{"id":1180,"date":"2024-12-19T13:18:17","date_gmt":"2024-12-19T18:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/?p=1180"},"modified":"2024-12-19T13:18:17","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T18:18:17","slug":"anne-callahan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/2024\/12\/19\/anne-callahan\/","title":{"rendered":"Anne Callahan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anne Callahan<\/strong> is a PhD student in American Studies at Boston University studying representations of work and free time in 19th and early 20th century North American media, with particular attention in the opportunistic use of working hours for play, invention, and personal profit, and the creation and theorization of alternatives to managerial workplaces.<\/em><\/p>\n

Noise and Work in Nineteenth-Century Lowell, Massachusetts: Stone Blasting, Shouts and Hissing, and Ringing in My Ears<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Noise characterized the experience of work in nineteenth-century Lowell, Massachusetts. Plotted into existence by Boston investors eager to create a model industrial city, Lowell was under construction even before the town was incorporated in 1826.[1]<\/span><\/a> By the 1840s, visitors to Lowell marveled at the \u201cjar and whirl of these crowded and noisy mills,\u201d the inescapable \u201cnoise of hammers, of spindles,\u201d and the \u201cterrific \u2026 thumpings\u201d of the water wheel.[2]<\/span><\/a> Yankee women who moved from rural New England for jobs as \u201coperatives\u201d \u2013 workers who operated industrial machinery \u2013 wrote and received letters about the \u201cnoisey factory\u201d and the \u201cdin and clatter of machinery.\u201d[3]<\/span><\/a> They dramatized the \u201cstrange discord,\u201d the \u201cclick-clack\u201d of the shuttles, and \u201cthe whizzing and singing\u201d of spinning machines in published stories and poems.[4]<\/span><\/a> Factory bells sounded as many as six times a day, prompting one operative to parody the \u201cding dong of a bell.\u201d[5]<\/span><\/a> Workers went home to a \u201cnoisy tenement,\u201d celebrated the Fourth of July with cannon fire, and summoned the police to quiet disturbers of the peace.[6]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Nineteenth-century Americans told stories about noise in part to make sense of transformations in familiar environments and economic, social, and political relations. The image of the quiet country village transformed into the noisy manufacturing city pervaded newspaper and magazine stories in the second half of the nineteenth century. Depending on the context, this flexible rhetorical device could portend moral corruption, trigger colonial nostalgia, or demonstrate U.S. ingenuity and cosmopolitanism to audiences abroad. \u201cThe hum of industry is now heard where a year ago all was silent as the tomb,\u201d cheered the metalworkers\u2019 trade magazine The Iron Age <\/em>in 1890, echoing earlier settler narratives that justified land expropriation as the improvement of \u201cvacant soyle\u201d and \u201cbarren wilderness\u201d through agriculture.[7]<\/span><\/a> Industrial development elicited laments as well as cheers. A poem published in a textile trade magazine in 1896 bemoaned that \u201cthe factory whistle roar \/ And screeching scream\u201d had replaced \u201cNature\u2019s joyous harmony.\u201d[8]<\/span><\/a> The language nineteenth-century Americans used to describe their \u201cheard world\u201d suggested prosperity and sociability as well as terror and loss of control.[9]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

In this essay I examine three accounts of noises that interfered with \u2013 \u201cdrowned\u201d or \u201cput down\u201d \u2013 other sounds in Lowell in the period from 1835 to 1846. Following sound studies scholar Mark M. Smith, I use \u201csound\u201d as a generic term for any element of the \u201cheard world,\u201d and define \u201cnoise\u201d as \u201cgratuitous\u201d sound \u2013 sound that some hearers, at least, deemed loud, noxious, inescapable, or alienating.[10]<\/span><\/a> I relate each description of noisy interference to the work culture emerging in this period, as cotton mill investors struggled to maintain the mills\u2019 famously high dividends and preserve Lowell\u2019s reputation as a model manufacturing city while facing unpredictable markets.[11]<\/span><\/a> Narrowly focusing on accounts of noise that interfered with other sounds has the advantage of showing interconnected layers of sounds \u00ad\u2013 and by extension events and experiences \u2013 that characterized work life in Lowell. Descriptions of noisy interferences also reveal hierarchies assumed by the people who documented them. Which sounds deserved hearing\u00ad and which sounds counted as \u2018noise\u2019 depended on the hearer.<\/p>\n

Published and manuscript sources documenting work life in nineteenth-century Lowell are full of references to noise. Historian David Zonderman has drawn from these sources to discuss Lowell operatives\u2019 aural experiences of two industrial machines for producing cotton cloth, the spinning throstle and the power loom.[12]<\/span><\/a> Mark M. Smith has analyzed mill operatives\u2019 descriptions of sounds in Lowell in order to trace female mill operatives\u2019 engagement with popular ideas about natural versus man-made worlds, and to complicate critic Leo Marx\u2019s metaphor of the \u201cmachine in the garden.\u201d[13]<\/span><\/a> In his longer study Listening to Nineteenth-Century America<\/em>, Smith demonstrates how Northerners and Southerners in the U.S. attached meanings to sounds that reflected regionally-grounded notions of progress and degradation.[14]<\/span><\/a> This essay examines accounts of noisy interference in order to gain insight into New Englanders\u2019 experiences as they negotiated first the emergence, then the increasing dominance, of industrial work society.<\/p>\n

