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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction……………………………………………………………………1

Chapter One…………………………………………………………………..27

Chapter Two………………………………………………………………….71

Chapter Three………………………………………………………………...108

Chapter Four………………………………………………………………….145

Chapter Five…………………………………………………………………..186

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..229

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………240

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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

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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.

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another situation like that of the encampment at Valley Forge, when thousands of

American soldiers suffered illness and death from winter exposure.

Military preparedness and economic stability necessitated manufacturing. A ground-level examination reveals industrialization as a set of solutions to the problems of power disparities and war. These solutions were brokered by government agents and private producers, whose relationships are the focus of this dissertation. In this geopolitical interpretation of the industrial revolution, the War and State Departments were central players in the development of domestic industry. Understood this way, the industrial revolution emerges as an outgrowth of national security capitalism.6 The early

United States economy hinged upon state policies that were formulated based on geopolitical realities. These policies included a mix of “free” trade with foreign countries and protectionist measures to enable the United States to withstand military and economic conflicts. The state had a compelling interest in developing national industrial resources and its policies lurk behind the histories of places like Lowell, Massachusetts.

With the executive branch at the helm, the early national state became, in many ways, an early example of the military-industrial complex.7

The term of course refers to the post-Second World War United States, not the post-Revolutionary War one. Popularized by President Eisenhower in the 1950s as a

6Just as the nation’s ability to wage war depended on public finance, so too did it depend on the public promotion of industry. Max Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783- 1867(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

7While a government monopoly on war-making was not a foregone conclusion, as Nicholas Parrillo has shown, the executive branch early on established itself as the director of both public and private military undertaking and industries. Nicholas Parrillo, "De-Privatization of American Warfare: How the U.S. Government Used, Regulated, and Ultimately Abandoned Privateering in the Nineteenth Century," Yale JL & Human vol. 19 (2007): 3-4.

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warning against the influence of a large military establishment on society, it names the self-perpetuating connections among the military, its contractors, and congressional appropriations.8 Defense spending in the middle of the twentieth century comprised roughly half of federal expenditures, but the genesis of the relationship between security and industry can be traced to the nation’s founding.9 Throughout the early nineteenth century, the military absorbed one-third of peacetime outlays.10 In the early republic we can find the roots of a modern American economy dominated by corporate interests and national security, and propped up by both direct and indirect government support.

These roots were the beginning of industrial capitalism in the United States.11

Neither term could yet be used to described an economy that was still largely agrarian and “moral” – indeed, “capitalism” would not enter the lexicon until the latter half of the nineteenth century – yet significant changes in the scope and scale of production occurred in the decades following the Revolution.12 Manufacturing processes became increasingly

8 James Fallows, "The Military-Industrial Complex," Foreign Policy 133 (2002): 46.

9 Defense spending was 48 percent of federal expenditures in the 1960s. Appendix Table B-80, Economic Report of the President 2013, presentation by Robert C. Levine, Yale School of Management, January 28, 2014.

10 According to Table Ea636-643 - Federal government expenditure, by major function: 1789–1970, in Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, Historical Statistics of the United States, Edited by Susan B. Carter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006): In 1810, federal defense spending comprised more than 55 percent of the budget– the army represented 24 percent, the navy 32 percent. In 1810, it was 48 percent of total expenditures – the army absorbed 28 percent and the navy 20 percent. In 1830, the army represented over 30 percent of government spending, the navy over 20 percent. During the War of 1812, defense spending spiked, totaling 80 percent of federal expenditures.

11This dissertation understands “industrial capitalism” as the prevalence of financial investment in mechanized production and the exchange of manufactured goods in the “free” market. It recognizes, however, that this wealth need not be private, and that “free” market exchange was determined by political decisions and social relationships.

12Naomi Lamoreaux, "Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast," The Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (2003): 437-461; Clark, Christopher. "Household Economy, Market

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mechanized, as capital and labor concentrated in factories and new technologies changed humans’ relationships to work, food, consumer goods, their environments, and other people. The private ownership of factories and machines, however, was not a radical break with a state-directed mercantile past, or a harbinger of an unfettered free-market future. Instead, these gradual changes marked the United States’ taking its place among the Old World nations it considered its peers.13 And just like the imperial governments of

Europe, the new United States government made decisions about production, security, and wealth – decisions that were bolstered and constrained by private producers – that would enable it to fight and trade on the most favorable terms possible. By the middle of the nineteenth century, America’s industrial capabilities, which developed in response to the geopolitical demands of the Age of Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars, looked markedly different than they had a half century earlier.

Changes in industrial capability were most evident in New England, a region that launched the beginning of the American Industrial Revolution. Industrial development certainly occurred elsewhere, most notably in the Mid-Atlantic, but New England is where large-scale integrated textile manufacturing developed first, and it is where 85 percent of the nation’s small arms were produced.14 War Department officials did more to standardize and expand private arms production in the Connecticut Valley than they did

Exchange and the Rise of Capitalism in the Connecticut Valley, 1800–1860," Journal of Social History 13, no. 2 (1979): 169-189.

13 Mark R. Wilson, “Law and the American State, from the Revolution to the Civil War: Institutional Growth and Structural Change,” in Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins, eds., The Cambridge History of Law in America. Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 35.

14 For the destabilization of New England as the birthplace of industry, see François Weil, "Capitalism and Industrialization in New England, 1815-1845," The Journal of American History 84, no. 4 (1998), 1336- 1354. See also, Thomas Childs Cochran, Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1981). Cochran deemphasizes New England and textile production and argues that Delaware was an important center of industrialization.

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in the region surrounding the other federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, where advancements always lagged behind its northern counterpart and manufacturers and workers resisted industrial growth.15 By 1831, more capital was invested in cotton establishments in New England than in anywhere else in the country. Massachusetts alone had more than $12 million invested in cotton factories and Rhode Island over $6 million. Outside of New England, the state with the largest cotton industry, Pennsylvania, had less than $4 million tied up in cotton establishments.16 The study of New England’s arms and textile industries reveals most clearly the mobilization of large scale private capital and government resources in the service of economic expansion and hemispheric dominance. It is with these two New England case studies that we can see the influence of public and private initiatives on the course of manufacturing in America and on the

United States’ position in the world economy.

To be clear, this is not a story of a hegemonic federal government directing the economy, nor of business manipulating politics and federal resources to reach its own ends. Rather, it is a story of how businessmen and government officials relied on each other as they maneuvered the early republican nation from agricultural supplier to industrial producer, from colonial dependent, to military power. The federal government depended on private capital, ingenuity and risk-taking to create economic growth and security. Entrepreneurs likewise needed federal resources, trade regulation, and diplomacy to generate profit for themselves and economic growth for the nation. The

15 Merritt Roe Smith, Harper’s Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).

16 Timothy Pitkin, A Statistical View of the Commerce of the United States of America: Including also an Account of Banks, Manufactures and Internal Trade and Improvements (New Haven: Durrie & Peck: 1835), 526.

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United States has never had an official industrial policy, as compared to say, China; state- sponsored industrial capitalism was, however, squarely within the realm of early republican political economy. As producers and public officials made decisions about real-time problems, they developed an ad hoc policy that would propel the United States to its status as an industrial super power.

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Big industry as it eventually developed under government patronage would of course have been unimaginable at the dawn of nationhood. After the Revolution, few firms were incorporated, small proprietors prevailed, and “capitalist” did not yet describe the economy.17 At the nation’s founding, the issue was the scope and scale of government intervention in that economy.18 Laissez faire was never an option and even

Adam Smith’s “free” trade referred to the national, rather than international context.19 For

Smith, the ideal political economy was one in which domestic goods circulated freely in a largely self-interested marketplace, but in which the state also levied import tariffs and subsidized infant industries and defense manufacturing. For eighteenth and early

17 For an excellent overview of the scholarly debates surrounding the classification of the early American economy as capitalist, see Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 33-38 and 57-58.

18 For economic thought following the Revolution, see Cathy D. Matson, "Capitalizing Hope: Economic Thought and the Early National Economy," Journal of the Early Republic 16, no. 2 (1996): 273-291.

19 Cathy D Matson and Peter S. Onuf, A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America (University Press of Kansas, 1990), 2-3; Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 81. For the argument that Smith viewed the “invisible hand” as a joke rather than a prescription for political economy, see Emma Rothschild, "Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand," American Economic Review 84, no. 2 (1994): 319-322.

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nineteenth-century statesmen and political economists, it was taken for granted that the government would have some role in the economy.20 But what role would that be?

Historians themselves have debated what kind of state the early republican national state was. The role of the state in the economy has ebbed and flowed in the historiography of the early United States, and scholars coming from such fields as

American Political Development and the “new history of capitalism” have weighed in.21

State power of course included different arenas and overlapping sovereignties – individual state and local governments and courts, as well as the federal legislature, executive, and judiciary – and historians have ascribed varying levels of influence on civilians’ lives to them. A preoccupation with the links between capitalism and the state in early America goes back at least as far as the 1940s, to Oscar and Mary Handlin’s pioneering study on the positive role of the Massachusetts state government on economic development.22 An activist state fell out of favor in the 1980s, when a body of scholars of the early republic described the transition to capitalism and the rise of industry in New

England as a story of Jeffersonian democracy ushering in individual freedoms, weak

20 For debates about the eighteenth-century prevalence of mercantilist policy, see “Forum: Rethinking Mercantilism,” The William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2012): 3-70.

21 For APD literature, see Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 1982); Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Morton Keller, America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Richard John, “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787-1835," Studies in American Political Development, 11 (Fall 1997): 347-380. See also, William J. Novak, “The Myth of the Weak American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 752-772. Other scholars, too, have noted the puzzling, but stubborn, notion of the United States as stateless. Desmond King and Robert C. Lieberman, "Ironies of State Building: a Comparative Perspective on the American State," World Politics 61, no. 3 (July 2009): 547-588.

22 See, for example, the pioneering study by Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774-1861 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969).

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government, and ambitious entrepreneurship.23 In this narrative, the virtues of the early federal government were its small size and the limits of its authority. More recent historians, however, have returned to the premise that the state mattered in economic development. They underscore the importance, or the ineffectiveness, of state and federal government in various realms of economic development, often with a focus on governmental support of internal improvements or on the judicial decisions that privileged corporations.24 And still another body of scholars, working within the loosely defined field of the “new history of capitalism,” proceeds from the assumption that the state helped govern capitalist relations.25 Yet in general, they have, as one scholar has pointed out, given short shrift to the significance of the national state in early republican political and economic development, despite the fact that the state did indeed loom large in the lives of American citizens.26 These historians have tended to focus on the ways in

23 See for example, Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984) and Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992).

24 See for examples Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) and A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783-1867(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), Richard R. John, Spread the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 2001); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University, 1994). For the effectiveness of the federal state in managing its population, territory, and economy, see Mark R. Wilson, “Law and the American State, from the Revolution to the Civil War.” And for an earlier interpretation of the importance of the national legal system in promoting economic growth and favoring the business class, see Morton J. Horwitz’s classic, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).

25Seth Rockman, “What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?,” Journal of the Early Republic, Volume 34, Number 3 (Fall 2014): 443.

26 Richard R. John, “Rethinking the Early America State,” Polity, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Jul., 2008): 333. And, in fact, the early American state offered more assistance to its citizens than scholars have previously thought, as Michele Dauber’s recent work on nineteenth century federal disaster relief shows. Michele Landis Daber, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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which financial capital connected seemingly disparate business structures, market exchanges, and systems of labor, and on the process by which the rules of capitalist relations became commonplace, rather than on the precise ways the state shaped economic exchange.27 Like other recent works on the history of capitalism, my project is less concerned with the extent to which market exchange pervaded economic life than it is with the creation and governing of those markets.28 Unlike other histories, however, it looks not at the cultural assumptions that undergirded changes in economic and material life, but at the concrete ways in which federal officials and private producers shaped those changes in the service of geopolitical strategy.29

What is missing from most studies of American industrialization is this geopolitical context. They have tended to focus on the social implications wrought by economic transformations for the worker, entrepreneur, firm, and community.30 Histories

27Aaron Carico, and Dara Orenstein, "Editors' Introduction: The Fictions of Finance," Radical History Review 2014, no. 118 (2014): 3-13; Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Kenneth Lipartito, "Connecting the Cultural and the Material in Business History," Enterprise and Society 14, no. 4 (2013): 686-704; Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

28 For the scholarly debates about the vitality of a “market revolution,” see the articles in Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 16, No. 2, Special Issue on Capitalism in the Early Republic (Summer, 1996); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University, 1994).

29 Like Gautham Rao’s work, it will connect foreign policy, trade regulation, and local relationships to economic development. Gautham Rao, At the Water’s Edge: Customhouses, Governance, and the Origins of the Early American State (under contract, University of Chicago Press).

30 Examples of studies of individual merchant-industrialists include, Frances W. Gregory, Nathan Appleton: Merchant and Entrepreneur, 1779–1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975); Chaim M. Rosenberg, Life and Times of Francis Cabot Lowell, 1775-1817 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011); Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston: Colonel T. H. Perkins, 1764–1854 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). Works on the social and cultural changes that accompanied a rise in the factory system include, Mary H. Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910 (Urbana, 1988); Alan Dawley, Class and Community. The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the

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of early American textile manufacturing by William Bagnall, Victor Clark, and Caroline

Ware have provided students of industrial development with comprehensive analyses of the nature of textile production in New England, while studies of the arms industry in

Connecticut, Massachusetts, and at the federal armory in Springfield by Felicia Johnson

Deyrup, James B. Whisker, and Kevin Spiker offer exhaustive details about arms manufacturing in New England.31 Although these works do much to explain the causes and effects of industrial development, they fail to connect industrial development to nation-state formation and international policies.32 Factories, as Jonathan Prude reminds us, were more than buildings with smoke stacks or water wheels within which mechanized manufacturing processes took place. True, they were centralized locations of

Industrial Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Gary Kulik, "Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in Rhode Island," Radical History Review 17 (1978): 5-37; David A. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). For business and technology, see Lamoreaux, Naomi R. "Entrepreneurship, Business Organization, and Economic Concentration," in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E Gallman, eds. The Cambridge Economic History of the United States 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000: 403-434; James L. Conrad, Jr., "Entrepreneurial Objectives, Organizational Design, Technology and Cotton Manufacturing of Almy and Brown 1787- 1797," Business and Economic History, 2d ser., 13 (1984): 7-19; David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States. Vol. 4 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985). For factories as sites of business modernization, the iconic example is Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977).

31 William R. Bagnall, The Textile Industries of the United States (Riverside, CA: Riverside Press, 1893); Victor Selden Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States: 1607-1860. Vol. 2 (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Institution, 1916); Caroline Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture, a Study in Industrial Beginnings (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931); Felicia Johnson Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley: A Regional Study of the Economic Development of the Small Arms industry, 1798- 1870 , Smith College Studies in History, Vol. XXXIII, Vera Brown Holmes, Hans Kohn, eds. (Northampton, MA: 1948); James B. Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 1795-1865 (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1997); James B. Whisker and Kevin Spiker, The Arms Makers of Massachusetts, 1610-1900 (Palo Alto, CA: Academia Press, LLC, 2012).

32 For the simultaneous development of nation-states and industrial capitalism, see, for example, Charles Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).

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the labor divisions that embodied the experiences of industrialization in America.33 Yet, they were more than sites of labor, too. Factories were sites where war, federal politics, and international relations converged with individuals’ labor and ingenuity.

As this dissertation examines the intersection of industrial development and national security capitalism, it will be primarily concerned with the arena of state power that has been less frequently studied for its effects on economic development – the federal executive. The executive branch had the power to shape industry in a way that individual entrepreneurs and mechanics, and Congress, did not; it had the power to pick winners and losers. Congress made laws that the judiciary upheld or challenged, but the executive branch doled out public monies and supplies, controlled the patent system, and conducted business with foreign governments. Congress declared war, but the executive made war.34 A little over a century after the creation of the United States government,

Max Weber described as inevitable the bureaucratic inefficiencies that result from governmental separation of powers.35 Protective measures for manufacturing interests often got hamstrung by legislative hurdles in Congress, creating tariff controversies throughout the nineteenth century.36 There was, however, sufficient “energy in the executive,” as Alexander Hamilton had recommended for effective governance, to permit

33 Jonathan Prude, “Capitalism, Industrialization, and the Factory in Post-Revolutionary America,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 16, No. 2, Special Issue on Capitalism in the Early Republic (Summer, 1996): 237-255.

34This had ramifications for U.S. military conflicts. Samuel J. Watson’s recent work reveals a professionalized officer corps that carried out violence beyond the purview of civilian decision-making. Jackson’s Sword: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1810-1821 (Lawrence University Press of Kansas, 2012).

35 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 283.

36 Edward Standwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903).

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the federal promotion of U.S. industry.37 Article Two, Section Two of the Constitution gave the president the power to appoint cabinet officers who would oversee war, the economy and foreign affairs. Accountable to Congress, but unencumbered by voting constituents, these officers made it possible for the federal government to create a federal arms supply, support a textile industry that could compete with British imports at home and, eventually, abroad, and develop contract and patent systems that would reward innovation.

The executive was most effective in the realm of international relations. To some extent, the dissertation will follow the model set by William Appleman Williams over fifty years ago in which Williams connected the American state with economic development via its foreign policies.38 In an article published in the 1950s, he argued that the central characteristic of American history from 1763 to 1828 was its development of mercantilism: the early American state aggressively pursued commercial markets and natural resources to safeguard its economic, and thus political, security.39 For Williams,

American statesmen saw themselves as inheritors of a mercantile system in which the young United States needed to build an empire that could compete effectively against other mercantile empires.40 But while Williams debated which statesman embodied the

37 Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #70, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961), 471.

38 William Appleman Williams made perhaps one of the most famous critiques of U.S. foreign policy as derived from economic interest. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (W.W. Norton & Company, 1988).

39 William Appleman Williams, “The Age of Mercantilism: An Interpretation of the American Political Economy, 1763 to 1828,” The William and Mary Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Oct., 1958): 419-437.

40 William Appleman Williams, “The Age of Mercantilism,” 419-24. While Williams takes for granted the commonality of mercantilist thinking among European leaders, Steve Pincus has demonstrated that British statesmen debated the tenets of mercantilism and that some argued that wealth was not a zero-sum game

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truest form of American mercantilism (Madison), this dissertation will not parse the framers’ and early diplomats’ various strands of mercantile and neo-mercantile thoughts.

Instead, it will reveal how federal officials and manufacturers used the state’s nation- building capacities, as well as relationships with each other, to generate economic opportunities at home and abroad. The State Department negotiated treaties that secured favorable trade policies and land acquisition, and employed growing American power to open new markets for domestic manufactures overseas. These actions did, in many ways, look a lot like an American reincarnation of the resource-gathering, surplus-avoiding, and military-wielding behaviors of European mercantile states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Yet, there is more to the story than the mere marriage of diplomatic and financial interests and the use of military power to suit economic ends. Neither states nor individuals operate in an economic realist vacuum. Personal relationships mattered, too.

One of the goals of this dissertation is to reveal the ways in which personal and political relationships among War Department officers, diplomats, private contractors, factory owners, and machinists determined the United States’ ability to expand its landholdings and the size of its factories, wage war effectively, and sell its goods abroad. Additionally, whereas the majority of Williams’s work, as well as that of most of his followers, has focused largely on the post-Civil War period of American history, this dissertation will work from the assumption that international relations were central to the early republic

Rather than being, as many diplomatic historians have contended, “nascent” or and could in fact be unlimited. Steve Pincus, "Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," The William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2012): 3-34. John E. Crowley argues that British policymakers were more “free- market” oriented than their American counterparts. The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

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“isolationist,” they were, in fact, essential to American state-building.41 Early American foreign policy, while not geared toward large-scale military engagements as it was in the twentieth century, shaped the international relationships that made U.S. economic expansion possible. Indeed, Drew McCoy’s indispensable work on Jeffersonian political economy, along with the more recent work of Brian Balogh, reveal the ways in which domestic and foreign policy were intertwined: the federal government’s management of international relations led to trade opportunities and territorial expansion in the first decades of the nineteenth century.42

The state’s ability to manage markets at home and abroad depended on military strength, even as big military spending, just like big industry, would have been unimaginable following the Revolution. As Americans transitioned into independence, many feared the large standing armies of Europe and believed state militias offered the best protection for republican citizens.43 Yet violent conflicts with Indian nations over land and threats of warfare with Europe necessitated greater armed forces than local

41 For recent work on the importance of early foreign relations for the development American nationhood, see Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2012). For a reconsideration of the meaning of isolationism, see Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, “Early Isolationism Revisited: Neutrality and Beyond in the 1790s,” Journal of American Studies. Vol. 29, No. 2 (Aug., 12995): 215-227.

42 Brian Balogh, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1980). Hannah Farber has recently demonstrated the importance of American public credit for diplomatic and commercial relations, highlighting the role of tribute payments by the U.S. government in maintaining commercial markets in the Mediterranean. Farber, “Millions for Credit: Peace with Algiers and the Establishment of America’s Commercial Reputation Overseas, 1795-96,” Journal of the Early Republic 34, no.2 (Summer 2014): 187-217. And Francis Cogliano argues that Thomas Jefferson achieved his “empire of liberty” through geopolitical means. Francis D. Cogliano, Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson’s Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

43 In this ideological study, Lawrence Delbert Cress argues that fears of centralized power led to the celebration of the militia. Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).

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militias could provide.44 As Max Edling has shown, the early national United States was in no way exempt from the realities of war-making. The ratification of the Constitution in fact called into being a fiscal-military state à la the European model.45 The military was part and parcel of the new nation-state.

The majority of scholarship on the military focuses on politicians’ responses to perceived military needs and the nature of U.S. military development in general. Some have trumpeted the existence of state militias, seeing the creation of a regular army as either the result of an aggressive, militaristic Federalist Party, or one of reluctant necessity, while others have characterized the emergence of a professional army as the appropriate response to grave security concerns. Traditional military histories focus on the details of western campaigns, while others assess the military’s purpose and effectiveness.46 Richard Kohn, for example, argues that following the Revolution, the regular army, an effective and reasonable response to security concerns, laid the foundation for the modern army; others characterize the American military before the

War of 1812 as underdeveloped and inefficient. 47 Another body of military historians focuses on the ideological opposition of military build-up. They pit bellicose, power-

44 Watson, Jackson’s Sword: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier.

45Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government, and “‘So Immense a power in the affairs of war:’ Alexander Hamilton and the Restoration of Public Credit,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 44, no. 2 (April 2007): 287-326.

46 James Ripley Jacobs, The Beginning of the U.S. Army, 1783–1812 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 12-14; Andrew J. Birtle, "The Origins of the Legion of the United States," The Journal of Military History 67, no. 4 (2003): 1250.

47 Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975); Ira Katznelson, "Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American Statebuilding," Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Cress, Citizens in Arms; Paul A. C. Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996).

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seeking Federalists against liberty-minded Jeffersonians.48 In this narrative, arguments about individual liberties take center stage, as Jeffersonian Republicans’ abhorrence to the military checked its power and almost led to its demise. Theodore Crackel, though, has shown that cutbacks to the military during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency actually did little to diminish the institution. If anything, Jefferson established the military on firmer footing by founding the military academy at West Point in 1802.49 The early military became, in the words of political scientist Ira Katznelson, “flexible, effective and efficient.”50

Whether we characterize the military as weak or efficient, as Hamiltonian or

Jeffersonian, the fact remains that it exerted influence on economic life. As this work reveals industrialization as a product of national security capitalism, it borrow insights from William H. Bergmann’s recent work, which connects U.S. military and fiscal power with economic development. He argues for their importance for land acquisition and generating economic opportunity in newly acquired territory.51 Likewise Paul

Koistinen’s study of the economic policies of American warfare is a useful supplement to military histories that privilege military tactics over economic mobilization because it interweaves economics, politics, and war. His reliance on mostly secondary sources,

48 Russell Frank Weigley, History of the United States Army (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809. Vol. 5 (New York City: Little, Brown, 1974).

49 Theodore J. Crackel, "Jefferson, Politics, and the Army: An Examination of the Military Peace Establishment Act of 1802," Journal of the Early Republic 2, no. 1 (1982): 22.

50Katznelson, "Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American Statebuilding," 98.

51 William H. Bergmann, The American National State and the Early West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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however, causes him to downplay the role of industry and the efficacy of the state.52 In the early republic, when security concerns linked military and economic life, the United

States government created and maintained a military apparatus capable of waging war and supporting industrial development.53 C. Vann Woodward referred to the one hundred thirty years between the end of the War of 1812 and the Second World War as an era of

“free security” in American history, in which Americans enjoyed safety with minimal military spending - generally less than one percent of the gross national product. 54 While political scientists and foreign policy scholars have appropriated the term to describe

America’s role in international affairs, it overstates the existence of peace – especially as the United States was always engaged in warfare against Indians - and obscures both the real costs to maintaining a military and the effects of this military on the economy.55 If the years following the second war with Britain seemed “free,” it is only because the previous twenty five years had been spent building an effective military organization and developing production capabilities. As Richard Kohn reminds us, during these years the military exerted a tremendous influence on American domestic life.56 It is a goal of this project to understand its influence on industrial development.

52 Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords.

53 Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the U.S. government created a bureaucratic network that was able to supply war materials for increasingly imperialistic military operations. Cynthia Ann Miller, "The United States Army Logistics Complex, 1818-1845: A Case Study of the Northern Frontier" (PhD Dissertation, Syracuse University, 1991).

54 C. Vann Woodward, "The Age of Reinterpretation." The American Historical Review 66.1 (1960): 3-4.

55Fareed Zakaria, “The Myth of America’s ‘Free Security,’” World Policy Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer, 1997): 35-43.

56 Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975), xiii.

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While industrial development was intricately linked with military security and economic independence, the influence of the military, federal policy, of course played out differently in different locations, just as the transition to capitalism was not a monolithic process.57 The classification of two different models or regions of industry in New

England, with a third region in the Mid-Atlantic, can be traced back to James

Montgomery, a manufacturer from Scotland who worked as a superintendent of a mill in

Maine.58 He distinguished between an eastern district, which became known as the

Waltham-Lowell system, a middle district, which became known as the Rhode Island system, and a southern district outside of New England. 59 Machinery, capitalization, and factory organization differentiated the three models. Later historians perpetuated the apparent differences between the Waltham-Lowell system, in which factories were financed by stockholders, managed by factory agents, and integrated all production processes under one roof, and the Rhode Island system, in which factories were financed and managed by small partnerships or sole proprietorships and which “put out” manufacturing processes, such as weaving, to individual households. Even as scholars have remedied analyses of industrialization in other regions of the country, they have left

57 For the debate about the experiences of capitalism in the early republic, see for examples, Naomi Lamoreaux, "Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast," The Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (2003): 437-461; Paul A. Gilje, "The Rise of Capitalism in the Early Republic." Journal of the Early Republic 16, no. 2 (1996): 159-181; Cathy D. Matson, "Capitalizing Hope: Economic Thought and the Early National Economy;” Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Christopher Clark, "Household Economy, Market Exchange and the Rise of Capitalism in the Connecticut Valley, 1800–1860," Journal of Social History 13, no. 2 (1979): 169-189.

58François Weil, "Capitalism and Industrialization in New England, 1815-1845," The Journal of American History 84, no. 4 (1998), 1341.

59 James Montgomery, A Practical Detail of the Cotton Manufacture of the United States of America (Glasgow, 1840).

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untouched the standard narrative of New England’s transition to industrial capitalism as being driven by the Rhode Island and Waltham-Lowell systems.

Historian François Weil argues that historians have mischaracterized American industrialization by using Boston-centered New England generalizations that do not apply to the rest of the nation, or even to all of New England. Weil criticizes the interpretation of the Boston Associates – a loose network of wealthy investors to whom the name was given by historian Vera Shlakman in the 1930s -- as the prime movers in the development of manufacturing in much of New England.60 As Weil focuses on the local investor networks in Springfield, however, he downplays other industrial influences, namely the federal government, which ran the public armory in the region.61 We must understand industrialization as more than labor management styles or levels of capitalization. There was more at play than whether a firm relied on factory laborers or household workers, or whether it was funded by local merchants or capitalists who lived a train’s ride away, or whether it was capitalized at $20,000 or $200,000. For when we step back, we see that different industrial realities arise from a firm’s position within a constellation of national and international factors, such as the extent to which military conflict generated demand, where and to whom contracts were given, and the channels through which one had access to diplomatic negotiations abroad.

A factory’s location within the international economy started with its geographic position in New England. This dissertation does not seek to dispute or to merely reaffirm

Montgomery’s geographic characterization of industry. Instead, it will use these

60 Vera Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town: a Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts (Northampton, Mass: The Department of History of Smith College, 1935).

61 François Weil, "Capitalism and Industrialization in New England, 1815-1845,” The Journal of American History 84, no. 4 (1998), 1336-1354.

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geographic models to the extent that capitalists and federal officials employed them in the service of national military and economic security. Additionally, it will distinguish among three waterways, instead of two, in New England: the Connecticut, Merrimack, and Blackstone River Valleys. The Connecticut Valley was the center of federal arms production, the Blackstone Valley the center of traditional, proprietary textile manufacturing and some arms-making, and the Merrimack Valley the center of highly capitalized, integrated textile manufacturing. Both public officials and factory owners sought to harness the natural resources and human capital these waterways offered, but in many ways the major movers in these regions were not investors or the manufacturers themselves, but a cast of federal officials: secretaries of state, treasury, and war, ordnance officers, and consular agents, who issued contracts and patents, conducted manufacturing reports, and employed diplomacy to benefit American manufacturing exports. They worked on behalf of both public policy and private sector interests.

The winners in this story were a network of arms contractors, a cohort of industrial-capitalists, and a host of small manufacturers and inventors. American civilians, too, benefitted from ever-cheaper fabrics and protection from belligerent

European nations and from Indians who wanted their land returned. There were losers, of course: farmers who had little choice but to sell their land or water privileges, skilled artisans who saw mechanization replace their craft tradition, overworked laborers, and victims of American warfare. The intention of this project is not to weigh the costs and benefits of industrialization, but to explain how federal officials, capitalists, and mechanics worked together, manipulated one another, and competed to create an industrial economy that would eventually rival that of the European nation-state.

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The first chapter opens with the United States in the shadow of European empires, as the newly independent nation struggled to establish economic and military security in an insecure world. Even as the United States considered itself a peer of European powers, it was unable to arm its own soldier or clothe its own citizens. In the face of border conflict, slave uprisings, and tax rebellions, this inadequacy proved a grave threat. Yet many American policymakers did not want to turn their nation of small farmers into a nation of industrial capitalists or wage earners, certainly not one with a large standing army. What would the solution be? Despite misgivings about the social ramifications of large-scale industry and militarization, leaders like George Washington recognized that the surest way to preserve peace was to be prepared -- with arms -- for war. Guns were of course more of a military imperative than textiles, but textiles mattered too, especially as visible manifestations of independence. This chapter takes a tour of the economic landscape of the 1790s by following a British textile entrepreneur on his visit to the

United States in 1794. As it stops at small factories throughout New England, the chapter connects these first forays into manufacturing with national policies. 1794 proved a decisive year for the new republic. It marked the establishment of the federal armory, the passage of a tariff that offered protection for a variety of manufactured goods, and the signing of the Jay Treaty, which improved commercial relations with Great Britain and staved off war until the United States was better prepared for it. The United States entered the nineteenth century with the infrastructure for national arms production firmly in place, but textile manufacturing proved unsustainable until the federal government waged military and commercial warfare against Britain.

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The next two chapters examine federal approaches to domestic manufacturing during and after the War of 1812. Federal policies, analogous to Keynesian stimulus spending, generated demand for domestic arms and textiles in a way that private consumption did not. In the 1930s, British economist John Maynard Keynes postulated that consumer demand sometimes fails to reach equilibrium with the supply capabilities of producers. The solution, he argued, is government expenditure, which the early national federal state provided.62 Chapter Two explores the United States’ struggle to be taken seriously as a world power as it launched a second war for independence against

Great Britain. Wartime mobilization brought to the fore the nation’s industrial shortcomings, prompting a more aggressive strategy for producing the stuff of war.

While the United States no longer depended on imported weapons, the federal armories did not yet manufacture enough guns annually to arm the military for war. To remedy this shortcoming, the federal government developed the Connecticut River Valley as a technology district akin to today’s Silicon Valley. As the federal government cultivated gun production in western New England, it took a different approach with the textile industry. Beginning in 1806, it limited imports of woolen cloth and ready-made clothing from Great Britain. Several years before the war, the government solicited samples from domestic manufacturers; during the war, it raised prices to entice factories to switch from civilian to military production. In 1800, American industry had seemed incapable of supplying an entire army, but in 1815, the United States emerged from a war with a major world power in which its soldiers had fought with American guns in their hands and at least some domestic textiles on their backs. With manufacturing no longer a question,

62 John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Atlantic Books, 1936).

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American policymakers asked how best they could channel federal resources into public and private industries to ensure national prosperity and dominance over the continent.

Chapter Three centers on the financial strategies used by the executive branch to stimulate industrial growth in the context of territorial expansion. It considers as financial stimulus the claims payments that a group of Boston merchant-industrialists received as a result of the Transcontinental Treaty. Allowing recipients to buy out smaller enterprises, these claims payments helped make possible industrial consolidation in the Merrimack

Valley. The chapter also examines the increase in federal funding and bureaucratic oversight in the arms industry at the same time as the United States waged war against

Seminole Indians in Florida and increased its needs for frontier protection. War

Department officials imposed production standards on their contractors and worked around congressional spending limits to ramp up American weapon output. All of these federal financial strategies helped grow and modernize U.S. industry in the late 1810s and 1820s.

The last two chapters explore America’s transition from industrial backwater to rising global producer by focusing on the acquisition of export markets for manufactured goods and on the development of new manufacturing processes. Chapter Four moves outside U.S. borders to focus on commercial diplomacy in Latin America in the 1810s and 1820s. Latin America served as the testing ground for United States commercial might. As Iberia’s colonies transitioned into independent states, the United States began its evolution from diplomatic underdog to bully. This chapter analyzes the role of U.S. diplomats in generating trade policies favorable to American manufactured goods in the context of the Independence Wars. Prior to the establishment of formal diplomacy, U.S.

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consuls cultivated amicable relationships with patriot leaders and facilitated the sale of weapons and other goods; following the war, U.S. agents lobbied aggressively for, and achieved, trade policies that privileged U.S. manufactures. Chapter Five looks ahead to

American superiority in firearms and textiles, which received international admiration by the 1850s. Indeed, the last piece of the industrial puzzle was sustained innovation, which the United States achieved through local initiatives and federal policies. For the arms industry, advance-sum contracts provided the research funds for improvements in gun manufacturing. For the textile industry, the patent system provided incentives for both individual tinkerers and large corporations by creating a federal market for patent rights.

These policies resulted in an industrial revolution that lasted many decades but that nonetheless launched the United States to hegemon status. And it was predicated on a strong executive and a general populace that was eager to take advantage of the state’s national security capitalism.

***

In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, the American economy still existed as much to serve the needs of European markets as it did to secure U.S. national security and self-sufficiency.63 The United States could boast robust agricultural output and a thriving shipping industry and trade, but its markets were glutted with British manufactures and it depended on Europe for military stores. Fast forward twenty or thirty years and it had achieved a military stalemate against one of the most powerful nations in the world, expanded its borders, become self-sufficient in arms production, developed a

63 In some respects, this would remain the case until the Civil War, as the United States’ biggest export was cotton, and England its biggest consumer. Regardless, the United States transitioned out of its status as merely an agricultural supplier.

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textile industry that could compete with European fabrics, and stationed a corps of diplomatic agents in cities all over the world, ready to facilitate the sale of American manufactures overseas. And it had begun with the recognition that independence required clothing and guns.

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CHAPTER ONE: The Political Economy of Guns and Textiles, 1794-1808

The Old World was watching the United States. European travelers and political economists commented on the prospects of the American economy and Britain in particular contemplated the fate of trade with its former colonies.1 In 1794, Henry Wansey, like other curious visitors to the United States, set out to “mark its progress since it began to rank among the nations of the earth.” As a British textile entrepreneur, Wansey toured manufactories and commented on their operations, but what he observed were merely “seeds of manufacturing.”

The factories he saw were certainly not “large establishments,” and likely not permanent. He assured his readers that England need not “fear a rivalship there.” His major conclusion was that

American manufacturing would never pose a threat to British industry, nor even keep pace with population growth. Instead, United States growth and prosperity would be a boon to British manufacturers because Americans, already dependent on British goods, would only increase their consumption of England’s manufactures as their population expanded. In his estimation, it would be “at least a century” before the United States could manufacture for its own population.2

Wansey’s ruminations were at least partly right. Political independence had been achieved, but economic independence had not.3 The United States was still very much reliant on

1Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville,"New Travels in the United States of America, 1788," Trans. Mara Soceanu Vamos and Durand Echeverria (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964).Walter E. Minchinton, Silas Deane and Lord Sheffield's “Observations on American Commerce,” (Coimbra, Portugal: UC Biblioteca Geral 1, 1980), 83.

2 David J. Jeremy, Henry Wansey and His American Journal, 1794 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1970), 40, 62-63.

3 Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1980); Lawrence Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early America Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); John E. Crowley, The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers

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British trade and manufactured goods; indeed, its commercial relationship with Britain largely had resumed its pre-war course.4 The Revolution had prompted the emergence of a political economy that promoted economic diversification in the interest of self-rule, and Americans had rallied to boycott British imports and ramp up household production. Following the War, however, Americans backed off their manufacturing initiatives.5 Many feared that industrialization and militarization would threaten their experiment in republican government, leading to British despotism and over-civilization. Some viewed the European industrial city and standing army with trepidation, even horror. Anxieties aside, however, economic independence and national defense were powerful motivators for the newly independent United States government. War against European nations could happen again at any time, and warfare against

Native Americans was constant. Because of this danger the American nation-state, as well as its economy, needed protection. But how would that protection be achieved?

Wansey arrived in the United States at the dawn of its Industrial Revolution. His tour occurred just as the federal government decided to establish national armories, and soon after the wheels on America’s first successful mechanized cotton-spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode

Island, started turning. As we follow Wansey, we will see what American manufacturing looked like on the ground at the same time as U.S. officials debated protectionism and foreign political economists deemed American industry, in the words of a later observer, “contrary to the natural

of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

4 Minchinton, Silas Deane and Lord Sheffield's “Observations on American Commerce,” 86.

5 For the American economy during the War, see Cathy D. Matson and Peter S. Onuf. A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America (University Press of Kansas, 1990); Margaret Newell, From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Rolla M. Tyron, Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917).

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course of things.”6 America’s military-industrial beginnings were almost imperceptible, to be sure, but within twenty years of its founding, the United States had a military establishment that included not only state militias, but a federal army of professional soldiers, a navy, and a national military academy.7 Yet as federal officials debated how best to create a sound economy and a secure nation-state, early debates about industrialization yielded only mixed results: direct investment for military production created a national arsenal of domestic weapons, while modest protectionism for civilian manufactures failed to establish sustainable industrial growth.8 The majority of manufacturers were left to navigate individual state aid (typically subsidies, lotteries, and local tax breaks), private wealth investment, and the recruitment of foreign talent, even as

American markets were inundated with superior British goods.

When Wansey arrived in the United States, Americans seemed to have “many better sources of national wealth, at present, than manufacture.”9 This was perhaps because policymakers had not yet determined how best to fuse international pressures with domestic production. There was no national policy, even as one of the most pressing concerns facing policymakers was America’s commercial position vis-à-vis the rest of the world. In 1794, policymakers still wondered: should the United States export mostly agricultural produce and to whom should it sell? Should it continue to import manufactures from Europe or develop its own

6 Timothy Pitkin, A Statistical View of the Commerce of the United States of America: Including also an Account of Banks, Manufactures and Internal Trade and Improvements (New Haven: Durrie & Peck: 1835), 474.

7 Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783-1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975), xi-xiii.

8 As Martin Öhman has shown, Tench Coxe articulated a national vision for an American political economy based on self-sufficiency and territorial growth. Öhman, "Perfecting Independence: Tench Coxe and the Political Economy of Western Development," Journal of the Early Republic 31, no. 3 (Fall, 2011): 397-433.

9 Jeremy, Henry Wansey and His American Journal, 127.

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industry? How large should that industry be? In many ways, in fact, American leaders, even as they sought political and military independence, struggled to move beyond what historian John

Crowley describes as their “privileged commercial dependence” on Britain. The majority of merchants were comfortable maintaining the profitable status quo. As the United States slowly transitioned out of its mercantilist relationship with its former colonizer, it had to balance economic nationalism with commercial pressures at home and abroad.10

Wartime experiences informed American policymakers’ strategies for a sound political economy. The Continental army had experienced frequent supply shortages.11 At the time of mobilization, new states were supposed to supply two pairs of clothing for each of its soldiers, but none consistently met its obligations. Additionally, despite boasting a considerable iron output for munitions, Americans were inexperienced at producing them. During the war,

American emissaries acted as covert labor recruiting agents to lure skilled workers from abroad, and Congress encouraged the manufacture of weapons and created a committee to investigate salt petre manufacturing so that gun powder could be made. After the war, both Thomas

Jefferson and John Adams helped English artisans emigrate, while Congress debated paying to bring skilled glassworkers to the United States.12 State governments meanwhile subsidized the production of war materials, and offered bounties and immunities for certain manufactures.13 All of this escaped the attention of Wansey, who, on his first stop in the city of Boston, greatly admired the bridges and theaters there, but dismissed all the manufactories he saw, including the

10 Crowley, The Privileges of Independence.

11 Paul A. C. Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 21.

12 Doron Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 162-3.

13Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution, 52.

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“curious” wool-card manufactory that produced the cards used by “every housewife” in the area.14 He did not realize that he was in the city known for early industrialist Paul Revere, who was at the forefront of a new post-revolutionary logic that emphasized preparedness, even as industrial military production remained almost imperceptible. Revere had begun experimenting with copper rolling during the Revolution and the Continental Congress had commissioned him to learn gun powder manufacture so that he could establish a powder mill in Massachusetts.15

After the war, he shifted to making brass canons for the government.

Following independence, Americans, recognizing that commercial might mattered at the international bargaining table, jealously guarded their economic reputation. They were outraged at the publication of British politician John Lord Sheffield’s 1784 Observations on the

Commerce of the American States. The economic tract denigrated American commerce and industrial prospects and advocated the maintenance of restrictive commercial policies against the former colonies. In response, Tench Coxe, a former delegate for Pennsylvania to the Continental

Congress, corrected Sheffield’s work, which had “disseminated ideas, very unfavorable to the

United States” with a pamphlet of his own.16 Coxe was aware that Sheffield’s writing was extremely influential among members of Parliament. He asserted that what manufactures

14 Jeremy, Henry Wansey and His American Journal, 61.

15 Robert Martello, "Paul Revere's Last Ride: The Road to Rolling Copper," Journal of the Early Republic 20, no.2 (Summer, 2000), 220, 224.

16 Tench Coxe, A brief examination of Lord Sheffield's Observations on the commerce of the United States. In seven numbers. With two supplementary notes on American manufactures (Philadelphia: From the press of M. Carey, 1791), 3.

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Americans produced “were found to be the most successful competitors with those of Great

Britain.”17

Dignity aside, economic patriotism had a practical side. As historian Drew McCoy has convincingly argued, America’s national prosperity depended on the ability to dispose of

American produce abroad, yet the 1790s were fraught with commercial hostilities that threatened this prosperity.18 There were two major strands of thought about how best to secure America’s place in the world via its economy. Alexander Hamilton was one of the staunchest advocates of an industrial society propped up by a strong government and wealthy capitalists. He issued A

Report on Manufactures in 1791 to recommend policies the United States could follow to elevate its economic status above that of a raw goods producer. Hamilton argued that the United States suffered from an inferior position in the international system of commercial exchange that rendered the nation vulnerable to both internal and external threats. The solution, according to

Hamilton and like-minded Federalists, was domestic manufacturing. There were, though, impediments to industrialization. In order to overcome the “scarcity of hand, dearness of labour, and want of capital” that threatened to prevent the United States from developing a robust manufacturing sector, Hamilton proposed a policy of bounties and premiums that would stimulate investment and production.19 The government could, he said, create demand with its economic policies. While Madison argued that higher duties on foreign manufactures would free the United States from economic dependence on England, Hamilton advocated a moderate

17 Tench Coxe, A brief examination of Lord Sheffield's Observations on the commerce of the United States. In seven numbers. With two supplementary notes on American manufactures (Philadelphia: From the press of M. Carey, 1791), 42.

18 Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1980).

19 Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, December 5, 1791 in Harold C. Syrett, ed. The Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Vol. 19 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).

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impost that could be collected in ports and paid back in bounties to reward certain economic activity.20 Hamilton’s mercantile and British sympathies prevented his sponsorship of burdensome tariffs, but like most Federalists, he believed federal stimulus coupled with the national development of a strong militia was the nation’s best protection of its independence.21

Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, championed a national economy propelled by virtuous yeoman farmers. While he understood that the country’s independence could be threatened by insufficient economic opportunities or an inadequate system of defense, he believed a strong military establishment and large-scale manufacturing threatened, rather than secured, independence. For Jeffersonians, the best economy for a republican society was one based on highly developed agriculture and the ability to dispose of produce in international markets. They were not, though, wholly opposed to manufacturing. Additionally, while many

Jeffersonians staunchly opposed the expansion of naval and military capabilities, Jefferson greatly admired French arms-making, and during his tenure as ambassador to France wrote home to fellow federal officials about the virtues of arms manufacturing.22 Textile manufacturing, too,

20 William Appleman Williams, “The Age of Mercantilism: An Interpretation of the American Political Economy, 1763 to 1828,” The William and Mary Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Oct., 1958), 430. Scholars have debated the extent to which Hamilton’s policies were intended to stimulate manufacturing. For an overview of this discussion, see Andrew Shankman, "A New Thing on Earth": Alexander Hamilton, Pro-Manufacturing Republicans, and the Democratization of American Political Economy,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Autumn, 2003), 326; John R. Nelson argues that Hamilton was not truly pro-manufacturing because he failed to endorse protective tariffs, while Drew McCoy posited that Hamilton’s support of bounties and premiums demonstrated his support for industry. John R. Nelson, "Alexander Hamilton and American Manufacturing: A Reexamination." The Journal of American History 65, no. 4 (1979): 971-995; Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1980). Hamilton’s plan for bounties did not receive Congressional support, but most of his tariff recommendations were implemented in the early 1790s.They were not highly protectionist because Hamilton did not want to destroy the tax base by decreasing imports. Douglas A. Irwin, "The Aftermath of Hamilton's ‘Report on Manufactures’," Journal of Economic History 64 (2004): 800-821.

21 Hamilton believed the military should be under national authority. Alexander Hamilton, “Concerning the Militia,” The Federalist No. 29, Independent Journal, January 9, 1788.

22 Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3-4. Andrew Fagal’s research suggests that the Jeffersonian political economy was indeed responsible for the development of U.S. war-making capabilities. Andrew Fagal, “The Political Economy of War in the Early American Republic, 1774-1821,” (Ph.D. diss., Binghamton University: State University of New York, 2013).

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had its virtues. The Jeffersonian political economy depended on agriculture, but its full realization also included the manufacture of coarse cloths and other homespun goods.23 The

Revolutionary experience had illustrated to Jeffersonians that these types of manufacturers were part of the republican vision so long as American wares were “useful,” in contrast to the fripperies produced in European factories.24 Small-scale manufacturing, in fact, separated the developed agrarian society from the undeveloped one. It was the natural extension of a successful agrarian republic and required no corrupting government intervention. Any manufacturing that did develop should do so naturally, but because Jeffersonian political economy depended on foreign consumers, federal action sometimes became necessary to maintain commercial exchange. As president, Jefferson, for example, decided to wage war against the Barbary States in the early 1800s, rather than pay tribute to maintain American trade in the Mediterranean.25 Opposition to naval build-up and government intervention often fell apart in the face of threats to commerce.26

Additionally, many manufacturers wanted government intervention. Following the

Revolution, mechanics saw themselves as vital to national security. They had produced goods for a colonial economy cut off from its industrial supplier; their wares provided material sustenance for independence. Once the war ended, however, British goods glutted American markets and mechanics wondered what the nation’s economic fate would be. They argued that a production-

23McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 211.

24McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 65.

25 Robert J. Allison, Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslin World, 1776-1815 (University of Chicago Press, 1995). See chapter 1 for an overview of American policy toward the Muslim world following American independence.

26McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 174.

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centered economy was best.27 Scholars have shown how these workers channeled their economic usefulness into a political identity and ideology.28 This political identity manifested itself into support for pro-manufacturing policies. In the years immediately following independence, most manufacturing-minded citizens supported Federalist policies that championed an activist state. The ratification of the Constitution represented a boon to manufacturing in its consolidation of federal power.29 But because manufacturers sought, as historian Andrew Shankman has demonstrated, economic equality alongside development, after

1800, they largely turned to Democratic-Republicanism. The democratization of both politics and banking opportunities encouraged manufacturers to see themselves as the urban versions of

Jefferson’s yeoman farmers. A dramatic increase in the number of state-chartered banks equalized access to banking and credit, which enabled small producers to experience greater financial autonomy. Many came to reject the tenets of a Hamiltonian system of development whose oppressive state seemed to foster inequality.30 Yet, in general, most manufacturers still wanted government-sponsored internal improvements and protective tariffs. And so, regardless of which political ticket mechanics voted, many desired an activist state that intervened in the economy to protect American manufactures.

