The American Textile Industry: From Slater’s Mill to the Cotton Kingdom

The American textile industry was the first major American industry, and it played a central role in the development of the American Industrial Revolution. Beginning with the first cotton mill of Samuel Slater in 1793 and growing rapidly through the nineteenth century, the American textile industry established the factory system in the United States, developed the distinctive Lowell system of labor, and created the first generation of American industrial capitalists.

The First American Mills

The first American cotton mill was built by Samuel Slater in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793. Slater was an English-born mechanic who had worked in the textile mills of Richard Arkwright in England, and who had memorized the designs of the new machines before emigrating to the United States. Working with the merchant Moses Brown, Slater built a water-powered cotton-spinning mill based on the English technology, and the mill was the beginning of the American textile industry.

The Lowell System

The most distinctive feature of the American textile industry was the Lowell system, developed by Francis Cabot Lowell and his associates in the 1820s. Lowell had visited Britain in 1810 and had memorized the designs of the British power loom, which was not yet in general use in the United States. Working with the mechanic Paul Moody, Lowell built a power loom and a complete cotton-spinning and weaving factory in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814. The article on Francis Cabot Lowell and the Lowell system describes Lowell’s role in this development in more detail. The Lowell system was distinctive not only for its integration of the production process but also for its labor system. The new factories employed young women from the surrounding New England farms, the “Lowell girls,” who worked in the mills for a few years before returning to their families to marry. The article on the Lowell mills describes the Lowell system in more detail.

The Decline of the Lowell System

The Lowell system began to decline in the 1840s and 1850s, as the conditions of work in the mills deteriorated and the women workers began to be replaced by cheaper labor. The Irish immigrants, who began to arrive in large numbers in the wake of the Irish Famine of the 1840s, were willing to work for lower wages than the Lowell girls, and the mill companies gradually replaced the women with Irish workers.

The Shift to the South

The center of the American textile industry gradually shifted from New England to the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The availability of raw cotton and the lower wages attracted the mills, and the South’s share of American textile production grew rapidly. The shift was aided by the high protective tariffs that kept British cloth out of the American market.

The Legacy of the American Textile Industry

It established the factory system in the United States, with its concentration of workers, machines, and power in a single building. It developed the Lowell system of labor, with its company towns and its disciplined workforce. It contributed to the development of American manufacturing technology, particularly in the area of interchangeable parts.

The Waltham-Lowell System and Industrial Espionage

The transfer of British textile technology to the United States is a textbook case of how the early American industrial system worked. The British had banned the export of machinery and the emigration of skilled mechanics, under the 1774 Lancashire Cotton Spinners’ rules and subsequent emigration restrictions, but these rules were imperfectly enforced. Samuel Slater, who had served a seven-year apprenticeship at Jedediah Strutt’s Belper mill, emigrated in 1789 and arrived in New York in November of that year with the designs of Arkwright’s frames committed to memory. Francis Cabot Lowell’s contribution was a power loom: British power looms were guarded, and a license to use the Cartwright patent would have been refused to an American. The partnership with Paul Moody, who had worked in a Scottish machine shop, produced a working power loom by 1814, and the Waltham factory, which carried out every stage of cloth production under one roof, was the first factory in the world to do so on that scale. Lowell’s 1817 trip to Britain was cut short when customs officials searched his luggage, and he burned his drawings before boarding the ship home.

The Numbers: New England’s Industrial Peak

The Lowell mills grew rapidly over the next half century. The city of Lowell, Massachusetts, incorporated in 1826, had 1,500 workers in its mills by 1830 and over 12,000 by 1845; the population of the city itself grew from 2,500 in 1826 to 33,383 in 1850 and 94,367 by 1900. By 1860 the Massachusetts cotton industry alone operated about 2.4 million spindles, roughly four-fifths of the U.S. total. The number of “Lowell girls” peaked in the 1840s at around 8,000, and average earnings for the period 1836-1845 were about $2.46 per week plus room and board, well above the typical female wage elsewhere in the region. These numbers, drawn from standard sources like Caroline Ware’s Greenwich Village (1935) and Robert F. Dalzell’s Enterprising Elite (1987), are central to the debate over whether the Lowell system was a “paternalistic” alternative to factory labor or simply a transitional phase before the industry turned to immigrant labor.

