The embarrassments to commerce growing out of the war in Europe, the Berlin and Milan decrees, orders in council, and our own embargo upon trade, had, prior to 1810, restricted the importation of foreign goods; and the consequent advance in prices gave impulse to a rapid increase in the production of such fabrics as could be manufactured here, particularly of cotton, to take the place of the foreign goods.

Mr. Batchelder, who was then making cotton goods, says, "The war with Great Britain in 1812 raised the price of goods to such extravagant rates that articles of cotton, such as had been previously imported from England at 17 to 20 cents per yard, were sold by the package at 75 cents. This state of affairs caused a further large increase of the manufacturing business during the war.

In 1811, Mr. Nathan Appleton' and Mr. Francis C. Lowell, of Boston, having met in Edinburgh, determined upon plans for the introduction to this country of the power-loom, then recently put in operation in some of the cotton mills in Great Britain. Those plans were carried into effect by Messrs. Lowell, Appleton, Patrick T. Jackson, and others, and power-loom weaving was successfully established in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814.

Improvements to the machinery for spinning and weaving, for card ing and dressing, and other processes in cotton manufacture were discovered and applied in rapid succession by the ready invention of Paul Moody and others. These, brought into use by the enterprise and sagacity of Mr. Lowell and his associates at Waltham, gave, in the vicinity of Boston, an impulse which for its day was as valuable and effective as that given by Slater and his associates in the vicinity of Providence at an earlier date. The later one was a great advance upon the first, yet the value of either to the welfare of the whole country cannot well be over-estimated.2

With the return of peace in 1815 the importation of foreign goods was resumed. The sudden fall in prices which followed was destructive of all profit in manufacturing operations, and brought ruin to many who were engaged in them.

plus cotton, (64,000,000 pounds,) even when thus simply manufactured, would be raised from $8,000,000 or $9,000,000 to $75,000,000."

The supplementary observations of Mr. Coxe, bearing date September, 1814, "in regard to the uses of steam" as applied to the manufactures of cotton and other materials, to "the moring of boats and vessels freighted with those raw materials," and other labor-saving devices, are peculiarly interesting now.

See Memoir of Hon. Nathan Appleton, prepared for the Massachusetts Historical Society by Hon. R. C. Winthrop, for interesting particulars concerning the establishment of the earlier factories, introduction of the power-loom, &c.

Mr. Nathan Appleton, in the sketches of his own life, which he had drawn up about the year 1855, and handed to Mr. Winthrop a short time before his death in 1861, thus wrote of the labor-saving machinery in the arrangement adopted by Mr. Lowell for the mill at Waltham prior to 1816. "It is remarkable how few changes, in this respect, have since been made from those established by him in the first mill built in Waltham."

REPORT OF THE CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE IN 1815.

A report of a committee of Congress in 1815 gave the following as the statistics of the cotton manufacture in the United States at that date.

Wages of the 100,000, at $1 50 per week, average..

Cotton consumed per year, 90,000 bales..

Yards of cloth produced.

Cost, averaging 30 cents per yard............

10,000

24,000

66,000

100,000 $15,000,0001

.lbs.. 27,000,000

81,000,000 $24,300,000

A statement of the spindles in three States was made as a basis for assessments to pay the expenses of an agent at Washington. It appears to have been carefully and correctly made up, and was as follows:

The foregoing statistics of 27,000,000 pounds of cotton used, producing 81,000,000 yards of cloth, or three yards of yard-wide cloth per pound of cotton, indicate an average of about No. 15 yarn. At the probable rate of that day, there should have been about 350,000 spindles in the United States to consume the 27,000,000 pounds of cotton.

Up to this time (1815) the cotton machinery had been employed only in the production of yarn, which was woven upon hand looms, (the mill at Waltham, having power looms, being a recent exception.) Now came the necessity for adopting whatever would cheapen the process yet improve the product, and power looms soon came into general use.

The great profits of the owners of cotton factories for a few years prior to 1813, and the desire to participate in them, led to the erection of new mills and their machinery, to a great extent, upon credit. Many had not the capital, which would have been required in ordinary times for a proper conduct of the business, and had ventured without it under the temptation of extraordinary prices. While all suffered, these were utterly disabled by the change that came with peace.

All this large interest was prostrate. In the "Autobiographical Sketches" left by Nathan Appleton, he made notes of a visit which he and Mr. Lowell made to Rhode Island in 1816. He says: "We proceeded to Pawtucket.

