American Industry

Content in this assignment is from American History: From Pre-Columbian to the New Millennium by the Independence Hall Association, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The Rise of American Industry

During the first 30 years of the 1800s, American industry was truly born.

Household manufacturing was almost universal in colonial days, with local craftsmen providing for their communities. This new era introduced factories, with machines and predetermined tasks, producing items to be shipped and sold elsewhere.

In 1790, Samuel Slater built the first factory in America, based on the secrets of textile manufacturing he brought from England. He built a cotton-spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, soon run by water power. Over the next decade, textiles was the dominant industry in the country, with hundreds of companies created.

In the iron industry, Pennsylvania’s furnaces and rolling mills were fast supplanting small local forges. In 1804, Oliver Evans of Philadelphia developed a high-pressure steam engine that was adaptable to a great variety of industrial purposes. Within a few years, it powered ships, sawmills, flour mills, printing presses, as well as textile factories. In 1798, Eli Whitney, who had invented the cotton gin in 1792, contributed one of the most important elements of the industrial age. He came up with the idea of making guns using interchangeable parts. The idea of interchangeable parts had been raised in Europe, but it took an American to successfully commercialize the concept.

The concept was seized by industry after industry. Canal and railway construction played an important role in transporting people and cargo west, increasing the size of the US marketplace. With the new infrastructure, even remote parts of the country gained the ability to communicate and establish trade relationships with the centers of commerce in the East.

The new industrialization was very expensive. Out of the need for money grew the corporation. Chartered under state laws, corporations could accumulate capital from as many investors as were interested in them, each of them enjoying some stock or stake in the corporation’s success. There was no limit to how much investors could earn, yet each with “limited liability” whereby they were financially responsible for the corporation’s debts only to the extent of their investment.

Yet, the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have been possible without one further ingredient—people. Canals and railways needed thousands of people to build them. Business schemes required people to execute them. The number of projects and businesses under development was enormous. The demand for labor was satisfied, in part, by millions of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and elsewhere. As is often the case when there’s a mass immigration, there was a great deal of resistance. Old and new political parties took strong positions on the rights of immigrants. Ultimately these positions hardened, leading to major political changes in America.

The Canal Era

Ever since the days of Jamestown and Plymouth, America was moving west. Trailblazers had first hewn their way on foot and by horseback. Homesteaders followed by wagon and by either keelboat or barge boat, bringing their possessions with them. Yet, real growth in the movement of people and goods west started with the canal.

For over a hundred years, people had dreamed of building a canal across New York that would connect the Great Lakes to the Hudson River to New York City and the Atlantic Ocean. After unsuccessfully seeking federal government assistance, Dewitt Clinton successfully petitioned the New York State legislature to build the canal and bring that dream to reality. “Clinton’s Ditch,” his critics called it.

Construction began in 1817 and was completed in 1825. The canal spanned 350 miles between the Great Lakes and the Hudson River and was an immediate success. Between its completion and its closure in 1882, it returned over $121 million in revenues on an original cost of $7 million. Its success led to the great Canal Age. By bringing the Great Lakes within reach of a metropolitan market, the Erie Canal opened up the unsettled northern regions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. It also fostered the development of many small industrial companies, whose products were used in the construction and operation of the canal.

New York City became the principal gateway to the West and financial center for the nation. The Erie Canal was also in part responsible for the creation of strong bonds between the new western territories and the northern states. Soon the flat lands of the West would be converted into large-scale grain farming. The Canal enabled the farmers to send their goods to New England. Subsistence farmers in the north were now less necessary. Many farmers left for jobs in the factories. The Erie Canal transformed America.

Pennsylvanians were shocked to find that the cheapest route to Pittsburgh was by way of New York City, up the Hudson River, across New York by the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes—with a short overland trip to Pittsburgh. When it became evident that little help for state improvements could be expected from the federal government, other states followed New York in constructing canals. Ohio built a canal in 1834 to link the Great Lakes with the Mississippi Valley. As a result of Ohio’s investment, Cleveland rose from a frontier village to a Great Lakes port by 1850. Cincinnati could now send food products down the Ohio and Mississippi by flatboat and steamboat and ship flour by canal boat to New York.

The state of Pennsylvania then put through a great portage canal system to Pittsburgh. It used a series of inclined planes and stationary steam engines to transport canal boats up and over the Alleghenies on rails. At its peak, Pennsylvania had almost a thousand miles of canals in operation. By the 1830s, the country had a complete water route from New York City to New Orleans. By 1840, over 3,000 miles of canals had been built. Yet, within 20 years a new mode of transportation, the railroad, would render most of them unprofitable.