27 Lawrence A. Peskin, "From Protection to Encouragement: Manufacturing and Mercantilism in New York City's Public Sphere, 1783-1795," Journal of the Early Republic 18, no. 4 (1998), 590.

28 Sean Wilentz argues that mechanics developed a unique social and political ideology, fusing trade pride, Revolutionary ideology, and egalitarianism into what he calls “artisan republicanism.” This ideology grew out of, and encouraged, common artisan political and social behaviors. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic; New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 13. See also Howard B. Rock and Paul A. Gilje, and Robert Asher, eds. American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750-1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) and Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York: New York University Press, 1979).

29 Peskin, "From Protection to Encouragement,” 599.

30Shankman, "A New Thing on Earth,” 340-1.

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Manufacturers of all stripes petitioned Congress for various forms of protection and support, but with mixed results. The first federal tariff for which a group of merchants and manufacturers petitioned in 1789, and received, was proof of the importance of manufacturing to the national agenda, as was the 1794 tariff, which offered support for boots, shoes, and slippers, millinery, iron manufactures, stones and marble, carpets, leather, carriages, paper, medicines, cotton and linen manufactures, as well as gold, silver, tobacco, and a variety of foodstuffs.31

Cordage manufacturers requested and received support, despite their relative success, and because the utility of ropes, especially for shipping, was not a hard sell, the Committee on

Commerce and Manufacturers supported a drawback for exporters of cordage, lines, twine, and pack-thread manufactured within the United States.32 Congress even granted the request of John

F. Amelung, a glass manufacturer from Frederick County, Maryland, who had petitioned for a loan from the government because of financial losses he had experienced from his manufactory.

Amelung’s manufactory was deemed “of great consequence and of great utility to the union,” and Congress authorized the Secretary of Treasury to make him a loan of $8,000.33

There were limits, though, to what the federal government would do for its manufacturers. Seven years after Amelung was granted his loan, William Crowley Jordan of

Philadelphia requested public capital from Congress to help him establish a silk manufactory, and was subsequently denied. That same year, the proprietors of a glass manufactory in Boston, as well as a group of “sundry manufacturers of hats,” petitioned the Committee of Commerce

31 American State Papers, “Increase of Duties,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, April, 1794, 3rd Congress, 1st Session, no. 65, 276-7; The federal tariff did much more to protect certain trades than the New York state tariff that it replaced. Peskin, "From Protection to Encouragement,” 604.

32 “Drawback on Cordage,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, February 7, 1793, American State Papers, Finance: 1, 2nd Congress, 2nd Session, No. 48, 202.

33 “Loan to John F. Amelung,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, June 2, 1790, American State Papers, Finance: 1, 1st Congress, 2nd Session, No. 14, 62.

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and Manufactures for additional duties, which were, in the words of the Committee, “of course disagreed to.” The Committee maintained that the real problem was the high cost of labor, which

“time only could cure.”34 After initial duties were established, Congress was disinclined to increase tariffs in favor of manufactures, not because manufactures were unimportant to economic security, but because support for them had to be balanced among a host of economic factors.35

The re-export trade comprised half of America’s commerce and the United States still had to consider its relationship with Britain. The values varied each year, but Britain generally absorbed around twenty to twenty five percent of America’s produce following independence and the provisioning of Britain’s colonies in the West Indies was particularly important for

American merchants and suppliers of foodstuffs and naval stores.36 Napoleonic warfare, however, threatened the safety of U.S. commercial voyages, and British wartime trade regulations threatened their legality with an expanded definition of “contraband,” meant to justify the seizure of France-bound ships. At issue was the sanctity of the United States’ status as a neutral provider. American policymakers recognized that diplomatic negotiations with Britain were of paramount importance, but disagreed over the substance of these negotiations. James

Madison, serving Virginia in the House of Representatives, believed that the United States should inflict commercial hardship on Britain. His argument that Britain needed American raw

34“Encouragement to Manufacturers,” January 9, 1797, House of Representatives, 4th Congress, 2nd Session, Annals of Congress: 1825-6.

35 Indeed, the first congressional argument for the unconstitutionality of tariffs to promote manufacturing interests came from Massachusetts representative Ezekial Whitman, which illustrates the diversity of commercial interests even within a state that would come to develop substantial industry. Daniel Peart, "Looking Beyond Parties and Elections: The Making of United States Tariff Policy during the Early 1820s,” Journal of the Early Republic 33, no. 1 (2013): 106, f.n. 27.

36 Table Ee533-550 - Exports, by country of destination: 1790–2001, in Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, Historical Statistics of the United States. Edited by Susan B. Carter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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materials and markets, while the United States could easily do without British manufactures, however, rested more on moral sentiment than on economic reality. He and other Jeffersonian

Republicans advocated a complete redirection of American trade from Britain to France.

Federalist merchants and politicians, on the other hand, were loath to give up trade with Britain and instead requested defense measures that included raising an army of 20,000 men in order to convince Britain to change its policies. Neither plan came to pass. The treaty brokered in 1794 by diplomat John Jay avoided war with Britain and offered Britain most-favored nation status.

While it offended much of America’s “national self-esteem,” according to historians Stanley

Elkins and Eric McKitrick, its ratification marked a diplomatic success for a new nation struggling to improve its international commercial viability.37 The treaty secured Britain’s promise to compensate American merchants for maritime losses and, although the United States agreed to adhere to Britain’s anti-French blockades, U.S. maritime commerce improved as a result of Jay’s negotiations.38

Although the Jay Treaty brought to the fore the issue of how best to determine and negotiate the composition of the United States’ commercial offerings, as well as their recipients, it had not resolved it. When Jay’s Treaty was ratified by Congress in 1796, Britain earned most favored nation status, which meant that the United States could not levy excessively burdensome duties on British imports.39 Tariffs would not and could not be the government’s primary means of industrial encouragement. Instead, policymakers would encourage the immigration of foreign mechanics and the importation of foreign machines, and rely on rhetoric and state aid to do the

37 Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, Age of Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 375-389.

38 For negotiations and controversies surrounding the Jay Treaty, see Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, chapter 9.

39 Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 175.

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rest. It was clear that the federal government valued manufacturing, but domestic and international considerations left military production the sole recipient of significant federal support. Mixed messages made a rocky start to American industrialization.

Clothing for Citizens

The textile industry struggled to take off in the face of policy inconsistency. Even as public figures extoled the virtues of American clothing they failed to rally around a cohesive industrial plan. While policymakers encouraged immigration and permitted technological piracy, as they had during the Revolution, they largely left civilian manufacturers to their own devices.

The first substantive tariff would not be raised until 1816 and individual state subsidies failed to make textile manufacturing profitable for all but a handful of manufacturers.40 In the interim, textile factories opened and closed.41 There were, though, some moderate success stories. Both

Massachusetts’ Beverly Cotton Manufactory, which employed more spinning machines than any other firm in the country, and Rhode Island’s Almy, Brown, and Slater, which experimented successfully with the water frame, have been credited as the first successful textile mill in the

United States. Only the latter, though, survived beyond the first decade of the nineteenth century.42 Both undertakings were backed by wealthy merchants, but the Rhode Island firm was

40 Economists have debated the extent to which antebellum tariffs were responsible for the competitiveness of American textiles. C. Knick Harley contended that tariffs were necessary, while Peter Temin and Douglas A. Irwin argued that opposite. C. Knick Harley, "International Competitiveness of the Antebellum American Cotton Textile Industry," Journal of Economic History 52, no. 3 (1992): 559-584; Douglas A. Irwin and Peter Temin. "The Antebellum Tariff on Cotton Textiles Revisited," The Journal of Economic History 61, no. 03 (2001): 777-798.

41 The majority of respondents in the 1820 manufacturing census reported that their factories commenced operation after 1807. U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, RG279, Washington: National Archives, 1944.

42Historians have debated whether the first successful textile mill was in Massachusetts, or Rhode Island, or the Mid-Atlantic. The genealogy of the debate goes back to Robert S. Rantoul, “The First Cotton Mill in America,” Historical Collections of the Essex Institute, vol. xxxiii (Salem, MA: Salem Press, 1898); Lovett, "The Beverly Cotton Manufactory,” 218-242; Caroline Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture, a Study in Industrial

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less ambitious, employing fewer machines and producing mostly cotton yarn and thread for household weavers and merchants who coordinated outwork. It also benefitted from the United

States’ lax immigration policy and encouragement of technological piracy, the first meaningful steps toward a national industrial policy. In general, though, inadequate state and federal policies prevented the majority of textile manufacturers from capturing the domestic market until commercial warfare against Britain in 1806 halted foreign imports.

It was not that textiles were not important. Even if military efficacy did not depend on textiles, the republican experiment did. Commercial dependence of all kinds was anathema to republican success. Textiles – yarn, thread, broad cloths and eventually ready-made clothing were visible forms of dependence. President George Washington recognized this when he delivered his annual speech to Congress in 1790 dressed in a suit of broadcloth made at a woolens factory in Hartford, Connecticut to show his support of American manufactures.43 As historian Michael Zakim has shown, textile production was intrinsically connected with national ideas about the productive citizen. Americans’ ability to manufacture the cotton, wool, and linen for clothing made evident the virtuosity of their struggle for independence.44 A national ideology that supported textile production -- first at home and then in the factory -- helped reconcile the transition from republican agrarianism to industrial nation-state. Just as the armed citizen who was ready to protect his nation was imbued with a republican morality, so too was the citizen who, if she did not make her own, purchased American-made thread, yarn, and cloth.

Beginnings (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 19; Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 51.

43 Pitkin, A Statistical View of the Commerce of the United States of America, 469.

44 Michael Zakim, "Sartorial Ideologies: From Homespun to Ready-Made," The American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1554.

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Yet, morality was one thing, reality was another. Although the nation’s first tariffs favored textile trades, perhaps because textiles, and their evolution into clothing, were some of the most visible and frequently consumed manufactures, they paled in comparison to tariffs forty years later and did little to help budding industry.45 As we have seen, the 1790s created a sort of policy conundrum: Americans sought independence, but their hands were tied by Jay’s Treaty and by merchants’ reliance on foreign markets.

Policy uncertainty was in fact why so much of what Wansey observed were “seeds of manufacturing.” Heading northwest out of Boston, Wansey stopped in Waltham, “a straggling village.”46 Other than the production of some very rough homespun kersey, nothing belied the fact that the town would become a textile center and certainly not that it would become home to the nation’s first integrated textile factory system twenty years later. Historians have tended to characterize the success of the Waltham-Lowell system – the nation’s first large-scale, integrated production process -- in the 1810s and 1820s as the result of innovative businessmen and large sums of merchant capital. Yet in 1789 some of the same men associated with Waltham invested their wealth from trade in textiles and failed. What was the difference? In 1789 the

Massachusetts Legislature granted a group of wealthy merchants, including Israel Thorndike,

George Cabot, and Joseph Lee, a parcel of land and the incorporation of their textile manufactory. Following incorporation, the state agreed to provide $4,000 in aid, so long as the company produced within seven years at least 50,000 yards of cotton and linen cloth that had theretofore been imported. In 1798, the original proprietors sold the factory and within ten years

45 Leather was also favored for similar reasons. Peskin, "From Protection to Encouragement,” 604.

46 Jeremy, Henry Wansey and His American Journal, 63.

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the company ceased all operations.47 Almost twenty years later, however, the Boston

Manufactory Company paid its first dividend of $170 per share, and Israel Thorndike and his son, Israel Thorndike, Jr., one of the company’s directors, each made $3,400. The BMC had benefitted from war-time consumer demand and a post-war tariff tailored to their business needs.48 These dividend payouts increased, and were issued twice annually, as the company grew and received an influx of federal capital in the early 1820s.49 The difference between the 1790s and the 1820s was the level of aid. In 1790, the stakeholders of Beverly Cotton Manufactory, who received state aid to produce coarse cloth, sought federal patronage and an additional impost on cotton imports. They did not receive it.50

As Wansey toured New England, he saw the limits of individual state aid. From

Waltham, he traveled west and stopped in Worcester to dine on beef and veal down the street from what had been the Worcester Cotton Manufactory. Three years earlier its promoters announced in a Massachusetts newspaper that the factory had produced its first piece of corduroy. Eighteen of Worcester’s leading men invested in the mill that was built on a small stream parallel to Main Street. Account records indicate that they employed local men and women in weaving the company’s menswear fabrics and paid city residents for boarding female workers. James Blake, for example, was paid for picking cotton, making candlesticks and loom

47 Lovett, "The Beverly Cotton Manufactory,” 219, 230-235.

48 October 7, 1817, Stockholders’ Records, Volume 1, page 42, Boston Manufacturing Co. Collection. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

49 These forms of federal support will be discussed in chapter 3.

50 Lovett, "The Beverly Cotton Manufactory,” 229-331.

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irons, and “boarding sundry girls.”51 The proprietors of the company were optimistic, extoling the superiority of their fabrics over imports and purchasing a large amount of pine boards in

January of 1790, indicating an expansion of factory size.52 Yet, a year later, hundreds of yards of fustians and jeans were returned to the company unsold and the majority of shareholders divested themselves of interest. At the time business ceased, there remained £288 worth of fustians and jeans and £37 worth of linen yarn, which were distributed among shareholders.53 Nathan Patch, the sole remaining proprietor, petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for aid in continuing the business, arguing that “an encouragement to American Manufactures is of great importance to the welfare of this community” and that his manufactory would “preclude the necessity of many

Importations.”54 On February 20, 1792, Patch was granted tax exemption for ten years, but that status mattered little when the factory was sold and converted into a store soon after.

Alexander Hamilton’s celebration of the “publick spirit” of Massachusetts in regards to manufacturing belie the fact that the failures of the Beverly Cotton Manufactory and the

Worcester Cotton Manufactory were not uncommon.55 State tax breaks did little to make cloth production profitable. When Wansey traveled south to Hartford, Connecticut, he found a woolen

51 Entries, January and March, 1790. Journal Accounts 1789-1791, Worcester Cotton Manufactory, Business Records of Various New England and New York textile firms, 1710-1938, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

52Entry, January, 1790. Journal Accounts 1789-1791, Worcester Cotton Manufactory, Business Records of Various New England and New York textile firms, 1710-1938, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

53 Entry November, 1791, Journal Accounts 1789-1791, Worcester Cotton Manufactory, Business Records of Various New England and New York textile firms, 1710-1938, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School. For the advertisement, see William R. Bagnall, The Textile Industries of the United States (Riverside, CA: Riverside Press, 1893), 129.

54 Bagnall, The Textile Industries of the United States, 130.

55 Alexander Hamilton, Arthur H. Cole, and Edwin Francis Gay, Industrial and Commercial Correspondence of Alexander Hamilton: Anticipating His Report on Manufactures (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), 78.

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manufactory, established six years prior, “very much in decay.”56 This was the factory of

Jeremiah Wadsworth, who had provided the cloth for Washington’s Congressional-speech suit.

Wadsworth advertised the high quality of his mill’s products, marketing its goods at the same prices as British ones. Consumers apparently disagreed and the company disposed its goods at auction and shut down within several years.57 Pretensions to high quality aside, the market was inhospitable to American-made cloths and state governments could do little to remedy this. In fact, the limits of state governments were painfully apparent to the small start-ups Wansey observed throughout New England.58 State governments had the power to grant corporate charters, oversee internal improvements, issue lotteries to raise money for new business ventures, and award tax exemptions on company profits. But Congress alone had the authority to regulate trade among states and with foreign nations, which was necessary to execute national trade policies to sell American-made manufactured goods profitably in domestic markets.59 In the words of Elisha Colt, the manager of the Hartford Woolen Factory, “the Legislature of the

United States alone are competent to this business [of encouragement] – the separate States having neither the authority or funds for the purpose”60 Like the Worcester Cotton Manufactory,

Hartford Woolen Factory, too, had received state aid: “a trifling bounty the first year on

56 Jeremy, Henry Wansey and His American Journal, 68.

57 Bagnall, The Textile Industries of the United States, 105-8.

58 Matson and Onuf, A Union of Interests, 160.

59 Paul A. Gilje, "The Rise of Capitalism in the Early Republic," Journal of the Early Republic 16, no. 2 (1996): 165; For manufacturers’ disappointments with individual state encouragement, see Matson and Onuf, A Union of Interests, 160. For the failures of individual states in carrying out internal improvement projects, see John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 2001).

60 Elisha Colt to John Chester, August 20, 1791, in Alexander Hamilton, Arthur H. Cole, and Edwin Francis Gay, Industrial and Commercial Correspondence of Alexander Hamilton: Anticipating His Report on Manufactures (Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), 11.

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spinning,” as well as a two-year exemption from a poll tax on their workmen and workshops.

Textile factories in New Haven, Farmington, and Killingly, Connecticut received the same benefits, but these were short-lived. The state legislature had also issued the Hartford Company a lottery to raise £1,000 for procuring new machinery to extend the factory’s business. The directors correctly predicted that the $3,000 they would raise still would not be enough because their want of capital was so great.61

One early success story, however, had escaped the attention of Wansey. Forty miles down the Blackstone Valley from the Worcester Cotton Manufactory, just as the company paid out its shareholders in leftover linen yarn and “goods on hand,” the waterwheel on Samuel

Slater’s mill first starting turning.62 Often heralded as the birthplace of the American Industrial

Revolution, and Samuel Slater as the father of the factory system born there, it was home to the first fully mechanized cotton-spinning mill in the United States. Slater’s water-powered textile mill, funded by Rhode Island merchants William Almy and Smith and Obadiah Brown, began production in 1790 and three years later was profitable enough to justify expansion.63 Slater’s industrial revolution was not the standard experience of the majority of the early manufacturing attempts that Wansey observed, but perhaps Wansey would have reconsidered his depiction of

U.S. manufacturing had he ventured to Rhode Island.64

61 Peter Colt to John Chester, July 21, 1791, in Alexander Hamilton, Arthur H. Cole, and Edwin Francis Gay, Industrial and Commercial Correspondence of Alexander Hamilton: Anticipating His Report on Manufactures (Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), 5-6.

62 August 1794 entry, Journal Accounts 1789-1791, Worcester Cotton Manufactory, Business Records of Various New England and New York textile firms, 1710-1938, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Mass.

63 Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826- 1860 (Columbia University Press, 1981), 15-17.

64 Nor did Slater’s mill represent the large-scale industry that would eventually characterize American manufacturing.

45

The Rhode Island firm of Almy, Brown, and Slater called into being the Blackstone River

Valley as the first manufacturing zone in the United States. It was home to small-scale spinners and weavers who, before the 1790s, mostly tinkered with machines, rather than making major changes in productive capacities. That changed with the immigration of Samuel Slater and soon the partnership with Almy and Brown spawned other similar textile ventures. While these mills would later be eclipsed by the factory system of eastern Massachusetts, their original business model of private-wealth financing and limited production -- mostly yarn -- proved modestly successful.65

Quaker merchant Moses Brown became interested in manufacturing and formed a partnership with William Almy and Smith Brown. Realizing that textile manufacturing would not be profitable unless they mechanized production, they acquired machines modeled after

Richard Arkwright’s famous water frame, but lacked the ability to assemble the components in their proper static and dynamic interrelationships. Enter Samuel Slater, who was working as a factory manager in Derbyshire, England when he was lured by the promise of financial remuneration for technical improvements to the United States. Once the United States ratified the

Constitution and political stability seemed secure, employment in the new nation offered a viable alternative to manufacturing opportunities in Britain. Even as British statesmen and manufacturers disdained U.S. manufacturing attempts, they jealously guarded their technology and their workers.66 British attempts to quarantine their manufacturing processes, however, were no match for an American public-private partnership that encouraged the importation of human and technological capital. In 1790, Congress debated subsidizing technological importation, but

65 Slater Family Business Records, Slater, Almy, and Brown, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

66 Jeremy, Henry Wansey and His American Journal, 83.

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decided that immigration offered the best solution for transferring technology, especially as U.S. citizens lacked the technical know-how to operate machines that had been developed under a foreign system of measuring and counting.67 Under the Naturalization Act of 1790, the nation opened its arms to free white immigrants of “good character,” while manufacturing advocates traveled overseas to encourage British artisans and mechanics to emigrate.68 Slater was emblematic of the artisan-immigrant who embarked on new manufacturing ventures in the

United States in the context of public and private support for foreign mechanical skill. Political support fused with private business desires to expand industrial capacities via immigration.

Slater left England in 1789 and while working in New York attracted the attention of Moses

Brown. Slater promised he could successfully install spinning machinery for the firm and they offered him all of the company’s profits for a six-month trial period.69 The men formed a business arrangement by which Almy and Brown provided capital and Slater oversaw production.70

As a result of the United States’ open immigration policies, Slater’s expertise infused the

Blackstone Valley with the technological knowledge necessary to launch a manufacturing system that would give the United States an alternative to importing from its former colonizer.71

He introduced and improved mechanized spinning in a region hitherto dependent on hand technologies. Slater implemented a version of Richard Arkwright’s water frame, which enabled

67 Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets,” 104; David J. Jeremy, Transatlantic Industrial Revolution: The Diffusion of Textile Technologies between Britain and America, 1790-1830s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 51.

68 Naturalization Act of 1790, Chapter 2, Statute II, March 1, 1790.

69 Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 50; Jeremy, Transatlantic Industrial Revolution, 79.

70Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 50-51.

71 Jeremy, Transatlantic Industrial Revolution, 101.

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the firm to use the currents of the Blackstone to make yarn more quickly and more cheaply. It gave it an edge over companies like Worcester Cotton Manufactory that still used pre-Arkwright spinning machines. Variations of Arkwright’s machine, which employed water power to turn cotton into yarn, had been constructed without success throughout the Northeast. Once installed, the machine reduced the amount of labor needed to spin yarn. In 1791, the firm employed twenty three weavers to transform the thread and yarn into cloth. Almy and Brown also constructed a dye house, which further distinguished the firm from earlier forms of textile manufacturing because it integrated additional steps of the production process within one firm. It required the importation of foreign dyestuffs, such as fustick and logwood from South

America.72 Yet for all its appearances of modernity, it was still a relatively small partnership that relied on putting out to household producers and rarely operated at full capacity.73 Slater’s imported technology made possible the success of the first textile spinning factory in the country, but it alone was not enough to create industrial growth on a regional scale. Slater’s factory model was not the model that would symbolize American industrialization. Within thirty years of its founding, it would be eclipsed by the Waltham-Lowell system.

Almy and Brown’s marginal success suggests American cotton manufacturing would yet require the stimulus provided by war-time embargoes on British goods. Demand for Almy and

Brown’s products was mixed. Imported cloth was still favored, but domestic cotton yarn had more success. Shopkeepers in Baltimore and Salem reported glowingly of good sales and a desire to sell more; others offered the opposite reaction.74 In order to sell cloth, the firm had to

72 Daybook entry, January 1, 1790, Volume 21, Almy and Brown Records, Mss29, Rhode Island Historical Society.

73Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 57-8.

74 William Brown to Almy and Brown, January 22, 1801; Josiah Townsend to Almy and Brown, March 2, 1801; E. Savage to Almy and Brown, March 10, 1801; A and A Smith to Almy and Brown, April 2 1801, Unbound Papers 1801-1811, Almy and Brown Records, Mss29, Rhode Island Historical Society.

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undersell household producers and meet the prices of British imports, a practice which sharply limited profits.75 A. and A. Smith of Wickford, Rhode Island reported that they could no longer sell the firm’s cotton goods because the profit was so small, while another merchant found the

“selling of yarns attended more trouble with greater interruption than [he] expected.”76 When merchants declined to offload Almy and Brown’s products, the firm simply found other sellers.

Their yarn usually found ready customers among women who engaged in household weaving, either for their own families or for sale outside the home, but this demand only went so far.77

One merchant in Poughkeepsie, New York informed Almy and Brown that he had been applied to by a factory manager in Connecticut to dispose of his yarn, but would continue selling for the

Rhode Island firm because he preferred to do business with manufacturers who would allow him to sell at the lowest prices and still provide commission.78 Their customers were savvy; they expected that when the price of cotton fell, the price of yarn should fall, too, regardless of a firm’s other economic considerations.79 Almy and Brown could sell low because they, unlike others, had sufficient wealth to manage their business. Also, the firm was a small partnership,

75 Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 61.

76 A and A Smith to Almy and Brown, April 2 1801; Unsigned letter to Almy and Brown, 1801, Unbound Papers 1801-1811, Almy and Brown Records, Mss29, Rhode Island Historical Society.

77 William Brown to Almy and Brown, January 22, 1801, Unbound Papers 1801-1811, Almy and Brown Records, Mss29, Rhode Island Historical Society; For women’s work in textiles, see Thomas Dublin, "Women's Work and the Family Economy: Textiles and Palm Leaf Hat Making in New England, 1830-1850," Toqueville Review 5 (Fall and Winter 1983): 297-316; and Thomas Dublin, "Women and Outwork in a Nineteenth Century New England Town: Fitzwilliam,” in Jonathan Prude and Steven Hahn, eds., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: 1985), 51-70.

78 Unsigned letter from Poughkeepsie to Almy and Brown, 1801, Unbound Papers 1801-1811, Almy and Brown Records, Mss29, Rhode Island Historical Society.

79 William Brown to Almy and Brown, March 12, 1801, Unbound Papers 1801-1811, Almy and Brown Records, Mss29, Rhode Island Historical Society.

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unbounded by profit-maximizing considerations for shareholder payouts. For these reasons, it survived into the nineteenth century, while firms like those at Worcester and Beverly failed.

Before the Embargo of 1807, there were only fifteen textile mills in the country, half of which were located along the Blackstone River and owned by Almy, Brown, and Slater; they mostly produced cotton yarn.80 Of the sixteen mills in operation in Rhode Island at the time the manufacturing census of 1810 was taken, two-thirds had started since the United States enacted prohibitive importation policies. One-fifth of all spindles in the United States were operated by one of Slater’s factories.81 During the 1807 trade embargo against Britain, G.K. Pitman, agent of the Providence Manufacturing Company, recognized that if normal trade with Great Britain resumed, British merchants would flood the market with cheaper factory goods, making it difficult once again for American manufacturers to compete.82 During the 1780s and 1790s, profitable textile production was not yet feasible for the very reason Pitman laid out. The domestic market could only absorb so much yarn, and Almy, Brown and Slater had successfully captured this market. Before the Embargo, wealthy capitalists like Thorndike, who had lofty revenue expectations, preferred international trade, while aspiring upstarts could not make a living from a cotton mill. And so for the better part of two decades, Almy and Brown, along with a handful of others, were the sum total of the American textile industry. While Almy and Brown still operated at full capacity thirty years after the firm’s founding, it would not be the face of

80Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 89.

81 Worcester Historical Society, Landscape of Industry: An Industrial History of the Blackstone Valley (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2009), 50.

82 Statistics of Manufacturing of Cotton in Rhode Island in the year 1809, November, 8 1809 , Box 1, Folder 1, Correspondence 1805-1819, Zachariah Allen Papers, Ms254, Rhode Island Historical Society.

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industry for long.83 The War of 1812 would demonstrate to policymakers that clothing and blankets were military necessities.84 Textile manufacturing was an economic imperative and it would, in time, receive more effective federal support. When it did, new competitors, namely along the Merrimack Valley, would expand and surpass the Blackstone Valley’s Rhode Island

System.

Before geopolitical realities created manufacturing opportunities and forced a more coherent industrial policy on the federal government, the burden was on manufacturers to promote their own importance. Beginning with the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufacturers and the Useful Arts, merchants and mechanics organized societies in cities from Boston to Baltimore to promote their usefulness to society. They were part voluntary associations, part industrial corporations that brought together wealthy merchants, skilled workers and interested politicians.85 While these societies produced more verbiage and fewer goods, they did much to advertise the values of manufacturing. The Providence Association of

Mechanics and Manufacturers, for example, endorsed the ratification of the Constitution, recognizing that a strong federal was necessary for trade protectionism, and pledged to supply

Congress with information on manufacturing. Its members also urged manufacturers in other cities to found similar societies.86 The most well-know of these manufacturing societies was the

Society to Establish Useful Manufacture in Paterson, New Jersey. When Wansey visited

83 Return of North Providence, Pawtucket, U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Massachusetts and Rhode Island, RG279 (Washington: National Archives, 1944), roll 2.

84 Statistician and statesman Timothy Pitkin lamented, in his compilation of American economic statistics that, “Notwithstanding the short period of the war [of 1812] the American armies suffered severely for the want of blankets and other necessary clothing.” Pitkin, A Statistical View of the Commerce of the United States of America, 408.

85 Lawrence Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution, 119, 98.

86 Gary J. Kornblith, “’Cementing the Mechanic Interest’: Origins of the Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers," Journal of the Early Republic 8, no. 4 (Winter, 1988), 361-362, 372.

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Newark, New Jersey, he dismissively mentioned the undertaking as another example of why

America should stick to agriculture rather than industry.87 It was the brain child of Tench Coxe, a leading political figure in Pennsylvania who had assisted Hamilton in writing the Report on

Manufactures. Together with Hamilton, Coxe enlisted wealthy New York investors to establish an industrial center with mills for spinning cotton. The company received preferential tax treatment and was funded with federal bonds, but it failed. The backlash against public-private partnership did not spell the end of manufacturing societies, though, or the end of public support.

The Providence Association, for example, would continue to influence legislation through the

Civil War.

These societies had gotten the message out: manufacturing was important for the new nation. In the early republican United States, manufactures of all kinds enjoyed political support.

A producerist ethos that had developed during the Revolution meant that it mattered politically whether Americans or foreigners clothed the new nation. This moral construction of domestic manufacturing persisted in varying forms through the Civil War, when seamstresses and tailors would protest the contract-purchasing of military uniforms from “non-producers.”88 In the nation’s first decades, though, the issue was not yet military uniforms, but general sustainability.

Even those who favored an agrarian economy recognized the virtues of productive capabilities.

James Madison, for example, in his plan for negotiating with Britain, advocated the exclusion of

British manufacturers in favor of the development of cottage industry. And even opponents to

Hamilton’s plans for manufacturing and militarization understood that the federal government could help promote economic development. Secretary of Treasury Albert Gallatin, for example,

87 Jeremy, Henry Wansey and His American Journal, 127.

88 Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 73.

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believed a national bank would enable the federal government to appropriate money expressly geared toward development projects and that the United States should lend money to merchants to help them compete effectively against the British in foreign markets.89 Federalists and

Jeffersonian Republicans alike recognized that both national security and aspiring manufacturers

-- their political constituents -- depended on federal support. Although the nation’s founders had different opinions on how economic equilibrium could be achieved, they all recognized that political independence, military security, and economic development were intricately linked.90

Yet, for all the political rhetoric championing the small producer, the federal government would channel most of its resources towards the arms industry and offer little financial support to textiles until the tariff of 1816.

Guns for Soldiers

After leaving Worcester, Wansey headed to western Massachusetts where he visited

Springfield, too soon to see much more than a paper mill and some printing presses. He remarked on the “handsome” arsenal and powder magazine, but wasted no time speculating about arms manufacture. He admired the Connecticut River, “a charming river, winding, like the

Thames, through a fruit valley.”91 Unbeknownst to Wansey, this river would power the

American arms industry.

89 Rozann Rothman, “Political Method in the Federal System: Albert Gallatin's Contribution,” Publius, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter, 1972), 132-3.

90 Industry, security, and the economy seemed especially connected as, for example, the United States sold high- quality, American-made warships to Algiers in order to maintain peace and commerce in the Mediterranean. Hannah Farber, “Millions for Credit: Peace with Algiers and the Establishment of America’s Commercial Reputation Overseas, 1795-96,” Journal of the Early Republic 34, no.2 (Summer 2014): 216.

91 Jeremy, Henry Wansey and His American Journal, 65.

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Soon after the Constitution was ratified, President George Washington warned Congress that they should not overlook the possibility of war. It could happen at any moment with nations

“most concerned in active commerce with this country.” 92 Calls for manufacturing centered on economic security, but there was a more tangible aspect to security that went beyond the physicality of American-made cloths and trinkets. Protection against threats from outside, and from within, was of paramount importance as the United States established itself as an independent nation.93 The solution was guns. The armed citizen would give the early national

United States a decided advantage over despotic European nations that did not trust their own civilians with guns. Guns were in many ways a moral imperative for citizens of the early republic. Republican thought dictated that society could only be maintained by citizens who were willing to protect it and, regardless of their opinions of a standing army, American officials believed in the interrelationship between guns, individual character and national security.

Politician and diplomat Joel Barlow argued that the American experiment depended on the fluidity between soldier and citizen, who should be “obliged” to bear arms. Thomas Jefferson believed the gun should be one’s “constant companion.” And George Washington recognized that the surest way to preserve peace was to be prepared -- with arms -- for war.94 Output from two federal armories, supplemented with contract arms, would supply the new nation with the

92 Journal of the Senate, December 8, 1790, 1st Cong., 3rd Sess., American State Papers: 217.

93 For the Washington Administration’s planned use of military coercion to suppress domestic rebellion against taxes, see Richard H. Kohn, "The Washington Administration's Decision to Crush the Whiskey Rebellion," The Journal of American History 59, no. 3 (1972): 567-584; For earlier internal dissent that resulted in military force to quell resistance to economic policies, see David P. Szatmary, Shay's Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980).

94 Robert E. Shalhope,"The Armed Citizen in the Early Republic," Law and Contemporary Problems 49, no. 1 (1986), 131-138.

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weapons it needed to fend off insurgent Americans, Indian neighbors, and belligerent European nations.

Following the Revolution, the nation’s arsenals, half-filled with old European models in need of repair, did not meet American military needs. And to many it seemed that the

“manufacture of military articles would become inconsiderable during the existing peace.”95

Local militias were supposed to supply themselves, but the individual states did not produce enough guns to arm their soldiers.96 In the wake of Revolutionary War expenses, cash-strapped governments found it difficult to afford contracts with private manufacturers. And it was too much to require individual militia members to contribute their own guns, which were often left at home during the Revolution for the protection of soldiers’ families, and whose cost represented about two weeks’ worth of wages for a laborer.97 Despite this shortcoming, though, it was not a foregone conclusion that the United States would produce or purchase weapons for the nation’s militia. In 1794 Congress recognized that “the principal defects in the existing provisions for arming the militia consist in the want of a competent source of supplying the militia” and

“resolved that further provision ought to be made by law for arming the militia of the United

States.”98 Yet even in 1798, after the federal armory at Springfield had been established, congressmen still debated how and when militia should be armed: Speaker of the House

Jonathan Dayton thought it would be “very inconvenient for the United States to become the

95 Tench Coxe, A brief examination of Lord Sheffield's Observations on the commerce of the United States. In seven numbers. With two supplementary notes on American manufactures (Philadelphia: From the press of M. Carey, 1791), 122-123.

96“Militia,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, December 11, 1794, , 3rd Cong., 2nd Sess., American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, No.21: 69.

97 Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763-1789 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 1977), 309.

98 “Militia,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, December 29, 1794, American State Papers, Military Affairs: Vol. 1, 3rd Congress, 2nd Session, no.23: 107.

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retailers of arms [to the militia]” and congressman George Thatcher of Massachusetts questioned why the “General Government should be put to the trouble and expense of providing arms for the state governments.” Thomas Claiborne of Virginia countered that “at this time it was proper that arms should be put into the hands of the people and that those who are not able to pay for them should have them given to them.”99 It is not surprising that support for federal arms fell upon regional lines, as many southern militias, Virginia’s included, could only arm less than a quarter of their men.100 Even as southerners often bemoaned federal intervention, they sought government assistance in arming white citizens, whose use of guns would quell slave insurrections.

Congressional squabbling reflected the local realities of state purses and voters’ preferences, but federal officials advocated policies based on national security concerns.

Secretary of War Henry Knox advised that “sound national policy” dictated that the nation produce its own arms, maintaining in its arsenals a minimum of 100,000 stands arms (which included the musket and its bayonet and ramrod, both of which fit to the weapon). Knox recognized that while manufacturing the arms might at first cost more than importing, the cost could not compare “with the solid advantages which would result from extending and perfecting the means upon which our safety may ultimately depend.”101 Indeed, an embarrassing defeat by the Western Indian Confederacy in the Northwest Territory in 1791 had highlighted the need for

99 “Arms for the Militia,” June, 1798, House of Representatives, 5th Congress, 2nd Sess., Annals of Congress: 1927- 1933.

100Fagal, “The Political Economy of War in the Early American Republic, 1774-1821,” 218. Fears of slave rebellion also no doubt prompted southerners to prefer government support of arms production. In 1798, Virginia established a state-owned arms manufactory. Giles Cromwell, The Virginia Manufactory of Arms (Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 1975). 101 “Return of Ordnance, Arms, and Military Stores,” Communicated to the Senate, December 16, 1793, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, 3rd Cong., 1st Sess., No. 10: 44.

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a well-equipped, well-trained army.102 In 1794, the same year that Washington’s administration sent the national militia to Pennsylvania to quell domestic unrest against excise taxes, Congress passed a bill to create and staff two federal armories, allotting $22,865 for construction expenses and $143,640 for the purchase of additional arms and ammunition.103 Complete and consistent statistics for the early national period are hard to come by, but spending on the military began to constitute anywhere from twenty to forty percent of total federal expenditures.104

An Act of Congress in 1792 gave the president power to select two sites for the nation’s federal armories. George Washington chose Springfield, Massachusetts and Harpers Ferry,

Virginia. Springfield was both an ideal site on which to construct a federal armory and nonetheless a problematic one. As Wansey had observed, it was already home to an arsenal and powder magazines, “both handsome new brick buildings.”105 It also boasted a dozen small workshops and storage buildings and a slew of barracks. It stood at the crossroads of several interstate transportation routes and had access to natural resources and raw materials from the mixed-wood forests of middle New England and a nearby iron foundry in Salisbury,

Connecticut. Additionally, its location sixty miles north of the mouth of the Connecticut River made it safe from naval attack. The site, though, was on a steep-sided plateau with limited access

102 Colin G. Calloway, The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

103 “Arsenals and Armories,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, March 5, 1794, American State Papers, Military Affairs: Vol. 1, 3rd Cong, 1st Sess., No. 14: 65

104Information in American State Papers has military spending at 21 percent of federal budget in 1794, See, “Increase of Duties,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, April 17, 1794, Finance, Vol. 1, 3rd Cong, 1st Sess., no. 65: 278. According to Table Ea636-643 - Federal government expenditure, by major function: 1789–1970, in Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright. Historical statistics of the United States, Edited by Susan B. Carter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), the army was 37 percent of total expenditures. According to Timothy Pitkin it was 30 percent. See, Pitkin, A Statistical View of the Commerce of the United States of America, 342.

105 Jeremy, Henry Wansey and His American Journal, 65.

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to water power.106 The Mill River, one of the larger streams that joined the Connecticut River, was chosen as the power source, but its limited drainage basin meant that it often experienced both floods and droughts. Also, although the federal government already owned the land on which the storage buildings were located, the government would have to purchase much more land in the area if it wanted to build the dams needed for generating sufficient power to produce arms on an industrial scale. But the site’s access to raw materials, iron, and steel, skilled labor, and good roads seemed to outweigh its natural limitations. With public funds, the federal government could purchase additional plots of land over the next several decades and establish what would become by the mid-nineteenth century the world’s largest arms-making institution.107

On June 22, 1795, the federal government bought its first acre-and-a-half parcel of land for $400 and commenced production.108 Workers, under the oversight of a superintendent and two master armorers, repaired old arms and manufactured the nation’s first public musket, known as the Model 1795 musket.109 This .69 caliber flintlock required the user to load powder from the muzzle end, followed by a lead ball rammed down with the ramrod. It was modeled after the French Charleville, which became the standard U.S. musket until the War of 1812. The

Charleville fired a smaller round than the British Brown Bess, but had a longer range and was more accurate. Secretary of War Timothy Pickering deemed it important to establish some

106 Michael S. Raber, "Conservative Innovators, Military Small Arms, and Industrial History at Springfield Armory, 1794-1918," IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 14, no.1 (1988): 2.

107 Derwent Stainthorpe Whittlesey, "The Springfield Armory: A Study in Institutional Development,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1920), 49.

108 Whittlesey, "The Springfield Armory: A Study in Institutional Development,” 47.

109 “Military Force, Arsenal, and Stores,” Communicated to the Senate, December 15, 1795, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, 4th Cong., 1st Sess., No. 25: 108; James B. Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 1795-1865 (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1997), 19.

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degree of standardization for the military’s weapon-use and, because this model was considered superior to any other European gun and had been used in great numbers during the Revolution, it seemed logical to make it the U.S. standard.

The United States had imported the majority of its guns from France during the

Revolution, but in the 1790s war with its old supplier seemed inevitable.110 Importing from

Napoleon’s France was no longer an option and the Springfield Armory could not at first meet

War Department needs. During its first few years of production, workers at the Armory manufactured guns under an apprentice system in which old handicraft techniques were used.

They produced only two hundred forty-five muskets during the Armory’s first year of operation and eight hundred twenty-five its second year, and then plateaued at a little over 1,000 muskets for several years after.111 In order to expand production, the federal government established four new factory sites on the Mill River, dividing the establishment between shops that used water power and those that used hand power.112 These new establishments enabled the Armory, under the direction of the second superintendent, Henry Morgan, to introduce labor-saving machinery and divide the work force into four categories of labor: barrel-makers and forge men; filers; stockers and assemblers; and grinders and polishers.113 The War Department also started paying workers more to keep pace with the higher wages paid by private contractors to their employees.

Officials figured that higher wages would increase the number of quality workers at the Armory

110 President George Washington, in fact, sent a questionnaire to American generals about the military tactics of the French. Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 23.

111 “Armory at Springfield,” Communicated to the Senate January 7, 1800, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, 6th Cong., 1st Sess., No. 37: 130.

112 Whittlesey, "The Springfield Armory: A Study in Institutional Development,” 48; Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 1795-1865, 18.

113 David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States, Volume 4 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 32.

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and that over time wages would go down. After initial struggles to properly construct machinery and to determine which men should be placed in which positions, efficiency at the Armory began to increase. Production changes cut the number of days it took each worker to manufacture one gun from twenty-one to nine, and reduced the public cost of a musket from $13.17 to $9.29. The

130- to 150-man workforce was soon able to complete one day’s work in a half day.114

But even with improvements in production efficiencies, the Armory could not at first produce enough guns to arm the military. It eventually produced thousands of muskets each year

-- 10,000 by 1810 – but in the 1790s it manufactured fewer than one thousand annually.115 The

War Department turned to private contractors, whom it hoped could supplement the limited output of Springfield Armory. This, though, was wishful thinking, since arms-making remained an underdeveloped industry. It had in fact, completely escaped the notice of Wansey. Upon visiting Middletown, Connecticut, which would within a decade be a major center of private arms contracting, the only noteworthy thing he saw was his first maple sugar tree.116 In the

1790s, gunsmithing in the United States was still a small-scale, specialized trade. In the Boston

Directory in 1800, for example, there were only four gunsmiths listed and each produced a small number of arms per year. Gunsmiths spent about a month of labor on each weapon and often forged the barrel, assembled the gunstock and completed grinding and filing tasks themselves.117

While wholesalers’ inventories and general stores were filled with foodstuffs, candles, and

114 “Armory at Springfield,” Communicated to the Senate January 7, 1800, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, 6th Cong., 1st Sess., No. 37:130.

115 “Armory at Springfield,” Communicated to the Senate January 7, 1800, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, 6th Cong., 1st Sess., No. 37:130.

116 Jeremy, Henry Wansey and His American Journal, 70.

117 The Boston Directory (Boston, Massachusetts: Published by John West, 1800).

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clothing items, gun purchases were few and far between.118 Families might purchase one gun for their households, and although private merchant ships and occasional privateering and filibustering expeditions needed weapons on board, consumer demand did not warrant a heavy capital investment in the enlargement of gun factories. Additionally, limited demand was compounded by costly labor. Officials in the War Department, though, believed that national security merited the expense.119 And so, over the next few decades it would dole out hefty contract sums to develop an infant industry in a way that it did not have to with a thriving industry like that of shipbuilding, which had benefitted from considerable merchant demand since the colonial era.

Even a bickering Congress understood security issues. The Indian campaigns that carried over from the Revolution winded down with the signing of treaty of Canandaiga in 1794, but the nation remained on high alert. Border warfare was always an issue and the United States routinely dealt with commercial and naval conflicts with European nations. In the late 1790s, the

United States prepared for war with France, with Congress allocating $800,000 for munitions after negotiations over naval aggression failed.120 Even after the Quasi War against France ended with an agreement that reduced French incursions against American shipping, a U.S. congressional committee on “the system of national defense” trumpeted the importance of security. Despite its recommendations for some reductions in military expenditures, it advocated

118 See for examples, Danvers, Mass., General Store Daybook, 1789-1791, Account Books (unidentified) Collection, 1703-1852, Folio Volume 6, American Antiquarian Society; Worcester or Boston, Mass., Wholesale and Imports Account Book, Account Books (unidentified) Collection, 1703-1852, Folio Volume 11, American Antiquarian Society. The controversy over Arming America notwithstanding, Michael Bellesiles’s argument that an early American gun-owning culture was less pervasive than popular culture suggests is at least partly true. Michael A. Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).

119 “Military Force, Arsenal, and Stores,” Communicated to the Senate, December 15, 1795, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, 4th Cong., 1st Sess., No. 25: 108.

120 James V. Joy, Jr., "Eli Whitney's Contracts for Muskets," Public Content. LJ 40 (1976), 142.

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that “no such material change in the state of the foreign relations of the United States has happened, as would justify a relinquishment of any means of defense heretofore adopted by

Congress, but that the national honor and interest, in the present posture of affairs, make it prudent and necessary to continue to be prepared for the worst event.”121

The same year that Wansey visited the United States, the federal government issued contracts for 7,000 muskets, the records of which no longer exist.122 Four years later it issued a larger round of contracts for 40,000 stands of arms at $13.40 each – an expense greater than the cost of a stand of arms produced at the Springfield Armory.123 The government had no choice but to pay this rate because although arms could be made more cheaply at the public armory, the

Armory did not yet have the capacity to turn out the necessary amounts.124 All of the muskets were to be modeled, like those at the Armory, after the French Charleville musket.125 No longer a consumer of weapons from France, the U.S. government instructed its contractors to make weapons worthy of its foe’s military. If the United States still depended on French technologies, at least it would not depend on French production.

121 “Suspension of the Recruiting Service,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, January 13, 1800, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, 6th Congress, 1st Session, No. 38: 132. Also, in 1796, South Carolina Representative Robert Goodloe Harper acknowledged that many in Congress doubted “the propriety of reducing the number of troops.” Robert Goodloe Harper, March 9, 1796, in Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., ed., Circular Letters of Congressmen to Their Constituents, 1789-1829 (Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 47.

122 Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 23.

123 Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 23; Samuel Hodgson to John Harris, September 3, 1798, National Archives and Record Administration: Post Revolutionary War Papers, Record Group 45.

124 David Ames to Samuel Hodgson, March 29, 1799, National Archives and Record Administration: Post Revolutionary War Papers, Record Group 45.

125 Samuel Hodgson to John Harris, September 3, 1798, National Archives and Record Administration: Post Revolutionary War Papers, Record Group 45.

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These early contracts, however, were largely unsuccessful in meeting production quotas.

While the system of soliciting contract bids from the civilian market worked for the Navy

Department with the shipbuilding industry, arms making was not yet the developed industry that shipbuilding was.126 The 1798 contracts were for eighteen months, but by September, 1800, the government had received only 1,000 muskets.127 Part of the reason for this shortage was no doubt because of kinks in the system. The War Department, for example, experienced difficulty in getting patterns of the Charleville musket to all their contractors, and in 1798 none of the six

Vermont arms makers had received a pattern.128 Another reason for the shortage was the method by which the government found suppliers. While federal officials eventually only contracted with men whom they knew and trusted enough to provide cash advances, the Treasury

Department initially selected would-be manufacturers from those who answered an advertisement. Many made promises they could not keep.129 Less than a year into the contracts, the Treasury Department expected noncompliance. One manufacturer sent in his proposal after the requisite number of muskets had been contracted for – contracts were essentially first come first serve – but, recognizing that contract failure was likely, Secretary of Treasury Oliver

Wolcott, Jr., entered into an agreement with the man for 500 muskets to make up for supply shortages.130

126 For an example of contract solicitations from the Navy Department to producers of the shipbuilding industry, see “Circular,” Boston, June 8, 1812, Amos Binney Letterbook, 1810-1814. American Antiquarian Society.

127 Joy, "Eli Whitney's Contracts for Muskets,” 45

128 Oliver Wolcott, Jr. to Samuel Hodgson, September 20, 1798, National Archives and Record Administration: Post-Revolutionary War Papers, Record Group 45.

129 Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 23.

130 Oliver Wolcott to William Henry, December 12, 1799, National Archives and Record Administration: Post- Revolutionary War Papers, Record Group 45.

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During the War of 1812 the government would forego this practice of soliciting arms from private parties who had not been vetted by federal officials and instead would dole out cash advances to a small cadre of reputable contractors in order to ensure adequate supply. One of these contractors was Eli Whitney, who would establish an armory in New Haven, Connecticut.

Nothing about Whitney suggested that he would become a major producer of weapons. As

Wansey toured New Haven, admiring the exotic snake skins at Yale College’s library, Whitney was embroiled in patent disputes over the cotton gin he had invented. There was certainly no sign that New Haven, “a very neat pleasant town,” whose only notable manufacturing included a cider mill and a struggling cotton and woolen manufactory, would become a center for arms manufacture.131 Just several years later, however, Whitney secured the largest contract for 10,000 muskets, to be produced at New Haven, albeit before Whitney had built a factory capable of doing so.

