Slater, Samuel: Was Slater a traitor to his homeland
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Nicola Rippon looks at the life of Samuel Slater, one of Belper’s most famous sons.
     
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But it is a pride shared by the people of Belper in Derbyshire, for it was the actions of a son of the town that enabled Pawtucket to kick-start the American industrial revolution and introduce mass production into the USA.
Samuel Slater was born at Holly House Farm, Blackbrook, in June 1768, the middle son of William Slater, a middle-class landowner.
His father was a business associate of Jedediah Strutt, former partner of Richard Arkwright and owner of several of the most advanced textile mills in the world.
In 1783, Strutt offered William Slater an apprenticeship for one of his sons. When Samuel was chosen, neither his father, nor employer, could have imagined the enormous influence he would have on the growth of the textile industry in the United States, nor the dramatic stagnation his “defection” to the rival industry would cause in Britain.
A responsible employee, an able and enthusiastic student, gifted bookkeeper, administrator, spinner and mechanic, Slater had soon been promoted to supervisor.
He was precisely the kind of employee the owners of the struggling textile industry in the US were hoping to attract.
Thanks to entrepreneurs like Strutt and Arkwright, Britain had by far the strongest textile production in the world with sound business structures, innovative and efficient machinery and a high-quality product.
The Government were so afraid that designs based on the machinery that gave British industry its edge might be stolen that, in 1774, it had introduced laws prohibiting the transportation of textile machinery or plans and forbidding workers from travelling to America, then still a British colony.
Fifteen years later, however, the newly independent United States had a significant skills vacuum and relied heavily on imported textiles.
Thus, American businessmen were willing to offer large sums of money to anyone who could design a machine to rival those of the British textile industry.
Although he had to break the law, effectively betray his employer and deceive his family, in 1789 Samuel Slater boarded a ship bound for New York, disguised as an agricultural worker, his indenture papers sewn into his clothes.
By November, Slater had found work in a small New York textile mill, but determined to find a better opportunity.
In December, he wrote to Moses Brown, a Quaker, and his partner William Almy, who were attempting to replicate British textiles in Rhode Island.
“I can give the greatest satisfaction, in making machinery, making good yarn, either for stockings or twist, as any that is made in England; as I have had opportunity, and an oversight, of Sir Richard Arkwright’s works, and in Mr Strutt’s mill upwards of eight years...If you please to drop a line respecting the amount of encouragement you wish to give...your most obedient humble servant, Samuel Slater.”
An offer such as this was manna from heaven for an American textile manufacturer. Brown replied immediately: “We are destitute of a person acquainted with water-frame spinning...If thy present situation does not come up to what thou wishest...come and work [with] ours and have the credit as well as the advantage of perfecting the first watermill in America.”
This was precisely the opportunity the 21-year-old Slater had been anticipating. Once he arrived in Providence, Slater realised that the machines were simply not good enough to adapt.
But the partners were initially reluctant to scrap their expensive machinery until Slater rebuilt one of the spinning frames to his own design.
They were so impressed with Slater’s machine that they immediately agreed to replace the old equipment with two new frames.
Remarkably, Slater had been able to produce a working copy of Arkwright’s original from memory, into which he had incorporated local ideas and designs to create a unique piece of machinery.
Although Slater’s creations would prove very damaging to the British textile industry, in 1795 he dared to send a sample of the cotton he had produced to Strutt, who complimented him on its quality.
After two years’ profitable, if small-scale, manufacture, Almy and Brown agreed to finance the building of a new water-powered mill on a bank of the Blackstone River at the nearby settlement of Pawtucket.
The name Pawtucket means “waterfall” in the local language, and it was here that the meandering Blackstone River dropped significantly before it flowed out towards Narragansett Bay.
For so long a convenient crossing point between the territories of the Narragansett and Wampanoag Indians, it was also notable for its abundant supply of fish – salmon, shad and alewives in particular.
The fresh drinking water and fishing had also attracted European setters, and numerous farms had been established there.
Now it would become, literally, the driving force of Slater’s new water-powered mill.
Industry had already been established in Pawtucket, but this was mostly small-scale ironworks, producing farm tools and anchors.
It was not until the opening of the Slater Mill – the first of its kind in the New World – that the settlement of Pawtucket became the birthplace of the American industrial revolution.
In 1797, Slater built his own White Mill, on the opposite bank of the river, yet he suffered considerable anti-English prejudice from the newly independent American citizens, and his attempts to bring in the English system of hiring women and children from distant communities failed miserably.
He quickly adapted by creating tenant farms around his mills so that entire families would be enticed to join his workforce.
He built houses within walking distance of the mills and opened company stores, schools and churches. It was a pattern that Slater would utilise time and time again, and which would be copied across the country.
So successful were Slater’s mills that dozens of others sprung up in the area, drawing both investment and migration from the Old World.
In the 10 years that followed, more than 80 cotton mills and many new villages were built in America. Slater had kick-started the country’s own industrial revolution.
By 1800, the town of Pawtucket boasted 29 cotton mills. Other mill villages like Uxbridge, Millville and Woonsocket grew up along the river. By the 1830s, there was one dam for every mile of river and its tributaries.
One such village was that of Slatersville, built by Samuel and his brother, John, on the Branch River. It was the first American village built solely for the purpose of producing cloth and it became a model for industrial villages all over America. By 1807, the community boasted the largest and most modern industrial building in the country, tenement housing for workers and a local general store to which much of the workers’ pay was given in return for credit.
In 1833, President Andrew Jackson paid Slater a visit and told him: “I understand you taught us how to spin...you have set thousands of spindles at work, which I have been delighted in viewing, and which have made so many happy, by a lucrative employment.”
Slater replied: “Yes sir, I suppose that I gave out the psalm and they have been singing the tune ever since.”
When, at the end of his visit, Jackson bestowed upon Slater the honorary title of “father of American manufactures”, it was by no means an exaggeration.
By 1835, the year of Slater’s death, America was producing more than 80 million lbs of cotton a year, compared with two million in the year he moved to Rhode Island.
He had amassed a personal fortune of 1.2 million dollars and had become one of the most famous and respected men in his adopted land.
In November 1986, the United States Congress established the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor to “preserve and interpret significant historic and cultural lands, waterways and structures in the Valley”. It is much in the vein of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site, where Slater had learned his trade.
Like the early mills of Arkwright and Strutt, Slater’s first mill in Pawtucket is a popular tourist attraction and even his hometown of Belper, which lost much of its overseas trade to the new Slater businesses, celebrates his contribution. In 1994, Belper was officially twinned with Pawtucket.
This article is from the Derby Evening Telegraph and is reproduced online here.
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