Industrialization

Industrialization is the process by which an agricultural society is transformed into one based primarily on large-scale, mechanized factory production. It first occurred in Great Britain in the Industrial Revolution starting in the mid-18th century, and began to spread to the United States in the early 19th century, though a full-scale industrial revolution did not take place there until after the American Civil War (1861-65).

Industrialization in America first took root in New England. The War of 1812 stimulated manufacturing in New England by encouraging reliance on domestic industries rather than those of the British enemy. But just as important was the ingenuity of enterprising textile manufacturers. Britain prohibited export of its profitable textile machinery, but British-born Samuel Slater memorized blueprints and brought them to America, where he and partner Moses Brown built the country’s first mechanized cotton-spinning mill, or factory, in Rhode Island in 1790. Soon several mills owned by their firm, Almy, Brown, & Slater, were churning out mass quantities of cotton yarn. As is characteristic of industrial facilities, Slater’s mills achieved efficient, inexpensive mass production of goods by using machines worked by large numbers of employees.

In 1814 Francis Cabot Lowell, a Boston merchant, developed the first American power loom, an improved version of English prototypes. With partners, he founded the Boston Manufacturing Company in 1813, the first mill or factory in America to handle all the operations involved in turning raw cotton into finished cloth. After his death in 1817, his partners gave his name to Lowell, Massachusetts, a textile manufacturing center incorporated as a city in 1836.

Through operations such as Slater’s and Lowell’s, the factory system for cotton spinning and weaving became established. It depended on raw cotton from the South, a product that had itself been affected by mechanization: The cotton gin, invented by Eli Whitney in 1793 to separate seeds from fibers, had greatly increased the profitability of cotton farming and made it the basis of the southern economy. By the presidency of James Monroe (1817-25), manufacturing was overtaking shipping as the primary interest in New England and Pennsylvania. By 1840 about 2.25 million spindles were in use in 1,200 cotton cloth factories, two-thirds of them in New England. Woolen manufacturing also advanced during this period, though at a slower pace. By 1850 more than 1,500 wool factories at places like Lawrence, Massachusetts, were producing flannel and blankets.

In addition to textile plants, numerous other kinds of factories sprang up in antebellum America. Near New Haven, Connecticut, Eli Whitney developed a system of interchangeable, standardized parts to mass-produce guns for the U. S. government. The system worked well enough to be widely copied, and Whitney applied it to making clocks. In Delaware, Oliver Evans founded a grist mill that mechanized the entire process from grinding to packing. In North Salem, New York, in 1835, the Howe Company began mass-producing straight pins at the rate of 50 a minute. In Philadelphia, Stuart & Company manufactured hollow ironware while the Disston Company made saws. Samuel Colt perfected Whitney’s techniques for mass-producing guns in his arms plant at Hartford, Connecticut, where, beginning in 1848, he turned out six-shooters (pistols with six revolving chambers). Other thriving industries in this period included gunpowder, associated with manufacturer Eleuthere Irenee Du Pont; soap and candles, linked with such entrepreneurs as William Colgate and the partnership of William Procter and James Gamble; and rubber, which flourished after Charles Goodyear discovered in 1839 how to vulcanize rubber to keep it elastic in all weathers.

As a result of all this activity, from 1819 to 1849 private production income from manufacturing grew from $64 million to $291 million. In 1850, more than $1 billion worth of manufactured goods were produced in America. In the late 1830s the United States began to export more goods than it imported, a characteristic shift in nations undergoing industrialization. However, manufactured goods remained a relatively small percentage of sales to other countries, accounting for only 12 percent of exports as late as 1860.

Manufacturing in America at this stage was mainly powered by water. The domestic coal industry, essential to steam power, was still developing, as were the iron and steel industries. By 1850 Americans were still importing almost

Showing the power looms of textile manufacture, this label was the early trademark of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company. (Museum of American Textile History)

Twice as much iron and steel as they were manufacturing at home. But iron production had begun to move out of small blacksmith shops to industrial forges and mills. From 1810 to 1850 the annual output of pig iron increased from 50,000 to 600,000 gross tons. Peter Cooper was among the entrepreneurs who shaped the American iron industry in this period.

In many cases, industrialization was helped by government support. For example, at the urging of textile magnate Francis Cabot Lowell, the tariff law of 1816 imposed duties on imported cotton cloth, aiding the domestic textile industry. Local, state, and federal governments directly or indirectly financed many enterprises through such means as tax exemptions and special franchise and monopoly privileges. Increasingly liberal state laws made it easier for enterprises to obtain financing from banks and to be organized as corporations that could sell stocks and bonds to raise money.

From 1820 to 1840 capital funds invested in the nation’s factories increased fivefold, from $50 million to $250 million. Much of the capital came from overseas: Up to 1839, the British had invested more than $170 million in American businesses. The relatively unrestricted flow of capital spurred industrial growth but also contributed to financial instability and devastating panics, or depressions, when confidence in the economy fell, notably the PANIC OF 1819 and PANIC OF 1837.

For industrialization to increase its pace, it was vital to have faster ways to get finished goods to far-flung markets and to get food, supplies, and raw materials to industrial centers. Steamboats, canals, and RAILROADS provided solutions. In 1807 American engineer Robert Fulton launched the first commercially viable steamboat, the Clermont, and this mode of transportation was improved and adapted throughout the antebellum years. In 1815 regular steamboat service began on the Mississippi River. However, rivers and lakes did not connect every market or production center, so a spate of canal-building began. From 1817 to 1825 the Erie Canal was constructed, spanning 365 miles from Albany to Buffalo, linking the Hudson River and the Great Lakes. By 1840 there were over 3,000 miles of canals in the United States. (See CANAL ERA.)

