Samuel Slater

American industrialist

• Born: June 9, 1768
• Birthplace: Near Belper, Derbyshire, England
• Died: April 21, 1835
• Place of death: Webster, Massachusetts

During the early years of America’s modern economic history, Slater almost single-handedly established the basis upon which the country’s industrial development would be built by effectively founding textile manufacturing in New England.

Early Life

The fifth child and second son of William Slater, a yeoman farmer, and Elizabeth Fox Slater, Samuel Slater was educated in the village school of Master Thomas Jackson. When he was fourteen, his father was killed in a farming accident, and Slater apprenticed himself to Jedediah Strutt, one of the early English textile manufacturers and a collaborator with Richard Arkwright in the development of textile-manufacturing machinery. Strutt was like a second father to Slater, and he rewarded the boy for the design of a device for distributing yarn more effectively on the spindle.

During the late eighteenth century, England enjoyed a virtual monopoly in advanced textile manufacturing technology. This monopoly was guarded by laws that prescribed heavy penalties for exporting technical information or for emigration of textile workers. At the same time, state governments in the United States were offering substantial incentives for the development of technology for the industrial exploitation of American cotton and wool, and while Slater was still indentured, Pennsylvania granted a bounty of a hundred pounds for a carding machine, even though it was only partially successful.

Slater therefore was determined to go to America. Before he was twenty-one he was given responsibility for assembling the equipment at one of Strutt’s new mills, and this experience and the memorized details of everything he had learned in his apprenticeship were the only assets he carried to the newly formed United States when he emigrated in September, 1789, disguised as a farm laborer to escape detection as a textile worker breaking the laws of England.

Arriving in November, 1789, Slater found work for a brief time in were chosen in the small factory of the New York Manufacturing Company, which was producing yarn with inferior equipment. Meanwhile, he made contact with Moses Brown of Providence, whose mill was machine-spinning cotton with defective equipment, and offered to duplicate the machinery of Richard Arkwright. Brown introduced him to his kinsman, Sylvanus Brown, and Slater agreed to build yarn-making equipment at the latter’s mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He was only twenty-one.

Life’s Work

Establishing a partnership with William Almy and Smith Brown, two kinsmen of Moses Brown, Slater, at a wage of a dollar a day, built the first efficient yarn-making equipment in the United States, duplicating the basic elements of Arkwright’s system—the carder and the water-frame spinner—and the Almy-Brown mill began using it to spin yarn on December 20, 1790, producing relatively small quantities because Slater was forced to use Surinam cotton, which was finer and more carefully cleaned than cotton from the American South. Three years later, however, Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin made possible the mass production of cotton thread and cloth from domestic supplies. In staffing the mill, Slater followed the practice, which apparently had proven efficient in England, of employing children under the age of twelve to operate the machinery. This machinery was built of oak and iron parts forged by Oziel Wilkinson, whose daughter Hannah became Slater’s wife on October 2, 1791.

In 1793, the firm of Almy, Brown and Slater built what came to be called the Old Slater Mill in Pawtucket, and spinning began there on July 12, 1793. Slater continued his partnership with Almy and Brown, even though they opened another mill on their own in 1799 and ran it in competition with Slater, using without compensation the methods he had perfected. Then, forming a partnership with relatives of his wife, he built at Rehobath the first mill in Massachusetts to use the Arkwright system, the so-called White Mill, which began production in 1801.

By this time, Slater was using power looms and was hiring experienced English textile workers to tend them, including his brother John, who arrived in America in 1803 with plans for the “mule,” invented in 1779 by Samuel Crompton for making muslin. Slater was still employing children, but he had established a reputation for fair dealing. He lent new employees money to establish themselves, and from the beginning he provided a Sunday school that taught his juvenile employees reading, writing, and arithmetic. In fact, Slater for a time taught in this school himself, and ultimately he created a day school for mill children, usually paying the teachers’ salaries himself.

In 1806, the town of Slaterville, Rhode Island, was established, built around a mill that Slater had built there in partnership with Almy, Brown, and John Slater. By the time that American industry was suffering a recession because of the Embargo Act of 1807 and the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, Slater’s mills were surviving because of careful domestic marketing of yarn, and in 1812 he built yet another mill at Oxford, Massachusetts. When the New England mills suffered a severe depression in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars because of the flood of cheap English goods into American markets, Slater suffered severe losses, but the Protective Tariff of 1816 soon restored the industry.

On October 2, 1812, Hannah Slater died, leaving her husband with six small sons to rear. In November, 1817, he married a widow, Esther Parkinson. He involved his sons, if they were interested, in the operation of his mills, even in their adolescence. For example, his son John at the age of thirteen was his father’s representative at the Oxford mill. Only one of the four sons who survived their father, Horatio Nelson Slater, lived to old age.

