MANUFACTURING

The turn toward manufacturing was one of the most notable economic developments of the early national period. From a series of agricultural and mercantile colonies in the 1750s, the United States had begun to evolve into an important manufacturing power by the 1820s.

before the transformation

The growth of manufacturing would have been very difficult to predict in the years before the Revolution. Although Benjamin Franklin half-jokingly wrote an English correspondent in 1764, "As to our being always supplied by you, 'tis a folly to expect it," the reality was that during the colonial era the colonists' manufactured goods were supplied primarily from overseas. British mercantilist legislation such as the Wool Act (1699), Hat Act (1732), and Iron Act (1750) was intended to prevent large-scale colonial manufacturing. Colonists for the most part were satisfied with this situation, provided that British merchants continued to pay good prices for American raw materials such as rice, tobacco, wheat, naval stores, and fish. Although some types of commercial manufacturing—such as iron forges—flourished, and some regions, particularly New England, developed a number of manufacturing establishments, the vast majority of Americans were content to stick to agricultural or mercantile pursuits throughout the colonial period. The dearth of manufacturing did not by any means signify a lack of goods; in fact, Americans participated in a consumer revolution during the eighteenth century as the number, types, and quality of imported manufactures grew exponentially.

The American Revolution brought an end to this colonial economic configuration. Most obviously, it destroyed the legal basis of British mercantilism. But several other related developments proved to be at least as significant. During the years of conflict in the 1760s and 1770s, the colonists turned toward economic protest as a means to coerce the British government into repealing obnoxious legislation such as the Stamp Act (1765) and Townshend Duties (1767). The most important weapon in their arsenal was the boycott used against British manufactures. Consequently, nonconsumption of British manufactures and production of domestically made articles became patriotic and profitable, spurring many Americans to begin manufacturing projects of their own. Some of these manufactories were built by individual entrepreneurs, while others, such as Philadelphia's socalled American Manufactory, were the products of patriotic civic committees. The boycotts also politicized for the first time America's artisans, who became very active in urban committees, such as the Sons of Liberty, that took it upon themselves to enforce the boycotts. Finally, the war itself impelled a certain level of economic independence as the British army and navy impeded Americans from importing goods as readily as they had during times of peace.

post-revolutionary developments

Enthusiasm for domestic manufactures and economic independence continued to grow after the war, and many sorts of people lobbied the national and state governments to encourage manufacturing. The newly politicized artisans initially led the movement. In most of the major cities they formed umbrella organizations that pushed the states to implement protective legislation. They were most successful in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, all of which enacted significant tariffs on foreign manufactures in the years before the ratification of the Constitution. Some merchants also saw the potential profits from manufacturing. In many cities they formed manufacturing societies that sponsored fairly large-scale textile factories to raise interest in the potential possibilities for domestic manufactures. Some, such as the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and the Useful Arts, were briefly profitable. Merchant members of these societies also joined with mechanics to lobby for government encouragement of manufacturing. Finally, a number of agricultural societies also publicized home manufacturing and larger-scale textile manufacturing as a means of stimulating new markets for agricultural products.

The most famous attempt to promote manufacturing during these years, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures (1791), owed much to these efforts. Co-written with Tench Coxe, assistant treasurer of the United States and founder of the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and the Useful Arts, the report urged greater investment in factory production and more government encouragement to manufactures, especially in the form of bounties. Although the report died in Congress, it did spawn the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, a multifactory corporation in Paterson, New Jersey, that resembled a larger version of the earlier manufacturing societies, attracted many of the same wealthy investors, and which benefited from a valuable package of incentives from the state of New Jersey.

Technological change and new legal developments were two other factors stimulating manufactures in the early Republic. The industrial revolution was already well under way in England, where factory technologies were zealously guarded. However, new technologies seeped into the United States along with heavy immigration of skilled Europeans—both free men and servants. Samuel Slater, alerted to America's need for industrial technology by the propaganda of one of the manufacturing societies, is perhaps the most famous example of an immigrant who smuggled detailed information into the United States. Slater, credited with establishing modern textile-producing technology in American mills, was not an isolated example; in fact, it was often government policy during the early Republic to encourage such technology piracy. The most important indigenous technological development was Eli Whitney's system of interchangeable parts, which came to be known as the "American System" of manufacturing and which made possible the widespread development of mass production. Additionally, the early national legal system increasingly encouraged manufacturing. Many states offered various forms of pecuniary inducements to manufacturers. Although their exact role is now debated, corporate charters issued by state legislatures encouraged manufacturing companies by providing them a solid legal foundation and, in some cases, state subsidies. Finally, the emerging doctrine of "creative destruction," most famously elaborated in the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837), made it easier for industrial projects to proceed, despite claims from local landowners (often farmers whose lands were flooded by mill dams) that such development impinged on their right to enjoy their own property.

