Industrialization in the Northeast
As the nation deepened its technological base, artisans and craftsmen were made obsolete through the process of deskilling, as they were replaced by non-specialized workers. These workers used machines to replicate in minutes or hours work that would require a skilled worker days to complete. As New England's textile industry took off, mill villages quickly grew into large factory towns, attracting rural workers from the surrounding countryside. The many children employed in early factories were paid very low wages because they were seen to be supplementing family income.
The Rise of the Textile Industry
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the textile industry was rife with potential for mechanization. Prior to this period, textile production was traditionally performed at home; however, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the work was mechanized and increasingly done on an industrial scale.
Slater's Mill
In the late eighteenth century, the English textile industry had adopted technological innovations that greatly improved the efficiency and quality of textile manufacture: the spinning jenny, water frame, and spinning mule. However, these technologies were closely guarded by the British government. In 1789, Samuel Slater, an apprentice in one of the largest textile factories in England, defied British laws against the emigration of skilled laborers and smuggled his knowledge of textile machinery to the United States. In 1793, he established a cotton-spinning mill with a fully mechanized water-power system at the Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Slater's Mill was established in the Blackstone Valley, which became one of the earliest industrialized regions in the United States. At its peak, more than 1,000 mills operated in this valley. Slater went on to build several more cotton and wool mills throughout New England.
Lowell's Factories
Slater's mills ran on a business model called the "Rhode Island System." In this model, mill villages employed all members of a family. By the 1820s, this system began to be replaced by a more efficient system based upon the ideas of Francis Cabot Lowell, an American businessman who was instrumental in bringing the Industrial Revolution to the United States. Lowell's Boston Manufacturing Company dominated the textile industry in the United States in the 1820s, developing efficient and novel systems of labor and production.
Lowell, a Massachusetts merchant, was permitted to tour British textile factories in 1810. He memorized the design of textile machines, and on his return to the United States, he established the Boston Manufacturing Company. In the "Waltham-Lowell System," for the first time, both spinning and weaving occurred on site, and mill workers resided in collective company housing under strict supervision. Following his death in 1817, Lowell's associates built America's first planned factory town: the eponymous Lowell, Massachusetts.
"Lowell Mill Girls," ca. 1870
Two women factory workers known as "Lowell Mill Girls."
Wage Labor and Factory Conditions
Lowell popularized the use of the wage labor, a system in which a worker sells his or her labor to an employer under contract. Wage labor displaced reliance on apprenticeship and family labor. Jeffersonian agrarians viewed wage labor as a negative force in society, arguing that the economy of the United States should be built upon agriculture rather than on industry. Jefferson reasoned that the growth of a class of wage laborers would decrease self-sufficiency in America.
Lowell's factory employed young female workers, some as young as ten years old. These workers were typically hired for contracts of one year. Though considered an improvement on the squalid conditions of factory towns in the United Kingdom, conditions in the Lowell mills were severe by modern American standards. Factories were crowded and extremely loud with poor air quality and little to no ventilation. Employees worked from 5:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m., for as many as 80 hours per week. This model became known as the "Waltham-Lowell System."
The monotony of repetitive tasks made days particularly long. In the winter, when the sun set early, oil lamps were used to light the factory floor, and employees strained their eyes to see their work and coughed as the rooms filled with smoke from the lamps. Some factories did not allow employees to sit down. Doors and windows were kept closed, especially in textile factories where fibers could be easily disturbed by incoming breezes, and mills were often unbearably hot and humid in the summer. In the winter, workers often shivered in the cold. In such environments, workers’ health suffered.
The workplace posed other dangers as well. The presence of cotton bales alongside the oil used to lubricate machines made fire a common problem in textile factories. Workplace injuries were also common. Workers’ hands and fingers were maimed or severed when they were caught in machines; in some cases, limbs or entire bodies were crushed. Workers who didn’t die from such injuries almost certainly lost their jobs, and with them, their income. Corporal punishment of both children and adults was common in factories; where abuse was most extreme, children sometimes died as a result of injuries suffered at the hands of an overseer.
As the decades passed, working conditions deteriorated in many mills. Workers were assigned more machines to tend, and the owners increased the speed at which the machines operated. Wages were cut in many factories, and employees who had once labored for an hourly wage now found themselves reduced to piecework, paid for the amount they produced and not for the hours they toiled. Owners also reduced compensation for piecework. Low wages combined with regular periods of unemployment made the lives of workers difficult, especially for those individuals with families to support. In New York City in 1850, for example, the average male worker earned $300 a year; it cost approximately $600 a year to support a family of five.
Early Labor Reform Movements
The long hours, strict discipline, and low wages soon led workers to organize to protest their working conditions and pay. In 1821, the young women employed by the Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham went on strike for two days when their wages were cut. In 1824, workers in Pawtucket went on strike to protest reduced pay rates and longer hours, the latter of which had been achieved by cutting back the amount of time allowed for meals. Similar strikes occurred at Lowell and in other mill towns such as Dover, New Hampshire, where the women employed by the Cocheco Manufacturing Company ceased working in December 1828 after their wages were reduced.
In the 1830s, female mill operatives in Lowell formed the Lowell Factory Girls Association to organize strike activities in the face of wage cuts and, later, established the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association to protest the twelve-hour workday. They distributed legislative petitions, formed labor organizations, contributed essays and articles to pro-labor newspapers, and protested through turn-outs or strikes. Even though strikes were rarely successful and workers usually were forced to accept reduced wages and increased hours, work stoppages as a form of labor protest represented the beginnings of the labor movement in the United States.
Constitution of the Factory Girls Association in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1836
This is the constitution of the Labor Reform Association of Lowell's female textile workers, drafted in 1836.