Palmer, A Night on the Hudson: Through at Daylight, 1864
Image ID: 8209
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Transportation, Arts and Architecture, Business 19th century, Class and Status, Environmental History, Expansion, Industrial Revolution, Luxury, Middle-Class Culture, National Events, Popular recreation 1870-1920, Railroad and steamboat, Technology, Women in labor movement, Women's work
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation
National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)
Card Text: Frances F. Palmer (American born England 1812–76), "A Night on the Hudson: 'Through at Daylight,'" Currier and Ives, 1864. From the 1840s to the mid-1860s, many passengers traveling between New York City and Albany, NY, preferred to go via steamship on the scenic Hudson River, about 7-1/2 hours each way. This print depicts the "Isaac Newton" and "Francis Skiddy," both among the largest Hudson River steamboats of their day, gliding along in moonlight, a shining lamp on the prow of each ship lighting the waters ahead. The ships offered comfortable cabins and staterooms for their passengers, with saloons (the lit rooms) and promenades along the second deck. This print likely commemorates these two favorite ships that transported many for years along the Hudson River route. The "Skiddy" was launched in 1852, but ran aground and wrecked on Nov. 5, 1864, four miles south of Albany. The "Newton" sailed the river for 18 years, and was destroyed in 1863 in an explosion near today's Washington Heights.
Nathaniel Currier's New York-based lithography company began in 1835 and produced thousands of hand-colored prints that create a vivid panorama of mid-to-late 19th century American life. As the firm expanded, Currier included his younger brother Charles in the business. In 1857, James Merritt Ives, the firm's accountant since 1852 and Charles's brother-in-law, was made a partner, and the business was renamed Currier & Ives. Over the decades, Americans eagerly acquired their lithographs of picturesque scenery, rural and city views, ships, railroads, portraits, hunting and fishing scenes, domestic life, and other subjects as inexpensive decorations for their homes and businesses. Although it was unusual for a woman to achieve prominence in a printing firm, Frances Flora (Fanny) Palmer was one of the most important artists working for the company. Between 1849 and 1868, she produced approximately 200 of the firm's best landscapes and most engaging scenes of daily life. Hand-colored lithograph. 17-3/4 × 27-3/4" (45.1 × 70.5 cm).
Citation: Image and text: Currier & Ives (American, active New York, 1857–1907). Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10028-0198. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/817645. Bequest of Adele S. Colgate, 1962. Acc. No: 63.550.49. All rights reserved. June 1, 2022.
Interior, Central Pacific Railroad Passenger Station, Sacramento, CA
Image ID: 8236
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Transportation, Agriculture, Beaches and Parks, Business 19th century, Business 20th century, Chinese, Class Separation, Coal, Emerging industrial city, Emigration and Passage, Environmental History, Expansion, Future Progress, Gilded Age, Indian-White Relations Since Revolution, Industrialization, Irish, Labor, Mills Factories Post Civil War, National Events, Nature and Civilization, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, Parks and Cemeteries, Politics & Government, Pro-Immigration, Prostitution, Pullman and Model Towns, Railroad and steamboat, Reconstruction, Taxes, Technology, The West, Upper Class since 1865, Urbanization
Region(s): Canada, United States
CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 8.8 - The divergent paths of the American people in the West from 1800 to the mid-1800s , 11.2 - The the relationship among the rise of industrialization, large-scale rural-to-urban migration, and massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, 11.4 - The rise of the United States to its role as a world power in the twentieth century
National Standard(s): Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877) , The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900) , The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)
Card Text: Interior, Central Pacific Railroad Passenger Station, Old Sacramento State Historic Park. The Station today is a faithful reconstruction of the 1876 western terminus of the first US transcontinental railroad. Visitors peer over the counter at Station Master Samuel Robinson’s ticket office, hear the dots and dashes emanating from the telegraph office, and look into George Smith’s crowded baggage room and separate waiting room intended for ladies and children only. Inside the train shed are vintage railroad locomotives, cars, and other equipment.
The Central Pacific was founded in 1861 by a group of California merchants known later as the “Big Four”: Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker, all remembered for having built part of the first US transcontinental rail line. The line was first conceived and surveyed by an engineer, Theodore Judah, who obtained the financial backing of the Big Four and won federal support in the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, which provided land grants and taxpayer subsidies to the Central Pacific and Union Pacific. Each company was granted financial support through government bonds and awarded sizable parcels of land along the entire length of their route as an added incentive, which enriched these corporations.
Huntington represented the company in the East, handling the financing, purchasing, and political lobbying. Crocker was in charge of construction. Stanford, the governor of California in 1862–63, saw to the company’s financial and political interests in the West. Hopkins was company treasurer. The men subscribed some of their own money initially, but most of the construction capital came from public (taxpayer) funds and grants. The Big Four became enormously wealthy, and Stanford went on to found Stanford University.
The Central Pacific began laying track eastward from Sacramento in 1863, and the Union Pacific started westward from Omaha, Nebraska, two years later. To meet its hunger for cheap labor, the Central Pacific hired thousands of Chinese workers, including many recruited from farms in Canton. The Chinese crew had the formidable task of laying the track that crossed the rugged Sierra Nevada, blasting nine tunnels to accomplish it. The crew of the Union Pacific, largely Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans, had to contend with Native people's attacks and the Rocky Mountains. On May 10, 1869, after completing 1,800 miles (2,900 km) of track, the two rail lines met at Promontory, Utah, today memorialized at the Golden Spike National Historic Site. The event's famous photographs exclude the Chinese and Irish laborers who built the railroad. In subsequent years feeder lines of the Central Pacific were established throughout California, some of them under the umbrella of the Southern Pacific Company of California. Southern Pacific acquired existing tracks along southern routes to Texas and New Orleans, Louisiana. On March 17, 1884, a new Southern Pacific Co. was incorporated to act as holding company for the several railroads. The Central Pacific was leased to it until 1959, when they merged, enriching their investors.
Citation: Image and First text: Courtesy of The California State Railroad Museum Library, 111 I St, Sacramento, CA 95814. https://www.californiarailroad.museum/ visit/outside-the-museum. All rights reserved. Our thanks to the Museum. Second text: Eds. of Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Central Pacific Railroad," Copyright Encyclopedia Britannica, Aug 28, 2019. Revised and updated by Erik Gregersen. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Central-Pacific-Railroad. All rights reserved. Oct 23, 2022.
Pomarede, View of Early St. Louis, 1832-35
Image ID: 8207
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Transportation, Arts and Architecture, Business 19th century, Cities, Developing Nations, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Expansion, Frontier, Industrial Revolution, Jacksonian Era, Labor, Market Economy, Nationhood, Railroad and steamboat, Success 19th century, Technology, The West, Trade
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.5 - U.S. foreign policy in the early Republic, 8.8 - The divergent paths of the American people in the West from 1800 to the mid-1800s
National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)
Card Text: Leon Pomarede, (French, c. 1807-92), "View of St. Louis" with steamboats, 1832-35. St. Louis, MO, was the “Gateway to the West,” a thriving metropolis and trade center during the 19th century. Explorers, fur trappers, hunters, merchants, and settlers all passed through the busy hub on the Mississippi River. Pomarede, a Frenchman who immigrated to the US around 1830, lived and worked in St. Louis for over 50 years. In this painting, he captured the bustling activity of ferryboat traffic. He took this view looking west from the Illinois side of the river..
A journey to St. Louis lasted many days as each steamboat pulsed past the tangled, heavily wooded banks of the Ohio River from Pittsburgh or Cincinnati, or pushed up against the Mississippi current from New Orleans. Passengers knew they were near their destination when they caught sight of the chimneys of flour mills and breweries spewing smoke into the blue prairie sky. As the boat drew closer, they saw church spires, and then the city itself, three parallel streets of pink brick stores and houses, on a limestone bluff on the left bank. St. Louis was halfway across the continent, and by the 1830s the former French trading post had a population approaching 10,000. With its warehouses, provision merchants, gunsmiths, saddlers, horse dealers, and wagon makers, this city was the marketplace of the frontier, dominating western trade and commerce. Most passengers were arriving to do business: insurance agents and corn dealers, salesmen from the East bringing samples of hardware or fabrics, soldiers and government officials heading to new postings. The age of the steamboat had arrived, with as many as eighty vessels in the river at once. As each boat nosed in, tying up at a diagonal, a throng of porters, carters, and runners for hotels and rooming houses rushed toward it. The air was filled with a cacophony of sound: The roar from the boats releasing steam from their high-pressure boilers, the shouting from the crowds of vendors and touts, and the clattering of wheels on cobbles. Oil on canvas. 29 x 39" (73.7 x 99.1 cm).
Citation: Image and first text: Copyright Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 600 Museum Way, Bentonville, AR 72712. Acc. No: 2007.16. Acquired 2007. All rights reserved. In "The Growing Years, The Life History of the U.S.," Vol. 3, Time-Life Books, 1974, p. 167. Second text: Peter Pagnamenta, "Prairie Fever: British Aristocrats in the American West 1830-1890," 2012. Copyright W.W. Norton & Co, Inc, 500 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10110. All rights reserved. Aug 9, 2022.
The Wickedest Man in New York, 1868
Image ID: 8280
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Industrial Revolution, Industrialization, Arts and Architecture, Business 19th century, Class Structure, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Exhibition, Games 19th century, Institutions and social disorder, Labor, Liquor, Market Economy, Moral lessons, Nineteenth Century Interiors, Popular recreation to 1865, Prostitution, Reform, Religion, Satire and Comedy, Success 19th century, Symbols of mass society, Trade, Urban gangs, Urban poverty, Victorian Culture, Women and Theater, Women's work
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast.
National Standard(s): The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)
Card Text: "The Wickedest Man in New York," Scene at John Allen's Dance House, 304 Water St, New York City, 1868. John Allen was born in 1823 in New York to Rev. Jesse B. Allen (1810-71) and Hannah Louise Cole (1812-84). His parents were prominent, well-to-do and religious, living in upstate New York near Syracuse. They had 10 children, 7 surviving childhood. John became a saloon keeper and underworld figure in New York City during the early- to mid-19th century. A former student of religion, John was a notorious criminal in the city and known as the "Wickedest Man in New York." A public crusade against him, headed by lawyer and journalist Oliver Dyer, resulted in a reform movement called the "Water Street Revival." This campaign, in which Allen and other notorious underworld figures were "reformed" by religious leaders, was eventually revealed to be a fraud through exposés published by The New York Times and The New York World, and Allen was forced to leave the city.
Two of John's brothers became Presbyterian preachers and a third a Baptist minister. The rest of his brothers, however, became "professional burglars and footpads [robbers]" in New York City; Theodore Allen became one of the city's earliest underworld figures. John was attending Union Theological Seminary when, around 1850, he left to join his brothers in New York. They tutored him in burglary but eventually cast him out after he confessed to being a police informant.
