Experimentation in Textile Technology, 1788–1790, and Its Impact on Handloom Weaving and Weavers in Rhode Island

Abstract

Experimentation in Textile Technology, 1788-1790, and Its Impact on Handloom Weaving and Weavers in Rhode Island GAIL FOWLER MOHANTY The landmark studies in British labor history published by Sid­ ney Pollard and E. P. Thompson in the 1960s prompted numerous complementary explorations of American labor’s response to fac­ tory work. In “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing Amer­ ica, 1815-1919,” Herbert Gutman described the process of adapting to mechanization and to the regularity and discipline of mill employment. Like Gutman’s, similar studies published subse­ quently focused primarily on 19th-century evidence.1 Actually, texDr . MOHANTY is director of administration and curator at the Charles River Mu­ seum of Industry and Adjunct Assistant Professor of American and New England Studies at Boston University. In 1986, the paper from which this article is derived was awarded the Levinson Prize by the Society for the History of Technology. The au­ thor would like to thank the following individuals who offered criticism and encourage­ ment: Anthony F. C. Wallace, Robert L. Schuyler, Judith A. McGaw, Merritt Roe Smith, Gary Kulik, and Harold Kemble. The Museum of American Textile History supported the research by means of the William F. Sullivan Fellowship in 1984. ‘Sidney Pollard, “Factory Discipline in the Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review 16 (1963): 254—71; E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 56—97; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963); Herbert Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in In­ dustrializing America 1815-1919,” American Historical Review 78 (1973): 533; Thom­ as Dublin, Mwien at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachu­ setts 1826—1860 (New York, 1979); David Montgomery, Worker’s Control in America: Stud­ ies in the History of Work, Technology and Labor Struggles (New York, 1979); Daniel J. Walkowitz, Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton Workers’ Protest in Troy and Co­ hoes, New York (Urbana, Ill., 1978); Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810—1860 (New York, 1983); and vol­ umes of collected articles such as Peter N. Stearns, comp., Workers in the Industrial Revo­ lution: Recent Studies of Labor in the United States and Europe (New Brunswick, N.J., 1974); Daniel J. Walkowitz and Michael Frisch, eds., Working Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society (Urbana, Ill., 1983). Barbara Tucker touches on the early period of textile manufacture (1787-90) only briefly in her volume enti­ tled Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry 1790-1860 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984). Tucker’s primary emphases are on Slater’s Oxford and Webster, Mass., factories and not on his Pawtucket interests.© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/88/2901-0001J01.00 1 2 Gail Fowler Mohanty tile manufacturers had incorporated hand-operated machinery into their workshops well before the end of the 18th century. The organi­ zation of spinning and weaving establishments in such places as Beverly and Worcester, Massachusetts, Hartford, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island, had already altered the workplace to a large extent during the Federal period (ca. 1787—1801) and had initi­ ated changes in the regulation of time and labor.2 This article addresses the response of Rhode Island handloom weavers to shifts in their work environment and routine. It ad­ vances the view that the mechanization of spinning and consequent rise of weaving workshops owned and managed by entrepreneurs rather than master craftsmen led to changes in the associated handcrafts earlier than suggested by studies of 19th-century industri­ alization. Further, it indicates that trained full-time or professional handloom artisans responded to attempts to alter their craft classifica­ tions, their work habits, and their art by avoiding factory or merchantowned weave shed employment, by shifting from job to job, and by investing in independent competitive weaving workshops.3 More im­ portant, weavers formerly employed by entrepreneurs opened their own weave sheds, contracted to manufacture fabrics for the mills, and wove cloth from machine-spun yarns for sale themselves. As Barbara Tucker suggests in her study of Samuel Slater’s tex­ tile businesses from 1790 to...