USA > Rhode Island > Rhode Island : three centuries of democracy, Vol. I > Part 90
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*Briscoe vs. Bank of Commonwealth of Kentucky, 11 Peters, 257.
¡Vide supra.
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The dash of ocean wave against the prow, The groan of mast and spar amid the gale, The rattling halliard, whining shroud and chain, And the sharp flapping of the bellied sail.
ENGLISH COMPETITION-The end of the war came suddenly, and with it the necessity for a fresh readjustment. The sea was open for commerce again, and English manufacturers began to pour their products into American markets with the purpose of destroying the new American enterprises. It was "well worth while," said Lord Brougham in a speech in Parlia- ment in 1816, "to incur a loss upon the first exportations, in order, by the glut, to stifle in the cradle those rising manufacturers in the United States which the war had forced into exist- ence." In Rhode Island the full effect of the new competition was felt in the woolen indus- try, which had undertaken to supply the American market. Thus the Providence Woolen Manufacturing Company, a new enterprise, completely equipped with steam-driven machinery for the production of broadcloth, closed its doors when the end of the war brought to the American market English cloth at prices lower than the cost of production in Rhode Island. Cotton textile manufacturing faced not only English competition in sales of cloth, but English competition for the cotton crop, which had the effect of raising the price of raw cotton per pound from thirteen cents in 1814 to twenty-seven cents in 1816. The tariff act of 1816 helped to save Rhode Island industry from disaster. A great many of the 130,000 spindles in Rhode Island factories in 1815 were idle temporarily. The acute situation was solved by the intro- duction of power looms, which not only restored the balance between spinning and weaving that had been upset by Slater's success, but also enabled Rhode Island factories to produce cloth at prices favorable for competition with England in a home market stabilized by the protective tariff. The fact that the building of factories in Rhode Island was in large part a process of reinvesting capital withdrawn from commerce avoided a conflict between manu- facturers and merchants, the former favoring protection for the assumed benefit to industry, and the latter opposing protection because of a belief that it would destroy the carrying trade. Rhode Island Senators and Representatives in Congress uniformly favored protection even at times when other New Englanders in Congress were ranked with the opposition. Had the captains of industry in Rhode Island been exclusively new men, instead of a group including new men, but recruited largely from scions of old families who had vision sufficient to under- stand the developing economic changes, the conflict between seaport and factory village that disturbed Massachusetts might have been duplicated in Rhode Island. In the industrial move- ment, as in others from the earliest days of the colonies, Rhode Island was far in advance of New England generally. Not until 1824 had the rest of New England definitely followed Rhode Island in supporting the protective system, and in 1828 Daniel Webster was still engaged in trying to "explain" his about-face on the tariff, which was not, however, any more remarkable than other changes made by that opportunist in a checkered political career, in which principle was too often surrendered for expediency or preferment. Webster was con- sistent only in his love for the union, and rose to the stature of statesmanship in his exposition of the Constitution of the United States.
GENUINE PROSPERITY-The prosperity of Rhode Island was genuine. It withstood dis- aster such as the flood of waters in 1807 which swept away the two bridges across the Seekonk, and the Mill Street and Smith Street bridges across the Moshassuck in Providence. The bridges were rebuilt. Again, even after the War of 1812 had interrupted normal commerce for two years, Rhode Island recovered speedily from the effects of the September gale of 1815, which wrought havoc by violence of wind and water along the shores of Narragansett Bay. Tradition relates that the wind was so terrific that it carried salt spray inland nearly fifty miles to Worcester, leaving a salty deposit on window panes. Moses Brown's account of the storm confirms the tradition. Moses Brown was a Quaker, and throughout his long life
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was given little to exaggeration of sober facts. The town of Providence, five years after the storm, appointed Moses Brown, Tristram Burges, Samuel Eddy, George Jackson and John Howland as a committee to collect information related to the storm for preservation as history. The committee did not complete its task, but Moses Brown left a manuscript relation of his own recollections.
