The Rise of Industry

By James P. Walsh

In the period from 1818 to 1876, Connecticut's economy shifted decisively from agriculture to industry. It is true that farming remained important and that the hay crop in 1845 was worth more than all the textiles made in the state's factories. But industry increased steadily, and people realized that a new social order was emerging as a result.

Connecticut became the home of several new manufactures after 1818, such as pins, sewing machines, rubber, and silver-plating, but it was the industries already long established that accounted for the most significant growth. Danbury, for example, was a major hat-making town in the eighteenth century; that industry continued to grow. Similarly, Waterbury further developed her brass works, Plymouth her clock industry, Vernon her cotton mills and New Haven her firearms factories. Measured by value of output, Connecticut had seven "million-dollar industries" in 1845: woolens, cotton textiles, ironware, shoes, coaches, paper, and brass. The Civil War does not seem to have retarded industrial growth in Connecticut, as it did elsewhere, and by 1870 nearly half of all the people who went to work in Connecticut reported to a factory. In fact, in terms of how the work force has been employed, Connecticut probably reached its most intense industrial development around 1870.

Industrialization created immense wealth and immense problems. Two of the most obvious problems were the employment of children and the dangerous conditions that existed in some factories. In 1855 the General Assembly prohibited anyone under the age of nine from being employed in manufacturing, and regulated the hours that could be worked by those below the age of eighteen. In 1874 Connecticut established a Labor Bureau to report on factory conditions. A more subtle but more important problem was the new social system that the factories were creating, a system in which one man controlled the lives of many. It seemed to many people in the nineteenth century that American democracy could not exist unless most adult, white males owned their own property and were their own masters.

Contrary to general belief, most factory workers were adult males. In 1874 in Connecticut they made up nearly 80% of the industrial work force. Because of the triumph of universal manhood suffrage, finally achieved in Connecticut in 1845, all of these men could vote, but they depended upon an employer for their rent and their groceries. Would not the factory owner translate his economic control into political power? In a famous incident in Lowell, Massachusetts, the owners of a factory threatened to fire workers who voted for certain candidates in a local election. No such blatant interference with the right to vote took place in Connecticut, but the dependence of the worker on his boss often became painfully apparent. In 1833, for example, when seventy-one weavers at the Thompsonville Carpet Company in Enfield went on strike, the Company sent eviction notices to all strikers living in its houses and hired weavers from out of Connecticut. The strike then collapsed. Until workers organized effective labor unions, which was long after 1876, their position was always precarious. It was this "servile" dependence which explains why so many Yankees left Connecticut for a farm in the West, while immigrants were taking the jobs that the factories were creating.

Yet, the nightmare visions of an America ruled by an oligarchy of greedy Industrialists who controlled the votes of vast armies of brutish workers never materialized, and one should be wary of describing the rise of industry as if it brought only problems. For the average person in Connecticut, industrialization brought greater wealth, greater opportunity, greater equality, and a more interesting way of life.

For Further Reading

A good general history of industry in Connecticut is Clive Day, The Rise of Manufacturing in Connecticut, 1820-1850 (New Haven, Connecticut, 1935).

* Entry under revision.