In 1814, in partnership with Edward Howard, Slater established a second mill at Oxford for the manufacture of woolen cloth, and when Howard sold his interest to Slater in 1829, the latter established Slater and Sons with his sons George, John, and Nelson. In time, this firm became the Dudley Manufacturing Company, and the company towns of Oxford and Dudley were merged in 1832 as the town of Webster, which Slater so named because of his admiration of Daniel Webster. Webster, Massachusetts, was home to Slater for the rest of his life.

Slater’s establishment of mills continued through the prosperity of the 1820’s. In 1823 at Jewett City, Connecticut, he formed S. and J. Slater with his brother, selling out his share to John in 1831. In 1825, with five partners, he acquired a mill at Amoskeag, near Manchester, New Hampshire. There he built a second mill, a sawmill, a cornmill, and a dam for water power, and established the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company. Up to this time, all of Slater’s mills had been powered by water, but in 1827 he built at Providence the first steam-power textile factory in Rhode Island and one of the first in the country. In all, between 1790, when he formed his first partnership with Almy and Brown, and 1827, Slater formed thirteen partnerships. In addition, he maintained a farm, engaged in a variety of philanthropic enterprises, and helped to incorporate and was for fifteen years president of the Manufacturers’ Bank of Pawtucket.

The economic slump that began in 1829 was accompanied by the onset of the ill health that plagued Slater’s last years. He once said that in his first thirty years in America he worked sixteen hours a day. In his last years, in ill health, he was struggling to maintain his industrial enterprises in the face of poor economic conditions. He died at Webster, Massachusetts, on April 21, 1835, recognized throughout the country as what President Andrew Jackson called him when he greeted him at Pawtucket in 1833: the father of American manufactures.

Significance

At a remarkably young age, Samuel Slater almost singlehandedly created the American textile industry and established the basis of American industrialism. Less an inventor than a man who built upon the inventions of others, he possessed considerable mechanical aptitude; his commercial success, however, derived mostly from his great cleverness in establishing factories, organizing production, taking advantage of the latest mechanical developments, and discovering the most effective methods of marketing his product. His single most important contribution to the growth of American industry was his establishment of a system of manufacture broken down into steps so simple that even children could perform them. This was of crucial importance during the early development of American industry because of the chronic shortage of skilled manpower in that period. With Eli Whitney, who inaugurated the system of manufacturing interchangeable parts rather than complete, custom-made assemblies, Slater stands as one of the two most influential figures in the first years of the American industrial revolution.

Bibliography

Bagnall, William R. Samuel Slater and the Early Development of Cotton Manufacturing in the United States. Middletown, Conn.: J. S. Steward, 1890. Except for an obscure biography published in the year following Slater’s death, this is the only nineteenth century biography. Superseded by Cameron.

Blake, John. “Samuel Slater.” In Lives of American Merchants, by Freeman Hunt. New York: Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine, 1856. A brief nineteenth century account of Slater’s life and achievements.

Burlingame, Roger. “The Spinning Hero: Samuel Slater.” North American Review 246 (Autumn, 1938): 150-161. A brief and somewhat superficial tribute to Slater’s achievements by a distinguished historian of American industry.

Cameron, E. H. Samuel Slater, Father of American Manufacturers. Freeport, Maine: Bond Wheelwright Company, 1960. The only modern full-length biography, written with the assistance of H. N. Slater, Samuel Slater’s great-grandson, and based in part on the research and unpublished manuscript of Frederick L. Lewton.

Gordon, John Steele. The Business of America. New York: Walker, 2001. This collection of Gordon’s columns from American Heritage magazine includes the article “Technology Transfer,” describing how Slater brought the textile industry from Great Britain to the United States during the late eighteenth century.

Lewton, Frederick L. “Samuel Slater and the Oldest Cotton Machinery in America.” In Smithsonian Report for 1936. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1936. Lewton devoted a large part of his life to research on Slater and was the primary modern authority on the technical aspects of Slater’s equipment. Cameron based his biography on Lewton’s unpublished manuscript. The oldest Slater machinery is in the Smithsonian museum. This is a semitechnical description of it.

Tucker, Barbara M. Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. Largely a case study of Slater’s factory system from 1790 to 1860. Examines Slater’s management methods in relation to the English system in which he was trained and the innovations made necessary by American conditions. Valuable for an understanding of Slater as a factory master, but thin on biographical detail.

Welles, Arnold. “Father of Our Factory System.” American Heritage 9 (April, 1958): 34-39, 90-92. A brief account of Slater’s life and accomplishments, with useful and enlightening illustrations from the prints of the period.