Despite the great expense needed to manufacture arms, he was the only arms maker to receive a government advance in the 1798 round of contracts. Whitney’s cash advance is noteworthy. True, his contract was much larger than the others -- the majority of which were for fewer than 1,000 stands of arms -- but even Daniel Gilbert, of Mansfield, Massachusetts, who contracted for 2,000 muskets, complete with bayonets and ramrods, did not receive an advance.132 Also, Whitney was lucky enough to receive a War Department request to construct several storehouses on his property, with the assurance that the government would foot the bill.133 Whitney received this preferential treatment partly because of his reputation as an

131 Jeremy, Henry Wansey and His American Journal, 72-73.

132 Oliver Wolcott to Daniel Gilbert, September 8, 1798, National Archives and Record Administration: Post- Revolutionary War Papers, Record Group 45.

133 Henry Dearborn to Eli Whitney, February 25, 1803, Order Book, Letters Sent Regarding Procurements, Records of the Office of the Secretary of War, RG107, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

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inventor. He had convinced War and Treasury Department officials that he could successfully transition from marketing the cotton gin he allegedly invented to making guns.134 Decius

Wadsworth, the War Department’s superintendent of small arms, wrote that Whitney could manufacture arms “superior to any musket for common use yet fabricated in this country” and was “highly deserving of national patronage,” before Whitney even had a large factory set up.135

This patronage flowed partly from Whitney’s personal and political connections. He corresponded with public figures like Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of Treasury Oliver

Wolcott, and was able to recruit reputable Connecticut men to serve as sureties on his government bond.136 He was close enough with Wolcott that Wolcott promised Whitney he would “guard against too much competition” from other arms manufacturers’ proposals.137

Reputation and government cash still did not guarantee that Whitney would fulfill his quota on time. In theory, contracts between producers and the federal government would be mutually beneficial relationships. According to Whitney, “it is in the interest of national security to train men to make arms…in preference to worthless vagabond foreigners.” 138 Arms production could serve patriotic aims while also lining pockets. Yet Whitney’s experience

134 For skepticism of Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, see Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

135 Decius Wadsworth to Eli Whitney, December 30, 1800, Box 1, Folder 16, Eli Whitney Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.

136 Eli Whitney to Samuel Dexter, February 7, 1801, Box 1, Folder 17, Eli Whitney Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. For the importance of reputation in making economic arrangements work, see Joel Mokyr, "The Institutional Origins of the Industrial Revolution,” in Elhanan Helpman, ed., Institutions and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 78-79.

137 Oliver Wolcott to Eli Whitney, October 9, 1798, Box 1, Folder 13, Eli Whitney Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.

138 Eli Whitney to Oliver Wolcott, June 15, 1798, Box 1, Folder 12, Eli Whitney Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.

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demonstrates a major reason the first contractors were unable to meet the terms of their contracts: most were enticed by federal patronage, but unprepared for industrial-level production.

Whitney asserted that he could manufacture muskets more cheaply than could be imported by employing machinery for some of the process.139 He had not, though, yet built the size factory that would enable him to undertake the manufacture of 10,000 muskets, but “had assumed that the [previous] secretary of treasury understood this.” 140 Although construction occupied

Whitney’s time, he assured the secretary of treasury that he was working hard, despite delays in the delivery of muskets, and that he would “effect the contract with some profit to myself and to the satisfaction of the government.”141 Whitney had undertaken arms production specifically because he wanted the steady patronage of the federal government, which promised to be more lucrative than his cotton gin. Others, too, needed to be offered enough cash to induce them to produce large quantities of government-standard arms, rather than the garden-variety agricultural implements that provided the livelihood of many gunsmiths. Simeon North and Nathan Starr, for example, returned to manufacturing farm tools at their Connecticut factories as soon as their

1798 contracts ended, suggesting that without government consumption, arms-making was not a profitable business. Whitney was allowed, after much struggling, to take until 1809 to fulfill his obligations, but the rest of the some fifteen contracts were terminated after several years, the majority of them incomplete. Whitney’s writings primarily reflect a preoccupation with extracting the greatest possible output at the lowest cost from a limited number of unskilled and

139 Edgar Goodrich to Simeon Baldwin, January 8, 1801, Box 1, Folder 17, Eli Whitney Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.

140 Eli Whitney to Samuel Dexter January 8, 1801, Box 1, Folder 17, Eli Whitney Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.

141 Eli Whitney to Samuel Dexter January 8, 1801, Box 1, Folder 17, Eli Whitney Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.

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semiskilled workers in order to complete his contract.142 He, in fact, sought to implement some of the labor-saving methods then in practice at the Springfield Armory and cautioned federal officials that the establishment of another factory near his own would raise the price of labor, which would be detrimental to profits and would make it difficult to “keep good order among the workmen.”143 Whitney’s obsession with cost-efficiency was one of the downsides of relying on private contractors. In many ways, Whitney was more interested in milking the contract system than on reaching production quotas.

Federal officials, though, continued to work on improving the arms industry, and cultivated relationships with private contractors, to augment the federal armories. Even as military conflict with France seemed less a threat, the War Department cautioned Congress that

“it can never be wise to vary our measures of security, with the continually varying aspect of

European affairs.” 144 The nation must always be prepared for war. So as the United States entered the nineteenth century, the War Department directed newly made-in-America guns to an expanded military and the Treasury Department dispensed funds to the two national armories and executed contracts with private manufacturers.145 In the hands of the executive, the arms

142 Eli Whitney to Oliver Wolcott, July 12, 1798, Box 1, Folder 13, Eli Whitney Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.

143 “Cost of a Musket,” July 21, 1821, Box 8, Folder 114, Eli Whitney Papers, Yale University Archives and Manuscripts; Robert S. Woodbury, "The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts," Technology and Culture 1, no. 3 (1960), 244-5.

144 “Reorganization of the Army,” James McHenry to John Adams, December 24, 1798, Communicated to Congress, December 31, 1798, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, 5th Cong., 3rd Sess., No. 35: 124.

145“Reorganization of the Army,” James McHenry to John Adams, December 24, 1798, Communicated to Congress, December 31, 1798, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, 5th Congr., 3rd Sess., No. 35, p.127; James McHenry and Samuel Hodgson to John Harris, September 10, 1798, Coxe Irvine Papers - Philadelphia Supply Agencies: Correspondence, Correspondence, Reports Returns Bill Accounts Receipts Vouchers and Contracts 1794-1842, Box 118, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, Entry 2118, National Archives Building, Washington D.C; James McHenry and Samuel Hodgson to John Harris, August 22, 1799, Coxe Irvine Papers - Philadelphia Supply Agencies: 1800-14 Invoices Orders for clothing and supplies, Box 184, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, Entry 2118, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C; Congress had spent over $1.2 million on the navy by the late 1790s as it geared up for war with

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industry would continue to grow. The legislature had given to the War Department the right to employ as many people as it saw fit in the production of public arms and to oversee the manufacturing and provisioning processes. 146 Any misgivings about the military would be rendered inconsequential as the nation, led by the War Department, prepared for war at any time.

Conclusion

Americans eventually proved Wansey wrong. When Tench Coxe issued “A Statement of the Arts and Manufactures” in 1812 for the Treasury Department, he celebrated New England textile manufacturers for rendering “green seed cotton” -- its fiber recently liberated by the cotton gin and an increasing number of slaves -- into a productive material domestically.147 In many ways, Alexander Hamilton’s vision two decades prior had come to fruition; cotton was no longer merely an export, but a raw material that could be spun and woven into cloth that offered to liberate Americans from economic dependence on England. By 1812, too, the United States no longer needed to import its weapons from France. Coxe reported that “the expense and trouble of a judicious and rigorous inspection…have made favorable changes in the condition of this important branch of our manufactures.”148 From a federal standpoint, the money and time spent on the production of guns was worth it. The War Department had entered into its second major round of contracts and was prepared to arm its soldiers for war against England. The

the Barbary States. Robert J. Allison, Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 30.

146 “Arsenals and Armories,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, March 5, 1794, American State Papers, Military Affairs: Vol. 1, 3rd Cong, 1st Sess., No. 14: 65

147 Tench Coxe, “A Statement of the Arts and Manufacture of the United States of America, for the year 1810,” (Philadelphia: A. Corman, 1814), ix-xi.

148 Coxe, “A Statement of the Arts and Manufacture of the United States of America, for the year 1810,” xivii.

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United States had come a long way since it had assessed the state of its manufactures and embarked on a national plan to produce its own weapons twenty years earlier.

The industrial mission, though, was far from complete. While public funds had created an arms industry, military supply inadequacies persisted on the eve of war with Britain and the nation still required European imports to clothe its soldiers. Up through the first decade of the nineteenth century, the majority of merchant wealth was still tied up in international commerce.

Men of Israel Thorndike’s status still found Cuddalore ginghams more profitable than Rhode

Island bedtickings. 149 But once the federal government made textile production a greater concern, this would change. Textiles, like arms, were a matter of national security and the United

States would start to do more than grant citizenship to immigrant manufacturers like Samuel

Slater. Thirty years after independence, manufacturing was no longer a question. Instead,

American policymakers asked how best they could channel federal resources into public and private industries to ensure national prosperity and unchallenged dominance over the continent.

Wansey may have misjudged Americans’ ability to manufacture, but French revolutionary

Jacques-Pierre Brissot had it right when he said that “[American] industry is sure to receive the reward of independency.”150

149 Memorandum of goods returned and goods missing on board the Schooner Two Friends, 11 July 1802, Israel Thorndike Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Mass. The majority of the voyages in which he invested brought in upwards of thirty or forty thousand dollars. See Box 5, Volume 8, 1802, Israel Thorndike Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Mass.

150 Jeremy, Henry Wansey and His American Journal, 39.

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CHAPTER TWO: Embargo and War

In 1810, J. and S. Hindsill built a woolen mill in Bennington, Vermont. The town in southwestern Vermont was home to paper, iron, furniture and textile manufacturers who benefitted from the generous waterpower offered by the Walloomsac River and Paran Creek, as well as from proximity to rich natural resources. Natural advantages aside, the Hindsills, like many aspiring manufacturers, were lured by the economic promise of nonimportation. If the

United States were to be closed to British imports, consumers’ desires would have to be satisfied by men like the Hindsills and towns like Bennington. And yet despite a profitable first few years, the Hindsills “abandoned the business of manufacturing” ten years after the company’s founding, citing insufficient government encouragement.1 This trajectory of the life and death of one mill’s operations was typical of many other small textile factories over the course of conflict and resolution with Britain. Yet it is not the only manufacturing story that can be told in the context of the War of 1812. While the Napoleonic Wars gave rise to a number of small textile factories throughout New England that did not survive peace, war also gave rise to the nation’s first large-scale textile industry and a thriving arms industry that did.

On June 18, 1812, President James Madison signed into law a declaration of war on

Great Britain, further angering a New England mercantile community that already opposed U.S. commercial policies against Britain. But what seemed disastrous for trade offered an opening for domestic manufactures. Without competition from British manufactured goods, American goods could dominate the market for cloths, guns, and other wares. Additionally, military demands for war materiel created opportunities for supplying the army. Whether we characterize the War of

1 J. and S. Hinsdill, Bennington, VT, 1820. U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Vermont, RG279 (Washington: National Archives, 1944), roll 3.

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1812 as a “second war of independence” or as a civil war among various American groups, we must recognize the United States as a war-making nation whose diplomatic and military pursuits created industrial growth.2 When we understand the War of 1812 as part of a European mercantilist competition for “geopolitical, commercial and economic hegemony,” as scholars have conceptualized Britain’s participation in the Napoleonic Wars, we see how protection against imports and favorable fiscal treatment for strategically important manufactures sparked long term industrial growth, even as it led to post-bellum economic contraction.3

Scholars working on conflicts like the Napoleonic Wars in England and the Civil War in the United States have looked for patterns in the relationship of government policy to the production of specific goods. For example, Mark R. Wilson’s study of the Civil War tent industry posits that many military supply industries, especially textiles, were characterized by extensive networks of workers and suppliers, in contrast to the centralized, capital-intensive arms industry. Decentralized production arrangements, in which far-flung factories and workshops sold to merchant middlemen, dominated the procurement of the majority of war-time supplies,

2 Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (University of Illinois Press, 2012). Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Vintage Books, 2010). For the importance of understanding the United States as a war-making power whose engagement in international affairs influenced domestic policies, see Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds., Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development (Princeton University Press, 2002); Scholars have pointed to the manufacturing-sector opportunities created by warfare. See for example, Patrick O’Brien, “The Contributions of Warfare with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France to the Consolidation and Progress of the British Industrial Revolution,” LSE Working Papers 150/11, (2011); For a broader approach to the generative effects of war on economic and industrial growth, see Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

3O’Brien, “The Contributions of Warfare with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France to the Consolidation and Progress of the British Industrial Revolution,” 2, 48; for the general contraction of the post-war economy, see Douglass Cecil North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 61-62. Although the United States experienced a post-war economic downturn, the scale of warfare and level of debt accumulation were much smaller than what Britain experienced during the Napoleonic Wars and so did not have as significant of an impact on economic growth. Jeffrey G. Williamson, "Why was British Growth So Slow during the Industrial Revolution?." Journal of Economic History 44, no. 3 (1984): 687-712.

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save for arms and ships.4 Wilson’s conceptualization of the military supply economy during the

Civil War can be applied in the early national context, as well. While federal agents relied on a combination of merchant suppliers and widely spread small textile firms to clothe the army, they depended on an increasingly concentrated core of arms manufacturers. The arms industry needed public capital in a way that the textile industry did not. Textile manufacturers did, however, depend on the war-time economic stimulus. This stimulus produced uneven effects immediately following the war. Many companies that started in the context of the Embargo and War suffered during the post-war resumption of trade. Likewise, not all contractors received peacetime renewals. It was these differences that shaped the course of the Industrial Revolution in America, an epoch of economic development that cannot be understood without giving government war- making powers a central role.

Preparing for War, 1806-11

The first act of retaliation against Britain for egregious naval actions was the Non- importation Act of April, 1806. Although ineffective, it marked the first step toward excluding

British goods from American markets. Subsequent commercial legislation did little to inflict material pain on Britain, especially as smuggling proliferated and customs officials had no real incentive to enforce it. But what historian Gautham Rao describes as “perhaps the most radical piece of market regulation in United States history” provided space for industrial growth.5 Even as the federal state struggled to enforce the Embargo and Enforcement Act, British imports were reduced and merchants, suffering from decreased trade, looked to factory investment.

4 Mark R. Wilson, "The Extensive Side of Nineteenth-Century Military Economy: The Tent Industry in the Northern United States during the Civil War," Enterprise and Society, no. 2 (2001), 300-301.

5 Gautham Rao, The Creation of the American State: Customhouses, Law, and Commerce in the Age of Revolution (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2008), 282.

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Additionally, in the context of possible warfare against Britain, the federal government took measures to ensure that it could supply itself. In 1808, Congress passed an Act for Arming the

Militia, providing $200,000 per year to supply arms to the state militias, which, under the Militia

Act of 1792, had been required to supply themselves. And in 1810 it commissioned a national report on arts and manufactures and began soliciting manufacturers for improved goods.6 This federal concern with preparedness resulted in haphazard supply, but as the nation prepared for war, its industry expanded beyond what had seemed possible at the turn of the century. The arms industry, beneficiaries of annual appropriations and government contracts, generated sufficient output for military needs. The textile industry, on the other hand, experienced countless new mill openings, but did not yet produce the quantity or quality of cloth necessary to clothe the army.

Regardless, commercial warfare made possible the growth of industry, even as it hindered general commerce. And it was in this period of retaliation against Britain that manufacturers’ dependence on the government was established.

Arms

The founding of a federal armory in 1794 had not solved the nation’s gun supply problem. Funding provided by the “Act to provide for the erecting and repairing of arsenals and magazines” had done much to establish a federal system for arms manufacture, but Springfield in

1798 was still a long way from supplying both state militias and the regular army.7 And the first rounds of contracts in the 1790s yielded lackluster results. The government had contracted for

6 American State Papers, “A Bill, Making Provision for arming and equipping the whole body of the militia of the United States,” April 4, 1808, Bills and Resolutions, House of Representatives, 10th Congress, 1st Sess., no.90; Tench Coxe, “A Statement of the Arts and Manufacture of the United States of America, for the year 1810” (Philadelphia, A. Corman, 1814).

7 Felicia Johnson Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley: A Regional Study of the Economic Development of the Small Arms industry, 1798-1870 , Smith College Studies in History, Vol. XXXIII, Vera Brown Holmes, Hans Kohn, eds. (Northampton, MA: 1948), 37; Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 40; James V. Joy, Jr., "Eli Whitney's Contracts for Muskets," Public Content. LJ 40 (1976), 143.

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40,000 muskets during the Quasi-War against France in 1798, to be delivered by September,

1800, yet only received 1,000 that year.8 Eli Whitney, for example, took until 1809 to complete his contract for 10,000 muskets.9 Despite the establishment of federal armories, there was no comprehensive plan for providing arms to the nation’s soldiers. Prior to the War of 1812, some states, such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia issued state-owned muskets to active militia; others required all members to purchase their own arms.10 Most of the state-owned arms were European models leftover from before and during the Revolution and many states, especially the southern ones, were less than half-armed.11 Some states turned to private contractors to bolster their supply. New York, for example, contracted with Eli Whitney to help supply the roughly 40 percent of militiamen who were unarmed.12 For a short time, Whitney was on both state and federal payrolls. This patchwork system did little to help cash-strapped states, or to engender militia standardization. All told, most of the 113,501 muskets the nation owned in

1806 were decades-old and in need of repair.13

These inadequacies, compounded with the impending hostility against Britain, prompted

Congress to debate how best to ensure the existence of a well-armed militia in the event of war.

8 “An account of monies advanced by Tench Coxe, PPS, by order of the War Department for the purpose of procuring arms by contract to manufacture in the United States and for their use,” December 31, 1809, Bound Volumes of the Philadelphia Supply Agencies, Volume 13 Manufacture of Clothing, Tailors Work, Contracts 1805- 11, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, Entry 2117, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C; David R. Meyer, "Formation of Advanced Technology Districts: New England Textile Machinery and Firearms, 1790–1820," Economic Geography 74, no. s1 (1998), 39.

9 Joy, "Eli Whitney's Contracts for Muskets," 145.

10 George D. Moller, American Military Shoulder Arms, Volume II: From the 1790s to the End of the Flintlock Period (Albuquerque: University New Mexico Press, 2011), chapter 144.

11Andrew Fagal, “The Political Economy of War in the Early American Republic, 1774-1821,” (Ph.D. diss., Binghamton University: State University of New York, 2013), 218.

12Fagal, “The Political Economy of War in the Early American Republic,”218; John McLean, Commissary of Military Stores, New York, 20th Feb., 1809, American Antiquarian Society.

13 Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 31.

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While some congressmen believed that each militiaman should supply himself and that federal aid would encroach on states’ rights, the majority agreed that the federal government needed to

“create a system of supplying the nation.”14 As one Virginia congressman wrote to his constituents, the Army “may soon require a hundred thousand men instead of four thousand.”15

The 1808 Militia Act reflected a compromise between those who wished to expand the national armories and those who wished to allow states to contract with private armories.16 The Act authorized the President to sell federally-owned weapons to individual states that wished to purchase them, while also appropriating $200,000 for provisioning the various states militias with arms. The national government would provide the militias with at least 15,000 muskets per year, but throughout the first decade of the 1800s, greater specialization and advancements in management procedures, including improved record-keeping and implementations of a piece-rate system, had failed to increase production. In 1810, for example, the Springfield Armory produced only 9,700 muskets – an improvement over the 1,000 it manufactured in 1798, but still a long way from supplying both state militias and the regular army.17 The armory’s position vis-

à-vis its water source rendered water power inadequate until more dams could be built, and a fire in 1805 destroyed several of the workshops.18Additionally, War Department officials were responsible for providing the armories with the requisite materials for weapon-making, which

14 “Arming the Militia,” April, 1808, House of Representatives, 10th Congress, 1st. Sess., American State Papers: 2175.

15 Thomas Mann Randolph (VA), April 27, 1806, in Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., ed., Circular Letters of Congressmen to Their Constituents, 1789-1829 (Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 478.

16 Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 36. All arms manufactured under this act were earmarked for the state militias.

17Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 40; Joy, "Eli Whitney's Contracts for Muskets,” 143.

18 Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 17.

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sometimes created supply shortages.19 The Militia Act included a solution for this problem by providing funds for private contractors. Although the federal government purchased military supplies in the “free” market, it was wary of purchasing arms that did not conform to government standards.20 When the government contracted with a private firm, it could supply that manufacturer with a pattern arm to replicate, while safeguarding itself against financial loss by requiring contractors to enter surety bonds.21 Beginning in 1808 the Purveyor of Public

Supplies made five year contracts with small arms makers and offered, for example, $10,075 up front for the promise to supply 10,000 stands of arms to the United States.22

It is with these contracts that the federal government established the Connecticut River

Valley as a technology district. Geographers and economists have analyzed the confluence of human capital, investments, government policies, and labor mobilization, among other things, in creating “new industrial districts” like today’s Silicon Valley and Route 128 in Boston.

Geographer David R. Meyer has applied this framework to “technology districts” in New

England in the early nineteenth century, arguing that the textile and arms industries developed as a result of the proper mixture of human and financial capital, which then attracted further

19See for example, Callendar Irvine, Superintendent of Military Stores, Philadelphia to Tench Coxe, Purveyor of Public Supplies, Philadelphia, June 5, 1805, Coxe Irvine Papers - Philadelphia Supply Agencies: Correspondence, Reports, Returns, Bill Accounts, Receipts, Vouchers and Contracts 1794-1842, Box 136, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, Entry 2118, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. The Springfield Armory needed 4,000 musket stocks to meet their demand.

20 Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 40.

21The United States Armory at Springfield, 1795-1865, 21.

22 “An account of monies advanced by Tench Coxe, PPS, by order of the War Department for the purpose of procuring arms by contract to manufacture in the United States and for their use”, December 31, 1809, Bound Volumes of the Philadelphia Supply Agencies, Volume 13 Manufacture of Clothing, Tailors Work, Contracts 1805- 11, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, Entry 2117, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

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investment.23 The development of both the federal armory in Springfield and the armories of the surrounding area were mutually reinforcing. The federal government had chosen this region not only for its strategic location on a plateau above the Connecticut River and its proximity to several major iron manufactories, but also for the technological know-how in the area.24 The region was home to skilled machinists, metalworking shops, and private armories. Additionally, there was a fairly prosperous population of successful farmers and businessmen who provided indirect capital to arms makers by endorsing notes for loans and posting bonds for federal contracts.25

Yet it was not a given that this region would be a center of gun production. Because large arms factories were expensive to operate, gunsmiths required ample investment capital and reliable demand. Private investors, though, shunned arms manufacturing, and the average male citizen only needed one gun. Even manufacturers who had been granted federal contracts in the

1790s had turned to other pursuits once their contracts ended. Connecticut arms manufacturers

Nathan Starr and Simeon North, for example, had received contracts for swords and pistols, respectively, but returned to manufacturing scythes and farm tools with the conclusion of government patronage. Metal workers like Starr and North halted arms-making until the next round of contracts in 1808.26 By then the government realized cash advances were the only way to induce manufacturers to maintain an expensive and risky undertaking. As Purveyor of Public

23 David R. Meyer, "Formation of Advanced Technology Districts: New England Textile Machinery and Firearms, 1790–1820*," Economic Geography 74, no. s1 (1998), 31.

24 Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 18; Meyer, "Formation of Advanced Technology Districts: New England Textile Machinery and Firearms,” 40.

25 Meyer, "Formation of Advanced Technology Districts: New England Textile Machinery and Firearms,” 40.

26 Starr also manufactured fire engines. James E. Hicks, Nathan Starr: The First Official Sword and Arms Maker (New York: James E. Hicks, 1940); Simeon Newton Dexter North, Simeon North, First Official Pistol Makers of the United States; A Memoir (Concord, N.H.: The Rumford Press, 1913), 56.

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Supplies Tench Coxe had recognized in 1807, advance-sum contracts would be needed to “excite and promote the small arms manufacturing and bring the business to settled form.27

And the best way to capitalize on these loans was to cultivate a cadre of manufacturers in one river valley to most effectively exploit both geographic and human resources. Theodore

Steinberg has shown the importance of water in driving economic and industrial change, as capitalists sought to control waterpower and colonize nature.28 In the same vein, the federal government exploited the Mill and Connecticut Rivers for water power and transportation: its employees built dams to generate energy for the armory’s machines, and shipped lumber, iron, and cases of guns up and down the river from Vermont to the Long Island Sound. But when water power around the Armory proved inadequate owing to flood, drought, or delays in dam construction, the War Department could rely on their contractors’ access to water power. It could, for example, depend on North’s and Starr’s strategic position in Middletown, Connecticut.

Middletown, a historic port located on the western bank of the Connecticut River, just before it narrows and turns sharply east, offered water power and shipping advantages at only the cost of payments to its contractors there.

In addition to excellent waterpower, western New England boasted superior craftsmanship. The region was home to a large number of skilled artisans who made fine combs, spectacles, and clocks.29 It also, as we have seen, was home to tool makers who became regular arms makers with federal support. Comb and clockmakers enjoyed a civilian market, but

27 [Tench Coxe?] Rough Draft of Letter to Secretary of War, November 5, 1807, Coxe Irvine Papers - Philadelphia Supply Agencies: Correspondence, Reports, Returns, Bill Accounts, Receipts, Vouchers and Contracts 1794-1842, Box 136, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, Entry 2118, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

28 Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

29 Donald R. Hoke, Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector (New York, Columbia University Press, 1989), 4.

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craftsmanship in weaponry was best cultivated under government patronage. As the government tapped into the human capital in the Connecticut Valley, its manufacturers in turn benefited from proximity to government production. Unlike the small gunsmiths located in urban centers, the arms makers in this area received renewed contracts by virtue of their position in a technology district. They also received more timely remuneration during the war and did not have to petition the government for payment, as those in eastern Massachusetts did.30 It made most sense to work with contractors located within easy travel of one another, especially because the government usually only hired one or two inspectors.31 By 1810, Hampshire County in western

Massachusetts produced more guns than anywhere else in the Northeast.32 In his response to the

1820 Census of Manufactures, gunsmith Lemuel Pomeroy in Pittsfield, Massachusetts celebrated the government’s decision “to manufacture their own weapons of defense within the United

States by which means a good and perhaps sufficient number of the first rate gunsmiths are to be found to fabricate arms of the first quality as fast as the government may deem it necessary to procure them.” The decision, in fact, made it possible for him to keep his factory -- opened in

1809 -- in continuous operation.33

Those who successfully fulfilled their obligation to the United States were usually offered continued government patronage. The first twenty-two contracts for arms following the Militia

Act were scattered throughout New England and Pennsylvania, but those who received renewed

30“An Act for the Relief of Adam Kinsley, Thomas French, and Charles Leonard,” February 20, 1819, in Richard Peters, By Authority of Congress, The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of American from the Organization of the Government in 1789 to March 3, 1845 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846), 223.

31Fagal, “The Political Economy of War in the Early American Republic, 1774-1821,” 235.

32 Tench Coxe, “A Statement of the Arts and Manufacture of the United States of America, for the year 1810” (Philadelphia, A. Corman, 1814).

33 Gunsmith Manufactory for Small Arms, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, December 30, 1820, U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Vermont, RG279 (Washington: National Archives, 1944), roll 2.

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contracts following the war were largely located in the Connecticut River Valley in western

Massachusetts and Connecticut and along the Blackstone River in Massachusetts and Rhode

Island.34 The most lucrative contracts went to Eli Whitney, Nathan Starr, and Simeon North, who had received the first government contracts in 1798 and were all located in the Connecticut

Valley. Eli Whitney received a contract for 15,000 muskets in 1812, Simeon North one for pistols in 1810, and Nathan Starr one for 10,000 swords in 1813.35

The War Department’s utilization of the natural and social relationships of the

Connecticut River Valley was its first experience developing a technology district. Government cash flowed in as weapons flowed out to American troops throughout the eastern half of the continent. This region made possible the United States’ first major go round with war against the

Old World.

Textiles

As the federal government cultivated gun production in western New England, it took a different approach with the textile industry. Congressional debates about how best to address grievances against Great Britain and what goods, if any, should be prohibited, yielded “An Act to prohibit the importation of certain goods, wares and merchandise” (April 18, 1806). This act limited imports of woolen cloth and ready-made clothing from Great Britain.36 While not

34 “An Account of monies advanced by Tench Coxe by order of the War Department for the purpose of procuring Arms in Contract to Manufacture in the United State for their use”, December 3, 1809, Bound Volumes of the Philadelphia Supply Agencies, Volume 13 Manufacture of Clothing, Tailors Work, Contracts 1805-11, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, Entry 2117, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.; Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 39.

35 North, Simeon North, First Official Pistol Makers of the United States, 76. 36“Non-importation of Goods from Great Britain”, March 1806, Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, 9th Congress, 1st Sess., American State Papers: 801; “An Act to prohibit the importation of certain goods, wares and merchandise”, April 18, 1806, Statutes at Large, 9th Cong., 1st. Sess., American State Papers, 379.

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consistently enforced until the end of 1807, restrictions on British imports offered American textiles a chance to succeed in markets usually dominated by superior British goods.37 And although the Embargo itself created financial distress for many Americans in commercial centers, making it harder to sell goods of either foreign or domestic manufacture, textiles seemed a viable option for individuals seeking new business prospects. 38

Additionally, raw cotton was cheaper than it had been, owing to an increase in domestic production made possible by slave labor. As historian Edward Baptist has contended, industry was “built on the backs of enslaved peoples.”39 While the human torture that Baptist documents had not yet fully reared its ugly head, developments in cotton processing techniques, like the cotton gin, as well as federal policies that expanded the slave frontier, had drastically increased the amount of cotton slaves could produce. In fact one of the earliest forms of government

“support” for industry could be thought of as the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, in which the

United States acquired vast amounts of territory on which cotton could be grown. Indeed, Baptist refers to this purchase as making possible a so-called second slavery that would generate tremendous economic growth for the United States.40 And as plantation owners began to experiment with more brutal forms of slave management, northern factory owners reaped the

37 Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, 22.

38Caroline F. Ware, "The Effect of the American Embargo, 1807–1809, on the New England Cotton Industry," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 40, no. 4 (1926), 684.

39 Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 322.

40 Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 75, No. 3 (August 2009): 627-650.

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benefits of increased supply. They no longer had to rely on cotton imports from Surinam, India, or Turkey.41

Hopeful upstarts enthusiastically took advantage of cheap raw materials, but it was commercial warfare against England that provided the real impetus for industrialization. Britain was the largest consumer of American cotton and its manufacturers churned out better, cheaper cloths than their American counterparts. The Embargo, however, provided the space for

Americans to try their hand at what had largely been a British undertaking. In the context of federal commercial policy, new factories opened and established firms adapted to a market saturated with greater numbers of domestic producers. Historian Caroline Ware, whose 1931 study of the early New England textile industry remains one of the most thorough overviews of the industry, argued that price-fixing among manufacturers provided the sine qua non stimulus for new textile factories. Her account rendered the Embargo negligible at best and detrimental at worst, a conclusion reached prematurely on the records of a single firm. Her proof centered on the fact that Rhode Island firm Almy and Brown had expanded prior to the Embargo of 1807.

While Ware rightly pointed to the fact that the commercial restrictions destroyed the purchasing power of many of their customers in Boston and Portland, this was by no means ruinous for business. Almy and Brown simply sought new clientele in other seaboard cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore, as well as in the growing west.42 In Ware’s analysis, the industry expanded not

41 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); And early in the nineteenth century southern planters still saw the Union in terms of complementary economic interests by which the plantation south could produce cotton for an increasingly industrial north. Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

42Ware, "The Effect of the American Embargo, 1807–1809, on the New England Cotton Industry,” 684-5. For the firm’s expansion into new markets, see Burr Woolman and Co. [Burlington] to Almy and Brown, September 20, 1808, Unbound Papers 1801-1811, Almy and Brown Records, Mss29, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, RI.

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because of new market opportunities, but because established manufacturers like Almy and

Brown worked hard to keep prices stable despite market changes.43 This, though, had always been the case. But it was beginning in 1806 that new mills appeared in Coventry and Cranston,

Rhode Island, Paran Creek, Vermont, Stonington, Connecticut, and Middlesex and Worcester counties, Massachusetts. These enterprises did well through the war, diminished consumer purchasing power aside. New selling houses devoted to selling New England yarn sprang up in major commercial centers. Yarn wholesalers in Philadelphia, for example, gave Almy and

Brown a run for their money, underselling the Rhode Island firm in its Vermont markets. This competition forced Almy and Brown to adjust by offering a discount for payments in cash, increasing the commission they paid, and guaranteeing a specific assortment of goods. 44 It was not until foreign cloths reappeared in American markets following the Treaty of Ghent that manufacturers began reporting reduced sales, some even ceasing or pausing operations.45

The Embargo also sparked military demand for domestic textiles. Reduced European imports meant that the War Department had to turn to domestic manufactures for some of its supplies. Hitherto, the majority of uniform-quality cloth came from Great Britain and Russia.

Army uniforms were made by commissioned tailors in the Philadelphia area using materials purchased from supply contractors who often bought imported cloth from auction houses.46 This would change with the introduction of embargo and wartime commercial regulations, though

43Ware, "The Effect of the American Embargo, 1807–1809, on the New England Cotton Industry,” 682.

44 Burr Woolman and Co. [Burlington] to Almy and Brown, September 20, 1808, Unbound Papers 1801-1811, Almy and Brown Records, Mss29, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, RI.

45 U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Vermont, RG279 (Washington: National Archives, 1944).

46 See for example of tailors’ names, “Memorandum of the quantity of cloth taken by each taylor separately in making the Army Clothing for the year 1804,” Coxe Irvine Papers - Philadelphia Supply Agencies: Correspondence, Reports, Returns, Bill Accounts, Receipts Vouchers, and Contracts 1794-1842, Volume 13 Box 145, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, Entry 2118, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

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army-grade cloth continued to show up in auction houses.47 Through the 1810s, New York auction houses served as an important depot for British manufacturers and military contractors, who preferred quick, bulk sales at low prices to auction houses, rather than annual orders from traditional merchants.48 Even after the first non-importation act in April, 1806, Purveyor of

Public Supplies Tench Coxe continued to purchase army cloth from Great Britain because

Americans simply did not produce the quality or quantity of cloth required to supply an army.49

Before the United States could become a military rival to Great Britain, it needed to improve production. As manufacturers erected new wool and cotton mills throughout New

England, the War Department charged Coxe with the collection of cloth supplies for uniform- making. Secretary of War William Eustis instructed Coxe in May 1811 to purchase blue cloths for coats and woolen and cotton cloths for vests and pantaloons. The following February, Eustis wrote to Coxe again with clothing instructions, this time asking for all the blue cloth Coxe could procure, noting that some of the cloth could be drab or mixed color if need be.50 The Department had to find a way to clothe 20,000 troops and could not be picky about color and texture.

Supplies were important as most men enlisted for clothing and money.51

47 See for example, “Invoice of Madrid, deposited in hands of Silas E. Weir”, Philadelphia, October 12, 1810, Auction Accounts of Weir, Willing, Lewis, Smith and Lisle, Auctioneers Oct 1810-Sept 1811, Folder 1 Silas E Weir Auction Accounts, October 1810, Mrs. Howard W. Lewis Collection of Early Philadelphia Business Papers, 1799- 1866 #0367, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia, PA.

48 Scott Reynolds Nelson, A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 54.

49 See, for example, the purchase of cloth for military uniforms from Bulmer, Horner and Co of Leeds, Great Britain, Memorandum: Purveyor of Public Supplies’ Office, Philadelphia, June 28, 1806, Volume 13 Box 145, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, Entry 2118, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

50 Reneé Chartrand, “A Most Warlike Appearance”: Uniforms, Flags, and Equipment of the United States Forces in the War of 1812 (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Service Publications, 2011), 27-8.

51 J.C.A. Stagg, Mr. Madison's War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783-1830. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 173.

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Coxe had little knowledge about manufacturing outside the Philadelphia vicinity, so he relied on manufacturers to send him samples in response to handbills and advertisements, realizing that most material would have to come to the city for processing, anyways.52 Uniforms were made by tailors and seamstresses on a piece-rate basis – seasonally, before the war, and year-round following mobilization.53 New England newspapers, as they lamented Congress’s injuring of commerce, printed news about the government’s encouragement of domestic manufacturers and contained advertisements for American-made cloth for army uniforms.54

While the War Department contracted directly with arms makers, it did not yet form these sorts of contracts with textile manufacturers. As early as at least 1809, manufacturers began sending

Coxe cloth samples for inspection, hoping for these sorts of contracts or at least the promise of a new customer. Almy and Brown, seeking new sales opportunities in the changing economy, sent

Tench Coxe cloth “for consideration” in March 1809.55 Coxe continued to solicit materials. He sent a circular in July of 1810 to manufacturers throughout the northeast beseeching improved cotton drilling. He enclosed samples of Russian linen (ravens duck), which was useful for light sails, tents, knapsacks, and wagon covers, unlike twilled cotton drilling from Europe and

America. He said that if manufacturers sent him suitable samples he would contract with them

52Stagg, Mr. Madison's War, 157.

53Fagal, “The Political Economy of War in the Early American Republic,” 212.

54See for examples, [Salem] Salem Gazette, November 25, 1808, which lamented the dire commercial conditions and advocated the encouragement of domestic manufactures; “American Manufactured Army clothing,” July 6 1811, Purveyors Office in [Boston] Independent Chronicle, July 15, 1811, which advertised that “proposals will be accepted at this office.” Also, ads in [New York] Public Advertiser, July 22, 1811, solicited green and blue broad cloth, twilled woolen blankets, and white woolens.

55 Almy and Brown to Tench Coxe, March 15, 1809, Vol. 111 Letterbook 1808-1810, Almy and Brown Records, Mss29, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, RI.

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the following year.56 This, though, did not happen to an extent that would have enabled the

United States to be self-sufficient in clothing production as it was in arms.

War

When the conflict formally began on June 18, 1812, preparation had been under way for the previous five years, but finances and wartime bureaucracy were not yet in order. The

Embargo had decreased customs revenue and Congress, in expectation of a wartime jump in expenditure to $22 million, doubled the tariff and borrowed $11 million on March 4, 1812.57

That same month, Congress passed into law the establishment of a Quartermaster General’s

Office, replaced the Purveyor of Public Supplies with a Commissary General of Purchases, and created an Ordnance Department.58 These wartime acts were meant to shore up funds and increase organizational capacity, yet none created smooth wartime machinery. Interaction among the three sections of the War Department remained chaotic and funds for the Quartermaster

Department were exhausted by October 1812.59 Americans, fearing the government’s inability to make interest payments, had only subscribed to $600,000 of the federal loan by May, 1812, prompting Congress to accept Secretary of Treasury Albert Gallatin’s suggestion for an issuance of $5 million in Treasury notes twelve days after the United States declared war on Britain.

These notes were not, however, readily accepted, except by federal agents and desperate

56 Tench Coxe, Purveyor of Public Supplies, Philadelphia, to The Cotton Manufacturers of the United States, July 27, 1810, Unbound Papers 1801-1811, Almy and Brown Records, Mss29, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, RI.

57 Donald H. Kagin, "Monetary Aspects of the Treasury Notes of the War of 1812," Journal of Economic History 44, no. 1 (1984), 71.

58 Stagg, Mr. Madison's War, 158; Merritt Roe Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (London: MIT Press, 1985), 43.

59 Stagg, Mr. Madison's War, 160, 171.

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creditors and contractors.60 Partly for this reason, textile manufacturers could do better financially by producing for consumer markets, in contrast to arms contractors who relied almost solely on government demand. Yet, many who received contracts or felt encouraged to start a factory during the war were disappointed in its aftermath. The War of 1812 created demand for both textiles and arms, but offered only fleeting opportunities for the majority of arms contractors and small textile manufacturers.61

Arms

The War increased the standing army from 5,700 to 35,000 men, which required an unprecedented quantity of American-manufactured arms.62 The federal armories and private contractors filled the demand, but not without difficulty. Of the 85,000 stands of arms contracted for after the 1808 Militia Act was passed, only 31,645 had been delivered at the start of war.63

The Springfield Armory responded to increased demand by tripling its production from 12,020 muskets in 1811 to over 35,000 the following year.64 Harpers Ferry still only produced 1,700 annually.65 Because so many U.S.-owned arms were outdated and/or damaged, the Armory had to devote significant attention to repair in 1813. In 1814, the Armory dropped its output to only

60 Kagin, "Monetary Aspects of the Treasury Notes of the War of 1812," 75.

61 Kagin, "Monetary Aspects of the Treasury Notes of the War of 1812," 85.

62 The increase in troops, though, was not easily achieved, as many American men preferred independence and laboring wages to the low pay and five-year service term of army life. Taylor, The Civil War of 1812, 325.

63 Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 41.

64“Armories and Arms Manufactured Therein,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, 12th Congress, 1st Sess., American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1. No.109: 317.

65 Merritt Roe Smith, Harper’s Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 170.

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9,585 arms, but repaired 5,190.66 Contract arms were slow in arriving and were generally deemed inferior to those produced at the armories, yet the government continued to rely on private arms-makers to supplement the federal armories’ output.67 Throughout the war, government cemented its relationships with a select group of manufacturers, while letting the majority of its nineteen contracts expire.

Just as in the 1790s, many arms manufacturers who had received contracts in 1809 and

1810 struggled to complete their government orders.68 The main cause of this failure was financial, and largely affected the smaller producers without the means or the political connections to withstand financial hardship. Several years after the War’s conclusion, Chief of

Ordnance Decius Wadsworth speculated that “those who first engaged in the business at a later period, when higher prices were given, were more successful.”69 Struggling manufacturers had solicited the initial contracts because they desperately needed money.70 Unlike the 1790s contracts, post-1808 contracts offered cash advances, which, although not standardized, were usually for between 10 and 20 percent of the total cost. These payments were emblematic of the codependent relationship between public and private resources: the government needed arms, the manufacturer needed capital. Cash advances enabled private production, but often posed problems for the War Department because failures to produce represented sunk costs for the

66 “National Armories,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, February 20, 1815, 13th Congress, 3rd Sess., American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1. No.141: 604.

67 Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 41.

68 See for example, Callendar Irvine, Commissary General’s Office, to John Armstrong, Secretary of War, March 1, 1814, in James E. Hicks, United States Ordnance: Volume II, Ordnance Correspondence Relative to Muskets, Rifles, Pistols and Swords (New York: James E. Hicks, 1940), 40. Irvine complained of R & C. Leonard’s failure to comply with the terms of their contract.

69Ordnance Reports, I: 176-77, in Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 39.

70 Joy, "Eli Whitney's Contracts for Muskets," 148.

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government. Rufus Perkins, for example, a manufacturer in eastern Massachusetts, received a cash advance of $2,687 for 2,500 stands arms, worth 10 percent of the $26,785 he would receive upon completion of his contract. But he never finished it. As a small producer of arms mostly for individual militia men and militia companies, Perkins was lured by public capital, but only delivered 200 muskets two years into his contract. In 1813 he was released from his contract, the first and only he would receive.71

Because of failures like Perkins’s, one of the purveyor’s duties was hunting down contractors’ sureties.72 Chasing down manufacturers and their co-signers for fulfillment of contracts took valuable time away from providing supplies for the military; when possible, it was better to contract with more established manufacturers and then give them greater advances.

While most early arms makers were certainly not wealthy, Coxe said he preferred to contract with “men of property.”73 Asa Waters, for example, was a prominent landowner and farm-tools manufacturer in Millbury, Massachusetts, who founded an armory with his brother, Elijah, in

1808.74 That year, the brothers obtained a contract for 5,000 muskets and a cash advance of

$9,375.75 Although new to the arms industry, the Waters brothers secured an advance worth over

71 “An Account of monies advanced by Tench Coxe by order of the War Department for the purpose of procuring Arms in Contract to Manufacture in the United State for their use,” December 3, 1809, Bound Volumes of the Philadelphia Supply Agencies, Volume 13 Manufacture of Clothing, Tailors Work, Contracts 1805-11, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, Entry 2117, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.;Moller, American Military Shoulder Arms, Volume II, 230.

72 Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley, 47-8.

72Ordnance Reports, I: 176-77, in Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 48.

73 Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley, 45.

74 See, Waters Family Papers, Octavo Vol. 1 and Boxes W Box 1, Folder 3, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA.

75 “An Account of monies advanced by Tench Coxe by order of the War Department for the purpose of procuring Arms in Contract to Manufacture in the United State for their use”, December 3, 1809, Bound Volumes of the Philadelphia Supply Agencies, Volume 13 Manufacture of Clothing, Tailors Work, Contracts 1805-11, Records of

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13 percent of the final total cost of the contract. This advance represented a significant allocation of public resources to men with no prior federal government experience. It also helped Asa

Waters expand his undertaking: several years later he remarked that his workshops were fully employed with laborers and that he could produce arms at an even faster rate if the government needed.76

The percentages that manufacturers received varied widely. For example, William Henry of Pennsylvania received a contract for double the number of muskets as Waters, but an advance of only $100 more. This disparity in payments reflected the fact that in many ways, the government, in addition to privileging producers in specific geographic locations, practiced what historian Joel Mokyr has described as “gentlemanly capitalism,” in which one’s reputation signaled his trustworthiness to fulfill market agreements.77 As a purchaser of manufacturers’ skills and capital goods, the federal government sought to minimize its exposure to risk, as well as maintain its network of valuable relationships. Now, part of this minimization of risk was related to skill. During the execution of his first contract, Whitney had adopted die-forging and jig-filing methods, French techniques that American arms-makers sought to emulate.78 More important than Whitney’s technical abilities, however, was his social capital. It had taken him over eleven years to complete his contract from 1798 and many of his deliveries were of poor

the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, Entry 2117, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

76 Asa Waters to Roswell Lee, September 3, 1817, Box 3, Folder 1, Letters Received Miscellaneous, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

77Mokyr, "The Institutional Origins of the Industrial Revolution.”

78 David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States, Volume 4 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 32.

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quality.79 Yet, despite delays in delivery during his first contract, Whitney received his second contract for 15,000 muskets on July 18, 1812 and federal reimbursements for factory construction.80 Whitney knew federal officials personally and they in turn knew the men who served as sureties on his government bond. Not only was Whitney familiar with the contract system, but he was also a longtime friend of Decius Wadsworth, a fellow Yale graduate, who had been appointed Commissary General of Ordnance on July 2, 1812. Whitney was also connected both personally and financially to Oliver Wolcott, former Secretary of Treasury.81

Wolcott in fact served as the surety on Whitney’s contract with the government. When Callendar

Irvine, serving as commissary general of purchases, terminated Whitney’s contract in 1813 for an alleged failure to complete one of its terms exactly as specified, Wolcott petitioned Secretary of War John Armstrong on Whitney’s behalf. Armstrong ordered Irvine to reinstate the contract, which Whitney satisfactorily carried out.82

The government’s contract with Eli Whitney was emblematic of the mutual dependence of reputable private makers and the federal government during the War. Just as Whitney recognized that his first government contract “saved him from ruin,” the government depended on him, and his personal contacts, in times of increased production needs.83 It also depended on

Simeon North of Middletown, Connecticut, who became a successful arms manufacturer with the help of government patronage. Like Whitney, North was a property owner and had wealthy

79 Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 32.

80 Henry Dearborn to Eli Whitney, February 25, 1803, Order Book, Letters Sent Regarding Procurements, Records of the Office of the Secretary of War, Record Group 107, Entry 10, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

81 See, for example, Oliver Wolcott, “Bills Receivable in July 1810”, Oliver Wolcott Account books, 1781-1831, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 32.

82 Joy, "Eli Whitney's Contracts for Muskets," 150-151.

83 Joy, "Eli Whitney's Contracts for Muskets,” 141.

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friends who endorsed his bank notes and served as his sureties84 Yet, his relationship with the government, more than Whitney’s, reflected skill and compliance with contract terms. After securing another contract following the Militia Act, North poured $100,000 into a new factory dedicated solely to arms manufacturing on Staddle Hill in Middletown, Connecticut.85 By 1811 he had completely given up other manufacturing pursuits.86 With government support he no longer needed other business opportunities. Secretary of War William Eustis, in fact, visited

North’s armory soon after war was declared in 1812, and asked him to increase the size of the factory. Eustis promised that if he complied, the government would award him a large contract.

The following April, North traveled to Washington and submitted several identical sample pistols. Duly impressed, ordnance officials granted him a contract for 20,000 pistols, the largest ever given.87

North’s 1813 contract was also the first contract to refer to the principle of uniformity.

Although the United States’ had achieved relative self-sufficiency in arms production,

Commissary General of Ordnance Decius Wadsworth was appalled at the lack of regularity in the weapons given to soldiers during the War of 1812, a shortcoming which compromised soldiers’ ability to change and repair parts. Reports from federal arsenals corroborated

Wadsworth’s opinion by lambasting the poor quality of American arms. Many stands had been

“overlooked by U.S. Armory inspectors” and came with “bayonets too weak in the neck that cracked a little, and several locks which pulled off too uncommonly hard.” One inspector of

84North, Simeon North, First Official Pistol Makers of the United States; A Memoir, 79.

