Although a famous Francophile, President Thomas Jefferson became so alarmed at Napoléon’s designs on America that in April 1802 he wrote to America’s ambassador in France, Robert Livingston, exhorting him to negotiate a solution because, “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans…we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” With war tensions rising, Jefferson a few months later dispatched specific additional negotiating instructions to his ambassadors in Paris. The United States, he instructed, was to offer up to $10 million to buy New Orleans and the Floridas outright. The price for New Orleans alone was $7.5 million. If France still refused to sell, they were to try to negotiate a perpetual right of transfer. All failing, Jefferson said, the American emissaries were to begin secret communications with England for the closer entangling alliance he fervently hoped to avoid.
Through no action on America’s part, circumstances at this juncture unexpectedly broke to the young nation’s advantage. The large French campaign to suppress the Haitian slave rebellion went badly awry. Rebel resistance was part of the reason, but far more debilitating to France’s 33,000 troops was the yellow fever epidemic inflicted upon them by the waterborne mosquito indigenous to the Caribbean tropics. Thousands died or became too enfeebled to fight. It was not the first nor the last time that waterborne diseases altered the course of history. Napoléon was forced to abandon Haiti, and with it his dream of rebuilding France’s New World empire, lest it compromise his grander strategy of invading England. According to Napoléon’s new political calculus, Louisiana would be better placed in American hands than to be left vulnerable to British seizure.
Thus on the very day Napoléon broke diplomatic relations with England, April 11, 1803, Napoléon’s minister, Talleyrand, stunned U.S. ambassador Robert Livingston at their day’s meeting by suddenly inquiring, “What would you give for the whole of Louisiana?” Livingston, regaining his composure, offered $4 million. “Too low!” Talleyrand said. “Reflect and see me tomorrow.” By April 30 the deal was done: for about $15 million, America got all of the Louisiana territory, including New Orleans, a claim on part of the western panhandle of Florida, and some of Texas. The entire fertile Mississippi River Valley—the key to the midwestern empire—was now officially within America’s grasp. Transfer to the United States was expeditiously completed in December 1803, the same month France withdrew its last troops from Haiti, which soon became the world’s first independent nation created by former slaves.
Yet Jefferson did not depend on legal negotiation alone to win America’s claim on the western frontier. Several months before the Louisiana Purchase was agreed, he took steps to launch the famous, 50 man Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–1806 to follow the Missouri River in search of a northwest water passage to the Pacific. Establishing viable water transportation routes, Jefferson reckoned pragmatically, would stimulate settlement and trade, and win possession of the unsettled territory by the de facto force of occupation. Soon thereafter he sent other, less-celebrated expeditions to explore the courses of the Red and Ouachita rivers and the source of the Mississippi; the latter went astray and instead tracked the Arkansas River to its headwaters in the Rockies.
Although by the early nineteenth century the western Mississippi Valley frontier beckoned with promise, it remained an unsettled wilderness. The majority of America’s population of almost 4 million still lived along the eastern seacoast. There was no ready transport route through the Appalachian Mountains to join the two regions by commerce, emigration, and common political destiny. Almost immediately after the Peace of Paris was signed, George Washington returned with urgency to the project that had absorbed him before the Revolution—to convert the rocky Potomac River into a navigable waterway that would become the primary gateway through the mountains to the west. As a statesman, Washington was preoccupied by the necessity of opening inland navigation to bind the western settlers to the United States instead of to the British or Spanish to the north and south. As the largest landowner along the Potomac and owner of over 33,000 acres of prime bottomland in the Ohio River Valley, Washington stood to profit handsomely from such a waterway. In 1785, after personally surveying the Potomac route and looking for a way to connect it to the Ohio, he became president of the Patowmack Canal Company. With the backing of influential fellow Virginians who stood to benefit most, he raised capital from private investors to build the project. In the end, he failed. The stony, waterfall-strewn, and sometimes too shallow Potomac proved too technically challenging. In 1788 Washington retired from active management to take up his new job as first president of the United States.