SEPTEMBER GALE-The gale of September 22-23, 1815, called a "line storm" because of coincidence with the autumnal equinox, began as a rainstorm on September 22, continuing through the day and night with wind from the northeast. The wind increased during the night and shifted, coming from the east early on the morning of September 23, from the east- southeast at nine o'clock, from the southeast at ten, and reaching the southwest at noon. At noon the storm had abated and the sun shone brightly on the wreck produced by two hours of hurricane and surging water. From 9:30 to 11:30 "the storm was tremendous, and beyond, far beyond, any in the memory of any man living" wrote Moses Brown. "On measuring the height of the tide from a well-known mark of the highest tide ever before known by our old- est people, this tide of 1815 appeared to be seven feet and five inches higher than any before known by them." Another account placed the height reached by the water in Market Square, Providence, as twelve feet higher than the spring tide mark, referring to the high tide with full moon nearest the vernal equinox. A bronze tablet marking the height reached, which formerly was attached to the building at the corner of Westminster Street and Washington Row, is now on the old Market Building .* The water flooded the bed of the Providence River and filled the gaps between east and west sides, reaching easterly up the slopes toward Benefit Street to the level of second story windows and westerly to Aborn Street.
Fortunately the wind abated a full hour before the time for high tide, and the waters receded rapidly. The wind and rising water tore vessels from their moorings; the "Ganges," ship, 550 tons, owned by Brown & Ives, was driven through and over Weybosset bridge, swung her bowsprit through the upper story of the Washington Insurance Company's build- ing, and flung on in mad career across the cove to a last resting place at the foot of Smith's Hill. With her, when the storm had passed, were two other ships, nine brigs, seven schooners and fifteen sloops. "The damage by the extreme violence of the wind," wrote Moses Brown, "extended to driving from their anchors and fastenings all the vessels, save two or three, that lay in the harbor and at the wharves; some against the bridge with such force as to open a free passage for others to follow to the northern extremity of the cove above the bridge, to the number of between thirty and forty, of various descriptions from 500 tons, downward. . Other ships and smaller vessels were lodged below the place of the bridge, on each side of the river, on the wharves. Scarcely a store that stood below Weybosset bridge, on both sides of the river, round the harber to India bridge, but what was damaged or entirely broken to pieces."
"William Aplin went on board a vessel, then lying at a wharf in the southerly part of the town, to render her situation more secure, by getting other fasts from her to the wharf," wrote Staples. "He succeeded in this, and with such effect that, in a short time, she raised the wharf, which was of wood, and together with parts of it was on her way up the river to the cove." Aplin himself, after attempting to leap from the vessel to another, found himself in the water, and was carried by it upstream and cast ashore at Great Point on the shore of the cove. Two men were killed during the storm and many others were injured.
The hurricane alone unroofed and damaged many houses that stood out of reach of the waters. "Many houses and barns," wrote Moses Brown, "were blown down by the excessive violence of the wind, and many others removed or broken by the height of the tide and vio- lence of the waves ; by which India Point bridge and the east and lower end of Central bridge,
*Chamber of Commerce.
R. I .- 34
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RHODE ISLAND-THREE CENTURIES OF DEMOCRACY
were carried off, and by their joint influence the Second Baptist Meeting House on the west side of the river was destroyed from the foundation." The First Baptist Meeting House was shaken and the spire bent before the blast. Five hundred buildings in Providence were destroyed. Moses Brown estimated the damage in the town of Providence alone as "near a million of dollars." The total loss to property in the state, including shipping at other places than Providence, was not less probably than $1,500,000. The work of retrieving the ruin was begun on the afternoon of September 23. In Providence the work included rebuilding the bridges; it was carried forward systematically. The storm had removed or destroyed many old buildings and old wharves. In the course of new construction new harbor lines were established with stone retaining walls, more substantial wharves were built, broken places in the shore line filled in, and rows of new warehouses arose along new water front streets, long before projected, but realized in physical form after the disaster. As an instance of the prog- ress made in the rehabilitation of the water front in Providence, Weybosset bridge had been entirely reconstructed in July, 1816; it was 120 feet long and 95 feet wide, and marked the limit of navigation in the Providence River, as it was built without a draw.
