NOTES
CHAPTER ONE
1 Robert Gardiner, ed.,
The Line of Battle: The Sailing Warship, 1650–1840 (London: Conway, 1992); and Brian Lavery,
Nelson’s Navy, The Ships, Men, and Organization, 1793–1815 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995), 245ff. My thanks to Quintin Colville of London’s National Maritime Museum for confirming the count of active British first-raters in 1815. (They were the
Caledonia, the
Ville de Paris, the
Hibernia, the
Impregnable, the
Ocean, and the newly launched
Nelson.)
2 Henry Adams,
History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1801–1817) (New York: Library of America, 1986), 2:447–448. For the chronology of the war, I used, among others, Jon Latimer,
1812: War with America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), an English account; Theodore Roosevelt,
The Naval War of 1812 (New York: Modern Library, 1999); Richard V. Barbuto,
Niagara 1814: America Invades Canada (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000); Robert Malcolmson,
Lords of the Lake: The Naval War on Lake Ontario, 1812–1814 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998); Robert Gardiner, ed.,
The Naval War of 1812 (London: Chatham, 1998); and for a crisp summary, Gordon Wood,
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), Chapter 18. The Naval Historical Center also published a splendid documentary history of the naval war, William S. Dudley, ed
.,
The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1985), and Michael J. Crawford, ed.,
The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 2002). Henry Adams’s classic history of the era, now back in print in two unabridged volumes, devotes nearly a fourth of its length to the war. Although Adams’s history is a splendid read, it cannot be taken as a reliable account. Details are often incorrect, and it has, not unfairly, been criticized as Federalist history. See, e.g., Irving Brant, “Madison and the War of 1812,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 74, no. 1 (January 1966): 51–67.
3 Latimer,
1812, 32, 17, 407 (for 1835 invasion plan).
4 Dumas Malone,
Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805–1809 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 415–416; Adams,
History, 2:1051 (
Times quote); Wood,
Empire of Liberty, 697–699, makes the case for the war as a confirmation of American sovereignty.
5 Niles Weekly Register, September 5, 1812, 5 (Connecticut); October 24, 1812, 116 (Massachusetts).
6 Geoffrey M. Footner,
Tidewater Triumph : The Development and Worldwide Success of the Chesapeake Bay Pilot Schooner (Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1998) 101–109.
8 Sinclair to Jones, September 3, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
The Naval War of 1812, 3:574.
9 Hamilton to Chauncey, August 31, 1812, in Dudley, ed.,
The Naval War of 1812, 1:297; emphasis in original.
10 The most thorough account of the Chambers gun is William Gilkerson,
Boarders Away II: Firearms in the Age of Fighting Sail (Woonsocket, RI: Andrew Mowbray, 1993), 123–139. Owen to Yeo, July 17, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:536. Gilkerson presents the evidence, which he calls circumstantial, for the presence of Chambers guns on Lake Ontario, but the Naval Institute (Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:537) takes it as settled. The rapid firing was transmitted from barrel to barrel by a cloth “roman-candle” fuse, ignited by the initial firing with the single lock.
11 Stoddard to Wadsworth, January 14, 1813, in Office of the Commander of Ordnance,
Correspondence, National Archives, Washington, DC (hereafter OCO).
12 Barclay to Yeo, September 1, 1813, in Dudley, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 2:551; emphasis in original.
13 For the ships on Ontario, I use the data assembled in the Appendices in Malcolmson,
Lords of the Lake, 327–342. For Huron and Erie, I rely primarily on Roosevelt,
Naval War of 1812.
14 Malcolmson,
Lords of the Lake, 54.
15 Stoddard to Wadsworth, January 23, 1813, OCO.
16 Lavery,
Nelson’s Navy, 172.
17 Roosevelt,
Naval War of 1812, 126.
18 Malcolmson,
Lords of the Lake, 174.
20 Roosevelt,
Naval War of 1812, 136.
21 Malcolmson,
Lords of the Lake, 194.
23 Roosevelt,
Naval War of 1812, 138. Roosevelt, however, faults Chauncey for not following all the way into Burlington Bay, because he “was afraid that the wind would come up to blow a gale” (139). But as Malcolmson makes clear, the gale was already raging during the chase, which is why it was so fast. Chauncey properly feared getting driven onto a lee shore where a large British army detachment was in camp. His squadron had an exhausting passage beating out of the bay against the storm and several times had to rescue one or the other of the lakers.
25 Barclay to Yeo, September 12, 1813, in Dudley, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 2:556; Inglis to Barclay, September 10, 1813, in Dudley, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 2: 554–555.
27 See, for instance, Ralph J. Roske and Richard W. Donley, “The Perry-Elliot Controversy: A Bitter Footnote to the Battle of Lake Erie,”
Northwest Ohio Quarterly 34, no. 3 (Summer 1962): 111–123, and Lawrence J. Friedman and David Curtis Skaggs, “Jesse Duncan Elliott and the Battle of Lake Erie: The Issue of Mental Stability,”
Journal of the Early Republic 10, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 493–516. An older source that presents Elliott’s side of the story is Charles J. Peterson,
American Navy: Being an Authentic History of the United States Navy and Biographical Sketches of American Naval Heroes (Philadelphia: James B. Smith, 1860), 401–417. Roosevelt,
Naval War of 1812, 147.
29 Jones to Chauncey, January 15, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:386.
30 Robinson to Prevost, April 6, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:413–415; Yeo to Prevost, April 22, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:416–417; Yeo to Cochrane, May 26, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:492.
31 Malcolmson,
Lords of the Lake, 243.
32 Crawford,
Naval War of 1812, 3:468–469.
33 For more information about the first footnote on page 28, see Malcolmson,
Lords of the Lake, 259. 34 For more information about the second footnote on page 28, see Latimer,
1812, 179.
35 Brown to Chauncey, August 10, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:584–585; Chauncey to Brown, September 14, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:587–588; Prevost to Drummond, September 16, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:614; Prevost to Bathhurst, October 18, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:628.
36 Wellington, quoted in Adams,
History, 2:988.
37 Report of Lt. Robinson RN, September 12, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:613.
39 MacDonell to Beckwith, February 4, 1815, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:688–689.
40 O’Conor to Melville, December 19, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:672.
41 Prevost to Bathhurst, October 18, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:628.
42 Jones to Madison, October 26, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:631–632.
43 Chauncey to Jones, October 12, 1814, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:622.
44 Eckford and Browns to Chauncey, February 10, 1815, in Crawford, ed.,
Naval War of 1812, 3:690.
CHAPTER TWO
1 Rory Muir,
Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807–1815 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 365; Niall Ferguson,
The House of Rothschild, vol. 1:
Money’s Prophets, 1798–1848 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), 96–98.
2 Cited in Ferguson,
House of Rothschild, 111.
3 Joel Mokyr,
The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Great Britain, 1700–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 257–260, has a good discussion of the issues; the quote is on 258.
4 Adam Smith,
Wealth of Nations (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 9–10.
5 Robert C. Allen,
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 146–147. The factor-price theory (high wages, cheap energy) as the spur to the British industrial revolution is from Allen.
7 The brief summary here follows ibid., 182–212.
8 The classic account is H. W. Dickinson,
A Short History of the Steam Engine (Cambridge, UK: The University Press, 1939), 29–51, 66–89.
9 Allen,
British Industrial Revolution, 217–293; H. R. Schubert, “Iron and Steel,” in
A History of Technology, vol. 4:
The Industrial Revolution, c.1750-c.1850, Charles Singer et al., eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 99–118, quote at 102.
10 K. C. Barraclough,
Steelmaking Before Bessemer, vol. 2:
Crucible Steel (London: The Metals Society, 1984), 102.
11 David S. Landes,
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: Norton, 1998), 215–220.
12 N. A. M. Rodger,
Command of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 172.
13 Dava Sobel,
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Mystery of His Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1995); David S. Landes,
Revolution in Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 145–170.