Settlement of the western farming frontier thus proceeded modestly. Yet the new nation had fertile, rain-fed cropland in the east as well as other water resources to launch its growth. From the outset, America’s long coastline and its British heritage had bred a vigorous maritime culture. Whaling and fishing were major activities in the northeast. Dried fish and whale oil, timber from America’s virgin woodlands, and agricultural surpluses from the middle colonies were traded up and down the Atlantic seaboard through the many good natural harbors from Boston to Baltimore to Charleston, into the Caribbean, and across the ocean to southern Europe. Often they were transported in American-built ships. New England’s abundance of tall trees, notably the 120-foot white pine that was ideal for cutting sturdy, single-piece masts, had made it a major shipbuilding center for over a century. Indeed, Britain’s early deforestation had spurred English orders from colonial shipbuilders; on the Revolution’s eve, some one-third of Britain’s fleet came from U.S. shipyards.
With a few notable exceptions such as Alexander Hamilton, most of the founding fathers quite reasonably believed that there was little prospect for rapid industrial development in a country so rich in farmland and raw materials and so short of capital, labor, and technical expertise. One comparative advantage America could exploit, however, was the cheap waterpower from its large number of swift-flowing rivers and streams. Indeed, settlement patterns since colonization had tracked good waterpower sites as well as navigable water routes. Many inexpensive wooden and cast-iron waterwheels were built from local supplies to power town gristmills and sawmills and the bellows and trip-hammers of the surprisingly widespread industry of small iron forges and foundries. Due to the availability of cheap waterpower and wood charcoal fuel, in fact, colonial ironmongers were actually producing more total pig and bar iron than England, and one-seventh of total world output, at the time of the Revolutionary War. Nevertheless, there was scant reason to think such rudimentary beginnings could provide the springboard of a homegrown American industrial revolution.
One unlikely motor of the U.S. industrial revolution was in textile manufacturing, notwithstanding Britain’s growing global dominance in inexpensive, high-quality textiles produced in its state-of-the-art, steam-powered factories. To protect its textile technology monopoly, moreover, Britain vigorously enforced sanctions against machinery exports and the emigration of skilled textile workers. America’s industry got its start because one ambitious young Englishman defied British sanctions to seek his fortune across the Atlantic. Samuel Slater had worked for years as a teenage apprentice and risen to the job of overseer in the textile mill of one of the partners of cotton manufacturing tycoon Richard Arkwright. A skilled technician with a gifted memory, Slater managed to memorize the design of the entire Arkwright factory. He disguised himself as a simple farm boy, and in 1789 sailed for America. Straightaway he entered business as a partner of a wealthy Rhode Island merchant, Moses Brown, who had been vainly trying to build an efficient cotton factory. Within a year, Slater reproduced an Arkwright-type mill in Pawtucket on the Blackstone River. But when opening day came, the machinery failed to function properly. It turned out that Slater had failed to remember the correct angle of the carder teeth. Following a tedious adjustment, America’s first automated cotton mill was operational. It had three carding machines and a spinner with 72 spindles—tiny in comparison to the 1,000
spindles at Arkwright’s original 1771 mill—and was run by a workforce of nine children, aged seven to twelve. By 1801, the profitable mill was powered by the falls of the Blackstone River with over 100 employees.
Many of the millwrights and workers who trained under Slater spawned a new generation of water-powered cotton mills. Most, however, failed because they couldn’t compete with imports from English factories. America’s infant textile industry was saved from premature demise by a radical change in business conditions caused by President Jefferson’s 1807 imposition of a foreign trade embargo. The embargo was intended to discourage the ongoing seizure of neutral American vessels on the high seas by both France and England during an escalation of the Napoleonic Wars. Like many embargos, it had unintended consequences. Exports and imports, including British textiles, froze. Any domestic American manufacturer able to make goods that substituted for the absent imports, suddenly could earn handsome profits. In 1809 alone, some 87 new cotton mills were built, nearly sextupling the 15 in existence. It was one of the ironies of U.S. history that it was the embargo policy of the agrarian champion Jefferson that galvanized the American industrialization he feared and that had been so ardently championed by his arch political opponent, Hamilton.
