The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (65 page)

BACK IN 1819, RACHEL
had climbed the New Orleans levee and then descended into a floodplain forested by pylons of cotton bales, silos of British metalware, and screes of calico bolts from Manchester. By then, Britain was clearly already becoming a new kind of society and economy, escaping the old Malthusian trap with the help of the New World’s ghost acres. Its
transformations began with the creation
of a cotton textile industry. On the capital that sector earned, piggybacking technologies and industries emerged. Soon more people worked in commerce and industry than in agriculture, producing a market of millions of consumers. Raw materials imported from overseas—such as cotton—were essential, but by 1834 the empire concluded it no longer needed its own slaves.
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Although the United States
and Britain spoke (mostly) the same language, the two nations found themselves in different situations. Britain lacked key natural resources, and therefore cotton made by enslaved US hands was essential to industrialization. Now Britain led the development race by a full quarter-century. Indeed, British-made goods still towered on the levee as the Palfrey people embarked for Boston, for in many manufacturing
sectors, such as high-quality textiles, Britain’s dominance had starved American competitors of market oxygen. Some northern Whigs, believing the United States should be further on the path that Britain had blazed, blamed enslavers for forcing the young nation to implement policy choices that pushed the republic away from replicating the empire’s success. To them, the national investment
in territorial expansion was a proof-text. Endless robbery of Indian lands in the Louisiana Purchase, Florida, and Texas also meant that land would remain cheap. Immigrants might move to the cheap-land frontier instead of working in factories, keeping industrialists’ labor costs high.
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Still, a quarter-century after Rachel’s 1819 arrival in New Orleans, some sectors of the US economy were changing
dramatically. One way to measure this transformation is to look at historical estimates of how fast the economy was expanding. Between 1774 and 1800, the annual rate of economic growth per capita in the United States was less than 0.4 percent. From 1800 to 1840, the average rate of increase climbed to between 0.66 percent and 1.13 percent per year—spiking in the mid-1830s, of course, but then
crashing into the negative range for several years after the Panic of 1837. By the 1850s, it rose to almost 2 percent per year. By comparison, the per capita growth rate of the US economy in the 1990s, its most successful decade since the 1950s, was about 2.5 percent per year.
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Traditional explanations for this metamorphosis into a post-Malthusian regime assume that the ultimate cause of growth
was some characteristic unique to the North’s free-labor economy. Writers have credited an individualistic culture, Puritanism, open land and high wages, amorphous “Yankee ingenuity,” government intervention in the economy, and government nonintervention in the economy. Yet we now also know that even as the entire economy became more productive, from 1800 to 1860 raw cotton production gained in
efficiency still more quickly than other sectors of
the economy. The increasing speed of cotton-picking yielded a productivity increase of slightly more than 2 percent per year from 1800 to 1860.

In 1832, the US government compiled a fascinating document that reveals the way that cotton not only dominated US exports and the financial sector but also drove the expansion of northern industry. Jackson’s
secretary of the treasury, Louis McLane, hoping to find evidence that the 1828 “Tariff of Abominations” was protecting the emergent US manufacturing sector, asked Democratic insiders across the free states to visit manufacturing establishments in their neighborhoods. They interviewed proprietors such as the manager of the Old Sable Iron Works in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, who warned that
if the tariff was reduced, “our nail establishments could not be sustained.”

McLane’s data not only showed that foreign iron was too cheap, but also revealed the crucial role of cotton textiles in driving the expansion of manufacturing. Over the preceding four decades, cotton mills yoked to water power had multiplied along the rivers and creeks of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
They relied on labor from southern New England’s worn-out agricultural sector, machinery designs stolen from Britain, and ever-cheaper southern cotton. Early factories had mechanized the process of spinning cotton, but still “put-out” thread to families who used home hand looms to weave it into cloth. Mill-based powered looms would enable the next transition to take place.