In her feminist critique of work politics, The Problem with Work<\/em>, critic Kathi Weeks introduces the concepts of the \u201cwork society\u201d and \u201cwork values\u201d in order to emphasize the public and political, rather than private and inevitable, nature of waged work. For Weeks, \u201cwork values\u201d assume that waged work, rather than other activities, is the natural mechanism for acquiring basic needs \u2013 food, clothing, shelter \u2013 as well as healthcare, care during old age, social relationships, and social status. Collective acceptance of \u201cwork values\u201d then produces \u201cwork society.\u201d[15]<\/span><\/a> Weeks\u2019s aim is to show that the work society many of us in the U.S. today take for granted is constructed and contingent; other kinds of societies built on other values are possible. Many New Englanders in the first half of the nineteenth century shared Weeks\u2019s suspicion of waged work as a god-given good, and their responses to the work society taking hold around them \u2013 in particular, to the emergence of an exclusive and seemingly permanent class of owner-employers \u2013 ranged from curiosity to confusion, from satisfaction to fury. I read the accounts of noisy interferences that follow as evidence of New Englanders\u2019 motivations and compromises as they responded to changing meanings of work.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Statistics of Lowell Manufactures, January 1, 1835. Local printers published and sold these one-page annual reports quantifying the Lowell corporations’s productive output from\u00a0the 1830s until the 1870s or later. The reports were widely re-printed in newspapers, trade and general interest magazines, and\u00a0government publications. Printed Ephemera Collection; Portfolio 56, Folder 10. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201chissing and shouts\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cLook at Lowell! See an anti-abolition meeting put down by hissing and shouts!\u201d The Washington, DC-based newspaper the Extra Globe<\/em> reprinted this account of noisy disruption from the United States<\/em> Telegraph<\/em> in September 1835.[16]<\/span><\/a> Other newspapers picked up the story of Lowell citizens \u2018hissing down\u2019 an anti-abolition meeting. The Baltimore-based Niles\u2019 Weekly Register<\/em> reprinted stories from newspapers in Virginia and South Carolina that recommended boycotting Lowell cloth in response to the \u201coutrageous conduct at an anti-abolition meeting\u201d and Lowell\u2019s \u201chostility\u201d to the South. Writers for the Extra Globe<\/em> and the New York American<\/em> downplayed the story. \u201cNo anti-abolition meeting was put down there by \u2018hissing and shouts,\u2019\u201d the Extra Globe<\/em> editor assured their readers, \u201cbut one was held there and largely attended, and resolutions hostile to the proceedings of the abolition fanatics passed unanimously.\u201d The New York American<\/em>\u2019s commentary, reprinted in the Niles\u2019 Weekly Register<\/em>, dismissed the original source of the report, the Lowell Times<\/em>, as a \u201crank abolition paper, as bad almost as the Liberator itself.\u201d[17]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The surge of national interest in Lowell\u2019s abolition politics in the fall of 1835 reflected Lowell\u2019s prominent position in public discourse, as a model industrial city on an international stage and a nexus that linked together Northern and Southern settler economies as the two-part foundation of the fabulously profitable global cotton trade. \u201cLowell is not an obscure and insignificant village, but an extensive manufacturing town,\u201d wrote The Richmond Compiler<\/em>, expressing alarm that abolitionists had \u201cmade such progress\u201d there.[18]<\/span><\/a> Indeed, Lowell\u2019s reach extended far beyond New England through a network of economic relations that produced wealth for cotton mill investors, plantation owners, and middle agents in the U.S. and England, while calling for faster work and greater output from enslaved Black farm laborers who farmed cotton fields and from waged factory operatives who produced cotton cloth.[19]<\/span><\/a> Antislavery protestors\u2019 alleged \u201chissing and shouts\u201d in Lowell portended danger and instability from the perspective of newspaper editors in Washington, D.C., Charleston, and Richmond aligned with plantation owners, and with that of Northerners invested in avoiding sectional confrontation at any cost. To self-declared abolitionists and other resisters who read or heard about the Lowell anti-abolition meeting, the \u201chissing and shouts\u201d may have been welcome news that proved the irrepressibility of antislavery sentiment.<\/p>\n

The flurry of commentary about the Lowell anti-abolition meeting in newspapers far from Lowell also reflected a national preoccupation with assigning places and people to one or another side in the slavery debates that absorbed U.S. culture in the 1830s and 1840s. Individuals identified themselves and others, as well as churches, newspapers, towns, and cities, as \u201canti-slavery,\u201d \u201cemancipationist,\u201d \u201cgradualist,\u201d \u201cimmediatist,\u201d \u201cnonextensionist,\u201d \u201camalgamationist,\u201d \u201ccolonizationist,\u201d \u201cabolitionist,\u201d and \u201canti-abolitionist.\u201d[20]<\/span><\/a> Motivated by white Southerners\u2019 outrage following the July 1835 abolitionist postal campaign, in which members of the newly-formed American Anti-Slavery Society mailed thousands of abolitionist books and newspapers to politicians and clergymen all over the U.S., Yankee men with political and financial investments in the South rushed to organize anti-abolition meetings and articulate statements of solidarity with \u201cSouthern brethren.\u201d[21]<\/span><\/a> Anti-abolition leaders presented their position as a reasonable middle ground that accommodated both pro-Southern-rights and antislavery beliefs while denouncing \u201cincendiary\u201d abolitionists. Stopping abolitionists became a rallying cry for white mobs throughout the U.S., who led violent multiple-day attacks on Black neighborhoods in Philadelphia, New York City, and Cincinnati in 1834 and 1836; surrounded a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and dragged abolitionist figurehead William Lloyd Garrison through the streets in 1835; and murdered abolitionist printer Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois in 1837.<\/p>\n

Two local newspapers offered details about the 1835 Lowell anti-abolition meeting allegedly disrupted by \u201chissing and shouts.\u201d The antislavery Lowell Journal and Mercury<\/em> published a transcript of the meeting that included an assertion of Southern states\u2019 constitutional right to retain \u201cregulation and control of slavery\u201d and a resolution to \u201ccherish the Union and maintain inviolate the compact under which it was formed.\u201d The meeting organizers reserved their strongest language for condemning \u201cAnti-Slavery societies of the North\u201d who called for \u201cimmediate abolition\u201d using tactics \u201ctending to endanger the harmony of the Union, to excite sectional jealousy and ill will, to disturb the domestic relations of society, and leading to insurrection and civil war.\u201d[22]<\/span><\/a> The report in the antislavery Lowell Times, <\/em>reprinted in Niles\u2019 Weekly Register<\/em>, denounced the anti-abolition meeting as \u201cutterly subversive to the principles of the constitution, and of common-sense\u201d and described the \u201chissing, scrapings, coughs, and yells\u201d and \u201cdisorder and confusion\u201d that resulted in the postponement of the meeting until the following week. The Lowell Times <\/em>writer chose an example of religious hypocrisy for their rhetorical climax. When \u201can attempt was made by H. C. Meriam, esq. to justify slavery from the scriptures \u2026 the strongest disapprobation was manifested by the audience, who, after repeated but ineffectual calls to order, hissed him down<\/em>.\u201d [23]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Descriptions of audiences who \u201chissed down\u201d actors and speakers appeared in publications in the U.S. and Europe throughout the 1800s. According to a Boston theater critic, hissing was acceptable behavior at the theater and offered useful feedback: \u201c\u2026 what the public hiss down in the performance of actors the actors will not attempt, nor will the managers \u2018bill\u2019 it, for the next performance.\u201d[24]<\/span><\/a> But to hiss down a political speech was not \u201crecognized as the dignified or legitimate way of shewing disagreement,\u201d according to an article reprinted in the Boston magazine Littell\u2019s Living Age<\/em>.[25]<\/span><\/a> Another magazine writer distinguished hissing from other expressions of disapproval as \u201cfar too direct and personal.\u201d[26]<\/span><\/a> The intended effect of hissing was to render public speech indecipherable, but hissing also had an association with the devil that distinguished it from shouting, coughing, or stomping. In an 1852 U.S. dictionary, \u201cto hiss down\u201d is one definition of \u201cto damn,\u201d alongside \u201cto curse; condemn,\u201d while \u201chiss\u201d by itself was defined as \u201cthe cry of a serpent; expression of contempt.\u201d[27]<\/span><\/a> Many Northerners, including abolitionists, cautious antislavery advocates, and others who rankled at \u201cslave power\u201d if not slavery itself, found common ground in their abhorrence of biblical arguments to justify slavery. From their perspective, hissing may have seemed like the ideal response. For the same reason, those on the receiving end of a hiss may have taken special offense.<\/p>\n