Early American Railroads

The development of railroads was one of the most important phenomena of the Industrial Revolution. With their formation, construction and operation, they brought profound social, economic, and political change to a country only 50 years old. Over the next 50 years, America would come to see magnificent bridges and other structures on which trains would run, awesome depots, ruthless rail magnates and the majesty of rail locomotives crossing the country.

The railroad was first developed in Great Britain. A man named George Stephenson successfully applied the steam technology of the day and created the world’s first successful locomotive. The first engines used in the United States were purchased from the Stephenson Works in England. Even rails were largely imported from England until the Civil War. Americans who had visited England to see new steam locomotives were impressed that railroads dropped the cost of shipping by carriage by 60–70 percent.

Baltimore, the third largest city in the nation in 1827, hadn’t invested in a canal. Yet, Baltimore was 200 miles closer to the frontier than New York and soon recognized that the development of a railway could make the city more competitive with New York and the Erie Canal in transporting people and goods to the West. The result was the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the first railroad chartered in the United States. There were great parades on the day the construction started. On July 4, 1828, the first spadeful of earth was turned over by the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, 91-year-old Charles Carroll.

New railroads came swiftly. In 1830, the South Carolina Canal and Rail-Road Company was formed to draw trade from the interior of the state. It had a steam locomotive built at the West Point Foundry in New York City, called the Best Friend of Charleston, the first steam locomotive to be built for sale in the United States. A year later, the Mohawk & Hudson railroad reduced a 40-mile wandering canal trip that took all day to accomplish to a 17-mile trip that took less than an hour. Its first steam engine was named the DeWitt Clinton after the builder of the Erie Canal.

Although the first railroads were successful, attempts to finance new ones originally failed as opposition was mounted by turnpike operators, canal companies, stagecoach companies, and those who drove wagons. Opposition was mounted, in many cases, by tavern owners and innkeepers whose businesses were threatened. Sometimes opposition turned to violence. Religious leaders decried trains as sacrilegious. But the economic benefits of the railroad soon won over the skeptics.

Perhaps the greatest physical feat of nineteenth-century America was the creation of the Transcontinental Railroad. Two railroads, the Central Pacific starting in San Francisco and a new railroad, the Union Pacific, starting in Omaha, Nebraska, would build the rail line. Huge forces of immigrants, mainly Irish for the Union Pacific and Chinese for the Central Pacific, crossed mountains, dug tunnels and laid track. The two railroads met at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869, and drove a last, golden spike into the completed railway.

Inventors and Inventions

A nation becomes great because of great people. Often the people that make the greatest impact on progress aren’t national leaders, but brilliant men and women of ideas. A handful of individuals developed inventions in the first half of the nineteenth century that, not only had a direct impact on everyone’s lives, but also affected the destiny of the American nation.

In the second decade of the nineteenth century, roads were few and poor. Getting to the frontier and instituting trade with settlers was difficult. In 1807, Robert Fulton sailed the first commercially viable steamboat, the Clermont, from New York City to Albany. Within four years, regular steamboat service from Pittsburgh took passengers and cargo down the Ohio into the Mississippi. Within 20 years, over 200 steamboats were plying these routes.

While New England was moving to mechanize manufacturing, others were working to mechanize agriculture. Cyrus McCormick wanted to design equipment that would simplify farmers’ work. In 1831, he invented a horse-drawn reaper to harvest grain and started selling it to others in 1840. It allowed the farmer to do five times the amount of harvesting in a day than they could by hand using a scythe. By 1851, his company was the largest producer of farm equipment in the world.

In 1837, John Deere made the first commercially successful riding plow. Deere’s steel plow allowed farmers to turn heavy, gummy prairie sod easily, which stuck to the older wooden and iron plows. His inventions made farm work much less physically demanding. During the Civil War, 25 years later, even women and young children of the South would use these devices allowing the men to be away at war.

Another notable American inventor was Samuel F. B. Morse, who invented the electric telegraph and Morse Code. Morse was an artist having a great deal of difficulty making enough money to make ends meet. He started pursuing a number of business opportunities which would allow him to continue his work as an artist. Out of these efforts came the telegraph. With the completion of the first telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington in 1844, almost instant communication between distant places in the country was possible. The man who was responsible for building this first telegraph line was Ezra Cornell, later the founder of Cornell University.

Charles Goodyear invented one of the most important chemical processes of the century. Natural rubber is brittle when cold and sticky when warm. In 1844, Goodyear received a patent for developing a method of treating rubber, called vulcanization that made it strong and supple when hot or cold. Although the process was instrumental in the development of tires used on bicycles and automobiles, the fruit of this technology came too late for Goodyear. He died a poor man.