During this time he married a "lush worker" known as Little Susie and they moved to the waterfront district of the infamous Fourth Ward in 1855. While Susie continued her trade of "rolling drunks," John lured sailors and other passersby into the dance hall, where they were drugged and "shanghaied," kidnapped and forced to work as crew on outgoing vessels. Allen himself suffered a similar fate two years later when, while drinking with his employer one night, he was drugged and robbed, waking up hours later "in the forecastle of a ship bound for South America." He made his way back to New York six months later, and his former employer was soon found "beaten to death with an iron belaying-pin." No evidence connected Allen to the murder, but he was considered a suspect by police and decided to seek different means of employment.
He and Susie moved to the district that would become the "Tenderloin" and began working for procuress Hester Jane Haskins. The husband and wife team were among the "respectable-looking young men and women" hired by Haskins to travel through New England luring young women to New York with the promises of work. Once arrived in the city the women were abducted and trafficked, forced to work in brothels as prostitutes. When Haskins began kidnapping young girls from prominent families, John and Susie decided to leave her organization. Haskins was arrested only a year later.
Returning to the waterfront in 1868, the Allens opened the dance hall on Water Street. It operated as a brothel, one of the most licentious establishments in New York City. John dressed his 20 or so “dance girls” in long black bodices of satin, scarlet skirts and red-topped boots, with sleigh-bells circling their ankles. One of the women who worked at Allen's business was supposedly the daughter of a lieutenant-governor in New England. She had come to New York to find her fortune but fell into the hands of procurers who forced her into prostitution. All types of vice and sexual "obscenities" were performed in private rooms, and sometimes out in the open - so much so that journalist Dyer wrote in Packard’s Monthly that John Allen was “The Wickedest Man in New York City.” Allen was so proud of his new moniker that he made up business cards. The dance hall was so prosperous that in just ten years, Allen banked more than $100,000, making him the richest pimp in New York City.
In time, Allen's resort became a principal hangout for the gangsters and other criminals of the Fourth Ward. As one of the earliest dance halls, it was the model for many of the city's most infamous dive bars and saloons of the late 19th century: The Haymarket, McGurk's Suicide Hall, Paresis Hall and Billy McGlory's Armory Hall. It was reported that, every evening, "several hundred partake of the rude fun, among them are boys and girls below twelve years of age. The atmosphere reeks with blasphemy. The women are driven to their work by imprecation [curses], and often by blows, from their task master."
Although involved in theft, sex trafficking and possibly murder, Allen remained a devoutly religious man. He gathered his employees, including prostitutes, bartenders and musicians, for a prayer meeting three days a week at noon in a barroom. In each cubicle where Allen's women brought men, a Bible and other religious literature were available. On gala nights, these were often given away as souvenirs by Allen himself. He subscribed to almost every religious magazine published in the US at the time as well as his favorite newspapers, the New York Observer and The Independent. He scattered these about his dance hall and barroom while every table and bench held "The Little Wanderers' Friend," a popular hymnbook. In this spirit Allen led his employees and patrons in a hymn sing-along, most often in "There is Rest for the Weary."
Citation: Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Aug. 8, 1868. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC 20540. LC-USZ62-2162. August 14, 2020
Merrimack Manufacturing Co., Lowell, MA, c.1850
Image ID: 8329
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Lowell, Antebellum Reform, Arts and Architecture, Business 19th century, Child labor, Class Structure, Corporate Image, Early mills and factories, Early National Period, Environmental History, Factory as symbol, Family to 1920, Gender-Bending, Industrial Revolution, Invention, Labor, Labor Organizations and Leaders, Market Economy, National Events, Nineteenth Century Children, Parents, Children, Families, Strikes and Violence, Sweatshops, Technology, Urbanization, Women in labor movement, Women's organizations, Women's work, Working Conditions
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 8.10 - The multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War, 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast.
National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)
Card Text: The Plant of the Merrimack Manufacturing Co., Lowell, MA, 1850, detail. The Merrimack Manufacturing Company (also known as Merrimack Mills) was the first major textile factory to open in Lowell, Massachusetts, beginning operations in 1823. After the death of Francis Cabot Lowell of the Boston Manufacturing Co., his "Boston Associates" began planning a larger operation in East Chelmsford, MA, on the Merrimack River. The Merrimack Manufacturing Co. was modeled after the second Boston Manufacturing Co. mill and built concurrently with the necessary canals, machine shop, dyehouse, and boardinghouses for the workers. The company employed the "Lowell System." Initially capitalized with $600,000, its typical product was calico cloth. Located at the foot of the Merrimack Canal, the original mills received the power of the full 32-foot drop of the river. The Merrimack Co. was the parent company of the later Lowell firms, although they were technically competitors. The Merrimack Co. became very powerful politically in Lowell. However, as US textile production shifted away from New England, the company's fortunes reversed. It survived the Great Depression of the 1930s due to military contracts and awards that revived the surrounding economy, and it was among the last of Lowell's textile giants to close. Shortly after it ceased operations in the late 1950s, nearly the entire complex was demolished for urban renewal in 1960. A few years later, many of the boardinghouses were destroyed as well. Today, the site is occupied by new arterial roads, parking lots, low-rise office buildings, a high-rise housing tower, and the newer buildings of Lowell High School.
"The Voice of industry" appeared during a period of unprecedented, explosive growth in the textile industry. It was the longest-running labor newspaper published during the US Industrial Revolution, and one of the most widely read of the many worker-run journals of the period. It started publication in 1845 in Fitchburg, Mass., under the auspices of the New England Workingmen’s Association. Written and published by the workers themselves, the "Voice" was concerned with the dramatic social changes taking place as corporations began to control economic life. New, large-scale machinery had come to dominate the production of cloth by 1840, and it was being rapidly developed in lockstep with equally new ways of organizing workers for mass production. Together, these mutually reinforcing technological and social changes produced staggering increases: From 1840 to 1860, the number of spindles in use rose from two million to over five million; bales of cotton from 300,000 to nearly a million; and the number of workers from 72,000 to nearly 122,000. This growth translated directly into large profits for the textile corporations. Between 1846 and 1850 the dividends of the “Boston Capitalists,” the group of textile companies that founded Lowell, averaged 14% per year. Most corporations recorded similarly high profits during this period, but workers saw none of these gains. In fact, most workers saw their positions decline sharply during this period as the corporations employed fewer workers and made them tend more machines at faster speeds for reduced wages. Not surprisingly, this trend created considerable discontent. Writing anonymously in the "Voice" as “one of the vast army of sufferers,” an operative protested that while workers now tended “three or four looms, where they used to tend but two” and produced twice as much cloth, “the pay is not increased to them, while the increase to the owners is very great. Is this just?” Nor was the increased danger to workers considered.
In most cases, workers' total earnings stayed the same during this period, and wage cuts took the form of reductions in “piece rates," the amount paid for each piece a worker produced. At this lower rate, their total earnings were maintained by producing more output; which, for the most part, was accomplished by pushing operatives to work harder. Workers were made to tend more machines (a practice referred to as the “stretch-out") at faster speeds (referred to as the “speedup"); they were, in other words, being made to perform more work for less money.
Another worker, writing in 1845, observed that while the profits of 11 Lowell mills had doubled from the year before, the workers were being paid 12.5% less. “This is the natural result of the state of things in New England," she concluded, “the more wealth becomes concentrated in a few hands, and the poorer the great mass becomes.” In the previous decade, the power of the corporations had been limited, as disillusioned workers could leave the factories and return to their nearby rural homes. By the early 1840s, however, many New England farms had been crushed by a severe economic depression, leaving workers with no alternative to harsh factory life. For the first time, a permanent “factory population” arose in Lowell. Measures aimed at increasing worker "discipline" became suddenly more effective. Corporations colluded to increase the workweek and the number of hours in the workday. They maintained "blacklists" that prevented discharged workers - fired, in many cases, for trivial reasons - from finding employment at other mills. A “premium system” was adopted in which supervisors were paid bonuses for pushing operatives to produce more. As a result, by the mid-1840s, workers were spending 12- to 14-hour days each day in factories that were often overheated and poorly ventilated, doing dreary, exhausting work. While they often wrote about being treated by mill owners as “living machines,” the reality was much worse - unlike their inanimate counterparts, workers could be forced to produce more, by way of pressure and intimidation. While workers bitterly condemned this abuse of power, they were even more alarmed by another, overarching feature of the new economic order: The disconnect between the liberating potential of "labor-saving" machinery, and the way these inventions were used instead to increase output. “With such gigantically increased means of production,” asked one reformer, “would it not be supposed that the Laboring Classes would be rendered more comfortable?…Certainly, but directly the reverse is the case.” Machinery, workers argued, should be developed and applied with the aim of freeing people from undesirable work, allowing them more time to cultivate and develop their talents. Instead, they watched with dismay as their work increased, and was fragmented into narrow, routine tasks, which left them physically and mentally debased. “Compared with their employers,” wrote a worker in the Voice, “[workers] are as a class sinking day by day into a still deeper degradation.” Another observed that there was now “machinery enough in New England to do the work of five times its present population performed in the old way,” but that, “the consequence is we are nearer starvation.” These workers were also criticizing the way costs and benefits were understood and tallied in the new, profit-driven, economic system. For the factory owner, the definition of “cost" was restricted to monetary expenses, and “benefit" was defined narrowly to mean physical output. Any other costs associated with production - such as the mental deterioration suffered by workers from performing repetitious, mindless tasks - were considered irrelevant in this calculus of “profitable” work.
While the rise of a permanent factory population increased the power of the corporations, it also allowed for a more lasting, permanent response to that power. In 1845, 12 factory operatives organized the first union of female factory workers in the US, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. Six months later, its membership had grown to 500. Under the guidance of the young labor leader Sarah Bagley, and with the "Voice of Industry" as its herald, the Association tirelessly campaigned to convince the public of the need for reform in the mills. It published a series of articles called “Factory Tracts,” which documented the deteriorating conditions in the mills, and provided “a true exposition of the Factory system and its effects upon the health and happiness of the operatives." The association would go on to become a leading organizing force in the Ten-Hour Movement in Lowell.
From 1900 until 1946, the Merrimack Manufacturing Company ran a plant in Huntsville, Alabama, with non-union labor.
Citation: Image: Lowell Historical Society, 115 John St, 4th Fl., Lowell, MA 01852. In John Coolidge, "Mill and Mansion: A Study of Architecture and Society in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1820-1865" (1942) fig. 2. First text: Copyright American Textile History Museum, 491 Dutton St, Lowell, MA 01854. All rights reserved. Second text: Public domain. "The Voice of Industry." https://www.industrialrevolution.org/industrial-revolution--featured-content. Aug. 30, 2023.
