Transcript
The Wedding of the Waters
1825 · 1836
October 26, 1825 Buffalo, New York
Ten o’clock in the morning.
At Buffalo, a cannon fires. The Erie Canal is finished.
Down the canal, a gunner hears it and fires his own. Then the next. Then the next.
About an hour and twenty minutes later, the news reaches New York City. New York fires back.
Nine days later, Governor DeWitt Clinton pours a keg of Lake Erie into the Atlantic.
A doctor adds bottles from the Ganges, the Nile, the Thames, the Amazon and nine other rivers. The canal itself was four feet deep.
In 1809, Joshua Forman pitched the canal to President Jefferson. He remembered the reply: It is little short of madness to think of it at this day.
Eleven years later. At Lockport, the canal meets a sixty-foot cliff and climbs it in five stone steps. Your turn.
Shipping a ton of wheat from Buffalo to New York cost about a hundred dollars. Now: about ten.
That “madness” cost about seven million dollars. In 1836, its tolls finished paying it back.
On deck: a crate of printed cotton from Lowell, Massachusetts, bound for a store in Ohio. The cotton was picked in Mississippi, by people who were never paid.
Between 1807 and 1848, every step of that trip got faster and cheaper.
Many Americans stopped making what they needed, and started buying it. So who got rich, who got worn out, and who paid for the cotton?
Homespun
1807–1815
In 1807, a New England farm family made most of what it used. They spun the thread, wove the cloth, dipped the candles, salted the pork.
What they couldn't make, they swapped with neighbors, and wrote it down. Historians call this semi-subsistence farming. Nobody then used the phrase.
In 1810, the Treasury reckoned two-thirds of country people's clothing was homemade.
Three in four working Americans farmed in 1800. By 1850, just over half.
Distance kept life local. In 1800, Cincinnati was three weeks from New York. Freight took over seven weeks, before steamboats and canals.
That August, Robert Fulton's steamboat went 150 miles up the Hudson in 32 hours under steam.
Everybody calls it the Clermont. Fulton called it the North River Steam Boat.
Jefferson's Embargo kept ships in port. Then came the War of 1812. British cloth stopped coming.
About 8,000 cotton spindles turned in 1808. By 1815, three New England states had over 119,000. The machines were British. Exporting them was against British law.
Machines in a Man's Head
1789–1826
Britain banned exporting its cotton machines. So, the story goes, 21-year-old Samuel Slater memorized them. In 1789 he sailed for New York.
Samuel Slater A few days ago I was informed that you wanted a manager of cotton spinning, &c. in which business I flatter myself that I can give the greatest satisfaction…
In 1790, his water-powered mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, began spinning cotton thread. His first workers were nine children, aged seven to twelve.
In 1810, Boston merchant Francis Cabot Lowell toured British mills as a polite visitor. The story goes he memorized their secret power loom.
Back home, he built his own loom. In 1814 his company opened a mill at Waltham. Raw cotton in, finished cloth out, all under one roof.
Lowell died in 1817. His partners took the idea to a waterfall on the Merrimack. Thirty Irish laborers came in 1822 to widen a canal. In 1826 the town took his name.
The crate from the canal boat was printed here. On the thread map, Lowell lights up.
Factories needed one more idea: parts that fit any copy. In January 1801, the story goes, Eli Whitney showed Adams and Jefferson a table of musket parts.
Jefferson was thrilled.
Thomas Jefferson …take 100 locks to pieces & mingle their parts, and the hundred locks may be put together as well by taking the first pieces which come to hand.
That letter is evidence. Of what? Historians who took Whitney's muskets apart found hand-filed parts that didn't swap.
He had promised 10,000 muskets by September 1800. He finished in January 1809.
The letter proves what Jefferson believed. The real thing came from a federal armory in the 1820s.
John H. Hall I have succeeded in establishing methods for fabricating arms exactly alike, & with economy, by the hands of common workmen.
The exam still credits Whitney with the idea. Now you know the evidence.
The Turn-Out
1834–1846
Lowell's founders had seen English mill towns, and they didn't like what they saw.
Nathan Appleton The operatives in the manufacturing cities of Europe, were notoriously of the lowest character, for intelligence and morals.
Their plan: hire farmers' daughters for a few years. Canal boats brought cheap Western grain, and New England's hill farms struggled.
Young women wanted cash: to pay a mortgage, send a brother to college, or keep it themselves. The company housed them, shut the doors at ten, and expected them in church.
Charles Dickens visited in 1842 and couldn't get over it.
Charles Dickens Firstly, there is a joint-stock piano in a great many of the boarding-houses.
Charles Dickens Secondly, nearly all these young ladies subscribe to circulating libraries.
Dickens imagined his English readers crying, 'How very preposterous!'
Charles Dickens It is their station to work. And they do work.
That's what the visitors saw. Now look closer.
In 1834, about 800 mill women had walked out over a wage cut. Now the companies raised the price of board.
