Abstract
On the death of Samuel Slater, the acclaimed father of American manufactures, the local Pawtucket Chronicle made a less flattering assessment of him: “Mr. Slater was not exactly a generous man. He gave little to public institutions and regarded not the appeals of private individuals. His object was gold. No man was more indefatigable.”1 Yet Slater had his supporters who saw in him and other manufacturers the embodiment of a new type of American character who looked to combine wealth, virtue, and patriotism into a new procapitalist mix. After his death, some biographers tried to transform him into an American icon. George S. White published the Memoir of Samuel Slater in 1836, a year after Slater’s death. White was “anxious to make the volume of some permanence and benefit to the cause of American manufacturers. “Furthermore,” he wrote, “I think the work is calculated to promote a patriotic attention to the general enterprise and prosperity of the country.”2
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Notes
Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 30–57.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2001).
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979).
Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Daniel L. Phillips, Griswold—A History Being a History of the Town of Griswold, Connecticut From the Earliest Times to the Entrance of our Country into the World War in 1917 (New Haven: Tuttle Morehouse and Taylor, 1929), 78–80, 100.
After the death of his mother, William Slater remained in Slatersville where he continued to reside until his death in 1882. He directed the Slatersville factories and guided the development of the community. Most of his father’s side of the family, including Mrs. Ruth Slater and Elizabeth Slater (sister of William and John Fox Slater), continued to live in Slatersville. Ruth Slater remained in the family home on School Street. Around 1850, William Slater built a sizeable house with a mansard roof and a magnificent four-story tower in town, and his sister Elizabeth, now married to Dr. Elisha Bartlett, moved into a grand home on Green Street. While her husband was a physician and college professor, he had strong ties to the industrial community of Lowell. A Brown University graduate, he served as a physician in Lowell, Massachusetts where he took an active interest in politics, becoming the first mayor of that town as well as a member of the state legislature. Known for his medical treatises such as “The History of the Diagnosis” and “Treatment of Typhoid and Typhus,” he achieved special recognition for his defense of the Lowell system of labor. He published “A Vindication of the Character and Condition of the Females Employed in the Lowell Mills” in 1841, as a response to previously published articles in the Boston Times and the Boston Quarterly Review that challenged the health and character of female mill operatives. Bartlett argued that the company was devoted to the health and welfare of its workers. In his pamphlet: “A Vindication of the Character and Condition of Females Employed in the Lowell Mill,” (Lowell, 1841), Bartlett wrote: “Both overseers and superintendents, pastors and Sunday School teachers interest themselves at once and warmly in her welfare and comfort ... and thus in addition to the good offices growing out of her common relations to her employers, she is blessed with the divine charities of a Christian love.” He worked to perpetuate the belief that factory work was a positive experience and a benefit to the laborer: “The aggregate change which is wrought in the moral character and condition of the young females who come here from the country is eminently happy and beneficial. The great preponderance of influence is enlightening, elevating and improving—not darkening, debasing and deteriorating. Their manners are cultivated, their minds are enlarged, and their moral and religious principles are developed and fortified. Hundreds and hundreds of these girls will long live to refer the commencement of their best and highest happiness to their residence in this this city.” See Elisha Bartlett, Vindication of the Character and Condition of Females Employed in the Lowell Mills, against the Charges Contained in the Boston Times and the Boston Quarterly Review (Lowell, 1841), 21. Thirteen years her senior, Bartlett had married Elizabeth, daughter of John Slater and sister of William and John Fox Slater. When his health declined in the 1850s, the couple took up residence in Slatersville and built their home on land previously owned by her parents. Within five years Bartlett died, and William Slater, now a widower, assumed responsibility for his widowed mother and sister. They all moved in together, along with William Slater’s four children. See William H. Jordy, Buildings of Rhode Island (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 244–48. Management of Slatersville remained under William Slater’s control throughout his lifetime, and the property and its administration later passed to his son, John.
John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections, Containing a General Collection of Interesting Facts, Traditions, Biographical Sketches, Anecdotes, etc., Relating to the History and Antiquities of Every Town in Connecticut; with Geographical Descriptions (New Haven: J. W. Barber, 1836), 310.
Heman Humphrey, Domestic Education (Amherst: J.S. & C. Adams, 1840) in Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, Robert Bremner, ed., 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 1:351.
General Regulations, Jewett City, January 1, 1841, Slater Company Records, Box 2. See also E. A. Buck, “AnHistorical Discourse Delivered at the Semi-Centennial Anniversary of the Slatersville Congregational Church, September 9, 1866” (Woonsocket: S.S. Foss, 1867), 24.