85Simeon North, December 1826, Firearms Makers Collection, Box 1, Folder 1. Middlesex County Historical Society.

86 Simeon North, Middletown, CT., U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Connecticut, RG279 (Washington: National Archives, 1944), roll 4.

87North, Simeon North, First Official Pistol Makers of the United States, 78-79, 86.

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arms for the Connecticut militia “could not pass them out,” but advocated that the muskets would be “good and sound” if “cut down to thirty-nine inches.”88 Eli Whitney was familiar with the

French system of military standardization that promised to overcome such failures in quality control. Whitney had not, however, implemented a system of parts interchangeability, nor were his arms perfect duplicates of each other.89 North’s fulfillment of his 1813 pistol contract, on the other hand, proved his ability to achieve uniformity in arms production, which wartime realities had convinced the War Department was essential.90 With that contract, the mutual dependence between North and the federal government was cemented. The government depended on North, and North, likewise, was only able to produce so many pistols because of federal patronage.

From the war forward, his manufactory would be devoted solely to producing arms for the nation.

Textiles

As the War Department nurtured a relationship of mutual dependence between the arms industry and the federal government, the textile industry resisted the best efforts of Ordnance to engineer a similar relationship. Instead, aspiring manufacturers responded to the market opportunities created by war-time trade policies. On July 6, 1812, the United States deemed it illegal to trade with Great Britain. Aspiring textile manufacturers saw profits in the void left by

88 Benjamin Moore to William Eustis, Secretary of War, November 24, 1812, Moore to Eustis, June 30, 1813 Moore to John Chaffee, Paymaster and Storekeeper, Springfield Armory, May 1, 1813, Benjamin Moore, Letters about Guns, 1812-13, MS 101435, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT.

89 Interchangeability will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5.

90 Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 32. Historian Ken Alder has shown how interchangeability of parts emerged in France as an attempt to maintain standards of production for an “artifact essential to the authority of the state,” Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 249.

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excluded British broadcloths, drab cloths, cassimeres, and muslins.91 It was relatively easy to start a textile mill, especially if one could predict ready sales, and many did, indeed, build new factories.92 Moses Arnold, William Bowen, Thomas Hubbard, and Benjamin Duick, for example, pulled together $5,000 in 1814 to expand their general store operations in Woodstock,

Connecticut to include a cotton spinning mill.93 In New England, well over twenty-five new companies started during the war, and others, already in operation, reported flourishing.94

Although U.S. involvement in the War of 1812 did not create a textile industry capable of clothing all of the armed forces, as it did the arms industry, war with Britain helped secure the existence of domestic textile manufacturing. Even with the post-war economic downturn, war was imperative for creating the incentive for textiles to takeoff when they did.

Coxe had tried to encourage Americans to manufacture cloth suitable for the military.

Before the war, he had sent samples of Russian duck and drillings, imploring manufacturers to improve their wares to match foreign quality and some indeed had sent back samples in return.

Amos Binney, the commander of the Charlestown Navy Yard, had also sent out circulars to textile manufacturers requesting samples of American duck.95 But Binney complained of the

91 “An Act to prohibit American vessels from proceeding to or trading with the enemies of the United States and for other purposes”, Statute I, July 6, 1812, 12th Congress, 1st Sess., American State Papers, Ch. 129: 778.

92 Ware, "The Effect of the American Embargo, 1807–1809, on the New England Cotton Industry."

93 Arnold Manufacturing Company Account Books, Connecticut Historical Society.

94 It is difficult to procure exact numbers because many textile records do not survive and the 1820 manufacturing census is far from complete. Additionally, manufacturers provided varying amounts of information and many did not refer to the founding date of their factories. Arnold Manufacturing Company in Woodstock, Connecticut, for example, was established in 1814, but omitted that information from their response to the census. U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Connecticut, RG279 (Washington: National Archives, 1944), roll 4; Arnold Manufacturing Company Account Books, Connecticut Historical Society. Additionally, during the War, observers noted anywhere between 25 and 45 new factories within 30 miles of Providence. Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 56.

95 Amos Binney to Secretary of Navy William Jones [?], June 9, 1813, Amos Binney Letterbook, 1810-1814. American Antiquarian Society.

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quality, and, as late as 1819, the Commissary General of Purchases Callendar Irvine lamented that it was nearly impossible to clothe the army solely with domestics because of high cost and low quality.96 Many manufacturers chose to produce goods that ordinary consumers would purchase, such as nankeens and ginghams. Manufacturers selected these pale yellow, fine cotton cloths and lovely, checked woven fabrics for their success in both urban and western markets, even as they offered little in the way of military suiting. Samuel Slater and Bela Tiffany, for example, opened a textile factory in Oxford, Massachusetts in 1812, choosing to specialize in ginghams, nankeens, stripes, shirtings, and twists, none of which were the drab cloths, heavy linens, and kerseys necessary for military uniforms. Although New England markets suffered following the Embargo, western demand was steadily increasing in places like Pittsburgh,

Cincinnati, and Zanesville.97 The opening of the National Road in 1811 connected the Potomac and Ohio Rivers and facilitated the westward flow of goods and people to new cities. Slater and

Tiffany, like many others, consigned their goods to Philadelphia where they could be sold in urban markets or shipped further west.98 Almy and Brown, likewise, sent their goods to

Philadelphia and the interior. They had sent samples to Coxe in 1809 when they needed new customers, but during the war, they passed up government contracts. Even with high shipping costs and the uncertainty of sales, larger established firms preferred the consumer market over the government because the potential for high profits was greater. And when there was “risque too great,” Almy and Brown simply instructed their agent to raise the prices 99 Alternately, when

96“Clothing the Army with Domestic Fabrics, Communicated to the Senate, January 11, 1820, 16th Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 180: 42.

97 Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture, a Study in Industrial Beginnings, 55.

98 Slater and Tiffany to Jeremiah Brown, March 11, 1816, Vol. H63 Consignments, Slater and Tiffany, Slater Family Business Records, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

99 Almy and Brown to Archibald Sturbuch, June 23, 1813 and Almy and Brown to Daniel Waldo, June 19, 1813,

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“ready sales for cash” were hard to come by, owing to “so many cotton mills… and cloth so easy to be obtained,” the firm directed the agent to “take to the interior” and sell the cloths at a 10-15 percent discount so that they would net the firm about 20 percent profit on the invoice price after deducting commission.100 Manufacturing establishments like Almy and Brown could afford to take risks in the flooded consumer marketplace.

Some firms that produced non-military wares, however, also produced government contract items. Huntington & Backus Woolen Manufactory in Norwich Connecticut, for example, manufactured both satinets, which were wool-cotton blends with a satin weave that were sold to lower-class consumers who could not afford an all-wool fabric, and coarse kerseys, which were sent to the military depot at Philadelphia, where some of the over 3,000 tailors employed by the government would transform the coarse woolen cloth into coats and trousers for soldiers.101 The owners had invested $70,000 in the company and were rewarded with handsome annual sales of $40,000 during the War.102 Similarly, J. and S. Hindsills’ Woolen Factory in

Bennington, Vermont, though significantly smaller than Huntington and Backus, produced for both the government and the public market. During the first year of war, the majority of the factory’s goods went to civilians, but in 1813 and 1814, the government provided the bulk of its income. In 1812, only $730 of the firm’s revenue came from the 1,000 yards of kersey it manufactured for the United States, while it received $10,375 for the 2,800 yards of fulled cloth it manufactured for public markets. The following year, however, the Hindsills produced twenty

Vol. 112, Letterbook 1813-1815, Almy and Brown Records, Mss29, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, RI.

100 Almy and Brown to Daniel Waldo, June 21, 1813, Vol 112, Letterbook 1813-1815, Almy and Brown Records, Mss29, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, RI.

101 Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords, 64; Chartrand, “A Most Warlike Appearance,” 38.

102 Huntington & Backus Woolen Manufactory, Norwich, CT. U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Connecticut, RG279 (Washington: National Archives, 1944), roll 4.

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times as many kerseys, and reduced its fulled cloth output to 2,000 yards. This shift in production likely resulted from price fluctuations. Fulled cloth went for over $3.50 per yard in

1812, but only $1.50 in 1813. Conversely, the government raised prices to entice contractors; the rate for white kersey increased from 73 cents per yard in 1813 to 94 cents per yard the following year. The firm added blankets to its repertoire in 1814, which sold at $4 each and netted $9,600.

Yet when the war ended, both J and S Hindsill and Huntington and Backus suffered. Military production ceased and the reintroduction of foreign goods into American markets crowded out domestic products. Hindsill cut production almost in half during the first year of peace; in 1816, it cut it in half again.

The same year that the Hindsills ramped up production for the government, Patrick Tracy

Jackson, James Lloyd, Francis Cabot Lowell, Nathan Appleton, John Gore, and Israel Thorndike incorporated the Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham, Massachusetts to produce brown and bleached shirtings and sheetings. Bleak commercial prospects prompted these merchants to deem 1813 a good year to invest some of their wealth in textiles. Francis Cabot Lowell in fact had recently returned from a factory tour of England. Lowell is credited with developing the first truly American system of manufacturing, but the system’s origins are anything but patriotic.103

He was in Britain before and during the first year of the War of 1812, buying fine linens and other British goods while his home nation practiced nonimportation.104 He also engaged in industrial espionage. The British state guarded national technology, which helps explain why

Lowell’s detailed record of his travels abroad reveals almost nothing of his factory observations.

As he traveled throughout the country with his family, Lowell wrote only that an acquaintance

103 Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 33.

104 Receipt, December 27, 1810, Box 6, Francis Cabot Lowell Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

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named William Smith had given him a tour of the town manufactories in Glasgow and that he found “the manufacturing towns very dirty.”105 Nathan Appleton’s nostalgic account of the introduction of the power loom simply remarked that he had met with Lowell at Edinburgh in

1811 when Lowell informed him that he planned to visit Manchester “for the purpose of obtaining all possible information on the subject, with a view to the improved manufacture in the

United States”106 It is generally believed that Lowell committed much of what he observed to memory and then returned home to profit from his observations.

Capitalized at $400,000, the Boston Manufacturing Company was worth over five times the value of Huntington and Backus, and over fifty times that of J. and S. Hindsill.107 The company needed no official government contract, because its directors had every other advantage working in their favor. In fact, Callendar Irvine remarked that during the war, the

“large establishments…would not make a yard of cloth for our suffering troops” 108 The directors of the Boston Manufacturing Company maintained a range of investments in foreign trade, insurance, and banking and were well-connected to legislators and consular agents all over the world.109 During the war, for example, Francis Cabot Lowell received a letter from his selling

105 Francis Cabot Lowell to William Cabot, May 28, 1811, Lowell to Ann Grant, May? 1811, Box 6, Francis Cabot Lowell Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

106 Nathan Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, and Origin of Lowell (Lowell, MA: B.H. Penhallow, 1858), 7.

107January 28, 1813, Stockholders’ Records, Volume 1, page 11, Boston Manufacturing Co. Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

108“Clothing the Army with Domestic Fabrics,” Communicated to the Senate, January 11, 1820, 16th Congress, 1st Sess., American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 180: 42.

109 For these men’s business ventures and extensive personal and political connections, see Robert F Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987). Some of these connections will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3. For the ways in which these connections functioned in banking and made possible both their own financial undertakings and economic development more generally, see Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For diplomatic connections, see for

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agent in England acknowledging that if war continued Lowell could not send corn or flour to

England, but that the government would issue licenses for him to take it to Spain or Portugal.110

Others, like Nathan Appleton, were engaged in smuggling during the embargo and war, and because of their connections, had legal recourse to compensation for shipping losses incurred from illegal trade.111 While other textile companies complained of a “want of capital” in the

1810s, the directors of the Boston Manufacturing Company had an easy time securing loans because they controlled stock in the major Boston banks.112 This wealth and access to power made it possible for the Company to buy up more land following the war when other companies struggled.113 The same year that Hindsill cut production in half, the Boston Manufacturing

Company authorized its treasurer to contract for the construction of new buildings.114

Peace

examples, George Erving to Israel Thorndike, July 15, 1802, Box 5, Volume 8, Israel Thorndike Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School; Thomas Appleton and Co. to S.K. Jones and Co., August 1, 1815, Box 3, Folder 2, Appleton Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

110 James Russell to Francis Cabot Lowell, September 1, 1812, Francis Cabot Lowell Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

111Lindsay Schakenbach, “From Discontented Bostonians to Patriotic Industrialists: The Boston Associates and the Transcontinental Treaty, 1790-1825,” New England Quarterly 84 (September 2011), 383-388. Shipping claims will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3.

112 See for example the response of John Arms, Conway, Massachusetts, U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Massachusetts and Rhode Island, RG279 (Washington: National Archives, 1944), roll 2; October 29, 1813, December 20, 1813, Directors’ Records, Volume 2, Boston Manufacturing Co. Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Insider Lending.

113 February 7 and July 17, 1815, Directors’ Records, Volume 2, Boston Manufacturing Co. Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

114 November 6, 1815, Directors’ Records, Volume 2, Boston Manufacturing Co. Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

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On December 24, 1814, a treaty of peace and amity between Britain and the United

States was signed in Ghent and ratified by Congress two months later. From the point of view of diplomats, nothing really changed. Boundaries stayed for the most part the same, the contentious issue of impressment remained unsolved, and arrangements were made for the return of prisoners and slaves. But the War marked Britain’s official acceptance of the United States as a sovereign nation with the prerogative to engage in commerce and expand its borders. It also highlighted the importance of military preparedness. In his message to Congress in February, 1815, President

James Madison urged Americans to remain vigilant despite the “pacific dispositions of the

American people and the pacific character of their political institutions.” While “resources were competent to the attainment of every national object,” “preparation for war is not only indispensable to avert disasters, but affords also the best security for the commitment of peace.”115 For this reason, the federal government would maintain a regular army and would continue to provide contracts for arms. But “preparation” during peace was only beneficial for some. After the War of 1812, only certain contracts were renewed and American manufacturers in general faced competition from the recommencement of foreign trade. Even before an armistice was declared, New England sellers feared the imminent fall of prices and the end of military requests.116

Madison’s celebration of the resumption of commerce with Britain in his post-treaty message to Congress ignored the realities of the impending flood of British imports. His message certainly would not have resonated with Frederick Wolcott, a textile manufacturer in

Torrington, Connecticut, who had built his factory during the War. Business prospects had

115“Treaty of Peace,” February 18, 1815, 13th Congress, 3rd Session, Annals of Congress: 255-256.

116Amos Binney to Tobias Lord, January 6, 1814, and Amost Binney to Isaac Hull, January 6, 1814, Amos Binney Letterbook, American Antiquarian Society.

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looked promising, but by the time Wolcott had cloth ready for sale, peace had been declared and the large importation of British textiles drastically reduced the prices of his wares.117 The owners of the small cotton factory in Coventry Rhode Island, likewise, experienced similar commercial disillusionment following the War. They, too, had commenced operations at the end of the War, hoping for good profits, but instead faced a surge of imports. As a result, they decided not to add more spindles.118 Those who had contracted with the government could not even count on its support. Huntington and Backus had contracted with the government for blankets and kerseys during the War, but were left with the same post-war reality as non-contractors. They, like others, bemoaned the “flood of foreign goods that left them unable to dispose of their goods.”119

The directors of the Boston Manufacturing Company, though, had little to lament. The government’s decision to close American markets to imports and ban U.S. ships from the carrying trade had provided the space for their foray into textile manufacturing; its decision to declare peace resumed their trade with Britain. These men imported and sold the British textiles that made so many other manufacturers irate.

As U.S. urban markets flooded with “cheap” cottons and woolens from Britain, particularly half-finished coats that had been fashioned for military use during the Napoleonic

Wars, wartime opportunities fizzled out.120 Manufacturers in Amesbury, Massachusetts, where

BMC stockholders would purchase a failed woolen mill five years later, implored naval agents

117 Frederick Wolcott, Litchfield County, Connecticut, U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Connecticut, RG279 (Washington: National Archives, 1944), roll 4.

118 Cotton Factory in Coventry, Rhode Island, U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Massachusetts and Rhode Island, RG279 (Washington: National Archives, 1944), roll 2.

119 Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords, 64; Chartrand, “A Most Warlike Appearance,” 38.

120 For the post-war trade in British “monkey” jackets, see Nelson, A Nation of Deadbeats, 52-54.

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for government contracts, but these contracts would be hard to come by.121 Sweet, Jenks and

Son, for example, the lone gunsmithing operation in Rhode Island, had received a contract for

4,000 stands of arms prior to the War, but by 1820, had transitioned solely to cotton production.122

Certain arms manufacturers, however, had secured their status as government contractors.

Federal production sites were still more efficient than these chosen few: Callendar Irvine complained about private contractors and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun argued that arms could be fabricated better and at least as cheaply by the federal armories as by contract.123 It was too risky, though, to leave all arms manufacturing to the federal armories. The burning of

Washington in 1814 had alerted War Department officials to the consequences of attacks on areas of strategic importance.124 At the close of 1814, fewer than 20,000 stands of arms remained in the federal arsenals, down from 200,000 at the start of the war, and War Department officials claimed that had the War continued, the country would have struggled to continue fighting with

121William Richardson to Francis Cabot Lowell, July 7, 1815, Box 8, Folder 5, Francis Cabot Lowell Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; Nathan and Charles Appleton to Thomas Jones and Co., March 15, 1815, Box 3, Folder 1, Appleton Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; Jona Morrill and Son to Jeremiah Nelson, Volume 4, Records Collection of the Office of Naval Records and Library, Record Group 25, Entry 328, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

122 Tench Coxe, “A Statement of the Arts and Manufacture of the United States of America, for the year 1810.” (Philadelphia, A. Corman, 1814); “An Account of monies advanced by Tench Coxe by order of the War Department for the purpose of procuring Arms in Contract to Manufacture in the United State for their use,” December 3, 1809, Bound Volumes of the Philadelphia Supply Agencies, Volume 13 Manufacture of Clothing, Tailors Work, Contracts 1805-11, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, Entry 2117, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.; Stephen Jenks and Sons Cotton Manufactory, U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Massachusetts and Rhode Island, RG279 (Washington: National Archives, 1944), roll 2.

123 “Western Armory,” Communicated to the Senate, December 7, 1818, Military Affairs: Vol. 1, 15th Congress, 2nd Session, American State Papers, No. 166: 773.

124 Joy, "Eli Whitney's Contracts for Muskets,” 154.

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this shortage of arms.125 Additionally, the government had established the manufactories of a cadre of reputable contractors with public capital and it intended to maintain its investment. Soon after the 1809 Militia Act five-year contracts expired, the Ordnance Department assumed administration of contracts, which had existed under the purview of a changing cadre of federal officers during the War. Decius Wadsworth, as chief of ordnance, would now be in charge of renewing contracts, and the relationships he had established with certain manufacturers, along with some contractors’ reputations for reliability and quality, determined who received peace- time contracts.126 Following the war, the main contractors for the next two decades would be

Robert Johnson, Nathan Starr and Simeon North in Middletown, Connecticut, Eli Whitney in

New Haven, Connecticut, Asa Waters in Millbury, Massachusetts, Lemuel Pomeroy in Pittsfield,

Massachusetts, and Marine T. Wickham, the only non-New Englander. Wickham, who had worked as master armorer at Harpers Ferry until 1811 and federal inspector of contract arms at

Philadelphia during the War, secured a contract in 1816 to produce 4,000 muskets at $14 per stand annually for the federal government at his manufactory in Philadelphia.127 This financial arrangement marked a vast improvement over Wickham’s humble origins as an apprentice to a country gunsmith in Maryland. While cotton manufacturers complained of the ebbs and flow of business, these men’s factories remained in “constant operation.”128 Though they depended on a

125 “Arming the Militia of the West,” Letter of Colonel Bomford, January 8, 1823, 17th Congress, 2nd Session, Annals of Congress: 1314.

126 Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, for example, argued that arms could be fabricated better and at least as cheaply by the federal armories as by contract. “Western Armory,” Communicated to the Senate, December 7, 1818, 15th Congress, 2nd Session, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 166: 773; Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change, 60; Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley, 55.

127 Smith, Harper’s Ferry Armory and the New Technology, 59-61.

128 Response of Lemuel Pomeroy, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Massachusetts and Rhode Island, RG279 (Washington: National Archives, 1944), roll 2.

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strong economy for payment, the government was a guaranteed customer. Nathan Starr for example went to Washington to solicit additional funding and made note that the government would not issue additional Treasury notes until trade duties started rolling in.129 Regardless, he would be paid. For some, the military offered dependable demand, even during times of peace.

Also, the United States was never really at peace. Despite peace treaties with Indian tribes following the war, the government maintained a military presence on its frontiers, especially along the Florida border where American troops under General Andrew Jackson had instigated hostilities between the United States and Creek and Seminole Indians during the

War.130 Additionally, in the wake of war with Britain, members of the government recognized that American liberties had been won through armed force and that they could be threatened at any time by despotic Europeans.131 A productive arms industry provided the antidote to real and perceived threats to national security and the War of 1812 had helped make this possible through the bolstering of the federal armories and the contract system. The development of a textile industry was less imperative for war-waging and national defense, because the government could and did import clothing for the military, but the War had done much to foster the industry’s growth. Indeed, the federal government began considering “the expediency of making provision by law for clothing of the army of the United States in domestic manufactures.”132 This began to seem possible because war-time trade policies and government initiatives had increased the

129 Nathan Starr, Sr. to Nathan Starr, Jr., September 5, 1815, Box 1, Folder 1, Arms Correspondence, Starr Family Collection, Middlesex County Historical Society.

130 John and Mary Lou Missall, The Seminole Wars: America’s Longest Indian Conflict (Gainesville, FL: Florida University Press, 2004), 22.

131 “Re-Organization of the Militia,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, January 7, 1817, 14th Congress, 2nd Session, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 152: 663.

132Senate Proceedings, December 2, 1818, Annals of Congress: 33.

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prevalence of American cottons and woolens in domestic markets and on military supply lists.133

By 1820, all of the army’s cotton drilling, grey cloth, and kersey, the principle article of wool for military clothing, were domestic. American kerseys, in fact, had reached a point of “high perfection.”134

To a large extent, the federal state and its war-making capabilities had made this growth and improvement possible by engaging in a sort of national security capitalism. The government had provided the contracts, picked the winners, and established policies that shored up resources and spawned industrial development. A small cadre of contractors, along with the federal armories, would guarantee an annual output of arsenal capable of arming the nation, while a growing number of textile firms, of varying size and with different relationships to the government would slowly but surely overtake foreign competition to clothe both civilians and armed forces. In 1800, American industry had seemed incapable of supplying an entire army, but in 1815, the United States had emerged from a war with a major world power in which its soldiers had fought with American guns in their hands and at least some domestic textiles on their backs. And this was only just the beginning. Despite a post-war contraction, American industry would continue to expand and, with it, the nation.

133 Amasa Stetson, Deputy Commissary’s Office, Boston, to Callendar Irvine, December 8, 1812, Box 136, Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92, Entry 2118, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

134“Clothing the Army with Domestic Fabrics, Communicated to the Senate, January 11, 1820, 16th Congress, 1st Sess., American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 180: 42. This “perfection” also, no doubt, reflected the demands of southern plantation owners for slave goods produced in northern factories. Seth Rockman, Plantation Goods and the National Economy of Slavery in Antebellum (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press).

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CHAPTER THREE: Financing Expansion

Twenty years after the United States purportedly gained Florida in the 1803 Louisiana

Purchase, the peninsula provided the venture capital for New England industry. After the War of

1812 had settled border issues with Britain and largely subdued the Delaware, Shawnee,

Cherokee, and Creek Indians, the United States turned its attention to its Indian and Spanish foes in Florida, which Spain had refused to cede with Louisiana.1 As cotton production pushed further south, the acquisition of Florida in 1821 promised aspiring planters new opportunities for profitable landholding and guaranteed commercial access to the Gulf of Mexico for the export of southern produce. The expansion of slave country, as the historian Adam Rothman has termed it, also provided a boon to New England manufacturing, not just in the form of increased supply of high quality long-staple cotton for northern manufacturers, but also in the form of arms appropriations and financial rewards for men who were just beginning to pivot from mercantile to manufacturing pursuits.2

In the decades between the purchase of the Louisiana territory and the coining of the phrase “Manifest Destiny,” American citizens and their government cooperated to expand and secure the nation’s borders.3 In the context of the contest for Florida, the United States federal government engaged in targeted stimulus spending to expand its industrial resources in the

North. The terms of the treaty by which the United States acquired Florida from Spain provided

1 Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992).

2 Edward Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 39.

3 Max M. Edling has argued that the United States created a revenue system that allowed it to effectively mobilize resources for war and achieve dominance on the North American continent. Max Edling, “War, Money, and the American States, 1783-1867,” paper presented at “Political Economy and Empire in the Early Modern World” conference at Yale University, May 4, 2013.

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remuneration to a select group of merchant-industrialists who had outstanding shipping claims against the Spanish government. These claims payments were then invested in northern factories.

Also, in an effort to shore up its control of the territory, the federal government pumped money and resources into its arms industry.

The executive’s most crucial decision in stimulating industry was to negotiate for Florida and in the process assume the mercantile debts of New England capitalists. The Transcontinental

Treaty would transfer over $1 million in federal funds to some of the Boston Manufacturing

Company proprietors as part of the United States’ agreement to assume American citizens’ claims against the Spanish government in exchange for the acquisition of Florida.4 As the Panic of 1819 created capital shortages for many businessmen, these claims payouts coincided perfectly with large-scale expansion at Lowell, the nation’s first industrial city.5 They provided financial assistance above and beyond what the initially-minimal protective duties offered.

Government remuneration from the government subsidized new textile undertakings, just as contracts subsidized arms makers. By 1820 federal reimbursements for claims against the government were nothing new, nor was the supply of a standing army. What was new was the imposition of an unprecedented level of federal oversight on its arms production to ensure adequate supply and the assumption that the government would bear the responsibility for failed private commercial ventures. Targeted federal spending -- part and parcel of national goals of economic and military security within an expanding nation -- made possible the expansion of industry in New England.

4 February 28 1820 entry, Volume 2 Director’s Records, p.227 Boston Manufacturing Company Collection. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

5 Chaim M. Rosenberg, Life and Times of Francis Cabot Lowell, 1775-1817 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 252-3.

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In the years between the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican American War, continental expansion should be understood primarily as the strategic consolidation of land on which to establish a sound political economy.6 Financial expenditure in the service of armed force is usually associated with eighteenth- and nineteenth- century European nation-states, but the early

American republic was no stranger to it. Public expenditures for territorial acquisition and defense became commonplace as the United States required ever more land to overcome constraints on its economic growth. Expanded markets for agricultural crops and manufactured goods formed the early republican solution to the problem of commercial fluctuations.7 As historian Drew McCoy has shown, the Jefferson Administration negotiated the Louisiana

Purchase with France because the territory promised to solve a key problem for Jeffersonian political economy. The North American continent offered seemingly endless land on which to hinge individual fortunes and national welfare. Edward Baptist has labeled this territory “ghost acres” – extra land that allowed the northeastern United States to avoid Malthusian catastrophe.8

Seemingly limitless land would enable the nation’s population to spread out, operate independent farms, and dispose of surplus produce. Scholars have typically understood expansion as a dominant theme throughout American history, characterizing it as being driven at various points

6 For example, the Monroe Administration was always willing to forego acquisition of Texas, which other scholars have pegged as the site of American imperial and racial ambitions during the 1830s and 40s, in its negotiations with Spain for Florida. William Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 167.

7 Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1980), 198-199. Martin Öhman argues that early republican policymakers understood that territorial expansion was linked with economic security and an improved status in the international trading system. The Louisiana Purchase, in fact, was executed with the understanding that the manufacturing sector would subsequently expand. Öhman, "Perfecting Independence: Tench Coxe and the Political Economy of Western Development," Journal of the Early Republic 31, no. 3 (2011): 397-433.

8 Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 112.

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by religion, “liberty,” race, “empire,” and masculinity; and for the antebellum period, it is often analyzed in the context of contestations over slavery and southern power.9

The Louisiana Purchase scarcely gave the United States meaningful control over

“Louisiana.” Even after treaties were signed and ratified, newly acquired territory required defense, which meant that western fortifications and Indian warfare began to absorb a significant proportion of public resources.10 The signing of the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 by no means ushered in a period of uncontested peace; disagreements with Great Britain over commercial rights persisted and the potential for British naval intervention posed a particular threat to U.S. military and commercial security. For this reason, Florida was of great strategic importance to the United States. Americans could not countenance another nations’ control of a peninsula whose extensive coastline offered coveted commercial access to Caribbean and Atlantic markets.

In foreign hands, however, the region threated national security, as when the Spanish made it a

9 For “manifest destiny” as an American ideology from settlement to the twentieth century, see Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson argue that Thomas Jefferson’s decision to purchase the Louisiana from Napoleon reflected his belief in a nation that would expand throughout the continent to create new republics that would be governed by liberty and republican virtues. Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). For expansion as a racial mission, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Harvard University Press, 1981). Amy S. Greenberg argues that by 1848 westward expansion was driven by two competing masculinities –“martial” versus “restrained” manhood. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 9; Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and its Aftermath: Slavery & the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Leonard Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Kinley J. Bauer, Cotton versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843-1848 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967).

10 For border fortifications and personnel, see American State Papers, “Military Force,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, February 15, 1805, Military Affairs: Vol. 1, 8th Cong, 2nd Sess., No. 55, p. 175. For spending on Indian relations, see Timothy Pitkin, A Statistical View of the Commerce of the United States of America: Its Connection with Agriculture and Manufactures: and an Account of the Public Debt, Revenues, and Expenditures of the United States. With a Brief Review of the Trade, Agriculture, and Manufactures of the Colonies, Previous to their Independence. Accompanied with tables, illustrative of the principles and objects of the work (James Eastburn & Company, 1817), 342, and A Statistical View of the Commerce of the United States of America: Including also an Account of Banks, Manufactures and Internal Trade and Improvements (New Haven: Durrie & Peck: 1835), 342.

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haven for runaway slaves from nearby states.11 Lax policing by Spanish officials made southern slaveholders especially fearful of another slave rebellion like the one that had occurred in

Louisiana in 1811.12 Commercial, and military motives drove American citizens and the

Madison and Monroe administrations to spend the remaining years of the 1810s completing their aggressive pursuit of Florida – in essence, consolidating control over land nominally possessed.13

While the acquisition of Florida would seem to have mostly benefited white southerners, who sought new land for plantation ownership and the eradication of slave-tolerant Spanish rule, it boosted the business prospects of some New England factory owners. The road to economic development in fact traveled through Florida. If we step back from the local history of places like

Lowell and view New England industrialization from Florida, the advent of New England manufacturing changes from one shaped by entrepreneurs and laborers, to one shaped by geopolitical developments and federal patronage. The conquest and acquisition of Florida required a steady supply of arms, as well as financial remuneration for the investors in what would become the greatest concentration of industrial resources in the United States: the

Waltham-Lowell mill complex. The War Department implemented improvements in the management and production of arms supply in the context of the ongoing military demands, but diminished military urgency in light of peace with Britain,. Expansion also provided a financial stimulus to textile manufacturing in the wake of the economic downturn of 1819. As the United

11Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire, 26-27, 30-33.

12 For a brief account of this rebellion, see Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 18-22.

13 This pursuit had been interrupted somewhat during the War of 1812. John and Mary Lou Missall, The Seminole Wars: America’s Longest Indian Conflict (Gainesville, FL: Florida University Press, 2004), 20.

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States waged war against Seminole Indians and negotiated with Spain for Florida, it vastly expanded its manufacturing capability in a region one thousand miles away.14

Industrial business underwent significant modernization in the 1810s and 1820s in the services of territorial expansion.15 Historian Alfred Chandler refers to these developments as the precursors to the post-1840s revolution in American business in which the “visible hand” of the manager, not the “invisible hand” of the market, dictated a firm’s functions.16 Yet when we shift our focus away from owners, agents, and managers, we see the hand of the federal government – clearly visible in the case of arms production, perhaps more gloved in the case of the textile industry. This hand was influential in ways to which scholars have not always paid attention.

While tariffs have rightfully received much study, they were but one form of fiscal support among a host of policy options. In the 1810s, in the context of peace with Europe and expansion and war at home, Congress passed the first serious tariff legislation. But while congressional debates about tariffs bred uncertainty on the part of manufacturers, decisions that were made by members of the executive about land and security generated industrial growth and efficiency.

The financial ramifications of these decisions are where we should cast our attention.

Arms

We are not always likely to associate government stimulus with early U.S. economic development. The state’s role is more visible in early modern Europe or in the twentieth century.

14 Although little studied, the First Seminole War was a transformative even in early national history. Deborah Rosen has recently argued that it was foundational in establishing United States policies on territoriality, war- making and foreign relations. Deborah A. Rosen, Border Law: The First Seminole War and American Nationhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

15 Thomas Cochran, “The Business Revolution,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 79, No. 5 (Dec., 1974): 1449-1466.

16 Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: the Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 71-74.

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Yet, the post-1812 propulsion of the American arms industry to the forefront of the international market derived from federal responses to territorial expansion and warfare in the Southeast.17

The government’s policing of borders for runaway slaves and Indian intruders increased the business prospects of weapon manufacturers. In the context of ongoing military needs, the federal government reorganized the bureaucracy responsible for arms supply and production.

Tariffs on muskets and pistols had been in place since 1795, a nod to both the importance of domestic manufacturing and the hopeful certainty that the United States would not need to rely on imports to arm its troops. These duties ranged from 15 to almost 40 percent, but it was the bureaucratic changes of the 1810s coupled with an increasingly financially assertive War

Department that prompted unprecedented productive capacity.18 The system of standardization and contract renewal increased the quantity and quality of arms produced by private contractors and the federal armory beyond what protective duties could do. And this system proved effective enough so that even in the face of troop reductions in the early 1820s, spending on arms production and efforts at improvements in efficiency remained firmly intact.

The United States’ struggles to equip its army during the War of 1812 had brought to the fore the importance of military logistics. Funds for the Quartermaster Department were

17 David F. Ericson has argued that warfare and border patrol -- hallmarks of European fiscal-military states and twentieth century America - characterized the U.S. federal government’s efforts to manage a slave-holding society. Ericson, Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 1791-1861 (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2011).

18 Historian Mark Wilson has shown how military supply bureaus became the most stable and bureaucratic arm of the U.S. government in the antebellum years. Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 35. For tariff rates on arms see, “Duties payable by law on all goods, wares and merchandise, imported into the United States of America, after the last day of June 1794. The inward column exhibiting the rates payable on those imported in ships or vessels of the United States, and the outward column the rates payable in foreign ships or vessels, including the additional duties to which the respective articles are liable,” (Philadelphia: Printed by Childs and Swaine?, 1794); U.S. Treasury Department, “A Correct List of Duties,” (New York: Longworth, 1806); “Duties payable by law on all goods, wares and merchandise imported into the United States of America, after the last day of June, eighteen hundred and twelve,” (Washington, 1812).

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exhausted by October 1812, supplies were never adequate, and the system for provisioning barracks often broke down.19 At the close of 1814, fewer than 20,000 stands of arms remained in the federal arsenals, down from 200,000 at the start of the war, and War Department officials recognized that had the conflict continued, the country would have struggled with this shortage of arms.20 Additionally, small arms and artillery parts had not been standardized, which created variance in quality and made difficult their discharge and repair.21 Considering these shortcomings in its weaponry, the United States was fortunate to have achieved a military stalemate against a first-rate military power. Before the United States could shore up its landholdings, it had to improve its military bureaucracy and the uniformity of its weapon production, especially in the face of ongoing skirmishes with southern Indian groups following the conclusion of the Creek War in 1814.

The war with Britain had specifically highlighted the need to streamline the War

Department’s bureaucratic processes.22 While earlier border conflicts with Indians required the deployment of American troops and supplies, the War of 1812 had revealed the inadequacies of this system. Up through the Treaty of Ghent, supplies were still procured and distributed by

19See chapter 3, “Organizing the Republic for War,” John Charles Anderson Stagg, Mr. Madison's War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783-1830 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 160, 171.

20 “Arming the Militia of the West,” Letter of Colonel Bomford, January 8, 1823, 17th Congress, 2nd Session, Annals of Congress: 1314.

21 The War of 1812 had also prompted War Department Officials to recognize the importance of achieving interchangeability in arms production. Felicia Johnson Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley: A Regional Study of the Economic Development of the Small Arms industry, 1798-1870 , Smith College Studies in History, Vol. XXXIII, Vera Brown Holmes, Hans Kohn, eds. (Northampton, MA: 1948), 88. 22Historian William H. Bergmann has demonstrated for the early national period the importance of military bureaucracy for managing Indian conflicts and controlling supply lines to western territories. Bergmann, The American National State and the Early West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 9. For the importance of controlling supply lines, see chapter two. For the dominant role bureaucracy has played in driving economic change/business history in the United States, see Charles Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

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subcontractors under the oversight of an overworked Secretary of War.23 At the start of the War, the government had created the Ordnance Department to remedy some of the problems of supplying an expanded army, but inefficiencies persisted. After the department’s first year of existence, Colonel Decius Wadsworth advocated for its expansion, noting that it was not equipped to effectively “discharge its duties.”24 Responding to these inadequacies, Congress passed an act in 1815 “for the better regulation of the Ordnance Department," which clarified instructions and strengthened its powers. The Act expanded the size of the Ordnance Department and granted the colonel of the Department autonomy in establishing military depots, appointing master armors, orchestrating supply, and overseeing the inspection of all arms.25 Under the oversight of the Secretary of War, Ordnance Department officials renewed contracts and shored up financial resources in an effort to provide adequate supply for an increasingly aggressive nation. In the process, they transcended bureaucratic constraints to create business opportunities for a select group of arms makers.

The newly organized Ordnance Department became important for the success of the arms industry in the face of a growing discrepancy between congressional fiscal priorities and War

Department military aims. Never a popular institution, the military remained unpopular among

American citizens following the War of 1812.26 Congressmen’s letters to their constituents reflected the pushback they received against any expansion of the military. They constantly

23Stagg, Mr. Madison's War, 155.

24“Extension of the Ordnance Department,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, June 19, 1813. Military Affairs, Vol. 1, 13th Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, No. 121: 336.

25 “An Act for the better regulation of the Ordnance Department”, February 8, 1815, 13th Cong., 3rd Sess., Ch.38, in Richard Peters, United States Statutes at Large, Vol. 3 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1846), 203-4. 26Stagg, Mr. Madison's War, 504. For the roots, of American anti-militarism, see Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783-1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 3. Kohn argues that the origins of Americans’ fear of armies lay in colonial tax and radical Whig ideology.

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acknowledged the odiousness of having to support an army, even as they assured their voters that any support they offered for the maintenance of an armed force resulted only from dire security concerns.27 The General Orders of May 7, 1815 had reduced the size of the army, but congressmen repeatedly presented arguments for further reducing the size of the army and the resources for the federal armories.28 Chief of Ordnance Decius Wadsworth, well aware of anti- militarism, wrote to Superintendent of the Springfield Armory Roswell Lee in 1817 that he

“suspected an attempt at the next session of congress would be made to reduce rather than increase the national armories.”29

That same year, after a small band of Seminoles refused to vacate lands just north of the

Florida border, General Edmund P. Gaines stormed an Indian settlement, initiating the start of the First Seminole War.30 Over the next two years, American troops led by General Andrew

Jackson waged war against the Seminoles in Spanish territory. While Congress never formally declared war, both Secretary of War John C. Calhoun and President James Monroe advocated violence against the Seminoles for the sake of punishment and national interest, only later appealing to Congress that the military action was necessary for the “safety of our fellow- citizens.”31 Jackson’s disregard for international law when he executed two British soldiers by no

27 Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., ed., Circular Letters of Congressmen to Their Constituents, 1789-1829 (Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978).

28 “Reduction of the Army Considered”, Communicated to the House of Representatives, December 4, 1818, 15th Congr., 2nd Sess., American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 168: 779.

29 Decius Wadsworth to Roswell Lee, July 13, 1817, Box 2, Folder 8, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

30Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire, 107.

31 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire, 109-110. “War with the Seminole Indians,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, March 25, 1818, 15th Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 163: 680.

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means improved the reputation of the military in Congress, which continued to push for a reduction in its budget. The House of Representatives requested that the War Department present a report on the feasibility of reducing the army, and called for “the attention and effort of the government to be roused to confine its excesses within the most moderate limits which may be practicable.” Secretary Calhoun complied, but one week after Calhoun presented his report,

North Carolina Representative Lewis Williams renewed the proposition for the reduction of the army because he “yet thought the measure necessary.”32 It took until 1821 for this reduction to occur and it was overridden two years later.

In spite of petitions to reduce the military budget, the Ordnance Department assertively pushed arms production. As Wadsworth noted, “it would not be prudent to remain dependent on foreign countries for articles intimately connected with security. Measures ought to be taken

…so we can wage a vigorous war. A great capital is needed.”33 Congress dictated the amount of money spent on arms production -- $200,000 every year for arming the militia as stipulated by the 1808 act, varying annual amounts for the armories, and additional monies as military needs arose. Accordingly, department officials made routine presentations to the president and to members of Congress about increasing appropriations for arms production to ensure adequate supply.34 They sometimes, however, sidestepped lobbying altogether. As skirmishes between

32 “Reduction of the Army Considered”, Communicated to the House of Representatives, December 4, 1818, 15th Congress, 2nd Session, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1,., No. 168: 779; “Reduction of the Army,” December 11, 1818, 15th Congress, 2nd Session, Annals of Congress: 391.

33 Decius Wadsworth to Roswell Lee, January 27, 1817, Box 2, Folder 4, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

34 John Morton, Ordnance Department, to Roswell Lee, Springfield Armory, December 16, 1817, Box 3, Folder 3, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

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Seminole Indians and Americans increased along the Florida border, Wadsworth, for example, instructed Lee to maintain the Springfield Armory’s output, even aif it meant exceeding the

$199,834 Congress had provided for the annual production of arms for the militia. Wadsworth insisted that at least 12,000 stands of arms should be produced, regardless of financial considerations. The debt, he said, could be made up later.35 Wadsworth did indeed come up with

Department funds to make up for his excessive spending the previous quarter, but he also requested that Lee delay making contracts for barrels “until the temper of Congress has cooled.”36 Ordnance Department officers recognized Congressional disapproval, and worked around it whenever possible.

The barrier between financial reality and ordnance supply aims was not, however, insurmountable. For one, the Armory began to institute labor-saving and output-maximizing divisions of labor. Before 1815, there were eleven distinct occupations at Springfield Armory.

This number increased to thirty-four in 1815, eighty-six in 1820, and one hundred in 1825. These positions were increasingly low-skill, and involved just small parts of the production process, such as cutting or filing.37 Additionally, the Ordnance Department developed accounting methods that made it appear as if less money had been spent. While every government agency required congressional approval of its finances, the Ordnance Department was unique in its

35 Decius Wadsworth, Colonel of Ordnance, to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, August 30, 1817, Box 3, Folder 9, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

36 Decius Wadsworth, Ordnance Department, to Roswell Lee, Springfield Armory, November 10, 1818, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of the War and Treasury Departments, Box 1, Target #2, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

37 Joshua L. Rosenbloom, “Anglo-American Technological Differences in Small Arms Manufacturing,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Spring, 1993): 690, 695; White men’s options became increasingly constrained as labor became mechanized. Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 54.

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development of sophisticated bookkeeping that enabled the Department to present figures in such a way that was more palatable to Congress. Beginning in 1816, the Department required all officers of armories and arsenals to submit quarterly returns, which were then summarized for

Congress.38 Following directions from the Ordnance Department, the Superintendent of the

Springfield Armory, in preparing his statement of materials on hand at the armory, only accounted for an amount that would appear to fit within the prescribed budget.39 Recent purchases for supplies like musket stocks could be included on the next return. As Mark Wilson has contended -- countering Ira Katznelson’s arguments about legislative checks on the military that allowed the nineteenth-century United States to transcend European absolutism -- it is foolish to think that the War Department was subordinate to Congress.40 In the words of one congressman, “it would seem that the Executive branch of the government, together with the military, claims the right to make war at pleasure, without the sanction of Congress.”41

The executive branch’s ability to evade congressional prescriptions for U.S. military capacity expanded industrial capacity and transformed labor practices at the Armory. Although

War Department officials generally recognized that federal armories could manufacture arms of better quality than could private manufactures, the Department continued to draw its supply from both the armory and private contractors. When the administration of these contracts, which had

38 Merritt Roe Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (London: MIT Press, 1985), 57.

39 John Morton Ordnance, to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, August 30, 1817, Box 3, Folder 9, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

40 Mark B. Wilson, “The Politics of Procurement: Military Origins of Bureaucratic Autonomy,” Journal of Policy History 18, no. 1 (2006): 45-75.

41 Jesse Slocumb (NC), February 22, 1819, in Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., ed., Circular Letters of Congressmen to Their Constituents, 1789-1829 (Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 1055-1056.

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previously existed under the purview of a changing cadre of federal officers, came under the sole direction of the Ordnance Department in 1816, the practice of renewing five-year contracts continued. The terms, however became more specific in the quantities required and in the expectations for quality and precision.42 The following year it also began contracting for arms parts, such as barrels, bayonets, and ramrods. With these contracts, the War Department channeled public funds to bolster technology districts. After the first set of contracts was issued,

Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, hoping to “increase the product of the national armory,” instructed Superintendent Roswell Lee to enter into new contracts for 5,000 barrels and rods.

These instructions preceded approval from Congress, but Wadsworth, accustomed to circumventing the legislative hurdles, “expected [the plan for new contracts] to be fully understood at the next session of Congress and measures taken to make it effectual.”43 Lee advertised for these weapon parts in local papers because engaging the manufacturing potential in the Connecticut Valley was more efficient than looking elsewhere for national supply.44 These new contracts ensured adequate weapon production in the midst of the Seminole War and provided additional business to some general machinists who did not have the factory capacity to manufacture complete arms. Springfield Manufacturing Company in Ludlow, Massachusetts, for

42 Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, for example, argued that arms could be fabricated better and at least as cheaply by the federal armories as by contract. “Western Armory,” Communicated to the Senate, December 7, 1818, 15th Congress, 2nd Session, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 166, p.773; Merritt Roe Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (London: MIT Press, 1985), 60; Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley, 55.

43 Decius Wadsworth, Ordnance Department, to Roswell Lee, Springfield Armory, July 25, 1818, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of the War and Treasury Departments, Box 1, Target #2, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

44 Adam Kinsley to Roswell Lee, April 7, 1817, Box 2, Folder 6, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

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example, which mostly existed as a wool carding business, secured its first contract for the manufacture of 5,000 musket barrels in 1817 and continued to make barrels through the 1820s.45

Small arms contractors remained based in Middletown and New Haven, Connecticut, and in Pittsfield and Millbury, Massachusetts. Asa Waters of Millbury, Lemuel Pomeroy of

Pittsfield, and Eli Whitney of New Haven produced muskets on contract, and Nathan Starr,

Robert and John D. Johnson, and Simeon North, of Middletown, manufactured swords and rifles, rifles, and pistols, respectively. These contracts provided their livelihood. Looking back from

1835, a group of small-arms contract holders in Massachusetts credited an 1808 law that had initiated permanent contracts as the sole reason their factories had survived the 1810s, while others had failed.46 Asa Waters, who most likely drafted this document, wrote that, “if the patronage of the government is not continued, in accordance with expectations long entertained by, our factories, in which are invested the hard earnings of our lives, will be worth but little.”47

From the 1810s onward, manufacturers like Nathan Starr, understood that the operation of a

“large and expensive factory” depended on “steady encouragement from the government.”48

Once the federal government had invested public money in supporting regional producers, these manufacturers were not left to the whims of private consumers. Although contractors normally produced complete weapons, they were allowed to shift factory production

45[Springfield] Hampden Federalist, “Wool Carding,” June 19, 1817. Benjamin Jenks and George Wilkinson to Roswell Lee, April 19, 1817, Box 3, Folder 6, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA. 46 Memorial of Private Contractors to U.S. Congress, 1835?, Waters Family, Papers, 1749-1873, BoxW1, Folder 4 1835, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

47 Memorial of Private Contractors to U.S. Congress, 1835?, Waters Family, Papers, 1749-1873, BoxW1, Folder 4 1835, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

48 Nathan Starr to John Rodgers, President of the Board of Navy Commissioners, March 23, 1816, Volume 3, Records Collection of the Office of Naval Records and Library, Record Group 25, Entry 328, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

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to gun parts when it was advantageous. When, for example, Wadsworth informed Lee that he was “anxious to have the plan pursued of producing 5,000 barrels, bayonets, and ramrods for the armory at Springfield in the course of the year,” they outsourced the work to Asa Waters and

Robert Johnson, who manufactured barrels, and Nathan Starr, who provided bayonets, as well as some barrels and ramrods.49 Their established relationships with the Armory also enabled Robert

Johnson, who had earlier contracted for barrels, to solicit a recommendation from Lee for making rifles that he took to Washington D.C. in 1819.50 Even during lean times, when War

Department officials “complained of the small appropriations,” Nathan Starr was reassured in

March of 1818 that he would receive federal payments.51 It no doubt helped that he maintained the type of relationship with Colonel Bomford in which the two could “have a good laugh” about the inferiority of Russian-made swords.52 In 1823, North, Starr, and Johnson traveled to D.C. to request rifle contracts.53 Their contracts were granted, along with new contracts for Whitney,

49 Decius Wadsworth to Roswell Lee, March 7, 1817, Box 2, Folder 5, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

50 Robert Johnson to Roswell Lee, December 25, 1817, Box 2, Folder 3, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA. Robert Johnson to Roswell Lee, February 27, 1819, Box 4, Folder 6, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

51 Nathan Starr, Sr. to Nathan Starr, Jr., March 24, 1818, Folder 1, Box 1, Arms Correspondence, Starr Family Collection, Middlesex County Historical Society.