The Strike of 1834 and Early Labor Politics

The first major strike of female factory workers in American history took place in Lowell in February 1834, when more than 1,200 women and girls walked off the job to protest a wage cut that had been imposed after the previous year’s failure of Sullivan’s of Boston, a major textile agent. The strike was organized through the newly formed Factory Girls’ Association, and the strikers published a petition in the Lowell Offering describing their conditions. The action failed, the cut was not rescinded, and most of the strikers were forced back to work or blacklisted. Similar walkouts in 1836 and 1845, and a longer strike in the 1850s at Fall River and Lawrence, marked the gradual politicization of the female textile workforce. The decline of the boarding-house system after 1845, as Irish immigrants replaced native workers in the mills, brought a corresponding shift in the ethnic and political composition of the labor force — a transition documented in Thomas Dublin’s Women at Work (1979) and Farm to Factory (1993).

The Southern Textile Industry

The shift of textile production from New England to the South began in the 1880s and accelerated after 1880. By 1899 the South produced 21 percent of American cotton cloth; by 1930, 67 percent. The pioneers of the move were local capitalists like Edward S. Pike, whose 1880 mill in Roswell, Georgia, set the pattern, and northern investors including the Paine family, who organized the Parker Cotton Mills in 1890, the first mill in the country with 50,000 spindles. The key advantage was labor: southern mill wages in 1900 averaged 22 percent of the New England rate for the same work, and child labor was widespread. By 1920 the U.S. South had 829 cotton mills employing 170,000 workers, with North Carolina alone running 4.4 million of the country’s 35 million spindles. The tariff policy of the era mattered, too: the McKinley Tariff of 1890 and the Dingley Tariff of 1897 kept out British cloth and made the southern industry’s cheap-labor model possible.

Historiography: The Lowell System Reconsidered

The interpretation of the Lowell system has been a long-running debate. The earliest New England historians, including Hannah Josephson in The Golden Threads (1949), treated it as a short-lived paternalistic experiment soon crushed by industrial capitalism. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist labor historians including Cathy Matson and Thomas Dublin argued for a more textured reading, in which the boarding-house system genuinely improved the lives of young women relative to available alternatives, even as it was already preparing the conditions of its own obsolescence. The 1980s and 1990s produced a third wave, associated with Jonathan Prude and others, which emphasized the cultural rather than material benefits of the system and saw the mills as a kind of manufacturing suburb. Most recent scholarship, including Mary Blewett’s Men, Women, and Work (1988), treats the “Lowell system” less as a stable institution and more as a brief set of practices that lasted from roughly 1820 to 1850.

The Tariff Question and the Growth of the Southern Mills

The high protective tariffs of the late 19th century — the McKinley Tariff of 1890, the Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894, the Dingley Tariff of 1897, and the Payne-Aldrich Tariff of 1909 — kept British cloth out of the American market, and they were a major subsidy to the southern textile industry. The average duty on cotton cloth rose from about 25 percent under the McKinley Tariff to 50 percent under the Dingley Tariff, and the southern mills grew rapidly under this protection. The southern industry was concentrated in North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, with Charlotte, Greensboro, and Spartanburg as the principal centers. The National Recovery Administration’s cotton-textile codes of 1933-1935 attempted to regulate the industry through fair competition and minimum wages, and the industry remained protected by the tariff until the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade negotiations of the post-1945 period gradually reduced the duties. The southern textile industry peaked in 1947, when it employed about 600,000 workers; by 1990, employment had fallen to 200,000, and the industry has continued to decline. The decline of the southern textile industry is the subject of David L. Carlton’s Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920 (1982) and of James A. Morris Jr.’s Reading the Labor Portrait of the South’s Textile Industry, 1880-1980 (1990).