By 1808 a new set of concerns further encouraged manufacturing. The immediate catalyst was the challenge to American shipping by the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815). President Jefferson's Embargo of 1808 was intended to coerce Britain and France to respect American neutrality at sea. It ultimately failed, but by cutting off all foreign imports it had the largely unintended effect of further encouraging American manufacturing. The War of 1812, which ensued when economic coercion failed, also acted as a continuing incentive for domestic manufacturing by further isolating America from European imports. With the end of the war, many American manufacturers and their political allies forcefully argued for the need to pass new legislation to protect America's emerging factories, resulting in the tariffs of 1816, 1824, and 1828. The last of these acts, sometimes derided as the Tariff of Abominations, proposed to raise many tariffs well above the 25 percent mark and nearly precipitated civil war during the Nullification Crisis of 1832.

the transformation

All of these factors led to a significant rise in manufacturing by 1830. The most notable sector was textiles. Cotton production capacity, for example, increased from 8,000 spindles in 1808, to 80,000 by 1811, an estimated 350,000 by 1820, and 1.2 million by 1830. The most famous of all the textile projects was the large, vertically integrated factories created in Waltham and Lowell, Massachusetts, by corporations founded by wealthy merchants retrospectively known as the Boston Associates. The Waltham-Lowell factories were typical insofar as they relied on pirated technology and were begun when the War of 1812 offered protection from competing imports. They initially employed large numbers of young farm women from the surrounding rural areas, many of whom lived in company boardinghouses. By 1836 Lowell alone could boast of twenty textile mills employing nearly 7,000 workers, for an average of 350 workers per mill.

Further to the south, Philadelphia also was a major manufacturing center by 1830, but without large, vertically integrated factories. Instead, manufacturing there was characterized by proprietary capitalism, a flexible mixture of small, highly specialized, generally privately owned firms. Well over one thousand workers labored in the thirty-nine Philadelphia textile firms that responded to the census of 1820, for an average of fewer than thirty workers per manufactory. Factories also flourished in the countryside, usually near likely sources of waterpower. For example, Oneida County, New York, lightly settled and almost entirely agricultural in the 1790s, supported twenty-one textile factories producing a total of half a million dollars worth of goods by 1832.

But textile factories, while having a high profile, were only one aspect of the rise of manufactures. The years just after the Revolution witnessed the growth of many sorts of nonmechanized manufacturing establishments such as sugar refineries, ropewalks, and small shoe manufactories. New York City was moving toward "metropolitan industrialization," characterized by growing numbers of nonmechanized manufactories using traditional technologies but often employing wage laborers rather than the traditional configuration of master, journeyman, and apprentice. Home manufacturing grew, too. One contemporary estimated that New England farm families manufactured twice as much in 1790 as they had twenty years earlier. However, by 1820 factory production was beginning to be accepted as the new standard. While the 1810 census of manufactures had included all sorts of manufacturers—nonmechanized, factory, and household—the 1820 census generally assumed that manufacturing would be performed outside the home by wage workers rather than by apprentices or family members.

By the time of the Civil War, the United States would be on the verge of becoming one of the world's largest manufacturing economies. It was not quite there by 1830, but it had advanced a very long way from the dependent, agricultural, colonial economy of sixty years earlier.

See alsoBritish Empire and the Atlantic World; Hamilton, Alexander; Manufacturing, in the Home; Textiles Manufacturing; Work: Artisans and Crafts Workers, and the Workshop; Work: Factory Labor .

bibliography

Ben-Atar, Doron S. Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.

Bezís-Selfa, John. Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Jeremy, David J. Transatlantic Industrial Revolution: The Diffusion of Textile Technologies between Britain and America, 1790–1830s. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981.

Licht, Walter. Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Peskin, Lawrence A. Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Scranton, Philip. Proprietary Capitalism The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800–1885. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Lawrence A. Peskin