For residents of Lowell, news about the noisy disruption of the anti-abolition meeting would have called to mind another meeting disrupted by hissing and shouts. Eight months earlier, in the fall of 1834, British abolitionist orator George Thompson made stops in Lowell while on a speaking tour of the U.S. that included lectures on \u201cSlavery and the Bible\u201d and \u201cHistory and Results of West India Emancipation.\u201d[28]<\/span><\/a> The Boston antislavery newspaper The Liberator<\/em> reported that Thompson\u2019s audience at the Lowell Town Hall \u201cwas large and listened with delight until a late hour\u201d on the first night of speaking, but on the second night, protestors tried to interrupt Thompson\u2019s lecture with \u201cstamping, vociferation, and hisses\u201d and by throwing a brick that just missed Thompson\u2019s head. The<\/em> Liberator <\/em>reporter, Lowell antislavery leader Asa Rand, distinguished between the \u201clow company of fellows\u201d who stamped and hissed, and the \u201cgentlemen\u201d who protested the formation of Lowell\u2019s antislavery society but declined an invitation to Thompson\u2019s lectures.[29]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Lowell\u2019s gentlemen \u2013 mill agents and their associates \u2013 organized the 1835 anti-abolition meeting in Lowell. Manuscript notes on the meeting in the collection of Lowell History Center identify Kirk Boott, the powerful on-the-ground representative of the Lowell investors, as co-signer on a public call for the meeting, alongside other high-level employees of the corporations as the meeting\u2019s organizers, including mill agents William Austin and John Aiken.[30]<\/span><\/a> Cotton industry investors understood anti-abolition as essential work. Harrison Otis Gray, whose significant wealth was invested in Boston real estate and a Taunton, Massachusetts cotton mill, led a Boston anti-abolition meeting held a day before the meeting in Lowell.[31]<\/span><\/a> Amos Lawrence, a Lowell investor whose family developed mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts on the Lowell model, traveled to cotton plantations in Georgia, Louisiana, and Alabama in 1836 and 1837 and assured planters of their shared interests.[32]<\/span><\/a> In the same period, the Whig party dominated Massachusetts politics and counted among its ranks cotton industry investors Nathan Appleton, Amos Lawrence\u2019s brother Abbott Lawrence, and Theodore Lyman II. Industry-friendly Whigs spread the anti-abolition message to town officers and business owners through personal relationships and party newspapers.[33]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

In her study of Blackness and cotton, Black Bodies, White Gold, <\/em>art historian Anna Arabindan-Kesson writes that \u201ca speculative vision\u201d \u2013 a constant looking forward to the next exchange \u2013 drove the U.S. cotton trade in the nineteenth century. Northern cotton industry investors and Southern cotton planters made decisions based on anticipation of the next harvest, the next sale, the next dividend.[34]<\/span><\/a> Millions of pounds of cheap raw cotton enabled Lowell mills\u2019 high dividends; the commodification of Black bodies enabled cheap cotton.[35]<\/span><\/a> Plantation owners who supplied raw material to the Lowell mills purchased cloth produced in Lowell \u2013 \u201cnegro cloth\u201d in mill records, \u201clowell cloth\u201d in plantation records \u2013 to clothe enslaved Black laborers who harvested cotton.[36]<\/span><\/a> Northern cotton industry investors imagined abolitionists\u2019 disruption of future profits and committed themselves to eliminating the threat. Anti-abolition activism would secure the future of the trade.<\/p>\n

