Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (6 page)

A fourth reason offered by British observers to explain American economic efficiency was an educational system that had produced widespread

14
. Quotations from H. J. Habbakuk,
American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, 1967), 6–7, and Douglass C. North,
The Economic Growth of the United States
1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, 1961), 173.

15
. Paul A. David,
Technical Choice, Innovation and Economic Growth: Essays on American and British Experience in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, 1975), 87–90; Rosenbereg, ed.,
American System
, 58–59; Dolores Greenberg, "Reassessing the Power Patterns of the Industrial Revolution: An Anglo-American Comparison,"
AHR
, 87(1982), 1237—61.

literacy and "adaptative versatility" among American workers. By contrast a British workman trained by long apprenticeship "in the trade" rather than in schools lacked "the ductility of mind and the readiness of apprehension for a new thing" and was "unwilling to change the methods which he has been used to," according to an English manufacturer. The craft apprenticeship system was breaking down in the United States, where most children in the Northeast went to school until age fourteen or fifteen. "Educated up to a far higher standard than those of a much superior social grade in the Old World . . . every [American] workman seems to be continually devising some new thing to assist him in his work, and there is a strong desire . . . to be 'posted up' in every new improvement."
¹⁶

This was perhaps putting it a bit strongly. But many American technological innovations were indeed contributed by workers themselves. Elias Howe, a journeyman machinist in Boston who invented a sewing machine, was one of many examples. This was what contemporaries meant when they spoke of Yankee ingenuity. They used "Yankee" in all three senses of the word: Americans; residents of northern states in particular; and New Englanders especially. Of 143 important inventions patented in the United States from 1790 to 1860, 93 percent came out of the free states and nearly half from New England alone—more than twice that region's proportion of the free population. Much of the machine-tool industry and most of the factories with the most advanced forms of the American system of manufactures were located in New England. An Argentine visitor to the United States in 1847 reported that New England migrants to other regions had carried "to the rest of the Union the . . . moral and intellectual aptitude [and] . . . manual aptitude which makes an American a walking workshop. . . . The great colonial and railroad enterprises, the banks, and the corporations are founded and developed by them."
¹⁷

The connection made by British observers between Yankee "adaptative versatility" and education was accurate. New England led the world in educational facilities and literacy at midcentury. More than 95 percent

16
. Rosenberg, ed.,
American System
, 203; John E. Sawyer, "The Social Basis of the American System of Manufacturing,"
Journal of Economic History
, 14 (1954), 377–78.

17
. Roger Burlingame,
March of the Iron Men: A Social History of Union Through Invention
(New York, 1938), 469–76; Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,
Sarmiento's Travels in the United States in
1847, trans. Michael A. Rockland (Princeton, 1970), 198.

of its adults could read and write; three-fourths of the children aged five to nineteen were enrolled in school, which they attended for an average of six months a year. The rest of the North was not far behind. The South lagged with only 80 percent of its white population literate and one-third of the white children enrolled in school for an average of three months a year. The slaves, of course, did not attend school and only about one-tenth of them could read and write. Even counting the slaves, nearly four-fifths of the American population was literate in the 1850s, compared with two-thirds in Britain and northwest Europe and one-fourth in southern and eastern Europe. Counting only the free population, the literacy rate of 90 percent in the United States was equaled only by Sweden and Denmark.
¹⁸

The rise of schooling in these countries since the seventeenth century had grown out of the Protestant Reformation. The priesthood of all believers needed to know how to read and understand God's word. In the nineteenth century, religion continued to play an important role in American education. Most colleges and many secondary schools were supported by church denominations. Even the public schools still reflected their Protestant auspices. Since 1830 a rapid expansion and rationalization of the public school system had spread westward and southward from New England—though it had not yet penetrated very far below the Ohio. As secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and a tireless publicist, Horace Mann presided over reforms which included the establishment of normal schools to train teachers, the introduction of standardized graded curricula, the evolution of various kinds of rural district schools and urban charity schools into a public school
system
, and extension of public education to the secondary level.

An important purpose of these schools remained the inculcation of Protestant ethic values "of regularity, punctuality, constancy and industry" by "moral and religious instruction daily given," according to the Massachusetts superintendent of schools in 1857. These values, along

18
. Albert Fishlow, "The Common School Revival: Fact or Fancy?" in Henry Rosov-sky, ed.,
Industrialization in Two Systems
(New York, 1966), 40–67; A
Compendium of the Seventh Census of the United States
(Washington, 1854), 141–51; Carlo M. Cippolla,
Literacy and Development in the West
(Harmondsworth, Eng., 1969); Carl F. Kaestle,
Pillars of the Republic: Common Schooling and American Society, 1780–1860
(New York, 1983), 13–74; Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens,
The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870
(Chicago, 1981), 89–142.