Yet early industry couldn’t have so responsively taken root had not England’s free enterprise culture already been transplanted in American soil. Indeed, America’s water geography further invigorated that culture. Its sea coastal economy linked it to Europe’s maritime free-market trading traditions. Its temperate, rain-fed, and small-river-rich landscapes promoted self-sufficient, independent communities with the wherewithal to safeguard its private property rights from any excessive commanding impulses of the central government, which in any case, as a practical matter, wished to encourage market entrepreneurialism in the economic realm. The rustic necessity of clever tinkering to make things work within the available physical resources and limited human labor at hand furthermore bred a distinctive practical innovativeness tailored to American conditions. This “Yankee ingenuity,” whet by the incentive of large pecuniary reward, yielded many original industrial inventions that spurred private enterprise. In 1787 Oliver Evans—who later invented the high-pressure steam engine that pumped Philadelphia’s waterworks and a gigantic steam-powered amphibious dredger—built a fully automatic, water-powered flour mill that processed wheat into flour with virtually no need for human labor; by 1837, 1,200 automated factories were at work on the frontier west of the Allegheny Mountains. What Evans did for flour, Eli Whitney did for cotton with his 1793 invention of the cotton gin that cleaned cotton with fifty times greater efficiency than by human hand and could be powered by water or animate force; overnight cotton became a thriving cash crop of the American South, reviving the waning institution of slavery in order to meet the surging demand for raw cotton. No innovation of Yankee ingenuity had so far-reaching, long-term impact as Whitney’s 1801 machine tool that produced standardized and therefore interchangeable parts—the core technology of the mass production methods that became the signature of American industry.
In textiles, the next important entrepreneurial breakthrough was made by Francis Cabot Lowell. While on a two-year family sojourn in England, Cabot, a well-to-do merchant from a prominent New England family, took special interest in his visits to the cotton mills of Birmingham and Manchester. At each stop he endeavored, like Slater before him, to remember as many details as he could about the mills’ layout and design of its machines. Upon his return home, Lowell raised capital from an association of wealthy Boston families and hired a master mechanic, Paul Moody, to help him build America’s first power loom to weave cloth. His 1813 spinning and weaving mill on the Charles River near Boston became America’s first integrated cotton factory, turning raw cotton into finished cloth. It was so successful that within a decade it became the model for the first planned industrial town. Located northwest of Boston at the junction of the Merrimack and Concord rivers near a 30-foot waterfall with enough waterpower to drive its factory system on a massive scale, the new town was named Lowell by the founding entrepreneur group in memory of Lowell, who had died in 1817 at age forty-two. At its peak in the late 1840s, Lowell’s complex of 10 major factories employed 10,000 workers. Its waterpower system included six miles of canals, dams, and reservoirs and the extraction of more than 10,000 horsepower from the falls. The company became the largest cotton producer in a national industry that by 1840 had grown to 1,200 factories with 2.25 million spindles. The village had become an industrial city of over 20,000 inhabitants. As late as 1870, cotton goods were still America’s second largest industry, surpassed only by indispensable flour mills that produced Americans’ daily bread.
What made Lowell’s factory system the object of wide admiration of Europeans for whom it was a fixed stop on their American tour, however, was not its productive output but its unique approach to labor management relations. The high-minded Lowell, influenced by utopianist Robert Owen and the ideals of nineteenth-century New England, conceived his factory system to demonstrate that profitable industry need not be accompanied by the satanic conditions of squalor, filth, poverty, illiteracy, and moral depravity that characterized the crowded British mill towns he’d seen. To attract enough farm girls in a chronically labor short, rural environment to his factory, he offered good living conditions and high enough wages to allow them to be able to save for a small dowry after two or three years. At the company town of Lowell, the neatly dressed girls lived in chaperoned boarding houses, with no more than two to a bed, around a square landscaped with trees and shrubs. Although their lives were regimented and they worked twelve hours per day, six days per week, they were edified by a literary weekly, company-organized lectures, and religious instruction. In his 1842 American tour, famous British factory system critic Charles Dickens extolled the Lowell system’s virtues.