Jail Cell Door, Williamsburg, VA, 1773
Image ID: 8341
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Antebellum Reform, 18th Century Interiors, Architecture, Class Separation, Colonial America, Early cities, Early National Period, Eighteenth Century, Institutions and social disorder, Moral lessons, Nativism, Nineteenth Century Slavery, Politics & Government, Prejudice and Discrimination, Slavery Misc., Social disorder and order to 1865, Temp to 1870's, Urban poverty, Williamsburg, Women's misc.
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 5.4 - Political, religious, social, and economic institutions that evolved in the colonial era. , 5.5 - The causes of the American Revolution, 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation
National Standard(s): Colonization and Settlement (1585-1763), Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)
Card Text: Jail cell door with grate, Williamsburg, VA, 1773. Thieves, runaway enslaved workers, murderers, cutthroats, pirates, debtors, political prisoners, and the criminally insane once paced the cells of the 1704 Public Gaol as they waited to be tried - and perhaps hanged. In these smelly, filthy cells prisoners were held before trial and punishment. In this two-story brick prison, the incarcerated didn’t just wake up to austere and depressing cells. With fellow occupants, including bloodthirsty pirates and traitors, they were also often greeted by belligerent bunkmates itching for conflict. The prisoners had only piles of straw for beds. Rodents, cockroaches, and lice infested the cells, the food was horrible, and typhus was common. The windows had no glass, so the prisoners, chained in heavy leg irons and handcuffs, were at risk from the weather. The poor living conditions and overcrowding caused more inmates to die of starvation and disease than hanging.
When Williamsburg became the capital of the Colony of Virginia in 1699, city officials realized that with economic growth came crime, and with heightened political activity, corruption. They therefore hired the best building contractor in the state, Henry Cary, to construct “a strong sweet prison” in 1701. Initial specifications for the gaol kept it small and simple because it was not intended to house murderers, thieves, and other dangerous miscreants. At first the Public Gaol had only three rooms: two for inmates, and one for the gaoler. But officials soon realized that the city’s population of wrongdoers was larger than they’d estimated; a 30- x 20-foot building simply could not house all the enslaved runaways, thieves, tories, and spies sentenced to prison. An exercise yard was therefore added in 1703, a “Debtor’s Prison” in 1711, and a separate brick dwelling for the gaoler in 1722.
Unfortunately, despite all these additions, the Public Gaol failed to live up to its “strong and sweet” expectations. It was an inhumane environment. The food was beyond terrible (soggy peas and overly salted beef, for instance); the cells were freezing (many inmates shivered to death); and the cleaning staff left much to be desired (“Gaol fever,” or typhus, plagued prisoners and jailers alike).
Incarceration in such an inhumane place is arguably a fitting punishment for evil pirates, especially if they served under the infamous Blackbeard. They were the gaol's most notorious inmates, captured with him in 1718. Before Edward Teach earned that name and a reputation for terrorizing the seas, he was just a humble sailor. Once he joined Benjamin Hornigold’s Flying Gang of pirates, however, he quickly learned their ways and became one of the most feared pirates to roam colonial coastlines. When Blackbeard sailed the "Queen Anne’s Revenge" to the Carolinas, Virginia Governor Alexander Spotswood ordered Lt Robert Maynard to engage and capture Blackbeard and his crew, but the pirate captain was killed during the bloody hand-to-hand conflict that followed. Some say that the Governor had a pike fixed with Blackbeard’s skull displayed prominently on the banks of the Hampton River to scare off other freebooters and prevent them from landing. As for Blackbeard’s 15 henchmen who survived the struggle:
“Taken to Williamsburg to stand trial, they were held in the public 'gaol' on Nicholson Street just north of the Capitol. At least some faced an admiralty court...one was acquitted, one pardoned and the rest sentenced to hang.” In 1719, the remaining pirates left the Public Gaol and walked down the streets of Williamsburg. They rode on top of their own coffins, a custom of the time, along Gallows Road to be hanged. Their bodies were allowed to rot for months in cages at the city entrance to deter would-be pirates.
Another of the gaol’s most famous occupants was Governor Henry Hamilton. Hamilton’s ability to forge friendships with Indian chiefs had earned him two nicknames, which he detested: the “Scalptaker” and the “Hair-Buyer General.” Rumors had spread of Hamilton's purchasing the scalps of dead settlers from Native American raiding parties, and he was captured by Colonel George Rogers Clark in 1779 to face these allegations. As he awaited trial, the poor Governor discovered that even political prominence did not exempt him from brutal treatment at the Public Gaol: He was refused pen and paper, shackled in a tiny cell with six other criminals, and forced to eat disgusting food.
Many prisoners, of course, belonged in a hospital, not a jail, but only in 1773 did Williamsburg open its first public hospital. Before the colonists understood the huge difference between lawbreakers and “lunaticks,” the mentally ill were forced to bunk with convicts - to everyone's disadvantage.
In Virginia, at least four or five persons were incarcerated in the Public Gaol in the 1760s, and it had a substantial female population. The ghosts of two women are still rumored to lurk in the gaoler’s upstairs quarters. The women’s animated conversations and the thumping of their heavy shoes are yet heard coming from the deserted room. It is as if the evil thoughts of criminals, and the pain of the innocent, have all seeped into the prison’s walls, where they remain to this day. One tourist recalls: “I went in there and I felt really, really, like there was something wrong, like something’s in there. I walked in further and further until I got to the very end where I could barely see light coming out from the door I walked in. Then, I noticed the chains moving and the ball, because it’s the ball and chain that hang on a wall, and I noticed it was moving and I was like, that’s kinda cool."The haunted Public Gaol of Colonial Williamsburg includes the ghosts of pirates, thieves, slaves, and corrupt officials. In this two-story brick prison, located at the east end of the city, the incarcerated didn’t just wake up to austere and depressing cells. With fellow occupants including bloodthirsty pirates and traitors to the country, they were also often greeted by belligerent bunkmates itching for some conflict.
Citation: Karen Halttunen photo. Colonial Williamsburg, Williamsburg, VA. First text: "Public Gaol Cell Yard," Colonial Williamsburg, Williamsburg, VA. https:// www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/locations/public-gaol-cell-yard/. ©2022 The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 101 Visitor Center Dr, Williamsburg, VA 23185. All rights reserved. Second text: "12. The Public Gaol, Colonial Williamsburg," Aug 15, 2017. https://colonial ghosts.com/public-gaol-and-wythe-house/. U.S. Ghost Adventures. © 2023 Copyright Colonial Ghosts. All rights reserved. Jan 31, 2023.
Mill Building of Five Floors, 1852
Image ID: 8276
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Industrial Revolution, Agrarian Reform, Arts and Architecture, Business 19th century, Class Structure, Corporate Image, Early mills and factories, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Expansion, Invention, Labor, Lowell, Market Economy, Mills Factories Post Civil War, National Events, Success 19th century, Sweatshops, Technology, Trade, Urbanization, Women in labor movement, Women's work
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 8.10 - The multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War, 8.11 - The character and lasting consequences of Reconstruction, 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 8.5 - U.S. foreign policy in the early Republic
National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877) , The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)
Card Text: Mill building, 1852. In the late 1700s, cotton goods originally imported from India became fashionable in North America because of their low cost and good looks. Due to its advances in cotton manufacturing, Great Britain was quickly becoming the world leader in manufacturing cotton goods. American consumers liked them and American merchants looked for ways of producing them. The first American mill to complete with the British was Slater's Mill, a spinning mill built in 1793 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island by Samuel Slater, an expatriate Englishman with knowledge of mills.
In 1807, President Thomas Jefferson imposed an embargo on British goods in retaliation for British kidnapping of American sailors on the high seas and forcing them to sail British ships. The embargo was unpopular in the US because the country was reliant on British manufactures, but it spurred the growth of US industries.
The first US cotton mills did not use power looms widely before 1815. In the 1840s and '50s, workers’ houses sprang up adjacent to the mills, and these mill hamlets grew into villages that by 1900 merged into urban communities. Rapid residential development followed. The mill owners in Baltimore, MD, for example, had several advantages: 1) their mills were close to the Southern cotton fields, and Marylanders were considered Southerners 2) the mills were located next to a busy trading and shipbuilding port and its market for their sail cloth 3) the new Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad ran through the coal fields of West Virginia, bringing cheap coal right to the harbor 4) and rail service to Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York was inexpensive, increasing the sales of their goods.
Cotton production boomed from 1850 to 1920. Initially, local cotton mills supplied sails for the Tea Clipper ships that raced across the Pacific and around Cape Horn to bring back the freshest tea from China. As clipper ships were replaced by steamships in the 1870s, the cotton mills began to make clothing, particularly uniforms, and other military gear such as tents and backpacks for the Spanish-American War and World War I.
Citation: Copyright Houghton Mifflin Co, 222 Berkeley St, Boston, MA 02116. All rights reserved. In David Macaulay, "Mill," 1989, p. 92. Text: ©2022 Deane Nettles, "Early Mill History of Baltimore: Cotton Mills of the Jones Falls." https://www.baltimoreindustrytours.com/history.php. All rights reserved. Nov 10, 2022.
Reason, Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?, 1835
Image ID: 8380
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Antebellum Reform, Slavery and Abolition, Abolition, African Americans, British Empire, Business 19th century, Civil War, Class Separation, Colonial America, Cooption of styles, Early American Slavery, Early National Period, Emancipation, Jacksonian Era, Logos, Middle-Class Culture, Moral lessons, Naive Art, National Politics, Nineteenth Century Slavery, Politics & Government, Propaganda, Race, Religion, Social disorder and order to 1865, Social Gospel and Missions, Success 19th century, Symbols, Upper class ante bellum, Victorian Culture, Whites, non planters ante bellum, Women in labor movement, Women's liberation, Women's organizations
Region(s): United States, Europe
CA Standard(s): 8.7 - The divergent paths of the American people in the South from 1800 to the mid-1800s , 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.1 - Major events preceding the founding of the nation and the development of American constitutional democracy, 8.2 - The political principles underlying the U.S. Constitution and compare the enumerated and implied powers of the federal government, 8.3 - The foundation of the American political system and the ways in which citizens participate in it, 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 11.3 - The role of religion in the founding of America and its lasting moral, social, and political impacts, and issues regarding religious liberty.
National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)
Card Text: Patrick Reason, "Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?" 1835. African-American women held as slaves were particularly vulnerable to rape and other sexual abuse at the hands of their white owners. This engraving appeared in abolitionist George Bourne’s 1837 "Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects upon Women." It highlighted the connections between the anti-slavery and women's rights movements, as some women abolitionists, such as Sarah and Angelina Grimke, used the anti-slavery cause to address their own plight as women. The connections they drew were controversial and many anti-slavery organizations were split over the issue of women's rights. Many groups fought slavery, but most were led by men while women worked hard in the anti-slavery campaign despite having little voice in politics.