The 1835 Lowell anti-abolition meeting took place on a Saturday evening in the Lowell Town Hall, removed from work sites and outside working hours. But talk of abolition and anti-abolition would have circulated through workplaces in Lowell. For some Lowell workers who created and controlled their workplaces, news-sharing and discussion was a seamless part their workday. John Levy, a Black barber who opened a shop in downtown Lowell in the 1830s, talked about antislavery politics with white clients while he shaved and trimmed.[37]<\/span><\/a> \u201cI began to discuss the question with my customers, in my shop at Lowell,\u201d Levy recounted in his memoir. \u201cBy this conduct I rendered myself obnoxious to the people to whom the question was distasteful. I felt proud of being a volunteer in the cause of freedom, and I had always a copy of the \u2018Liberator\u2019 on my table.\u201d[38]<\/span><\/a> Asa Rand, a white minister and president of the Lowell Anti-Slavery Society in 1835, operated a bookstore on Merrimack Street from 1834 to 1836 where he may have discussed antislavery news with customers and friends.[39]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Just over five thousand white Yankee women worked in the Lowell mills in 1835, the majority under the age of thirty-five, and nearly all of them lived together in boardinghouses built and owned by mill investors.[40]<\/span><\/a>[41]<\/span><\/a> Operatives worked for twelve to thirteen hours a day, six days a week, in noisy rooms. Talk about the noisy showdowns at George Thompson\u2019s lectures or at Lowell\u2019s anti-abolition meeting would have taken place during meal breaks, pauses at work, or after hours in boardinghouse rooms or in public spaces such as lecture halls and churches. Between 1832 and 1835 women in Lowell, including many mill operatives, organized a female antislavery society.[42]<\/span><\/a> Together with women in other New England antislavery groups, they participated in a public practice of citizenship when they signed, and sought neighbors\u2019 and co-workers\u2019 signatures, on an antislavery petitions addressed to the federal government in 1836 and 1837.[43]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Lowell operatives who supported antislavery did so at the same time they expressed ambivalence about their conditions of work. Operatives who protested pay cuts in 1834 and 1836 by \u201cturning out\u201d \u2013 walking off the job \u2013 at once glimpsed and obscured their entanglement with slavery when they invoked liberty and bondage and warned that \u201cthe oppressing hand of avarice\u201d would \u201censlave\u201d them.\u201d[44]<\/span><\/a> Their language comparing factory work to slavery sounded a common theme in contemporary white labor reform that traded on racialized fear while dimly suggesting common cause with enslaved African Americans as fellow victims of coercive work culture.[45]<\/span><\/a> Lowell\u2019s antislavery societies were foundering by the early 1840s, due to \u201cdivisions in the ranks of its friends,\u201d according to one observer, but re-formed and expanded during the 1840s and 1850s as abolitionism entered mainstream discourse as righteous cause alongside temperance and labor reform, and as Lowell became a fixture on abolitionist speaking tours and a safe haven for Black freedom seekers.[46]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Hissing, and appeals to stop hissing, would become standard fare at antislavery meetings in New England as abolitionism gained ground in the 1840s. In 1843, when a delegation of abolitionist lecturers visited Lowell on a packed New England tour, offended audience members issued a \u201cvolley of wrathful hisses from an hundred tongues,\u201d while other audiences members offered \u201cgood-natured tokens of applause,\u201d in response one speaker\u2019s attack on the complacency of local clergymen. The same newspaper report described \u201cconsiderable hissing\u201d at a meeting in Lowell later in same day featuring speeches by abolitionists Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, William White, Parker Pillsbury, and John Collins, but noted that the audience stopped \u201cwhen it was distinctly admitted that they had the right of hissing.\u201d[47]<\/span><\/a> Like the newspaper editors who either amplified or denied the story of noisy protest at the 1835 anti-abolition meeting, audiences who applauded or disrupted antislavery speech made claims about who and what deserved to be heard. In Lowell, where workaday lives were tied fast to the Southern slave economy, audience members\u2019 claps and hisses expressed not only their moral and religious feelings, but also their investments in Lowell\u2019s structures of work.<\/p>\n

\u201creports of stone blasting\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In September 1846, Lowell mill operative Sarah Bagley published an attack on the Christian piety of cotton mill investors and their agents in the Lowell-based labor newspaper the Voice of Industry<\/em>. Bagley was both an experienced weaver who had worked in the Lowell mills for ten years and a labor reform leader who co-founded the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association in 1844, spoke before the Massachusetts legislature in favor of the ten-hour work day in 1845, and served on the publishing committee of the Voice of Industry <\/em>from 1845 to 1846. Bagley had publicly denounced the religious hypocrisy of mill owners before, in an 1845 pamphlet titled \u201cFactory Life As It Is\u201d published by the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association.[48]<\/span><\/a> She addressed her 1846 critique to a Scottish newspaper correspondent who had published an admiring report on the famous American manufacturing city, citing Lowell\u2019s \u201ctwenty-three churches\u201d and the absence of \u201cpoverty,\u201d \u201cdrunkenness,\u201d and \u201crioting\u201d as evidence of its high moral standard.[49]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Bagley challenged the Scottish correspondent\u2019s sunny image of Lowell. Had they observed Lowell on a Sunday, Bagley asserted, they would have witnessed abundant evidence of desecration of the sabbath: \u201cYou might have seen workmen employed by the hundreds\u2026 you might have seen teams moving gravel \u2026 you might have seen a train of cars coming in from New Hampshire\u2026 loaded with workmen.\u201d In addition to seeing work, they would have heard it:<\/p>\n

You might have heard the reports of stone blasting, that would shake the foundation of the \u2018twenty-three churches,\u2019 and drown the voice of the man of God, who was dispensing the word of life to the agents under whose directions the work was performed.[50]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThis,\u201d Bagley continued, \u201cis the real, actual, practical<\/em> religion of the corporations, a very different thing from profession.\u201d Her styling of her target as \u201cthe corporations\u201d reflected common usage among operatives in Lowell and points to Bagley\u2019s and other workers\u2019 recognition of the novel financial structures that made Lowell possible.[51]<\/span><\/a> For Lowell\u2019s labor reformers, \u201cthe corporations\u201d were extensive, abstract, and powerful adversaries.<\/p>\n

