Winning a war of independence was only the beginning. Mere months after the Constitution of the United States went into effect, a second revolution began. This one would not start with a declaration, but it would be launched with the opening of a mill. This mill introduced a new way to transform cotton into thread. In 1789, an aspiring industrialist from Belper, England disembarked a ship in New York. What he did next set into a motion a series of events that fundamentally changed how people lived and worked. We still deal with some of the consequences of these choices today.
Samuel Slater left his home in England after completing a lengthy apprenticeship. Born in 1768, Slater was trained for work in the cotton spinning industry. Slater worked in textiles from the age of 14 until his death in 1835. For several years, Slater worked in a factory run by Jedediah Strutt in Milford, England. That training period ended in August 1789. The following month, he was on a ship headed to the Americas.
Slater arrived in New York late in November 1789. He came looking for opportunity. If Slater had stayed in England, he could have worked within family businesses or made his way through his connection to the Strutts. He could have made a comfortable living. But there was a limit to his ambitions. Slater must have sensed that more was possible in the United States.
In January 1790, Slater came to Rhode Island, where an investor named Moses Brown was willing to take a chance on an unknown machine maker. Over the next three and a half years, Slater, Brown, and a number of investors and craftspeople worked together to make a cotton spinning mill. This process truly took a village, and it was not a singular accomplishment.
Between 1790 and 1793, Slater’s main task was to work with local laborers to build machines that could spin cotton into thread. He also prepared his workforce for a new type of labor. Slater’s workers were children, most around ten years of age. The idea of children working was not unusual in the 1790s. Working for a stranger, in a new type of mill, for pay, was something new for these Americans. The amount of turnover and conflict recorded in Slater’s logbooks and letters reveals that this was not a smooth transition for anyone.
Unlike the people of Pawtucket, Slater was familiar with how factories ran in England. By age 21, Slater had spent a third of his life among mill workers. The craftspeople and farmers he encountered in the United States, people who’d recently fought a war for freedom, were not accustomed to the more rigid ways of factory work. Slater’s mill offered people living nearby a new way to earn money. The child laborers he hired did not get to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Few gave serious thought to the rights of free children as independent beings. Wages went directly to parents.
Slater came of age in an era of Revolutions. This may partially explain why he took the chance to make a name for himself in a foreign land. In Rhode Island, Slater settled among people just learning to live with the Revolution. Along with the people of Pawtucket, Slater was just starting to realize what separating from the British Empire might mean. Should Slater succeed, he could accrue a tremendous amount of wealth, away from the watchful eyes of the Strutts and other established English factory owners. If he failed, this would be yet another setback in the creation of a strong manufacturing system in the United States.
Source: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service