The words "Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?" are imposed above the figure of a black enslaved woman, on one knee, who holds up her chained hands as if in prayer. This powerful symbol was used in the early 19th c. by British and American women fighting for the end of slavery worldwide and for the right to have a voice on the subject. The image was based on the motto "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?," similarly featured beside an image of an enslaved black man on one knee and in chains. This motto and image were originally used by the antislavery Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and later by many abolitionist organizations.
There had always been opposition to the slave trade from its 15th century beginnings, but antislavery organizations did not begin to form in Britain until slavery had been outlawed in the country. Though slavery had been ruled illegal, people could still hold enslaved servants or buy and sell them in other countries under British rule at the time. "Abolitionists” wanted to “abolish” every aspect of slavery, and the most famous abolitionists were the Englishmen William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson. However, as women also played a major role in the anti-slavery movement, it was a woman, Lady Middleton, who persuaded both Wilberforce and Clarkson to join the abolitionist movement.
Women at the time were prevented from taking any active part in politics, including the abolitionist movement. They were not even allowed to add their names to the mass petitions to end slavery; men felt that the petitions' value would be diminished if women were allowed to sign them. Women were only occasionally allowed to take part in public debates, and at a 1788 debate in London, they could speak only if they covered their faces with veils.
Because of these political restrictions, women had to find other ways to support abolition. Poetry was considered suitable for women at the time, so many of them wrote verses that brought light to the experiences of the enslaved and argued vehemently for abolition. Phillis Wheatley was the first enslaved black woman to have a book of poetry published in Britain. Hannah More's "Slavery, a Poem" was published in 1788 as a large 20-page book.
Women also gave enormous financial support to the abolitionist movement. Many donated money to the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, even though they could not take official roles in the organization. They boycotted slave-produced goods like sugar from the West Indies, shopping instead for sugar grown in the East Indies by free labor, and purchased bracelets, earrings and other items carrying the “Am I Not a Man and a Brother” image.
The British Parliament passed a law in 1807 that abolished the slave trade in the country and other countries under its rule. The anti-slavery campaign continued, however, with the aim of abolishing slavery worldwide. Over the years that followed, women began to form their own anti-slavery societies - to much criticism. Wilberforce expressed a common view: "...For for ladies to meet, to go from house to house stirring up petitions – these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture."
In the early 19th century, hundreds of thousands of women signed petitions, participated in the political process, and even questioned the aims of the movement. In 1824, abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick called for the immediate emancipation of slaves, contradicting the Anti-Slavery Society’s aim of gradual emancipation. Six years later, the influential Birmingham women’s society threatened to withdraw its funding from the Anti-Slavery Society if it did not agree to change its aim to immediate abolition. The change was agreed to. However, women would still face challenges. In 1840 the first World Anti-Slavery Convention was organized in London. Women delegates arrived from all parts of Britain, and from the US who also campaigned for women’s rights. All the women were denied participation in the convention. That decision led not only to a split in the British anti-slavery movement but indirectly to the beginning of the US campaign for women’s right to vote. Several of the British women who were not allowed to participate were among those who, 26 years later, signed the first petition to grant women the right to vote. Engraving.
Citation: Image: George Bourne, "Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects upon Woman," Boston, 1837. Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20540. LC Control No.: 11006909. First text: "History Matters: The US Survey Course on the Web." Last updated: March 22, 2018. https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6726/#: ~:text=African%2DAmerican%20women%20 held%20as,upon%20Women%2C%20published%20in%201837. Copyright 1998-2023 American Social History Productions, Inc., Center for History and New Media, Research 1, Ste 450, 4400 University Dr, MSN 3G1, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030. All rights reserved. Second text: Adapted from Elizabeth Crawford, "Am I Not A Woman And A Sister? Women and the Anti-Slavery Campaign," 2019. https://www.gpsd.us/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=11554&dataid=14749&FileName=commonlit_am-i-not-a-woman-and-a-sister_student.pdf. Common Lit. Copyright Elizabeth Crawford. All rights reserved. Jan 11, 2023.
A View of Lowell, MA: Boott's Cotton Mills, 1852
Image ID: 8314
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Lowell, Architecture, Business 19th century, Civil Rights, Civil War, Class Separation, Early mills and factories, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Family to 1920, Gender-Bending, Immigrants, Industrial Revolution, Invention, Irish, Labor, Labor Organizations and Leaders, National Events, Parents, Children, Families, Prejudice and Discrimination, Pullman and Model Towns, Strikes and Violence, Sweatshops, Technology, Town and city planning, Women in labor movement, Women's work, Work and Housing, Working Conditions
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 11.2 - The the relationship among the rise of industrialization, large-scale rural-to-urban migration, and massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe
National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)
Card Text: "A View of Lowell," Kirk Boott's cotton mills at Lowell, MA, 1852. Workers promenade in the courtyard, imitating genteel respectability; "ladies and gentlemen" mingle on a small green with trees. In 1835, Boott Cotton Mills were chartered "for the purpose of manufacturing cotton and woolen goods," and became a part of Lowell, the first major industrial city in the US. The story of the Boott Mills, the most architecturally significant of the surviving mill complexes, parallels the city's rise, decline and rebirth. Named for Kirk Boott, an English-American born in Boston who oversaw the construction and operation of the many canals and mills of early Lowell, the Boott Mills complex was built next to the Merrimack River and Eastern Canal. Waterpower for the mill was supplied by the 8-foot-deep, 2037-foot-long canal constructed in 1835-36. In its heyday in 1893, the Boott employed more than 2,200 workers, 76% of whom were female. In weave rooms, the noise, heat, and humidity were overwhelming. Looms packed the floor and the air was filled with cotton dust; byssinosis has been an infamous disabling occupational lung disease caused by cotton dust - both then and now. In time, Northern mills faced aggressive Southern competition, outmoded physical plants, high taxes, and conflict between Lowell's workers and managers.
In 1813, after examining British models, Francis Cabot Lowell successfully constructed a power loom that spurred the expansion of the city of Lowell, known then as East Chelmsford. The city was in a prime location for water-powered factories thanks to the nearby Merrimack River, and the Middlesex Canal provided easy transport of goods to and from nearby Boston. The industrialist Kirk Boott worked for the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, one of the earliest in the area. He was responsible for much of the early urban planning that shaped Lowell's industrial and residential landscape, from the deafening noise of machinery to the transformation of bales of cotton into bolts of cloth to the labor struggles waged by the women and immigrant workers of Lowell. He was concerned with the factories and dormitories that would house workers, not with the other residents of the town or the workers' well-being. He reserved the prime space along the river for the mills, with the dormitories to their rear.
The shift to factory-produced textiles was one of the major processes of the Industrial Revolution, and it profoundly affected New England society. To keep costs down and obtain an easily-controlled labor force, mill owners like Boott recruited young women to work in the mills. During the 1800s, it was uncommon for women to leave the protection of their father, husband or brother. To convince their “protectors” to let them work in the factory, away from the safety of the home, and to keep them away from the dangers of the city, the mill operators built boarding houses to be run by older women of good repute. The worker-residents had to sign a contract requiring them to attend church and respect a curfew. The mill girls were expected to work hard for $1.85 to $3.00 a week, the highest wage in the country for women at the time, though lower than the wages paid to male workers. In addition to cash wages, Lowell factory workers were given educational and cultural opportunities meant to improve their prospects; women were not expected to work for long in the mills, but for only a few years before getting married - or unionizing.
During the Civil War, however, a shortage of cotton and other raw materials forced many mills to shut down, and the mill girls left the area in massive waves in search of work. Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine were happy to move to the area and work in the factories for lower wages than the American women had. The Irish took the jobs and brought their children to work in the factory. With time, the working conditions in the mills deteriorated, wages decreased, and longer shifts were demanded. The owners of Boott Manufacturing Company and other mills pursued the most aggressive "labor-cheapening" policies they could devise. By making workers' tasks as simple and repetitive as possible, they exacted a psychological toll on their workers while making them easy to replace. Textile workers thus lost the ability to exert collective bargaining power. The mills' initial control over virtually all aspects of the mill girls' lives echoed in the extreme power imbalance between management and labor that endured for the lifespan of the mills. Yet despite the difficulties involved in labor organizing, women led strikes and other forms of labor resistance instrumental in securing reduced work hours, higher wages, and better working conditions throughout the history of the New England textile industry.
The Boott Cotton Mills continued in operation until 1954. The mills are now part of Lowell National Historical Park, managed by the National Park Service.
Citation: Gleason, Frederick, Publisher, et al., "Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion," (Boston, MA: 1852) 2, p. 336. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn%209 1063210/. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC 20540. First text: National Historical Park, National Park Service, Lowell, Massachusetts, 246 Market St, Lowell, MA 01852. http://npshistory.com/brochures/lowe/ boott-cotton-mills.pdf. Second text: Amanda Shaver, Thomas Mays, and NEH EDSITEment, "Boott Cotton Mills Museum," Clio: Your Guide to History, Feb 19, 2020. https://theclio.com/entry/67081. Nov 26, 2022.
Boardinghouse Regulations, Middlesex Company, Lowell, MA, c.1846
Image ID: 8333
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Lowell, Industrialization, Antebellum Reform, Business 19th century, Child labor, Civil Rights, Class Separation, Corporate Image, Early mills and factories, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Family to 1920, Gender-Bending, Immigrants, Individualism, Technology, Institutions and social disorder, Irish, Labor Organizations and Leaders, Market Economy, Mythology, National Politics, Reform, Strikes and Violence, Sweatshops, Technology, Temp to 1870's, Town and city planning, Urbanization, Victorian Culture, Women in labor movement, Women's work, Work and Housing, Working Conditions
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast.
National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), An Age of Revolutions, 1750-1914
Card Text: "Boardinghouse regulations, Middlesex Company," Lowell, MA, c. 1846. Each morning across New England, the factory bells tolled. And six mornings a week, the “Belles of New England” walked through the streets to the mills, trudging, talking, sometimes singing. The Mill Girls became a fixture in America’s brightest pictures of itself.
"O sing me a song of the Factory Girl/So merry and glad and free/ —The bloom on her cheeks, of health it speaks!/ — O a happy creature is she!"
But with time, a different picture emerged. The picture rarely appears in high school history, yet it tells of young women sparking the fight that continues to this day — the fight for a living wage.
The hiring of Mill Girls was driven by both capitalism and compassion. Francis Cabot Lowell had toured England’s “dark satanic mills.” He had seen children working 12-hour days, workers living in hovels, families hungry, desperate, ground into submission. Lowell had a better idea. Why not recruit farm girls? Lodge them in boarding houses? Enrich them with lectures and discussion groups? Hire older women as “keepers” to keep these “factory queens” moral and upright?