Bagley\u2019s story about noisy sabbath labor reads as a parable of religious hypocrisy. Directing work on Sundays proved the corporations\u2019 unholy zeal for profit, and their unconcern for drowning the voice of the minister, or shaking the church foundations, proved their faithlessness. Bagley invited her readers to picture mill agents in particular \u2013 local proxies for the Boston investors who controlled the mills\u2019 daily operations \u2013 seated in their pews on Sunday before the muted minister, hearing not a sermon or Gospel reading but instead repeating explosions that signaled industrial expansion. Increasing their returns on investment, Bagley implied, was the corporations\u2019 real \u201cword of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bagley\u2019s rhetoric was strategic, but the noise was real. Stone blasting was a job, performed by men hired as \u201coutdoor hands\u201d by the Proprietors of the Locks and Canals, the company that controlled waterpower privileges in Lowell.[52]<\/span><\/a> The same year Bagley published her attack on the corporations\u2019 religious hypocrisy, the Locks and Canals broke ground on an ambitious project to expand and retrofit their canal system in order to increase the number of lease-able mill seats. From the perspective of the mill owners, the Northern Canal was an investment on the same logic as the initial development of Lowell \u2013 a massive outlay of capital that promised high returns on investment \u2013 and a maintenance and upgrade project motivated by increasing market competition.[53]<\/span><\/a> From the perspective of men seeking work, the Northern Canal represented opportunities for work after a slow hiring period at the mills. In his history of waterpower in Lowell, Patrick Malone found that between February and August 1846, the Locks and Canals increased their workforce from \u201c17 mechanics and laborers\u201d to over eight hundred.[54]<\/span><\/a> The Locks and Canals classified them as \u201claborers\u201d or \u201cout-door hands.\u201d[55]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The majority of the people who worked on the Northern Canal were Irish men.[56]<\/span><\/a> They applied for work through the Locks and Canals\u2019 superintendent of outdoor work, who had been on the job since the 1820s and may have known returning laborers by name.[57]<\/span><\/a> Work on the Northern Canal included manual drilling, excavating hard rock with black powder explosives, moving gravel, earth, wood, and stones, and de-constructing and re-constructing wood and stone canal walls and other structures. A supervisor on the project described the scope of excavation work in his notebook, in terms that quantify and abstract the strenuous labor: \u201cthe daily work of a laboring man is raising 10 lb. to the height of 10 ft. in a second and continue this for 10 hours.\u201d[58]<\/span><\/a> Newspapers reported on the deaths of at least four workmen during the construction of the Northern Canal, including one, Michael Reefe, who was struck by falling rock.[59]<\/span><\/a> In his history of Irish communities in Lowell, historian Brian C. Mitchell calculated that laborers working on the Northern Canal received on average $1 per day, slightly higher than the usual rate of 83\u00a2, possibly because the work was dangerous and the timeline was short.[60]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Northern Canal construction was likely the noise in Sarah Bagley\u2019s ear in 1846, but construction noise had been ongoing since the Lowell investors started buying land and water rights at Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River in 1821. The first Irish work crew arrived on the site in 1822, traveling by foot from Charlestown to apply to Kirk Boott for work as canal builders. Boott met the crew at a tavern and made arrangements with their foreman, and they started work the next day.[61]<\/span><\/a> Later in the 1820s Irish men moved to Lowell with their families to take advantage of the seasonal construction jobs, including work on the canals as well as building streets, railways, mill buildings, and boarding houses; permanent jobs in the mills were reserved for Yankees.[62]<\/span><\/a> Brian Mitchell tracks the slowly increasing numbers of Irish residents of Lowell throughout the 1820s and 1830s, and the rapidly increasing numbers after 1841, when new travel routes opened up from Ireland to Boston, and again after 1846, when effects of the Irish Famine were most devastating.[63]<\/span><\/a> Contemporary newspaper reports and later histories of Lowell referred to the \u201chuts,\u201d \u201ccabins,\u201d \u201ctents,\u201d and \u201cshanties\u201d built by Irish families on land across the canal from the mill district that was known as the \u201cpaddy camp lands,\u201d the \u201cIrish camp,\u201d \u201cNew Dublin,\u201d and \u201cthe Acre\u201d and \u201cHalf-Acre.\u201d[64]<\/span><\/a> The lively outdoor life and provisional appearance of the Irish neighborhood contrasted with the long, orderly rows brick boarding houses for Yankee women on the other side of the canal.<\/p>\n

Bagley characterized the working men who carted gravel and blasted rocks on the sabbath as victims of corporate avarice who deserved the same protections as the Yankee operatives. For others in Lowell, the noise of blasting performed by Irish working men may have seemed of a piece with other experiences of Irish noise and disorder. A French-Canadian mechanic living in Lowell in 1840 was dismayed by the \u201cgreat many Irish here\u201d who \u201cwill get drunk and fight and then go to Church\u201d and who \u201cwill at the death of a friend get drunk and howl over the body in a manner truly terrifying.\u201d[65]<\/span><\/a> Police reports in the Lowell Courier<\/em> newspaper in the 1840s regularly named Irish men who disturbed the peace. A typical report from May 1841 teasingly described a \u201c\u2018fight royal\u2019 between the counties of Cork and Kerry\u201d and listed Jerry Shea, James Moran, Morris Quinn, Tom Quinn and his five sons, Pat Horagan, and Kate and Nelly Fitzgerald as antagonists, victims, and witnesses. Morris Quinn \u201cwas held in $50 to keep quiet 3 months.\u201d[66]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Kirk Boott responded to reports of Irish disorder by appealing to Irish Catholic leadership in Boston for help, and by donating corporation land for a Catholic church on the Acre. Irish men worked after hours to complete the construction of St. Patrick\u2019s in 1831.[67]<\/span><\/a> Although St. Patrick\u2019s counted among the \u201ctwenty-three churches\u201d cited by Bagley and the Scottish correspondent, it stood apart from Lowell\u2019s Protestant church culture. For mill agents and for middle-class Irish people invested in respectability, St. Patrick\u2019s functioned as a labor control mechanism, with only mixed success. Before construction was complete, a mob of Yankee nativists, allegedly angered by the church as a sign of Irish permanence in Lowell, attacked the church construction site and surrounding neighborhood but were held off by residents armed with stones, and eventually, by town officials.[68]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

For textile mill operatives and other Lowell residents, the congregation of St. Patrick\u2019s may have seemed more likely to disrupt than to suffer disruptions. Bagley\u2019s description in the Voice of Industry <\/em>of stone blasting disrupting the minister\u2019s speech, and the mill agents\u2019 inability to hear \u201cthe word of life,\u201d would have brought to mind images of Protestant churches attended by mill agents and mill overseers such as St. Anne\u2019s, the Episcopal church Kirk Boott established in 1825, or the John Street Congregational Church, established by mill agent John Aiken and others in 1839. Sound studies scholar Mark Smith has identified nineteenth-century \u201cnorms of genteel Protestant worship\u201d in the U.S. including silence, solemnity, and discipline over emotions.[69]<\/span><\/a> Many Lowell Yankees perceived Lowell\u2019s Irish residents as embodying the opposite values: noisiness, passion, and disorder.<\/p>\n

Bagley\u2019s critique of sabbath labor in 1846 coincided with the end of the period when young Yankee women formed the majority of the work force in the Lowell mills. As Irish women seeking permanent employment began to fill positions in the spinning and weaving rooms, Yankee operatives remembered wistfully when their workplace was more social and day-to-day work discipline was less strict, even while agents and overseers took greater paternal interest in each worker. Some Yankee operatives jumped to make connections between the degradation of working conditions and the degraded nature of the incoming Irish workers. One Yankee operative writing in the Lowell Offering <\/em>in 1849 warned that if operatives quit their positions in response to a wage reduction, \u201cvacancies left by these substantial, well-educated, upright-minded girls will be filled by the Irish.\u201d She elaborated on her objection to \u201cthe Irish\u201d taking positions as operatives, explaining that \u201cthey are untidy, ignorant, passionate\u201d and \u201cthe better class, even the middle class of our New England girls, will not be seen in the street with them, will not room with them, cannot find them in the least degree companionable.\u201d[70]<\/span><\/a> Bagley took a different position, arguing that the mill investors had failed all their workers, and labored to build a far-reaching coalition of working people that focused on the ten-hour work day but also supported abolition, land reform, temperance, and cooperative movements.<\/p>\n