We called on Mr. Wilkinson, the maker of

1 Should be $150,000.

machinery. He took us into his establishment-a large one. All was silent-not a wheel in motion-not a man to be seen. He informed us that there was not a spindle running in Pawtucket, except a few in Slater's old mill, making yarns; all was dead and still. We saw several manufacturers; they were all sad and despairing."

Congress was petitioned for relief in the form of a protective tariff, and the policy of encouraging American industry in this way was earnestly advocated and carried by Calhoun, Clay, and other leading southern men in Congress, against the strenuous resistance of representatives from the New England and other districts largely interested in shipping and foreign commerce.

The recovery from this extreme depression was slow and gradual. Adversity had compelled the adoption of the best labor-saving machinery which ingenious men could devise, and a resort to all the wise economies that should tend to cheapen the cost of production. Under favor of these benefits and the fostering effect of the protective tariff the manufacturing interest regained a profitable position, and began a new period of growth and prosperity. It has since passed through adverse times, making losses and encountering changes of legislative policy that were discouraging; but in spite of these and their checks to progress, it has increased from one decade to another, and has become one of the most important, as it is one of the most firmly established industries of our people.

In 1821 Messrs. Nathan Appleton, Kirk Boott, P. T. Jackson, and Paul Moody started the improvement of the water-power on the Merrimack river, which created the city of Lowell. It was the origin and type of the many great manufacturing towns which have become the seats of wealth-producing power.

Our limited time and space do not permit even a chronological statement in detail of the beginning and progress of the large manufacturing works at Saco, Biddeford, and Lewiston, in Maine; at Great Falls, Salmon Falls, Manchester, and Nashua, in New Hampshire; at Lawrence, Fall River, and the hundred other manufacturing cities and towns in Massachusetts; nor of the extension of this business in the States of Rhode Island and Connecticut, dotting them all over with factories wherever a water-power could be utilized under the influences which began with and flowed from the success of Slater in 1789–290.

The early, persistent, and successful efforts for the promotion of manufactures in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, and the results achieved, deserve special mention, but, like the others, must be passed

over.

STATISTICS OF MANUFACTURE.

It remains now to present such statistics as are obtainable to show the growth of this business from one decade to another and its present condition.

The following table is made from the data gathered and presented to Congress by Mr. Woodbury in his special report, March 4, 1836. Few, if any, of its quantities could have been taken from actual returns, and all are more or less the subjects of estimate. (The spindles in 1815 must have been over 300,000.) Mr. Woodbury explains that the quantities of cotton stated as consumed included the cotton used in families for home spinning and all other purposes.

Number of spindles and consumption of cotton from 1805 to 1835 inclusive, according to Woodbury.

The following table of statistics was compiled from the census returns of 1840. The number of cotton mills then returned exceeds the number now in existence. Either many have been discontinued, or some were included then that were not properly cotton factories.

It will be noticed that there were no cotton mills in the States of Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Florida, Wisconsin, Iowa, nor in the District of Columbia.

Statistics of the cotton manufacture of the United States according to the census returns of 1840.

States.

Statistics of the cotton manufacture, &c.-Continued.

* Evidently erroneous; probably three mills, and eighteen persons employed.

The report of the seventh United States census (for 1850) does not mention cotton mills or spindles. Its statistics of the cotton manufacture specify the capital employed, value of the production, number of persons employed, and some other items of information that would be useful if they were reliable. It fails to supply the details necessary to a comparision of the cotton manufacture in 1850 with that of 1840 and 1860.

In a compendium of the seventh census, prepared by J. D. B. DeBow in 1854, are to be found some statistics that were omitted in the large quarto report. Some of these are included in Table 196 in the compendium, upon "cotton manufactures, 1850." Still the table,' like the census report, omits mention of the cotton spindles, and as an exhibit of the manufacturing capacity of the cotton mills in the several States is very unsatisfactory and inaccurate. The number of mills in Rhode Island, their capital and their product, are set down as less in 1850 than they were by the census of 1840, when, in fact, there had been a large increase. According to the annual cotton crop statement, published by the New York Shipping List for the year 1849-50, the total quantity of cotton taken for home consumption that year was 613,000 bales, for all uses, north and south, of which not more than 600,000 bales could have been consumed by the spinning machinery. DeBow's table states the con

1 The table referred to is copied (without credit, however) into the Supplement on Cotton Statistics and Manufactures, by P. L. Simmonds, appended to the edition of Ure's Cotton Manufactures of Great Britain, published by Bohn, London, 1861. Our country should supply more carefully prepared statistics for use in the preparation of works so valuable as those of Ure and Simmonds. (See Vol. 1, page 436.)