Early Mills In 1789 the Pennsylvania legislature placed an

Early Mills

During the first half of the 19th century, unmarried women made up a majority of the work force in cotton textile mills and a substantial minority of In 1789 the Pennsylvania legislature placed an workers in factories manufacturing ready-made advertisement in English newspapers offering a clothing, furs, hats, shoes, and umbrellas. Women cash bounty to any English textile worker who would migrate to the state. Samuel Slater, who was were also employed in significant numbers in the manufacture of buttons, furniture, gloves, just finishing an apprenticeship in a Derbyshire textile mill, read the ad. He went to London, booked gunpowder, shovels, and tobacco. passage to America, and landed in Philadelphia. Many women found the new opportunities There he learned that Moses Brown, a Quaker exhilarating. Eleven-year-old Lucy Larcom went off merchant, had just completed a mill in Pawtucket, to the Lowell textile mill enthusiastically: "The Rhode Island, and needed a manager. Slater novelty of it made it seem easy, and it really was applied for the job and received it, along with a not hard, just to change the bobbins on the promise that if he made the factory a success he spinning-frames every three quarters of an hour or would receive all the business's profits, less the so.... The intervals were spent frolicking around cost and interest on the machinery. among the spinning-frames, teasing and talking to the older girls, or entertaining ourselves with games On December 21, 1790, the mill opened. Seven boys and 2 girls, all between the ages of 7 and 12, and stories in a corner." operated the little factory's 72 spindles. Slater soon Unlike farm work or domestic service, employment discovered that these children, "constantly in a mill offered female companionship and an employed under the immediate inspection of a independent income. Wages were twice what a [supervisor]," could produce three times as much woman could make as a seamstress, tailor, or as whole families working in their homes. To keep the children awake and alert, Slater whipped them schoolteacher. Furthermore, most mill girls viewed the work as only temporary before marriage. Most with a leather strap or sprinkled them with water. On Sundays the children attended a special school worked in the mills fewer than four years, and frequently interrupted their stints in the mill for Slater founded for their education. several months at a time with trips back home. The opening of Slater's mill marked the beginning By the 1830s, increasing competition among textile of a widespread movement to consolidate manufacturers caused deteriorating working manufacturing operations under a single roof. conditions that drove native-born women out of the During the last years of the 18th century, mills. Employers cut wages, lengthened the merchants and master craftspeople who were workday, and required mill workers to tend four discontented with the inefficiencies of their work looms instead of just two. Hannah Borden, a Fall force created the nation's first modern factories. River, Massachusetts, textile worker, was required Within these centralized workshops, employers closely supervised employees, synchronized work to have her loom running at 5 A.M. She was given an hour for breakfast and half an hour for lunch. to the clock, and punished infractions of rules with Her workday ended at 7:30 P.M., 14.5 hours after heavy fines or dismissal. In 1820, just 350,000 her workday had begun. For a 6-day work week, Americans worked in factories or mills. Four she received between $2.50 and $3.50. decades later, on the eve of the Civil War, the number had soared to 2 million. The mill girls militantly protested the wage cuts. In 1834 and again in 1836, the mill girls went out on For an inexpensive and reliable labor force, many strike. An open letter spelled out the workers' factory owners turned to child labor. During the complaints: "sixteen females [crowded] into the early phases of industrialization, textile mills and same hot, ill-ventilated attic"; a workday "two or agricultural tool, metal goods, nail, and rubber three hours longer a day than is done in Europe"; factories had a ravenous appetite for cheap teenage laborers. In many mechanized industries, and workers compelled to "stand so long at the machinery ... that varicose veins, dropsical swelling from a quarter to over half of the work force was made up of young men or women under the age of of the feet and limbs, and prolepsis uter[us], diseases that end only with life, are not rare but 20. common occurrences."

During the 1840s, fewer and fewer native-born women were willing to work in the mills. "Slavers," which were long, black wagons that criss-crossed the Vermont and New Hampshire countryside in search of mill hands, arrived in Rhode Island and Massachusetts milltowns empty. Increasingly, employers replaced the native-born mill girls with a new class of permanent factory operatives: immigrant women from Ireland.

In larger eastern cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, as well as in smaller western cities like Cincinnati, Louisville, and Pittsburgh, they formed local trade unions and city trades' assemblies. House carpenters, handloom weavers, combmakers, shoemakers, and printers formed national societies to uphold uniform wage standards. In 1834 journeymen established the National Trades' Union, the first organization of American wage earners on a national scale. By 1836 union membership had climbed to 300,000.

Early Labor Unions

These early unions encountered bitter employer opposition. To counter the influence of the newly formed unions, employers banded together in employers' associations, which claimed that union methods were "most obnoxious, coercive, and detrimental to the peace, prosperity and best interests of the community." Employers also requested prosecution of unions as criminal combinations. In 1806, in a case involving Philadelphia shoemakers, a Pennsylvania court established an important precedent by ruling that a labor union was guilty of criminal conspiracy if workers struck to obtain wages higher than those set by custom. Other court decisions declared union’s illegal constraints on trade. In 1842, in the landmark case Commonwealth v. Hunt, the Massachusetts Supreme Court established a new precedent by recognizing the right of unions to exist and restricting the use of the criminal conspiracy doctrine.

In 1806 journeymen shoemakers in New York City organized one of the nation's first labor strikes. The workers' chief demands were not higher wages and shorter hours. Instead, they protested the changing conditions of work. They staged a "turn-out" or "stand-out," as a strike was then called, to protest the use of cheap unskilled and apprentice labor and the subdivision and subcontracting of work. To ensure that journeymen did not resume work, a "tramping committee" patrolled the shops. The strike ended when the city's largest shoe employers asked municipal authorities to criminally prosecute the shoemakers for conspiracy to obstruct trade. A court found the journeymen shoemakers guilty and fined them $1 plus court costs. By the 1820s, a growing number of journeymen were organizing to protest employer practices that were undermining the independence of workers, reducing them to the status of "a humiliating servile dependency, incompatible with the inherent natural equality of men." Unlike their counterparts in Britain, American journeymen did not protest against the introduction of machinery into the workplace. Instead, they vehemently protested wage reductions, declining standards of workmanship, and the increased use of unskilled and semiskilled workers. Journeymen charged that manufacturers had reduced "them to degradation and the loss of that self-respect which had made the mechanics and laborers the pride of the world." They insisted that they were the true producers of wealth and that manufacturers, who did not engage in manual labor, were unjust expropriators of wealth. In an attempt to raise wages, restrict hours, and reduce competition from unskilled workers, skilled journeymen formed the nation's first labor unions.

In addition to establishing the nation's first labor unions, journeymen also formed political organizations, known as Working Men's parties, as well as mutual benefit societies, libraries, educational institutions, and producers' and consumers' cooperatives. Working men and women published at least 68 labor papers, and they agitated for free public education, reduction of the work day, and abolition of capital punishment, state militias, and imprisonment for debt. Following the Panic of 1837, land reform was one of labor's chief demands. One hundred sixty acres of free public land for those who would actually settle the land was the demand and "Vote Yourself a Farm" became the popular slogan.