Critics likely viewed Bagley herself as a source of noisy interference, of both gender norms and workplace norms. A poem printed in the Voice of Industry <\/em>in 1845 used a metaphor of noise to describe the work of labor reform: \u201cBe the Voice of Industry \/ on every hill top heard.\u201d[71]<\/span><\/a> Bagley\u2019s voice in particular stood out as loud, uncompromising, and female. Bagley left her position at the Voice of Industry<\/em> in late 1846, explaining in a letter to a friend that the new Voice of Industry <\/em>editor \u201cfound fault with my communications\u201d and planned to eliminate the newspaper\u2019s Female Department, which Bagley had introduced in early 1846 with assurances to readers that it would \u201cnot be neutral, because it is female.\u201d[72]<\/span><\/a> She lamented to her friend that the new editor believed \u201ctruth ought to be spoken in such honeyed words that if it hits any one, it shall not affect him unfavorably.\u201d[73]<\/span><\/a> Bagley\u2019s metaphorical language offers a negative counterpart to noisy speech \u2013 smooth and palatable \u201choneyed words\u201d \u2013 while suggesting that the effectiveness of the reformer\u2019s voice lies in its capacity for physical impact.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Statistics of the Lowell Manufactures, January 1, 1847. The 1847 statistics include data about city amenities as well as corporate productivity. The “New Canal” refers to the Northern Canal. The number of “males employed” probably does not include “outdoor hands,” who were not permanent employees. Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company Records, MSS 919, Box 2, Folder 3. Courtesy of Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Rowley, MA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cringing in my ears\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1867, the labor reform newspaper the Boston Daily Evening Voice <\/em>published a letter from \u201cA Working Woman\u201d in which she recollects her experience as a factory operative in the Lowell in the late 1830s. \u201cA Working Woman\u201d described both the appeal and the hardships of working in the Lowell mills and charted the development of her political consciousness. Witnessing firsthand the enviable condition of mill owners\u2019 daughters, who were \u201ctenderly cared for,\u201d \u201chad an abundance of leisure,\u201d and could work or attend school \u201cwhen they pleased,\u201d she explained, moved her to reflect \u201con the injustice of society\u201d and ultimately participate in the campaign for the ten-hour work day.[74]<\/span><\/a> The working woman offered her story as part of an argument for shorter working hours, recalling how fatigue from overwork competed with her eagerness to educate herself by reading and attending evening lectures. \u201cI am sure few possessed a more ardent desire for knowledge than I did,\u201d she wrote, but \u201cit was impossible to study History, Philosophy, or Science\u201d after \u201cten to fourteen hours\u201d of manual labor. At evening lectures it was too hard to hear, which she blamed in part on noisy interference in her ears:<\/p>\n

I well remember the chagrin I often felt when attending lectures, to find myself unable to keep awake; or perhaps so far from the speaker on account of being late, that the ringing in my ears caused by the noise of the looms during the day, prevented my hearing scarcely a sentence he uttered.<\/p>\n

In the working woman\u2019s description, ringing in the ears, like stone blasting and hissing, rendered authoritative speech indecipherable. Unlike blasting and hissing, the ringing, \u201ccaused by the noise of the looms during the day,\u201d was a sound that moved across time as well as space, following the working woman from the weaving room into leisure space of the lecture hall. Like the working woman\u2019s other symptoms of poor health, the ringing in her ears was an example of employer-controlled work conditions taking hold of her body after work hours and outside the workplace.<\/p>\n

The female operatives\u2019 self-organized literary magazines, the Lowell Offering<\/em> and its successor the New England Offering<\/em>, include numerous references to noisy workplaces in fictional stories about mill work. Writers commented on the ways noise obstructed sociability or fostered introspection. In the fictional story \u201cA Week in the Mill\u201d published in 1845, the narrator recounts an operative\u2019s limited opportunities for conversation with co-workers: \u201cNow and then she mingles with a knot of busy talkers\u201d or \u201cholds converse with some intelligent and agreeable friend.\u201d But since \u201cthe clattering and rumbling around her prevent any other noise from attracting her,\u201d she is often \u201cleft to her own thoughts.\u201d[75]<\/span><\/a> In another story framed as a series of journal entries, a fictional operative describes her friendship with \u201ca very pretty sociable girl in the mill, who comes and screams in my ear to tell my funny things, but I cannot understand her half the time.\u201d[76]<\/span><\/a> The noise of the machines did not prevent sociability in these stories, but it did determine its quality and extent.<\/p>\n

In her 1889 memoir about working in the Lowell mills, Lucy Larcom described how her perception of mill noise changed during her time as operative in the late 1830s and 1840s. At first, \u201c[t]he noise of the machinery was particularly distasteful to me,\u201d she recalled, though she was determined that \u201cits incessant discords\u201d would not \u201cdrown the music of my thoughts.\u201d[77]<\/span><\/a> When Larcom returned to mill work after caring for family members for several months, her perspective on the noise of the machines changed. She found that she \u201cenjoyed \u2026 the familiar, unremitting clatter of the mill, because it indicated that something was going on.\u201d Larcom reflected that she particularly took pleasure in the company of her co-workers and the experience of collective work. \u201cI liked to feel the people around me, even those whom I did not know, as a wave may like to feel the surrounding waves urging it forward…. I felt that I belonged to the world…\u201d[78]<\/span><\/a> The 1841 story \u201cThe Spirit of Discontent\u201d published in The Lowell Offering <\/em>also presented two distinct perspectives on mill noise. When the fictional operative Ellen Collins complains about \u201cthe clang of the bell\u201d that calls her to work at an early hour, and confinement in \u201ca close noisy room from morning til night,\u201d her friend suggests that returning to her rural home may not resolve her frustrations. \u201cWhat difference does it make, whether you shall be awakened by a bell, or the noisy bustle of a farm-house?\u201d the friend asks, after inventorying the advantages of urban life in Lowell, including proximity to churches and access to books and evening lectures.[79]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Like the fictional operative, the anonymous working woman counted Lowell\u2019s evening lecture programs as a positive part of her experience of mill work. Operatives\u2019 enthusiasm for lectures reflected an interest in intellectual and moral improvement that pervaded nineteenth-century New England. Reading groups, circulating libraries, and lecture programs known as \u2018lyceums\u2019 appeared in seemingly every New England village and town in the 1830s.[80]<\/span><\/a> Lowell operatives attended evening concerts, classes, improvement circles (where they prepared contributions to the operatives\u2019 literary magazines), and lectures on science, religion, philosophy, and literature. The corporations sponsored many of these edifying offerings as part of their project to protect female operatives from corrupting influences, but the success of the lyceum lectures and improvement circles also related to operatives\u2019 desire to prepare for something better than factory work.[81]<\/span><\/a> Historians of the Lowell mills Caroline Ware, Hannah Josephson, and Thomas Dublin have demonstrated the high turnover of female operatives and the frequency with which they pursued cosmopolitan urban lives after a period of work in the mills.[82]<\/span><\/a> The anonymous working woman noted that she entered mill work in order to \u201cpay expenses at an Academy,\u201d and that she worked in the mill for just three years.<\/p>\n

