Samuel Slater’s mill: the “second revolution” along the Blackstone, and who it left out

A revolution can mean an overthrow, a major social change, or a single complete orbit, and an NPS essay on the Blackstone River Valley says Samuel Slater's mill was all three. Months after the Constitution took effect, the essay says, a second revolution began, launched not with a declaration but with a mill that turned cotton into thread in a new way.

Slater Mill and dam in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Image from the National Park Service's page.

An apprentice arrives

Slater was born in 1768 in England and worked in textiles from the age of 14 until his death in 1835. He trained in cotton spinning, including at a factory run by Jedediah Strutt in Milford, England; that training ended in August 1789, and the following month he was on a ship to the Americas, arriving in New York in late November 1789. By age 21 he had spent a third of his life among mill workers. In England he might have lived comfortably through family businesses and his connection to the Strutts, but the essay says there was a limit to his ambitions.

In January 1790 he came to Rhode Island, where the investor Moses Brown was willing to take a chance on an unknown machine maker. Over the next three and a half years Slater, Brown, other investors and craftspeople built a cotton spinning mill together, which the essay says was not a singular accomplishment. It opened in Pawtucket in 1793.

Samuel Slater. Image from the National Park Service's page.

A new kind of work

From 1790 to 1793 Slater's main task was to work with local laborers to build machines that could spin cotton, and to prepare a workforce for a new kind of labor. His workers were children, most around ten years old. Child work was not unusual in the 1790s, but working for a stranger in a mill, for pay, was new, and turnover and conflict recorded in his logbooks and letters show the transition was not smooth. The craftspeople and farmers he met, who had recently fought a war for freedom, were not used to rigid factory discipline. The mill gave nearby families a new way to earn money, but the wages went to parents, and the children did not enjoy the fruits of their labor.

The mill mattered beyond Pawtucket. Colonists had long bought finished goods such as cloth from Great Britain, and an early biographer wrote that supplying colonies with home manufactures was Britain's policy. Spinning cotton by machine was an important first step toward breaking away from the English textile industry. Not all Americans agreed that manufacturing was the way: the essay says President Thomas Jefferson argued that one class of free people ought to be supported by enslaved labor, living on large tracts of land.

Child laborers in a mill. Image from the National Park Service's page.

What the mills cost

Children who grew up in mills could suffer life-altering injuries and might never learn another trade. Slater and others went on to build mill villages, where entire families worked for pay in and around the mills. In Rhode Island only a small number of people could vote to begin with, and owning land was one requirement, so the essay says men who moved to a mill village lost an essential right to take part in democracy.

Factory work was also closed to many. Enslaved labor was essential to growing cotton, but enslaved people were not brought into the mills, and recently freed African Americans were not hired once operations were fully under way. Black craftspeople did help build the mill and work on machines before July 1793, but they were not regular employees and their children were not hired.

Slavery's shadow

Rhode Island passed its Gradual Emancipation Act in 1784, but emancipation did not need to be immediate, and when Slater arrived in 1790 approximately 20 percent of African Americans in the state were still held in bondage. Some people in Rhode Island were still not free when Slater died in 1835. Brown had been part of a Rhode Island campaign to end slavery, yet he had personally invested in the slave trade and kept profiting from slavery by trading in cotton grown on plantations that relied on slave labor. The essay says Slater's mill was economically tied to slavery from the start.

Samuel Slater's spinning frame. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Whose freedom?

The essay asks what freedom meant to the first generation of American mill workers. The freedom to earn a wage was not extended to everyone, and it asks what the factories gave the children whose days were set by owners ringing bells, the people whose lives were disrupted by mills and dams that polluted waterways, and the Indigenous peoples whose lands were claimed and renamed in the name of progress. It closes with a turn on the word: Slater took a fully English way of running factories and workers' lives to a place where people were desperate to break free from Great Britain.

Sources

• National Park Service, Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park, "Going in Circles: A Revolution Along the Blackstone" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/going-in-circles-a-revolution-along-the-blackstone.htm); the essay's quotations from an early biography are paraphrased and the essay's authorship is not stated; rewritten in hubnx's own words.