Harriet Hanson Robinson Then, when the girls in my room stood irresolute, uncertain what to do, asking each other, 'Would you?' or 'Shall we turn out?' and not one of them having the courage to lead off,
Harriet Hanson Robinson I, who began to think they would not go out, after all their talk, became impatient, and started on ahead, saying, with childish bravado,
Harriet Hanson Robinson 'I don't care what you do, I am going to turn out, whether any one else does or not;' and I marched out, and was followed by the others.
Harriet Hanson Robinson As I looked back at the long line that followed me, I was more proud than I have ever been since at any success I may have achieved,
Harriet Hanson Robinson and more proud than I shall ever be again until my own beloved State gives to its women citizens the right of suffrage.
Lowell mill women Oh! isn't it a pity, such a pretty girl as I
Lowell mill women Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Lowell mill women Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,
Lowell mill women For I'm so fond of liberty that I cannot be a slave.
They paid for it.
Harriet Hanson Robinson My mother was turned away from her boarding-house, that functionary saying, 'Mrs. Hanson, you could not prevent the older girls from turning out, but your daughter is a child, and her you could control.'
Harriet remembered the strike as a failure. In fact, Boott and Merrimack dropped the charge, and Hamilton partly did. Memory is evidence too. Check it.
In the 1840s the companies sped up the machines. Weavers went from two looms to three or four.
A weaver named Sarah Bagley led the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. By 1846 its petitions for a ten-hour day carried five thousand signatures.
A committee of the legislature listened, and decided it wasn't the legislature's problem.
The chairman, William Schouler, put it in writing.
The women couldn't vote, but they campaigned against Schouler anyway. When he lost that fall, they thanked the voters.
Lowell mill women For I'm so fond of liberty that I cannot be a slave.
Downriver
1793–1840s
Lowell mill women That I cannot be a slave.
The cotton on their looms was picked by people who were.
Some Lowell women did fight slavery. In 1845 they signed a petition against making Texas a slave state. It didn’t change where the cotton came from.
Eli Whitney’s gin, patented in 1794, cleaned inland cotton fast. Planters carried the crop west, onto land the Choctaw and Chickasaw were forced to give up.
Between 1800 and 1840, the cotton crop grew eighteen times over. The number of enslaved people nearly tripled.
By 1840, cotton was more than half of what Americans grew or made and sold abroad.
Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped into slavery, described the end of each day.
Solomon Northup No matter how fatigued and weary he may be—no matter how much he longs for sleep and rest—a slave never approaches the gin-house with his basket of cotton but with fear.
Solomon Northup If it falls short in weight—if he has not performed the full task appointed him, he knows that he must suffer.
Solomon Northup And if he has exceeded it by ten or twenty pounds, in all probability his master will measure the next day’s task accordingly.
Solomon Northup So, whether he has too little or too much, his approach to the gin-house is always with fear and trembling.
Every bale in this film began here. Pressed, roped and marked, each one went down to the river.
Steam carried it downriver.
In 1811, the first steamboat on the western rivers sailed under a comet, with a baby on board. In December, an earthquake shook the river.
John H. B. Latrobe there were those who insisted that the comet of 1811 had fallen into the Ohio and had produced the hubbub!
Upstream by keelboat, New Orleans to Louisville often took four months. By the 1830s, the fastest steamboats did it in about a week.
Boilers burst. Between 1816 and 1848, 233 explosions killed 2,563 people.
New York had given one company a monopoly on steamboats in its waters. In Gibbons v. Ogden, the Supreme Court said only Congress regulates trade between states.
Chief Justice John Marshall Commerce, undoubtedly, is traffic, but it is something more: it is intercourse.
The monopoly died, and fares fell. The rival’s young captain was Cornelius Vanderbilt.
In 1818, New York’s Black Ball Line began sailing to Liverpool on a fixed schedule, full or not.
Cotton sailed from New Orleans to Liverpool, and to New York. New York’s merchants, banks and insurers took a share of the trade.
Some went on to Boston. The last miles to Lowell ran on a railroad the mill owners backed.
The Horse Won
1827–1850
Baltimore watched New York win the West's trade. In 1827 Maryland chartered a railroad in reply.
On July 4, 1828, Charles Carroll, the last living signer of the Declaration, laid the first stone. Later books have him ranking it second only to signing the Declaration.
That same day, President John Quincy Adams broke ground for a rival, the C&O Canal. His spade hit a stump.
John Quincy Adams after repeating the stroke three or four times without making any impression, I threw off my coat,
John Quincy Adams and resuming the Spade, raised a shovel full of the Earth, at which a general shout burst forth from the surrounding multitude.
The canal stopped at Cumberland in 1850. The railroad reached the Ohio in 1852.
The B&O's cars ran on horses. Then Peter Cooper brought a tiny engine, Tom Thumb.
John H. B. Latrobe A gallant gray of great beauty and power.
John H. B. Latrobe The pace increased, the passengers shouted, the engine gained on the horse.