52 Nathan Starr, Sr. to Nathan Starr, Jr., March 25, 1818, Folder 1, Box 1, Arms Correspondence, Starr Family Collection, Middlesex County Historical Society.

53 George Bomford to Roswell Lee, March 6, 1823, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of the War and Treasury Departments, Box 2, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94- 066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

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Pomeroy and Waters.54 They had satisfactorily completed their contracts throughout the 1810s and would now continue manufacturing under government patronage.

By “An Act to Reduce and Fix the Military Peace Establishment of the United States” of

March 2, 1821, the Ordnance Department merged with the Corps of Artillery, losing its status as an independent bureau.55 Reorganization, however frustrating to Ordnance officials, did not impair the development of arms manufacturing.56 The economic downturn of 1819-22 had prompted the demotion of the Ordnance Department as a means of cutting costs, but by then a standing army even in peacetime was not seriously questioned by members of Congress. As

Secretary of War John C. Calhoun explained in his statement to the House in 1820, “The necessity of a standing army in peace is not believed to be involved in the subject under consideration, as the resolution presupposes the propriety of maintaining one; and in fact its necessity is so apparent that even those least friendly to the army have never attempted to abolish it, or even reduce it, since the late war.” 57 Calhoun had made it his mission to regularly inform

Congress of the importance of maintaining or expanding U.S. military capability. In 1823,

Congress voted to increase funding for arms and at the end of that year President James Monroe remarked in a congressional address that, “the money appropriated for the use of the Ordnance

54“Contracts Made since January 1, 1820 for canon, shot, muskets, and other small arms”, Communicated to the House of Representatives, January 6, 1824, 18th Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 248: 599.

55 “An Act to Reduce and Fix the Military Peace Establishment of the United States,” Statute II, March 2, 1821, 16th Cong., 2nd Sess., Ch. XIII: 615.

56 Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change, 67.

57 Secretary of War John C. Calhoun explained in his statement to the House in 1820, “The necessity of a standing army in peace is not believed to be involved in the subject under consideration, as the resolution presupposes the propriety of maintaining one; and in fact its necessity is so apparent that even those least friendly to the army have never attempted to abolish it, or even reduce it, since the late war,” in “Reduction of the Army,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, December 12 1820, 16th Congress, 2nd Session, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 197: 188.

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Department has been regularly and economically applied. The fabrication of arms at the national armories, and by contract with the Department, has been gradually improving in quality and cheapness.”58 This increase was followed by an expansion in the physical size and production capacity of the Springfield Armory a few years later. 59 The Ordnance Department had succeeded in fostering a thriving arms industry by acting as both consumer and investor.

Textiles

In 1821, the same year the United States formally acquired Florida, Joshua Aubin was sent to Amesbury, Massachusetts, to purchase a woolen mill. There was no need even to break ground in Amesbury because a mill, with its old machinery, was already there. It had most likely been one of the casualties of the recent economic downturn and was “worth but little.” Aubin, in fact, paid only $7,000 for it. The death of one man’s business venture, though, was an opportunity for Amos Adams Lawrence and his business associates, who, back in Boston, incorporated the undertaking as the Amesbury Flannel Manufacturing Company and capitalized it at $100,000.60 This was only a preview of what was to come: one year after Aubin purchased the woolen mill on behalf of Lawrence and company, this same group of men received an act of

58 Journal of the Senate, December 2, 1823, 18th Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, Vol. 13: 14.

59 Journal of the House of Representatives, February 25, 1823, 17th Congress, 2nd Session, American State Papers, Vol. 16: 261. For example, in 1825 the Springfield Armory withdrew and spent $325,480.80 from the Treasury. “Expenditures at the National Armories and the Arms Made Therein During the Year 1825,” Communicated to the House of Representatives, February 22, 1826, 19th Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 3, No. 315: 244; For new construction at the Armory, see for example “Copy of the Deposit Made”, July 9, 1822, Box 8, Folder 5, and John E. Wool, Inspector General’s Office Nassau, NY, October 25, 1826 to Lee, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry 1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

60 Joshua Aubin, “A Few Particulars in Relation to Woolen Manufacturing During an Agency in Amesbury of 31 years commencing in 1821 and ending in 1852” (unknown binding: 1854), Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

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incorporation for the Merrimack Manufacturing Company in Lowell.61 Valued at $600,000, it was worth far more than any other manufacturing venture in the country. Most of its directors were members of the Boston Associates, a loose network of mercantile, manufacturing and banking investors that included men from such illustrious New England families as the Lowells,

Lawrences, Cabots, Appletons, Perkinses, and Otises.62

In the 1810s the federal government provided the impetus for the arms industry’s expansion and production quality, but in the case of the textile industry, public capital followed private action. The directors of the Boston Manufacturing Company had created a textile manufactory in 1813 that presaged the success of mechanized domestic production and whose success was soon internationally known.63 They, unlike many others, escaped the economic downturn of 1819 unscathed. British imports, price deflation and general economic depression in some areas of New England drastically decreased textile output and led some producers to cease production all together.64 The 1820 census was replete with manufactures lamenting the downturn and pleading for government help. In the “general remarks” section of the census questionnaire, the agent for the Winthrop Cotton Factory in Kennebunk, Maine, for example, wrote that the stockholders had planned to stop operations the previous winter because things were so bad. Relying on what they “supposed and confidently expected Congress would do for

Manufactures,” they made an additional expenditure of $1,000 that spring, but greater tariff

61 “An Act to Incorporate the Merrimack Manufacturing Company,” Vol. 2 Stockholders’ Minutes, Merrimack Manufacturing Co. Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

62 Economic historian Vera Shlakman gave them this name in the 1930s. Vera Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town: a Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts (Northampton, Mass: Department of History, Smith College, 1935).

63 Rosenberg, Life and Times of Francis Cabot Lowell, 257.

64 Douglass North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 165, 178, 185.

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protection was still several years away and sales remained low.65 The Boston Associates, however, were well positioned to expand their manufacturing investments. They, unlike the proprietors of the Winthrop Cotton Factory, had good reasons to confidently expect government support because, after decades of successful (and sometimes not so successful), international commercial ventures, they received public capital for failed shipping ventures off the coast of

Florida.

In fact, if we follow the money and trace the personal and political networks that gave certain New England industrialists access to a huge subsidy at precisely the moment of great industrial opportunity, the development of large-scale manufacturing in New England becomes less the result of individual ingenuity and personal wealth and more the result of expansionist diplomacy and political wrangling. When Secretary of State John Quincy Adams negotiated with the Spanish minister Luis de Onís to acquire the Floridas and establish the United States’ southern boundary west to the Pacific coast, he agreed that the United States would assume $5 million of American citizens’ claims against the Spanish government. These claims stemmed from Spanish land grants made to American settlers in Florida and from commercial losses sustained under Spanish jurisdiction. Along with disagreements over the Unites States’ border with New Spain, which included present day Mexico and a majority of North America west of the Mississippi River and south of Canada, a dispute over shipping damages had plagued U.S.-

Spanish relations for decades. Spanish officials had failed to adequately police naval violence in their waters – a negligence which prompted American merchants to establish long lists of claims

65 Response of Cotton Manufactory in Winthrop, Kennebunk, Maine, Nov 20, 1820, U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Maine and New Hampshire, Microcopy number 279, National Archives. Washington, 1964, roll 1; Edward Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1 (Houghton, Mifflin, 1903), 160. The duties on cotton thread, yarn and cloths, for example, were raised from 25 to 35 percent.

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against the Spanish government. Many shippers claimed that their cargoes had been unlawfully seized at customs or that pirates had ransacked their ships. Marine insurance companies from

Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore made up a large portion of the spoliations claimants. They pleaded indemnity for the cases of rum, sugar, and silks their subscribers had lost at the hands of privateers and pirates.66 While the first sentence of Article IX of the Treaty mandated that the United States and Spain renounce all claims against each other, the U.S. government alone offered to repay its own for citizens for shipping damages caused by the other power’s faulty management of its ports. Article XI pegged the extent of the U.S. pledge at $5 million.67 In the geographic breakdown of the claims’ distribution, New England claimants received $1.8 million, Philadelphia $1.3 million, New York less than $1 million, Baltimore

$600,000, and all areas south of the Potomac only $300,000 combined. A core group of

Associates, including Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Nathan Appleton, and Henry Cabot, and their various insurance and trading companies, received over half of the claims paid to New

England.68

The claims payments the Associates received are important both because they reveal the allocation of federal power for business development and because they represent a source of industrial capital that has been neglected by scholars who point to the private commercial wealth

66 Petitions from Chesapeake Insurance Co, the Union Insurance Co, the Maryland Insurance Co and the Baltimore Insurance Co. sent to Congress in 1826, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Jan 3, 1826 and Mar 1, 1826 (SEN19A-G6), National Archives, Washington, D.C.

67U.S. Department of State, Library of Congress, Treaty of Amity, Settlement, and Limits between the United States of America and His Catholic Majesty, 1819 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), available from http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/sp1819.asp; accessed May 17, 2010.

68Alfred S. Konefsky and Andrew J. King, eds., The Papers of Daniel Webster, Legal Papers, vol. 2: The Boston Practice (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983), 228.

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that funded New England textile investments.69 The claims payouts were financed by a government loan contracted in 1823 that was then paid for with taxpayer revenue via the 1824 tariff, which conveniently also represented the Associates’ interests.70 If we examine the disbursement of funds for claims as subsidies, just as were the annual appropriations for the federal armories, the picture of federal intervention in the development of large scale textile manufacturing in New England becomes clearer. With Articles IX and XI, Adams, long a supporter of industrialization and national development projects, built into the Treaty the opportunity for financial gain for northern companies.71 The $5 million that the United States agreed to pay Spain did not represent the sum total of all cases compiled by Americans against the Spanish government. Onís resented the fact that the United States did not pay more for its purchase of Florida, but Adams did not want to subject the federal government to unlimited liability for American claims.72 Because of this capped amount, not all claimants would be reimbursed. Soon after the conclusion of claims adjudication, the Senate Committee on Foreign

Relations received a host of petitions claiming insufficient indemnity as a result of payment decisions.73 And so it matters which claimants received rewards. In a letter to Philadelphia U.S.

69 See for examples, Robert F. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987); Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977); Frances W. Gregory, Nathan Appleton: Merchant and Entrepreneur, 1779–1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975); Rosenberg, Life and Times of Francis Cabot Lowell; Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston: Colonel T. H. Perkins, 1764–1854 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

70 Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century, 202-3.

71 John Lauritz Larson, "’Bind the Republic Together’: The National Union and the Struggle for a System of Internal Improvements,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 74, no. 2 (Sep., 1987): 386-7; Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York: Knopf, 1956), 89.

72 Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire, 164.

73 The merchants from Philadelphia and Baltimore, for example, petitioned the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for insufficient claims payments; the Associates did not. See for example petitions by Philadelphia and Baltimore sent to Congress in 1826, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Jan 3, 1826 and Mar 1, 1826 (SEN19A-G6), National Archives, Washington, D.C.

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Representative Joseph Hopkinson, U.S. congressman and lawyer Daniel Webster, serving as the lawyer for the Associates, referred to the northern cases that he represented as “the real commercial losses, which occasioned the Treaty.”74 While his assertion suggesting that claims by northern merchants provided Adams’s impetus in negotiating the acquisition of Florida is perhaps an overstatement of the links between specific interests and diplomacy, the Associates undoubtedly reaped the benefits of Article XI because of political connections and because of the nature of their business pursuits.

The expanded nation that John Quincy Adams had helped build with his Transcontinental

Treaty was constructed not just from the plantation system or from Indian land claimed by a

European power, but from a series of investments, political deals, and connected favors.75 It was not by chance that specific merchants, entrepreneurs, and investors received such favorable treatment from the U.S. government. The same men who had founded a nationally celebrated textile manufacturing company also financed the national government through bond-buying, and were influential figures in Massachusetts politics and philanthropy.76 Yet they had previously opposed federal policies that promoted expansion and economic protectionism. Some of these

Boston investors were among the minority of Americans who opposed the Louisiana Purchase and various members of this cohort had bypassed trade restrictions between 1807 and 1812 by shipping merchandise through Canada and Amelia Island, Florida. Some had even engaged

74Daniel Webster to Joseph Hopkinson, February 1, 1822 in Konefsky and King, eds., The Papers of Daniel Webster, Legal Papers, vol. 1, 305. 75 Charles Eisen’s recent work on John Quincy Adams reveals the leader as a shrewd politician and pragmatic statesman in his crafting of American policies that would expand the nation’s borders, support manufacturing, and mitigate foreign threats. Charles N. Eisen, Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

76 See for example, “Six percent stock of 1813,” October 14, 1816, Box 3, Folder 4, General Correspondence, Appleton Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA.

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illegally in the slave trade.77 This illicit trade was one strategy to make the best of prohibitory commercial regulations; the founding of the Boston Manufacturing Company was another. And they would be rewarded for both. Although they were previously opponents of federal policies geared toward expansion and development, by the 1820s, they reaped the benefits of a growing nation and national government.

The Associates had access to decision-making along every step of the way. For starters, for the first time in almost two decades, they were on good terms with the President.78 President

James Monroe arrived in Boston on July 2, 1817, as part of his “good will tour” and met with members of the “Essex Junto,” a group of Federalist part leaders, among them T.H. Perkins, who had three years earlier represented Massachusetts in the subversive Hartford Convention.79

Despite his Republican politics, Monroe established close ties with various Federalist merchants.

In addition to maintaining a mutually rewarding relationship with northern trading enterprises, such as John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company, Monroe’s administration granted special political privileges to some northern Federalists. After Monroe defeated New York merchant and politician Rufus King in the presidential election, he made King an ally of the administration. As part of this relationship, Secretary of State Adams sent King confidential briefings on the affairs

77Frances W. Gregory, Nathan Appleton: Merchant and Entrepreneur, 1779-1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), 100; Merchants also used St. Mary’s, Georgia, for illicit trade, Christopher Ward, “The Commerce of East Florida during the Embargo, 1806-1812: The Role of Amelia Island,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 68, no. 2 (Oct., 1989): 179. T.H. Perkins, who would receive a significant share of the Spanish Claims payouts, traded slaves until around 1810, two years after the slave trade’s official end. NP Russell to TH and James Perkins, Jan. 25, 1810, Thomas Handasyd Perkins Papers, MHS; The Perkins Company, which T.H. inherited after his father’s death, had been heavily involved in the slave trade in the West Indies, particularly in Cape Francis, San Domingo. Jane Thompson-Stahr, The Burling Books: Ancestors and Descendants of Edward and Grace Burling, Quakers, 1600-2000 (Louisville, KY: Gateway Press, 2001), 315-316.

78Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire, 52.

79Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire, 48-52.

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of the state. 80 King kept regular correspondence with a number of Massachusetts politicians and merchants, including his brother William, who would serve on the Spanish Claims Commission, and U.S. Senator from Massachusetts Harrison Gray Otis. During the year following the Treaty’s signing, Otis repeatedly urged the Senate to ratify it.81Otis, linked by family, politics, and money to the Associates and an investor in the textile industry and shareholder in several Massachusetts insurance companies, understood that he and his Boston constituents stood to gain from the expansion of the United States into Spanish Florida.

They were also able to influence the commissioners’ decision-making process. The

Spanish Claims Commission, a three-member committee created by President Monroe in March

1821 with the advice of the Senate, proved essential in ensuring that the Associates benefitted from the treaty. Webster, their legal representative, only personally knew one member of the commission -- William King, a former Massachusetts politician who had recently become the first governor of Maine. King was no stranger to the Associates themselves, either. He controlled several townships in the District of Maine with Senator Otis, who would serve as shareholder of several New England factories. Neither Webster nor the Associates had strong ties to the other two members of the commission; however, the commission sought advice from merchants on how to assess shipping claims, which worked to their advantage. Peter Chardon

Brooks, Webster’s most prominent client, provided much of this advice.82 Brooks engaged in extensive correspondence with William King over how to determine merchants’ reimbursements.

Brooks instructed King on calculating the value of a ship’s freight and insurance. He requested

80Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire, 48-52.

81Harrison Gray Otis to Sally Foster Otis, February 28, 1820, Harrison Gray Otis Papers, MHS.

82 Alfred S. Konefsky and Andrew J. King, eds., The Papers of Daniel Webster, Legal Papers, vol. 2: The Boston Practice (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983), 183.

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government aid in securing shipping documents from Spanish ports. Brooks also asked King, as a prominent resident of Maine, for a personal favor in locating the partners of an insurance firm in Bath, Maine, so that he could collect the papers related to the capture of one of his ships in

1797.83 His correspondence with the Commission proves that members of the Associates maintained ample ties to federal decision-making. This worked out well for Brooks; the

Commission approved most of his claims.84

It also helped that Webster, as their legal agent, gave some cases more privileged attention than others. His relationship with the Associates had commenced during the 1815–16 session of Congress, when Webster met with Francis Cabot Lowell in Washington. As a U.S. representative from New Hampshire, a state with robust maritime interests, Webster had opposed tariffs, but after meeting with Lowell, he modified his position to advocate a moderate cotton duty that would the Associates’ nascent manufacturing company protect from foreign imports.85

In the years before the Treaty was signed, Webster also represented Otis, Appleton, and several of the Cabots and Lowells, and he helped broker the Associates’ amicable relationship with the

Republican Administration, which no doubt helped during negotiations.86 Webster, in fact, was on the payroll of the Boston Manufacturing Company for his regular legal services to the

83 Peter Chardon Brooks to William King, Jun. 4, 1821 and Aug. 3, 1821 in Alfred S. Konefsky and Andrew J. King, eds., The Papers of Daniel Webster, Legal Papers, vol. 2: The Boston Practice (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983).

84 Daniel Webster to Alexander Bliss, March 2, 1822, in Charles M. Wiltse, ed. Microfilm Edition of the Papers of Daniel Webster (Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Press, 1975), Reel 3.

85Dalzell, Enterprising Elites, 28–29.

86Robert Vincent Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), pp. 138,146; Gregory, Nathan Appleton: Merchant and Entrepreneur, 127.

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directors.87 His relationship with the Associates explains why, during the Spanish Claims

Commission, Webster indicated that some cases received better care than others. In a June, 1822, letter to Boston broker Samuel Jaudon, Webster updated Jaudon on the state of cases and memorials and added that, “some from Salem [from where Thorndike and others shipped their goods] you will observe to be well arranged.”88 Similarly, Webster sent a letter to Alexander

Bliss, who ran the Boston law office while Webster was in Washington for the Claims

Commission, instructing him to take whatever measures necessary to strengthen Perkins’s case, even if the proper papers were missing.”89 Nathan Appleton, Peter Chardon Brooks, and Israel

Thorndike all made claims for losses in the West Indies that had been postponed owing to lack of evidence, but Webster continued to work towards a settlement.90 The contract prohibited

Webster from representing their “losses happened from smuggling, illicit trade, and the Slave trade;” he, however, did his best to procure papers for even the more dubious cases. Much of the

Associates’ West Indies trade involved the circumvention of U.S. shipping laws, as well as the occasional transport of slaves.91 Perkins, for example, engaged heavily in the West Indies trade,

87 Accounts Current, July 1822, Volume 35, Boston Manufacturing Company Records, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

88 Daniel Webster to Samuel Jaudon, June 5, 1822, Charles M. Wiltse, ed. Microfilm Edition of the Papers of Daniel Webster (Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Press, 1975), Reel 3.

89 Daniel Webster to Alexander Bliss, Jan. 4, 1824 in Alfred S. Konefsky and Andrew J. King, eds., The Papers of Daniel Webster, Legal Papers, vol. 2: The Boston Practice (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983).

90 Application to Postpone Cases, July 21, 1823 and DW to Alexander Bliss, Dec. 30, 1822 in Alfred S. Konefsky and Andrew J. King, eds., The Papers of Daniel Webster, Legal Papers, vol. 2: The Boston Practice (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983), 219-221.

91 For examples of the nature of the Associates’ trade in the West Indies, see Frances W. Gregory, Nathan Appleton: Merchant and Entrepreneur, 1779-1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), 35, 38; J.D. Forbes, Israel Thorndike, Federalist Financier (New York: Exposition Press, 1953), 29-30; and Jane Thompson-Stahr, The Burling Books: Ancestors and Descendants of Edward and Grace Burling, Quakers, 1600-2000 (Louisville, KY: Gateway Press, 2001), 315-316.

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including its slave trade, after it was banned.92 He would receive roughly $132,000 from the claims and would go on to invest over $100,000 in several textile factories and become president of the Appleton Company.93 And Israel Thorndike, one of the original backers of the Boston

Manufacturing Company, would invest more in the various textile ventures than any other individual.94

Documentation of the Associates’ investments does not reveal their precise origins, but it does suggest strong links to their Spanish claims income. Because many of these claims stemmed from insurance underwriting, the Boston Associates received additional payment for insurances claims they had long before settled locally.95 Shareholders in companies such as

Massachusetts Hospital Life, the Boston Marine Insurance Company, and the Massachusetts Fire and Marine Insurance Company, received additional returns on investment as a result of these claims.96 And this windfall occurred right as textile manufacturing was taking off. For a group of businessmen who were concerned above all else with the safety of their wealth, the timing of the

Treaty increased the soundness of production plans for their manufacturing companies.97 The

Associates knew by 1819 that they would receive federal funds and the following year,

92 NP Russell to TH and James Perkins, Jan. 25, 1810, Thomas Handasyd Perkins Papers, MHS; The Perkins Company, which T.H. inherited after his father’s death, had been heavily involved in the slave trade in the West Indies, particularly in Cape Francis, San Domingo. Jane Thompson-Stahr, The Burling Books: Ancestors and

93 Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston: Colonel T.H. Perkins, 1764-1854 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 395.

94Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 133-4.

95 Prince, Carl E. and Seth Taylor, “Daniel Webster, the Boston Associates, and the U.S. Role in the Industrializing Process, 1815-1830.” Journal of the Early Republic 2, no. 3 (Autumn, 1982): 294.

96Prince and Taylor, “Daniel Webster, the Boston Associates,” 295.

97Lowell and Appleton were more concerned with ensuring the safety of investors' capital and the size of their dividends than with developing long-range plans to increase production dramatically Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 55- 6.

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construction and production at Waltham increased rapidly. Several months after the ratification of the treaty, a group of Bostonians, including Peter Chardon Brooks and Thomas Handasyd

Perkins, convened to commission Daniel Webster to represent them before the Spanish Claims

Commission. And in 1822 the proprietors of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company drew up its articles of association.98 Soon after, they started the Taunton Manufacturing Company (1823) and the Hamilton Manufacturing Company (1825), prompting Adams to praise Perkins for his

“truly patriotic undertakings.”99 These companies were followed by the Appleton and Lowell

Companies in 1828 and the Suffolk, Tremont, and Lawrence Companies in 1830.100 They also began buying up the debt of other manufacturing companies, just as did the insurance companies in which they owned stock.101

The public funds from the Transcontinental Treaty enabled the recipients to engage in the investment strategy historian Edward Balleisen has argued became increasingly common in the decades before the Civil War: vulture capitalism.102 Their shipping failures had been subsidized by the government, positioning them to take advantage of others’ failures. The Panic of 1819 landscape was ripe for this type of predatory purchasing. The Rockland Manufacturing Company in Scituate, Rhode Island for example, had cost $7,000 to build and was capitalized at $23,400,

98 Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 58.

99 John Quincy Adams to TH Perkins, Oct. 3, 1827, Thomas Handasyd Perkins Papers, MHS.

100 Richard Candee, “The Great Factory at Dover, New Hampshire: The Dover Manufacturing Co. Print Works, 1825,” Old Sturbridge Village, MA; Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 49.

101 Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 105.

102 Edward Balleisen argues that in antebellum America, certain people increasingly made a living off of others’ business failures. Edward J. Balleisen, "Vulture Capitalism in Antebellum America: the 1841 Federal Bankruptcy Act and the exploitation of financial distress,” Business History Review 70, no. 04 (1996): 474.

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but in 1819, sold for only $750 at public auction.103 When Joshua Aubin went to Amesbury to purchase a textile mill for the Lawrences, he entered a town that similarly had been hit hard by the economic downturn. The owners of one textile factory in the town had solicited the Navy

Department several years earlier for patronage, writing that “the times are requiring a large capital” and “people in this town are out of employ.”104 Failures like this throughout the region offered opportunities to those with capital. While the Associates usually chose to buy land and construct their own factories rather than purchase abandoned mills, they began purchasing what eventually became controlling stock in firms. The Dover Cotton Factory, chartered by the New

Hampshire legislature in 1812, was reorganized in 1820 to raise additional capital by offering greater stock options.105 The company’s share offerings began attracting Boston investors in the early 1820s and by 1827 -- reorganized again under the name Cocheco Manufacturing Company

-- members of the Associates and their insurance companies effectively controlled the factory through share ownership.106 Additionally, the Boston Manufacturing Company owned stock in the Nashua and Amoskeag companies, which they eventually controlled. 107 They also simply bought up large plots of land on which to expand their enterprises. For example, soon after its incorporation, the directors of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company made plans to build

103 U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Microcopy number 279, National Archives. Washington, 1964, roll 2. 104 Jonathan Morrill and Son, Amesbury, MA, to Jeremiah Nelson, Washington D.C., February 14, 1816, Volume 4, Records Collection of the Office of Naval Records and Library, Record Group 25, Entry 328, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

105 Richard Candee, “The Great Factory at Dover, New Hampshire: The Dover Manufacturing Co. Print Works, 1825” (Old Sturbridge Village, MA), 39-41.

106 “To Sundry Accounts for shares held in the Capital stock of Cocheco Manufacturing Company October 14, 1827,” Volume B-1 Stockholders’ Records, Cocheco Manufacturing Company Records, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

107 “Miscellaneous” February 1829, Accounts Current, Volume 35, Boston Manufacturing Company Records, Baker Library, Harvard Business School; Francis W. Gregory, Nathan Appleton: Merchant and Entrepreneur, 1779-1861. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), 152.

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another factory, requiring additional land purchases.108 In 1826, they received from the Boston

Manufacturing Company two-thirds of the real estate the latter had recently purchased from two local farmers.109 Historian Theodore Steinberg argues the Boston Associates essentially created a

“hydraulic empire” on the Merrimack River with these purchases of land and their control of

“flowing lands.”110 They did not limit themselves to the Merrimack River. In 1823, the agents of the Boston and Springfield bought up land and water rights on the Chicopee River in western

Massachusetts from the Belcher Iron Works and incorporated the Chicopee Manufacturing

Company.111

This expansion had been made possible, in part, by federal reimbursements. While the claims were just one source of funding among many, they are nonetheless important in the context of federal “encouragement” of domestic manufacturing. The execution of Articles IX and XI of the Transcontinental Treaty represented federal intervention with the outcome of growing large-scale manufacturing. These sorts of funds, though, were inaccessible to the majority of textile manufacturers who desperately petitioned Congress for new tariff legislation in the midst of the 1819-1822 recession.112 These manufacturers in fact had to wait until the tariff of 1824 to receive greater protection for American products. And while the 1824 legislation

108 Entry, December 31, 1823, Vol. 2 Stock Holders’ Minutes, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

109 Entry for January 24, 1826, Volume 3, Boston Manufacturing Company Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

110 Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 83; “Miscellaneous”, March 1822, Vol. 35, Boston Manufacturing Company Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

111 John M. Cudd, Chicopee Manufacturing Company, 1823-1915 (Rowman & Littlefield, 1974), 20.

112 “Protection to Manufactures,” Communicated to the Senate, January 10, 1820, 16th Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, Finance: Vol. 3, No. 568: 452.

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was at least a nod to the importance of protecting American industry, its efficacy in rewarding the efforts of textile manufacturers is debatable, and it paled in comparison to the cash payouts the Associates received.113 Additionally, if anything, the legislation was skewed in favor of the

Associates’ companies, whose interests were represented by U.S. Representative Daniel

Webster. Unlike small companies, the Associates preferred limited protective duties, so as not to interfere with their own import trade. Additionally, these minimal tariffs gave their goods just enough protection to compete against British imports, while being low enough to prevent the success of smaller domestic manufacturers.

That is not to say, though, that small producers were left without advocates. Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey had long been a champion of protection for American industry and in

1819 published a treatise chastising the United States for adopting a “ruinous policy, discarded by all the nations of Christendom, except Spain, Portugal and the United States” that denied sufficient tariff protection to domestic industry.114 And as the Spanish Claims Committee wrapped up its work, proprietors of small factories in Rhode Island – the ones who were luckier than the owners of the Rockland Manufacturing Company - sent letters to Rhode Island politician and manufacturer Zachariah Allen, who represented their interests to the Senate

Committee for Commerce and Manufacturing. On their behalf, Allen requested an additional

113 Frank William Taussig, Some Aspects of the Tariff Question: An Examination of the Development of American Industries under Protection, Vol. 12 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931); Douglas A. Irwin and Peter Temin. "The Antebellum Tariff on Cotton Textiles Revisited," The Journal of Economic History 61, no. 03 (2001): 777-798. In a rejoinder, Harley faults Irwin’s and Temin’s regression model, which, he argues, incorrectly assumes that British and American factories produced different goods. Applying a Ricardian perception of trade, Harley asserts that Britain withheld cloth similar to American-made textiles from U.S. markets, but not from, say, India or Brazil, precisely because the U.S. tariff was prohibitive. C. Knick Harley, "The Antebellum Tariff: Different Products or Competing Sources? A Comment on Irwin and Temin," Journal of Economic History 61, no. 3 (2001): 799-805.

114 Matthew Carey, Address of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry, to the Citizens of the United States (Philadelphia: s.n., 1819), 12.

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duty on imported woolen goods.115 Historian Daniel Peart has shown how this type of lobbying and petition-making was in fact an effective means of achieving favorable tariff policy in the early 1820s.116 The resulting tariff, though, was modest: the ad valorem tariff increased from 20 to 25 percent.117 By 1830, some woolen manufactures would finally receive heftier protective duties – in some cases a 50 percent tariff rate.118 Yet uncertainty was bad for business. A man known to the historical record as Mr. Winterbotham, for example, was forced to give up his woolen manufactory on the Housatonic River in South Britain, Connecticut to his creditors in the late 1820s. He cited tariff uncertainty.119

Many companies who had languished during the depression survived despite the minimal protection for wool and cotton manufactures, but as the Associates’ undertakings fanned out over

New England, these smaller companies remained small..120 Others never even made it through the depression. In 1819, Waltham Cotton and Wool Factory agreed to the $16,000 selling price the Boston Manufacturing Company offered it -- $9,000 less than the Waltham Factory had proposed in 1817. At that time, the directors of the BMC had deemed it “not expedient” to

115 N.R. Knight to Zachariah Allen, December 14, 1823, Box1, Folder 2, Zachariah Allen Papers, Ms254, Rhode Island Historical Society. 116 Daniel Peart, "Looking Beyond Parties and Elections: The Making of United States Tariff Policy during the Early 1820s,” Journal of the Early Republic 33, no. 1 (2013): 87-108.

117 Douglas A. Irwin and Peter Temin, "The Antebellum Tariff on Cotton Textiles Revisited," The Journal of Economic History 61, no. 03 (2001): 779.

118 The American tariff, for 1833: comprising an alphabetical list of the duties on merchandize imported into the United States, in which the numerous errors and mistakes in the editions hitherto published are corrected (London: O. Rich, 12, Red Lion Square, 1833), 14. This rate, though, would be reduced by the compromise tariff of 1833.

119William R. Bagnall, The Textile Industries of the United States (Riverside, CA: Riverside Press, 1893), 359.

120Standwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1, 207-210. See for example, Account of Pawlet Manufacturing Co. Cloth Factory, Rutland County. U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, Schedule for Vermont, Microcopy number 279, National Archives. Washington, 1964, roll 3 and “Answers of Milton Brown, of Pawlet,” Document 7, Number 2. United States Dept. of the Treasury and Louis McLane, Documents Relative to the Manufactures in the United States, Volume 1 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969). The company was worth $17,000 at its establishment in 1809, and only $14,000 in 1832.

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purchase real estate. Two years later, however, when the economic downturn increased the direness of circumstances for the Waltham Factory and the stockholders of the Boston

Manufacturing Company anticipated public capital from the treaty with Spain, vulture capitalism became expedient.121

Conclusion

Not all forms of federal stimulus created similar results. While tariffs only ever produced moderate impacts, diplomacy with the disintegrating Spanish empire had provided a windfall for specific merchant-industrialists.122 Similarly, the reorganization of the War Department and its lobbying of Congress in the wake of the War of 1812 provided opportunities and incentives for improvement for certain arms-makers. And so the arms and textiles industries expanded together, unevenly. The textile boom, however, produced unintended consequences for the arms industry. Semi-skilled workers flocked to the slew of new factories that were popping up, leaving the Springfield Armory and private arms manufactories struggling to find good help. The superintendent of the Springfield Armory, recognizing that he would need to offer higher wages were he to entice workers back to arms manufacturing, lobbied the Ordnance Department and

Congress for an increase in his budget, which he received in October 1824.123 Though workers would continue to petition for higher wages – a growing occurrence in an economy increasingly predicated on low-wage labor-- the pecuniary constraints on production had been largely

121 November 26, 1817 and February 18, 1819, Directors’ Records, Volume 2, Boston Manufacturing Co. Collection. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

122 Douglass North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 156; Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1, 160-162.

123 Whisker, The United States Armory at Springfield, 1795-1865 (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1997), 79.

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eliminated by an influx of funds.124 Labor was, after all, vital to the assembly of weapons for a nation that continually needed to reassert its dominance over the continent. The United States would wage a costly and expensive war against the Seminoles a second time in the 1830s, and a decade later would go to war again to annex the territory it had neglected to attain during the

Transcontinental Treaty negotiations.125 Recurrent warfare would depend on the nation’s ability to readily equip its soldiers, and so industry would have to keep pace with expansion and war.

The ability to supply the nation with the stuff of war became a reality because of federal stimulus spending. By the 1820s the New England arms industry, under the oversight of an increasingly assertive Ordnance Department, had achieved unprecedented levels of efficiency and quality, and it had been complimented enthusiastically by U.S. presidents.126 Perhaps more important, it had overcome legislative barriers to sufficient production by convincing Congress to increase the budget for arms manufacture or, more often, by circumventing limited appropriations with clever accounting or blatant overspending. The financial support that the

Ordnance Department provided small arms contractors made possible the manufacture,

124 See for example, Hopestill Bigelow to Roswell Lee, Springfield, December 17, 1825, Box 11, Folder 8, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA; Christopher L. Tomlins, ed. Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 112. 125 The United State spent $30 million on the Second Seminole War. Ericson, Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 16. Adams and Monroe chose not to negotiate for Texas because they did not want it. Onís had already agreed to cede Florida at the beginning of 1818; the signing of the treaty was delayed another year not because Adams tried to acquire Texas, but because he struggled to gain as much of the Northwest as possible. Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire, 167.

126 The Springfield standard pattern was firmly in place by 1823. Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change, 60. U.S. Representative to Massachusetts Samuel Lathrop dined with President Monroe, who informed him that he was convinced of the importance of the Springfield Armory and very pleased with the work it had done. Samuel Lathrop to Roswell Lee, 1 January 1820, Springfield Armory Records, Letters received, Box 5, Folder 7. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066 National Archives, Waltham, MA.

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improvement, and diversification of weaponry to fit national demands.127 The textile industry, too, had improved in the years since Tench Coxe, as Purveyor of Public Supplies, had implored

American manufacturers to improve the quality of their cottons in order to decrease military- related importations.128 In 1820, Callender Irvine, purveyor of public supplies, still doubted whether American manufacturers could produce the quality or the quantity of cloth needed to clothe the militia so that they were “on equal footing” with the regular army.129 Yet before long, the quality and quantity would indeed increase. The Merrimack Valley, flush with fresh capital, saw the proliferation of large integrated factories that each specialized in a different kind of cloth. These new factories churned out browned and bleached shirtings and sheetings, jeans, flannels, ginghams, and calicoes that could outperform imports from Britain, Russia, and

Germany in domestic markets. Their wares offered ordinary consumers and military supply contractors alike an array of good quality and inexpensive choices. The Associates’ good fortune in Spanish Florida had helped make available the made-in-Massachusetts calicoes that westerners could now buy or the flannels that soldiers could now wear.

Florida, and expansion more generally, had provided the capital and the impetus for growth for northern manufacturing. Under the patronage of the War and State Departments, the newly expanded and improved textile and small arms industries could now supply goods for the

127 Years of government contracts, for example, had put Simeon North’s business on sound footing, which enabled him to transition from pistol to rifle manufacture, for which he received a lucrative contract in 1824. Simeon Newton Dexter North, Simeon North, First Official Pistol Makers of the United States: A Memoir (Concord, NH: The Rumford Press, 1913), 156-7. 128 See for example, Tench Coxe, Purveyor of Public Supplies, Philadelphia, to the Manufacturers of the United States, July 17, 1810, Unbound Papers 1801-11, Almy and Brown Records Ms29, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, RI.

129 “Clothing the Army with Domestic Fabrics,” Communicated to the Senate, January 11, 1820, 16th Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, Military Affairs: Vol. 2, No. 180: 42.

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nation. Home markets, though, would not and could not be enough as factory growth led to increased supply and thus lower prices. New markets would have to be sought elsewhere.

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CHAPTER FOUR: Managing New Markets

William Tudor wondered whether an exclusionary duty on cotton cloth made in the

United States, fast becoming a common item in Latin American markets, was “an issue to be negotiated, or something that should be left to the manufacturers to overcome.”1 In the spring of

1825, Tudor, the U.S. consul to Lima, chose the former. He alerted Secretary of State Henry

Clay that this issue “must be a decision for the government.”2 Rather than subject American textiles to market competition, Tudor met multiple times with the council of government in Lima and brokered a more favorable tariff policy for American exports.3 Tudor had proven himself right: “whenever the United States have a representative here with diplomatic powers, [it can] prevent insidious regulations.”4

The development of early republican capitalism required a body of public servants like

William Tudor to promote commercial interest abroad. Throughout the 1810s and 1820s, U.S. federal agents gradually transitioned from a policy of relationship building and commercial information-gathering to one in which they solicited new governments for regulations favorable for U.S. manufactures. Tudor and other agents pursued a trade relationship in which the United

States exported its manufactured wares in exchange for the raw materials that it could not produce itself. The process by which this exchange became a reality had less to do with free trade, economic rationality or comparative advantage, than it did with United States diplomatic

1 William Tudor to Henry Clay, June 12, 1825, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Lima, 1823-54, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 154, roll 1.

2 William Tudor to Henry Clay, June 12, 1825, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Lima, 1823-54, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 154, roll 1.

3 After speaking to Marshall Santa Ana, the council of government deliberated on Tudor’s recommendation and decided to lessen the duty. William Tudor to Henry Clay, November 21, 1826, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Lima, 1823-54, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 154, roll 1.

4 William Tudor to Henry Clay, 28 February 1826, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Lima, 1823-54, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 154, roll 1.

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policy in Latin America.5 While commercial diplomacy mattered everywhere, it is to Latin

America during the Independence era, specifically, that we must look in order to understand the rise of United States industrial power. 6 As U.S. diplomats worked on behalf of public and private manufacturers, they took advantage of Latin American nations’ requests for provisions and diplomatic recognition in the pursuit of independence from Spain. Latin American governments needed U.S. arms in the 1810s to wage war against colonial rule, but they did not need American-made cassimeres and broadcloths in the 1820s. It would be consuls like Tudor who would navigate the United States’ transition from merchant to industrial capitalism on the ground in Latin America. Negotiations pertaining to arms exportation and political support in the

1810s set a precedent for U.S. advantage, even as U.S. manufacturers came to depend on Latin

American markets for their profits.7

Rivaled only by Great Britain, the United States achieved a commercial and diplomatic dominance in Latin America first in relation to arms. In the early 1800s, the majority of the world’s guns were made in Western Europe; the Napoleonic Wars, however, created a shortage in international supply. South American patriots turned to the United States, which by 1810

5 Merchants themselves did not necessarily even want free trade. See for example, a letter to Rhode Island merchant Edwin T. Jenckes from his business associates in Arica, Chile, in which they speak of the desire for the Chilean government to afford them discriminatory tariffs that would enable their cargoes to compete more effectively against the glut of British goods. McFadon and Cobb to Edwin T. Jenckes, July 26, 1825, Box 8, Folder 1, Nightingale- Jenckes Papers (MSS588), Rhode Island Historical Society.

6 For the role of early U.S. commercial diplomacy in other regions of the world, see for example, Author(s): David W. McFadden, “John Quincy Adams, American Commercial Diplomacy, and Russia, 1809-1825,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Dec., 1993): 613-629; Ruth Kark, American Consuls in the Holy Land, 1832- 1914. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994). For the importance of merchants as consuls and diplomats to U.S. commerce, see John M. Belohlavek, “Economic Interest Groups and the Formation of Foreign Policy in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 14.4 (Winter 1994): 479.

7 While Mary Rose maintains that U.S. manufacturers depended more on domestic tariff support than their counterparts in Britain, who traded freely in the international marketplace, she underestimates the extent to which export markets became increasingly important for the United States. Mary Rose, Firms, Networks, and Business Values: The British and American Cotton Industries since 1750 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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manufactured the vast majority of its own arms and produced a surplus of gun parts every year.8

Although repeated pleas for government loans and military reinforcement often fell on deaf ears,

Latin American demand for guns shifted the policies of Latin American governments in favor of

U.S. trade, paving the way for commercial diplomacy that benefitted American textile importation, for which no obvious demand existed. The power dynamics that emerged as a result of military provisioning subsequently enabled U.S. agents to aggressively push for favorable textile regulations in the mid-1820s. These dynamics can be understood as the beginning of the

United States’ exertion of soft power in the region, whereby the United States used its growing economic power to pursue ever more favorable trade policies.9 International markets had been an important part of the American economy since before the Revolution, but access to South

American markets became increasingly important for United States manufacturers, whose exports almost exclusively went to the Caribbean islands, Mexico, and South America.10 When the State Department surveyed American manufacturers in the early 1830s, one hundred five factories -- or about 40 percent of the factories capitalized at more than $50,000 -- declared that

8 Brian DeLay, “How Not to Arm a State: American Guns and the Crisis of Governance in Mexico, Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries,” Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 95, No.1 (Spring 2013): 8-9. For surplus stock see John Morton, Ordnance Department, to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, July14, 1817. Box 2, Folder 8, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

9 Soft power can be understood as the upper hand gained by engaging in economic relationships that involve discrimination. Jonathan Kirshner, "Political Economy in Security Studies After the Cold War," Review of International Political Economy 5, no. 1 (1998): 72. For twentieth-century “dollar diplomacy” in Latin America, see David Sheinin, “The New Dollar Diplomacy in Latin America,” American Studies International, Vol. 37, No. 3 (October 1999): 81-99.

10 For a discussion of the importance of international trade for the U.S. economy, and the subsequent shift to manufacturing investment, see chapter 5 of Douglass Cecil North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790- 1860 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 46-58.

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they exported a significant portion of their produce to South America.11 Diplomatic power made this exportation possible.

After the majority of Latin American republics had achieved independence and were recognized by the United States, U.S. ministers (who had the power to officially treat with foreign states and were assigned to various Latin American nations once the United States recognized independence), continued the diplomatic work that consuls had done in the 1810s and early 1820s. By that time, a region that had once been closed off to the majority of U.S. exports had become a profitable outlet for American manufactures. From 1816 to1822, U.S. exports of domestic produce to Latin America rose from $3 million to $5.3 million, and again to $6.2 million in 1836; in the 1830s, the region received one-third of all the United States’ exports, the majority of which were manufactured goods.12 By the 1840s the United States had entered into several favorable treaties of amity and commerce with South American nations and was

11 See responses to “The different kinds and values of foreign materials” and “what proportion in foreign countries and where,” in United States Department of the Treasury and Louis McLane, Documents Relative to the Manufactures in the United States Vol. 1 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969). And these are only the ones who reported it. Many sent goods to Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore, and from there agents shipped their goods to South America and Mexico. For example, W. A. Andross, the agent for Hartford Cotton Manufacturing Company responded that his company’s goods were sold in the United States and “if exported, not known,” United States Department of the Treasury and Louis McLane, Documents Relative to the Manufactures in the United States Vol. 1 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), 1006. There were 249 firms capitalized at over $50,000, but the majority were much smaller than that. Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 60-61.

12While the United States’ biggest export was cotton to Great Britain, the United States sent mostly manufactured goods to Latin America. “Exports for the Year ending in September 30 1815” Communicated to the House of representative, February 15, 1816, 14th Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, Commerce and Navigation, Vol. 15, No. 196: 20; “Exports for the Year Ending September 30, 1816,” Communicated to the House of Representatives February 3, 1817, 15th Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, Commerce and Navigation Vol. 2, No. 205: 55; “Commerce and Navigation for Year Ending September 30, 1821,” Communicated to the Senate, Jan 24, 1822,” 17th Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, Commerce and Navigation, Vol. 2, No. 246: 239. U.S. House, Committee on Commerce and Navigation, “Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury, in relation to the commerce and navigation of the United States for the year 1836,” April 4 1837, 25th Congress, 1st Session, House Document 188: 731; see also, United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1976), 551.

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regularly sending cargoes of manufactured goods in return for minerals, hides, dyewoods, and other goods necessary for the United States’ transformation into an industrial power.13

New Opportunities?

By the time the Napoleonic Wars reached South America, the United States had done much to remedy what Alexander Hamilton had once referred to as its status as “victim of the system.” Treaties with European nations and manufacturing initiatives at home left the United

States closer to being able to trade with Europe on equal terms. But while it was no longer

“precluded from foreign commerce,” its goal of access to ample markets in which to dispose of

American produce remained elusive.14 South American independence offered the United States the opportunity to make its goal a reality. During the independence wars that wracked Spanish and Portuguese America from 1808 through the 1820s, U.S. diplomatic agents ostensibly maintained neutrality, while at the same time taking advantage of Latin American requests for material and political support in order to achieve favorable market conditions for U.S. goods.15

13 General Convention of Peace, Amity, Navigation, and Commerce, United States and the Republic of Colombia 1824. Convention of Peace, Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, United States and Republic of Chile, May 16, 1832. Proclaimed April 29, 1834. Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Navigation, and Commerce, United States and the Republic of Venezuela was signed on January 20, 1836. Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Navigation, and Commerce, United States and Ecuador, June 13 1839.

14 Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, December 5, 1791 in Harold C. Syrett, ed. The Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Vol. 19 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).

15For maintenance of neutrality, see William G. Miller to John Quincy Adams, 14 September 1821, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Montevideo, 1811-1837, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M71, roll 1. Miller remarked to John Quincy Adams in regards to his dealing with Portuguese officials during their occupation of Montevideo: “I have studiously avoided any compromise that would hereafter render me as consul of the United States unpopular with the patriot party.” For examples of requests for military and political support see, Thomas Lloyd Halsey to James Monroe, May 5, 1815, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1, and William Worthington to John Quincy Adams, January 1, 1818, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Ministers to Argentina, 1817-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1952. Microfilm, no.M-69, roll 1.

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The termination of colonial relationships left the United States in a favorable position both commercially and diplomatically. Spain had long maintained royal monopolies by granting favorable commercial contracts to Spanish merchant houses and levying onerous duties and restrictions on foreign vessels. Early letters from the U.S. consul in Havana complained of the

“jealousies that appear by the officers of government against our trade” and the expectations that

U.S. trade with the island would “dwindle away to nothing.”16 This would change in Cuba, as

Spain came to rely on the United States to provision an island dedicated almost solely to sugar production. Before the independence wars broke out, though, this reliance did not extend to other colonies, or to trade in anything other than lumber and foodstuffs.17 For all other commerce, the

Crown believed in a “free,” Crown-protected trade between European and American Spaniards, which operated to the detriment of American traders seeking outlets for European and Asian goods, as well as for American produce like tobacco.18 Monopolies were especially burdensome for merchants seeking silver. Silver was one of the most valuable commodities of the early modern world.19 By 1800, Spanish silver constituted 80 percent of legal tender in the United

States, yet merchants could not legally acquire it directly from South American mines because of

16 Oliver Pollock to Robert Livingston, December 14, 1783, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Havana, 1783-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1956. Microfilm, no. T20, roll 1.

17 John Morton to James Madison, January 20, 1802, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Havana, 1783-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1956. Microfilm, no. T20, roll 1.

18 Bibiano Torres Ramirez and Javier Ortiz de la Tabla, eds., Reglamento para el Comercio Libre, 1778 (Seville, 1979); John Fisher, “Imperial" Free Trade" and the Hispanic Economy, 1778-1796,” Journal of Latin American Studies 13, no.1 (May 1981): 21.Venezuela and New Spain were excluded from this “free trade” between Spain and the Americas. The Caracas Company had successfully dominated trade between Caracas and Vera and it was feared that if this trade were opened to other Spanish merchants, they would all flock there to the detriment of other colonies’ trade. For an explanation of the ways in which the New World silver trade enabled Spain to maintain a tobacco monopoly, see Carlos Marichal and Matilde Souto Mantecón, "Silver and Situados: New Spain and the Financing of the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean in the Eighteenth Century," The Hispanic American Historical Review 74, no. 4 (1994): 587-613, 602.