When word got out, the plan was widely praised. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier eulogized “Acres of girlhood... The young, the graceful... Who shall count your vocation as otherwise than noble and ennobling?”
At first, the girls agreed. Glad to be free of the farm, they earned enough — $2 a week — to buy clothes, save a little, and send money home. “The thought that I am living on no one is a happy one, indeed,” a New Hampshire girl wrote.
But the Iron Law of wages soon shackled them and the free market's “invisible hand” slapped them down. As more mills and more mill towns increased competition, pay was cut, hours increased. And then there were the mills themselves.
Power looms roared. Windows were nailed shut to keep cotton moist, filling rooms with lint and airborne diseases. Bosses could fire a girl for, as historian Philip Foner wrote, “levity, hysteria, impudence, or simply not being liked.”
The girls responded with spirit and charm. They pinned poetry to looms, put flowers in weaving rooms, tacked math problems on walls. “I defied the machine to make me its slave,” Lucy Larcom wrote. “Its incessant discords could not drown out the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.”
But as looms were speeded, the girls found themselves stretched as thin as the cotton they spun. Then in May 1824, mill owners in Pawtucket, Rhode Island lengthened the work week. A hundred girls walked out. New England was shocked. This first “turnout” lasted just a week, with the girls settling for only one extra hour in their workday, but it was a start.
In 1828, strikes began in earnest. For the next dozen years, hordes of girls, up to 800 in some towns, walked off the job protesting pay cuts and 12-hour workdays. In Dover, New Hampshire, striking girls formed a half-mile line marching behind a band. In Lowell, the “factory queens” met in secret, then walked out as one, going from mill to mill to gather more strikers. In 1834, America’s first female union, the Factory Girls Association, began collecting dues, forming strike funds, sticking together. Suddenly the pretty picture of pretty mill girls had a stark frame. Factory Girls Association president Sarah Bagley asked, “Is anyone such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand factory girls in Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it?” And girls were singing: "Oh! Isn’t it a pity that such a pretty girl as I/Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?"
The fight for a 10-hour day had begun. By the time it was won — in 1874 — the myth of the Mill Girls was fixed in American history. But the girls themselves had gone home. Home where, as one wrote, “I shall not be obliged to rise so early in the morning, nor be dragged about by the factory bell, nor confined in a close noisy room from morning to night, just as though we were so many living machines.”
Economics provided another reason. The growth of mill towns made it impossible to find enough farm girls. By 1850, Irish immigrants were doing the work the girls had pioneered. And America’s Labor Movement -- "the folks that brought you the weekend" -- was taking root, its seeds sown by the Belles of New England.
Citation: Image: University of Massachusetts Lowell, One University Ave, Lowell, MA 01854. https://libguides.uml.edu/c.php?g=536409&p=3671354. Lowell Historical Society, P.O. Box 1826, Lowell, MA 01853. Text: Copyright Bruce Watson, "The Myth of the Mill Girls," The Attic. https://www.theattic.space/ home-page-blogs/2018/8/30/the-myth-of-the-mill-girls. All rights reserved. Aug 28, 2023.
Waterloo Inn, The First Stage from Baltimore to Washington, DC, 1827
Image ID: 8216
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Transportation, Arts and Architecture, Blacks in Rural South, Business 19th century, Early National Period, Labor, Naive Art, Nationhood, Nature and Civilization, Southern Society, Technology, Urbanization, Victorian Culture
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.7 - The divergent paths of the American people in the South from 1800 to the mid-1800s , 8.8 - The divergent paths of the American people in the West from 1800 to the mid-1800s
National Standard(s): Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)
Card Text: "Waterloo Inn, The First Stage from Baltimore to Washington, D.C.," 1827. This Maryland inn was the first stop between Baltimore and Washington, about 15 miles from Baltimore. In the 1790s, stagecoach travel between cities typically involved days of jostling and discomfort. Even along the main post roads, many fords and long stretches were virtually impassable in bad weather. Used in London by 1640, and about 20 years later in Paris, stagecoaches reached their greatest importance in England and the US in the 19th century, when new macadam roads made travel quicker and more comfortable. Nevertheless, they remained extremely uncomfortable. In the US, only coaches could carry people long distances. In 1802 a traveler could go by coach 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometres) between Boston and Savannah, GA, at a total price for travel and lodging of $100. Several New York companies made light, almost egg-shaped coaches like this one for use on the East Coast. Lithograph.
Citation: J.F. Fitzgerald De Ros, "Personal narrative of travels in the United States and Canada in 1826," 1827. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. LC-USZ62-1236. Maryland Historical Society, 201 W Monument St, Baltimore, MD 21201-4674. https://www.britannica.com/ technology/stagecoach-vehicle. Oct 15, 2022.
Time Table of the Lowell Mills, 1851
Image ID: 8332
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Lowell, Industrialization
Region(s):
CA Standard(s): 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution
National Standard(s):
Card Text: "Time Table of the Lowell Mills" showing hours of labor, Lowell, MA, 1851, “to take effect on and after Oct. 21st, 1851." This timetable does not list all of the bells that the women might have heard throughout the day. The struggle for the ten-hour day, more than any other issue, was the focal point for many workers' organizations in the 1840s. By 1845, factory workers in Lowell were spending an average of 12.5 hours per day performing dreary, exhausting work in onerous conditions. When the time spent going to and from the mills was factored in, the days approached 14.5 hours.
The long hours worsened the already physically- and mentally-debasing factory life. Operatives (workers) wrote that the hours of work were “sufficient to impair health, induce disease, premature old age, and death...to say nothing of the intellectual degeneracy which must necessarily result from the want of mental recreation.” Many were so worn out by their work that they were unable to take advantage of the wealth of educational opportunities offered in Lowell.
The system of long hours was embodied in the factory bells, gates and public clocks that the mills used to regiment the workday. The system of bells established new, industrial work rhythms that synchronized Lowell’s workforce. The bells woke the operatives up, and called them into the mills; they rang at breakfast, called them back into the mills, again at lunch, at closing time, and finally at curfew.
In order to succeed, ten-hour workday initiatives required legislative action, making government and the political process part of reform discussions for the first time. Workers organized several petition campaigns demanding laws that limited the workday. In Lowell, women led these efforts. Although earlier petition efforts found little traction, in 1845 the "Voice of Industry," a workers' newspaper, spearheaded a vigorous campaign that collected over 2,000 signatures (mostly from women). This effort led to the creation of a House of Representatives committee to investigate factory conditions, the first such committee in the United States. The committee was led by William Schouler, an appointment that dismayed many of the activists who had run the campaign. As the editor of a factory-friendly newspaper called the “Lowell Courier,” Schouler was perceived as being biased in favor of the corporations; his newspaper was often described by the Voice as a “political organ of the corporations.”
The committee heard testimony from a number of women who spoke about the dreary work and long hours in the mills. Despite this, it opted not to intervene. Indeed, the committee’s report amounted to a full exoneration of the corporations. A law restricting the workday, the committee wrote, would negatively affect the competitiveness of the mills. It would also affect “the question of wages,” which the committee held should be set by the market, as negotiated between labor and capital. In Lowell, the committee said, “labor is on an equality with capital, and indeed controls it…Labor is intelligent enough to make its own bargains, and look out for its own interests without any interference from us.” The committee concluded by expressing confidence that any abuses in the mills would remedy themselves, through “the progressive improvement in art and science, in a higher appreciation of man's destiny.”
"The Voice" reacted sharply to the report, charging that the political process had been hijacked by the corporations, and accused the committee of distorting the workers’ testimony. When Schouler sought re-election following the release of the report, the Female Labor Reform Association vigorously campaigned against him, likely contributing to his defeat a year later.
Workers in New England had varying attitudes towards the ten hour campaigns. Some believed that they were the first step in a broader reform movement. For others, it was an attempt to simply ease the negative effects of the new economic system, the basic premise of which had already been reluctantly accepted. Still other workers, fearing that a ten-hour system would put a limit on their earnings, refused to lend their support to the movement
Citation: Image: Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Soldiers' Field, Boston, MA 02163. "The Ten Hour Movement." Copyright The Voice of Industry. https:// www.industrialrevolution.org/10-hours-movement. All rights reserved. Sept 7, 2023.
Female and Child Factory Workers Reeding or Drawing in at Loom, England, 1840
Image ID: 8331
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Lowell, Agriculture, Arts and Architecture, British Empire, Business 19th century, Child labor, Class Structure, Cooption of styles, Corporate Image, Early mills and factories, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Factory as symbol, Gender-Bending, Imperialism, Industrial Revolution, Institutions and social disorder, Invention, Labor, Labor Organizations and Leaders, Market Economy, National Events, Nineteenth Century Children, Nineteenth Century Furniture, Nineteenth Century Interiors, Strikes and Violence, Success 19th century, Sweatshops, Technology, Urbanization, Victorian Culture, Women and Health, Women in labor movement, Women's organizations, Women's work, Work and Housing, Work and Workers
Region(s): United States, Europe
CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 7.10 - The historical developments of the Scientific Revolution and its lasting effect on religious, political, and cultural institutions, 10.3 - The effects of the Industrial Revolution in England, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States. , 10.4 - Global change in the era of New Imperialism in Africa, Southeast Asia, China, India, Latin America, and the Philippines
National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)
Card Text: Female and child factory workers reeding or drawing in at large cotton loom, England, 1840. Thread reeding is the process of arranging fabric threads on a loom in the correct order before weaving begins. Reeding allows the same loom to make both very fine and very coarse fabric, and to weave threads at very different densities.
"The Beam full of yarn, after being dressed with size to stiffen and strengthen the threads, is brought to the Drawing-in Frame, and hung up as you see in the picture, the Healds which are made of twisted worsted, or Cotton, are hung under the beam and weighted below. The ends of the warp are then drawn down, and the rods hung up to preserve the lease, or the warp could not be woven. There is a female at each side of the healds; one takes hold of the ends of the warp, and gives them separately to the other, who draws them through the healds. When all the ends are through, the Drawing-in is completed. Next comes the Reeding; a reed consists of a great number of short flat pieces of steel or brass called Dents, fixed at short and equal distances from each other, in long pieces of split cane, and tightly secured with a wax band. Through each space, between the dents, two ends are drawn by a small hook, called a Reed-hook. It is not always necessary to draw the warps in; they can also be twisted in, that is, when the warp is nearly all woven into cloth by the weaver, the yarn is cut off, and the fresh warp twisted to the old one. Drawing-in and Reeding is very tedious work and requires great care, there are not only a great number of threads to draw in and reed, but if they were to miss one dent or one heald, it is probable that the whole or a part of the work would have to be done over again. Since this is the case, the steady, careful look of the girls is not to be wondered at."