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In the 1820s, the
“Boston Associates,” a group that included men such as Nathan Appleton and Abbot Lawrence, who would become Cotton Whigs and John G. Palfrey’s political enemies, planted a factory town on the Merrimack River in eastern Massachusetts. They named it Lowell, after an industrial spy who had stolen loom designs from British factories. By 1832 four massive mills were in operation there. Each integrated
spinning and weaving under a single roof. Collectively the mills contained $1 million worth of machinery, and these machines were tended by 3,000 workers, of whom three-quarters were women and girls. Each year, the mills used 5.5 million pounds of cleaned cotton: more than 13,000 bales, close to 15 million pounds as weighed on cotton-stand balance beams. Thus Lowell consumed 100,000 days of enslaved
people’s labor every year. And as enslaved hands made pounds of cotton more efficiently than free ones, dropping the inflation-adjusted price of cotton delivered to US and British textile mills by 60 percent between 1790 and 1860, the whipping-machine was freeing up millions of dollars for the Boston Associates. They invested it in other machines, higher pay for factory workers, and the finery
and architecture that
overwhelmed Palfrey’s freedpeople in the church on Beacon Street. They also lowered the price of textiles, expanding both Lowell’s markets and the access of ordinary people all over the world to factory-made cotton textiles. An entire planet’s consumers shared in the welfare of the growing margin between the price of raw cotton and what the price would have been if picked
by free labor.
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In 1820, only 3.2 percent of the US labor force had worked in manufacturing—maybe 75,000 workers in all. By 1832, the date of McLane’s report, factories and workshops across the North employed about 200,000 workers. The biggest share was in cotton mills, which were the most mechanized, capital-heavy,
industrial
kind of industry in the entire United States. Their 20,000 employees
represented something new in US history: an unpropertied, nonagricultural, free working class, the growth of which created demand for goods. In fact, both cotton labor camps and cotton mills generated increased demand for such things as iron goods, ready-made clothes, rope, furniture, and shoes. By the time of the 1832 McLane census, American industry was beginning to produce more of these goods.
Non-textile production still usually took place in relatively small-scale workshops. These included the small but flexible workshops of New York’s “sweated trades,” such as clothes-making, furniture, leather goods, and hats. Then as now, the city attracted a stream of hungry immigrants willing to toil long hours in cramped conditions. Small size also reflected limited technology, for most industries
had not yet found substitutes for human power and hand production. The tiny workshops scattered through rural areas near Philadelphia and Pittsburgh still dominated the iron industry. A rare exception was the Ousatonic Manufacturing Company of Litchfield County in Connecticut, which in 1831 employed more than one hundred laborers and made 600 tons of iron.
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Textiles made from southwestern cotton
continued to lead the way: above all, in employing a working class whose wages created a consumer market that encouraged ever more dynamic market production in other areas. In his response to McLane’s questionnaire, David Anthony of Fall River, Massachusetts, wrote that the town’s mills employed 4,000 textile workers—“all depending directly or indirectly on the manufacturing business . . . requiring
as much agricultural produce as any other class of people in the country.” Growing markets for food accelerated a commercialization of daily life that reached into the free states’ rural districts. Farmers grew crops for the market, rather than for subsistence. In Ohio and Indiana, farmers reached southwestern markets via the Mississippi River, and once New York completed the
Erie Canal in 1824,
upstate farmers could ship produce to New York City. Now that efficiency reaped rewards, northern farmers became more efficient: their farms became larger, farmers began to specialize, and they demanded improved seeds and implements.
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McLane created his document for the political advantage of northern manufacturers, but it shows that as of 1832, cotton made by enslaved people was driving US
economic expansion. Almost all commercial production and consumption fed into or spun out from a mighty stream of white bolls. Politicians and entrepreneurs used the force of cotton’s flood like a millrace to turn other wheels. Politicians, for instance, created a tariff system whose core principle was the protection of New England textile manufacturing. After the War of 1812, the British allegedly
tried to smother America’s infant industries by dumping goods below cost on US markets. In response, Congress added a surcharge of almost 35 cents per yard to low-quality imported cloth. The tariff redistributed the productivity of enslaved hands to northern manufacturers and merchants (in the form of profits) and millworkers (in the form of wages). And it allowed American mills to specialize. While
finely woven British products filled wardrobes like the ones displayed in Boston churches, American mill towns produced cheap, rough cloth protected by the tariffs on lower-grade textiles.
