In 1787, when the U.S. constitution was being written, one of the key compromises was the decision that a slave would be considered three-fifths of a white person in determining the size of each state’s representation in Congress. Many northern delegates assuaged their negative feelings about the compromise with the belief that slavery was inevitably doomed to naturally disappear. It might take a few decades but some northern states had already banned it and it was clear that slavery was a financially inefficient way to grow crops, especially cotton. Those thoughts became pipe dreams when Samuel Slater emigrated from England to the United States and Eli Whitney accepted a position as a tutor in Georgia.
In the mid-18th century, England was the industrial capital of the world, especially in the production of textiles. Samuel Slater was apprenticed to a textile manufacturer and was ambitious to start a business of his own. However, he had neither the contacts nor the resources to accomplish his dream in England and so emigrated to the United States in hope of starting his own enterprise. The British government, though, was fiercely protective of its industrial secrets and forbid the exporting of any industrial designs or drawings. Slater, perhaps the first industrial spy, committed all the designs and specifications to memory and sailed to America in 1789.
He arrived in Philadelphia and began seeking out a financial backer. He soon met Otto Brown of Rhode Island, and they built a mill in Pawtucket that was ready for operation by 1791. It was an immediate success. They opened a second one in 1793 and eventually seven more in New England. Slater and Brown had ushered the nation into the industrial age which soon brought with it a new set of problems including the growing need for more cotton.
In 1792 Eli Whitney graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University and accepted a position as a tutor in South Carolina. But on the ship taking him to Charleston, he met a fellow passenger, Catherine Greene, the widow of General Nathaniel Greene. She invited him to visit her plantation in Georgia where he learned about Geogia upland short cotton and that it was barely a viable crop to grow. The cotton was so loaded with seeds that it took a slave an hour to clean one pound of it. (Some reports state that it took a whole day.) Whitney soon developed a cotton gin (gin is short for engine) that permitted the slave to clean 50 pounds in an hour. In 1793, just as there was a growing demand for cotton from both New England and British textile mills, Whitney’s invention made cotton from the American South a profitable crop.
As the nineteenth century dawned, life in both the North and South began to change dramatically. In the North, the mills needed workers but most males were still employed as small farmers, blacksmiths, carpenters and other traditional occupations. It was quickly realized there was an available workforce of young girls and even children who could work the machines in the factories. By 1820 in Lowell, Massachusetts there were dormitories to house female workers at the town’s many textile mills.
Whitney contributed to the industrialization of the North. In 1798 he received a contract to produce firearms for the government. He pushed for the idea of interchangeable parts in their production and this led directly to the idea of the assembly line and the growth of the factory system. In a short while there would develop a need for increased immigration to man the assembly lines.
In the South, now that cotton was a profitable crop, there was an expanding demand for more land to grow it. Present day Mississippi and Alabama contained the traditional land of five large native tribes including the Creek and Cherokee. There began a steady movement to take that fertile acreage away from the native Americans which culminated during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. He ordered that all native tribes in the South must vacate their traditional grounds and move to new land west of the Mississippi River. That order resulted in the infamous Death March of 1837. Cotton was now king of the South and white-owned plantations proliferated throughout the area which only recently had been Native American reservations. As a result, slavery, instead of diminishing, exploded tremendously in growth and also cruelty.
Slater and Whitney’s innovations inadvertently created a United States with an industrialized North and an agricultural South dependent on slavery. Despite the best of intentions, their efforts indirectly resulted in the Civil War from whose wounds the country has not yet healed.
Richard Szlosek lives in Northampton.