CHAPTER TWO The American Industrial Revolution JAMES C. WILLIAMS Halfway through the twentieth century, American sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild (1950) observed that United States Census enumerators in 1900 counted 23 persons who had been alive when the first Census was taken in 1790. He speculated about the extraordinarily fascinating times through which these centenarians had lived: “This little handful of individuals had not only shared in the growth of one of the greatest nations in history, from its birth to its late adolescence, but, even more, their lifetime had also covered a century [in] which ...the availability of vast stretches of unexploited land [converged] with brand-new, and incredibly efficacious, instrumentalities for getting things out of the land and fitting them for human use” (pp. xi, xvi–xvii). They had lived, Fairchild rightly declared, through an age of striking technological change. The great societal transformation known as the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, where canals built during the late eighteenth century vastly improved transportation. This accelerated the change from a traditional agrarian and artisan society to one based on manufacturing and machine-made goods, a change already underway in textile production. At the same time, coal replaced wood as fuel, technological innovations occurred in iron production and use, improvements in precision machining of wood and metal set the foundation for the machine tool industry, and James Watt (1736–1819) invented a steam powered engine in 1769 that eventually freed manufacturers from relying on waterpower and opened up enormous opportunities in locomotion. Despite the War of Independence and subsequent hostile relations between Great Britain and the new United States, the Americans shared in the benefits of Britain’s technological changes. As colonists, they had years of experience importing tools, machines, and the people who made and used them. Therefore, even though British legislation in 1785 prohibited the export of textile machinery, steam engines, and other new machines, “the Americans were well positioned,” note historians Hindle and Lubar (1986, p. 25), “to import the Industrial Revolution from their former mother country.” All they needed was the motivation to do so, which their location and geopolitical situation in the world readily provided. America in 1800 In 1800, the United States was a quiet, pre-industrial nation comprised largely of white subsistence farmers, who were hostile to aristocracy, supportive of equality, and CafC02.fm Page 31 Tuesday, August 10, 2004 5:21 PM