"Factory Rules from the Handbook to Lowell, 1848: REGULATIONS TO BE OBSERVED by all persons employed in the factories of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company. The overseers are to be always in their rooms at the starting of the mill, and not absent unnecessarily during working hours. They are to see that all those employed in their rooms, are in their places in due season, and keep a correct account of their time and work. They may grant leave of absence to those employed under them, when they have spare hands to supply their places, and not otherwise, except in cases of absolute necessity. All persons in the employ of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company, are to observe the regulations of the room where they are employed. They are not to be absent from their work without the consent of the over-seer, except in cases of sickness, and then they are to send him word of the cause of their absence. They are to board in one of the houses of the company and give information at the counting room, where they board, when they begin, or, whenever they change their boarding place; and are to observe the regulations of their boarding-house. Those intending to leave the employment of the company are to give at least two weeks' notice thereof to their overseer. All persons entering into the employment of the company, are considered as engaged for twelve months, and those who leave sooner, or do not comply with all these regulations, will not be entitled to a regular discharge. The company will not employ anyone who is habitually absent from public worship on the Sabbath, or known to be guilty of immorality. A physician will attend once in every month at the counting-room, to vaccinate all who may need it, free of expense. Anyone who shall take from the mills or the yard, any yarn, cloth or other article belonging to the company, will be considered guilty of stealing and be liable to prosecution. Payment will be made monthly, including board and wages. The accounts will be made up to the last Saturday but one in every month, and paid in the course of the following week. These regulations are considered part of the contract, with which all persons entering into the employment of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company, engage to comply. JOHN AVERY, Agent."
"… Miss Sarah G. Bagl[e]y said she had worked in the Lowell Mills eight years and a half, six years and a half on the Hamilton Corporation, and two years on the Middlesex. She is a weaver, and works by the piece. She worked in the mills three years before her health began to fail. She is a native of New Hampshire, and went home six weeks during the summer. Last year she was out of the mill a third of the time. She thinks the health of the operatives is not so good as the health of females who do housework or millinery business. The chief evil, so far as health is concerned, is the shortness of time allowed for meals. The next evil is the length of time employed - not giving them time to cultivate their minds. She spoke of the high moral and intellectual character of the girls. That many were engaged as teachers in the Sunday schools. That many attended the lectures of the Lowell Institute; and she thought, if more time was allowed, that more lectures would be given and more girls attend. She thought that the girls generally were favorable to the ten hour system. She had presented a petition...to 132 girls, most of whom said that they would prefer to work but ten hours. In a pecuniary point of view, it would be better, as their health would be improved. They would have more time for sewing. Their intellectual, moral and religious habits would also be benefited by the change."
Citation: J.R. Barfoot, "The Progress of Cotton, 1835-40," #9: "Reeding or Drawing in," in a series of 12 prints. Slater Mill Historic Site, 67 Roosevelt Ave, Pawtucket, RI 02860. First text: Public domain: "The Progress of Cotton No. 9: Reading or Drawing In," 1840. From Barfoot's series of colored lithographs of 1840 depicting the cotton manufacturing process. Original text written to accompany Lithograph No.9. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ manchesterarchiveplus/6503188589/in/album-72157629084961692/. Manchester Archives, Manchester Central Library, Manchester City Council, Town Hall, Albert Square, Manchester M60 2LA, UNITED KINGDOM. Second text: Public domain: "Factory Rules from the Handbook to Lowell, 1848." https: //chnm.gmu.edu/mcpstah/wordpress/wp-content/themes/tah/files/mckee_primary-sources.pdf. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Department of History and Art History, George Mason University, 4400 University Dr, MSN 1E7, Fairfax, VA 22030. Third text: Public domain.
"Report," Massachusetts House Document, no. 50, March, 1845. https://archives.lib.state.ma.us/bitstream/handle/2452/755732/ocm39986872-1845-HB-0050.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. State Library of Massachusetts, 24 Beacon St, State House Rm 341, Boston, MA 02133. Sept 7, 2023.
American Stage Waggon, Spread Eagle Tavern, Stafford, PA, 1798
Image ID: 8219
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Transportation, 18th Century Exteriors, Arts and Architecture, Business 19th century, Class and Status, Early Images -- America, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Expansion, Frontier, Individualism, Technology, Invention, Labor, Middle-Class Culture, Nationhood, Nature and Civilization, Nineteenth Century Furniture, Outdoor Life, The West, Victorian Culture
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s...
National Standard(s): Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)
Card Text: Isaac Weld, Jr. (Irish, 1774-1856), "American Stage Waggon" at the Spread Eagle Tavern, Stafford, PA, on the "Great Road" between Philadelphia and Lancaster, 1798. Dubliner Isaac Weld sailed to Philadelphia in 1795 and spent two years traveling the east coast of Canada and the newly-formed United States on horseback, foot, and canoe along rivers and through dense forests. During his travels he met George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. His trip was intended partly to find places suitable for Irish immigration. In the end, he preferred Canada to the US, finding Americans too materialistic, and he found the quality of US taverns “indifferent." In this American scene, a stagecoach is pulling away from a rural tavern.
The predecessor of the early 19th-century stagecoach was the so-called "stage waggon" in common use during the latter part of the 18th c. The first so-called stage coaches in upstate New York were primarily inventions of a local carriage or wagon-maker. As soon as wagon roads were broken through the forests, the primitive "stage-waggon," as it was called, made its appearance. The "stage-waggons" or "coachees" were in use throughout the country, all of the same general design. As early as 1767 a "stage-chaise" was operating between Salem and Boston, Massachusetts, while "stage-coaches" and "stage-waggons" plied other shorter routes out of Boston. After the Revolutionary War, the stagecoach business expanded into New York State, where the familiar "stage-waggon" woodcuts adorned advertisements as early as 1795. The wagon body was long in proportion to its breadth and contained four seats, each holding three passengers, who sat facing forward. From the height of the seats the coach was open all around. The roof was supported by slender shafts rising at the corners and sides. In wet weather a leather apron was let down at the sides and back, and fastened to buttons. A curtain in the front separated the driver from the passengers. The wagon had no door and the passengers got in through the front, stepping over the seats as they went to the end of the wagon. The driver sat on the front seat with a passenger on either side. The heavier luggage and trunks were fastened behind on a frame while smaller articles and the nail bag were stuffed under the seats, to the great annoyance of the passengers, who were frequently forced to sit with their knees up to their chins. One traveler remarked that the passengers' feet were squeezed between two trunks, "where they are most lovingly compressed whenever the vehicle makes a lurch into a rut." The body of the wagon, as in the the early stagecoaches, was suspended on two leather straps lengthwise under it and secured on strong horizontal bars in front and behind. There were no backs on the benches to support passengers during a rough and fatiguing journey over a new, poorly constructed road. The first three passengers in had the advantage of resting their shaken frames on the back of the wagon. Women were usually given these seats and it was "amusing" to some to watch them crawl over the seats; if the women happened to be late, they had to straddle over the men who sat in front. This vehicle was in use on the road west of Albany as late as l8l8. One visitor noted two classes of "stage-waggons" in use: "The light waggons are on the same construction, and are calculated to accommodate from four to twelve people. The only difference between a small waggon and a coachee is that the latter is better finished, has varnished panels, and doors at the side. The former has no doors, but the passengers scramble in the best way they can, over the seat of the driver. The waggons are used universally for stage carriages." Stories were told of the driver's requesting passengers to lean out of the carriage, first to one side and then the other, to prevent the stage from overturning in deep ruts. Contradicting the frequency of stories of accidents, another visitor to the US noted in 1807: "Though the roads are in general very bad, yet the clumsy waggon is proportionably strong to encounter the shocks; and accidents but rarely happen." Gradually this "stage waggon" was replaced by a new type of coach that had just three seats and a door at the side. The driver's seat was outside and separate from the interior, and the front seat faced backward. On the New York to Albany route there was a locked box under this seat for the through mail. Only the postmasters at each end had keys to open mail sacks. This type of coach was encouraged by the Post Office Department and was designed for it by Levi Pease, proprietor of a stage line between New York and Boston. J. Stoner engraving of drawing.
Citation: Isaac Weld, "Travels Through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797," (London, England, 1799). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC 20540. LC-USZ62-1800. Second text: Adapted from Richard F. Palmer, "Stagecoach Days: Evolution of the Stagecoach," Oct 9, 2011. http://stagecoachdays.blogspot.com/2011/10/evolution-of-stagecoach.html. Copyright Richard F. Palmer. All rights reserved. Sept 6, 2023.
Sebron, Giant Steamboats at the Sugar Levee, New Orleans, LA, 1853
Image ID: 8208
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Transportation, African Americans, Agriculture, Apartheid, Arts and Architecture, Business 19th century, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Expansion, Industrial Revolution, Labor, Market Economy, Nineteenth Century Slavery, Post Antebellum south, Railroad and steamboat, Slavery, Working, and Living Conditions, Southern Society, Symbols, Technology, Trade
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 8.10 - The multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War, 8.12 - The transformation of the American economy and the changing social and political conditions…in response to the Industrial Revolution, 8.7 - The divergent paths of the American people in the South from 1800 to the mid-1800s , 8.8 - The divergent paths of the American people in the West from 1800 to the mid-1800s
National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)
Card Text: Hippolyte V.V. Sebron, "Giant Steamboats" at the Sugar Levee, New Orleans, LA, 1853. The "Gipsy," "Grand Turk," and others line the wharf, which is busy with stevedores. New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, was the primary trading hub for enslaved Africans and African Americans and the cotton they produced that fueled the growth of the southern economy. Nine new slave states entered the Union between 1789 and 1860, rapidly transforming the South into a region of expanded economic growth built on slave labor. In this painting, innumerable enslaved workers load cargo onto a steamship in the Port of New Orleans, the commercial center of the antebellum South, while two well-dressed white men stand together talking. Commercial activity extends as far as the eye can see.
By the mid-19th century, southern cities like New Orleans saw the greatest concentration of wealth in the United States. While most white southerners did not own slaves, many aspired to join the rich slaveholder class who dominated the politics of both the South and the nation. Meanwhile, slavery shaped the culture and society of the South, which rested on a racial ideology of white male supremacy and a vision of the US as a white man’s republic. Enslaved Africans and African Americans endured the traumas of bondage by creating their own cultures and using the Christian message of redemption to find hope for a world of freedom without hatred and violence. Oil on canvas. Deatil. 48.5 x 72.3" (123.1 x 183.8 cm).
Citation: Bateaux à Vapeur Géant, la Nouvelle-Orléans, 1853. Louisiana Digital Library. Copyright Tulane University Art Collection, Tulane University Library, 7001 Freret St, New Orleans, LA 70118. All rights reserved. Oct 13, 2022.