Perhaps no one had as great an impact on the development of the industrial north as Eli Whitney. Whitney raised eyebrows when he walked into the US Patent office, took apart 10 guns, and reassembled them mixing the parts of each gun. Whitney lived in an age where an artisan would handcraft each part of every gun. No two products were quite the same. Whitney’s milling machine allowed workers to cut metal objects in an identical fashion, making interchangeable parts. It was the start of the concept of mass production. Over the course of time, the device and Whitney’s techniques were used to make many others products. Elias Howe used it to make the first workable sewing machine in 1846. Clockmakers used it to make metal gears. In making the cotton gin, Eli Whitney had played a major part in expanding slavery. In making the milling machine to produce precision guns and rifles in a very efficient and effective way, he set the industrial forces of the North in motion.

The First American Factories

There was more than one kind of frontier and one kind of pioneer in early America.

While many people were trying to carve out a new existence in states and territories continually stretching to the West, another group pioneered the American Industrial Revolution. They developed new, large forms of business enterprise that involved the use of power-driven machinery to produce products and goods previously produced in the home or small shop. The machinery was grouped together in factories.

Part of the technology used in forming these new business enterprises came from England, however, increasingly they came from American inventors and scientists and mechanics.

The first factory in the United States was begun after George Washington became president. In 1790, Samuel Slater, a cotton spinner’s apprentice who left England the year before with the secrets of textile machinery, built a factory from memory to produce spindles of yarn.

The factory had 72 spindles, powered by nine children pushing foot treadles, soon replaced by water power. Three years later, John and Arthur Schofield, who also came from England, built the first factory to manufacture woolens in Massachusetts.

From these humble beginnings to the time of the Civil War there were over two million spindles in over 1,200 cotton factories and 1,500 woolen factories in the United States.

From the textile industry, the factory spread to many other areas. In Pennsylvania, large furnaces and rolling mills supplanted small local forges and blacksmiths. In Connecticut, tin ware and clocks were produced. Soon reapers and sewing machines would be manufactured.

At first, these new factories were financed by business partnerships, where several individuals invested in the factory and paid for business expenses like advertising and product distribution.

Shortly after the War of 1812, a new form of business enterprise became prominent—the corporation. In a corporation, individual investors are financially responsible for business debts only to the extent of their investment, rather than extending to their full net worth, which included his house and property.

First used by bankers and builders, the corporation concept spread to manufacturing. In 1813, Francis Cabot Lowell, Nathan Appleton, and Patrick Johnson formed the Boston Manufacturing Company to build America’s first integrated textile factory that performed every operation necessary to transform cotton lint into finished cloth.

Over the next 15 years, they charted additional companies in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Others copied their corporation model and by 1840 the corporate manufacturer was commonplace.

Lowell and his associates hoped to avoid the worst evils of British industry. They built their production facilities at Massachusetts. To work in the textile mills, Lowell hired young, unmarried women from New England farms. The “mill girls” were chaperoned by matrons and were held to a strict curfew and moral code.

Although the work was tedious (12 hours per day, 6 days per week), many women enjoyed a sense of independence they hadn’t known on the farm. The wages were about triple the going rate for a domestic servant at the time.

The impact of the creation of all these factories and corporations was to drive people from rural areas to the cities where factories were located. This movement was well underway by the Civil War. During the 1840s, the population of the country as a whole increased by 36 percent. The population of towns and cities of 8,000 or more increased by 90 percent. With a huge and growing market, unconstrained by European traditions that could hamper their development, the corporation became the central force in America’s economic growth.

The Emergence of the “Women’s Sphere”

Chaos seemed to reign in the early 1800s. Cities swelled with immigrants and farmers’ sons and daughters seeking their fortunes. Disease, poverty, and crime were rampant. Factory cities were being built almost overnight and the frontier was reaching to the Pacific Coast. The public institutions—schools, hospitals, orphanages, almshouses, and prisons—were expected to handle these problems, but were overwhelmed. Somewhere there must be safe haven from the hubbub and confusion of business and industry, a private refuge. That place was the home.

Money equaled status, and increased status opened more doors of opportunity for the upwardly mobile. The home was the perfect location to display the wealth. The husband had to be out in the public sphere creating the wealth, but his wife was free to manage the private sphere, the “women’s sphere.” Together, a successful husband and wife created a picture of perfect harmony. As he developed skills for business, she cultivated a complementary role. This recipe for success was so popular that all who could adopted it. In short order, the newly created roles for men and women were thought to reflect their true nature. A “true man” was concerned about success and moving up the social ladder. He was aggressive, competitive, rational, and channeled all of his time and energy into his work. A “true woman,” on the other hand, was virtuous. Her four chief characteristics were piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. She was the great civilizer who created order in the home in return for her husband’s protection, financial security, and social status.