14 K. R. Gilbert, “Machine-Tools,” in Singer, ed.,
The Industrial Revolution, 417–441; K. R. Gilbert,
Henry Maudslay: Machine Builder (London: Science Museum, 1971); Joseph Wickham Roe,
English and American Tool Builders (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1916), 33–49.
15 Maurice Damaus, “Precision Mechanics,” in Singer, ed.,
The Industrial Revolution, 379–416, quote at 414.
16 Gilbert,
Henry Maudslay, 4.
17 James Nasmyth,
An Autobiography, Samuel Smiles, ed. (London: John Murray, 1883), 148–149.
18 T. M. Goodeve and C. P. B. Shelley,
The Whitworth Measuring Machine (London: Longman, Green, 1877), 16, 18.
19 Nasmyth,
Autobiography, 270.
20 Sir Joseph Whitworth,
Miscellaneous Papers on Mechanical Subjects: Guns and Steel (London: Longmans, Green, Readers & Dyer, 1873), 24. The military similarly rejected his fluid compressed steel, a very compact, nearly flawless steel (it was compressed under high pressure for some hours after it flowed from the converter) that was later adopted by Bethlehem Steel, the largest American heavy ordnance maker. (William Kent,
The Mechanical Engineers’ Pocket-Book, 6th ed. [New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1903], 410.) The Whitworth rifle was much favored by Confederate snipers during the Civil War. (Union sniper rifles were as accurate but weighed twenty to thirty pounds, compared to the nine-pound Whitworth rifle.) Although the British did eventually adopt the Whitworth bore size, some features of the original design that made it so accurate—like the hexagonal barrel with a larger number of rifling twists—made it prone to fouling with black powder ammunition. Accuracy was in any case not a great advantage with standard volley-firing infantry tactics. A British Civil War buffs’ organization (
www.americancivilwar.org.uk/index.php) has many details on the sales and use of the Whitworth rifle during the Civil War.
21 The account here including the Whitworth solution is drawn primarily from Goodeve and Shelley,
The Whitworth Measuring Machine.
22 Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 13, no. 1 (1852): 123–125, quote at 124.
24 Doron Swade,
The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (New York: Viking, 2001), is the best modern account of Babbage and his calculating engines.
25 Charles Babbage,
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1864), 68–96, is his own account of the struggle over funding. Not all the dates agree with Swade’s, which I take to be the definitive account.
26 Roe,
English and American Tool Builders, chapter titled “Inventors of the Planer,” quotes from 52, 59.
27 Babbage,
Passages. The disputed phrase quoted in the footnote is on 71.
28 The description of number two and the rejection note are from Swade,
Difference Engine, 173–176.
31 Charles Babbage, “On the Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery,”
Philosophic Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 2, 1826, reprinted in
Charles Babbage and His Calculating Machines, Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison, eds. (New York: Dover, 1961), 346–354, quote at 351, plates at 380–384.
32 Swade, personal communication.
33 Babbage
, Passages, 452.
34 The account here is from Swade, “A Modern Sequel,” Part 3 in
Difference Engine.
35 Swade,
Difference Engine, 292.
36 Ibid., 305. Note that Swade and his team did not attempt to make Babbage’s printer, which was of the same size and complexity of the DE2 itself.
38 Charles Babbage,
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturing (London: John Murray, 1846).
39 Joseph Bizup,
Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 8.
41 The most detailed available history and analyses are Carolyn C. Cooper, “The Portsmouth System of Manufacture,”
Technology and Culture 25, no. 2 (April 1984): 182–225, and Carolyn C. Cooper, “The Production Line at Portsmouth Block Mill,”
Industrial Archaeology Review 6, no. 1 (Winter 1981–1982): 28–44. See also Richard Beamish,
Memoir of the Life of Marc Isambard Brunel (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1862); Roe,
English and American Tool Masters, esp. the chapter “Bentham and Brunel,” 22–31; Simon Sebag Montefiore, “The Bentham Brothers: Their Adventure in Russia,”
History Today (July 2003), a UK-based web-based journal; and Gilbert,
Henry Maudslay.
42 Gilbert,
Henry Maudslay, 18.
43 Cooper, “Portsmouth System,” 198.
45 See, for example, Alfred Chandler,
Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962), 284, where Chandler dismisses the importance of manufacturing issues, on the grounds that managers “had plenty of information to go on” from the “scientific management” movement of the 1920s. For a withering indictment, see Robert H. Hayes and William J. Abernathy, “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline,”
Harvard Business Review (July–August 1980): 67–77. Nevertheless, Hayes and Abernathy, both Harvard Business School professors, assiduously avoid mentioning the leading contribution of their own institution, or of their own previous writings, to the debacle they deplore.
CHAPTER THREE
1 Niles Weekly Register, October 29, 1825, 128; November 12, 1825, 173–174.
2 Sydney Smith, The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1859), “America,” 281–292, at 291.
3 Michael R. Haines, “The Population of the United States, 1790–1920,” in
The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2:
The Long Nineteenth Century, Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 156 (Table 4.2).
4 Gordon S. Wood,
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 706; Jack Larkin,
The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1989), 8.
5 Rothenberg’s work first appeared in a magisterial series of articles in the
Journal of Economic History, beginning in 1981. They are collected and updated in Winifred Barr Rothenberg,
From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
6 Naomi R. Lamoureaux, “Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast,”
Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (September 2003): 456–457.
7 Robert B. Gordon,
A Landscape Transformed: The Ironworking District of Salisbury, Connecticut (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 29–30.
8 Ibid., 35–38, for a sketch of the Holley iron venture. The family tree and the personal details of the Holley family are all from Holley Family Correspondence, Connecticut Historical Society, and “Fragments of the Diary of Alexander H. Holley,” Town Archive, Scoville Memorial Library, Salisbury, Connecticut. Both of the archives have a great deal of information on family and social matters, but business references are usually sketchy.
9 Daniel Walker Howe,
What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 555–556.
10 Thomas M. Doerflinger, “Rural Capitalism in Iron Country: Staffing a Forest Factory, 1808–1815,”
William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 1 (January 2002): 3–38; furnace data output from Tench Coxe,
A Statement of the Arts and Manufacturers of the United States of America for the Year 1810 (Philadelphia, PA: A. Cornman, 1814), Tables by States, Territories, and Districts (Table 10).
11 Donald R. Hoke,
Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 43–99, is the essential essay on Terry and his manufacturing innovations. The primary source for Eli’s career and early Connecticut clockmaking is Henry Terry (one of Eli’s sons), “A Review of Dr. Alcotts History of Clock-Making,”
Waterbury American, June 10, 1853. It is reprinted, along with much other primary material, in Kenneth D. Roberts,
Eli Terry and the Connecticut Shelf Clock (Bristol, CT: Kenneth D. Roberts, 1994), 30–39, 45–61, 170–175.
12 Roberts,
Eli Terry, 61.
13 Joseph T. Rainier, “The ‘Sharper’ Image: Yankee Peddlers, Southern Consumers, and the Market Revolution,”
Business and Economic History 26, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 27–44.
14 David S. Landes,
Revolution in Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 311–313.
15 David J. Jeremy,
Transatlantic Industrial Revolution: The Diffusion of Textile Technologies Between Britain and America, 1790–1830s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), is invaluable, with considerable detail on both the industry and specific machines and technologies; James Montgomery,
A Practical Detail of the Cotton Manufacture of the United States of America (Glasgow: John Niven, 1840), has clear descriptions and drawings of contemporary spinning machines in both England and America.
16 For Slater, Barbara M. Tucker,
Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), and the traditional source, George S. White,
Memoir of Samuel Slater, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1836).
17 The partnership agreement is in White,
Memoir, 74–75.
18 David R. Meyer,
Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 59. Wilkinson’s lathe was designed for cutting large industrial screws for fine manipulation of heavy industrial machinery.
19 Robert F. Dalzell Jr.,
Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Robert Sobel,
The Entrepreneurs: An American Adventure (1986; rept., Washington, DC: Beard Books, 2000), 1–41; George S. Gibb,
The Saco-Lowell Shops: Textile Machinery Building in New England, 1813–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950).