19James R. Fichter, So Great a Profit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

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imperial trade policy. The only sector in which Spain had encouraged truly “free” trade was slave trading. In 1791 Spain began liberalizing its slave trade policy by increasing tonnage limits and the amount of time a vessel could remain in port, enabling foreigners to supply slaves for

Spain’s colonial sugar plantations. Once the Napoleonic Wars broke out in 1803, however,

British naval power cut off the Spanish dominions from the African sources of supply, causing the virtual cessation of traffic in slaves over the next few years. While Americans certainly took advantage of this short-lived opportunity in trafficking human bodies (and would continue to do so illegally), they soon needed to find other commodities to trade in South America, especially as many of Spain’s former colonies enacted legislation that restricted slavery and the slave trade.20

Consuls helped find these new commercial opportunities, which soon included manufactured goods.

The Spanish American Wars for Independence provided the United States the opportunity to move into the diplomatic vacuum created by Spain’s diminishing power. During the 1790s and early 1800s, the Spanish Crown had denied foreign nations consular presence at any of its colonies, except for in Cuba and for one post at La Guiara in the Viceroyalty of New

Granada. Portugal, however, had allowed the U.S. to maintain a minster in colonial Brazil at Rio de Janeiro. As soon as Buenos Aires deposed the Spanish viceroy and established an independent junta in May of 1810, the United States appointed Joel Poinsett “special agent of the United

States to South America.” He was soon followed by commissioned consuls in Buenos Aires, La

Guiara, and Valparaiso. These men occupied nebulous positions. In fact, Special Agent to the

20James Ferguson King, “The Evolution of the Free Trade Principle in Spanish Colonial Administration, The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Feb., 1942): 34-56, 55-6. See also Leonardo Marques, "Slave Trading in a New World: The Strategies of North American Slave Traders in the Age of Abolition," Journal of the Early Republic 32.2 (2012): 233-260 for a discussion of changing attitudes toward the slave trade, as well as a discussion of the importance of Cuba as a market for American slave traders.

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United Provinces of Rio de la Plata William G.D. Worthington specifically requested that his passport be “general, so I go as not an agent but a citizen of the United States.”21 Because consuls could not treat with foreign nations (as ministers could), they were able assure South

Americans of their “real”, albeit unofficial, affection for the patriot cause.22

The United States had been appointing consular representatives to important port cities since its declaration of independence. The first representatives worked to secure commerce with

France during the American Revolution, but by the 1790s the United States had consuls in such far flung places as Canton, Tenerife, Franconia, Gibraltar, and Cape Town.23 The ratification of the Constitution created an executive with the power to expand the consular service. George

Washington and Thomas Jefferson were two of the strongest advocates of a foreign service that could promote American trade in a way that Congressional legislation could not. 24 In his second annual address to Congress, President George Washington declared that “the patronage of our commerce…has called for the appointment of consuls in foreign countries.”25 Consuls were appointed by the president at the advice of the State Department, which regularly fielded solicitations from merchants seeking consular posts for themselves or their friends.26 Future consuls should understand the particulars of their host ports’ markets: the goods in demand, the

21 William G.D. Worthington to Richard Rush, 28 April 1817, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Ministers to Argentina, 1817-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1952. Microfilm, no.M-69, roll 1. 22 See for example, P. Sartoris to José Bonifacio de Silva, 21 August 1822, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Rio de Janeiro, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no.T-172, roll 1.

23 Charles Stuart Kennedy, The American Consul: A History of the United States Consular Service, 1776-1914 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 20.

24 Kennedy, The American Consul, 18.

25Kennedy, The American Consul, 21.

26 See for example, John Quincy Adams to James Birkhead and John Quincy Adams to Aaron Tyler, August 19, 1819, U.S. Department of State, Domestic Letters of the Department of State, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1943. Microfilm, no. M40, roll 15.

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market prices, the fees and tariffs, and the issues with safety. Most important, they should know how to make a profit. Consuls were in fact expected to be successful merchants and application letters attested to the individuals’ success and reputation in the commercial world. They were entitled to profit from trade during their tenure. In 1778, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and

Arthur Lee had suggested in a letter to the president of Congress that consuls should be “better qualified for this business that any others…and the advantages to be derived from trade, will be a sufficient inducement to undertake it.”27 Consuls’ success in the commercial world was intricately connected with their service to their country and to their constituents. As U.S. consul to Havana John Morton wrote in 1801, “having been considerably engaged in business, I have experienced the additional advantage derived from acting in a public capacity, knowing that I had the additional weight or influence with officers of the courts of justice.”28 Historian Ellen

Hartigan-O’Connor has shown how the appointment of public auctioneers in the early republic raised fundamental questions about federal patronage and the common good.29 While the appointment of consuls, unlike that of auctioneers, remained largely outside the purview of ordinary citizens, the same conflict and complementarity between private interests and the regulation of the economy were at play. Consuls were both well-connected merchants and agents of the federal government who were charged, in the words of an 1838 brief, with giving their

“attention to whatever can promote the commerce and navigation of our country, as well as the

27Franklin, Lee, Adams to President of Congress, 20 July 1778, in Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams, with a Life of the Author (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1856), 20.

28 John Morton to James Madison, 11 December 1801, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Havana, 1783-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1956. Microfilm, no. T20, roll 1.

29 Ellen Hartigan O’Connor, “‘Auctioneer of Offices’: Patronage, Value, and Trust in the Early Republic Marketplace," Journal of the Early Republic 33, no. 3 (2013): 463-488.

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particular affairs of the individuals of our nation who may require the exercise of the consular function.”30

Acting as both state agents and private merchants, consuls were able to work toward U.S. commercial objectives in South America. These objectives included the minimization of embargoes and blockades, the reduction of tonnage duties, the adjudication of violations of law, the settlement of shipping claims, and the garnering of equal or preferential treatment in tariff legislation. Prior to the establishment of official diplomacy, the United States could not enter into trade treaties, but it could ensure that some of its objectives were met without having to endorse independence. Consuls were particularly effective in navigating shipping claims. Merchants sent countless letters to the State Department requesting aid in pursuing their legal claims against various foreign governments. These petitions requested remuneration or exemption from payment in response to a variety of grievances, which included the perceived unlawful seizure of a vessel or cargo or the application of a particular duty or customhouse fee, as well as damage to property that resulted from the insufficient policing of waters and territory within a government’s jurisdiction. The Department delegated much of the work of claims cases to their consular agents abroad because consuls were in many ways the bureaucratic gatekeepers both to the foreign governments and to the information that was needed to achieve indemnity. Consuls’ success in achieving favorable settlements allowed the Secretary of State to confidently assure prominent merchants that the U.S. government was on the job.31 Efficacy in this arena of

30 Kennedy, The American Consul, 52; United States Department of State, General Instructions to the Consuls and Commercial Agents of the United States (Washington D.C., 1838), 24.

31 See, for example, John M. Forbes to John Quincy Adams, 29 December 1821, U.S. Department of States, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1; John Quincy Adams to Messers Peabody and Tucker, 10 February 1818, U.S. Department of State, Domestic Letters of the Department of State, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1943. Microfilm, no. M40, roll 15.

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diplomacy meant that some merchants sidestepped the State Department altogether, saving the

Department unnecessary paperwork. New York shipping firm Baldwin and Spooner, for example, wrote directly to U.S. Consul John MacPherson, who also acted as their commercial contact in Cartagena. He served as their agent in pursuing claims against a Colombian governor for seizing a quantity of tobacco that had already passed lawfully through customs at Chagres.32

Consuls wielded American commercial power, which was in many ways more alluring than the military might of imperial European nations when dealing with newly independent nations in the Western Hemisphere. As Supreme Director of Rio de La Plata Gervasio Antonio de Pasadas explained in a letter to President James Madison: “the greatness of the powers of

Europe has been founded on our degradation. It is in you we place our present hopes.”33 In the wake of European mercantilist control of Latin American trade, officials recognized the importance of U.S. markets and shipping for economic independence. Pasadas wrote to Madison informing him that U.S. “influence in the commercial world” prompted his government to seek

U.S. support.34 These requests helped the early republican United States achieve access to new markets, while also beginning to exert its commercial power in the region. And guns were a major source of this commercial power.

32 See for example, to John MacPherson, 17 May, 1824 and Simeon Baldwin and Francis J. Spooner to Prescott and Sherman, 6 May 1824, Baldwin and Company Papers (MS 56). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, Box 1, Letterbook 1823-24. New York shipping firm Baldwin and Spooner depended on U.S. Consul to Cartagena John MacPherson to help them pursue their claims against the Colombian government.

33 Gervasio Antonio de Pasada to James Madison, 9 March 1814, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1.

34Gervasio Antonio de Pasadas to James Madison, 9 March 1814, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1. For another example, see Thomas Lloyd Halsey to James Monroe, 3 May 1813, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1, in which Halsey informs Monroe that the government of Buenos Aires has expressed its desire for a large quantity of military supplies.

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Selling Arms in an Age of Revolutions

At the same time as the United States fought its second war of independence against

Great Britain, so South Americans fought their first against Spain and Portugal. But while the

United States had been able to establish a domestic arms industry, its neighbors to the south had not. Patriots and royalists alike, in fact, turned to the United States for weapons in the face of

European shortages. Throughout the 1810s, the United States’ ability to maintain, expand, and improve its own arms supply increased, as did its production of superfluous and substandard guns. Diplomatic considerations prevented their export from being a foregone conclusion, but once federal officials and individual merchants created an arrangement whereby private parties were able to sell public arms, United States manufacturers used Latin America to dispose of surplus stock. As diplomats began to cultivate a sense of material and political dependency among patriot leaders in the 1810s, they laid the foundation for solid textile sales in the 1820s.

The Independence Wars appeared especially advantageous for U.S. arms makers and sellers, but they at first presented a conundrum for commercial policy: to whom, if anyone, should the United States provide weapons of war? Soon after Venezuelan patriots established an independent junta in 1810, the Spanish Captaincy General of Venezuela gave a New York vessel the exclusive privilege of loading and shipping her cargo, which included weapons for the royal army.35 Likewise, the patriot government at Buenos Aires repeatedly sought arms from the

United States, asking for “10,000 at a fixed price or the permission to export from the United

35 Robert K. Lowry to Robert Smith. 1 October 1810, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in La Guiara, 1810-1836, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 84, roll 1.

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States that number of arms.”36 Supply, though, did not always meet demand. First, many

Americans did not want to sell to Spain. They opposed the provisioning of a European empire that they deplored as oppressive and tyrannical and instead demanded that the United States recognize and support the patriot cause.37 U.S. merchants in Colombia specifically requested that the United States prohibit the exportation of arms to Maracaibo, where the Spanish army stockpiled military supplies.38 Second, although no international law prevented the United States from providing guns to rebel governments, the official military provisioning of Spain’s colonies would hinder diplomacy with Spain, derailing negotiations for the acquisition of Florida.39

Civilian merchants, though, offered a way around this challenge, a solution Thomas Jefferson had anticipated in 1793 when he declared that private persons be permitted to export arms to belligerents.40 Jefferson’s pronouncement became U.S. policy for most of the nineteenth century, and New England arms manufactured under government patronage, either by the federal armories or by private contractors, made their way to Mexico and South America. By allowing individual merchants to sell both public and private arms to whomever they chose, the United

36 See for examples, William G. Miller to James Monroe, March 15, 1812, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Montevideo, 1811-1837, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M71, roll 1, and Thomas Lloyd Halsey to James Monroe, May 3, 1812, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1.

37 See for example newspaper articles such as “From the Saratoga Journal, [New York] Shamrock; 21 January 1815, which deplores the “slavery and oppression” of Old Spain in Spanish America and provides an overview of geography and the independence struggles to its readers, and “United Provinces of La Plata,” [Charlestown, West Virginia] Farmer’s Repository; February 29, 1816.

38 Robert K. Lowry to Robert Smith, October 1, 1810 and Lowry to Monroe, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in La Guiara, 1810-1836, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 84, roll 1.

39 Elton Atwater describes the law of neutrality as a working set of agreements between nations regarding behavior toward belligerents, in American Regulation of Arms Exports (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1941), p.7, f.n.2. John Missall and Mary Lou Missall, The Seminole Wars: America’s Longest Indian Conflict (Gainesville, FL: University Press, 2004), 52.

40 In a note to British Minister at Washington George Hammond on May 15, 1793, Jefferson announced that the government would not prohibit the private sale of arms or contraband to belligerents. Atwater, American Regulation of Arms Exports, 8.

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States government made it possible for Latin American patriots to wage war and for U.S. diplomats to obtain favorable trade policies as a token of their indebtedness, all while appeasing the Spanish government.

The arrangement by which private parties exported government arms, while U.S. agents on the ground maintained the official policy of neutrality in response to requests for aid, worked out well for both the United States’ international reputation and American manufactures. It is difficult to know just how many arms went to Latin America and by whom they were produced, because annual lists of exports for the United States for the 1810s and 1820s do not specifically list types of weaponry, even for years when we know U.S. arms were sold in South America. But when arms were exported, it is likely that they came from a New England manufactory that depended on government patronage for its existence. As we have seen, the majority of the small arms industry was located in this region and would not have existed but for the government contract system.41 Yet while government demand afforded arms makers a market that private consumers could not provide, manufacturers occasionally had to look elsewhere for sales. For example, Nathan Starr, the owner of the nation’s oldest private arms manufactory in

Middletown, Connecticut, and contractor to Springfield Armory, exported arms to Colombia following the War of 1812 to supplement his income.42 Starr, whose factory operations depended on federal contracts, claimed that the exportation of surplus arms compensated for the depreciated wartime payments he had received from the U.S. government.43 And despite

41 Felicia Johnson Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley: A Regional Study of the Economic Development of the Small Arms industry, 1798-1870, Smith College Studies in History, Vol. XXXIII, Vera Brown Holmes, Hans Kohn, eds. (Northampton, MA: 1948), 14, 38.

42 Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley, 46.

43 Nathan Starr, Middletown, CT, to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, Washington, January 30, 1826. Box 12, Folder 1, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry 1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

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guaranteed domestic demand and financial support, the national armory at Springfield also produced a surplus of arms each year. Most of this surplus was disposed of through agents and auction houses in Philadelphia and New York and was then sold to domestic patrons or to Latin

American patriots, often with the knowledge of federal officials. 44

In addition to providing the capital for the arms industry, the federal government cultivated a commercial relationship with Latin America that facilitated the ease with which these arms were sold. In response to patriot leaders’ requests for U.S. arms and political approval, U.S. State Department agents cultivated good will by assuring them of U.S. sympathy for their cause, which helped create a commercial environment in which shipping claims were settled and preferential treatment in tariff legislation was secured. U.S. diplomatic agents understood well that the United States’ status as a first-rate producer of armaments gave it the upper hand in negotiations. A representative from the newly-established independent junta at

Caracas declared to U.S. Secretary of State Robert Smith that New Granada’s harbors would

“await with open arms” U.S. trade.45 Foreign markets were indispensable for a political economy geared toward disposing agricultural, and increasingly, manufactured, produce. Supplying arms to revolutionaries not only refilled federal coffers; more broadly, it served national economic interests because, as one consul reminded Secretary of State James Madison, “should this country succeed, their trade with the United States will be lucrative and important, but should it

44 Auction houses were often viewed as the best place for the Armory to dispose of its goods. John Morton, Ordnance Department, to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, July 5, 1815. Box 1, Folder 3, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

45 Martin Tovar Ponte to Robert Smith, 25 April 1810, U.S. Department of State, Notes from the Colombian Legation, 1810-1906, RG59 National Archives. Washington: 1943. Microfilm, no.M51, roll 1. Soon after fighting broke out in Venezuela, Ponte wrote to Smith that because Spain was now occupied by a foreign monarch and a sovereign junta had been established for the territory of Venezuela,, Venezuela would no longer accept goods from Spain’s “mercantile expeditions” and would “await with open arms” U.S. trade.

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for the want of assistance succumb, the ports will be shut against foreign trade.”46 Arms were the first step in making sure the ports did not shut.

Examining the relationship between arms exportation and diplomacy in one recipient country allows us to understand how unequal power dynamics emerged around demand and supply, making possible the type of diplomatic relationship that would provide a boon to

American manufactures. The independent junta in the viceroyalty Rio de la Plata (present-day

Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay) was particularly solicitous in its arms requests and, in fact, ended up better supplied than some of its neighbors.47 U.S. consul to Buenos Aires

William Miller wrote to Secretary of State James Monroe in March of 1812 that the government in Buenos Aires wanted to ship a large amount of copper to Boston in exchange for arms.48 One year later, U.S. Consul Thomas Lloyd Halsey informed the Secretary of State of this government’s desire to purchase 10,000 stands of arms.49 Military deficiencies set the stage for an unequal trade relationship in which Supreme Director of the Provinces of Rio de la Plata wrote to President James Madison that if the United States would supply arms, his government would “be ready to engage in any treaties of commerce that will be advantageous to the United

States” and “duties on U.S. manufactures would be reduced.”50 Formerly dependent on royal supplies, and once depots of Iberian produce, Latin American ports now opened to U.S. wares.51

46 Thomas Lloyd Halsey to James Madison, February 11, 1815, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1.

47 Isaac Foster Coffin Journal 1820, Appleton Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

48 William G. Miller to James Monroe, March 15, 1812, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Montevideo, 1811-1837, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M71, roll 1.

49 Thomas Lloyd Halsey to James Monroe, May 3, 1812, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1.

50 Thomas Lloyd Halsey to James Monroe, October 21, 1812, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1;

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The patriot forces in Rio de la Plata were especially receptive to Springfield arms. The superintendent of the Springfield Armory maintained a complex web of dealers in North and

South American cities to facilitate the sale of arms that could not be absorbed by domestic markets. When the armory exceeded its annual budget, which it often did, the War Department required it to dispose of excess materials to recoup losses.52 While it often sent surplus stock to

New York or Philadelphia, not all of its articles always sold. The superintendent, in fact, looked for additional outlets in the new state of Mississippi, but found that rifles only sold at low prices and that a “more advantageous sale could not be forced.”53 Additionally, the government did not want any more paper money from “south of Philadelphia;” the specie that selling agents could

Gervasio Antonio de Pasada to James Madison, U.S. Department of State, March 9 1814, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1.

51 Early letters from the U.S. consul in Havana complained of the “jealousies that appear by the officers of government against our trade” and the expectations that U.S. trade with the island would “dwindle away to nothing.” Oliver Pollock to Robert Livingston, 14 December 1783, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Havana, 1783-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1956. Microfilm, no. T20, roll 1. The Crown believed in a “free”, Crown-protected trade between European and American Spaniards, which operated to the detriment of American traders seeking outlets for European and Asian goods, as well as for American produce like tobacco. Bibiano Torres Ramirez and Javier Ortiz de la Tabla, eds., Reglamento para el Comercio Libre, 1778 (Seville, 1979); John Fisher, “Imperial" Free Trade" and the Hispanic Economy, 1778-1796,” Journal of Latin American Studies 13, no.1 (May 1981): 21. The only sector in which Spain had encouraged truly “free” trade was slave trading, which Americans certainly took advantage of, both legally and illegally, but they soon needed to find other commodities to trade in South America, as many of Spain’s former colonies enacted legislation that restricted slavery and the slave trade. James Ferguson King, “The Evolution of the Free Trade Principle in Spanish Colonial Administration, The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Feb., 1942): 55-6. See also Leonardo Marques, "Slave Trading in a New World: The Strategies of North American Slave Traders in the Age of Abolition," Journal of the Early Republic 32.2 (2012): 233-260 for a discussion of changing attitudes toward the slave trade, as well as a discussion of the importance of Cuba as a market for American slave traders. And for the importance of silver for the development of American capitalism and the U.S. financial sector, see Fichter, So Great a Profit, 31-33.

52 Decius Wadsworth, Colonel of Ordnance, to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, September 26, 1817, Box 3, Folder 1, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

53 Henry W. Huntington, Natchez, to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, September 20, 1818, Box 4, Folder 1, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

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obtain from South America was a more satisfactory mode of payment.54 Even in an expanding

United States, regional urban markets and emerging southern markets did not always supply sufficient demand or imbursement. Just as patriots in Rio de la Plata needed guns, the federal armory also needed new markets.

In order to transition into foreign markets, Springfield Superintendent Roswell Lee cultivated a mutually beneficial relationship between the federal government and selling agents: the agents found outlets for surplus stock and gave the Armory direct feedback on their products, while the agents profited from U.S. diplomatic presence abroad. One of the Springfield

Armory’s principal agents in Philadelphia was William Cramond, a merchant who recognized that surplus arms “were of little use to the United States” and that a “low price for them might induce a sale of the whole.”55 Lee perhaps chose Cramond as his agent because of Cramond’s experience with South American commerce and his ties to merchants in Buenos Aires.56

Cramond was connected with Baltimore shipping firm D’Arcy and Didier, which dealt government arms both in Argentina and Mexico in 1815 and 1816.57 In July 1815, Cramond

54 John Morton, Captain of Ordnance, to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, and William Cramond to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory June 19, 1815, and September 25, 1815, Box 1, Folders 3 and 4, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA; For the variation in bank notes’ values, see Stephen Mihm, Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

55 William Cramond, Philadelphia to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, July 17, 1815. Box 1, Folder 9, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

56 Receipts, January 31, 1815 and August 16, 1814 William Cramond, William Cramond receipt book 1814-1815, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. D’Arcy and Didier did business with David Curtis De Forest who had established the first American commercial house in Buenos Aires in 1815. DeForest provided political cover and served as agent for privateering activities. Jeffrey Orenstein," Joseph Almeida: Portrait of a Privateer, Pirate & Plaintiff, Part II," Green Bag 2d 12 (2008): 36.

57 “Memorial on Behalf of the Owners of the Schooner Highflier, Having a Claim on the Mexican Government Addressed to the Board of Commissioners under the Convention of the 11th of April, 1839 between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic,” Case Number 24, Thomas Tenant, Case Files for Cases Heard, 08/25/1850-51, Record Group 76: Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitrations, 1716-1994,

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received authorization from Captain John Morton of the Ordnance Department to negotiate a sale of arms with Lee. There was some sense of urgency in this deal. Cramond sent his agent George

Hockley to purchase arms with a letter from the acting Secretary of War Alexander Dallas, who had approved the mode of payment so that “no delay in shipping the arms may take place.”58 In a series of visits, Hockley negotiated with Lee for a fair price so that business could be done.59

From his agents, Lee received information about Latin American markets that would enable him to make the best possible decisions about arms exports, and thus improve armory sales. He knew, for example, that the sale of additional arms to Argentina would be advantageous. Cramond informed Lee that one agent in Buenos Aires had received favorable reports from purchasers of old Springfield arms in 1816.60 Lee also knew that shorter barreled muskets “were in very high demand in South America” and were in fact favored over long- barreled ones. But in order to sell these weapons at a profit, the selling agent needed from Lee specific guarantees that they had been properly inspected by the Armory’s inspectors and were found to be of good quality, “though probably not of the first quality,” and that they were being sold only on account of the size of the barrel. Lee also had to inform the agent of the price

National Archives, College Park, MD. Nixon Walker and George McCallmint, Philadelphia to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, September 20, 1816. Box 1, Folder 8, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

58 William Cramond, Philadelphia, to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, July 15, 1815. Box 1, Folder 4, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

59 See for examples, William Cramond to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, July 17, September 2, September 25, September 28, 1815 Superintendent, Springfield Armory, April 11, 1817. Box 1, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

60 William Cramond, Philadelphia, to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, November 6, 1816. Box 1, Folder 9, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

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difference between the two types, as short barrel muskets were not usually made for U.S. service.61 This type of communication enabled Lee and his merchant to profitably dispose of muskets that had been made by accident by the armory’s employees at the government’s expense and could not be used domestically. Because selling agents alerted Lee to quality issues and preferences, and solicited production information for marketing purposes, federal arms were received in Buenos Aires in “preference to others and at the highest price in the market.”62

These arms vendors, meanwhile, benefitted from the aid of U.S. diplomatic agents in

South America. The shipment of arms promoted positive opinions of the United States and created a situation by which the U.S. achieved commercial power as the main supplier of military goods; exportation alone, however, was not necessarily enough to secure business deals for American manufactures. To be sure, patriot leaders readily accepted and appreciated armaments. The U.S. consul at Buenos Aires in 1812 informed Secretary of State James Monroe that a small supply of arms had arrived on the Liberty and increased the sense that the United

States should be “looked up to not only by the government but by the people as the only sincere friends.”63 Throughout their struggle against Spain, Argentinian leaders echoed this sentiment in letters to U.S. presidents.

61 William Cramond, Philadelphia, to Roswell Lee Superintendent, Springfield Armory, June 12, 1817. Box 2, Folder 7, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

62 William Cramond, Philadelphia to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, November 6, 1816. Box 1, Folder 9, Nixon Walker and George McCallmint, Philadelphia to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, September 20, 1816. Box 1, Folder 8, and William Cramond, Philadelphia to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, April 11, 1817. Box 2, Folder 6, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA; For quality issues, see Nixon Walker and George McCallmint, Philadelphia to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, September 20, 1816. Box 1, Folder 8, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

63 William G Miller to James Monroe, July 6, 1812, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1. 63 Gervasio Antonio de Pasada to James Madison, U.S. Department of State, March 9 1814, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in

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Even as South Americans sought business with U.S. merchants, these merchants still needed federal help. John Devereux, a Baltimore merchant, relied on the U.S. consular agent at

Buenos Aires to execute his contract with General Juan Martin de Pueyredón for military supplies and a loan of $2 million dollars.64 U.S. consul Thomas Lloyd Halsey was an ideal commercial agent because he resided in the city and was on good terms with the leaders of

Buenos Aires, who had given him assurances that U.S. commerce would always benefit from favorable treatment.65 Likewise, Baltimore shipping firm D’Arcy and Didier, which purchased and sold Springfield arms, maintained a close relationship with the U.S. consul at Valparaiso in order to better facilitate their trade there.66 The consul, Henry Hill, informed the firm of blockades, duties and other pertinent commercial information. Hill’s correspondence with them and other merchants helped mitigate the transoceanic effects of imperfect information -- an invaluable service in the United States’ transition to capitalism.67 When the patriot government in Valparaiso was unable to pay for all the supplies it needed, it forewent revenue by allowing all military items to enter the country without paying any tariffs, which encouraged selling houses

Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1. Pasada wrote to Madison: “The preponderance we should give to your influence in the commercial world has not a little influence. It is in you we place our present hopes.”

64Thomas Murray, The Story of the Irish in Argentina (New York: P.J. Kennedy and Sons: 1919); Juan Martin de Pueyredón to James Monroe, January 31,1817, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1. Thomas Murray, The Story of the Irish in Argentina (New York: P.J. Kennedy and Sons: 1919).

65 Thomas Lloyd Halsey to John Quincy Adams, November 31, 1817, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1.

66 “List of vessels sailing from port of Valparaiso between July, 1817 and July, 1818” in U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Valparaiso, 1826-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1961. Microfilm, no. T-167, roll 1.

67 For example, Hill alerted merchant correspondents that most vessels only paid a duty of 10 or 12 percent and that munitions and military stores were free, which influenced the decisions of exporters. Henry Hill to D’Arcy and Didier and Shepard, June 16, 1817 and Hill to Palmer and Hamilton, D’Arcy and Didier, January 30, 1818, Henry Hill Papers. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. Box 1, Folder 2.

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like D’Arcy and Didier to ship more arms.68After D’Arcy and Didier’s cargo of 3,000 muskets arrived free of charge, Hill alerted the Supreme Director, who then issued a public announcement calling on all citizens of the state to purchase these particular arms.69 Weapons may have been duty free, but their sale could always use assistance. What if, for example, a cargo of arms was captured at sea? In 1819, a schooner from Baltimore carrying a cargo of “sundry merchandise” and arms was captured off the Port of Callou by a Chile squadron commanded by Admiral Lord

Cochrane. U.S. consul Henry Hill immediately petitioned the Tribunal of Prizes in Santiago for the ship’s release.70 Agents like Hill and Halsey helped make South America an ideal place to send surplus armaments.

Post-Independence Markets for Textiles

Consuls’ commercial support was essential not just for the sale of arms in Latin America, but also for the diplomatic precedent it set for the exportation of U.S. textiles. As diplomatic agents facilitated sales and assured patriots of U.S. support for independence, they built up good will and helped establish the United States’ reputation as an important trading partner, which made it possible for diplomats in the 1820s to push for lower tariffs and favorable nation status.

In the absence of official diplomatic relations, Halsey and others made business deals and helped cultivate favorable opinions of U.S. presence in the region among Latin American officials and businessmen. Halsey, for example, was invited to visit the Chief of the Oriental Republic Jose

68 Henry Hill to D’Arcy and Didier and Shepard, February 6, 1817, Henry Hill Papers. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. Box 1, Folder 2.

69 Henry Hill to D’Arcy and Didier and Shepard, June 22, 1817 and Hill to Palmer and Hamilton, D’Arcy and Didier, January 30, 1818, Box 1, Folder 2, Henry Hill Papers. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.

70 Henry Hill to John Quincy Adams, September 28, 1819, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Valparaiso, 1812-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 146, roll 1.

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Artigas and was received with “marked attention and kindness both by the chief and by all classes of people.” Halsey’s boasts do not, of course, necessarily reflect the actual sentiment of those around him, but they do suggest that he was treated with a level of respect that would permit favorable negotiations. 71 Prior to the commencement of official diplomacy, this cultivation of amicable relations both created a stable and friendly commercial environment for

American merchants and laid the groundwork for later policy implementation. U.S. diplomacy in

Latin America in the 1810s had promoted the American arms trade within the limits of neutrality; but in the wake of independence, the diplomatic and commercial climates changed.

The ability of New England textiles to compete successfully with British ones required a more aggressive strategy than had been possible or necessary in the 1810s.

After years spent staving off political recognition of patriot governments, the United

States government finally commenced formal diplomacy with the new nations to its south. In

1822, Washington began receiving representatives from various Latin American nations and the

State Department established official diplomatic missions in return.72 It finally, according to

President James Monroe, “seemed obvious” that Spain could not subdue her former colonies, nor

“improve the condition of the people in those countries,” and so official neutrality gave way to a more forceful assertion of U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere. Monroe declared the hemisphere

71 Thomas Lloyd Halsey to John Quincy Adams, 31 November 1817, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1. See also, William G. Miller to John Quincy Adams, 12 July 1821, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Montevideo, 1811-1837, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M71, roll 1. Miller similarly wrote about his favorable relations with generals and government officials.

72 The United States would, following President Monroe’s message to Congress at the end of 1822, “sustain its neutral position, and allow to each party, while the war continues, equal rights...according to the well-known law of nations.” U.S. Senate Journal, 17th Congress, 2nd Sess., 3 December 1822: 16.

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closed to “future colonization by any European powers.”73 The United States government could now make pretensions to being the dominant “interest” in Latin America – a position that U.S.

Consul to Argentina William Worthington had urged John Quincy Adams to assert five years earlier. Worthington had warned that if the United State did not take a more proactive stance in its recognition of independence and in its formal commercial policy with the southern provinces of South America, Europe would gain too strong a foothold and the United States would “lose all the glory and profit to be desired from this country.”74 Worthington need not have worried too much. By 1832, Americans had more ships in many South American ports than any other nation and its “tonnage was daily increasing.”75

Yet the increase in American commerce was not a foregone conclusion and in the 1820s, there were still barriers to overcome. The military urgency for provisions diminished and new governments enacted heavy tariffs to recover from wartime debts and encourage domestic agriculture and manufacturing. Although Latin American leaders had specifically solicited

73 James Monroe, Annual Message to Congress, December 2, 1823, 18th Cong., 1st Sess., Senate Journal: 11. For scholarly interpretations, see Dexter Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1941), William Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1992), and Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang, 2011). While Monroe’s message lacked military teeth, it did informally bind the United States to take action should this declaration have been violated – an obligation to which Latin American officials held the U.S. government accountable and to which it often complied. For examples of ministers asking the U.S. State Department for clarification on its promise to resist foreign interference by the Holy Alliance and later requesting U.S. military intervention against Britain and diplomatic intervention in negotiation with Spain, see José María Salazar to John Quincy Adams, July 2, 1824, U.S. Department of State, Notes from the Colombian Legation, 1810-1906, RG59 National Archives. Washington, D.C.: 1943. Microfilm, no-M51, roll 2. Domingo Acosta to Louis McLane, April 17, 1834 and Domingo Acosta to John Forsyth, February 25, 1837. See Pablo Obregon to Henry Clay (acknowledging the receipt of his note saying a U.S. minister had been sent to Russia requesting its influence with Spain in concluding peace with Mexico), January 4, 1824, U.S. Department of State, Notes from the Mexican Legation, 1821-1906, RG59 National Archives. Washington: 1960. Microfilm, no-M54, roll 1.

74 William G.D. Worthington to John Quincy Adams, 15 January 1818, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Ministers in Argentina, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no. M-51, roll 1.

75 For ports in South America, see for example, “A Statement showing the Amount of vessels into the Ports of the Republic of Venezuela for the year 1832” in despatch from JGA Williamson to Louis Mclane. May 4, 1833, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in La Guiara, 1810-36, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 84, roll 3. For quote, see John M. MacPherson to Martin Van Buren, 14 December 1829, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Cartagena, 1822-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1958. Microfilm, no. T-192, roll 1.

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American arms, they did not request American textiles. Nor did they allow textiles to enter ports duty-free as they did with military stores. The introduction of American textiles required more diplomatic work than had arms exportation because imported cloth ran up against these barriers to trade. The congress in Vera Cruz, with whom the United State had an extensive overland trade, for example, prohibited in the early 1820s the importation of all cotton goods.76

The two main barriers to entry for U.S. textiles were tariffs and subsidies for domestic manufactures in Latin American countries. Following independence, some Latin American government began experimenting with targeted incentives for domestic manufacturing. The first documented case of government support for industry was an 1825 Mexican act that exempted paper manufacturers from excise taxes, and by the 1830s several countries had adopted similar encouragements.77 Peru developed an industrial sector in its northern provinces that enjoyed nationalist economic policies in the capital city, where even city consumers were not wholly opposed to cost-raising tariffs on imports. 78

Latin American scholars have debated the extent to which post-independence Latin

American governments adopted protectionist trade policies. Beginning in the 1980s, economic historians began challenging the arguments put forth by dependency theorists, in which liberal elites in Latin American nations imposed detrimental free trade policies that rendered their countries dependent on Europe. Historian D.C.M. Platt argues that the region was unwillingly

76 For the importance of this overland trade between the United States and Mexico, see Richard J. Salvucci, "The Origins and Progress of U.S.-Mexican Trade, 1825-1884,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 71, no. 4 (1991): 697-735. Salvucci argues that it increased immensely after 1825, pages 701-2.

77 John H. Coatsworth and Jeffrey G. Williamson, "Always Protectionist? Latin American Tariffs from Independence to Great Depression." Journal of Latin American Studies 36, no. 2 (2004), 213-14. Robert A. Potash, Mexican Government and Industrial Development in the Early Republic: The Banco de Avio (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983).

78 Paul Gootenberg, “North-South: Trade Policy, Regionalism and Caudillismo in Post-Independence Peru,” Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (May, 1991): 282-3.

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self-sufficient in the nineteenth century and that an inability to pay for foreign goods produced strong incentives for home manufacturing, while John Coatsworth and Jeffrey Williams argue that the revenue demands of almost-constant military conflicts led most Latin American governments to levy high tariffs, so that by 1865 the region had some of the highest tariffs rates in the world.79 Other approaches emphasize the internal politics and regional differences that made policy implementation anything but uniform throughout the region.80 Colombia, Chile, and

Argentina had particularly low tariff rates, while Mexico, Peru, and Brazil experienced more protectionist policies, but even these rates are debated.81 Protectionism varied depending on local geography, domestic politics, world price rates, and international relations. Regardless of the precise levels of duties, however, Latin America was far from being a region that threw open its doors to liberal trade – a fact of which U.S. consuls were quite aware. The U.S. consul to Vera

Cruz William Taylor made Secretary of State Adams aware of these impediments to American trade, specifically the prohibition of cotton imports, and suggested that a minister with full treaty-making powers stationed in the country would improve the situation.82

Yet, not just protectionist policies but the consumption preferences of the people mattered, too. The appointment of Joel Robert Poinsett as minister to Mexico one year after

Taylor’s request did in fact improve trade, and by 1826 American cottons found a “ready vent.”

79 D.C.M. Platt, “Dependency in Nineteenth-century Latin America: An Historian Objects," Latin American Research Review 15, no. 1 (1980), 117.

80 See, for example, Joseph LeRoy Love and Nils Jacobsen, Guiding the Invisible Hand: Economic Liberalism and the State in Latin American History (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1988) and Stephen H., Haber, ed., How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800-1914 (Stanford University Press, 1997).

81 John H. Coatsworth and Jeffrey G. Williamson, "Always Protectionist? Latin American Tariffs from Independence to Great Depression," Journal of Latin American Studies 36, no. 2 (2004): 208.

82 William Taylor to John Quincy Adams, December 19, 1824, and January 5, 1825 U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Vera Cruz, 1822-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1960. Microfilm, no.M-183, roll 1.

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But even as Poinsett reported that some consumers were starting to prefer U.S. cloth to British, he urged the improvement of American domestic manufactures.83 As trade was redirected from

Spain and Portugal to northern Europe and the United States, Latin American consumers still desired the latest fashions, which did not exactly bode well for U.S. manufacturers whose own domestic customer base still often preferred European wares to American ones.84 On the other hand, Latin American nations had a substantial body of poor consumers whose needs were not met by fine European imports or upstart local firms catering to elite preferences. This created a space for U.S. goods, especially as many factories specialized in coarser fabrics, like cheap broadcloths and kerseys.85

U.S. consuls helped manufacturers at home navigate these preferences, just as the output of textile factories was increasing. The timing of Latin American independence and the commencement of formal diplomacy boded well for the expansion of manufacturing. At the same time as the United States began acknowledging national sovereignties, for example, the stockholders of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company in Lowell, Massachusetts, the largest manufacturing undertaking of its time in the United States, voted to improve water power and expand production.86 They found new markets in South America, in part, because they had a

83 See Consular Return January 1- June 30, 1826 in William Taylor to Henry Clay, August 2, 1826, and letter Jan 8, 1826, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Vera Cruz, 1822-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1960. Microfilm, no.M-183, roll 1.

84 Platt, “Dependency in Nineteenth-century Latin America: an Historian Objects,” 117.

85 Paul Gootenberg, “The Social Origins of Protectionism and Free Trade in Nineteenth-Century Lima,” Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Nov., 1982): 341-2.

86 Stockholders’ Minutes 1822-1842, Oct 29, 1824, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard University.

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consul working for them.87 The case study of one consul’s negotiations with Peru, a nation with its own burgeoning industry and protective economic policies, illustrates the degree to which diplomacy mattered for U.S. exports and the rise of industry. If we are to understand the early success of the Waltham-Lowell system we must do so in the context of diplomacy. U.S. Consul to Lima William Tudor successfully lobbied the government of Peru for measures that specifically benefitted his friends in manufacturing. While exports to Latin America accounted for just one part of their profits in the 1820s, the ability to export mattered to them and so it matters to the story of manufacturing in the United States.

The Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham, Massachusetts, had been in operation for a decade when Nathan Appleton, one of the company’s proprietors, sent cloth samples to

William Tudor, who promised to “do his best to introduce them in Lima and Upper Peru.”88

Tudor was a leading Bostonian who had been appointed consul to Lima, Peru in 1823. Peru, a royalist stronghold, was one of the last Latin American countries to receive U.S. recognition, which rendered Tudor the sole diplomat for over two years. During his seven years in Peru,

Tudor served a dual role for the economy and diplomacy of the United States, which were inextricably intertwined. He worked to cultivate amiable relations with his host country and functioned as a liaison for American commerce in Peru. He also served as a specific agent for his associates in manufacturing. In fact, while Tudor advocated on behalf of American commerce generally, he was most effective in influencing policies that benefitted U.S. manufacturing, and specifically those that benefitted his friends. Tudor’s tenure as consul was in many ways

87 New York markets were overstocked in the 1820s and in bad economic years the Boston Associates relied on exports to South America, Caroline Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture, a Study in Industrial Beginnings (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 90, 190.

88 William Tudor to Nathan Appleton May 3, 1824, Appleton Family Papers, MHS.

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emblematic of early national state-promoted capitalism: his actions stimulated U.S. economic growth generally, but privileged certain individuals.

The men responsible for the Waltham Lowell system had access to the state’s diplomatic network in ways that the owners of the majority of New England factories did not. The

Northbridge Cotton Manufacturing Company in Northbridge, Massachusetts, for example, which, capitalized at $150,000, was fairly average in size, employed the “putting out” system, and sold locally.89 The company, like many others, did not have overseas accounts or correspondence with agents of the state. While many of these companies did just fine without it, they did not become emblems of the new American factory system. The ability of American textile manufacturing to reach its large-scale potential depended on diplomacy to create outlets and the proprietors of the various Waltham-Lowell firms had decades of experience dealing with

U.S. commercial agents abroad. Israel Thorndike, one of the directors of the Boston

Manufacturing Company had a longstanding account with Thomas Lloyd Halsey, who had also facilitated arms deals. Halsey had worked on Thorndike’s behalf, managing his sales of ox and horse hides and foreign satins, in the years that Waltham goods were still being sold in domestic markets.90 They also had accounts with John Murray Forbes, who was stationed at Buenos Aires from 1820 to 1831 in various diplomatic posts, and was appointed the high post of chargé d’ affaires in 1825. Forbes settled claims related to military stores, achieved reduced tariffs, and maintained friendly relations with both Argentinian officials and the business community. These duties were invaluable to American interests abroad; Tudor; however, did more than most

89 Northbridge Cotton Manufacturing Company Collection, Business Records of Various New England and New York Textile Firms, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

90 Thomas Lloyd Halsey to Israel Thorndike, 21 August 1818, Israel Thorndike Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

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consuls to aid the development of American textile manufacturing.91 Throughout his tenure as consul, he not only served as a sales agent for manufacturers and achieved changes in tariff policies. He also, after the United States recognized Peruvian independence by appointing a chargé d’affaires in May, 1826, began to pressure Peruvian officials to abandon domestic manufacturing projects in favor of importing U.S. textiles. Tudor’s promotion of U.S. manufacturing helped complete the United States’ transition from neutrality to a more aggressive commercial diplomacy.

Tudor spent the first part of his tenure continuing the practice of neutral diplomacy, while also dispensing commercial information and facilitating business deals in Peru. By the spring of

1824, when Tudor showcased Waltham goods among Peruvian shopkeepers, the United States had officially recognized Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Brazil, but Spain’s military success in

Lima required Tudor to uphold pretensions to nonalignment. Even as he assured the Spanish viceroy of Lima that the United States had never recognized the Republic of Peru and that his job was strictly to assist destitute seamen and promote the commercial interests of his country, the

Spanish viceroy refused to recognize his status as consul.92 This diplomatic inconvenience, though, did not prevent Tudor from acting as business agent for Boston capitalists. Just as commercial agents had informed Superintendent Roswell Lee about the most suitable arms for

Argentine markets and U.S. consul Henry Hill had facilitated the sale of Springfield arms in the

1810s, Tudor helped market various styles of Massachusetts textiles. The information he relayed to manufacturers enabled them to make calculated production decisions. Tudor instructed

91 John M. Forbes to John Quincy Adams, December 29 1821 and January 21, 1822, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 3.

92 William Tudor to José de la Serna e Hinojosa, May 25, 1824, and August 30, 1824, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Lima, 1823-54, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 154, roll 1.

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Appleton that coarse cloths would do well among the poorer classes, while “quality” pieces would receive the “same preference they have obtained at home.”93 This information was especially useful to Appleton, who had determined that each of the Boston Associates’ industrial undertakings would specialize in different kinds of cloth. The Merrimack Manufacturing

Company, which had only just begun operating when Appleton sent samples to Peru, would specialize in fancy calicoes, as would the Cocheco Manufacturing Company beginning in 1827; the Boston Manufacturing Company would always have on hand at least $100,000 worth of coarse cloth.94 In 1825, construction began on the Hamilton Manufacturing Company in Lowell,

Massachusetts. It would specialize in yet other kinds of cloth, which would find ready markets in

Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro.95 Knowledge of market preferences enabled Appleton and his associates to be more strategic about production and exportation.

Tudor did more than supply marketing services; he actually improved the market for certain types of cloth in South America. Tudor’s initial report to Appleton had informed the manufacturer that bleached cloths would not “answer well” because they were too similar to those made in Peru. Peruvians had begun to manufacture tucuyos, a type of woven plain cotton that often appeared similar to plain white cloth from the United States. Because tucuyos faced competition from cloths imported from England, India, and especially the United States, the

Peruvian government levied a prohibitive duty of 80 percent on white sheetings produced in the

93 William Tudor to Nathan Appleton May 3, 1824, Appleton Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.

94 Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made, 50. Accounts Current 1822-31, Boston Manufacturing Co. Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School. In August of 1824, for example, the Company had in stock $164,623 of bleached and brown cloth, page 96. They would continue to manufacture large quantities of the cloth. See for example, Accounts Current 1830-40, February 1832, Boston Manufacturing Co. Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

95 Entries, March-April, 1825, Journal 1825, Vol. 29 Hamilton Manufacturing Co. Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School. Accounts 1828-31, Miscellaneous Papers, Hamilton Manufacturing Co. Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School. They would specialize in flannels, drills, and dimities. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 50.

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U.S.96 This trade barrier, though, could be overcome with the proper diplomatic maneuverings.

In a lengthy letter to Minister of Foreign Affairs José Manuel de Pardo, Tudor argued that the encouragement of tucuyos would drive American domestics out of the market, much to the detriment of the Peruvian consumer. Despite cosmetic similarities, Tudor insisted on the superiority of American cloths. He maintained that Peruvian manufacturers would not be able to produce the type or the quantity of cloth that the population demanded. Peruvian consumers, he suggested, preferred American cloths to those from India or Britain, which would now be able to dominate the market because of the discriminatory tariff policy. American manufacturers, on the other hand, would adapt their goods to the wants of the country, and if the policy changes happened soon, none of these commercial injuries would come to fruition. In case the minister was not convinced, Tudor also made sure to remind him that half of all the foreign duties that

Peru’s treasury received came from American trade, lest the minister forget Peru’s most important trading partner.97 Tudor’s polite threats worked. The government complied by equalizing the tariff on all foreign goods, a policy change that would enable U.S. cotton goods, in

Tudor’s estimation, to dominate the market because of their superior quality.98 The trade in

American bleached cloths was not interrupted, and tucuyos, which had had the upper hand in

Peruvian markets since at least the early 1820s, lost out to American imports.99

96 William Tudor to Henry Clay, June 11, 1826, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Lima, 1823-54, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 154, roll 1.

97 William Tudor to José Manuel de Pardo, 2 November 1826, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Lima, 1823-54, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 154, roll 1.

98 William Tudor to Henry Clay, 6 January 1827, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Lima, 1823-54, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 154, roll 1.

99 In a letter to one of their selling agents, the Newmarket Manufacturing Company wrote that they had received information that cotton sheetings were selling well in Peru and Chile, Letter to Hacker Brown and Co., June 26, 1827, and October 15, 1828, Newmarket Manufacturing Company Vol. 1, Business Records of Various New England and New York Textile Firms, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School. The Peruvian production of tucuyos had been a problem for imports since at least the early 1820s, but by the time of Tudor’s

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Tudor’s strategy may have promoted national economic goals of increased market access, but his negotiations centered primarily on commercial policies that would aid his cohorts in

Boston. For example, in his negotiations with the Peruvian minister of foreign affairs over tucuyos, Tudor made sure to specify that the types of cloth he wanted the tariff change to affect were those made on power looms, the specialty of the Boston Associates (only eleven other

Massachusetts factories used them in 1820). Power looms were expensive to procure, and the

Boston Associates controlled the patent rights for the best model. And irrespective of their price, power looms were not adopted uniformly. Samuel Slater, for example, was slow to introduce the use of the power loom in his mills, not for financial reasons, but because his business model was less growth-oriented than his colleagues’ in Waltham and Lowell.100 Yet as an ancillary consequence of Tudor’s targeted commercial diplomacy, other manufacturers whose products were similar to those produced by the Waltham-Lowell system were able to profit, as well. 101

His negotiations at least impacted a wider class of manufacturers than the Boston elite.

Although Tudor was perhaps unique in his pursuit of regulations that supported U.S. textiles – he was certainly unique in his verbosity in economic affairs - other diplomats, too, recognized the importance of trade regulation for textiles. For example, U.S. Consul to

Pernambuco John T. Mansfield observed that coarse cotton goods manufactured in the United

States were becoming markedly more popular in the city than English ones and that if assigned

negotiations, American bleached and unbleached cottons had supplanted those of other countries. See, Thomas Hockley, March 1822, Thomas Hockley Letterbook 1819-1822, Hockley family, Hockley family papers 1731-1883, History Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; and Charles Frederick Bradford, “South American Market 1826- 1830,” Edward Hickling Bradford Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.

100 Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 91-109. Tucker argues that Slater could not adapt to the new market society, page 109.