Women’s virtue was as much a hallmark of Victorian society as materialism. As long as women functioned flawlessly within the domestic sphere and never ventured from it, women were held in reverence by their husbands and general society. But this was carried to ridiculous extremes. To protect women’s purity, certain words couldn’t be spoken in their presence. Undergarments were “unmentionables.” A leg or an arm was called a “limb.” Even tables had limbs, and in one especially delicate household, the “limbs” of a piano were covered in little trousers.

The cult of true womanhood wasn’t simply fostered by men. In fact, the promotion of women’s sphere was a female obsession as well. Writers like Sarah Hale published magazines that detailed the behaviors of a proper lady. Godey’s Lady’s Book sold 150,000 copies annually. Catherine Beecher advocated taking women’s sphere to the classroom. Women as teachers, she said, could instill the proper moral code into future generations.

It was a fragile existence for a woman. One indiscretion, trivial by today’s standards, would be her downfall, and there was no place in polite society for a fallen woman. But a fallen woman wasn’t alone. The great majority of women never met the rigorous standard of “true womanhood” set by the Victorian middle class, nor could they ever hope to. Sojourner Truth drove that point home in 1851: “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?” Only white women of European descent, and very few of them, could be “true women.” For immigrant women, the wives and daughters of farmers, and the women who followed their husbands to the frontier, the necessities of daily life overshadowed the niceties. Nevertheless, the ideal of True Womanhood affected every facet of American culture in the nineteenth century.

Irish and German Immigration

In the middle half of the nineteenth century, more than one-half of the population of Ireland emigrated to the United States. So did an equal number of Germans. Most of them came because of civil unrest, severe unemployment or almost inconceivable hardships at home. This wave of immigration affected almost every city and almost every person in America. From 1820 to 1870, over seven and a half million immigrants came to the United States—more than the entire population of the country in 1810. Nearly all of them came from northern and western Europe—about a third from Ireland and almost a third from Germany. Burgeoning companies were able to absorb all that wanted to work. Immigrants built canals and constructed railroads. They became involved in almost every labor-intensive endeavor in the country. Much of the country was built on their backs.

In Ireland, almost half of the population lived on farms that produced little income. Because of their poverty, most Irish people depended on potatoes for food. When this crop failed three years in succession, it led to a great famine with horrendous consequences. Over 750,000 people starved to death. Over two million Irish eventually moved to the United States seeking relief from their desolated country. Impoverished, the Irish couldn’t buy property. Instead, they congregated in the cities where they landed, almost all in the northeastern United States. Today, Ireland has just half the population it did in the early 1840s. There are now more Irish Americans than there are Irish nationals.

In the decade from 1845 to 1855, more than a million Germans fled to the United States to escape economic hardship. They also sought to escape the political unrest caused by riots, rebellion, and eventually, a revolution in 1848. The Germans had little choice—few other places besides the United States allowed German immigration. Unlike the Irish, many Germans had enough money to journey to the Midwest in search of farmland and work. The largest settlements of Germans were in New York City, Baltimore, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee.

With the vast numbers of German and Irish coming to America, hostility to them erupted. Part of the reason for the opposition was religious. All of the Irish and many of the Germans were Roman Catholic. Part of the opposition was political. Most immigrants living in cities became Democrats because the party focused on the needs of commoners. Part of the opposition occurred because Americans in low-paying jobs were threatened and sometimes replaced by groups willing to work for almost nothing in order to survive. Signs that read NINA—“No Irish need apply”—sprang up throughout the country.

Ethnic and anti-Catholic rioting occurred in many northern cities, the largest occurring in Philadelphia in 1844 during a period of economic depression. Protestants, Catholics, and local militia fought in the streets. Sixteen were killed, dozens were injured, and over 40 buildings were demolished. Nativist political parties sprang up almost overnight. The most influential of these parties, the Know Nothings, was anti-Catholic and wanted to extend the amount of time it took immigrants to become citizens and voters. They also wanted to prevent foreign-born people from ever holding public office. Economic recovery after the 1844 depression reduced the number of serious confrontations for a time, as the country seemed to be able to use all the labor it could get.

But nativism returned in the 1850s with a vengeance. In the 1854 elections, Nativists won control of state governments in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and California. They won elections in Maryland and Kentucky and took 45 percent of the vote in 5 other states. In 1856, Millard Fillmore was the American Party candidate for president and trumpeted anti-immigrant themes. Nativism caused much splintering in the political landscape, and the Republicans, with no platform or policies about it, benefited and rode to victory in the divisive election of 1860.