along our eastern seaboard, and it is well known that the settlers of New England must have starved if they had not been helped from the supplies of the Indians. Among the southern tribes, such as the Creeks, agriculture was still more developed. In Mexico, Central America, and the Greater Antilles abundant crops were raised. . . . The first and simplest agricultural tool was a sharpened stick for A simple digging up roots. . . . This first simple tool is used not only as a digging stick, but also for drilling holes in which to plant seeds; such is its use in Nubia, Yucatan, the Antilles, Sweden, and many other places. tool. time. Corn-planting in Central America was and is a very simple process; Planting a man going first with his drilling stick, makes a hole in the ground; his wife following after drops in a few seeds of maize; little people, following after these, with their feet cover the grain thus sown with the earth which was loosened by the stick. . . . wild rice. The first threshing must have been a very simple thing. The Harvesting Indian women on the Illinois River, at an early day, simply bent the stalks of wild rice over the edge of their canoe and with flat paddles beat the heads until the seeds fell from them into the boat. Fire no doubt was used by [the] women of many primitive folk to get the useless husk off from the grain and seeds. After animals were tamed and reduced to use they would be brought into service; thus among the Pueblo Indians in the Southwest, threshing is performed as follows: among the A circular area some yards across is cleared and smoothed and Threshing covered with a firm floor of beaten or hard-trodden clay. This Pueblo floor is enclosed by a circle of poles set in the ground, and connected Indians. by means of ropes or cords. The grain to be threshed is cut and brought in from the fields; it is heaped up, upon the threshing floor; a drove of ponies is turned into the enclosure and kept running around and around by a man who stands in the center with a whip. Soon the motion of the many hoofs upon the straw shakes the grain from the husks. . . . Such is one form of primitive threshing. . . ... The industrial efficiency of civilized man is of recent growth. The home stage in boot and shoe manufacture. The handicraft stage. 40. Division of labor in colonial manufactures 1 If we were to contrast the productive methods of savages with the methods employed in some of the largest and most efficient factories of modern times, it would appear that there is no comparison between the productivity of the savage and that of civilized man. And yet the highly effective methods of modern industry are only two or three centuries old. In some of the manufactures of colonial days, for example, there was not a sufficient application of the principle of the division of labor, and certainly not enough in the way of industrial efficiency, to warrant a contempt for the methods of the savage. The relatively unproductive methods of colonial times may be illustrated by the boot and shoe industry in early Massachusetts. The early stages of this industry are described by Miss Hazard as follows: During the home stage in the shoe industry in Massachusetts shoes were made only for human consumption. There was no market for them. . . . The farmer and his older sons made up in winter around the kitchen hearth the year's supply of boots and shoes for the family, out of leather raised and tanned on his own or a neighbor's farm. . . . Each boy in turn stood on a piece of paper or on the bare floor, and had the length of his foot roughly marked off with chalk or charcoal. The shoemaker selected from among his meagre supply of lasts the one which came "somewhere near" that measure. There were only two styles, low shoes or brogans, and high boots. The second or handicraft stage came in the Massachusetts boot and shoe industry with easier times in each village in turn. It had been foreshadowed by the itinerant cobbler. Now the real shoemaker could stay in his own shop, working on his own or his customer's supply of leather. He dealt directly with his market in the first phase of this stage and made only ordered or "bespoke" work. . . The number of master workmen in any one town was comparatively small, of course, in this "direct market" or "town economy" period, dependent as they would be upon the possible orders of a single community. Their journeymen went to the frontier settlements 1 From Blanche E. Hazard, "The Organization of the Boot and Shoe Industry in Massachusetts before 1875." Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. xxvii. February, 1913; pp. 239-244. to set up in the craft for themselves, leaving the supply of apprentices to fill their places in the future. . . There were times when the more advanced apprentices or even The manufacture of the journeymen spoiled a pair of shoes started for a definite customer, "extra" or and these remained on the master's hands to be disposed of. Then "sale" shoes. there were slack times when the apprentices might fairly be expected to "eat their own heads off," to the shoemaker's loss. In such a case the craftsman ventured to make up the stock on hand, to employ this otherwise wasting labor, and then tried to dispose of the shoes in the village grocery store. Since the market was uncertain and slow for this extra work, both stock and labor may frequently have been below the standard used in the custom-made shoes. In case the shoemakers lived in villages too far from Boston to attract customers, but near enough to send in their surplus product, their attention to sale work would steadily grow. A seemingly typical case, with all its local flavor, can be followed in detail in the bills, letters, account