INCREASE OF POPULATION-The population of Rhode Island more than doubled in the fifty years from 1800 to 1850, from 69,122 to 147,545. In the same period the population of Providence County more than trebled, from 25,854 to 87,626. Washington County was stagnant, 16,135 to 16,430. Kent and Bristol Counties had approximately doubled, and New- port County had gained not quite twenty per cent. The three northern counties had become in large part industrial or were sharing in the industrial development of the factory towns. The town of Providence, with 7614 inhabitants in 1800, had become the city of Providence five times greater in population, with 41,513. Three towns in Newport County had lost popu- lation, but Newport, still a very important maritime city, had gained, as had Tiverton, because of the industrial development at Fall River. Within the increase and shifting of population, marked changes had taken place also in the economic and social life of the people. The build- ing in less than half a century of an industrial state had involved readjustments in the ways in which the majority of the people lived that were far-reaching in their significance. A popu- lation that had been principally an independent yeomanry attached through intensive agricul- ture to the soil had become urban. The vast majority were employes ; an industrial feudalism had arisen.
The coming of Samuel Slater to Rhode Island marked not only the beginning of success- ful and profitable manufacturing of cotton textiles, but also the introduction of the factory system of production, through the substitution of machinery for tools, the supplementing of the work of a few artisans by a plethora of operatives, and the growth of population that could not be supported by food raised within the state. Rhode Island no longer exported food, as in colonial days ; the farmer found a market for more than he could produce, almost at his door, in thickly populated cities and factory villages. Rhode Island imported food and other necessities, besides raw material for its factories and fuel. It exported a wealth of manufac- tured commodities and piled up capital because of a favorable balance in trade. The construc- tion of the Erie Canal, interpreted by many New England historians as detrimental to New England because it opened a gateway to the West through which a stream of migration flowed out by way of the Mohawk Valley into the Mississippi Valley, was, without question, bene- ficial to Rhode Island, because it brought to tidewater the produce of Middle Western farms and thus helped to solve the problem of food supply; and also because through the same gateway floated westward on the canal the commodities manufactured in Rhode Island for sale to the farming population in the Mississippi Valley. Similarly the rail and water route across Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh helped Rhode Island, as it brought iron and coal to tidewater and carried back what Rhode Island offered for sale. The migration of Rhode Islanders immediately after the Revolution to Vermont and Ohio continued for only a short period; it was arrested
DAGGETT HOUSE In Slater Park, Pawtucket. House built in 1685.
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INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN RHODE ISLAND
as Rhode Island became prosperous and recovered from the poverty that prompted the west- ward movement. In Rhode Island the building of a new economic organization was not the metamorphosis of an agricultural into an industrial population, for the farming population has remained almost constant for a century and a quarter. Agriculture did not gain; the natural increase of the farming population gravitated toward the cities and factory towns, instead of remaining on soil that had been developed for the time being to the limit of pro- ductivity by cultivation processes not yet modernized by agricultural science .* Nor was the change in Rhode Island confined to the expansion of old industries. Home manufacturing, including the spinning of yarn and the weaving of cloth, there had been, as part of the process of maintaining the family as an independent self-sustaining economic unit. Shop manufac- turing had been developed in the colonial period, including such enterprises as the elaborate iron manufactories conducted by the Jencks family in Pawtucket, by the Greenes in Warwick, and at Furnace Hope. Slater brought with him to America not only a knowledge of textile machinery that enabled him to reproduce the spinning devices invented by Arkwright, but also a familiarity with the organization of the factory system in England.