Horse-drawn railways went into operation, such as the Granite Railway in Massachusetts between Quincy and the Neponset River, opened in 1826. But these were only a precursor to the steam locomotive, which was soon everywhere. Industrialist Peter Cooper introduced the first U. S.-built locomotive, the To-m Thumb, in 1830, the same year that the BALTIMORE & OHIO Railroad (B&O), based in Baltimore, began using steam locomotives for rail service. Other railroads followed quickly, linking cities along the eastern seaboard to each other and the West. The Pennsylvania Railroad was chartered in 1846; the Pacific Railroad Company, the first railroad west of the Mississippi, was begun in 1849; and the New York Central Railroad was started in 1853. By 1850 there were more than 9,000 miles of railroad track; by 1860, about 30,000 miles. Railroad manufacturing itself became an important industry, as factories were established to build locomotives, car parts, and track. The telegraph, demonstrated by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1844, became important in scheduling and dispatching trains, as well as in facilitating other kinds of business communications.

Improved transportation was useful not only for shipping goods, but for moving people. By steamboat or train, as well as by older modes of transport, rural residents and new immigrants migrated to urban centers to take up jobs in factories. During the 1840s alone, towns and cities of 8,000 or more people grew by 90 percent, a much faster rate than the U. S. population as a whole, 36 percent. Between 1820 and 1850 the combined population of Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York more than tripled to 1.2 million. The state of transportation was such that daily commutes over long distances were still difficult to manage, so company towns, built to house workers, sprang up around mills.

Farm mechanization freed laborers for factory work while also ensuring enough food for the growing cities. In 1831 Cyrus Hall Mccormick invented a mechanical, horse-drawn reaper that dramatically improved the efficiency of harvesting. In 1838 JOHN Deere began manufacturing steel plows, which was an improvement over iron plows and initiated a new industrial empire, that of Deere agricultural equipment.

As is usual with nations undergoing industrialization, the economy grew and per capita income rose, but it did not do so equally. It is estimated that the share of wealth owned by the top 1 percent of Americans grew from 13 percent in 1774 to 29 percent in 1860. In Boston from 1833 to 1848 alone, the share of wealth held by the top 10 percent grew from 75 percent to 82 percent, while the share owned by the bottom 80 percent fell from 14 percent to 4 percent.

Industrialization lowered prices for many goods, making them more available to the middle and lower classes and so improving their standard of living. Wages were relatively high at first, especially for skilled mechanics who understood or could learn how to repair and build machines. American factories attracted immigrants by paying wages that were a third to a half higher than were available in Europe. But as more workers became available, wages fell. Men in general earned more than women or children: Men in Massachusetts earned $5 a week, women $1.75-$2.50, and children $1-$2.

Working conditions were often hard. Factory workers typically toiled from dusk to dawn for 11-131/2 hours a day. The Lowell Mills, under the influence of British socialist Robert Owen, offered a neat, educational, chaperoned environment for the young women who worked there as “factory girls.” But working conditions in other factories were not so attractive. In the company towns of New York and Pennsylvania, workers had to buy what they needed at company-owned stores, frequently going into long-lasting debt to their employers.

The factory system was rapidly making domestic craft labor obsolete. Before industrialization, most manufactured products had come out of the homes and workshops of skilled artisans. Cloth manufacturing, for example, had been done at home, in domestic weaving operations where the worker owned her own tools. Increasingly, domestic enterprises were replaced: by 1840, more goods were manufactured in mills than in homes and workshops. However, in many businesses, such as boot - and shoe-making, skilled craftsmanship and domestic manufacturing remained the norm until after the Civil War.

Even as workers carried the burden of industrialization, capitalist entrepreneurs prospered. Whereas wealth before the 19th century had been primarily measured by land ownership, industrialists such as Lowell, Cooper, Du Pont, Colt, and Colgate made fortunes. By the 1840s, the phrases “millionaire” and “labor union” had both entered the American lexicon, an indication of the development of new social classes and of the growing struggle between them. In the 1830s, textile and craft workers organized to demand a 10-hour day. From 1834 to 1837, union membership grew from 26,000 to hundreds of thousands.

The benefits of manufacturing were distributed unequally by region as well as class. The North was far more heavily industrialized than the South, particularly in the Northeast, site of the first textile factories in New England; and in the Midwest, where Cincinnati, Chicago, and

St. Louis became industrial centers by the 1850s, providing manufactured goods for settlers. In the South, however, the heavily agricultural economy was centered on cotton farming, with slaves picking cotton to be shipped north to be spun and woven into textiles.

By the end of the antebellum period, the majority of American workers were still on farms, but industrialization was clearly in the ascendancy. The proportion of American workers engaged in AGRICULTURE declined from 71.8 percent in 1820 to 68.6 percent in 1840 and to 58.9 percent in 1860. By 1849, private manufacturing income amounted to an eighth of total national income from private sources, with manufacturing the economy’s most rapidly growing segment. The pace of industrialization quickened even more from 1860 to 1890. By the late 19th century, the United States was the world’s largest industrial power.

Further reading: Thomas V. DiBacco, Made in the U. S.A.: The History of American Business (New York: Harper & Row, 1987); Alex Groner et al., The American Heritage History of American Business & Industry (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1972); Robert Heilbroner and Aaron Singer, The Economic Transformation of America: 1600 to the Present, 3d ed. (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1994).

—George Ochoa