4.2 Labor in the Antebellum United States

Slave labor helped fuel the Market Revolution. By 1832, textile companies made up 88 out of 106 American corporations valued at over $100,000.¹ These textile mills, worked by free labor, nevertheless depended on southern cotton, and the vast new market economy spurred the expansion of the plantation South.

By the early nineteenth century, states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had taken steps to abolish slavery. Vermont included abolition as a provision of its 1777 state constitution. Pennsylvania’s emancipation act of 1780 stipulated that freed children must serve an indenture term of twenty-eight years. Gradualism brought emancipation while also defending the interests of northern masters and controlling still another generation of black Americans. In 1804 New Jersey became the last of the northern states to adopt gradual emancipation plans. There was no immediate moment of jubilee, as many northern states only promised to liberate future children born to enslaved mothers. Such laws also stipulated that such children remain in indentured servitude to their mother’s master in order to compensate the slaveholder’s loss. James Mars, a young man indentured under this system in Connecticut, risked being thrown in jail when he protested the arrangement that kept him bound to his mother’s master until age twenty-five.²

Quicker routes to freedom included escape or direct emancipation by masters. But escape was dangerous and voluntary manumission rare. Congress, for instance, made the harboring of a fugitive slave a federal crime as early as 1793. Hopes for manumission were even slimmer, as few northern slaveholders emancipated their own slaves. Roughly one fifth of the white families in New York City owned slaves, and fewer than eighty slaveholders in the city voluntarily manumitted slaves between 1783 and 1800. By 1830, census data suggests that at least 3,500 people were still enslaved in the North. Elderly Connecticut slaves remained in bondage as late as 1848, and in New Jersey slavery endured until after the Civil War.³

Emancipation proceeded slowly, but proceeded nonetheless. A free black population of fewer than 60,000 in 1790 increased to more than 186,000 by 1810. Growing free black communities fought for their civil rights. In a number of New England locales, free African Americans could vote and send their children to public schools. Most northern states granted black citizens property rights and trial by jury. African Americans owned land and businesses, founded mutual aid societies, established churches, promoted education, developed print culture, and voted.

Nationally, however, the slave population continued to grow, from less than 700,000 in 1790 to more than 1.5 million by 1820.⁴ The growth of abolition in the North and the acceleration of slavery in the South created growing divisions. Cotton drove the process more than any other crop. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, a simple hand-cranked device designed to mechanically remove sticky green seeds from short staple cotton, allowed southern planters to dramatically expand cotton production for the national and international markets. Water-powered textile factories in England and the American Northeast rapidly turned raw cotton into cloth. Technology increased both the supply of and demand for cotton. White southerners responded by expanding cultivation farther west, to the Mississippi River and beyond. Slavery had been growing less profitable in tobacco-planting regions like Virginia, but the growth of cotton farther south and west increased the demand for human bondage. Eager cotton planters invested their new profits in new slaves.

The cotton boom fueled speculation in slavery. Many slave owners leveraged potential profits into loans used to purchase ever increasing numbers of slaves. For example, one 1840 Louisiana Courier ad warned, “it is very difficult now to find persons willing to buy slaves from Mississippi or Alabama on account of the fears entertained that such property may be already mortgaged to the banks of the above named states.”⁵

New national and international markets fueled the plantation boom. American cotton exports rose from 150,000 bales in 1815 to 4,541,000 bales in 1859. The Census Bureau’s 1860 Census of Manufactures stated that “the manufacture of cotton constitutes the most striking feature of the industrial history of the last fifty years.”⁶ Slave owners shipped their cotton north to textile manufacturers and to northern financers for overseas shipments. Northern insurance brokers and exporters in the Northeast profited greatly.

While the United States ended its legal participation in the global slave trade in 1808, slave traders moved one million slaves from the tobacco-producing Upper South to cotton fields in the Lower South between 1790 and 1860.⁷ This harrowing trade in human flesh supported middle-class occupations in the North and South: bankers, doctors, lawyers, insurance brokers, and shipping agents all profited. And of course it facilitated the expansion of northeastern textile mills.

Changes in Labor Organization

While industrialization bypassed most of the American South, southern cotton production nevertheless nurtured industrialization in the Northeast and Midwest. The drive to produce cloth transformed the American system of labor. In the early republic, laborers in manufacturing might typically have been expected to work at every stage of production. But a new system, piecework, divided much of production into discrete steps performed by different workers. In this new system, merchants or investors sent or “put out” materials to individuals and families to complete at home. These independent laborers then turned over the partially finished goods to the owner to be given to another laborer to finish.