Durrie, Winter in the Country, 1857
Image ID: 8206
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Transportation, 19th century Genre painting, Agrarianism, Architecture, Business 19th century, Class Structure, Domesticity, Founding Myths, Industrialization, Labor, Landscape, anti-urban, Market Economy, Middle-Class Culture, Nature and Civilization, Plantation Exterior, Success 19th century, Symbols
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast. , 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.10 - The multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War, 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation
National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)
Card Text: George Henry Durrie (1820-63), "Winter in the Country (Winter Time at Jones Inn)," New England, 1857. Durrie's painting evokes the New England landscape near his New Haven, CT, home. The house at right is a colonial-era saltbox, characterized by a roof steeply pitched in the front but descending gradually toward the back. This image documents the economic progress of the original settlers, who built a single-story home and added a three-story hotel to capitalize on the needs of travelers and tourists. Painted just before the Civil War, this prosperous scene celebrates the virtues of Northern free labor, which was often contrasted with the inequalities and evil of Southern slave labor. Durrie's paintings were popularized by the firm of Currier & Ives, who published ten prints of his paintings, mostly of his winter scenes, from 1861 to 1867. These idealized depictions of New England farms resonated with Northerners nostalgic for the rural life being transformed - and damaged - by industrialization. Oil on canvas. 18 x 24" (45.7 x 61 cm).
Citation: Image: Copyright Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, San Francisco, CA 94118. Museum purchase, Roscoe and Margaret Oakes Income Fund. 1985.47. All rights reserved. Text: "Winter in the Country." https://artsandculture.google. com/asset/winter-in-the-country/ZwGmZN60gIldWg?hl=en. May 31, 2022.
Lowell, MA, Shopping District, Merrimac St, 1856
Image ID: 8336
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Lowell
Region(s):
CA Standard(s): 8.10 - The multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War
National Standard(s):
Card Text: Lowell shopping district, Merrimac Street, 1856. Abolitionists craving information about the anti-slavery movement often turned to newspapers. One of their main sources in Lowell was the anti-slavery Middlesex Standard, a newspaper produced in the Nesmith Block on the corner of Merrimack and John Streets. The Middlesex Standard ran from July 25, 1844 to March 13, 1845 under the editorship of John Greenleaf Whittier and Chauncey Langdon Knapp. This paper circulated only briefly but during a time when important abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass came to the city to speak against slavery. It was also a period when people in towns near Lowell were actively reporting the movements of self-emancipated persons. Whittier and Knapp made it clear that they would not report any individual who escaped slavery. They did print stories about enslaved people who successfully joined family members already in Massachusetts. In addition to publishing anti-slavery articles, newspaper staff became involved in fundraising for legal fees for abolitionists who were captured in their attempts to free enslaved people. Though the Middlesex Standard ran for less than a year, it was a vital source of information that reached many citizens of Lowell, spreading its message that “Slavery in all its forms is anti-democratic, the natural enemy of the working man.”
In the early-to-mid 1800s, Lowell’s textile-based economy was wholly dependent on the institution of slavery. To meet the demand for Lowell’s cotton mills, enslaved people collectively worked about 33 million hours per year. Yet some of the people whose livelihoods depended on this enslaved labor also fought against slavery by signing petitions, forming societies, and donating hard-earned money to individuals and court cases. Fugitives from slavery also came to Lowell to start new lives as free people. It was possible for a textile factory worker to listen to anti-slavery gospels one day and earn her pay weaving cloth made from the cotton produced by enslaved workers the next. Lowell’s historic downtown today is full of sites of anti-slavery activity frequented by activists, free people, operatives, and leaders. Their fight for freedom and equity took place on factory floors, in church pews, and in old City Hall. Yet elites in Lowell and the South maintained an “unholy alliance,” mutually benefiting off the “terrible trade.” Lowell’s split history of abolitionism and support for slavery created great tension in the city.
When an anti-slavery speaker came to Lowell in 1834, he drew an angry stone-throwing mob. Mill owners and workers depended on Southern cotton, and anyone who threatened the system was unwelcome. Ever since Slater's cotton mill was established in 1790 and the cotton gin invented three years later, Southern cotton and Northern textiles had had a reciprocal relationship. The North's appetite for raw cotton spurred increased cotton production and the expansion of slavery. Lowell not only bought Southern cotton, but it made "negro cloth" that was sold to plantations. For a few years, the machine shop produced cotton gins sold in the South. Senator Charles Sumner called it an " unholy union...between the cotton planters and flesh-mongers of Louisiana and Mississippi and the cotton spinners and traffickers of New England - between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom." Dependence on slave grown cotton and moral indignation over slavery coexisted uneasily in Lowell in the years before the Civil War. Many Lowell residents were uncomfortable enough about slavery that they opposed its extension into western territories. Most, however, fearing the mounting sectional conflict, probably would have supported a compromise that accepted slavery where it already existed. But when war broke out, the Union cause and the abolitionists’ cause merged. Its "Southern connection" broken, the city lined up behind Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Union war effort. Wood engraving.
Citation: Image: Ballou's Pictorial Journal (Boston, MA), April 26, 1856. Lowell Historical Society, 115 John St, 4th Fl., Lowell, MA 01852. First text: "Paper Trails & Freedom Fighters," last updated Sept 24, 2020. https://www.nps.gov/lowe/learn/historyculture/paper-trails-freedom-fighters.htm. Second text: "Lowell's Southern Connection," Last updated: Feb 26, 2015. https://www.nps.gov/lowe/learn/photosmultimedia/southern_connection.htm#:~:text=Many%20 Lowell%20residents%20were%20uncomfortable,slavery%20where%20it%20already%20existed. Lowell National Historical Park, 67 Kirk St, Lowell, MA 01852. National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, 1849 C Street, NW, Washington, DC 20240. Sept 10, 2023.
Sailors Throwing Slaves Overboard, 1862
Image ID: 8381
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Antebellum Reform, Slavery and Abolition, Abolition, British Empire, Business 19th century, Colonial America, Early American Slavery, Early National Period, Eighteenth Century, Imperialism, Institutions and social disorder, Jacksonian Era, Moral lessons, National Politics, Nineteenth Century Slavery, Politics & Government, Prejudice and Discrimination, Slave Trading, Symbols, Transportation, Upper class ante bellum, Victorian Culture, Whites, non planters ante bellum
Region(s): United States, Africa, Caribbean, Europe
CA Standard(s): 8.10 - The multiple causes, key events, and complex consequences of the Civil War, 5.4 - Political, religious, social, and economic institutions that evolved in the colonial era. , 5.7 - People and events associated with the development of the U.S. Constitution and it's significance as the foundation of the American republic, 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.1 - Major events preceding the founding of the nation and the development of American constitutional democracy, 8.2 - The political principles underlying the U.S. Constitution and compare the enumerated and implied powers of the federal government, 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.5 - U.S. foreign policy in the early Republic
National Standard(s): Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877) , Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)
Card Text: "Sailors Throwing Slaves Overboard," 1862. In 1781, a British slave ship, the Zong, left Ghana with 442 enslaved Africans aboard – twice the number it was designed to carry – bound for Jamaica. The ship’s owners claimed that due to navigational errors, it took longer than anticipated to reach Jamaica, and as water was running low, the crew threw more than 130 live enslaved people overboard in order to save the rest. The truth was disputed and evidence suggested that a rainstorm during the voyage had provided the ship enough water. As was common practice, the ship owners had taken out insurance for their “cargo” of enslaved people. When news of the massacre reached England, the owners made a claim for compensation. The insurers refused to pay and the ship owners took them to court. The case shows that the law facilitated the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but also strengthened the campaign for abolition. It was, says James Walvin, professor emeritus of history at the University of York and author of the book "The Zong," “mass murder masquerading as an insurance claim.”
A jury heard the dispute, "Gregson v Gilbert," in London in 1783 and ruled in favor of the ship owners. The insurers appealed not on the basis of common humanity but because it occurred as a result of errors of navigation and mismanagement of the vessel, namely insufficient water onboard. The case came before the lord chief justice, Lord Mansfield, who in a previous judgment had ruled that there was never an English legal basis for slave ownership in England. He called for a retrial because of new evidence that suggested that the captain and crew had been at fault.
Apparently no trial ever took place, so the ship owners did not receive their insurance payment. While the facts of the Zong case were unusual, there would have been many claims under cargo insurance policies for the loss of enslaved Africans during their transportation. Slavers usually insured their slave cargo, and had the Zong simply sunk in a storm with a similar loss of life, the insurance claim for the value of the lost slaves would probably have been paid. The only restriction was that deaths had to arise from “perils of the seas” and would not cover deaths from disease or insurrection. Some scholars have suggested that the West Indian trade in enslaved humans plus slave-grown produce accounted for up to 40% of the cargo insurance premium in the London market of the late 18th century.
The Zong case was important in exposing the brutality of the trade, reducing African lives to chattels and mere items of trade or cargo that could be insured and claims made for their loss. After the first trial, anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharpe attempted unsuccessfully to have the ship’s crew prosecuted for murder. Reports of the massacre increased momentum for the abolitionist movement, but not until 50 years later did the Slavery Abolition Act (1833) end slavery in most British colonies. The League of Nations (1926) Slavery Convention announce global prohibition of slavery and the slave trade. The UK introduced the Modern Slavery Act in 2015, combining previous laws to prevent and prosecute slavery, servitude, forced labor and human trafficking, and to make big businesses accountable for slavery and labor abuses in their supply chain. While international law has moved from permitting and regulating slavery to denying and outlawing it, Katarina Schwarz, University of Nottingham professor of antislavery law, stresses that there is still a long way to go: “Everyone assumes that slavery is illegal around the world, but almost half of all countries have no criminal offence of slavery and there are huge gaps in the laws, including in the UK, to combat slavery and protect and support survivors.” Woodcut.
Citation: Image: Austa Malinda French, "Slavery in South Carolina and the Ex-Slaves; or The Port Royal Mission" (New York: Negro University Press, 1969). Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20540. LC Control No.: 75082051. Text: Catherine Baksi, "The Story of the Zong Slave Ship: a mass murder masquerading as an insurance claim. A 1783 case exposed how the law facilitated the slave trade – and increased momentum for the abolitionist movement," 19 Jan 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/jan/19/the-story-of-the-zong-slave-ship-a-mass-masquerading-as-an-insurance-claim. © 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited, 61 Broadway, New York, NY 10006. All rights reserved. Feb 25, 2023.
Svinin, Travel by Stagecoach Near Trenton, New Jersey, 1811-c.1813
Image ID: 8215
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Transportation, African Americans, Arts and Architecture, Business 19th century, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Free Blacks, Invention, Labor, Naive Art, Nationhood, Technology, Victorian Culture, Work and Workers
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast.