John H. B. Latrobe The race was neck and neck, nose and nose.
John H. B. Latrobe Then the engine passed the horse, and a great hurrah hailed the victory.
John H. B. Latrobe The band which drove the pulley, which drove the blower, slipped from the drum.
John H. B. Latrobe The engine for want of breath began to wheeze and pant.
John H. B. Latrobe In vain Mr. Cooper, who was his own engineman and fireman, lacerated his hands.
John H. B. Latrobe The horse gained on the machine, and passed it.
The horse won. The railroad won everything else.
No 1830 newspaper reported a race. Latrobe told it 38 years later.
Canals still led in 1840. Ten years later, railroads had 9,021 miles.
A Boston toll bridge sued a rival. The Supreme Court said no.
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney We shall be thrown back to the improvements of the last century, and obliged to stand still, until the claims of the old turnpike corporations shall be satisfied…
By 1850 tracks crowded the Northeast and Ohio. The South had far fewer.
In 1846 Sarah Bagley, a former weaver, took charge of Lowell's telegraph office.
The Store in Ohio
1817–1848
Nathaniel Hawthorne I was inclined to be poetical about the Grand Canal. In my imagination, De Witt Clinton was an enchanter…
Nathaniel Hawthorne …our adventurous navigation of an interminable mud-puddle.
The Erie paid for itself so fast that every state wanted a canal. By 1840 Americans had dug more than 3,300 miles of canals. The National Road ran west from Cumberland.
Before the canals, a Western farmer's crop floated south to New Orleans.
After them, more and more of it went east, to New York. Erie Canal wheat and flour from the lakes grew thirteenfold in sixteen years.
The North and the Midwest got tied together. The South, less so. Remember that in 1861.
Cincinnati grew from 2,500 people in 1810 to 115,000 in 1850.
It packed so much pork, people called it Porkopolis.
Frances Trollope I am sure I should have liked Cincinnati much better if the people had not dealt so very largely in hogs.
By the 1830s, almost a third of Americans lived west of the Alleghenies.
Rebecca Burlend The time occupied in passing from New Orleans to St. Louis was about twelve days.
Prairie soil stuck to iron plows. In 1837 a blacksmith named John Deere gave one a steel cutting edge, cut from a broken saw blade.
Cyrus McCormick's reaper cut at least five times as much wheat as one man with a scythe. Jo Anderson, a man the McCormicks enslaved, helped build the first one.
Now farmers grew wheat and pork for people they would never meet. Then they went shopping.
That's the market revolution in one room: a family that made less, and bought more.
Parlors and Piecework
1828–1848
At the top sat a small business elite. Lowell's owners also held banks, insurance companies and railroads.
Below them grew a middle class of clerks and storekeepers. Father's work moved to an office. The parlor got a piano.
Catharine Beecher wrote the rulebook.
Catharine Beecher …the formation of the moral and intellectual character of the young is committed mainly to the female hand.
Only a family on one good income could afford that ideal. Everyone else saved every scrap.
In Philadelphia, Black families kept parlors and pianos too. Willson noted they rarely went out for pleasure, a careful nod to white hostility.
Not every household matched the ideal. In Vermont, two women lived together for forty years, in a union sacred to them as marriage.
Beneath the parlors grew the laboring poor. In 1833 a Philadelphia seamstress earned twelve and a half cents a shirt, at best.
Nine shirts a week paid a dollar twelve. Lodging took fifty cents. Mathew Carey said others made immense fortunes from such work.
Arrivals leapt from sixty thousand in 1832 to nearly 235,000 in 1847.
They landed in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Few went South. Nearly half were Irish.
Irish crews cut the railroad beds. Fifty-seven died at Duffy's Cut in 1832, in a cholera summer. Researchers say some were killed.
Skilled workers watched machines undercut their trades. They formed unions, then a Working Men's Party.
The Panic of 1837 broke many unions. In 1842 Massachusetts's highest court ruled that a union was not, by itself, a criminal conspiracy.
The Knot
1848
Follow the thread one last time. The store's pork went to Cincinnati, then down the Ohio to the Mississippi.
Cloth went west. Pork went south. Cotton came north.
New York to Cincinnati: about three weeks in 1800, one week by 1830, two days by 1857.
Claim: a great deal. It moved work out of the home and tied Americans to distant markets.
Mary Paul left a Vermont farm for wages.
Mary Paul If any girl wants employment I advise them to come to Lowell.
Deere's plow and McCormick's reaper let Midwestern farmers grow wheat for distant cities.
Mill owners, merchants and bankers got rich. A growing middle class bought pianos.
Women at the looms wore out. So did the men in the canal ditches, and the seamstress by her candle.
The people who picked the cotton paid for it first. They were never paid at all.
Horace Bushnell This transition from mother and daughter power, to water and steam power, is a great one,
Horace Bushnell greater by far than many have as yet begun to conceive…
By 1848, canals and railroads had bound the West to the North. The river still ran south.
In thirteen years, that would matter more than anything.