books, and oral traditions of Quincy Reed of Weymouth. He expected to be a shoemaker just as his great-grandfather William, who landed in Weymouth in 1635, and his grandfather and father had been. In 1809 the father was a master with custom work and probably some sale work for local consumption. As Quincy tells the story: The case of Weymouth. "My brother Harvey began it by taking chickens to Boston. His story. He had a pair of chaise wheels in the barn, and putting on a top piece, loaded her up and drove to town. He hung some shoes on the Ichaise and we sold them in Boston. All the shoes . . . before we began business, were carried into Boston in saddle bags. . . "We hired a store of Uriah Cotting at 133 Broad Street and fitted it up. Then I used to keep a chest of shoes in a cellar near Dock Square and on Wednesday and Saturday would bring out the chest and sell. I got $15 and $20 a day by it in 1809. I was sixteen and my brother was eighteen years old then. We moved into the Broad Street store with two bushels of shoes. I used to cut out what would promise to be $100 worth a day. We couldn't have them made [as fast as that], but I could cut them. One day I cut 350 pair of boot fronts and tended store besides. Most of the shoes were made by people in South Weymouth. We had nearly every man there working for us before long. Used to bring out the sole leather swung across the horse's back in those days." . ... 41. Slater introduces power machinery into America 1 The foregoing selection traces, to a slight extent, the increasing efficiency of individuals engaged in the boot and shoe industry. While this type of development was going on in this and a number of other colonial industries, the invention in England of a series of remarkable machines was permitting the manufacturers of that country to make greater and greater use of natural power. The Industrial Revolution, initiated in England after 1750, gave that country a decided advantage in the manufacture of textiles and other products. This naturally increased the desire of American manufacturers to set up machines similar to those in use in England. The following extract tells, briefly, the story of how power machinery was introduced into the United States from England: It was at the period so prolific in inventions, and when the use of cotton had so increased in England, that the manufacture was commenced in the United States. The first [textile] mill was at Beverly, Mass. It had a capital of [about] $450,000, and was organized in 1787, for the manufacture of corduroys and bed ticks. The machines were very rude, inasmuch as the new inventions in England were then unknown here. Samuel Slater was an apprentice to Jedediah Strutt, the partner of Arkwright. He served his time, and when of age departed for America, where he arrived in 1789. In the following year, he entered into partnership with Almey and Brown to start a factory in Pawtucket [Rhode Island]. Here, then, were put up, in the best manner, the whole series of machines patented and used by Arkwright for spinning cotton. There had been previous attempts at the spinning of cotton by water power, and some rude machines were in existence for spinning the rolls pre pared by hand, in private families; but the machines that had been invented in England were entirely unknown here until put up by Slater. 1 From One Hundred Years' Progress of the United States. Hartford, Conn., 1872; pp. 277-281, Those machines were so perfect that, although put up in 1790, and sets up they continued to be used forty years, up to 1830, when they formed power machinery part of an establishment of two thousand spindles, which still exists at Pawin Pawtucket under the name of the "old mill." Slater's business tucket. was prosperous, and he amassed a large fortune. He died in 1834. . . . It is to be remarked that his business was confined to the spinning of cotton. This business, of course, spread as soon as it was found to be profitable. . . . It will be observed that Mr. J. Slater got his mill into operation at the same period that the Federal government was organized under the new Constitution, a most auspicious event. The manufacture did not fail to attract the attention of the new government, and Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, in his famous report of 1791, remarks: "The manufacture of cotton goods not long since established at Beverly, in Massachusetts, and at Providence, Rhode Island, seems to have overcome the first obstacles to success; producing corduroys, velverets, fustians, jeans, and other similar articles, of a quality which will bear a comparison with the like articles brought from Manchester. The [mill] at Providence has the merit of being the first in introducing into the United States the celebrated cotton mill, which not only furnishes material for the factory itself, but for the supply of private families for household manufacture.” . . . Alexander Hamilton comments upon the significance of Slater's work. attitude toward the of machines. It may be remarked that down to 1828 the exportation of machines England's of all kinds . . . was strictly prohibited in England, for fear other nations should benefit by English mechanical genius, of which they exportation supposedly had a monopoly; . . . Mr. Slater, the "father" of American cotton manufactures, was so closely watched at the English custom-house, that he could not smuggle over a drawing or pattern. He had, however, acquired a full knowledge of the Arkwright principle of spinning, and from recollection, and with his own hands, made three cards and twenty-two spindles, and put them in motion in the building of a clothier, by the water-wheel of an old fulling-mill.. ... |