20 Charles Dickens,
American Notes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 60–63.
21 A. Stowers, “Watermills,” in
A History of Technology, vol. 4:
The Industrial Revolution, c. 1750-c.1850, Charles Singer, et al., ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 199–213.
22 Patrick M. Malone,
Waterpower in Lowell: Engineering and Industry in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) is the definitive work on the Locks & Canals Co.
23 Gibb,
Saco-Lowell Shops, 179.
24 Louis C. Hunter,
A History of Industrial Power in the United States, vol. 1:
Waterpower in the Century of the Steam Engine (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), 322–342, 569–574.
25 Constance McLaughlin Green,
Holyoke, Massachusetts: A Case Study of the Industrial Revolution in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939), 19–63, and Vera Shlakman,
Economic History of a Factory Town: Chicopee, Massachusetts, Smith College Studies in History 20 (Northampton, MA: Department of History, Smith College, 1935), 24–80.
26 Dalzell,
Enterprising Elite, 95–108.
27 Harriet H. Robinson, “Early Factory Labor in New England,” in Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor,
Fourteenth Annual Report (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1883).
28 Paul G. E. Clemens, “The Consumer Culture of the Middle Atlantic, 1760–1820,”
William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 4 (October 2005): 577–624.
29 David R. Meyer,
The Roots of American Industrialization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 69–71, 227, 228.
30 Howell J. Harris, “Inventing the U.S. Stove Industry, c.1815-1875: Making and Selling the First Universal Consumer Durable,”
Business History Review 82 (Winter 2008), 701–733.
31 H. W. Dickinson,
A Short History of the Steam Engine (Cambridge, UK: The University Press, 1935), 94–95; Harley I. Halsey, “The Choice Between High-Pressure and Low-Pressure Steam Power in America in the Nineteenth Century,”
Journal of Economic History 16, no. 4 (December 1981): 723–744. Halsey concludes that economics alone drove the choice of the Evans-style engine; safety considerations were not a major issue.
32 Hunter,
Steam Power, vol. 2,
History of Industrial Power, 353.
33 T. J. Stiles,
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 84.
34 Hunter,
History of Industrial Power, vol. 2,
Steam Power, 371.
CHAPTER FOUR
1 Library of Congress, Statutes at Large, 5th Congress, Session 2, chapters 33 and 47; and Session 3, chapters 31 and 76. The Congress authorized a “provisional army” of 10,000 men in addition to the current force level, which I take to include a previous authorization for a regiment of artillerists and engineers. (A full-strength regiment was about 1,000 troops and officers.) The pre-existing national force was about 3,500 men, so I round the “authorized” total to 15,000. The additional power for an emergency troop raise was for twenty-seven regiments of infantry and cavalry, plus some additional riflemen and artillery. Some sources carry the emergency authorization at “50,000,” but I can’t find grounds for that in the statutes. The authorizations were mostly repealed once the “Quasi-war” with France ended in 1800. For background, see Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick,
The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 561–599.
2 Michael S. Raber, Patrick M. Malone, Robert B. Gordon, and Carolyn C. Cooper,
Conservative Innovators and Military Small Arms: An Industrial History of the Springfield Armory, 1794-1968 (Boston, MA: National Park Service, 1989), 54–55, 173–181. For Harpers Ferry, Merritt Roe Smith,
Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 52–53.
3 William Avis, “Drilling, Reaming and Straightening Rifle Barrels,”
Machinery 22 (October 1915): 671–680, lays out the dozens of separate steps in producing a barrel at early-twentieth-century armories.
4 The discussion here follows Robert B. Gordon, “Who Turned the Mechanical Ideal into Mechanical Reality?”
Technology and Culture 29, no. 14 (October 1988): 774–778.
5 The
locus classicus for the anti-Whitney argument is Robert S. Woodbury, “The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts,”
Technology and Culture 1, no. 3 (Summer 1960): 235–253. The traditional accounts are Jeannette Mirsky and Allan Nevins,
The World of Eli Whitney (New York: Macmillan, 1954), and Constance McLaughlin Green,
Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956). The best assessment of Whitney’s current standing among historians is Carolyn C. Cooper, “Myth, Rumor, and History: The Yankee Whittling Boy as Hero and Villain,”
Technology and Culture 44, no. 1 (January 2003): 82–96.
7 Whitney to Stebbins, November 27, 1798, in Whitney Correspondence, Yale University (hereafter WC).
8 Whitney to Wolcott, May 15, 1798, in WC.
9 Wolcott to Whitney, May 16, 1798, in WC; Whitney to Wolcott, June 2, 1798, in WC; Woodbury, “Legend,” 240.
10 Wolcott to Whitney, May 16, 1798, in WC; Francis to Wolcott, June 7, 1798, in WC.
11 Whitney to Stebbins, November 27, 1798, in WC.
12 Whitney to Wolcott, July 30, 1799, in WC.
13 Mirsky and Nevins,
World of Eli Whitney, 209.
15 Denison Olmsted,
Memoir of Eli Whitney (New Haven, CT: Durrie & Peck, 1846), 50. This is a reprint of an 1832 article from the
American Journal of Science. Also see Blake,
History of the Town of Hamden, 125, and Joseph Wickham Roe,
English and American Toolmakers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1916), 133. Cooper, “Myth,” 87–93, is very good on all of this. I mildly disagree with her to the degree that she implies it is inconsistent to see Whitney as both a charlatan and a highly competent manufacturer.
16 Wadsworth to Wolcott, December 24, 1800, in WC.
17 Mirsky and Nevins,
World of Eli Whitney, 214.
18 Whitney to Wolcott, May 31, 1799, in WC.
19 Mirsky and Nevins,
World of Eli Whitney, 154–55, Green,
Eli Whitney, 133.
20 Carl P. Russell,
Guns on the Early Frontiers: A History of Firearms from Colonial Times Through the Years of the Western Fur Trade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1957), 158–159.
21 Author’s email correspondence with Richard Barbuto, June 2010.
22 In 1808, Whitney contracted to provide the New York militia with 2,000 muskets, probably delivered in late 1810. Another 2,000 were contracted for in 1812 (Mirsky and Nevins,
World of Eli Whitney, 236, 246). Whitney’s correspondence states that all of the second tranche had been delivered by 1813 (Whitney to Irvine, November 18, 1813, in WC). The final 1,000 were delivered in September 1814, after Tompkins’s intervention (Tompkins to Lewis [a militia major general], September 3, 1814, in WC). Whitney always referred to his New York muskets as his contract standard, e.g., Contract between Eustis and Whitney, July 18, 1812, in WC.
23 S. N. D. North and Ralph H. North,
Simeon North: First Official Pistol Maker (Concord, NH: Rumford Press, 1913); Robert D. Jeska,
Early Simeon North Pistol Correspondence with Comments by Robert Jeska (privately published, 1993). Unless otherwise indicated, I use the North and North book for personal information and Jeska for the pistol contracts. Jeska distributed several hundred copies of the book; I purchased one of the last available new copies from his widow. The book is available in major research libraries. His pistol collection was auctioned after his death at an auction house in San Francisco. He is described as a “noted collector,” and the auctioned items included: “flintlock pistols, many by Simeon North, William Evans and Henry Deringer.”
24 Jeska,
North Pistol Correspondence, 10–13. Jeska’s original question was why the pistols are stamped “S. North & E. Cheney” even though Cheney’s name doesn’t appear on any of the payment or surety documents. Elisha Cheney, married to North’s sister, was a clockmaker, the son of Benjamin Cheney, Eli Terry’s first master. He did supply screws and other small parts for some of North’s guns, but that normally wouldn’t warrant a name stamp. The contract was first awarded to Voight, a clockmaker who had worked with the inventor John Fitch on his famous steam engines. Fitch, also a clockmaker, had apprenticed with Benjamin Cheney at the same time as Elisha, so they must have been well acquainted. The mint had been slated to close in 1799, presumably prompting Voight’s bid for the pistol job, and he must have changed his mind when the mint received a reprieve. (He worked at the mint until 1814.) His friend Fitch may have introduced him to Cheney and North, or he may have already known Cheney. Near-clinching evidence for a contract sale is that the payment to Voight was made by the government and the amount expressly offset against North’s contract award.