with cognitive skills and knowledge, also served the needs of a growing capitalist economy. Schools were "the grand agent for the development or augmentation of national resources," wrote Horace Mann in 1848, "more powerful in the production and gainful employment of the total wealth of a country than all the other things mentioned in the books of the political economists."
¹⁹
Textile magnate Abbott Lawrence advised a Virginia friend who wanted his state to emulate New England's industrial progress that "you cannot expect to develop your resources without a general system of popular education; it is the lever to all permanent improvement." "Intelligent laborers," added another Yankee businessman in 1853 as if in echo of British visitors, "can add much more to the capital employed in a business than those who are ignorant."
²⁰

III

Recent scholarship has challenged the observations quoted earlier that American workers readily embraced the new industrial order.
²¹
Skilled artisans in particular appear to have resisted certain features of capitalist development. They formed trade unions and workingmen's parties which attained considerable strength in the 1830s, when tensions caused by the transition from a localized craft economy to an expanding capitalism were most acute. Disputes about wages and control of the work process

19
. Michael B. Katz,
The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts
(Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 43; Horace Mann, "Annual Report of 1848," in
The Life and Works of Horace Mann
, 5 vols. (Boston, 1891), IV, 245–51.

20
. Abbott Lawrence,
Letters to William C. Rives of Virginia
(Boston, 1846), 6; Arthur A. Ekirch,
The Idea of Progress in America, 1815–1860
(New York, 1944), 197.

21
. This and the following paragraphs have drawn on some of the numerous studies of the antebellum working class that have appeared in recent years, including Alan Dawley,
Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn
(Cambridge, Mass., 1976); Anthony F. C. Wallace,
Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution
(New York, 1978); Thomas Dublin,
Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860
(New York, 1979); Jonathan Prude,
The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860
(Cambridge, 1983); Sean Wilentz,
Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850
(New York, 1984); Walter Licht,
Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century
(Princeton, 1983); Steven J. Ross,
Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788–1890
(New York, 1985); Christine Stansell,
City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860
(New York, 1986).

provoked strikes and other forms of conflict. Worker activism declined after 1837 as the depression generated unemployment which drew the fangs of militancy. After recovery from the depression, vastly increased immigration intensified ethnic and religious divisions within the working class. Nativism, temperance, and the growing sectional conflict took precedence over the economic issues that had prevailed in the 1830s. Nevertheless, frictions persisted in the workplace and occasionally erupted, as in the Massachusetts shoemakers' strike of 1860.

Technological innovation was not the main cause of worker unrest. To be sure, machines displaced some craftsmen or downgraded their skills. But most machines during this era executed simple repetitive motions previously performed by unskilled or semiskilled workers. And even when more complex machine tools replaced some artisans, they expanded other categories of highly skilled workers—machinists, tool-and-die makers, millwrights, civil and mechanical engineers—whose numbers doubled during the 1850s.
²²
The transportation and communications revolutions created whole new occupations, some of them skilled and well paid—steamboat pilots, railroad men, telegraphers. The latter two categories increased fivefold in the 1850s. The rapid westward expansion of the urban frontier, the extraordinary mobility of the American population, and regional differentials in the pace of technological development meant that skilled workers who were displaced by new technology in one part of the country could go west and find a job. European observers who contrasted workers' resistance to innovation in their own countries with workers' receptivity toward change in the United States were not off the mark.

Nor was declining income the principal cause of worker unrest in the United States. Despite bursts of inflation in the mid-1830s and mid-1850s, and periods of unemployment caused by depressions, the long-term trend of real wages was upward. Of course people live in the short run, and the average worker trying to make ends meet during economic downturns in, say, 1841 or 1857 lacked the mollifying perspective of an historian. Moreover, the wages of male artisans in certain occupations suffered erosion when the introduction of new methods or new machines enabled employers to hire "green hands" or "slop workers," often women and children, to perform separate parts of a sequential process previously done entirely by skilled workers. It was no coincidence that

22
. Calculated from the occupational lists in the 1850 and 1860 censuses.

much of the unrest occurred in specific trades experiencing this de-skilling process: shoemakers, tailors, weavers, cabinetmakers, printers.

Then, too, despite the generally rising trend of real wages, workers at the bottom of the scale, especially women, children, and recent immigrants, labored long hours in sweatshops or airless factories for a pittance. They could make a living only if other members of their families also worked. For some of these laborers, however, the pennies they earned as domestic servants or factory hands or stevedores or seamstresses or hod-carriers or construction workers represented an improvement over the famine conditions they had left in Ireland. Nevertheless, poverty was widespread and becoming more so among laborers in large cities with a substantial immigrant population. New York packed an immense populace of the poor into noisome tenements, giving the city a death rate nearly twice as high as London.
²³