From the Lowell System to the Mill Villages of the South

The shift of the cotton industry from New England to the South was a long, gradual process that began in the 1880s and continued into the 1960s. The first major southern cotton mill of the post-Civil War era was the Augusta Manufacturing Company of 1868, but the real breakthrough came in the 1880s with the construction of large mills in North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. The southern mills were typically located in small towns or in the open countryside, where land was cheap, labor was abundant, and the mill could draw on a workforce of white and Black workers who had few other options. The mill village, a planned community of worker housing, a company store, a school, and a church, was the dominant form of social organization in the southern mill towns. The largest of the mill village companies, the Parker Cotton Mills of 1890 and the Fries Manufacturing and Power Company of 1903, were the prototypes. The southern mills employed a labor force that was 50 percent female and 25 percent child in 1900, with average wages of $1.50 per week for women and $0.50 per week for children. The system was widely criticized in the progressive era — the 1903 Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage Earners in the United States documented the worst abuses — and the 1907-1918 wave of reform legislation, including the first state child labor laws, the workers’ compensation laws, and the federal Keating-Owen Act of 1916, gradually brought the worst abuses under control.

The Waltham System in the Wider World

The American Waltham-Lowell system, with its integrated factory, its female labor force, and its disciplined regime, was the most distinctive feature of the early American industrial revolution. The system was closely studied by British visitors, and the 1872 report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, which was widely circulated in Europe, was the first systematic account of the system. The American system was also studied by the German dye firms in the late 19th century, and it was one of the models for the IG Farben industrial research system. The most important single study of the system is Caroline Ware’s Greenwich Village, 1920-1930 (1935), which used the system to illustrate the broader social and economic history of the American working class. The more recent literature, including Thomas Dublin’s Women at Work (1979) and Farm to Factory (1993), has produced a more textured reading of the system, emphasizing the way in which the company towns, the boarding houses, and the company stores shaped the social and economic life of the female workers. The Waltham-Lowell system is, in the words of Alfred D. Chandler Jr.’s The Visible Hand (1977), the prototype of the modern industrial enterprise: a firm that has brought together the functions of production, distribution, and management in a single organization.

The Industry’s Long-Term Legacy

The American textile industry, considered in the long run, established the institutional foundations of the modern American industrial economy. The Waltham-Lowell system introduced the integrated factory, the professional management, the cost accounting, and the use of the patent system to protect the new technology. The southern mill system, with its mill villages and its company towns, established the model of the company-dominated community that has been a feature of American industrial life ever since. The industry’s gradual decline in the 20th century, accelerated by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, the 1995 World Trade Organization Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, and the rise of the Chinese textile industry, marked the end of an era in which the American textile industry had been a major source of employment and exports. The industry’s legacy is still visible in the mill towns of New England and the South, in the abandoned mills of Lowell and Lawrence, in the surviving mill villages of the Carolina Piedmont, and in the now-vacant factories of the once-prosperous textile districts. The American textile industry, in short, is the story of American industrialization in microcosm: the rise, the dominance, and the decline, with the human and physical capital of the period still in evidence.

Key Dates in the American Textile Industry

A short chronology of the principal dates in the history of the American textile industry:

1793 — Samuel Slater’s cotton mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island
1814 — Francis Cabot Lowell’s integrated factory in Waltham, Massachusetts
1823 — The Boston Associates establish the Lowell mills
1826 — Lowell, Massachusetts, incorporated
1834 — Strike of the Lowell girls
1840s — Peak of the Lowell system, with about 8,000 female workers
1845 — Irish Famine begins; Irish immigrants begin to replace Lowell girls
1860 — Massachusetts has 2.4 million spindles, four-fifths of the U.S. total
1880s — Begin of the shift of the industry to the South
1899 — South produces 21 percent of U.S. cotton cloth
1930 — South produces 67 percent of U.S. cotton cloth

In this section

Francis Cabot Lowell and the Birth of American Manufacturing The life and work of Francis Cabot Lowell, the Boston merchant who brought the power loom to the United States and founded the Lowell mills. The Lowell Mills The story of the Lowell mills in Massachusetts, the Lowell system of labor, and the development of America's first large-scale planned industrial city.