25 Jeska,
Early Simeon North, 43.
29 The Irvine-Whitney dispute occupies a substantial portion of Whitney’s 1813 and 1814 correspondence. The essence of it is in Irvine to Armstrong (the secretary of war), April 5, 1813; Whitney to Irvine, November 4, 1813; Irvine to Whitney, November 7, 1813; Whitney to Irvine, April 25, 1814; Irvine to Armstrong, May 9, 1814; Whitney to Armstrong, May 10(?), 1814, in WC.
30 Jeska,
Early Simeon North, 146.
31 Ibid., 187; 159–160; 204–205. The letter to naval procurement, dated May 10, 1816, is addressed to the Board of Naval Commissioners and states that “I have now on hand about 14 hundred pistols of superior quality that I made for the War Department all of the size and dimensions of the one I left at the Navy office in Jany. last. The barrels have all been proved and inspected by an officer appointed on the part of the Government, and the locks are all made so uniformly alike that each of the respective locks may be fitted to the whole number.” Recall that North’s barrels were proved in large quantities as they were made, but he had never had an inspection of the finished pistols.
32 Jeska speculates that North was under pressure by Hartford-Convention federalists not to support the war effort, for Connecticut was the heart of the pro-British party. But Nathan Starr and other military contractors in the area were active at the same time, and in any case, selling weapons to militias was about as anti-British as selling them to regulars.
33 Felicia Johnson Deyrup,
Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley, Smith College Studies in History, vol. 33 (Northampton, MA: Department of History, Smith College, 1948), 62.
34 Robert B. Gordon, “Simeon North, John Hall, and Mechanized Manufacturing,” Letters to the Editor,
Technology and Culture 30, no. 1 (1989): 179–188, at 182.
35 Gary Boyd Roberts,
Genealogies of Connecticut Families (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1983); Nancy Simons Peterson, “Guarded Pasts: The Lives and Offspring of Colonel George and Clara (Baldwin) Bomford,”
National Genealogical Society Quarterly 86 (December 1998): 283–305; “Joseph Gardner Swift,” West Point Association of Graduates,
www.westpointaog.org.
36 Cummings to Superintendent of all Stores, March 11, 1812, in “Letters Received,” US War Department, Office of the Chief of the Ordnance Department, Library of Congress (hereafter OCO); Eustis to Wadsworth, August 30 and 31, 1812, in OCO; Arthur to Wadsworth, June 14, 1813, in OCO; Bomford to Wadsworth, August 4, 1813, in OCO; Freeman to Wadsworth, March 4, 1813, in OCO; Bealle to Wadsworth, August 11, 1812, and January 2, 1813, in OCO.
37 Bomford to Wadsworth, August 8, 1812, in OCO.
38 Bomford to Wadsworth, March 6, June 6, and June 11, 1813; March 15, 1814; April 14, 1813; April 28, 1813; June 10, 1813; July 6, 1813, in OCO.
39 Bomford to Wadsworth, June 22 and August 22, 1814, in OCO.
40 Bealle to Wadsworth, August 11, 1812; January 2, 1813, in OCO.
41 The role of Ordnance and the Springfield Armory in driving American manufacturing technology has been a favorite topic of industrial historians. Raber et al.,
Conservative Innovators, is the most complete and judicious analysis by senior scholars in the field. The report is available but difficult to track down; it should be published and sold through the Government Printing Office. Other important studies include Merritt Roe Smith,
Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); and “Army Ordnance and the ‘American System’ of Manufacturing,” in
Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience, Merritt Roe Smith, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 39–86; Gene Silvero Cesari, “American Arms-Making Machine Tool Development 1798–1855” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1970); and the seminal Deyrup,
Arms Makers.
42 Lee to Wadsworth, March 7, 1813, and March 28, 1814, in OCO; William Lee,
John Leigh of Agawam [Ipswich] Massachusetts, 1634–1671 and His Descendants in the Name of Lee (Albany, NY: J. Munsell Sons, 1893); Henry F. Waters, ed.,
New England Historical and Genealogical Reporter, vol. 30 (Boston: New England Historical and Genealogical Society, 1876).
43 Smith,
Harpers Ferry Armory, 53–56.
44 For more information about the footnote on page 137, see “Contract Between the United States and Simeon North,” April 16, 1813, in WC.
45 Raber et al.,
Conservative Innovators, 136, 147.
46 Dumas Malone,
Jefferson and His Time, vol. 2:
Jefferson and the Rights of Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), 25–26; “Contract Between the United States and Simeon North,” April 16, 1813, in WC.
47 Quoted in David A. Hounshell,
From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 35; and see, e.g., Smith,
Harpers Ferry Armory, 192–195, 220.
48 David A. Hounshell,
From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 35; and see, e.g., Smith,
Harpers Ferry Armory, 192–195, 220; Deyrup,
Arms Makers, 88.
49 Major James Dalliba, “The Armory at Springfield,” October 1819,
American State Papers, Military Affairs, II, 541–553, at 543–544.
50 Carolyn C. Cooper,
Shaping Invention: Thomas Blanchard’s Machinery and Patent Management in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), is the best single source on Blanchard. Except as noted below, the narrative in this section follows Cooper. The original source is Asa H. Waters,
Biographical Sketch of Thomas Blanchard and His Inventions (Worcester, MA: L. P. Goddard, 1878). Waters knew Blanchard, and the pamphlet was written as a eulogy after Blanchard’s death.
51 For more information about the footnote on page 139, see Deyrup, Arms Makers, 95.
52 Waters,
Thomas Blanchard, 5–7.
53 Lee to Blanchard, November 18, 1818, in Correspondence, Springfield Armory Archive, Waltham, MA (hereafter SAA).
54 Blanchard to Lee, March 18, 1820, in SAA.
55 Waters,
Thomas Blanchard, 6.
57 Blanchard to Lee, February 2, 1819, in SAA.
58 Blanchard to Lee, June 9, 1819, in SAA; Lee to Blanchard, June 14 and June 18, 1819, in SAA; Kenney to Lee, June 11, 1819, in SAA; Blanchard to Lee, July 3, 1819, in SAA; Lee to Thornton, August 17, 1819, in SAA.
59 Blanchard to Lee, June 9, 1819, in SAA.
60 Blanchard to Lee, September 28 and October 7, 1820, in SAA; Lee to Blanchard, October 2 and October 14, 1820, in SAA.
61 Foot to Lee, February 21, 1820, in SAA.
62 Pomeroy to Lee, October 15, 1819, January 10 and February 20, 1820, March 2 and April 5, 1821, in SAA; Evans to Lee, March 28 and April 7, 1821, in SAA; Lee to Decatur, August 20, 1819, in SAA.
63 Foot to Lee, February 21, 1820, in SAA; Pomeroy to Lee, October 15, 1819, January 10, 1820, February 20, 1820, March 2, 1821, April 5, 1821, in SAA; Evans to Lee, March 28, 1821, April 7, 1821, in SAA; Lee to Decatur, August 20, 1819, in SAA; Blanchard to Lee, April 29, 1820, May 34, 1820, in SAA.
64 Blanchard to Lee, February 19, 1821, in SAA.
65 Charles H. Fitch,
The Manufacture of Fire-Arms: Report on the Manufactures of the Interchangeable Mechanism, 1880 (1883; rept., Bradley, IL: Lindsay Publications, 1992), 35.
66 Quoted in Cooper,
Shaping Invention, 91.
68 Waters,
Thomas Blanchard, 1.
69 The best sources on Hall are Smith,
Harpers Ferry Armory, 184–251, and R. T. Huntington,
Hall’s Breechloaders: John H. Hall’s Invention and Development of a Breechloading Rifle with Precision-made Interchangeable Parts and Its Introduction into the United States Service (York, PA: G. Shumway, 1972), which has extensive selections from Hall’s correspondence and various official reports on his rifles.
