199–200Google Scholar; Appleton, Nathan, Labor, Its Relations in Europe and the United States Compared (Boston, 1844), p. 14Google Scholar; Gregg, William, Essays on Domestic Industry: Or, An Enquiry into the Expediency of Establishing Cotton Manufacturing in South Carolina (Charleston, S.C., 1845), p. 46.Google Scholar

8 The publicity given this argument is reviewed by Rezneck, “Rise of Industrial Consciousness,” pp. 784–811. But see also Cole, Arthur H., ed., Industrial and Commercial Correspondence of Alexander Hamilton (Chicago: A. W. Shaw Company, 1928), pp. 42–43, 49–50, 122, 261–65.Google Scholar

9 Greenslet, Ferris, The Lowells and Their Seven Worlds (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1946), pp. 128, 175.Google Scholar

10 Lawrence, William R., ed., Extracts from the Diary and Correspondence of the Late Amos Lawrence; with a Brief Account of Some Incidents in His Life (Boston, 1855), pp. 48–49.Google Scholar

11 Greenslet, The Lowells, p. 122.

12 Loring, Susan M., ed., Selections from the Diaries of William Appleton, 1786–1862 (Boston: privately printed, 1922), pp. 19, 24, 29, 78.Google Scholar William Appleton was a merchant and banker rather than an industrialist, but he invested money in his cousins' factories.

13 Mitchell, Broadus, William Gregg, Factory Master of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1928), pp. 237–39Google Scholar; Gregg, Essays on Domestic Industry, pp. 10–11.

14 Amos Lawrence, Diaries and Correspondence, pp. 43, 90.

15 William Appleton, Diaries, p. 20; Cabot's letters in Rantoul, Robert S., “The First Cotton Mill in America,” Historical Collections of the Essex Institute, XXXIII (1897), 39–41.Google Scholar

16 White, George S., Memoir of Samuel Slater, the Father of American Manufactures. Connected with a History of the Rise and Progress of the Cotton Manufacture in England and America, with Remarks on the Moral Influence of Manufactories in the United States (2d ed., Philadelphia, 1836), p. 97.Google Scholar

17 Quoted in [Friends of Domestic Industry], Report on the Production and Manufacture of Cotton (Boston, 1832), p. 8.Google Scholar

18 Mitchell, William Gregg, pp. 150, 304n.

19 Rezneck, “Rise of Industrial Consciousness,” p. 799.

20 The Aristocracy of Boston; Who They Are, and What They Were, By one who knows them (Boston, 1848), p. 15.Google Scholar

21 Mitchell, William Gregg, pp. 107, 141.

22 [Friends of Domestic Industry], Report, p. 13.

23 See the queries and answers in White, Memoir of Samuel Slater, pp. 125–42.

24 Coxe, Tench, An Address to an Assembly of the Friends of American Manufactures (Philadelphia, 1787), pp. 24–25.Google Scholar

25 White, Memoir of Samuel Slater, pp. 38, 120; Amos Lawrence, Diaries and Correspondence, pp. 78, 126.

26 Lodge, Henry Cabot, Life and Letters of George Cabot (Boston, 1877), pp. 96, 158, 160, 232, 238.Google Scholar

27 Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1946), II, 161Google Scholar; the labor view and statement of Phillips, Wendell in Commons, John R.et al., eds., Documentary History of American Industrial Society, 10 vols. (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1910–1911), V, 363, VII, 221Google Scholar; Godwin, Parke, Democracy, Constructive and Pacific (1844)Google Scholar, in Thorp, Willardet al., eds., American Issues, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1944), I, 414.Google Scholar

28 Lodge, George Cabot, p. 227; Forbes, J. D., Israel Thorndike (New York: Exposition Press, 1953) p. 117Google Scholar; Gregory, “Nathan Appleton,” pp. 303, 307–10; Nathan Appleton MSS., Vol. I, Massachusetts Historical Society.

29 Amos Lawrence, Diaries and Correspondence, pp. 20–21, 100, 155–56; Nathan Appleton, Labor, p. 9; Mitchell, William Gregg, pp. 20, 73; Gregg, Essays on Domestic Industry, pp. 7–8, 14–17, 137; for the concept of the “stewardship” see, for example, William Appleton, Diaries, pp. 31, 33, 39, 47, 49, 107–8, and Ballard, Frank, The Stewardship of Wealth … as Illustrated in the Lives of Amos and Abbott Lawrence (New York, 1865), pp. 3–16.Google Scholar

30 Greenslet, The Lowells, p. 140. An informed estimate of Francis Cabot Lowell's idealism and sense of mission is Bagnall, William R., “Contributions to American Economic History (Unpublished Materials): Sketches of Manufacturing Establishments. …,” 4 vols. (Carnegie Institute, 1908, typed MS. in Baker Library, Harvard University), III, 2007–2008, 2022.Google Scholar Bagnall also testifies to the patriotism of Uriah Cotting, the Thorndikes, and other promoters. Thorndike, however, was not as liberal a public donor.

31 Nathan Appleton, Labor, p. 9; White, Memoir of Samuel Slater, pp. 14, 24.

32 Amos Lawrence, Diaries and Correspondence, pp. 103–4, 79–80, 169, 258; Rantoul, “First Cotton Mill,” p. 38; Letters from the Hon. Abbott Lawrence to the Hon. William C. Rives of Virginia (Boston, 1846), p. 19Google Scholar; Lowell's letter in Lincoln, Jonathan T., “Beginnings of the Machine Age in New England: Documents Relating to the Introduction of the Power Loom,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, VIII (1933), 7–9Google Scholar; Batchelder, Samuel, Introduction and Early Progress of the Cotton Manufacture in the United States (Boston, 1863), p. 8.Google Scholar

33 Freedley, Edwin T., Philadelphia and Its Manufactures in 1857 (Philadelphia, 1858), p. 252Google Scholar; Commons, Documentary History, II, 333; Gregg, Essays on Domestic Industry, pp. 8, 17, 35.

34 Amos Lawrence, Diaries and Correspondence, p. 202; Abbott Lawrence, Letters to Rives, p. 6.

35 Jackson wrote the Friends of Domestic Industry Report, p. 14; Kirk Boott's letter in White, Memoir of Samuel Slater, p. 255; also Matthew Carey and Slater's biographer, pp. 168, 15, 57. The Napoleon image competed with Franklin's for the manufacturers' admiration. Samuel Slater was praised, however, for not following the bad example of Franklin in breaking his apprenticeship. Franklin was honored for confessing this erratum. For the adaptation of the Franklin image to American ideas of progress see Sanford, Charles L., “An American Pilgrim's Progress,” American Quarterly, VI (Winter 1954), 297–310Google Scholar; and Wright, Louis B., “Franklin's Legacy to the Gilded Age,” Virginia Quarterly Review, XXII (1946), 268–79.Google Scholar

36 Appleton, Nathan, Introduction of the Power Loom and Origin of Lowell (Lowell, 1858), pp. 15–16.Google Scholar But see also Appleton's Correspondence Between Nathan Appleton and John A. Lowell in Relation to the Early History of the City of Lowell (Boston, 1848), pp. 18–19.Google Scholar

37 The dearth of labor, of course, partially accounted for a greater substitution of machinery at this time, but there was much discussion of the use of machines to make manual labor lighter and less degrading for women and children.

38 Hutton, Graham, in the London Economist, reprinted in the New York Herald Tribune, July 20, 1953.Google Scholar