Opinions and Evidence - Because of their great land endowments, Americans in the colonial and early national years were mainly a nation of farmers, but New Englanders were the least well endowed of early Americans in terms of good farm land. Hence, New Englanders always sought other ways to earn a livelihood. Specializing on the products and services of the sea--fishing, whaling, shipping, ship building, and mercantile trading--represented early alternatives to farming. Another alternative came with the new technologies of factory manufacturing. New England seized upon the new manufacturing technologies and led the way in U.S. industrialization.
Outline
- Background. What manufacturing meant before the Industrial Revolution
- Industrial policy: Hamilton's 1791 Report of Manufactures; tariff protection
- The early
U.S. mechanized textile industry--spinning
- Samuel Slater and the Browns; Slater's Mill at Pawtucket
- Spread of mechanized spinning
- Labor recruitment: the southern New England family system
- Marketing the yard output of spinning mills
- Integrated
manufacturing: spinning and weaving under one roof
- Francis Cabot Lowell and the Boston Manufacturing Co.
- Lowell, Massachusetts
- Labor recruitment: the northern New England boarding house system
- Growth of the textile industry
- U.S. innovations: machine tools, interchangeable parts, assembly lines
- Spread of mechanized manufacturing before 1860