As early as the 1790s, however, merchants in New England began experimenting with machines to replace the putting-out system. To effect this transition, merchants and factory owners relied on the theft of British technological knowledge to build the machines they needed. In 1789, for instance, a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, contracted twenty-one-year-old British immigrant Samuel Slater to build a yarn-spinning machine and then a carding machine. Slater had apprenticed in an English mill and succeeded in mimicking the English machinery. The fruits of American industrial espionage peaked in 1813 when Francis Cabot Lowell and Paul Moody re-created the powered loom used in the mills of Manchester, England. Lowell had spent two years in Britain observing and touring mills in England. He committed the design of the powered loom to memory so that, no matter how many times British customs officials searched his luggage, he could smuggle England’s industrial know-how into New England.

Lowell’s contribution to American industrialism was not only technological, it was organizational. He helped reorganize and centralize the American manufacturing process. A new approach, the Waltham-Lowell System, created the textile mill that defined antebellum New England and American industrialism before the Civil War. The modern American textile mill was fully realized in the planned mill town of Lowell in 1821, four years after Lowell himself died. Powered by the Merrimack River in northern Massachusetts and operated by local farm girls, the mills of Lowell centralized the process of textile manufacturing under one roof. The modern American factory was born. Soon ten thousand workers labored in Lowell alone. Sarah Rice, who worked at the nearby Millbury factory, found it “a noisy place” that was “more confined than I like to be.”⁸ Working conditions were harsh for the many desperate “mill girls” who operated the factories relentlessly from sunup to sundown. One worker complained that “a large class of females are, and have been, destined to a state of servitude.”⁹ Female workers went on strike. They lobbied for better working hours. But the lure of wages was too much. As another worker noted, “very many Ladies . . . have given up millinery, dressmaking & school keeping for work in the mill.”¹⁰ With a large supply of eager workers, Lowell’s vision brought a rush of capital and entrepreneurs into New England. The first American manufacturing boom was underway.

The Market Revolution shook other industries as well. Craftsmen began to understand that new markets increased the demand for their products. Some shoemakers, for instance, abandoned the traditional method of producing custom-built shoes at their home workshops and instead began producing larger quantities of shoes in ready-made sizes to be shipped to urban centers. Manufacturers wanting increased production abandoned the old personal approach of relying on a single live-in apprentice for labor and instead hired unskilled wage laborers who did not have to be trained in all aspects of making shoes but could simply be assigned a single repeatable aspect of the task. Factories slowly replaced shops. The old paternalistic apprentice system, which involved long-term obligations between apprentice and master, gave way to a more impersonal and more flexible labor system in which unskilled laborers could be hired and fired as the market dictated. A writer in the New York Observer in 1826 complained, “The master no longer lives among his apprentices [and] watches over their moral as well as mechanical improvement.”¹¹ Masters-turned-employers now not only had fewer obligations to their workers, they had a lesser attachment. They no longer shared the bonds of their trade but were subsumed under new class-based relationships: employers and employees, bosses and workers, capitalists and laborers. On the other hand, workers were freed from the long-term, paternalistic obligations of apprenticeship or the legal subjugation of indentured servitude. They could theoretically work when and where they wanted. When men or women made an agreement with an employer to work for wages, they were “left free to apportion among themselves their respective shares, untrammeled . . . by unwise laws,” as Reverend Alonzo Potter rosily proclaimed in 1840.¹² But while the new labor system was celebrated throughout the northern United States as “free labor,” it was simultaneously lamented by a growing powerless class of laborers.

As the northern United States rushed headlong toward commercialization and an early capitalist economy, many Americans grew uneasy with the growing gap between wealthy businessmen and impoverished wage laborers. Elites like Daniel Webster might defend their wealth and privilege by insisting that all workers could achieve “a career of usefulness and enterprise” if they were “industrious and sober,” but labor activist Seth Luther countered that capitalism created “a cruel system of extraction on the bodies and minds of the producing classes . . . for no other object than to enable the ‘rich’ to ‘take care of themselves’ while the poor must work or starve.”¹³

Americans embarked on their Industrial Revolution with the expectation that all men could start their careers as humble wage workers but later achieve positions of ownership and stability with hard work. Wage work had traditionally been looked down on as a state of dependence, suitable only as a temporary waypoint for young men without resources on their path toward the middle class and the economic success necessary to support a wife and children ensconced within the domestic sphere. Children’s magazines—such as Juvenile Miscellany and Parley’s Magazine—glorified the prospect of moving up the economic ladder. This “free labor ideology” provided many northerners with a keen sense of superiority over the slave economy of the southern states.¹⁴

But the commercial economy often failed in its promise of social mobility. Depressions and downturns might destroy businesses and reduce owners to wage work. Even in times of prosperity unskilled workers might perpetually lack good wages and economic security and therefore had to forever depend on supplemental income from their wives and young children.