70 John H. Hall,
Remarks upon the Patent Improved Rifles Made by John H. Hall of Portland, ME (pamphlet) (Portland: F. Douglas, 1816) 1, 5 (in the collections of the New York Public Library).
72 Smith,
Harpers Ferry Armory, 186–194.
73 James Thomas Flexner,
Steamboats Come True: American Inventors in Action (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 177–184; Malone,
Jefferson and the Rights of Man, 385–387;
American National Biographical Dictionary online.
74 Huntington,
Hall’s Breechloaders, 3.
75 Smith,
Harpers Ferry Armory, 188.
76 Fitch,
Manufacture of Fire-Arms, 6–7; “U.S. Rifle Model 1819”; John Walter,
Rifles of the World (Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 1998), 159.
77 Smith,
Harpers, 196; Huntington,
Hall’s Breechloaders, 305.
78 Huntington,
Hall’s Breechloaders, 17.
79 The discussion of Hall’s technology contribution draws on Smith,
Harpers Ferry Armory, 224–241, and his “John H. Hall, Simon North, and the Milling Machine: The Nature of Innovation Among Antebellum Arms Makers,”
Technology and Culture 14, no. 4 (October 1973): 573–591; Fitch,
Manufacture of Fire-Arms, 56–63.
80 Raber et al.,
Conservative Innovators, 139–141; Fitch,
Manufacture of Fire-Arms, 7.
81 Smith,
Harpers Ferry Armory, 240–241.
83 The 1827 military board and manufacturing reviews are reprinted in full in Huntington,
Hall’s Breechloaders, 306–323, quotes at 311, 319–320, 323.
84 Gordon, “Simeon North,” 183; Doron Swade,
The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (New York: Viking, 2001), 229.
85 Green,
Eli Whitney, 139.
86 John K. Mahon,
History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1991), 120–121.
87 Robert B. Gordon, “Who Turned the Mechanical Ideal Into Mechanical Reality?”
Technology and Culture 29, no. 14 (October 1988): 744–778.
88 Deyrup,
Arms Makers, 182; Charles T. Haven and Frank A. Belden,
A History of the Colt Revolver and Other Arms Made by Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company from 1836 to 1940 (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1940), 389.
89 Raber et al.,
Conservative Innovators, 98–101.
CHAPTER FIVE
1 Frances Trollope,
Domestic Manners of the Americans, Edited, with a History of Mrs. Trollope’s Adventures in America, by Donald Smalley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949). The biographical note follows Smalley’s. In her book, Trollope makes only the barest allusion to her entrepreneurial activities in Cincinnati.
2 Barbara M. Tucker and Kenneth H. Tucker,
Industrializing Antebellum America: The Rise of Manufacturing Entrepreneurs in the Early Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 47.
3 Trollope,
Domestic Manners, 6.
4 Robert E. Lipsey, “U.S. Foreign Trade and the Balance of Payments, 1800-1913, in
The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2:
The Long Nineteenth Century, Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 685–732 (Table 15.9).
5 Trade data from the Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition Online, Table Ee7.
6 Namsuk Kim and John Joseph Wallis, “The Market for American State Government Bonds in Britain and the United States, 1830 to 1843,” Working Paper 10108, National Bureau of Economic Research, November 2003.
7 Bray Hammond,
Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 268–325. Thomas Payne Govan,
Nicholas Biddle: Nationalist and Public Banker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), is a detailed biography.
8 Hammond,
Banks and Politics, 324, quoting Jacob Viner.
9 Govan,
Nicholas Biddle, 92–95, 95–97, 205–206.
10 For criticism of Biddle, see William M. Gouge,
A Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States (Philadelphia: T. W. Ustick, 1833), 183–184.
11 Hammond,
Banks and Politics, 600–601.
12 Douglass C. North,
The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 66–74.
13 Jeremy Atack and Peter Passell,
A New Economic View of American History, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994), 155.
14 Paul Bairoch, “International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980,”
Journal of European Economic History 11, no. 2 (Fall 1982): 269–333.
15 Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), 1:53.
16 Quoted in Leo Damrosch,
Tocqueville’s Discovery of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 136.
17 Harriet Martineau,
Society in America (New York: Sanders and Otley, 1837), 2:26.
18 Trollope,
Domestic Manners, 43.
22 Charles Dickens,
American Notes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 180.
23 Martineau,
Society in America, 2:211.
24 Damrosch has a fine discussion of Tocqueville’s development of his doctrine of interest, which I follow here. All of the quotes in this section are drawn from his book,
Tocqueville’s Discovery, 47, 136–142.
25 Martineau,
Society in America, 2:1–2, 21.
26 T. J. Stiles,
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 24, 31–32.
27 Niles Weekly Register, June 8, 1816, 234.
28 Louis C. Hunter,
Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), is the basic source. Except as noted, this section is drawn from Hunter.
29 Hunter,
Steamboats, 33, calculates that there were 187 operating steamboats on western rivers in 1830, representing about half of total American tonnage. Since eastern boats tended to be considerably bigger, there would have been correspondingly fewer of them.
32 Trollope,
Domestic Manners, 49.
33 Hunter,
Steamboats, 31–32; Joseph T. Rainier, “The ‘Sharper’ Image: Yankee Peddlers, Southern Consumers, and the Market Revolution,” in
Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America, 1790–1860, ed. Scott C. Martin (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 89–110; David R. Meyer,
The Roots of American Industrialization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 271–277.
35 Dickens,
American Notes, 147.
36 Sean Wilentz, ed.,
Major Problems in the Early Republic, 1789–1848: Documents and Essays (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1992), 175–177.
37 Trollope,
Domestic Manners, 49.
40 Sean Wilentz,
Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1785–1850 (1984; rept., New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 211–275.
41 Rodney Finke and Roger Stark,
The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 89–95.
42 The account herein, and the quotations, are from Trollope,
Domestic Manners, 167–175.
44 For more information about the footnote on page 186, see Robert W. Fogel,
Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964). The basic argument is laid out in the first chapter. Note that Fogel’s argument is organized around agricultural commodities as the primary railroad freight, which permits him much greater flexibility in discounting the value of speed. Later in the century, railroad speed, in my view, was an essential precondition to the mass consumption economy.
45 J. Parker Lamb,
Perfecting the American Steam Locomotive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 7–9.
46 John F. Stover,
American Railroads (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 21–25; Christian Wolmar,
Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railroads Transformed the World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 70–75; John H. White, Jr.,
American Locomotives: An Engineering History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 8–10.
47 Harriet Martineau,
Society in America (New York: Sanders and Otley, 1837), 2:10–11.
48 British data are from Grace’s Guide (
www.gracesguide.co.uk), which accumulates the data from
Bradshaw’s Manual, the equivalent of Henry Poor’s compilations for the United States. The American data is from Old Railroad History (
www.oldrailhistory.com), which accumulates the data from Poor’s and several other manuals and reconciles them with those of the Census Bureau. The manuals give slightly higher numbers in earlier years and converge about 1850.
49 Robert V. Remini,
Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 252–255.
50 Trollope,
Domestic Manners, 227, 235.
51 William B. Sipes,
The Pennsylvania Railroad: Its Origins, Construction, Condition, and Connections (Philadelphia: Passenger Department of the Pennsylvania Railroad, 1875), 7–8.
52 Dickens,
American Notes, 139–140.
53 William Bender Wilson, “Altoona to Pittsburgh,” in
History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Co. (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates, 1899), 1:94–164.
54 Edward Harold Mott,
Between the Ocean and the Lakes: The Story of Erie (New York: John S. Collins, 1899), 356.
55 Mott,
Between the Ocean and the Lakes, 350, 352.
56 Ibid., 92–93; Frederick Lyman Hitchcock,
History of Scranton and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Pub., 1914), 1:23–26.
57 The account of the excursion follows Mott,
Between the Ocean and the Lakes, 90–101.
59 Ibid., 91–92; Stover,
American Railroads, 41.
60 Mott,
Between the Ocean and the Lakes, 104.