National Standard(s): Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) , Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)
Card Text: Pavel Svinin (Russian, 1787/88–1839), "Travel by Stagecoach Near Trenton, New Jersey," 1811-c.1813. A white male passenger in the coach "Diligence" lunges for his dropped top hat as a fellow passenger alerts the African American driver to the loss. In the second seat, another passenger is losing his newspaper to the breeze as his female seatmate watches. In the back seat, a young mother wearing a flowing red shawl holds her baby as the young father looks on with concern. Meanwhile, the carriage driver raises his whip above his team of four white horses as they walk down a steep hill above a winding river.
A "diligence" was a large, four-wheeled, closed French stagecoach used for long journeys. It was also used in England and was popular in both countries in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some diligences held up to 16 people and were divided into two or three compartments. The driver rode on a seat just above the front wheels.
Progress has made most American colonial and revolutionary towns unrecognizable. The tavern, where the gay gentlemen in periwigs and knickerbockers once gossiped with the stage driver and the post rider, has gradually given way to the modern hotel with conveniences formerly undreamt of. The village blacksmith shop is a memory, and in its place stands the gaudily-painted gasoline station with garage and repair shop in the rear. Old homes, with their large rooms and open fireplaces, are a rarity. The plain meeting house or church, where those before us worshipped on rough-hewn benches and listened attentively to long discourses on the weaknesses of the flesh, has been entirely renovated. The grist mill crumbled away years after its pad wheel ceased to turn. The placid mill pond disappeared with the removal of the dam, and the waters of the once pretty stream that fed it are murky with industrial waste.
Trenton is one of these transformed communities. In colonial and revolutionary days it was a center of life and trade, the main stop on the stage line between New York and Philadelphia. The leading figures of those times passed through its streets, and in the history of the nation, Trenton has been an important city. It was the scene of two brilliant Revolutionary battles of George Washington’s winter campaign of 1776-77. The Continental Congress met in the town in postwar days, and for a time it was favored for the permanent national capital. It was selected as the site for the State Capital, and during yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia, the seat of government, it served twice in that capacity.
Vestiges of these days still linger. The narrow, crooked streets, landmarks, church graveyards and old buildings hiding their identity behind modern construction are reminders of earlier life. These sites have stories to tell, and some are of national interest. Col. Rall's Christmas party was held at a corner in the town center. At another corner the early governing body of the land met, the State Legislature held sessions, and General and Martha Washington, General Lafayette and other eminent persons were entertained. Nearby, the first American railroad charter was granted; noted trials were held; Prince Lucien Murat, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, pawned the diamond bracelet of Hortense, Queen of Holland; Louis Kossuth, the famous Hungarian patriot, and President Franklin Pierce were dined; Col. Rall had his headquarters; President John Adams was entertained; and the famous Goodyear vs. Day rubber case was tried. These are but a few of the many highlights of Trenton’s rapidly-changing sites. Watercolor, gouache, and pen and ink on off-white wove paper. 6-7/8 x 9-13/16". (17.5 x 24.9 cm).
Citation: Public domain. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10028-0198. Rogers Fund, 1942 (42.95.11). https://www.metmuseum.org/art/ collection/search/12753. Text: Harry J. Podmore, "Trenton Old and New," 1927; revised and edited by Mary J. Messler. https://www.trentonhistory.org/ Old&New.html. Copyright Trenton Tercentenary Commission. Printed by MacCrellish & Quigley Co., Trenton, NJ, 1964. Trenton Historical Society, PO Box 1112, Trenton, NJ 08606. All rights reserved. Oct 15, 2022.
Four Lowell Women Workers Holding Their Weaving Shuttles, 1860
Image ID: 8334
Collection: Karen Halttunen
Topic(s): Nineteenth Century, Lowell, Antebellum Reform, Business 19th century, Child labor, Class Structure, Early mills and factories, Early National Period, Emerging industrial city, Environmental History, Gender-Bending, Immigrants, Industrial Revolution, Irish, Labor, Market Economy, National Events, Pro feminist and suffrage, Strikes and Violence, Success 19th century, Sweatshops, Technology, Urban poverty, Victorian Culture, Women in labor movement, Women's liberation, Women's work, Work and Workers
Region(s): United States
CA Standard(s): 5.8 - The colonization, immigration, and settlement patterns of the American people from 1789 to the mid-1800s..., 8.4 - The aspirations and ideals of the people of the new nation, 8.6 - The divergent paths of the American people from 1800 to the mid-1800s...with emphasis on the Northeast.
National Standard(s): Expansion and Reform (1801-1861), Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)
Card Text: Four Lowell women workers from Maine holding weaving shuttles, Lowell, MA, 1860. The Boston Transcript started in 1830 as a daily “penny evening newspaper” that covered local events while remaining neutral on political issues. In 1834 the Transcript reported on the Lowell textile workers' strike against factory wage cuts:
“We learn that extraordinary excitement was occasioned at Lowell, last week, by an announcement that the wages paid in some of the departments would be reduced 15 percent on the 1st of March. The reduction principally affected the female operatives, and they held several meetings, or caucuses, at which a young woman presided, who took an active part in persuading her associates to give notice that they should quit the mills, and to induce them to ‘make a run’ on the Lowell Bank and the Savings Bank, which they did. On Friday morning, the young woman referred to was dismissed, by the Agent...and on leaving the office...waved her calash [bonnet or hood] in the air, as a signal to the others, who were watching from the windows, when they immediately ‘struck’ and assembled about her, in despite of the overseers. “The number soon increased to nearly 800. A procession was formed, and they marched about the town, to the amusement of a mob of idlers and boys, and we are sorry to add, not altogether to the credit of Yankee girls [sic: women]....We are told that one of the leaders mounted a stump and made a flaming Mary Wollstonecraft [English feminist] speech on the rights of women and the iniquities of the ‘monied aristocracy,’ which produced a powerful effect on her auditors, and they determined to 'have their way if they died for it.’”
The Waltham-Lowell system was a labor and production model employed during the rise of the textile industry in the United States, particularly in New England, amid the larger backdrop of rapid expansion of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century. Made possible by inventions such as the spinning jenny, spinning mule, and water frame around the time of the American Revolution, the textile industry was among the earliest mechanized industries, and models of production and labor sources were first explored here. The system used domestic labor, often referred to as mill girls, who came to the new textile centers from rural towns to earn more money than they could at home, and to live a cultured life in "the city." Their lives were very regimented—they lived in company boardinghouses and were held to strict hours and a moral code. As competition grew in the domestic textile industry and wages declined, the workers began to strike, and with the introduction of cheaper imported foreign workers by mid-century, the system proved unprofitable and collapsed.
The precursor to the Waltham-Lowell system was seen in Rhode Island, where British immigrant Samuel Slater set up his first spinning mills in the 1790s. Slater drew on his British village experience to create a factory organization called the "Rhode Island System," based on the customary patterns of family life in New England villages. Children aged 7 to 12 were the first employees of the mill, and Slater supervised them closely. The first child workers were hired in 1790. It is unlikely that Slater resorted to physical punishment, relying on a system of fines. He first tried to staff his mill with women and children from afar, but that failed due to the close-knit nature of the New England family. He then brought in whole families, creating entire towns. He provided company-owned housing and company stores, and he sponsored a Sunday School where college students taught the children reading and writing.
The Waltham-Lowell system pioneered the use of a vertically integrated system, allowing complete control over all aspects of production. Spinning, weaving, dyeing, and cutting were now completed in a single factory, preventing other companies from interfering with production. The Waltham mill also pioneered the process of mass production, greatly increasing the scale of manufacturing. Water-powered line shafts and belts now connected hundreds of power lines. This increase in manufacturing output was so rapid that the numbers of local workers could not meet the company's needs. Lowell solved this problem by hiring young women.
After Slater's successes, a group of investors now called The Boston Associates and led by Newburyport, MA, merchant Francis Cabot Lowell devised a new textile operation on the Charles River in Waltham, west of Boston. This new firm, the first in the nation to place raw cotton-to-finish cloth production under one roof, was incorporated as the Boston Manufacturing Co. in 1814. The Boston Associates tried to create a controlled system of labor, but without the harsh conditions they had observed in Lancashire, England. The owners recruited young New England farm "girls" from the surrounding area to work the machines at Waltham. The mill girls lived in company boarding houses and were subject to strict codes of conduct under the supervision of older women. They worked about 80 hours per week. Six days per week, they woke to the factory bell at 4:40 am and reported to work at 5 am before a half-hour breakfast break at 7 am. They worked until a lunch break of 30 to 45 minutes around noon. The workers returned to their company houses at 7 pm when the factory closed. This pattern became known as the Waltham System.
While the Boston Manufacturing Co. proved immensely profitable, the Charles River was a poor power source. Francis Cabot Lowell died prematurely in 1817, and soon his partners traveled north of Boston to East Chelmsford, MA, where the large Merrimack River could provide far more power. The first mills of the Merrimack Manufacturing Co. were running by 1823. The settlement was incorporated as the town of Lowell in 1826, and became a city ten years later. Boasting ten textile corporations, all running on the Waltham System and considerably larger than the Boston Manufacturing Co., Lowell became one of the largest cities in New England. The Lowell System was copied elsewhere in New England, often in other mill towns developed by the Boston Associates, such as Manchester, New Hampshire; Lewiston, Maine; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Holyoke, Massachusetts .
Eventually, cheaper and less organized foreign labor replaced the mill girls. Even by the time of the founding of Lawrence in 1845, questions were being raised about its profitability. A leading cause of this transition to immigrant workers and the demise of the system was the coming of the Civil War. The young women became nurses, returned to their farms, or took jobs that men had left when they joined the military. These women were out of the mills for the duration of the war, and when the mills reopened afterward, they were no longer hired. Some had moved into new occupations, married, or moved on in life; and Irish immigrants were far cheaper labor.
The Irish community that was building in Lowell was not exclusively female, unlike the groups of mill girls who lived in the company boardinghouses. The number of male employees at the mill increased rapidly, and the Lowell plants became heavily dependent on foreign working-class immigrants, especially the Irish who flocked to Massachusetts. The mills' reliance on cheaper foreign workers accelerated poverty and spurred the development of slums. While in many cases the boardinghouses outlived the system, families of immigrant workers typically lived in tenement neighborhoods and off of company property.
Citation: Copyright holder unknown. Formerly held by American Textile History Museum, 491 Dutton St, Lowell, MA 01854. First text: The Boston Transcript, "Turnout in Lowell," 1834. https://chnm.gmu.edu/mcpstah/wordpress/wp-content/themes/tah/files/mckee_primary-sources.pdf. In “A Week in the Mill,” Lowell Offering, Vol. V. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Department of History and Art History, George Mason University, 4400 University Dr, MSN 1E7, Fairfax, VA 22030. Sept 11, 2013.