The working woman\u2019s letter shows a person engaged with the dynamics of work, power, and gender who sought to negotiate a measure of autonomy in her own work life. She linked her commitment to the campaign for the ten-hour work day to her desire to correct the injustice that allowed some people to \u201cdo as they pleased\u201d while others experienced strict time discipline. At the end of her letter, she reflected on her preferred work arrangements:<\/p>\n

And I will say in truth that if the hours of labor had been only eight instead of thirteen, I should prefer working in the mill to house work, enjoyed the society of the girls, and the noise of the machinery was not displeasing to me\u2026<\/p>\n

Like the fictional character who compared mill work to farm work, the working woman imagined a version of mill work that she would prefer to house work. The noise of the looms figured into her imagined version of mill work, but in these improved conditions \u201cthe noise of the machinery was not displeasing.\u201d In the work life she would choose, with less time required on the job and more time to do what she pleased, the noise would become bearable or even enjoyable.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stone blasting, hissing, and ringing in ears shut out the voices of the minister, the anti-abolition speaker, and the lyceum lecturer in Lowell in the first half of the nineteenth-century. Other voices, in turn, documented these noisy interferences, choosing words, forms of address, and mediums that served their own goals as witnesses, critics, resistors, or defenders of the status quo. Irish men noisily excavated rocky land, incidentally drowning out the Christian \u201cword of life,\u201d in order to materialize investment opportunities for distant owners. Sarah Bagley turned the church-disrupting noise into a damning parable that cast waged laborers as freedom-seekers and cotton industry investors as worshippers of dividends. Anti-abolitionists and abolitionists \u201chissed down\u201d \u2013 condemned \u2013 each other\u2019s speech in the Lowell Town Hall. Arguments for and against emancipation \u2013 gradual, immediate, and colonial \u2013 circulated through mill rooms, through Levy\u2019s barbershop, and through newspapers that reached far beyond Lowell. The clatter, rattle, and hum of spinning frames and power looms dominated operatives\u2019 experience of mill work and followed them off the job, but they were also familiar sounds that operatives associated with Yankee sisterhood and cosmopolitan urban life.<\/p>\n

Stories about noise in Lowell in the first half of the nineteenth century show people reckoning with new work relations that seemed to be hardening into unchangeable facts of life. The anonymous working woman, looking back on her time as an operative in Lowell in the late 1830s, tentatively imagined the work life she would choose: social relationships with co-workers, factory work instead of housework, shorter hours with more time and energy for reading. In the \u201cThe Spirit of Discontent,\u201d one fictional operative preferred the self-determined schedule of farm life; the other preferred the escape from household management she enjoyed as a Lowell operative.[83]<\/span><\/a> Like the working woman and the fictional operatives choosing between farm and factory, many of the Lowell workers in this essay test their ability to control their work conditions. The noisy interferences I examine here each mark out moments of friction, when one bid for control interfered with another. Noticing these sticking points is a method for mapping New Englanders\u2019 motivations and strategies in response to their first encounters with waged work.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/span><\/a> A small, well-connected group of Boston merchants plotted the creation of a model industrial city in New England soon after developing a lucrative modern cotton mill in Waltham, Massachusetts in the 1810s. The Waltham mill, masterminded by Boston merchant Francis Cabot Lowell, made profitable use of new power loom technology Lowell had observed in England, an advantageous mill site on the Charles River, and the cheap labor of young women from local farming families. Around 1815, Lowell and his associates determined to scale up their lucrative experiment on a larger site with access to more waterpower. They chose a site on the Merrimack River that would eventually become Lowell, Massachusetts. See Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 17-22.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/span><\/a> \u201cjar and whirl\u201d: John Greenleaf Whittier, The Stranger in Lowell <\/em>(Boston: Waite, Peirce, and Company, 1845), 22; \u201cdin and clatter\u201d: \u201cnoise of hammers\u201d: Michel Chevalier, Society, Manners and Politics in the United States, Being a Series of Letters on North America <\/em>(Boston: Weeks, Jordan, and Company, 1839), 129; \u201cthumpings\u201d: \u201cA Trip to Lowell, \u201d The People\u2019s Journal<\/em>, June 13, 1846, 328.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/span><\/a> \u201cnoisey factory\u201d: Amy Galusha to Aaron Leland Galusha, 3 Apr. 1849, Letter 001, Galusha Family Collection, Lowell National Historical Park, Lowell, MA, https:\/\/libguides.uml.edu\/c.php?g=542883&p=3724664<\/a>; \u201cdin and clatter\u201d: Marie Currier to Harriot Hanson Robinson, Oct. 12, 1845, in Allis Rosenberg Wolfe, \u201cLetters of a Lowell Mill Girls and Friends and Friends, 1845-1846,\u201d Labor History<\/em> 17, no. 1 (1976): 98.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/span><\/a> \u201cstrange discord\u201d: Harriet Farley, \u201cLetters from Susan: Letter Second,\u201d Lowell Offering<\/em>, June 1844, 52; \u201cclick-clack\u201d: Lucy Larcom, An Idyl of Work <\/em>(Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875), 80; \u201cwhizzing and spinning\u201d: Josephine L. Baker, \u201cA Second Peep at Factory Life,\u201d Lowell Offering<\/em>, May 1845, 98.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/span><\/a> Almira, \u201cThe Spirit of Discontent,\u201d Lowell Offering<\/em>, 1841, 113.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/span><\/a> \u201cnoisy tenement\u201d: Ella, \u201cWeaver\u2019s Reverie,\u201d Lowell Offering<\/em>, 1841, 188; cannon fire: Elizabeth [pseudonym], \u201cMy First Independence Day in Lowell,\u201d Lowell Offering<\/em>, November 1845, 249; \u201cdisturb the peace\u201d: see the \u201cPolice Court\u201d section in the Lowell Courier<\/em> between 1841 and 1842.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/span><\/a> The Iron Age<\/em>, January 30, 1890, 171; \u201cvacant soyle\u201d: John Cotton, God\u2019s Promise to His Plantations<\/em> (London: Printed by William Jones for John Bellamy, 1634), 5; \u201cbarren wilderness\u201d: William Hubbard, The Happiness of a People in the Wisdome of their Rulers Directing and In the Obedience of Their Brethren\u2026<\/em> (Boston: Printed by John Foster, 1676), 61. See William Cronon, Changes in the Land:<\/em> Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England <\/em>(New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), 54-81.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/span><\/a> J.H., \u201cThe Song of the Factory Hand,\u201d Truth and Opinion, Supplement to Fiber and Fabric<\/em>, October 17, 1896, 1.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/span><\/a> Mark M. Smith has studied the ways aurality and aural images are central to representations of industrialization in the U.S. The term \u201cheard world\u201d comes from Smith. Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth Century America<\/em> (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).<\/p>\n