THE FACTORY SYSTEM-Perhaps it was the strike in the Pawtucket factory under Slater's administration, whereby the men who had been trained by Slater were scattered and by hiring out to other employers initiated the latter into the mysteries of the Slater processes and made them active competitors which induced Slater to employ young children in preference to men to tend his spinning machines. Among his earliest employes were seven boys and two girls, aged seven to twelve years; in 1801 over 100 children aged four to ten years, were working in the Slater factory. Instead of the strike, however, the reason for the employment of chil- dren may have been Slater's purpose to train their nimble fingers while they were still young. Slater was not only practical, but also an idealist and social worker. For the children employed in the factory Slater established a Sunday secular school, in which he taught them to read and write. The factory school exemplified a principle of responsibility on the part of the employer that was seldom lost sight of in Rhode Island in the development of the factory system. The conception of the factory as a type of social welfare institution, useful because it afforded employment for the children of the poor, and elevating, because, as administered by Slater, the morals of the children were safeguarded and education was provided, was consistent with the philosophy of Moses Brown as expressed in a letter to a friend in Newport in 1791, refer- ring to a proposal to establish a duck and twine factory: "I believe it would suit your situa- tion, and prove more publicly useful with you than with us, as our poor of both sexes are, or may be, employed in the various branches of business carried on already, and yours, I under- stand, are not. . .. You have public lands near your poorhouse. The poor may be employed if a house for spinning was erected. The filling may be spun all over the town, and many poor families might get their bread by the business, that may be now dependent on daily charities." When Josiah Quincy visited the Slater factory his attention was directed to the employment of poor children as one of the excellencies of the factory system, but Quincy was more impressed by "an eloquence . . . on the other side of the question . . . . which called us to pity these little creatures, plying in a contracted room, among flyers and cogs, at an age when nature requires for them air, space and sports. There was an air of dull dejection on the countenances of all of them." The rapid extension of the factory system created a demand for operatives that transcended the limitations of employment of dependent poor and the chil- dren of poor families. The location of mills at favoring water falls involved both the problem of inducing prospective operatives to remove to domiciles convenient to the factories and providing the domiciles, which must be built along with the factories. The obvious solution was the factory village, with houses or tenements owned by the proprietors and rented to the operatives.
*The author believes that there is a future for Rhode Island agriculture based upon a combination of scientific methods and sound management.
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RHODE ISLAND -- THREE CENTURIES OF DEMOCRACY
In Rhode Island the unit for employment was the family, and the domicile was a tene- ment house varying in type with the location, the smallest planned usually for four to six families and the largest, in Providence, assuming the proportions of four-story wooden build- ings accommodating sixteen families to a unit. As a rule, every member of the family includ- ing children able to walk, was employed, and large families were preferred because of the economy in housing, and also because, assuming operation of the economic "law of wages," a large family earned little more in wages than a smaller family and gave to the employer a larger number of hands. The Rhode Island system differed from the Waltham system, common in Massachusetts factory towns, of employing women and girls principally and boarding them in dormitories conducted under supervision of factory managers, varying from merely nominal to intimate oversight of living conditions and morality. The Rhode Island factory population, because whole families were employed, was less transitory and tended to become fixed. None but employes of the factory and household relatives were permitted to live in the factory vil- lage owned by the mill proprietors. Because factory employment was confining in the sense that operation was daily, and that hours of labor were as long as daylight permitted from early morning until dusk, these limits being imposed by the want for the time being of a satis- factory and cheap system of artificial lighting, convenience would dictate the provision of a factory store in which the operatives could buy food, clothing, fuel and other necessaries, as well as such luxuries as were not by the proprietor considered too extravagant. Factory own- ership of the village would exclude competing stores, and limit mill operatives practically to trading in the factory stores. There was no choice; the prices demanded by the factory store must be paid. Against the family wages were charged rent for the factory tenement, fixed by the proprietor, and supplies drawn from the factory stores; the balance, if any, due the fam- ily might be paid in cash or in orders for more credit at the store, the latter to encourage fur- ther purchases.
The system in operation might establish economic dependence; family balances, under the system of charging rent and purchases in the store might never favor the family, which, because always in debt to the employer, must remain in the village, working in the mill, with no prospect of change. Under these circumstances, although the relation between employer and operative superficially had the appearance of resting on contract, and the contract stipu- lated wages, in actual practice the operative was as definitely attached to the factory and the factory village as were villein and serf to feudal estates when knighthood was in flower. In the person of factory owner were united the employer, landlord, and procurator of every life necessity, for the bilateral contract embraced three relations comprehending those most signifi- cant for life-employer and employe, landlord and tenant, and merchant and buyer. The fac- tory system was profitable for the factory owner because it assured him: (1) as a manufac- turer the most reliable type of employe, the steady worker, as contrasted with the transient who drives to distraction the modern personnel manager; (2) as a landlord and owner of land and tenements, an unfailing tenantry and an unbroken flow of rent; (3) as a merchant, owner of the factory store, a regular patronage of cash customers, as credit offset wages. The advantages were not, however, exclusively on the side of the manufacturer.