61 Herzog zu Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach Bernhard, “
Reise Sr. Hoheit des Herzogs Bernard zu Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach durch Nord Amerika, in den Jahren 1825
und 1826,
” (Weimar: W. Hoffman, 1828); Captain Basil Hall,
Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828, Royal Navy, 3 vols. 12 mo. Edin.,
Quarterly Review 41, no. 82 (1829): 417–447, at 427, 420–421, 445. An English language version of the duke’s book is William Jeroninus, trans.,
Travels by His Highness Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimer-Eisenach Through North America in the Years 1825 and 1826 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001). Although an interesting travelogue, it is much blander than Trollope or Dickens and lacks the insight of a Tocqueville.
CHAPTER SIX
1 Robert A. Margo, “The Labor Force in the Nineteenth Century,” in Engerman and Gallman, eds.,
The Long Nineteenth Century, 213.
2 Robert A. Gallman, “Growth and Change in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Engerman and Gallman, eds.,
The Long Nineteenth Century, 52 (Table 1.15).
3 Stuart M. Blumin,
The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 112–117; Brian P. Luskey,
Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 42–45, 89–91, 219.
4 Robert W. Fogel,
The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11.
5 Jim Downs,
Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4, 21–30, 170–180; Fogel,
Escape, 16–18.
6 Albert Fishlow, “The American Common School Revival: Fact or Fantasy?” in
Industrialization in Two Systems: Essays in Honor of Alexander Gerschenkron, Henry Rosovsky, ed. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1966), 40–67.
7 “Special Report of Joseph Whitworth, 1854,” in Nathan Rosenberg, ed.,
The American System of Manufactures: Report of the Committee on the Machinery of the United States, 1855 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969), 388–389.
8 Stephen N. Broadberry and Douglas A. Irwin, “Labor productivity in the United States and the United Kingdom During the Nineteenth Century,” Working Paper 10364, National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2004, 22 (Table 3).
9 There is no biography of Bird; the information here is from Wikipedia, which cites a biographical note from an introduction to one of her travel books, which I was not able to find.
10 Isabella L. Bird,
The Englishwoman in America (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1856), 141.
11 Isabella L. Bird,
A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1879–1880), 91.
13 Ibid., 295–296; “Historical Background for the Rocky Mountain National Park” (
www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/berkeley/rensch3/rensch3f.htm). The details of Nugent’s death, such as they are, and the “cowardly” comment are from the National Park Service literature on Estes Park, where Bird lived. Given the backgrounds of Evans and Nugent, it seems unlikely that Evans, who was usually drunk, could have killed Nugent in a fair fight. Estes Park was also the area where Alfred Bierstadt executed his famous Illuminist-school Rocky Mountain paintings.
14 Bird,
Englishwoman, 114.
20 Rudolf A. Clemen, “Waterways in Livestock and Meat Trade,”
American Economic Review 16, no. 4 (December 1926): 640–652, 646.
21 Bird,
Englishwoman, 125.
22 Steve C. Gordon, “From Slaughterhouse to Soap-Boiler: Cincinnati’s Meat Packing Industry, Changing Technologies, and the Rise of Mass Production, 1825–1870,”
Journal for the Society of Industrial Archaeology 16, no. 1 (1990): 55–67; Charles T. Levitt, “Aspects of the Western Meat-Packing Industry, 1830–1860,”
Journal of Business of the University of Chicago 4, no. 1 (January 1931): 68–90.
23 Levitt, “Western Meat-Packing,” 76–80. For more information about the footnote on page 205, on plant decentralization, see Robert Adudel and Louis P. Cain, “Location and Collusion in the Meatpacking Industry,” in
Business Enterprise and Economic Change: Essays in Honor of Harold F. Williamson, Louis P. Cain and Paul Uselding, eds. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1973), 85–117.
24 Gordon, “From Slaughterhouse to Soap-Boiler,” 56.
25 David Hounshell,
From the American System to Mass Production (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 241.
28 Except as indicated, the detailed descriptions of lard processing are from Gordon, “From Slaughterhouse to Soap-Boiler.”
30 Richard L. Bushman and Claudia L. Bushman, “The Early History of Cleanliness in America,”
Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (March 1988): 1213–1238.
31 Thomas L. Ilgen, “‘Better Living Through Chemistry’: The Chemical Industry in the World Economy,”
International Organization 37, no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 647–680, 650.
32 Chemistry was the first of the natural sciences to take root in American academia. See I. Bernard Cohen, “The Beginning of Chemical Instruction in America: A Brief Account of the Teaching of Chemistry at Harvard Prior to 1800,”
Chymia 3 (1950): 17–44; Glenn Sonnedecker, “The Scientific Background of Chemistry Teachers in Representative Pharmacy Schools of the United States During the 19th Century,”
Chymia 4 (1953): 171–200; and Daniel J. Kevles et al., “The Sciences in America, Circa 1880,”
Science n.s. 209, no. 4452 (July 1980): 26–32.
33 Bird,
Englishwoman, 122.
34 Vincent S. Clark,
History of Manufacturing in the United States, 1607–1860 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916), 467–472. This is an older source, but it was the outcome of a decade-long project by the Carnegie Endowment to assemble the available contemporary sources. The sources for the study are primarily the census,
Niles Weekly Register, and other sources that are still the starting point for the field.
35 J. Richards,
A Treatise of the Construction and Operation of Wood-Working Machines, Including a History of the Origin and Progress of the Manufacture of Wood-Working Machinery (London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1872), 132–133.
37 Joseph Whitworth, “Special Report,” in Rosenberg,
American System, 346.
38 Except as indicated, information on Mitchell and Rammelsberg are from Donald C. Peirce, “Mitchell and Rammelsberg, Cincinnati Furniture Manufacturing 1847–1881,” in
American Furniture and Its Makers, Winterthur Portfolio 13, Ian M. G. Quimby, ed. (Chicago: Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum by the University of Chicago Press, 1979), 209–229.
39 Michael J. Ettema, “Technological Innovation and Design Economics in Furniture Manufacture,” in
American Furniture and Its Makers, Winterthur Portfolio 16, no. (Summer/Autumn 1981) (Chicago: Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum by the University of Chicago Press, 1981), 197–223. Richards,
Treatise, includes detailed descriptions and engravings of specimens of all the machines mentioned here.
40 Richards,
Treatise, iii–v, 30–35.
41 Quoted in Peirce, “Mitchell and Rammelsberg,” 217.
42 Rosenberg,
American System, 7n.
43 David R. Meyer, “Midwestern American Manufacturing and the American Manufacturing Belt in the Nineteenth Century,”
Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4 (December 1989): 921–937.
44 T. J. Stiles,
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 99–103, 123–127.
45 John H. Morrison,
History of the New York Ship Yards (New York: Sametz, 1909), 95–96, 102.
46 David Budlong Tyler,
Steam Conquers the Atlantic (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1939), 164–169.
47 Cedric Ridgely-Nevitt,
American Steamships on the Atlantic, (Newark Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1981) 149
–177; Tyler,
Steam Conquers, 181–183.
48 Stiles,
First Tycoon, 194–212.
50 Ibid., 227–233; Ridgely-Nevitt,
American Steamships, 222–248.
51 Tyler,
Steam Conquers, 336–337; Morrison,
New York Ship Yards, 155–156.
52 Tyler,
Steam Conquers, 352–353; Charles R. Morris,
The Tycoons (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2005), 277–281.
53 Except as indicated, this account is drawn from John K. Brown,
The Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1831–1915 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
54 Malcolm C. Clark, “The Birth of an Enterprise: Baldwin Locomotive, 1831–1842,”
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 90, no. 4 (October 1966): 423–444, 426.
55 Clark, “Birth of an Enterprise,” has a detailed account of Baldwin’s financial scramblings. For company rankings, see Brown,
Baldwin Locomotive, Appendix B.
56 Brown,
Baldwin Locomotive, 95.