101 Letter to Hacker Brown and Co., June 26, 1827, Newmarket Manufacturing Company Vol. 1, Business Records of Various New England and New York Textile Firms, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

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the same tariffs as English wares, American imports would greatly increase.102 Elsewhere, effective commercial diplomacy helped contribute to the ease with which U.S. domestics were exported. In his letter to a Boston selling house about the steady importation of domestic cottons into Valparaiso, merchant Charles Frederick Bradford casually remarked that in Valparaiso,

“port charges are reasonable; the tonnage duty is only 12.5 cents.”103 This 50 percent reduction in tonnage duties had been achieved by the U.S. consul there several years earlier and would save “many thousands of dollars to [U.S.] commercial interest” over the next decade.”104 And the directors of the Newmarket Manufacturing Company in New Hampshire were pleased to learn that “South America is favorable for domestics and the duties are put on a more favorable footing.”105 Policy changes such as these were one reason American textiles, and manufactures of all kinds, were fast becoming common items in Latin American ports.106 And in general, the privileged status the United States and its diplomats had attained as a result of the arms trade and its diplomacy during the Independence Wars created a favorable climate for U.S. exports.

Argentina’s Minister to Foreign States Bernandino Rivadavia assured U.S. Consul to Buenos

102 John T. Mansfield to Henry Clay, July 15, 1826, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Pernambuco, 1817-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1960. Microfilm, no.T-344, roll 1.

103Charles Frederick Bradford to Perkins and Company, July 10, 1826, Edward Hickling Bradford Family Papers, MHS.

104 Michael Hogan to the Edward Livingston. 5 May 1832, Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Valparaiso, 1812-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 146, roll 2.

105 Letter to Kimball and Clark., January 10, 1828, Newmarket Manufacturing Company Vol. 1, Business Records of Various New England and New York Textile Firms, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

106 See for examples, Report of the Vessels of the United States which Enter at the Port of Guayaquil from July 1 to December 31, 1825, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Guayaquil, 1826-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1958. Microfilm, no. T209, roll 1, Report of the Arrival, Departure, Cargo, Outward and Inward, of American Vessels Arriving at the Port of La Guiara, July 1 to Dec 31 1826, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in La Guiara, 1810-1836, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 84, roll 2; “Consular Return January to June 1826” in William Taylor to Henry Clay, 2 August, 1826, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Vera Cruz, 1822-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1960. Microfilm, no.M-183, roll 1.

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Aires John Murray Forbes of his good feelings toward him, noting that U.S. recognition of independence mattered more to his government than that of any other nation and that no exclusive privileges would be granted to any nation other than the United States.107

A New Relationship?

Although this privileged status abetted an increase in the exportation of textiles from the

United States in the 1820s, arms exportation actually decreased as Latin American republics officially achieved their independence and no longer required a steady supply of armaments. The arms trade and the federal support it received, however, by no means ceased. For example, New

York merchant David Curtis De Forest, whose business connections with the Springfield

Armory’s agent, William Cramond, linked him with federal supply, sent arms to Peru through the Providence mercantile house Brown and Ives in 1821.108 And Americans who had exported arms in the 1810s continued to receive federal assistance. For example, merchant Jacob Idler, who in 1817 had contracted with the government at Caracas to supply Venezuela in its fight against Spain, experienced a delay in payment that extended much beyond his contract’s stipulations. While this issue was not resolved until the 1830s, the U.S. consul eventually achieved a satisfactory settlement of the case.109 Similarly, many Americans who had shipped arms to Mexico during the 1810s experienced delays in payment or damage to cargoes, but were

107“Minutes of a Conference with Mr. Rivadavia, Buenos Aires,” 17 September 1821, U.S. Department of States, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Buenos Aires, 1811-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M-70, roll 1.

108 David Curtis de Forest to Brown and Ives, 15 January 1821, Box 4, Folder 18, Letter book 7, De Forest Family Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

109J.G.A Williamson to P. Dias, Secretary of Exterior Relations Caracas, February 3, 1834, and March 3, 1834, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in La Guiara, 1810-1836, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 84, roll 3.

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rewarded when Congress established a commission in 1839 to resolve their claims against the

Mexican government.110 The resolution of commercial claims sent the message to manufacturers and merchants and to foreign governments that U.S. business interests would be protected and promoted, even if it impinged on other nations’ jurisprudence.

American claims against the Mexican government, in fact, contributed to the growing hostility between the two governments, as Mexico became a site in which the commercial and diplomatic relationship that had emerged around arms exportation crystallized and became especially unequal. Throughout the 1810s and 1820s Mexico relied on the importation of arms from the United States to supply its army.111 Yet while trade between the two countries became especially important for the economy of the United States, U.S. diplomats, emboldened by their increasing diplomatic power, began to more aggressively assert a policy of commercial dominance.112 For example, when the cargo of three American brigs was confiscated by a national vessel of Mexico because of the prohibition of imports, U.S. consul William Taylor, who knew the cargo was prohibited by Mexican law, called in U.S. military reinforcement to

“demand the immediate restoration of these vessels and their cargoes.” He justified military

110 For information on the claims commission that commenced in 1839 to settle American claims against the Mexican government, see the digital work of David Mackenzie, who is a PhD student at George Masson University, http://davidmckenzie.info/claims/index.php.

111 See for example, William Davis Robinson, Memoirs of the Mexican Revolution: including a narrative of the expedition of General Xavier Mina: with some observations on the practicability of opening commerce between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, through the Mexican Isthmus in the Province of Oaxaca, and at the Lake of Nicaragua, and on the future importance of such commerce to the civilized world, and more especially to the United States (London: Printed for Lackington, Hughes, Mavord & Lepard, 1821), 62, 252, 365; and William Taylor to Henry Clay, January 18, 1826, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Vera Cruz, 1822-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1960. Microfilm, no.M-183, roll 1.

112 For a rise in the overland trade between the United States and Mexico after 1825, see Richard J. Salvucci, “The Origins and Progress of U.S.-Mexican Trade, 1825-1884: ‘Hoc opus, hic labor est’,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 71, no. 4 (1991): 701-2.

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action by stating that the United States must command respect.113 Taylor, who also vouched for the legitimacy of his friends’ claims against the Mexican government for the detention of their vessel, despite knowing them to be false, could not countenance Mexican assertion of legal sovereignty if it disadvantaged Americans.114 Negotiations such as Taylor’s increased both the success of American commerce and the hostility with which the Mexican government viewed

American commerce.

The assumption of American commercial dominion developed in tandem with greater resource extraction in the region.115 After denigrating Mexican governance, John Ward had speculated that perhaps one reason for the developing Mexican hostility toward Americans came from “a reluctance to have so much of their monied capital [specie] exported.”116 Although

Americans had been importing specie, hides, and dyestuffs from Latin America for decades, these importation intensified in the late 1820s. Logwood, for example, increased, as the number of textile manufacturing companies that depended on its bark for purplish-red dye rose.117 The

113 William Taylor to John Quincy Adams, 4 June 1824, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Vera Cruz, 1822-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1960. Microfilm, no.M-183, roll 1.

114 William Taylor to Henry Clay, November 18, 1825 and John Wilkinson to William Taylor, 25 October 1825, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Vera Cruz, 1822-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1960. Microfilm, no.M-183, roll 1.

115Historian D.K. Fieldhouse has characterized the exploitation of natural resources as the defining characteristic of colonial empires, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982), 386.

116 John Ward to Martin Van Buren, November 30, 1830, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Chihuahua, 1826-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1961. Microfilm, no. T-167, roll 1. Similarly, customs officials in Panama City illegally, according to the U.S. consul, detained American cargoes of specie, perhaps because of this resentment over exportation. JB Ferand to Governor of Panama, 14 June 1834, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Panama City, 1823-1906, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no.M-139, roll 1.

117 For the extensive exportation of Mexican logwood to the United States, see for examples, the multiple consular returns contained in, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Campeche, 1820-1880, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1963, Microfilm, no. 286, roll 1. See also, Salvucci, "The Origins and Progress of U.S.-Mexican Trade, 1825-1884,” 701-2. For examples of manufacturing companies that rely on imports of logwood see for examples, Return for Athol Manufacturing Company, Schedules for Maine and New Hampshire,

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speed with which raw goods flowed out of the mines and soils of South America increased, just as greater numbers of American manufactured goods flowed in.118 The United States had finally become a threat to British superiority in international commerce. In a show of jealousy, the

British minister to Mexico “excluded [U.S. diplomats] from all their social parties and encouraged and gave toasts hostile to the United States.”119 No longer Britain’s colonial backwater, the United States developed its own unequal relationship with its southern neighbors.

Conclusion

This new relationship with Iberia’s former colonies marked the beginning of the United

States’ exertion of soft power in the region.120 While the twentieth century would see the rise of

“dollar diplomacy,” whereby the United States doled out loans to Latin American national governments with the implied caveat that these governments adopt U.S.-style democracies and free-trade policies, the 1810s and 1820s were years in which U.S. diplomats and merchants capitalized on the United States’ status as a non-imperial nation with growing political and

U.S. Department of State, Records of the 1820 Census of Manufactures, RG279, Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1944, roll 2; Slater and Tiffany, Order Book, August 9 1824, Slater Companies Collection. Baker Library, Harvard Business School; Merrimack Manufacturing Company, Journal 1826-29, page 239, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Collection, Baker Library, Harvard University; Aza Arnold, Inventory of dyestuffs, February 13, 1837, Folder 2 Memoranda, Aza Arnold Papers, Ms 266, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, RI.

118 See for examples, “Account of the Shipping Cargoes Outward and Inward of American Vessels” in JGA Williamson to Henry Clay, 1 January 1828 and “Statement of American Vessels, January 1- July 1, 1830” in JGA Williamson to Martin Van Buren, 8 July 1830, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in La Guiara, 1810-36, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1949. Microfilm, no. 84, roll 2. Also, Consular Return July 1- December 30, 1835” in John Patrick to John Forsyth, December 31,1835 and “Consular Return January 1- June 30, 1836” in John Patrick to John Forsyth, July 20, 1836, U.S. Department of State, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Montevideo, 1811-1837, RG59, National Archives. Washington: 1944. Microfilm, no.M71, roll 1.

119“Mexico and Mr. Poinsett: Reply to a British Pamphlet, entitled “Observation on the Instructions given by the president of the United States of America to the representatives of that republic, at the Congress of Panama” (Philadelphia: s.n., 1829), 11.

120 Kirshner, "Political Economy in Security Studies After the Cold War," 72.

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economic power to promote manufacturing interests overseas. 121 By so doing, they set a precedent for the utilization of soft power to achieve industrial superiority. The neutrality, good will, and material disparity that characterized commercial and diplomatic exchange during the

Independence Wars gave way to one in which U.S. agents were able to shape commercial policies that eased American manufactures into foreign markets and created demand for

American goods.

U.S. guns had created inequities in the commercial relationship between the United States and its southern neighbors. As South American patriots fought for their independence using U.S. muskets, the Springfield stamps that were proof of standardized quality in the United States became symbols of its manufacturing prowess abroad. Consular agents facilitated the sales of these weapons, which bolstered U.S. national security aims doubly: reliable surplus markets made high rates of productive capacity worthwhile for the arms industry, while the development of commercial diplomacy bolstered U.S. political power overseas. For the young U.S. republic accustomed to European dominance, Latin America became one region where it could start to negotiate with the upper hand. Consuls like William Tudor became effective at this sort of negotiation as they brokered policies that would improve the sale of manufactured goods, particularly textiles, in new markets. Private manufacturers who had access to federal agents fared especially well. The policy of economic coercion that diplomats established in Latin

America in the 1820s became increasingly important as new textile factories and arms manufactories sprang up throughout New England in the 1830s.122

121Sheinin, “The New Dollar Diplomacy in Latin America,” 82.

122 The Colt Manufacturing Company, for example, was founded in Hartford in 1836 and would go on to be a major government contractor and exporter of firearms. And the Boston Associates and the Slater family established new factories throughout the 1830s.

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It was in Spain’s and Portugal’s former colonies that the United States’ transition from merchant to industrial capitalism became complete. U.S. agents had successfully negotiated the transition from colonialism to independence in Latin America and the United States had emerged as a major supplier of the Western Hemisphere. By the 1830s, as Americans continued to spread out across the North American continent, the United States could arm and clothe not only its own citizens, but those of the new republics to its south. And as it did so, it would develop the manufacturing technology that would become the object of international envy.

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CHAPTER FIVE: Industrial Innovators

The fruits of the Connecticut Valley manufacturing system were on display at the Crystal

Palace Exhibition in London in 1851. Samuel Colt, an arms maker from Hartford, Connecticut, exhibited his soon-to-be world famous revolvers at this prominent venue, much to the admiration of Britain’s Board of Ordnance. Three years later, the Board’s Select Committee on Small Arms decided to model its national armory on the American one and to stock it with American-made machinery.1 Times had changed. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the United States pirated technology from its former colonizer; fifty years later, Britain looked to emulate the “American

System of Manufactures.”

Likely originating in 1850s England, the label “American System of Manufactures” described the methods of interchangeability and mechanization that enabled the United States to compete effectively with Great Britain.2 This system of innovation developed first in the arms and textile industries under the patronage of the federal government. Ironically, of all the countries on display, the United States government alone neglected to fund its exhibitors at the

Crystal Palace Exhibition.3 Nonetheless, U.S. leaders understood well that independence and national security depended on Americans’ ability to make, fix, and improve things. Following the Revolutionary War, national output grew, albeit mostly in the form of agricultural products;

1 David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States, Volume 4 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 16-25.

2 Nathan Rosenberg, Technology and American Economic Growth (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 87-88. David Hounshell notes that while Rosenberg and others attribute the expression to a variety of British reports on American manufacturing in the mid-1850s, it was not really used except by historians, and not until the early twentieth century. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 16-17.

3 Doron Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 210.

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but technological productivity did not, until the national government began a concerted effort to make it grow.4

It did this by commodifying invention. Scholars have debated the process by which technological innovation happens in different times and places; explanations range from national political economy to individual ingenuity, with corporate research and development, prize and patent incentives, and technological diffusion also joining the story.5 According to historian Joel

Mokyr, the Enlightenment had endowed Western Europe with an expanded base of “practical” men who questioned how things worked and who were responsible for sparking and sustaining improvements in technology. 6 Britain, especially, benefitted from a large population of mechanics and the diffusion of useful knowledge through scientific societies; it had an intellectual environment that the young United States had not yet had a chance to develop.7 As we have seen, the United States appropriated much of its spinning and weaving technologies

4 Ross Thomson, Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age: Technological Innovation in the United States, 1790–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 15-16.

5 For a review of the scholarly literature, see Richard R. John, "Business Historians and the Challenge of Innovation," Business History Review 85 (Spring 2011): 185-201. See also Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton University Press, 2003); Philip Scranton. Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Naomi R. Lamoreaux, et. al, have recently argued against the notion that talented inventors are most productive when they can focus on generating new ideas and leave the commercializing to others. They maintain that some scholars have overstated the ease of internal corporate research and development overstate the burden of market transactions. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Kenneth L. Sokoloff, and Dhanoos Sutthiphisal, "Patent Alchemy: The Market for Technology in U.S. History," Business History Review 87, no. 01 (2013): 4.

6 Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton University Press, 2003).

7 Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). The Industrial Revolution prompts particular speculation about the extent to which certain institutional practices and cultural values created economic growth and whether property protection or expanded markets had a bigger impact on innovation. Economic historian Joel Mokyr and other skeptics of the effectiveness of patent rights point to the supply-side effects Europe’s widening technical skill base in generating eighteenth and nineteenth century industrial growth. Joel Mokyr,"Intellectual Property Rights, the Industrial Revolution, and the Beginnings of Modern Economic Growth," The American Economic Review (2009): 350. Petra Moser argues that patents do not cause or hinder new inventions; rather, they shape the type of invention, which in the early United States led to inventions in machinery. Petra Moser, “How Do Patent Laws Influence Innovation? Evidence from Nineteenth- century World Fairs,” No. w9909 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2003), 6.

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from Britain and it learned of interchangeable production from the French.8 Americans mostly tinkered with machines, rather than making major changes in productive capacities, but in the

1790s and early 1800s this began to change. The increase in U.S. inventive capacity was the result not just of the ingenuity of tinkerers or the increased consumer demand for new products, but of piecemeal policies that amounted to a federal program of innovation. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution declared the government’s commitment to intellectual property by empowering Congress to set up a system for granting legal protections to the nation’s creators.

Authors of texts would petition local courts for legal protections; inventors of mechanical products were granted protection by the federal executive.9 Several patent acts over the nation’s first half century clarified how machines and technological processes would be promoted, protected, and valued. These acts created and improved the market for patents, which stimulated demand for patented products and processes and increased tinkerers’ incentive to generate and publicize new inventions. Meanwhile, federal contracts with arms makers guaranteed demand for their products and advance-sum payments funded new product development.

This program of patents and contracts exemplified the government’s commitment to utilizing public and private resources to shape industrial development. The United States government legislated into existence a federal patent market that incentivized “improvements” by allowing invention to have a market value. This gave individuals and corporations the right to financially control machines and processes. Because technology and military security were intricately linked, the federal state took a more direct approach to arms innovation by harnessing

8 For the importance of technological theft in the early republic United States, see Doron Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

9For the evolution of copyright policy in the early republic, see Nora Slonimksy, "The Engine of Free Expression: The Political Development of Copyright in the Colonial British Atlantic and Early National United States,” (Ph.D. diss., CUNY Graduate Center, in progress).

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American skills and inventions through the contract system.10 War Department officials offered financial support to the most promising arms manufacturers and, in the process, took advantage of contractors’ networks of machinists. The legal and financial support given by the patent and contract systems helped develop networks of mechanics and inventors who transferred technologies from factory to factory and industry to industry.

The federal government, as it coopted the talents of individuals, created an early predecessor to the types of technology transfer that NASA research of the 1960s spawned with its influences on the personal computer and high-tech fabrics. Just as federal spending on the shuttle program in the twentieth century generated new manufacturing techniques and materials that could be used by diverse industries, so too did federal spending on weapon manufacturing in the early nineteenth century help develop new machinery that could be used in the textile and other industries. The mechanics and inventors who created and diffused technology in the early republic would transform the nation into an industrial superpower by the second half of the nineteenth century. Under federal stewardship, manufacturing in the United States evolved from small enterprises that relied on individual craftsmanship and hand technologies at the turn of the nineteenth century, to large industrial undertakings that utilized mechanized processes to churn out guns and cloth. By the 1840s, the nation was well on its way to the mass production that characterized early-twentieth-century assembly lines. But once the visible hand of the government had set the program for innovation in motion, it relinquished the ability to control the course of industrial progress in America.

Patent System

10 The United States Military Philosophical Society, for example, was founded at West Point to supplement the scientific activities of the Corps of Engineers and provide education in military science to the militia. Sidney Forman, “The United States Military Philosophical Society, 1802-1813: Scientia in BelloPax,” William and Mary Quarterly 3 (1945): 273-285.

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The United States Constitution deemed innovation worthy of reward. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gave Congress the power to grant exclusive rights to inventors and in 1790, the nation’s first patent act made inventors eligible for monopoly rights to their inventions after submitting an application to the State Department. The treatment of inventions as property rights mirrored the early American ideal of land ownership as independence. Pro-manufacturing statesmen like Alexander Hamilton and Tench Coxe believed both property and industrial development would secure American independence, and even Thomas Jefferson, who generally opposed monopolies, came to believe that inventors should be granted ownership of the rights to their inventions.11 In fact, he advocated a patent term of nineteen years, five years longer than the

British system, and eleven years longer than what the United States would establish as the term length.12 The nation’s first patent act, passed in 1790, gave the secretary of state, the secretary of war, and the attorney general the power to grant patents for any invention “sufficiently useful and important.” It treated patents as nontransferable monopolies, except to heirs or estate executors.13 Three years later, new patent legislation created a market for patents. Section 4 of the Act of 1793 allowed individuals to transfer patent rights to another individual or corporation, who would “thereafter stand in the place of the original inventor.”14 The new law also marked a change in the review process. Under the 1790 law, Thomas Jefferson, as secretary of state, had carefully read each application and granted patents sparingly, but the new law placed the

11 Martin Öhman, "Perfecting Independence: Tench Coxe and the Political Economy of Western Development," Journal of the Early Republic 31, no. 3 (2011): 416; Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, December 5, 1791 in Harold C. Syrett, ed. The Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Vol. 19 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).

12 Herbert Sloan, “The Earth Belongs in Usufruct to the Living,” in Peter Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 285.

13 Patent Act of 1790, Ch. 7, 1 Statute 109, April 10, 1790.

14 Patent Act of 1793, Chapter 11, Statute 318-323, February 21, 1793.

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responsibility of patent conferral with a patent superintendent, who was not required to examine applications for “usefulness” or originality. The market quickly grew as an overworked superintendent dispensed patent rights liberally. It was left to the courts to adjudicate issues of

“originality.”15

Under this system the federal government incentivized innovation by granting legal control -- and the right to collect royalties -- to inventors. Undeterred by inefficiencies in patent enforcement, Americans made technological improvements and sought patent protection, and the

State Department expanded the marketplace for patents. At the same time as ostensible property protection continued to motivate inventors, manufacturing processes spread and generated further innovation because infringement was relatively easy. Throughout the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the private sector responded to the patent system by buying, selling, and pirating the rights to manufacturing inventions. When the patent system changed again in 1836, the review process became more stringent and infringement more punishable. Patents thus became more valuable. An expanded Patent Office attempted to regain control of the patent market but by then the logic of the market had won out. The patent market – the monetization of inventions -- had become important not just for generating innovation, but for enabling corporations to consolidate their control of technological developments.

Historians have debated whether patents did more to stimulate or retard economic development during the Industrial Revolution. In the early republic, patents were a powerful incentive for New England’s tinkerers.16 They offered legal control, however illusory, to

15 Hunter A. Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Arno Press, 1980), 46-47; Christine P. Benagh, The History of Private Patent Legislation in the House of Representatives (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979), 7-8. 16 William Rosen, for example, argues that Britain’s development of the patent system was responsible for its industrial success. William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

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middling mechanics and wealthy manufacturers alike. Patents grew sevenfold in the first decade of nineteenth century – from 35 in 1800 to 246 in 1810, even as they brought little monetary benefit or status to their holders. The 1793 Act set punishment for infringement at “three times the price, for which the patentee has usually sold or licensed to other persons, the use of the said invention,” but the burden was on the patent holder to litigate infringement.17 Major inventors like Oliver Evans, who invented a flour mill and steam engine among other things, spent a good deal of time complaining about the patent system and attempting to get private patent legislation passed in their favor.18 Despite the difficulty patent holders had in collecting license fees for their inventions’ use, patents continued to attract inventors. Even as Evans claimed he was insufficiently recognized and remunerated for his inventions – and went to court against alleged infringers -- Congress granted Evans an extension of his flour mill patent. He also managed to extract fairly high fees for a number of his inventions. Others, too, were undeterred by inefficiencies in patent enforcement because patents offered at least the appearance of ownership of a thing or a process. Also, it was relatively easy to obtain a patent: it only required an application form and a $30 fee. The number of patentees remained high, reaching 752 in 1835.19

From a national standpoint, this number meant innovation policies were working. All over New England in the first decades of the nineteenth century, men made improvements in

(University of Chicago Press, 2012). And economist Zorina Khan argues that the accessibility of the American patent system, far from creating an inefficient cycle of patent litigation, fostered the dissemination of knowledge and ideas that led to economic growth. Zorina B. Khan, The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

17 Patent Act of 1793, Ch. 11, 1 Statute 318-323, February 21, 1793.

18 Christine P. Benagh, The History of Private Patent Legislation in the House of Representatives (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979), 6; Steven Lubar, "The Transformation of Antebellum Patent Law," Technology and Culture (1991): 943. 19 Doron Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 188; Pasquale Joseph Federico, “Number of Patents granted annually by the U.S. Patent Office from 1790 to 1840,” Journal of the Patent Office Society, 18 (July 1936): 230-231.

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textile production. At a small shop in Leicester, Massachusetts in 1803, a mechanic earned a patent for a card clothing machine; Rhode Island native John Thorp, who had patented a crank loom in 1812, invented the ring spinning frame for spinning yarn in the 1820s and a running cap spinner for cotton yarn in 1830; and Reuben Daniels of Woodstock, Vermont patented a cloth shearing machine in 1834.20 Lax enforcement and technological piracy spread technological innovation. As men like Samuel Plant and Moses Carlton of Lancaster and Shirley,

Massachusetts, were accused of violating patent rights to a double speeder and dressing machine, and Amos Whittemore dealt with infringers on his cotton card machines, their experiences were evidence of American industrial development.21

Patent law had the appearance of being a great democratizer in the United States as it was not in England. In the new nation, reward for innovation took an ostensibly more democratic form than in Great Britain: namely, ordinary citizens would receive monopoly privileges for their inventions and these privileges would take the form of property rights, rather than prizes and premiums.22 In England prizes and premiums were often reserved for the elite, and inventors were less likely to apply for patents because the British state could appropriate patent rights without consent or compensation..23 Additionally, the fees for patents that covered England,

20 David J. Jeremy, Transatlantic Industrial Revolution: The Diffusion of Textile Technologies between Britain and America, 1790-1830s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 136; Charles W. Carey, American Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and Business Visionaries (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 341; Journal of the Franklin Institute, Volume 10, Issue 6, December 1830: 388. Barbara Suit Janssen, Technology in Miniature: American Textile Patent Models, 1819-1840 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1988), 6.

21 Samuel Plant to P.T. Jackson, May 3 1821, Box 6, Folder 9, Boston Manufacturing Company Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School; Zorina B. Khan, “Property Rights and Patent Litigation in Early Nineteenth-Century America,” The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 55, no. 1 (1995): 75. 22Zorina B. Khan, "Premium Inventions: Patents and Prizes as Incentive Mechanisms in Britain and the United States, 1750-1930," in Understanding Long-Run Economic Growth: Geography, Institutions, and the Knowledge Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 211.

23Khan, "Premium Inventions: Patents and Prizes as Incentive Mechanisms in Britain and the United States, 1750- 1930," 224, 211.

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Scotland and Wales were more than ten times greater than per capita income. For potential emigrants, the U.S. patent system provided an opportunity beyond what Britain’s middling mechanics could hope to achieve.24 While private parties in the United States doled out premiums for discoveries and inventions as they did in Great Britain -- Samuel Slater, in fact, had been enticed to emigrate by a newspaper report about premiums awarded by the

Pennsylvania Society -- Americans by and large sought patent rights more than awards or prizes.25 The American Academy for Arts and Science, for example, had a biennial award, yet from its first year in 1796 to 1828 no one had won it because not enough worthy candidates had applied.26 And although Zachariah Allen won a premium of $700 for “very handsome pieces of blue broadcloth,” he soon after moved to secure a patent for his gig mill, which had enabled him to produce the cloth’s distinguishing nap.27 The patent, unlike the premium, afforded him extended profit opportunities by granting proprietorship of his invention. Patents, more common and more egalitarian than prizes, offered a greater incentive to inventors.

While patents were important, economists and historians of technology have tended to place greater emphasis on the role of technology networks and textile machine markets for

24Khan, "Premium Inventions: Patents and Prizes as Incentive Mechanisms in Britain and the United States, 1750- 1930," 210.

25 Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 21; Jeremy, Transatlantic Industrial Revolution, 79; Khan, "Premium Inventions: Patents and Prizes as Incentive Mechanisms in Britain and the United States, 1750-1930," 207.

26 “The Rumford Premium of the American Academy,” Journal of the Franklin Institute, Volume 1, New Series, January 1828.

27 Certificate, Rhode Island Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Industry, October 16, 1823, Box 1, Folder 2 Correspondence 1820s, Zachariah Allen Papers, Mss254, Rhode Island Historical Society.

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facilitating innovation.28 Innovations tend to occur in geographic clusters because improvements in machinery build off of one another – one central innovation leads to others. Chief machinists and “great” inventors served as nodes in technology networks, training and communicating with other machinists who then created innovation elsewhere.29 Slater served as one such node, making it possible for New England industry to benefit from British technology. When he,

Almy, and Brown brought their manufacturing processes to a spinning mill in Warwick, Rhode

Island, Slater’s production methods spread outward.30 The workers Slater trained brought their knowledge and their technological improvements to other factories in Rhode Island and

Massachusetts, as well as up to New Hampshire, and down to New York.

Slater’s experience serves as an example of the benefits of an open immigration policy and the transatlantic flow of information and technology, but patents, too, played a role in his network. While Slater himself never sought patent rights for any of his manufacturing processes

– one biographer underscores Slater’s traditionalist nature in explaining his slowness to adopt such technological improvements as the power loom -- the manufacturers and mechanics in his professional milieu were much savvier to the patent market.31 We cannot of course discount knowledge diffusion or entrepreneurial networks and industrial districts for generating technological innovation, but patents were a major part of these technological constellations.

28 Zorina Khan and Kenneth Sokoloff, “Schemes of Practical Utility: Entrepreneurship and Innovation among 'Great Inventors' in the United States, 1790-1865,” Journal of Economic History 53, no. 2 (June 1993): 290.

29 David R. Meyer, Networked Machinists: High-technology Industries in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 7-11; Ross Thomson, Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age: Technological Innovation in the United States, 1790–1865 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 24.

30 Jeremy, Transatlantic Industrial Revolution, 87. 31 Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry. He was however concerned with workplace secrecy in an attempt to limit business competition. Catherine L. Fisk, Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 45.

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Slater’s brother-in-law David Wilkinson, the son of a Rhode Island blacksmith, became a well- known Rhode Island engineer, and the chief machinist for Slater, Almy and Brown. He went on to open his own cotton mill in 1810. During and after his time working with Slater, Wilkinson did much to aid American industry, but he, unlike Slater, was motivated by patents and sought legal control of his inventions. He patented a lathe for cutting screws in 1798 and a general purpose lathe in 1806 that, like Thomas Blanchard’s later barrel-turning lathe, was a major innovation for the machine tool industry. Patents represented a return on his commitment to innovation. Legal control enabled Wilkinson to reap the profits from his invention as he sold his lathe to factories throughout the northeast. His career represented the intersection of public and private industrial efforts. He gained experience in the textile industry working for Slater and then, motivated by patent rights used his technical know-how to develop key advances in the tool industry. The lathes he developed increased manufacturing precision and became indispensable to the arms industry and its goal of interchangeability. Here was an early example of

“technology transfer:” the federal government purchased directly from Wilkinson’s shop.32 He sold, notably, the castings for engine lathes to the Springfield Armory.33

Wilkinson and Company also sold textile machinery, and with it operational knowledge, to manufacturers throughout New England. One such purchaser was Aza Arnold, another node in

Slater’s network.34 Arnold was a carpenter, turned machinist, turned inventor, who trained under

32 David Wilkinson to Roswell Lee, July 21, 1818, Box 3, Folder 8, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

33 Smith, Harper’s Ferry Armory and the New Technology, 104.

34 David Wilkinson and Co. to Aza Arnold, March 14, 1828, Folder Correspondence 1828, Box 1, Aza Arnold Papers (Ms266), Rhode Island Historical Society, Box 2.

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Slater and Wilkinson, and later set up his own shop.35 He traveled around New England and the

Mid-Atlantic, operating different factories and workshops throughout the region.36 Like

Wilkinson, he believed in the importance of patents, yet this acknowledgement came late in the game. Arnold invented an improvement on a double speeder in 1818, but neglected to patent it until 1823. In the meantime, firms throughout New England began to use his double speeder.

When he finally secured rights to it he had trouble collecting royalties because the invention’s users assumed he had not originated it. For the patentee, one flaw in the early patent system was ease of infringement, especially as many mechanics moved between factories. However, in many ways this ability to pirate others’ inventions was good for technological diffusion and generation. As machinists in Slater’s industrial milieu sought patents –in the hopes of subsidizing their tinkering -- their inventions spread throughout New England’s manufacturing networks.

Even as patent violation abounded, legal control of one’s invention (and of others’) – the ownership of saleable property – remained the ideal for American inventors. Slater may have been uninterested in patents, but America’s other “father of the industrial revolution,” Francis

Cabot Lowell, certainly was not. U.S. patent law permitted Lowell to capitalize on his redesigning of British technology. When he returned to Massachusetts in 1813, Lowell hired a well-known Massachusetts mechanic named Paul Moody to build machinery for the newly incorporated Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham. Together with Moody and his brother-in-law Patrick Tracy Jackson, Lowell constructed a uniquely “American” power loom that improved upon the double speeder in the English versions he had seen and doubled the

35 Patent for Double Speeder, January 12, 1823, in the Aza Arnold Papers (Ms266), Rhode Island Historical Society, Box 2.

36 Patent for Double Speeder, January 12, 1823, in the Aza Arnold Papers (Ms266), Rhode Island Historical Society, Box 2.

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efficiency of the dresser.37 After many trials and improvements, Moody was “assured of its success” and Lowell and Jackson received a patent on February 23, 1815. According to law, a patentee was required to be the “original” inventor, but between the Patent Act of 1793 and that of 1836, the superintendent of the Patent Office did not fully examine an invention’s

“usefulness” or originality.38 Three years before Lowell received his patent, Congress had debated changing the 1793 to allow people who imported inventions to receive patents because

Americans realized that the upcoming conflict with Britain might depend on manufacturing capability.39 The overt patenting of stolen technology did not become law, but patents, even for pirated technology, were given out liberally with little consideration of the inventions’ actual origins.

Legal control authorized Lowell, and his successors, to sell his Waltham loom at anywhere between $125 and $300. The only ostensible rival, William Gilmour’s Scotch loom, sold for less than $100 and had no patent until 1820.40 People could surely attempt to pirate

Lowell’s technology, but they had to get access to it, which was difficult and expensive. Lowell and his successors drove a hard bargain. The Boston Manufacturing Company informed Misters

Williams and Wendell of Dover, New Hampshire that it would not sell patent rights and

37 Nathan Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, and Origin of Lowell (Lowell, MA: B.H. Penhallow, 1858), 9- 10.

38 Christine P. Benagh, The History of Private Patent Legislation in the House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979), 7-8.

39Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets, 191.

40 Scientific American: An Illustrated Journal Art, Science, and Mechanics, Volume XIX (New York: Munn & Co., 1868), 234; Henry Stedman Nourse, The Power Loom: Its Genesis in Worcester County. Hamilton press, 1904), 27; Gail Fowler Mohanty, Labor and Laborers of the Loom: Mechanization and Handloom Weavers 1780-1840 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 134.

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privileges unless the men agreed to pay for all the spindles they built.41 And so Lowell’s company treated with manufacturers who were able to afford their prices. They sold, for example, patent rights to a dressing machine and eight looms to manufacturer Moses Carleton.42

Patents appeared to be democratic and certainly created incentives, but they let certain individuals assume greater control than others over technology. Patents were not just held by the inventor; the patent market enabled individuals to purchase someone else’s patent. The market for goods and machines was also a market for patents and it was in this marketplace that some profited from their inventions, while others relinquished their rights to ownership. During the early republic, new machine designs and technological processes became forms of saleable property, just as their implementation came to represent another form of financial risk in a developing economy.43 Legal control of one’s own, or someone else’s, invention offered an additional revenue source beyond what the machine or process itself could produce. Internal research and development, however small-scale and inchoate compared to the rise of corporate research labs later in the nineteenth century, became a feature of textile firms beginning in the

1810s. But experimentation alone was not enough to produce improvements in technology. New machines were costly and would not necessarily result in improved efficiency. If they did, manufacturers wanted to know that they would have the exclusive privilege of licensing the rights to the invention’s use; otherwise, there was no point to testing new mechanical processes,

41 Entry, June 11, 1823, Directors’ Records, Volume 2, Boston Manufacturing Company Collection. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

42 Copy of Receipt given to Moses Carlton, August 29, 1822, Box 6, Folder 9, Boston Manufacturing Company Collection. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

43 George M. Armstrong has referred to the treatment of patents as property as the "commodification of inventive ideas.” George M. Armstrong, Jr., "From the Fetishism of Commodities to the Regulated Market: The Rise and Decline of Property," Northwestern University Law Review 82 (1987): 79-108.

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only to have other companies copy them. Patents, which gave the holder legal protection of his right to derive profit from the invention, offered the ability to offset this risk.

For many manufacturers, U.S. patents and the benefits they conferred served as incentives to invest time and money in improving machinery. Erastus Bigelow was an inventor and engineer from West Boylston, Massachusetts, who had published a stenography guide in

Massachusetts and manufactured and sold patent awl sets.44 He was in many ways emblematic of the first generation of post-Revolution Americans that historian Joyce Appleby characterizes as entrepreneurs, opportunists, and relentless risk takers; throughout his career he leveraged his inventiveness and chased opportunities.45 In 1834, he purchased the patent rights to a power loom for weaving carpets from a man in New Jersey.46 Using that loom, Bigelow developed the

“mechanical principles” for power weaving knotted counterpanes, which were used for floor, table, and bed cloths.47 He then enticed Boston merchants Freeman Cobb and Company and machinist Joseph B. Parker to fund two-thirds and one-third, respectively, of the construction of counterpane looms, in exchange for three-quarters of the potential patent rights (Bigelow would retain one-quarter). Freeman Cobb and Co. and Parker also agreed, should the loom prove successful, to “furnish the money to carry on the manufacture of said counterpanes and build the looms and corresponding set of machinery for preparing a supply of yarn.”48 Their investments

Copyright for Stenographic Guide, March 30, 1832; Agreement Ethan Allen, Stephen Brigham, Erastus Bigelow, February 7, 1835, Box 1, Folder 1, Erastus B. Bigelow Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

45 Joyce Oldham Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 5-7.

46 John Haight to Erastus Bigelow, May 17, 1834, Box 1, Folder 1, Erastus B. Bigelow Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

47 Agreement, November 24, 1837, Box 1, Folder 3, Erastus B. Bigelow Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

48 Agreement, Freeman Cobb and Co., Joseph B. Parker, Erastus Bigelow, March 18, 1836, Box 1, Folder 2, Erastus B. Bigelow Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

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paid off when Bigelow received a patent the following year. He also invented and patented a loom for weaving coach lace, which he leveraged into an agreement with a group of Worcester investors, who assumed the expense of building the looms and funding improvements in exchange for four-fifths patent rights.49 The promise of patent rights, or even the potential for them, was enough to interest investors. Inventors were sometimes able to include in their legal agreements the right to buy back their patent rights in full, which Bigelow did. After using the capital of the Worcester investor to produce coach lace looms, Bigelow repurchased their ownership in four-fifths of his patent rights, so that he could do with them what he pleased.50

Some inventors, though, were required by contract to surrender their patents to the company for which they worked.51 The firm’s payment of salary, wage, or stock option to the mechanic represented research and development investment from which the firm expected to reap benefits. Historian Catherine Fisk has argued that employer ownership of workplace knowledge and innovation did not become widespread until the latter half of the nineteenth century, as a result of changes in contractual law. In the early republic, however, we can find the roots of contractual and non-contractual workplace relationships in which workers transferred the ownership of their “improvements” to their employers.52 In exchange for hiring William

Calvert, Lowell mill owner George Lyman, for example, presumed he would receive the rights to

49 Agreement, June 19, 1836, Box 1, Folder 2, Erastus B. Bigelow Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

50Assignment of Coach Lace Loom Patent, U.S. Patent Office, from Henry Loring, Henry and Stephen Fairbanks, John Wright, Israel Longley and Horatio Bigelow to Erastus Bigelow, February 7, 1838, Box 1, Folder 3, Erastus B. Bigelow Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

51 For the notion of the labor contract as an ostensibly voluntary agreement between two parties, see Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Era of Slave Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

52 Fisk, Working Knowledge.

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the wool and flax combing machine Calvert invented during his tenure at the factory. Calvert accordingly assigned the patent rights to Lyman, who profited from all subsequent sales of the machine.53 Paul Moody, too, relinquished the rights of all his inventions to the Boston

Manufacturing Company. After Lowell and Jackson patented their power loom, of which Moody may well have been the primary inventor, Moody himself went on to patent nine more textile machinery improvements over the next five years, but these would be for the company.54 Even after Lowell’s associates founded a new company at Lowell and Moody entered into a contract with the new firm, the Boston Manufacturing Company still controlled the rights to Moody’s inventions at Chelmsford.55 Perhaps the directors of the company assumed this was a fair deal since Moody was allowed to buy privileged stock in the company and in 1818 they paid him

$995 for the improvements he had brought to the company thus far. Considering, though, that the company’s patent rights were worth $75,000 in 1823, this remuneration seemed rather small.56

Other inventors relinquished the rights to their inventions because immediate payment outweighed the benefits of continued ownership. Liquid capital enabled some firms and individuals to take advantage of other people’s inventions because the 1793 law both permitted the sale of patent rights and left the adjudication of patent protection up to individual courts. The

Boston Manufacturing Company, which maintained at least one-third of its capital in liquid

53 Barbara Suit Janssen, Technology in Miniature: American Textile Patent Models, 1819-1840 (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1988), 10.

54 Patrick Tracy Jackson to Francis Cabot Lowell, January 30, 1814, Box 7, Francis Cabot Lowell Papers, MHS; Jeremy, Transatlantic Industrial Revolution, 185.

55 Entry, May 21, 1823, Volume 2 Stockholders’ Minutes, Merrimack Manufacturing Co. Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School; Entry, August 9, 1823, Volume 1 Stockholders’ Records, Boston Manufacturing Company Collection. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

56 Entry, September 21, 1818, Volume 2, Directors’ Records, Boston Manufacturing Company Collection. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

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form, practiced a combination of patent infringement and purchasing. It kept a running account of patent payments and established a committee expressly to deal with the issue of patent purchases.57 For those whose legal rights the firm violated, the only recourse was an expensive lawsuit. Because of this, some just gave up completely. James Stimpson had patented two of the motions -- the feed and the application of the arms to one shaft for the lay motion - used in the

Waltham looms, yet rather than assume the expense of pursuing justice through the court system he agreed to give up his rights for “less than what I consider I deserve.”58 The directors of large firms like the BMC had no trouble flouting others’ patents, even as they were unsympathetic to those who supposedly infringed on their own.59 Several years after Stimpson opted for minimal remuneration in favor of a costly lawsuit, the Locks and Canal Company, a textile machinery company run by BMC stockholders, began using Aza Arnold’s patented double speeder. The

Rhode Island machinist had patented his improvement – an added motion to the roving of cotton

-- in 1823, but this did not safeguard him against infringement. Arnold sued the Proprietors of the Locks and Canal Company for $30,000, but the patent law changed in 1836; he was unable to extend his patent before the case made it to court.60

The 1836 Act provided for both a chief commissioner and an examining officer with attending clerks, and mandated a more thorough application review process. For Jacksonians, these reforms represented a strengthening of property rights for the common inventor to the

57Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 30; Entries October 23, 1821, and August 9, 1823, Volume 2 Directors’ Records, Boston Manufacturing Company Collection. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

58James Stimpson to Patrick Tracy Jackson, November 13, 1820, Box 6, Folder 9, Boston Manufacturing Company Collection. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

59 Moses Carleton to Patrick Tracy Jackson, December 17, 1820, Box 6, Folder 9, Boston Manufacturing Company Collection. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

60 Patent for Double Speeder, January 12, 1823, in the Aza Arnold Papers (Ms266), Rhode Island Historical Society, Box 2.

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benefit of the general public.61 By making patents harder to obtain, though, the reforms also made patents more valuable to the purchaser. Also, once patents were obtained, their benefits were extended from the previous seven years to fourteen years (section 5). Section 11 of the Act improved marketing options by declaring that the patentee could assign not only full rights but also partial ones – a specification of which Bigelow would come to take advantage. The 1839

Patent Act then made it even easier to assign away rights by removing the $3 assignment fee.62

The 1793 Act had set punishment for infringement at “three times the price, for which the patentee has usually sold or licensed to other persons, the use of the said invention,” but section

17 of the new law, on the other hand, moved litigation into the realm of equity law, thereby removing juries’ role, and offered unlimited possibilities for sentencing. It also (section 14) granted the award of damages to “patentees, assignees, or grantees of the exclusive right within and throughout a specified part of the United States.”63 These provisions extended remuneration benefits beyond the original inventor to patent purchasers, while also enlarging the geographic bounds of patent protection. For large patent holders like the Boston Associates, sections 14 and

17 marked valuable changes in the law.64

While the new law was a way of shoring up the power of the market, it also represented an attempt by the federal executive to assume greater control over the patent system by giving it more bureaucratic authority. But in many ways, the attempt came too late. The patent system and technology importation had already created a dynamic of ongoing invention and market

61 Steven Lubar, "The Transformation of Antebellum Patent Law," Technology and Culture (1991), 941-2.

62 Patent Act of 1839, Ch. 88, 5 Stat. 353-355 (March 3, 1839).

63 Patent Act of 1836, Ch. 357, 5 Stat. 117 (July 4, 1836).

64 Carl E. Prince and Seth Taylor, “Daniel Webster, the Boston Associates, and the U.S. Role in the Industrializing Process, 1815-1830,” Journal of the Early Republic 2, no. 3 (Autumn, 1982): 291.

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exchange of machine rights; a rise in bureaucratic oversight merely led to the emergence of a body of professionals to help inventors to secure patent acquisition.65 Aza Arnold, for example, perhaps provoked by his patent misfortune, moved to Washington in the 1840s to become a professional patent solicitor for others.66 The new law made it marginally more difficult to obtain a patent, and expanded the government’s review process, but left the marketplace firmly intact.

Economists characterize the purchasers of patents as “angel investors” or venture capitalists, rather than trolls or sharks, but these descriptions detract from the ways in which bigger firms used patents as a way to consolidate their control over technological improvement.67

After the passage of the new law, the Boston Associates continued to assume the rights to others’ patents, like they had Stimpson’s. Eventually, even Erastus Bigelow relinquished the “exclusive rights and privileges” of his counterpane loom to their corporations.68 As we have seen, Bigelow spent the better part of the 1830s leveraging his patent potential into investments and partnerships. By 1838, Bigelow had attracted the attention of New England Carpet Company in

Hartford County, Connecticut. The Company supplied him with jacquard machines, which produced fancy cloths such as brocades. The directors wanted him to transfer some of the mechanics of his counterpane loom to the jacquard machines, with the hopes of producing imperial counterpanes.69 And in 1840 Bigelow entered into an agreement with Ebenezer Rhodes

65 Ross Thomson, Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age: Technological Innovation in the United States, 1790–1865 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 32; Kara W. Swanson, "The Emergence of the Professional Patent Practitioner." Technology and Culture 50 (2009): 519-548.

66 Swanson, "The Emergence of the Professional Patent Practitioner."

67 Patent “trolls” refers to individuals or companies who hold patents for the purpose of enforcing the rights to them, but do not actually produce anything.

68Copy of a letter to George W. Lyman, June 28, 1839, Box 1, Folder 4, Erastus B. Bigelow Papers, MHS.

69 Agreement with New England Carpet Company, May 28, 1838, Box 1, Folder 4, Erastus B. Bigelow Papers, MHS.

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of Roxbury, Massachusetts, whereby Rhodes was permitted to apply Bigelow’s improvements in counterpane weaving to his attempts to manufacture petticoat robes and bed covers. In exchange, Rhodes would pay Bigelow three cents for every yard he produced.70 Bigelow relinquished these rights, however, when he entered into a series of contracts with a committee serving on behalf of the agents of the Merrimack, Tremont, Lawrence, Lowell, Boott, Hamilton, and Appleton Companies.71 The Boston Associates, the directors of these companies, moved to take advantage of the sum total of Bigelow’s patent agreements and innovative potential. The companies paid $10,000 for the rights to the counterpane loom, which included Rhodes’s payments for his use of it.72 Once Bigelow contracted to work for them, he was expected to be

“solely in their employ” and to relinquish all inventions or publications that resulted from his work to the corporation, just as Paul Moody had.73 He also, like Moody, was permitted to purchase coveted shares of company stock.74

The United States government had created a marketplace in which men like Erastus

Bigelow could transform their ingenuity into saleable goods that often generated further inventions and opportunities, especially as tight capital markets made it difficult for the ordinary

70 Memorandum of Agreement between Ebenezer Rhodes and Erastus Bigelow, April 1, 1840, Box 1, Folder 5, Erastus B. Bigelow Papers, MHS.

71 B.F. French, John Aiken, J.C. Clark to Erastus Bigelow, August 31, 1842, Box 1, Folder 7, Erastus B. Bigelow Papers, MHS.

72 to George W. Lyman to Erastus Bigelow, April 2, 1840, Box 1, Folder 5, Erastus B. Bigelow Papers, MHS.

73 B.F. French, John Aiken, J.C. Clark to Erastus Bigelow, August 31, 1842, Box 1, Folder 8, Erastus B. Bigelow Papers, MHS.

74 William Appleton to Erastus Bigelow, December 13, 1843, Box 1, Folder 4, Erastus B. Bigelow Papers, MHS.

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inventor to manufacture and develop new machines himself.75 But as the expanded market created by the 1836 reforms better enabled inventors to secure funding for product development, it meant giving up the rights to one’s inventions. The patent market became a place where firms with disposable capital could transform individual talents into profitable goods. By entering into labor contracts with mechanics and paying for patents, the Boston Associates co-opted the networks of innovation in eastern New England.76 By the 1830s and 1840s, Lowell’s associates and successors, now directors of the largest manufacturing companies in eastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, had developed and purchased much of the best technology in the region. With manufacturing technology firmly in place the region would continue to industrialize as the century progressed.