It has been assumed that the Rhode Island factory system discouraged thrift and made dependence practically an inevitable certainty, as the employer absorbed through the credit system all the wages earned by workers. Had that been true, there could have been no busi- ness for savings banks, the first of which, the Savings Bank of Newport and the Providence Institution for Savings, were incorporated in 1819. Savings banks were established in large numbers, reaching most towns in Rhode Island, and in many instances were promoted by fac- tory owners to encourage thrift among their employes. As a matter of fact, the foundations for family independence and comfort, and for educating youth, were laid through thrifty liv- ing in factory villages. Again, the feudal organization of the factory system has been made
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INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN RHODE ISLAND
the basis for an assumption of ill-treatment or neglect of the welfare of workers, neither of which has been proved. The same common sense and economic motives that prompt the owner of cattle to care for his herd and that induced the owner of slaves to safeguard the physical welfare of his chattels, would counsel action by the factory manager to insure reasonable standards of living for his employes.
The Rhode Island factory villages, as a general rule, were well kept; the houses were built so well that many have endured a century of exposure to New England weather. The owner could not guarantee cleanliness, that being a matter depending, first, last and always, upon the family. In contrast with the Waltham system of supervising dormitories to assure morality, the Rhode Island plan of respecting the privacy of the family has been characterized by the epithet "laissez-faire." In answer it might be suggested that there was little cant and hypocrisy in Rhode Island, no meddlesomeness, and an enduring faith in the decency of the common man, particularly of the type who is willing to work hard to support his family. The epithet of "laissez-faire" was amply justified as a commendation for paying strict attention to business, particularly one's own-and this forbade meddlesomeness; and was equally unjusti- fiable in view of the care taken by factory managers to exclude unwholesome influences from their villages. Amasa Sprague's opposition to the granting of a liquor license for a resort near one of his factory villages occasioned the resentment which the state alleged and attempted to prove as a motive in the chain of circumstantial evidence through which John Gordon was convicted* of murdering Sprague and hanged. The 1200 men who followed John Gordon's body in funeral procession to his grave thus mutely protested their belief that he was innocent of the crime. Information available later tended to establish John Gordon's innocence, and explained his refusal, during the trial, to testify, lest by telling a story that would absolve him- self he should betray another. John Gordon died the death of a martyr, but he convinced Rhode Island that the death penalty ought to be abolished, and it was. In a great many instances the factory owner encouraged the building of churches by leasing land rent free, and contributing liberally to the cost of construction. In most factory villages warm and weather- tight houses, a reasonable abundance of food and other necessities, and a moderate contentment prevailed.
Objections to the factory system rest fundamentally upon the vital difference between benevolent despotism and democracy, and upon that human instinct that resents a continuation of dependence. A Rhode Island manufacturer once reported a conversation with the wife of one of his employes. When he made a personal tour of inspection, she had answered his ques- tions to the effect that the house she lived in was warm, dry and comfortable; that the family had an abundance of food that was wholesome, because there was little sickness; that the family had warm clothing of good quality, and good shoes, and that she had had one new best dress for Sunday every year. She complained that she had never a dollar to spend as she pleased, from one year's end to another, and that the family had no vision of a future beyond life in the factory village. The manufacturer marvelled that one who had all that was neces- sary for comfortable living was discontented. Neither he nor the woman had grasped the real truth that he as the owner and operator of the factory and she as the wife of an operative had been caught in an industrial system as rigid in its stratification of society and its classifications of men and women, and as inexorable in its definition of services and obligations as the most masterful exemplification of the feudal system in medieval Europe.
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