Yet Lowell’s novel industrial labor relations proved to be less enduring when challenged by the fierce realities of free-market competition. Living and work conditions did not keep pace with business expansion and the company’s quest for profits. Early strikes in 1834 and 1836 were crushed. From the 1840s, the Lowell girls were replaced by vast numbers of unskilled, illiterate, low wage, and compliant European immigrants who began swarming across the Atlantic with the advent of ocean steamers in search of better lives. In the twenty years leading up to 1840, the number of immigrants rose ninefold to 90,000 per year. In 1850, 300,000 came over; in 1854, nearly 500,000. By the mid-nineteenth century, foreign immigration had ended America’s chronic labor shortage. Domestic businesses had accumulated ample capital to finance large-scale investment. Technical expertise, too, was available. Other bottlenecks to growth, including transportation, had been alleviated. America was beginning the industrial takeoff that fully flourished after the Civil War.
In contrast to the steam-driven industries of England, the U.S. industrial revolution was distinguished by its heavy emphasis on the inventive exploitation of America’s waterpower. Experimentation with waterwheels and power designs steadily improved horsepower output and ultimately surpassed the limits of the steam engine. Lowell’s textile industry was a creative fulcrum of the development of the seminal water turbine, a derivative of the waterwheel, which harnessed greater energy from falling water by channeling it through enclosed passages to spin finlike rotary blades. By the mid-nineteenth century, water turbines were used to drive sawmills and the elaborate gears, camshafts, pulleys, and belting of large textile mills. As early as the 1840s, one of Lowell’s textile companies on the Merrimack River began using turbines capable of 190 horsepower. A watershed innovation was made by James B. Francis, chief engineer of Lowell’s waterpower works. Through the combination of methodical scientific analysis, theory, and testing, and the expert craftsmanship of Lowell’s famed machine shop, Francis produced a highly efficient, new class of turbine design in 1848. The water turbine’s heyday arrived in the late nineteenth century when an evolved iteration of the Fran
cis turbine with its rotating shaft attached to a dynamo proved to be the most effective motor for the mass generation of electricity.
Ever since British scientist Michael Faraday’s 1831 discovery that electricity could be produced by rotating magnets inside of copper coils, inventors had been seeking ways to tap the awesome potential of the new energy source. Morse’s electric telegraph in the 1840s revolutionized communications and linked continents. The industrial electricity age arrived with the advent of the modern electricity-generating dynamo and early applications like Thomas Edison’s lightbulb and Werner Siemens’s electric streetcar in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. But to achieve takeoff required a means to generate massive amounts of electrical power. It was in the ensuing quest to extract hydroelectricity from large waterfalls, notably the pioneering effort at Niagara Falls in the 1880s and 1890s, that the water turbine found its great historic application. Just after the turn of the century, the Niagara Falls Power Company was generating hydroelectricity from 5,500 horsepower Francis turbines that spun under 135 feet of water; two years later Francis turbines capable of generating 10,000 horsepower were being built.
Electricity was the only form of energy that was easily stored and transmitted over long distances. Wherever it was applied on a large scale, it transformed almost every aspect of human life. Cities were illuminated; homes eventually got washing machines, telephones, and radios. Refrigeration allowed food to be stored longer and transported over long distances. Transportation accelerated. Precision increased. Compact electric engines were fitted on all sorts of work products to boost productivity. Entire new industrial sectors came into being. Aluminum, for example, could be cost-effectively extracted from its ores and refined only with massive amounts of electricity. Countries rich in hydroelectric power, such as the United States, Canada, and Norway, became world leading aluminum producers. Cheap aluminum, in turn, spurred advances in manufacturing airplanes, ships, and cars. Along with steel, petroleum, and the internal combustion engine, electricity became one of the dynamic foundations of the mass production industrial revolution that superseded the age of steam and iron.
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