Wage workers—a population disproportionately composed of immigrants and poorer Americans—faced low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. Class conflict developed. Instead of the formal inequality of a master-servant contract, employer and employee entered a contract presumably as equals. But hierarchy was evident: employers had financial security and political power; employees faced uncertainty and powerlessness in the workplace. Dependent on the whims of their employers, some workers turned to strikes and unions to pool their resources. In 1825 a group of journeymen in Boston formed a Carpenters’ Union to protest their inability “to maintain a family at the present time, with the wages which are now usually given.”¹⁵ Working men organized unions to assert themselves and win both the respect and the resources due to a breadwinner and a citizen.

For the middle-class managers and civic leaders caught between workers and owners, unions enflamed a dangerous antagonism between employers and employees. They countered any claims of inherent class conflict with the ideology of social mobility. Middle-class owners and managers justified their economic privilege as the natural product of superior character traits, including decision making and hard work. One group of master carpenters denounced their striking journeymen in 1825 with the claim that workers of “industrious and temperate habits, have, in their turn, become thriving and respectable Masters, and the great body of our Mechanics have been enabled to acquire property and respectability, with a just weight and influence in society.”¹⁶ In an 1856 speech in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Abraham Lincoln had to assure his audience that the country’s commercial transformation had not reduced American laborers to slavery. Southerners, he said, “insist that their slaves are far better off than Northern freemen. What a mistaken view do these men have of Northern labourers! They think that men are always to remain labourers here—but there is no such class. The man who laboured for another last year, this year labours for himself. And next year he will hire others to labour for him.”¹⁷ This essential belief undergirded the northern commitment to “free labor” and won the Market Revolution much widespread acceptance.

Notes

1. Philip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800–1885 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 12.
2. Robert J. Cottrol, ed., From African to Yankee: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum New England (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1998), 62.
3. The 1830 census enumerates 3,568 enslaved people in the northern states (Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont). 1830 U.S. Census data taken from Minnesota Population Center, National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011), http://www.nhgis.org; David Menschel, “Abolition Without Deliverance: The Law of Connecticut Slavery 1784–1848,” Yale Law Journal 111, no. 1 (October 2001): 191; James J. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey 1775–1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 248.
4. Minnesota Population Center, National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0.
5. Louisiana Courier, February 12, 1840.
6. U.S. Census Office 8th Census 1860 and James Madison Edmunds, Manufactures of the United States in 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, Under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1865).
7. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 168–169.
8. Sarah “Sally” Rice to her father, February 23, 1845, published in The New England Mill Village, 1790–1860 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 390.
9. Factory Tracts: Factory Life as It Is, no. 1 (Lowell, MA: Female Labor Reform Association 1845), 4.
10. Malenda M. Edwards to Sabrina Bennett, April 4, 1839, quoted in Thomas Dublin, ed., Farm to Factory Women’s Letters, 1830–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 74.
11. “Apprentices No. 2,” New York Observer, October 14, 1826.
12. Reverend Alonzo Potter, Political Economy: Its Objects, Uses, and Principles (New York: Potter, 1840), 92.
13. Daniel Webster, “Lecture Before the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” in The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster: Writings and Speeches Hitherto Uncollected, vol. 1. Addresses on Various Occasions, ed. Edward Everett (Boston: Little, Brown, 1903); Carl Siracusa, A Mechanical People: Perceptions of the Industrial Order in Massachusetts, 1815–1880 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 157.
14. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men : The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
15. “Notice to House Carpenters in the Country,” Columbian Centinel, April 23, 1825.
16. John R. Commons, ed., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society (New York: Russell and Russell, 1958), Vol. 6: 79.
17. Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Kalamazoo, Michigan, Aug. 27, 1856,” in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 2 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 364.