“Constitution of the Methodist Episcopal Church Sabbath School, 1861–1863,” Webster, MA, United Church of Christ, Webster, Massachusetts. For a more detailed examination of the Sabbath School, see Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 163–74.
U.S. Bureau of the Census, United States Federal Population Census, Manuscript Schedules, Eighth Census of the United States (Washington, DC, 1860); Griswold, Connecticut, 1860 (Washington, DC, 1860). Hereafter cited as Federal Population MSS 8. See also Connecticut Bureau of Labor Statistics, Second Annual Report, May session (Hartford, 1875), 13–21; Albert E. Van Dusen, Connecticut (New York: Random House: 1961), 255.
Malcolm McGregor Dana, The Annals of Norwich, New London County, Connecticut in the Great Rebellion of 1861–65 (Norwich: J.H. Jewett & Company, 1873), 19, 49, 58–59.
John D. Nolan, History of Taftville, Connecticut (Norwich: Bulletin Press, 1940), 3–8.
Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 475.
Frances M. Caulkins, History of New London Connecticut from the first Survey of the Coast in 1612 to 1860: with memoir of the author (New London: H.D. Utley, 1895), 387–99.
James T. Dickinson, A Sermon Delivered in the Second Congregational Church on the fourth of July, 1834 at the Request of the Anti-Slavery Society of Norwich and Vicinity (Norwich: Anti-Slavery Society, 1834), 4–5.
John P. Gulliver and Daniel Coit Gilman, Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Slater Memorial Building at Norwich, Connecticut, Thursday November 4, 1886 (Norwich: L. & E. Edwards, 1856), 11.
Luella Sampson Kellogg, United Workers of Norwich: A History of One-Hundred Years of Community Service (Cambridge: Word Guild, 1978), v-vi, 1–7.
Frederick C. Jaher, Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago and Los Angles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 58–64.
A. Whittemann, American Philanthropists (New York: A. Wittemann, 1887), 13.
Duane. Hamilton Hurd, History of Worcester County, Massachusetts, with Biographical Sketcher of Many of its Pioneers and Prominent Men, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis, 1889), Tucker, Samuel Slater, 126–29, 154–59; and “Two Hundred Years of Progress: Webster-Dudley 17391939,” Webster Times, 1939, 10.
Waite to Samuel Slater and Sons, Webster, November 9, 1835, Union Mills, v. 185, Slater MSS; Waite to Samuel Slater and Sons, Webster, November 16, 1836, Union Mills, v. 185, Slater MSS. See also John R. Mulkern, The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts: The Rise and Fall of a People’s Movement (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 16–17.
O’Connor, Lords of the Loom, 36–37; Waite to Samuel Slater and Sons, Webster, November 9, 1835, Union Mills, v. 185, Slater MSS and Joseph Dorfman, “Jackson Wage-Earner Thesis,” American Historical Review 54 (January 1949): 301, 305.
William A. Emerson, History of the Town of Douglas, Massachusetts, Earliest Period to the Close of 1878 (Boston: F. W. Bird, 1879).
H. Thomas Johnson, “Early Cost Accounting for Internal Management Control: Lyman Mills in the 1850s,” Business History Review 46 (Winter 1972): 468.
Slater Mills at Webster, 10; D. W. Jones to Horatio Nelson Slater, May 14, 1836, Horatio N. Slater Records, Box 1. Personal control also extended to other aspects of his business, including transportation. In the1840s, the Norwich and Worcester Railroad ran through Webster. Horatio Slater paid to have a turn out tract constructed near one of his factories. Later, to compete with the local Norwich and Worcester Railroad, Slater built and operated his own railroad, the Providence, Webster and Springfield line. Later it was operated by the Boston and Albany Railroad. See Ellery Bicknell Crane, Historic Homes and Institutions and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs of Worcester County, Massachusetts, with a History of Worcester Society of Antiquity (New York: Lewis Publishing Company, 1907) 2:802. “Two Hundred Years of Progress,” 4; Slater Mills at Webster, 10; Agreement: Samuel Slater and Sons and Norwich & Worcester Railroad Company, February 5, 1850, Union Mills, v. 193, Slater MSS
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© 2008 Barbara M. Tucker and Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr.
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Tucker, B.M., Tucker, K.H. (2008). John Fox and Horatio Nelson Slater. In: Industrializing Antebellum America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614642_6
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