Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1790- 1840 By Lindsay Schakenbach Regele Brown University, PhD candidate A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2015 ©Copyright 2015 by Lindsay Schakenbach Regele This dissertation by Lindsay Schakenbach Regele is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Date _____________ _____________________ Seth Rockman, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date______________ _______________________ Michael Vorenberg, Reader Date ______________ _______________________ Harold J. Cook, Reader Date ______________ _______________________ Mark Wilson, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date _______________ _______________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii VITA Lindsay Schakenbach Regele was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on April 18, 1984. She attended Connecticut College in New London, where she earned a B.A., summa cum laude. She received an M.A. in United States History from Tufts University in 2009. At Brown University, she studied early American History, specializing in diplomacy and political economy. She’s taught classes on American business history and the American Revolution at Brown and has published articles in New England Quarterly and New York History. In the fall of 2015, she will join the faculty at Miami University as an Assistant Professor in History. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am not sure how to begin thanking people for all the help they have given me. I probably would not have pursued a PhD, had it not been for my undergraduate adviser Leo Garofalo, who encouraged me to become a history major, and Ben Carp, who provided invaluable mentorship and feedback on my master’s thesis at Tufts University. Tufts was a terrific place to get an M.A. and I am indebted to the faculty and staff there, especially my adviser, Reed Ueda. Brown University, too, has been a wonderful place to attend graduate school. I cannot say enough good things about the History Department. The faculty and staff have all been tremendously supportive and my fellow graduate students have made everything more fun. I’ve met some of my closest friends there. The three directors of graduate studies during my time at Brown -- Joan Richards, Robert Self, and Tara Nummedal -- made being a graduate student easier and more enjoyable. I owe my biggest intellectual debt to my adviser Seth Rockman. He’s changed how I think about the past, shaped the development of my project, and cleaned up my messy writing, all while making me think that it was my own doing. I am also grateful to Michael Vorenberg, in whose first-year legal history seminar my dissertation originated. His encouragement and suggestions launched the project and he has provided helpful feedback throughout. Hal Cook, too, has been a generous reader of my work and the conversations I’ve had with him have helped me see the young United States through the lens of early modern commercial and information exchange. Mark Wilson kindly agreed to serve as an outside reader. My work has benefitted enormously from his scholarship and expertise. v I would also like to thank a host of research institutions that made my dissertation possible. Brown University, the Colonial Dames Society, the Rovensky Fellowship, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and American Antiquarian Society provided funding for archival research. The extraordinarily knowledgeable and helpful staffs at the Waltham, College Park, and Washington D.C. branches of the National Archives; Harvard Business School’s Baker Library; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island Historical Societies; and American Antiquarian Society answered questions and offered research leads and advice with patience and enthusiasm. I am fortunate to have had the opportunities to present my research at the Massachusetts Historical Society, American Antiquarian Society, and the Yale Early American Historians workshop, as well as at conferences at Harvard and Cornell, and at the annual meetings of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the Business History Conference. The participants at all these venues improved the outcome of my project. And then, of course, there is my family. I could never repay my parents for their unwavering love and support and for the happiness they gave me growing up. Mom, thank you for making it okay to fail. Dad, thank you for always pushing me to expand the selection of books I read and shorten the sentences that I wrote. You deserve some sort of medal for reading almost everything I’ve ever written. And Evan, you’re the kindest brother a sister could ask for. Finally, Matt: thank you for loving me and challenging me since before we could drive. You’ve made paper writing, and life in general, infinitely better. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One…………………………………………………………………..27 Chapter Two………………………………………………………………….71 Chapter Three………………………………………………………………...108 Chapter Four………………………………………………………………….145 Chapter Five…………………………………………………………………..186 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..229 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………240 vii INTRODUCTION Thomas Jefferson’s vision for an agrarian republic was an impractical one. No nation of yeoman farmers and small merchants could withstand the pressures of imperial rivalries, open borders, and resource insecurities. Geopolitical considerations weighed heavily on the newly independent United States. The precise course of economic and military development was uncertain at the nation’s founding, but it became clear that the survival of the new nation depended on war, diplomacy, and industry. What follows is a study of the relationship between state power and private entrepreneurship in the course of post-Revolutionary nation building. Focused on arms and textile industries in New England, this dissertation argues that the federal government, through its foreign and domestic policies, initiated the Industrial Revolution in America. As it draws on consular and congressional papers, federal armory records, and manufacturers’ business letters and account books, it connects the large themes of political economy – war, trade, state power – with the small-scale sites of technological innovation and entrepreneurship in the machine shops and mills along New England waterways. The stories of arms and textiles - one industry a public investment reliant on private contracts and the other an ostensibly private investment reliant on government interventions -- are not usually told in a single narrative. Studied together, and in contrast, the arms and textile industries allow us to see the blurred lines between public and private in an early republican political economy that predicated national self-sufficiency on the 1 wealth generated and held by its citizens. In a single narrative, guns and cloth emerge as products of national security.1 Military readiness and industrial capacity, then as now, were intertwined in the service of national security.2 Without guns, the new nation could not defend itself; without textiles, it was at the economic mercy of foreign powers. Without either, the United States would risk the recurrence of war-time supply dependence: during the Revolution, it had imported more than half its munitions and textiles.3 Such a situation was anathema to American policymakers, governed as they were by anxieties about dependence as the modern world’s first post-colonial society.4 If dependence results from asymmetries in economic relationships, the United States sought to avoid the losing end of its relationships.5 This preoccupation with dependence was not merely ideological, but had very real ramifications. In an era when armies literally froze in the field, military preparedness required blankets and jackets; these considerations rivaled the guns and horses that are usually considered determining factors in the successes of early modern militaries. Federal officials made sure that the United States would never again witness 1 Historian Charles S. Maier defined national security as the “capacity to control those domestic and foreign conditions that the public opinion of a given community believes necessary to enjoy its own self- determination or autonomy, prosperity and wellbeing." Charles S. Maier, "Peace and Security for the 1990s," Unpublished paper for the MacArthur Fellowship Program, Social Science Research Council 12 (1990): 5. For the importance of textiles in nations’ security strategies, see Alan Collins, ed. Contemporary Security Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 217. 2 Jonathan Kirshner, "Political Economy in Security Studies After the Cold War," Review of International Political Economy 5, no. 1 (1998): 66. 3 Paul A. C. Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 20. 4 For post-independence American anxieties about the United States’ status in the world, see Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 5 Kirshner, "Political Economy in Security Studies After the Cold War," 71. 2 another situation like that of the encampment at Valley Forge,