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In fact, the same cotton that hands picked returned, spun and woven, in the shape of the rough New England cloth that enslavers bought to cover the backs of African Americans. On his “Southdown” and “Waterloo”
slave labor camps in Louisiana, for instance, entrepreneur John Minor issued a yearly “ration” of about ten to fifteen yards of cloth. With over a million slaves in the cotton and sugar areas in 1832, entrepreneurs might have bought 15 million yards of cloth, or all of Lowell’s annual output. There was enough market space in the Mississippi Valley. Every year, one of the Hazard brothers, the
owners of Rhode Island’s Peace Dale Manufacturing Firm, traveled down to New Orleans and then out to the countryside to sell their cloth, hats, and other goods. Planters measured women’s shoe sizes, decided whether to buy ready-made clothes or bolts of cloth that year, and sent lists of men by rough measures of size, such as “No. 1” and “No. 2.” The cotton-picking sacks the Hazards offered, made
of sturdy cloth from Peace Dale’s steam-powered looms, were “by far the very best” he had “ever seen,” said customer John Routh. Even heavier grades of cotton woven with hemp were needed as wrappings for processed cotton, whether in the more backward “round bale districts” or among up-to-date planters whose newer equipment forced ginned cotton into solid cubes.
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The specialized workforces of
the southwestern slavery frontier didn’t just transfer British money paid for raw cotton into infant US textile firms. They also used American-made shovels, plows, ropes, hats, shoes, and hoes. In fact, one estimate suggests that 30 percent of the “transportable” goods made in the Northeast in the 1830s were sold to the West and South. Thousands of northern women braided palm leaves from Cuba into
the wide-brimmed disposable hats that enslavers issued, one to each hand, at the start of the picking season. In 1832 in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, alone, 47 different palm-hat-making firms reported a total of 863,000 hats made, costing 28 cents each wholesale, employing 2,500 women year round. Although they were paid 30 cents or less a day, these women in all earned over a quarter of a million
dollars—which, measured differently, was in turn paid by 50,000 person-days of cotton-picking.
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Another example of the way that southwestern efficiencies provided markets for the infant industries of the Northeast is the story of the Collins Axe Works along the Farmington River in Connecticut. In around 1827, Samuel Collins’s brilliant craftsman Charles Morgan mapped the axe-making process into
specific tasks: forging, tempering, grinding, polishing, each carried out by an individual worker. Classical economist Adam Smith, who illustrated the division of labor by showing how the production of a pin could be broken into dozens of steps to increase efficiency a hundredfold, would have been proud. So the Collins works ramped up production to 1,000 axes a day, albeit at the cost of an epidemic
of silicosis, or “grinders’ asthma,” a fatal disease caused by constant exposure to the dust generated by grindstones spinning against metal axe-heads. Collins’s southwestern traveling agents quickly generated huge sales, such as the order for 30,000 axes placed by one merchant firm. By the middle of the decade, the Collins works was turning out a quarter of a million axes every year.
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Collins
axes came ready-ground, so they could replace cheap British axes that came at a tariff-inflated price and did not have edges. (Purchasers had to hire or buy blacksmiths to grind edges onto the British blades before use.) Two thousand miles from Connecticut, along the Mississippi River, enslaver Haller Nutt broke open a couple of crates—$20.00 each, containing twelve Collins axes—and put them right
into the hands of his male hands. In those hands, Collins axes literally remapped the natural world, felling hundreds of millions of southwestern hickories, oaks, cottonwoods, gums, and pines. An experienced overseer from Tipton County in West Tennessee, who said that there, “the timber [is] I think easier to clear” than in other areas, calculated that a “full hand,” a healthy and strong man,
working exclusively at
clearing, would only open about four acres in a year. By 1860, after thirty years of settlement, Tipton County had 65,570 improved (cleared) acres. Sixteen thousand man-years of swinging Collins axes had made Tipton into a giant organic machine for growing cotton and corn. And Tipton County was one of about 250 similar cotton and sugar counties across slavery’s frontier.
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