The Contract System

In contrast to the textile inventors working within a whimsical patent market, arms manufacturers worked through the comparably stable War Department to generate profitable machine improvements. Until the patent market improved under the 1836 law, the majority of arms contractors found sufficient encouragement for innovation under the contract system. From the War of 1812 up through the 1830s, the federal government carried out an ad hoc program of government-subsidized research and product development that provided cash advances to outside contractors and privileged machine-use to inside contractors. Cash advances had existed since

75Thomson, Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age, 19-20. The Panic of 1837 generated a specie drain from eastern banks and plunged growth in capital investment from 6.6 percent per year in the first part of the decade to - 1.0% over the five years following the Panic. Peter L. Rousseau, "Jacksonian Monetary Policy, Specie Flows, and the Panic of 1837," The Journal of Economic History 62, no. 02 (2002): 457.

76 Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Kenneth L. Sokoloff, and Dhanoos Sutthiphisal, "Patent Alchemy: The Market for Technology in U.S. History," Business History Review 87, no. 01 (2013), 20.

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the late 1790s, but it was in the 1810s that the practice of renewing cash-advance contracts, predicated on the manufacturers’ commitment to innovation, became the norm. Meanwhile, the

War Department brought talented inventors to the federal armory to foster new product development; these “inside” contractors received steady employment and public machine-use in exchange for federal appropriation of invention rights. By working with, and providing resources for, public and private armorers, the United States government achieved a level of mechanization and uniformity in arms production that would not have been possible with either operating alone.

The contractual relationships between private arms makers and the War Department culminated in interchangeable production in the early 1840s.77

From the outset interchangeability in weapons production was a goal of the federal state, albeit a lofty one.78 Interchangeability would permit both the manufacturer and the soldier to substitute one part for another. It would also enable the government to exert more control over the production process – something the French state under both Louis XVI and Napoleon understood well. During his tenure as ambassador to France in the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson admired the superiority of French arms-making, and the War Department ordered two volumes of a French guide to manufacturing weapons, complete with tables on standardized measurements.79 Historian Ken Alder has shown how the French state sought to assume greater

77 While Merritt Roe Smith and David Hounshell argue that armory practices led to the achievement of interchangeability by the 1840s, historian Donald Hoke asserts that interchangeability was far from an absolute concept for manufacturers and was not solely a product of federal arms-making. Hoke maintains that interchangeability varied not only across industries, but also from factory and factory, and developed slowly throughout the nineteenth century, largely in the private sector. Donald R. Hoke, Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector (New York, Columbia University Press, 1989), 3-4.

78Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 25.

79 Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3; Drawings and Tables of Foreign Ordnance, Volumes 1 and 2, 1787, Records of the Office of the Chief of Ordnance, Record Group 156, Entry 69, National Archives, Washington D.C.

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control over the processes of production from private gunsmiths through its artillerists’ management of the tools and skills associated with interchangeability. Interchangeability would be a public sign that uniformity had been achieved under the authority of state bureaucrats. The

French gun was, according to Alder, an “artifact essential to the authority of the state.”80 For the

U.S. state, however, interchangeability was as much about corralling talent and resources to create industrial and military efficiencies, as it was a signal of state authority. Arms contractors spent the better part of three decades improving machinery and techniques and finally produced the first fully interchangeable firearm in 1841.81 By the time this happened, the federal government had begun to shift away from contract advances, especially as efficiencies in production at the federal armory generated sufficient output for the “peacetime” army. In the coming decades the War Department would instead increasingly rely on the private market for both supplementary stock and technological advances in firearms manufacture.

Eli Whitney is generally credited with being the first American to understand and attempt to achieve interchangeability in arms production in the late 1790s, but his experimentation paled in comparison to the concerted efforts made following the War of 1812. Whitney most likely learned of interchangeability through the influence of Thomas Jefferson. During Jefferson’s first year as ambassador to France in 1785, Jefferson had visited the workshop of Honoré Blanc, an inventor and military gunsmith who had developed a new method for manufacturing the musket’s flintlock (the firing mechanism used on rifles and muskets from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries). Blanc was able to assemble the flintlock from an assorted

80Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 131, 223, 249.

81 Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change, 61-63.

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array of “interchangeable” parts; no longer was each weapon a single, unique unit.82 Jefferson, deeply impressed by the manufacturing processes he witnessed, encouraged Blanc to emigrate; when that did not happen he settled for shipping a selection of French muskets to the United

States for study.83 He also conversed with Whitney. While there is no surviving documentation of an overt reference to interchangeability in exchanges between Jefferson and Whitney,

Jefferson explained the process he witnessed to War Department officials and Secretary of

Treasury Oliver Wolcott, who relayed the information about interchangeability to Whitney.

Wolcott forwarded the pamphlet on French arms-making that Jefferson had sent, suggesting to

Whitney that the information would “help establish the manufacture on a permanent footing.”84

Wolcott’s letter to Whitney about the French system of interchangeability exemplified the way in which individual manufacturers could benefit from federal interest in innovation, interpersonal information-sharing, and privileged attention. Whitney moved to make the most of the privileged information he had received from Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of the Treasury Oliver

Wolcott about French interchangeability, even as he had snidely remarked to Wolcott that the

French pamphlet “appeared calculated to mislead as much as to instruct.”85 Whitney traveled to

Washington in 1798 and showcased his knowledge of the system by reassembling the scrambled parts of several muskets in front of President John Adams and Vice President Thomas

Jefferson.86 As purportedly the only private manufacturer familiar with cutting-edge French

82 Alder, Engineering the Revolution, 4.

83 Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change, 47-49.

84 Oliver Wolcott to Eli Whitney, October 9, 1798, Box 1, Folder 13, Eli Whitney Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. 85 Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change, 47-49; Eli Whitney to Oliver Wolcott, October 17, 1798, Box 1, Folder 13, Eli Whitney Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.

86 James V. Joy, Jr., "Eli Whitney's Contracts for Muskets," Public Content. LJ 40 (1976), 144.

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techniques, he received the largest of the 1798 government contracts. Whitney’s grandiose display, however, did not reflect the reality of large-scale interchangeable production. Although

Whitney understood the virtues of a manufacturing system based on interchangeable parts, he was unable to make it a reality.

The precedent for linking cash advances with innovation had been set with Whitney, but developments in interchangeable production happened slowly and did not become a major priority until the War of 1812, at the same time as the strengthening of government and military power became increasingly important.87 Ordnance officials recognized that uniformity in arms production mattered for battlefield operations: when hammer springs on muskets, for example, were not made according to standards, they could not “produce the most fire” and had “a great effect in deranging the pointing of the musket or the accuracy of fire.”88 To safeguard against irregularities, Captain of Ordnance John Morton informed Springfield Superintendent Roswell

Lee that “muskets given out as patterns from the armories be strictly alike…in order that the conditions of the contracts now entered into by this department be made conformably thereto.”89

In the second half of the 1810s, government stamps on arms became distinct marks of quality.90

Even as arms production became more standardized, however, the realization of

87 Brian Balogh writes that following the War of 1812, U.S. leaders moved to create a “more assertive General Government” that would increase funding for defense and lead to military preparedness, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 202.

88 John Morton to Roswell Lee, July 24, 1816, Box 1, Folder 7, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

89 John Morton to Roswell Lee, July 24, 1816, Box 1, Folder 7, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

90 John Morton, Ordnance Department, to Roswell Lee, July 24, 1816, Box 1, Folder 7, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

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interchangeability remained unattainable. True interchangeability required that all public and private armories machine-produce identical gun parts.

This required not just innovation from manufacturers, but foresight on the part of federal bureaucrats. Although the United States’ had achieved relative self-sufficiency in arms production, Colonel Decius Wadsworth, who served as the first Chief of Ordnance, was appalled at the lack of regularity in the weapons given to soldiers, a shortcoming which compromised their ability to change and repair parts.91 A series of letters written to Secretary of War William

Eustis and to the storekeeper at the Springfield Armory during the War lambasted the poor quality and failure of a number of muskets, bayonets, barrels, and locks that were stored in the

U.S. arsenal at Springfield for militia distribution.92 Such complaints validated Wadsworth’s belief the U.S. could and should match the French system of military standardization. He and other officials implored the superintendent at Springfield, Roswell Lee, to figure out the “best means to be devised and adopted for bringing the manufacture of arms to a uniform standard and pattern in all of their parts.”93 Wadsworth implemented a relentless timeline for achieving uniformity, requiring the national armories to produce pattern muskets by 1815 and begin full- scale production of the “Model 1816” the following year.94 In many ways Wadsworth acted as an institutional entrepreneur who was as important to arms improvements as the arms makers

91Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change, 51.

92 Benjamin Moore to William Eustis, Secretary of War, November 24, 1812, Moore to Eustis, June 30, 1813 Moore to John Chaffee, Paymaster and Storekeeper, Springfield Armory, May 1, 1813, Benjamin Moore, Letters about Guns, 1812-13, MS 101435, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT.

93 John Morton to Roswell Lee, November 14, 1817, Box 1, Target #2, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of the War and Treasury Departments, Box 1, Target #3, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

94 The Springfield Armory complied successfully with this order; Harper’s Ferry did not. Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change, 53.

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themselves. Sociologists and entrepreneurship scholars have studied the ways in which individuals use regulatory change to promote new organizational practices and disseminate innovative practices across organizations.95 Understood this way, Wadsworth is an example of a government official who disrupted institutional norms to create industrial innovation. Prior to

Wadsworth’s tenure, the War Department lacked a coordinated set of standards for its arm contractors. Wadsworth spearheaded a system of inspection that required all contract arms to be examined by a government proof-master who would verify that the weapon matched the model provided by the Springfield Armory.96 Under Wadsworth’s direction, ordnance officials insisted that all “contractors’ arms should be equal to those produced at the national armories” and that inspectors should be “particularly careful and rigid in their inspections.”97

These contract terms generated innovation not only by way of standards, but also by technological diffusion. As we have seen, the Connecticut Valley functioned as a “technology district” because of its human and financial capital and strategic transportation. Contract terms stipulated that manufacturers receive inspections from government officials and so, after every

500 stands of arms they produced, factory owners sent letters to Springfield, announcing their

95 Rodrigo Canales, “From Ideals to Institutions: Institutional Entrepreneurship and the Growth of Mexican Small Business Finance,” Yale School of Management, working paper (2011), 3; Katherine C. Kellogg, "Operating Room: Relational Spaces and Microinstitutional Change in Surgery," American Journal of Sociology 115, no. 3 (2009): 657-711; Heather A. Haveman and Hayagreeva Rao, "Structuring a Theory of Moral Sentiments: Institutional and Organizational Coevolution in the Early Thrift Industry," American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 6 (1997): 1606- 1651; Pamela S. Tolbert, and Lynne G. Zucker, "Institutional Sources of Change in the Formal Structure of Organizations: The Diffusion of Civil Service Reform, 1880-1935," Administrative Science Quarterly (1983): 22- 39.

96 Felicia Johnson Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley: A Regional Study of the Economic Development of the Small Arms industry, 1798-1870, Smith College Studies in History, Vol. XXXIII, Vera Brown Holmes, Hans Kohn, eds. (Northampton, MA: 1948), 57.

97 John Morton to Roswell Lee, March 4, 1818, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of the War and Treasury Departments, Box 1, Target #2, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA; George Bomford to Roswell Lee, June 1, 1823, Box 2, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of the War and Treasury Departments, Box 1, Target #1, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

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readiness for inspection or requesting that a new pattern be sent for them to emulate.98 There was one inspector assigned to Pittsfield and Millbury, Massachusetts, and one to Middletown and

New Haven, Connecticut.99 This system allowed information about manufacturing processes to spread: Nathan Starr and Simeon North, for example, received inspections from the same official every month and shared information about supplies, workers and manufacturing processes through this medium.100 While technological advances were fewer in the area near Harpers Ferry

– it did not benefit from the cadre of nearby private contractors that Springfield did -- technological advances did occur at Harpers Ferry. These, though, could easily be absorbed by

New England’s cohort of contractors because contract terms also stipulated that manufacturers were permitted to observe production at and borrow machinery from the national establishments.

Arms makers regularly visited both federal armories and, for example, might request to receive

“one of Hall’s rifles to look at for a week,” as Nathan Starr did.101

Simeon North was a major player in the Connecticut Valley network of manufacturers and mechanics. North’s 1813 contract for 20,000 pistols was the first United States contract to be centered on the principle of interchangeability; it represented federal efforts to begin to more

98 See for examples Asa Waters to Roswell Lee, September 28, 1816, Box 1, Folder 8, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA; Edward Hulbert September 9, 1826, Box 12, Folder 4, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

99 Elihu Black to Roswell Lee, April 25, 1818, Box 3, Folder 6, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

100 Nathan Starr to Roswell Lee, March 13, 1818, Box 3, Folder 5, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

101 Nathan Starr to Roswell Lee, March 24, 1829, Box 15, Folder 2, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

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seriously work toward its goals of efficient mechanization. The term “interchangeability” was not referred to, but contained the novel specification that any part of any gun should be made to fit any other.102 By contracting with North, the Ordnance Department was also able to exploit the dissemination of ideas in the Connecticut Valley. Wadsworth’s regulatory system in fact capitalized on North’s position in this manufacturing district. Factory owners, federal inspectors and officials, and itinerant mechanics spread news of technological developments from North’s factory in Middletown to Eli Whitney’s factory in New Haven and Lemuel Pomeroy’s Pittsfield factory, as well as to the Springfield Armory, and even down to Harpers Ferry. Colonel George

Bomford of the Ordnance Department sent the superintendents of Springfield and Harpers Ferry to North’s factory to observe his improvements in manufacturing pistols and then implement the changes at the federal armories.103 North’s improvements were then incorporated into the armories’ standards, which changed all the time, and redistributed by way of new patterns.104

While patterns did not lead to perfection, the statistics were compelling: by 1818, under improved inspection methods, the New England arms industry had achieved a passing rate of ninety percent for the firearms manufactured at the Armory, and seventy-five to eighty percent for those produced by individual contractors.105

Bringing the concept of interchangeability to fruition, however, involved more than patterns and inspections for contractors; it also required great expense to develop and improve

102Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley, 88. 103 Decius Wadsworth to Roswell Lee February 22, 1816, Box 2, Folder 5, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

104 John Morton to Roswell Lee, July 16, 1816, Box 1, Folder 7, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

105 Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley, 58.

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the machinery for mass production of uniform parts.106 The royalty fees for cutting-edge gun- stocking machines, for example, prevented Asa Waters, from implementing them in his shop until 1825. Left to his own devices, Waters probably would not have purchased such machinery, but this machinery was necessary in order to meet Ordnance Department specifications.107 The expense of such machinery was covered by government cash advances, which served as interest- free loans and were meant to solve the problem of mechanical expense. Sometimes, even these were not enough. Several years into his federal contract, North was in debt, despite government advances of $27,000. Wadsworth, ever the relentless advocate of interchangeability, convinced

Secretary of War John C. Calhoun that the Ordnance Department should grant North whatever additional aid he requested.108 Wadsworth understood the importance of supporting a manufacturer who was indispensable to arms innovation. He was not wrong. North worked diligently toward interchangeability over the course of his tenure under government contract. In the 1830s he would develop and improve a model carbine, a shortened version of the Hall-North rifle, which gave mounted cavalry the dexterity of a shorter rifle.109 This rifle embodied the War

Department’s goals of uniformity and modernization.110 North is also credited with manufacturing the first milling machine, a requisite machine for the system of interchangeable manufacture, in 1816.111 The device achieved a high degree of precision by mechanically feeding

106 Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley, 88-89.

107Smith, Harper’s Ferry Armory and the New Technology, 325-326. 108 Decius Wadsworth to William H. Crawford, April 20, 1816, quoted in Simeon Newton Dexter North, Simeon North, First Official Pistol Makers of the United States; A Memoir (Hardhead Press Publishing), pp.103-5.

109 Simeon North to Colonel George Talcott, May 15, 1839, in James E. Hicks, United States Ordnance: Volume II, Ordnance Correspondence Relative to Muskets, Rifles, Pistols and Swords (New York: James E. Hicks, 1940), 114.

110 The rifle was, in fact, novel enough that it required an instruction manual. “Directions for Using the Arms known by the name Hall’s Rifle,” Box 1, Folder 10, Firearm Makers Collection, Middlesex County Historical Society.

111 Merritt Roe Smith, "John H. Hall, Simeon North, and the Milling Machine: The Nature of Innovation among Antebellum Arms Makers," Technology and Culture 14, no. 4 (1973), 576.

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a table holding the work piece (or part to be cut, shaped, and smoothed) into a rotary multiple- toothed cutter. This machine represented, according to historian Merritt Roe Smith, “the first glimmerings of interchangeable production.”112 In 1824 a machine for milling bayonet muzzles was up and running at the Springfield Armory.113

The experiences of men like North suggest that cash advances were perhaps more of a draw than patents. North did not patent any machinery until after 1840. Patent enforcement was difficult, especially prior to 1836, and so in many cases it was in the armorer’s best interest to work diligently toward improvement and assume that his contract would be renewed. Whitney, for example, had experienced the limitations of patent protection with his cotton gin and never patented any arms machinery; he found government contractors a better inducement to innovate.

The Springfield Armory implemented several of Whitney’s inventions -- a bridle and the mechanisms for forging metals and for driving a trip hammer by belt -- without having to negotiate for their use. 114 Although Whitney never succeeded in complete interchangeable production, federal officials maintained that for anything Whitney pursued “in earnest” they could “expect as much uniformity as can be desired.”115 And so Whitney benefitted from

112 Smith, "John H. Hall, Simeon North, and the Milling Machine: The Nature of Innovation among Antebellum Arms Makers," 574.

113 Decius Wadsworth to Roswell Lee, March 8 1816, Box 1, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA; Adonijah Foot to Roswell Lee, December 7, 1824, Box 11, Folder 1, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

114 Decius Wadsworth to Roswell Lee, February 22, 1816, Box 1, Folder 5; Decius Wadsworth to Roswell Lee, February 22, 1816, Box 1, Folder 5, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

115 Decius Wadsworth to Roswell Lee, February 6, 1819, Box 1, Target #3, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of the War and Treasury Departments, Box 1, Target #3, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

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government capital, while the United States government reaped machinery improvements from its investments.

The Ordnance Department did not always employ cash advances to stimulate improvements in production, however. While arms makers required large influxes of capital to run their factories and undertake experiments in production, engineers capable of making improvements to arms machinery did not necessarily have gun factories in which to invest. But these inventors could be bought, and their talents transformed into useful public property.

Thomas Blanchard was another member of the Connecticut Valley network whose skills the

Ordnance Department sought to appropriate; unlike Whitney and North, however, Blanchard worked as an inside contractor at the Springfield Armory. His career with the Armory represents an alternative to a research and development plan centered on outside contracts. Rather than pay

Blanchard interest-free loans, the Ordnance Department paid for his work at the federal armories and provided the tools and machinery he needed, in exchange for the free use of Blanchard’s inventions. Blanchard was an inventor from Sutton, Massachusetts, whose upbringing was in many ways emblematic of the idealized American success story. Born to a poor family and plagued by a stutter and a lack of education, he eventually became, according to a popular 1863 cartoon, a “man of progress.”116 Over the course of his life he patented over 50 inventions, but none was more important to the development of interchangeable production (and thus military security) than his lathe for turning gun barrels. Blanchard secured a patent for this invention in

1820, but it was government-subsidized experimentation at the armory and government support of his patent rights that resulted in advances in interchangeable machinery.

116 Asa H. Waters, Biographical Sketch of Thomas Blanchard and his Inventions (Worcester, MA: L.P Goddard, 1878), 3-4.

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The New England legend that “the idea for this machine came to [Blanchard] it is said by watching the labors of a wood-boring insect” may have been true, but the lathe’s successful construction and dissemination required federal support.117 Blanchard first benefitted from public cash when Asa Waters invited Blanchard to his factory in Millbury, Massachusetts. In 1818,

Waters received a patent for a lathe he had invented to turn gun barrels, but innovative as it was, it did not eliminate the need for hand-filing. He called on Blanchard, whom he knew to be a local inventor, for help building filing capability into his lathe.118 While working at Waters’ manufactory, which existed by virtue of federal funding, Blanchard succeeded in integrating filing capability into Waters’ barrel-turning process by adding a movement of the cam, an accessory that adjusts the path of the material to create a non-circular curve.119 Because news spread quickly among the War Department’s network of arms makers, Superintendent Roswell

Lee heard about Blanchard’s improvement and called on him to demonstrate it at the Armory.120

After tweaking the Armory’s lathes to include his cam motion, Blanchard went home to attempt a machine for making gunstocks, which were hitherto extraordinarily labor-intensive to make -- even a skilled group of workers could only turn out eight or ten in a week.121 He successfully completed a miniature version, which Lee also heard about it. Lee proposed to Ordnance that it hire Blanchard to come to Springfield so that Blanchard could perfect his stocking machines using the Armory’s resources. Wadsworth first sent Blanchard down to Harpers Ferry and upon

117 Dwight Goddard, A Short Story of Thomas Blanchard: from Wyman & Gordon, Worcester, Mass (Worcester: Wyman-Gordon Company, 1900), 4.

118 Carolyn C. Cooper, Shaping Invention: Thomas Blanchard's Machinery and Patent Management in Nineteenth- Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 17-18.

119Waters, Biographical Sketch of Thomas Blanchard and his Inventions, 6.

120Smith, Harper’s Ferry Armory and the New Technology, 127.

121 Charles R. Morris, The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and JP Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy (New York: Times Books, 2005), 34-5.

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his return to Massachusetts, Blanchard commenced a five-year position at the Springfield

Armory. In 1822, Lee and Blanchard hammered out a deal by which Blanchard would receive

37 cents a musket and free use of Armory tools and in exchange would hire his own workers and allow the Armory free use of his patented lathe. By November 1822, he had nine new machines up and running at the Armory.122

The relationship between Blanchard and the Armory was one of mutual dependence.

Blanchard routinely solicited work and money; the Armory reaped the benefits of his inventions.123 Blanchard’s experience with the early patent system is emblematic of the type of reciprocal, and occasionally parasitical, connections the Ordnance Department facilitated with the private sector. Unlike many private contractors, Blanchard secured over fifty patents throughout the course of his life (many of which were unrelated to the arms industry), a host of which were attained prior to the 1836 patent reforms. In 1817 he had obtained a patent for a tack- making machine and, after improving his irregular turning lathe, received a patent for it on

January 20, 1820.124 While Blanchard argued that his employment making gunstocks at

Springfield Armory in the 1820s had prevented him from “maintaining the patent privilege against conflicting pretensions,” his patent was indeed secured only through government support.

Not only did the Armory provide the resources for Blanchard to perfect his machine; they also bolstered his legal claims to invention.125 After Blanchard applied for a patent in Washington,

122 Smith, Harper’s Ferry Armory and the New Technology, 134-135.

123 Thomas Blanchard to Roswell Lee, April 27, 1822, Box 8, Folder 3, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.; Thomas Blanchard to Roswell Lee, September 28, 1820, Box 5, Folder 4, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

124 Cooper, Shaping Invention, 17, 39.

125Morris, The Tycoons, 37.

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D.C., another Millbury man named Asa Kenney came forward claiming to be the original inventor and brought a patent interference suit against him.126 Kenney, unlike Blanchard, did not have government connections. Lee was appointed chief commissioner to adjudicate the suit in

Millbury by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. Kenney, not surprisingly, objected to this appointment and requested a postponement of the trial. Blanchard, eager to secure his patent, asked Lee to make sure that the trial happened sooner rather than later. He understood his importance to the Armory, goading Lee that the sooner the trial happened, the sooner he could

“get to making your turning machine before it is claimed by anyone else.”127 Blanchard’s wish was granted. The suit concluded at the end of the month and Blanchard emerged the victor. He would maintain his patent rights, through individual acts of Congress, until 1862.128 During his employment at the Springfield Armory, Blanchard did indeed lose private sector profits to infringers, but by the time he left public employment in 1827, he had received $18,500 in patent fees from the federal government, as well as from a host of other sources.129 The War

Department, likewise, experienced savings from Blanchard’s machines. Historian Carolyn

Cooper estimates that Blanchard’s half-stocking machines delivered to the United States a net savings of $47,340 at Springfield Armory and a total of $89,239 at both federal armories between 1820 and 1839.130 The Ordnance Department had nurtured Blanchard’s talents and invested in new product development and Blanchard’s machines had in turn proven to be a wise

126 Cooper, Shaping Invention, 18. 127Thomas Blanchard to Roswell Lee, July 3, 1819, Box 4, Folder 8, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

128 Cooper, Shaping Invention, 46.

129Morris, The Tycoons, 37.

130 Cooper, Shaping Invention, 116.

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investment in research and development. And in 1827, when Lee felt that the Armory had gained all the benefits that could be gained from Blanchard, Ordnance terminated his employment.

Blanchard’s resistance to his termination contract with the Armory offers further evidence that before 1836, contract work was more desirable than patent protection. Perhaps that was because contract work sometimes came with extra perks. Wadsworth, for example, in his tireless promotion of innovation believed that Blanchard had been underpaid for his turning lathe, so he instructed Lee to “pay him extra for other works or something that is in accordance with rules for accounting monies.” 131 And so when Lee offered Blanchard compensation for use of the machines Blanchard had patented under government tenure, Blanchard put up a fight, preferring to continue his contract work of manufacturing the Armory’s gun barrels and stocks himself. Lee and Blanchard finally reached an agreement whereby the Armory would pay him nine cents per musket if it could use all of his machinery for free.132 Blanchard stopped working for the Armory on December 31, 1827, but would continue to receive patent fees and to solicit federal use of his inventions.133

Federal patronage and regulatory practices that maximized access to manufacturers’ inventions had enabled the Ordnance Department to convert the talents of the Connecticut Valley into useful public property. After Blanchard installed his turning machines at Harpers Ferry

Armory, John Hall, a New England gun-maker also employed there, began producing the

131 Decius Wadsworth, Ordnance Department, to Roswell Lee, Springfield Armory, June 4, 1819, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of the War and Treasury Departments, Box 1, Target #3, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

132 Smith, Harper’s Ferry Armory and the New Technology, 136.

133 Thomas Blanchard to Roswell Lee, February 17, 1829, Box 15, Folder 2, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

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breechloading rifles that he had invented using Blanchard’s lathes. By 1826, Hall’s rifles included interchangeable parts. Ordnance contracted with Simeon North a year later to produce these same rifles for the militia (because all arms manufactured at the federal armories were required by law to service the U.S. military; only private contractors could produce militia arms), improved them further, and succeeded in making rifles that were interchangeable with those made by Hall in Virginia. Their Model 1841 was the first fully interchangeable firearm.134 The achievement of interchangeability and the ubiquity of the logic of standardization meant that the government no longer needed to chase innovation with cash advances and research incentives.135

Additionally, the post-1836 patent system made patents more lucrative. Indeed, it stipulated that

“if a patentee near the expiration of his term can satisfy the commissioner of patents, that he has not been remunerated enough…it is made the duty of the officer to extend the term.”136 Profit was now a legal feature of patent protection. Following the new law, North received a patent for the improvement he had made to pistols and in 1839 Nathan Starr’s patented a rifling machine and file cutter that contributed to the production of interchangeable gun parts.137 After two

134 Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change, 61-63.

135 Letters from inspectors and agreements with subcontractors reflect the degree of precision that was sought after. See for example, James Carrington to Roswell Lee, June 20, 1826, Box 12, Folder 3, Letters Received Miscellaneous. Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94-066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA; “Agreement between Levi Hitchcock” and Asa Waters and Asa H. Waters, August 24, 1837, Letterbook, Octavo Vols. W, Waters Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society.

136 Stephen Nelson, “Charge of Judge Nelson in the case of Thomas Blanchard, vs. Philo S. Beers & Albert Goodyear: delivered in Hartford at the September term of the United States Circuit Court for the District of Connecticut” (Newark, NJ: Daily Mercury Office, 1853), 3.

137 Bernard P. Prue and Bernadette S. Prue, Nathan Starr Arms (Salem, MA: Higginson Book Company, 1999), 13.

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decades of urging uniformity in arms production by federal officials like Brevet Colonel of

Artillery on Ordnance Service John Bomford, by 1840 uniformity was a reality.138

A new system would then emerge, in which the federal armories met production needs themselves, and purchased additional arms from patent firearms firms during times of great military demand, like the Civil War. Ordnance abandoned the private contractors whose innovations it had bankrolled in favor of total federal production supplemented with occasional market purchases.139 A young inventor from Hartford, Connecticut by the name of Samuel Colt, who had toured both Springfield Armory and Simeon North’s factory in Middletown, would become the face of American arms manufacturing in the coming decades. He produced fully interchangeable revolvers, which would be exported to Britain and used in the Seminole Wars, the Mexican American War, and the Civil War. Colt did so mostly without contract, even as he consistently sought one.140 The United States had emulated French arms making and lusted after

British industrial strength, but succeeded where the other countries had fallen short.141 In fact, its partnership with private arms makers helped improve weapon production so much so that

American arms were now desirable in European markets. The United States’ achievements in interchangeability would now be on display for friend and foe alike.

138 George Bomford to Roswell Lee, March 6, 1823, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of the War and Treasury Departments, Box 2, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, Record Group 156, Entry1362, NM-59, 94- 066; National Archives Building, Waltham, MA.

139 Asa Waters to Eli Whitney, Jr., December 8, 1845, Letterbook, Octavo Vols. W, Waters Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society.

140William N. Hosley, Colt: The Making of an American Legend (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 18. The War Department for example, offered Colt $4 per gun for patent privilege, but preferred to have them manufactured at the federal armories, which were now capable of large-scale production. Petition of Samuel Colt,” Referred to the Committee of Military Affairs, December 12, 1848, 30th Congress, 2nd Session, U.S. Congressional Serial Set, Miscellaneaous, No. 3: 1-3.

141Alder, Engineering the Revolution, 5.

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Conclusion

Mechanization and standardization had been achieved much to the astonishment of

British onlookers. After Blanchard’s barrel turning machinery had been implemented at the

Springfield Armory, Parliament sent over a committee to investigate whether the machinery really existed. The committee, believing that “the very idea of turning a gunstock is absurd on the face of it as all must know who ever saw one,” were incredulous that the United States had surpassed it in manufacturing technology.142 American manufacturers had overcome what

Congress’s Committee of Commerce and Manufactures deemed in 1797 the problem of the high cost of labor, which “time only could cure,” as well as the irregularity that resulted from handcraftsmanship.143 To be sure, manufacturers still depended on labor and struggled when

“help did not return,” but improved machinery allowed manufacturers to maximize and standardize the production output made possible by any set of laborers.144 The power loom and its attendant improvements enabled textile companies to churn out large quantities of inexpensive cloth, while achievements in interchangeable gun production made it possible for gun makers to meet government demands for standardized firearms. When Seth Bemis, manufacturer of duck in Watertown, Massachusetts, introduced the power loom, his cost of weaving was reduced from 14 to 1 cent per yard, just as increased mechanization in arms production led to savings in labor for the Springfield Armory.145 For the manufacturer, war

142 Asa H. Waters, Biographical Sketch of Thomas Blanchard and his Inventions. Worcester, MA: L.P Goddard, 1878), 13.

143 “Encouragement to Manufacturers,” January 9, 1797, House of Representatives, 4th Congress, 2nd Session, Annals of Congress: 1825-6.

144 Amory Warren, Hookset Manufacturing Company, Report for the week ending December 8, 1838, Box 1819- 1858, Folder 7, George Howe Papers, MHS.

145 Henry Stedman Nourse, The Power Loom: Its Genesis in Worcester County (Hamilton Press, 1904), 29.

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materials were now easier and cheaper to produce. From Simeon North’s milling machine and

Francis Cabot Lowell’s crude power loom of the 1810s, to Samuel Colt’s repeating pistol and

Isaac Merritt Singer’s sewing machine of the 1840s and 1850s, American manufacturers and inventors had embarked on a program of innovation that was intimately linked to national security and industrial dominance.146 When American goods were displayed on an international stage in 1851, the world saw that the United States could mass produce clothing for its military and civilians alike, while its soldiers could wage war and patrol American borders with a steady supply of standardized firearms. Already by 1832, a manufacturer from Leeds, England, referred to the United States as “a powerful rival on the other side of the water” in a letter about manufacturing to Zachariah Allen.147

The federal government had set the nation on this route to technological dominance by encouraging the importation of ideas and technology, creating a patent system to foster innovation among various sections of the social strata, and designing weapon contracts around goals in interchangeable production. Innovation flourished as immigrants arrived in the United

States with mechanical know-how, American citizens usurped foreign technology, and networks of inventors and machinists diffused knowledge and machinery throughout New England. Yet while the federal state had in many ways spawned improvements in textile manufacturing with patent and immigration legislation, and had subsidized the research and development costs of the arms industry, it would not be able to control the results of this technology, just as James

Stimpson could not control his improvements in the power loom. In many ways, its

146 Smith, "John H. Hall, Simeon North, and the Milling Machine: The Nature of Innovation among Antebellum Arms Makers," 574.

147 John Jones to Zachariah Allen, June 12, 1832, Box 1, Folder 3, Correspondence 1830s, Zachariah Allen Papers, Mss254, Rhode Island Historical Society.

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relinquishment of power to private business continued to support national interests. Capitalists appropriated technology in the service of both personal profits and domestic and international consumption.148 Technology, though, could also be used against these interests. Samuel Colt’s revolvers, the embodiment of interchangeability and mass production, would be used to help

Confederate soldiers wage war against the United States 10 years after their proud display in

England. The century had begun with the United States as a technological and military backwater. But it would end with the United States poised to become one of the world’s most formidable superpowers.

148 Davies, Robert Bruce, Peacefully Working to Conquer the World: Singer Sewing Machines in Foreign Markets, 1854-1920 (New York: Arno Press, 1976).

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CONCLUSION

If Alexander Hamilton’s 1792 Report on Manufactures had not set the nation on its industrial course when it called for “render[ing] the United States independent on foreign nations for military and essential supplies,” it had at least predicted its outcome.1 What Hamilton had said explicitly, the nation had done implicitly with a public-private partnership between federal officials and manufacturers. Government contracts, protective trade policies, and entrepreneurial spirit had generated war matériel, while immigration, patent law, and information-sharing had led to technological superiority. And shifting balances of power abroad created export opportunities for American wares, of which U.S. diplomats and factory owners took advantage.

Hamilton’s vision for a nation that could bring to the international marketplace both agricultural and industrial produce had been realized.

This vision called forth national security capitalism. Geopolitical considerations – a constellation of territory, rivalries, and resources – shaped the new nation’s approach to political economy. Military and economic independence were of paramount importance following the

Revolution. If it were to withstand European warfare, battles with Indians over land, and internal dissent, it would need to be able to clothe and arms its people. The United States had to prove its self-sufficiency to the outside world to avoid being bullied around. And so as policymakers and manufacturers generated solutions to military and commercial conflicts, they created an industrial nation.

1 Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, December 5, 1791 in Harold C. Syrett, ed. The Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Vol. 19 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).

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The individuals who made this happen ranged from inventive mechanics in small New

England towns and wealthy merchants in Boston to ordnance officials in Washington and consular agents in Lima, Peru. Aza Arnold’s power loom improvements combined with William

Tudor’s deployment of soft power in Peru to make possible an increase in cloth exports to South

America, while Decius Wadsworth’s relentless drive for weapon standardization fused with

Simeon North’s industriousness and network access to make interchangeability in arms production a reality. And on a larger scale, the Madison Administration’s decision to go to war with Britain spurred productivity with government contracts and market opportunities, while

Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’s negotiations with Spain for new territory provided capital for industrial development in Lowell, Massachusetts, and expanded U.S. border patrol needs. These individuals were all part of the story of military and economic security in the early republic.

These individuals’ relationships to one another were important to the story. It mattered that Erastus Bigelow was not just an inventor from West Boylston, Massachusetts, but that he eventually worked for the Boston Associates in Lowell, who were connected to Secretary of

State John Quincy Adams and U.S. consul William Tudor. Eli Whitney was not just an arms maker, but was politically and personally connected with Secretary of State Oliver Wolcott and

Colonel Decius Wadsworth, who in turn knew Nathan Starr, Simeon North, and Robert Johnson, all of whom had traveled to Washington D.C. together to visit Secretary of War John C.

Calhoun. These relationships mattered because they connected webs of manufacturers and mechanics to the administrative capacities of a burgeoning state. Federal officials declared war and negotiated treaties, to which the Hindsill family in Bennington, Vermont and Israel

Thorndike in Salem, Massachusetts responded, by producing cloth for the military and investing

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merchant capital in new textile factories, respectively. They also maintained day-to-day relations with foreign countries, which made it possible for Nathan Appleton to ship cloth samples to his diplomatic associate in Peru and Roswell Lee to dispense armory surplus in Argentina. Federal officials’ ability to manage geopolitical affairs required productivity and innovation in manufacturing because without either, the United States could neither maintain an army nor serve as a valuable trade partner. The War and State Departments cultivated this by issuing patents and contracts. When they recognized individuals like David Wilkinson, whose patented screw-making lathe helped mechanize both the arms and textile industries, and Simeon North, whose tenure as an arms contractor led to greater standardization in arms production and eventually mass production of textiles, they brought the nation closer to industrial superiority.

Federal officials engendered the public and private sector relationships that had created economic growth in the first half of the nineteenth century and would make possible massive procurement for the Union Army during the Civil War. The mixed military economy that emerged in the 1860s had its roots in the industrial expansion of the first half of the nineteenth century.2 By 1840, U.S. output rivaled that of Great Britain and France and by 1865, the

Springfield Armory was the largest arsenal in the world.3 Yet, the relationship between public and private changed. Once the Ordnance Department had met its goals of standardization and the federal armories could fill both immediate and reserve needs, the regular letting of large government contracts to private arms manufacturers ceased.4 The government issued its last five-

2 Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 2, 35.

3 Paul A. C. Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 76.

4 Arms produced by the federal government were declared superior to solicitations from private firms. “Report of the President of a Board of Officers on Improvements in Fire-Arms by Hall, Colt, Cochran, Leavitt, and Baron

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year contracts to its cohort of Connecticut Valley manufacturers in 1840 and stipulated that the contract could be terminated at any time.5 The firms that had risen to prominence under federal patronage and paved the way in innovation and national service faded into obscurity.6 They either ceased operations or, like Asa H. Waters and Company, downsized production and sold their guns to consumers elsewhere.7 In general, these firms had difficulty adjusting to post- contract production. In their place, patent arms firms, most notably Winchester Repeating Arms

Company and Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing, became the face of private arms manufacturing.8 While the 1830s were rough, increased international demand, war with Mexico in 1846, and, later, the Civil War offered business opportunities.9 These new firms built upon the decades of improvements in arms manufacturing in the Connecticut Valley and took advantage of a more lucrative patent market following the 1836 reforms. They positioned themselves to take advantage of growing frontier demand, as more and more Americans who

Hackett, as Compared with the United States Musket,” Communicated to the Senate October 3, 1837, 25th Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 7, No. 743: 525.

5 See for example, Lemuel Pomeroy, Contract for the Manufacture and Delivery for the Service of the United States 6,000 Muskets, February 26, 1840, Contracts for Ordnance and Ordnance Supplies, Volume 2, Records of the Chief of the Ordnance Department, Record Group 156, Entry 78, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

6 For frustration with the cessation of contract payments, see Asa H. Waters to Eli Whitney, Jr., December 8, 1845, Octavo Volume 7, Letterbook 1837-65, Waters Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society.

7 Waters sold arms to Mexico in the 1840s. Asa H. Waters and Co. to Richard M. Jones, October 13, 1842, Octavo Volume 7, Letterbook 1837-65, Waters Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society.

8 Arms produced by the federal government were declared superior to solicitations from private firms. “Report of the President of a Board of Officers on Improvements in Fire-Arms by Hall, Colt, Cochran, Leavitt, and Baron Hackett, as Compared with the United States Musket,” Communicated to the Senate October 3, 183725th Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, Military Affairs, Vol. 7, No. 743: 525.

9 Samuel Colt had little success until his second factory attempt in Hartford, Connecticut in the 1850s. Russell I. Fries, "British Response to the American System: The Case of the Small-Arms Industry after 1850," Technology and Culture (1975): 385. For demand from American settlers in Mexico and Texas, see, Petition of Samuel Colt,” Referred to the Committee of Military Affairs, December 12, 1848, 30th Congress, 2nd Session, U.S. Congressional Serial Set, Miscellaneaous, No. 3: 1-3.

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moved west wanted guns. And, because the quality of American guns now surpassed that of the

British and French, they had access to European markets.

During and after the Mexican American War and Civil War, the government still turned to private gun manufactories to boost its arsenals, as it had before 1840.10 It also contracted out to the commercial sector for military clothing. 11 While robust domestic output was a slower achievement in the textile industry than in arms, the United States became entirely self-sufficient in textile production by the Civil War with the help of immigrant labor and increasing mechanization. For the first time in the nation’s history, the federal government was able to provide its troops with uniforms made exclusively at home.12 The work that had gone into industrial development during the first half of the nineteenth century paid off militarily as the nation entered the second half.

For producers, the downside of all this industrial growth was that domestic markets became glutted with American manufactures. But as American manufacturing and diplomacy improved and expanded, so too did market opportunities abroad. Latin America had been just the beginning of new outlets for U.S. manufactures. The State Department continued to dispatch consuls whose main mission was to facilitate American business abroad, and as the United States became more enmeshed in international affairs, it cultivated new trading relationships. The

United States earned coveted “favored nation status” with Turkey in 1831, and commenced formal diplomacy with China in 1844. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson boasted that, “new

10 See for examples, Samuel Colt Contract for Furnishing Rifles, February 4, 1850 and E. Remington and Sons Contract for Rifles, November 21, 1851, Contracts for Ordnance and Ordnance Supplies, Volume 3, Records of the Chief of the Ordnance Department, Record Group 156, Entry 78, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

11Wilson, The Business of Civil War, 73.

12 Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords, 140-1.

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markets are opening for our commodities…we now enjoy the trade and navigation of the Black

Sea, and of all the ports belonging to the Turkish Empire and Asia, on the most perfect equality with all foreign nations.”13 Cotton cloths now went not only to Latin America, but to Africa, the

Mediterranean, and Asia.14 The Waltham-Lowell firms turned to these new markets with the same enthusiasm with which they had entered Latin American markets in the 1820s. By 1840,

Canton, previously a depot only for specie, now absorbed 15 percent of the companies’ cotton exports.15 Chinese consumers also became the purchasers of American muskets in the 1830s, which the U.S. government rewarded by giving the American shippers drawbacks of $1.50 for every stand of muskets exported.16

Industrial superiority was not a stated goal at the nation’s founding; indeed, it would have seemed a lofty or impossible one. By the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851, however, it was close to becoming a reality. Since before the nation’s founding, New England’s three major rivers provided waterpower and transportation for entrepreneurs to build mills and send goods to market, and for mechanics to tinker and develop new machinery. These waterways were just the start. While factory owners harnessed the water power by acquiring water privileges and building dams, federal officials exploited the water power to its fullest potential by employing the rivers’ networks of producers, inventors, and capitalists. Members of the executive, from the president down to ordnance inspectors, toured these river valleys’ factories, observing

13 Journal of the Senate, December 4, 1832, 22nd Congress, 2nd Session, American State Papers, Vol. 22: 8.

14Salem Abstract of Exports, “Aggregate of Exports Entitled to Drawbacks,” Lists of Exports and Imports Oct 1833- Dec 1835, v.1 20/01/01, U.S. Customs Service, Record Group 36, National Archives Building, Waltham, MA. For the Salem-Zanzibar exchange, see Jeremy Prestholdt, "On the Global Repercussions of East African Consumerism." The American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (2004): 755-781.

15 Frances W. Gregory, Nathan Appleton: Merchant and Entrepreneur, 1779–1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), 227.

16 Statutes at Large, July 14, 1832, 22nd Congress, 1st Session, American State Papers, Ch. 227: 587.

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manufacturing processes, soliciting materials, and negotiating contracts. Their encouragement signaled that industrial improvement was a national imperative.

Yet, the influence of the government varied as these three rivers occupied different places in the national and international systems of production. The Blackstone Valley and Merrimack

Valley were the centers of American textile production while the Connecticut Valley was the capital of guns. The federal government channeled the majority of its energies into the arms factories that spanned the Connecticut River from Pittsfield and Springfield, Massachusetts, down to Middletown, Connecticut. Of the three waterways, Blackstone’s manufacturers received the least amount of direct federal support, in comparison to the large contracts that supported

Connecticut Valley’s gun makers or to the claims payouts that were funneled into Merrimack.

Still it, too, benefitted from patents, protective trade policies, and the occasional contract. As the century progressed, however, Merrimack Valley’s industry eclipsed it; major capitalists in eastern Massachusetts had recourse to federal politics and diplomatic missions in a way that

Blackstone producers did not. The same patent system that issued David Wilkinson’s lathe patent allowed the capitalists of the Merrimack Valley to appropriate technology from all over the region. In the national story of industrialization, these exchanges of patent rights and disparities in access to policymakers became but a subplot as the United States began to surpass other nations in industrial capability. Job loss and worker alienation were another flip side of innovation, but the accumulation of all the improvements in manufacturing that were made in factories up and down these three rivers culminated in industrial strength that would bolster the

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nation’s successes at the international bargaining table.17 With industrial capabilities, the United

States could take its place “among the powers of the earth.”18

***

While this has been a study of the relationship between federal power and manufacturing capability in New England, this relationship did not operate in a vacuum. Federal power connected with manufacturers wherever there was industry, just as manufacturers from New

England were linked to merchants, consumers, and other factory owners in other regions. As the century progressed, the regions of the United States became more interconnected through markets, transportation, and manufacturing specialization. New England cemented its position as home to one-industry factory towns, supplying the nation with standardized textiles, shoes, guns, and clocks, while the New York, Philadelphia, and New Jersey perfected the urban industrial model of small shops that produced highly specialized goods.19 Delaware emerged as the capital of gunpowder production, while Pennsylvania became known for its iron industry. Local initiatives in the South employed slave labor and knowledge in the factory production of sugar,

17 Historian Philip Scranton describes power carpet looms as “double-edged innovations” that led to job loss and price-damaging overproduction. Scranton, "Build a Firm, Start Another: The Bromleys and Family Firm Entrepreneurship in the Philadelphia Region,” Business History 35, no. 4 (1993): 117. For the displacement of less technologically-adaptive artisan-entrepreneurs by the shift to mechanization, see David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

18 Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

19 Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 34; For the role of the South in the rise of industrial capitalism, see Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); For the connections between northern factories and southern plantations see, Seth Rockman, Plantation Goods and the National Economy of Slavery in Antebellum (forthcoming University of Chicago Press).

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textiles and other manufactured goods. 20 Each of these regions depended on the others for some combination of raw goods, capital, and consumption.

But it was in New England that the roots of the relationship between large-scale industrial business and the federal government were most firmly planted. Ties between government and the arms industry were strongest in New England, where the largest gun factories emerged. The largest textile factories, too, were in New England and the connections between its textile capitalists and federal power predicted the relationship that would develop for the nation’s first truly large business, the railroad.21 Just as relationships between federal officials and producers and dependence on the government for contracts and markets characterized the development of the arms and textile industries, so they determined the emergence of the railroads. Some of the same capitalists who funded textile growth also dabbled in railroad development. In 1827, in fact, President John Quincy Adams toured Thomas Handasyd Perkins’s Granite Railway in

Massachusetts, which ran from Quincy to Charlestown and was the first commercial railroad in the United States, remarking on Perkins’s “ardent public spirit” in his diary.22 Railroads, though, would not become “big business” until the 1860s, when some companies received the first federal corporate charters, and the government generated demand that did not exist among the general population.23 War, too, created supply and contract opportunities for railroad companies, just as it had for antebellum manufacturing firms. Railroads would hasten connections among

20 Licht, Industrializing America, 35.

21 I am defining “big business” as corporations that depend on complex supply and distribution networks coordinated by managers and large capital markets to raise funds ahead of revenue. Jack High, “Economic Theory and the Rise of Big Business in America, 1870-1910,” Business History Review 85, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 86-87.

22 Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston: Colonel T.H. Perkins, 1764-1854 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 344.

23 Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011).

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industries, consumers, and federal officials, and strengthen the links between territorial expansion, war, and security initiatives. By the end of the Civil War a new political economic order had emerged, held up by a powerful national state and the federal promotion of growth and large-scale enterprise.24

This economic order grew out of the river valleys of New England, where human capital and natural resources offered the nation the foundations of economic and military security. The region’s manufacturers were receptive to a strong national state. Although the early twentieth century would witness a rewriting of the nation’s history in which the state and military were erased from its foundation, this whitewashing did not reflect early republican reality.25 Arms makers eagerly entered into federal contracts and adhered to stringent inspection standards; textiles manufacturers took advantage of territorial expansion and federal commercial policies.

They worked with federal officials to create a new nation that was not only politically independent, but militarily independent, as well. The United States was now not only capable of equipping a well-regulated army; its arms and textile technologies became the envy of European onlookers. It would never again be completely dependent on the Old World. Indeed, one 1842 survey declared British industry, “once spectacular, now in distress,” in contrast to its developing former colony.26 As the United States had developed advantages in manufacturing and, with it, political and military strength, the international marketplace became a favorable place for

Americans to do business. Industry and the military were no longer anathema to the American

24Licht, Industrializing America, 98.

25 Wilson, The Business of Civil War, 225.

26 Samuel Goodrich, Supplement to the Pictorial Geography of the World, for 1841 and 1842 (Boston: Published by C.D. Strong, 17 and 21 School Street, 1842), 31.

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experiment. The United States had made it work, in ways that still bedevil our experiment in government by, for, and of the people.

235

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