57 Except as indicated, this section is drawn from Louis C. Hunter’s splendid
A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930, vol. 2:
Steam Power (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985). Chapter 5 is devoted entirely to the Corliss engine; the quote is at 264. I have also reviewed the patent descriptions, the most important one of which is the first, United States Patent Office: Geo. H. Corliss of Providence, Rhode Island, Cut-Off and Working the Valves of Steam Engines, No. 6, 162, dated March 10, 1849.
58 John S. Ritenour, “Master Minds of Type and Press,”
Inland Printer 57, no. 2 (May 1916): 205–207.
59 The material on printers is all drawn from Robert Hoe,
A Short History of the Printing Press and of the Improvements in Printing Machinery from the Time of Gutenberg up to the Present Day (New York: privately published, 1902). This Robert Hoe was the nephew of Robert Hoe III, the grandson of the founder who was still running the firm at the time of publication.
60 Luther D. Burlingame, “How We Came to Have the Micrometer Caliper,”
Machinery 22 (September 1916): 58–59.
61 Phillip Scranton,
Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 363n62.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1 “Specification of the Patent Granted to James Hartley, of Sunderland, Glass Manufacturer, for Improvements in the Manufacture of Glass,” enrolled April 7, 1848,
The Repertory of Patent Inventions, enl. series 11 (London: Alexander MacIntosh, 1848), 297–298.
2 David W. Shaw,
America’s Victory: The Heroic Triumph of a Gang of Ordinary Americans—and How They Won the Greatest Yacht Race Ever (New York: Free Press, 2002), 155–156.
3 Except as indicated, the account here is drawn from Shaw,
America’s Victory; for the Baltimore Clippers, Geoffrey M. Footner,
Tidewater Triumph: The Development and Worldwide Success of the Chesapeake Bay Pilot Schooner (Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1998), 101–109.
4 Shaw,
America’s Victory, 184.
8 Nathan Rosenberg, Introduction to
The American System of Manufactures: The Report of the Committee on the Machinery of the United States 1855, Nathan Rosenberg, ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969), 1–53, at 7–8. The events of the exhibition and the
Punch doggerel are drawn from Rosenberg’s account.
9 Except as noted, the Collinsville account is drawn from Donald R. Hoke,
The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 102–130. Paul Uselding, “Elisha K. Root, Forging and the ‘American System,’”
Technology and Culture 15, no. 4 (October 1974): 543–568, is still useful, but his technical discussion has been superseded by Hoke.
10 Robert B. Gordon, “Material Evidence of the Development of Metalworking Technology at the Collins Axe Factory,”
Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology 9, no. 1 (1983): 19–28.
11 E. K. Root, Punching Mach., Patent No. 1027, December 10, 1838.
12 For Colt, beside the Colt correspondence at the library of the Connecticut Historical Society (hereafter Colt Correspondence, CHS), I use Barbara M. Tucker and Kenneth H. Tucker Jr.,
Industrializing Antebellum America: The Rise of Manufacturing Entrepreneurs in the Early Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 13–71 (for family and background); Herbert G. Houze, Carolyn C. Cooper, and Elizabeth Mankin Kornhouser,
Samuel Colt: Arms, Art, and Invention, (New Haven, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2006); Charles T. Haven and Frank A. Belden,
A History of the Colt Revolver and Other Arms Made by Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company from 1836 to 1940 (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1940).
13 Tucker and Tucker,
Industrializing, 30; Houze,
Samuel Colt, 66.
14 Houze,
Samuel Colt, 66–67.
15 The dispute is captured in Christopher Colt to Samuel Colt, April 10, 1837; Dudley Selden to Samuel Colt, July 1 and 3, 1837, in Box 1, Colt Correspondence, CHS.
16 S. Colt, Impt. in Fire Arms. Patent No. 1304, August 29, 1839. There would be many more improvements, but this patent moves the appearance and the mechanisms of the pistol much closer to those of the 1850s and 1860s. A number of the improvements Colt cites in his 1855 lecture (discussed later in this chapter) are first seen in this patent.
17 Lawton to Colt, August 3, 1837, in Box 1, Colt Correspondence, CHS.
18 Haven and Belden,
History, 389.
19 Colonel Samuel Colt, “On the Application of Machinery to the Manufacture of Rotating Chambered-Breech Fire-Arms,”
Excerpt Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, vol. 11, November 25, 1851 (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1855), 12.
20 Rosenberg,
American System, 32–39.
21 Report from the Select Committee on Small Arms: Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix, 1854 (236), Testimony of Mr. J. Nasmyth, 123, Qs. 1662 and 1663.
22 Report of the Committee on the Machinery of the United States of America, reprinted in Rosenberg, ed.,
American System, 87–197, at 89.
23 “Colonel Colt’s Small Arms Manufactory,”
Newton’s London Journal of Arts and Sciences n.s. 13, vol. 3 (1856): 1–11, 65–75.
24 Some details of the building are from Howard L. Blackmore, “Colt’s London Armory,” in
Technological Change: The United States and Britain in the 19th Century, S. B. Saul, ed. (Suffolk, UK: Methuen & Co., 1970), 171–195.
25 “Colonel Colt’s Small Arms,” 4.
26 Nasmyth Testimony, Q. 1441.
27 Quoted in Rosenberg,
American System, 45–46.
28 Charles Dickens, “Description of Colonel Colt’s Fire-Arm Manufactory,”
Household Words, May 27, 1854, reprinted in Appendix to Colt, “On the Application.”
29 Report on Machinery, 128.
31 My judgment, from the James-Sam correspondence.
32 Haven and Belden,
Samuel Colt, 62–63.
33 Colt, “Application of Machinery,” 13; David Hounshell,
From the American System to Mass Production (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 23, 21.
34 Hounshell,
From the American System, 67–89, supplemented by multiple Willcox & Gibbs collectors’ websites.
35 Hoke,
Rise of the American System, 133.
38 See tables in Allen H. Fenichel, “Growth and Diffusion of Power in Manufacturing,” in
Studies in Income and Wealth, vol. 30:
Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States After 1800, ed. Dorothy S. Brady (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1966), 443–478.
39 Duncan M. McDougall, “Machine Tool Output, 1861–1910,” Brady, ed.,
Output, Employment, 502.
40 Robert A. Margo, “The Labor Force in the Nineteenth Century,” in
The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2:
The Long Nineteenth Century, Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 214.
41 Eric Foner,
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 301–307; Roy E. Basler, ed.,
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), 3:361–363; Wilma A. Dunaway,
The First American Frontier: The Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1760–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 268–272.
42 Commodity and physical output data are from Robert S. Manthy,
Natural Resource Commodities—A Century of Statistics: Prices, Output, Consumption, Foreign Trade, and Employment in the United States, 1870–1913 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), Tables N-1, 2, 4, and 5; MC-11, 20, and MO-3; for food, Tables AC-11, 12, 9, and 10. There are no comprehensive data on railroad loadings for this period, so I took a sample of large roads from the relevant
Poor’s Manual of Railroads (Henry V. Poor,
Poor’s Manual of Railroads [New York: Poor’s Publishing, 1869]). For the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy; Lake Shore and Michigan and Southern; New York Central; Pennsylvania; and Union Pacific from 1871 (1872 for Union Pacific) to 1877, freight tonnage rose, respectively, 135 percent, 46 percent, 40 percent, 47 percent, and 89 percent, which is roughly consistent with the increases in commodity output. The 6.2 percent annual real growth rate is from the
Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition, Tables Ca9-19, for the years 1870–1880. The phenomenon is even sharper if measured from 1869–1879. Nominal annual growth was only 1.2 percent, but real growth, at 4.4 percent, was 3.7 times as high.
43 Robert E. Gallman, “Economic Growth and Structural Change in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Engerman and Gallman, eds.,
The Long Nineteenth Century, 1–56; Ra-jabrata Banerjee, “The US-UK Productivity Gap Since 1870: Contributions from Technology and Population,” Working Paper 2011–03, Centre for Regulation and Market Analysis, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1 The story summarized in this chapter was the primary subject of my book
The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).
2 Henrietta M. Larson,
Jay Cooke, Private Banker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936).
3 Hiram A. Drache, “The Day of the Bonanza: A History of Bonanza Farming in the Red River Valley of the North,” (Fargo, ND: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1964).
4 Jimmy M. Skaggs,
Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the United States, 1607–
1983 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1983), 50–89 (ranching) and 90–129 (meatpacking); and Robert Adudell and Louis Cain, “Location and Collusion in the Meatpacking Industry,” in Louis P. Cain and Paul J. Uselding, eds.,
Business Enterprise and Economic Change: Essays in Honor of Harold F. Williamson (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1973), 85–117.
5 A. L. Holley and Lenox Smith, “American Iron and Steel Works, No. XXI, the works of the Edgar Thomson Steel Works (Limited),”
Engineer (London), April 19, 1878, 295–301; April 26, 1878, 313–317; May 17, 1878, 381–384.
6 Jeanne McHugh,
Alexander Holley and the Masters of Steel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 253.
7 Peter Temin,
Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America: An Economic Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964), “Appendix C: Statistics of Iron and Steel,” 264–285 (for American prices); D. L. Burn,
The Economic History of Steelmaking, 1867–
1939: A Study in Competition (Cambridge, UK: University Press, 1940), 103 (for British fob rail export prices.) Elbert Gary testimony in
Hearings before the Committee on Investigation of United States Steel Corporation, 8 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1912), I:220.
8 Allan Nevins,
John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 1:486.
9 Harold F. Williamson and Arnold R. Daum,
The American Petroleum Industry, vol. 1:
The Age of Illumination, 1859–1899 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1959), 6.
10 This section closely follows my treatment in
The Tycoons.
11 Paul Bairoch, “International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980,”
Journal of European Economic History 11, no. 2 (Fall 1982): 269–333; Stephen N. Broadberry and Douglas Irwin, “Labor Productivity in the United States and the United Kingdom During the Nineteenth Century,” NBER Working Paper 10364, March 2004; W. Arthur Lewis,
Growth and Fluctuation, 1870–1913 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978), 17–18.
12 J. Stephen Jeans, ed.,
American Industrial Conditions and Competition: Reports of the Commissioners Appointed by the British Iron Trade Association to Enquire into the Iron, Steel, and Allied Industries of the United States (London, 1902), and Frank Popplewell,
Some Modern Conditions and Recent Developments in Iron and Steel Production in America (Manchester, UK: University Press, 1906).
13 Jeans,
American Industrial Conditions, 306–307.
14 Popplewell,
Some Modern Conditions, 103.
15 Jeans,
American Industrial Conditions, 121.
16 D. L. Burn,
The Economic History of Steelmaking, 1867–1939: A Study in Competition (Cambridge, UK: University Press, 1940), 208, 106.
17 A conversation with the author.
18 Jagdish Bhagwati and Douglas A. Irwin, “The Return of the Reciprocitarians: U.S. Trade Policy Today,”
World Economy 10, no. 2 (June 1987): 113.
19 Burn,
Economic History of Steelmaking, 312.
20 Jeremiah Whipple Jenks,
The Trust Problem (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1914), 44.
21 American rail prices from Peter Temin, “Appendix C: Statistics of Iron and Steel,” in
Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America: An Economic Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 264–285; British fob rail export prices from Burn,
Economic History of Steelmaking , 103.
22 Niall Ferguson,
The House of Rothschild, vol. 2:
The World’s Banker, 1849–1999 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999), background at 360–368, quote 367.
23 Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition, Table Ee7.
24 Lance E. Davis and Robert C. Cull, “International Capital Movements, Domestic Capital Markets, and American Economic Growth, 1820–1914,” in
The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2:
The Long Nineteenth Century, Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 733–812.
CHAPTER NINE
1 My understanding of Chinese issues was greatly advanced by a series of roundtable discussions at the Council on Foreign Relations, coordinated by Jerome Cohen of New York University and Elizabeth Economy at the Council. Speakers included, among others, Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute; Kerry Brown, University of Sydney; and Patrick Chovanec of Tsing Hua University. I also benefited from discussions with Dr. Economy and Matt Pottinger, a Council fellow.
2 Michael Spence,
The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), Chapter 16: “The Middle-Income Transition.”
3 Ann Woolner et al., “The Great Brain Robbery,”
Businessweek, March 15, 2012.
4 Siobhan Norman, “Chinese Hackers Suspected in Long-Term Nortel Breach,”
Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2012.
5 U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, “2011 Report to Congress of the United States,” November 2011, 174–175; Art Coviello, Executive Chairman of RSA, “Open Letter to RSA Customers” (undated),
www.rsa.com./node.aspx?id=3872
6 John Bussey, “China Venture Is Good for GE but Is It Good for the United States?”
Wall Street Journal, September 30, 2011; Audrey Cohen, “GE to Develop Avionics with Chinese Firm,”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 19, 2011.
7 David Caploe, “China High-End Value Added—The German Connection,”
Economy Watch, September 14, 2010.
8 James McGregor, “China’s Drive for ‘Indigenous Innovation’: A Web of Industrial Policies,”
U.S. Chamber of Commerce (2011): 4.
10 Elizabeth C. Economy,
The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); “China’s Growing Water Crisis,”
World Politics Review, August 9, 2011; “China’s Global Quest for Resources and Implications for the United States,” testimony Prepared for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, January 26, 2012; Edward Wong, “Plan for China’s Water Crisis Spurs Concern,”
New York Times, June 1, 2001.
11 “A Comparison with America Reveals a Deep Flaw in China’s Model of Growth,”
Economist, April 21, 2012; “The Consequences of an Aging Population,”
Economist, June 23, 2011.
12 “Table A.33: World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision,” Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations; Nicholas R. Lardy,
Sustaining China’s Economic Growth After the Financial Crisis (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute of International Economics, 2012), 126.
13 Lardy,
Sustaining China’s Economic Growth, 1–2.
14 Ibid., 43–65, quote at 51.
15 Patrick Chovanec, “Should China Be Bracing Itself for a Hard Landing?” March 24, 2012; “Bloomberg: Inflated Notions,” April 21, 2012; “Roubini/Chovanec,” February 9, 2012; “WSJ: Chinese Banks Are Worse Off Than You Think,” July 22, 2011; and “Chinese Banks’ Illusory Earnings,” April 1, 2011,
Patrick Chovanec: An American Perspective from China (blog),
chovanec.wordpress.com.
16 Jing Wu et al., “Evaluating Conditions in China’s Major Housing Markets,” NBER Working Paper 16189, July 2010.
17 David Barboza and Sharon LaFraniere, “‘Princelings’ in China Use Family Ties to Gain Riches,”
New York Times, May 17, 2012; Catherine Tai, “The ‘Princelings’ and China’s Corruption Woes,”
CIPE Development Blog, August 5, 2009,
www.cipe.org/blog.
APPENDIX
1 Angela Lakwete,
Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 45.
2 Whitney and Greene corresponded regularly the rest of her life, and his regular trips to the South were usually built around visiting with Greene. In Whitney’s youthful correspondence with Yale friends, he affected a kind of pre-Raphaelite sensibility, which he maintains throughout the Greene correspondence. The letters seem mawkish today, but it’s hard to believe that they were not motivated by genuine feeling. Whitney did not marry until he was fifty-one, nearly a decade after Greene’s death.
5 Ibid., private communication.
9 Constance McLaughlin Green,
Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956), 48.
10 Eli Whitney, “Description of a New Invented Cotton Gin,” US Patent (X)72, copy of patent filed June 20, 1793, certified correct by James Madison, Secretary of State, November 25, 1903.
11 P. J. Federico, “Records of Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin Patent,”
Technology and Culture 1, no. 2 (Spring 1960): 168–176. (Quotes in the footnote are on 173.) Federico was examiner in chief of the United States Patent Office.
12 Whitney, “Description.”
13 Miller to Whitney, April 19, 1797; Whitney to Stebbins, November 27, 1798; Miller to Whitney, June 6, 1800, in Eli Whitney Correspondence, Yale University.