[10]<\/span><\/a> Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America<\/em>, 11.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/span><\/a> See Norman Ware\u2019s description of this period as characterized by increasing demands on workers\u2019 speed and attention. Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860: The Reaction of American Industrial Society to the Advance of Industrial Revolution <\/em>(Houghton Mifflin, 1924), xii-xiii and 106-124. Robert F. Dalzell charts the same phenomenon from the perspective of the owners of the Lowell mills. Dalzell also argues that the primary goal motivating the investors who developed Lowell was wealth preservation, rather than wealth production. Robert F. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made<\/em> (Harvard University Press, 1987), 66-70.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/span><\/a> David A. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System <\/em>(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 22-23.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/span><\/a> Mark M. Smith, \u201cThe Garden in the Machine: Listening to Early American Industrialization,\u201d The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, <\/em>eds. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bjistervel (Oxford University Press, 2011), 39-57.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/span><\/a> Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/span><\/a> Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries <\/em>(Duke University Press, 2011), 5-8.<\/p>\n

[16]<\/span><\/a> Extra Globe<\/em> (Washington, D.C.), October 2, 1835, 298.<\/p>\n

[17]<\/span><\/a> Niles\u2019 Weekly Register<\/em>, October 3, 1835, 74.<\/p>\n

[18]<\/span><\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[19]<\/span><\/a> For evidence of speed-ups and other labor intensification practices: Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 85-120; Peter A. Coclanis, \u201cHow the Low Country Was Taken to Task: Slave-Labor Organization in Coastal South Carolina and Georgia,\u201d in Slavery, Secession, and Southern History<\/em>, eds. Robert Louis Paquette and Louis A. Ferleger (University Press of Virginia, 2000), 59-78; Philip D. Morgan, \u201cTask and Gang Systems: The Organization of Labor on New World Plantations\u201d in Work and Labor in Early America<\/em>, ed. Stephen Innes (University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 189-200; Thomas Dublin, Women at Work<\/em>, 109-113; and Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties<\/em>, 33-35. Historians and scholars of the cotton trade have also noted the ways industrial machinery, such as the loom and the cotton gin, was subject to the logic of intensification.<\/p>\n

[20]<\/span><\/a> \u201cEmancipationist,\u201d \u201cgradualist,\u201d \u201cimmediatist,\u201d \u201cnonextensionist,\u201d and \u201ccolonizationist\u201d referred to distinct antislavery positions. \u201cAmalgamationist\u201d was a term used to incite fear by implying an equivalence between antislavery politics and support for \u201cracial blending\u201d at the level of the family.<\/p>\n

[21]<\/span><\/a> Lowell Journal and Mercury<\/em>, September 4, 1835.<\/p>\n

[22]<\/span><\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[23]<\/span><\/a> Niles\u2019 Weekly Register<\/em>, October 3, 1835, 74.<\/p>\n

[24]<\/span><\/a> \u201cThe Ethics of Amusement,\u201d The Musical Record, <\/em>April 1884, 10.<\/p>\n

[25]<\/span><\/a> \u201cHissing,\u201d Littell\u2019s Living Age<\/em>, May 16, 1874, 444.<\/p>\n

[26]<\/span><\/a> \u201cHissing Actors,\u201d The Week<\/em>, November 30, 1872, 713.<\/p>\n

[27]<\/span><\/a> J. Walker, A Rhyming, Spelling, and Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language<\/em> (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1852), 311, 469.<\/p>\n

[28]<\/span><\/a> Z. E. Stone, \u201cGeorge Thompson, the English Philanthropist, in Lowell,\u201d Contributions of the Old Residents’ Historical Association<\/em> (Lowell, MA: Old Residents’ Historical Association and Morning Mail Print, 1883), 118-119, and Arthur L. Eno, \u201cThe Civil War: Patriotism vs. King Cotton,\u201d Cotton was King: A History of Lowell, Massachusetts, <\/em>ed. Arthur L. Eno (New Hampshire Publishing Company and the Lowell Historical Society, 1976), 128.<\/p>\n

[29]<\/span><\/a> A. Rand [Asa Rand], \u201cMr. Thompson at Lowell,\u201d The Liberator<\/em>, December 6, 1834, 194.<\/p>\n

[30]<\/span><\/a> Yukako Hisada, \u201cGeorge Thompson and Anti-Abolitionism in Lowell, Massachusetts,\u201d Journal of the Faculty of Foreign Studies<\/em> no. 46 (2014): 222-223.<\/p>\n

[31]<\/span><\/a> Thomas H. O\u2019Connor, Lords of the Loom: The Cotton Whigs and the Coming of the Civil War<\/em> (New York: Charles Scribner\u2019s Sons, 1968), 52, and John Michael Cudd, The Chicopee Manufacturing Company: 1823-1915 <\/em>(Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1974), 15.<\/p>\n

[32]<\/span><\/a> Dalzell, Enterprising Elite<\/em>, 180-181; O\u2019Connor, Lords of the Loom<\/em>, 48-49.<\/p>\n

[33]<\/span><\/a> Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles<\/em> (University of Illinois Press, 1982), 55.<\/p>\n

[34]<\/span><\/a> Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies: White Gold: Art, Cotton, Commerce in the Atlantic World <\/em>(Duke University Press, 2021).<\/p>\n

[35]<\/span><\/a> Ronald Bailey lists domestic cotton consumption in pounds per year for every tenth year between 1790 and 1860. Ronald Bailey, \u201cThe Other Side of Slavery: Black Labor, Cotton, and Textile Industrialization in Great Britain and the United States, Agricultural History<\/em> 68, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 37. For nineteenth-century published sources for Lowell statistics, see for ex. an 1840 report on U.S. cotton manufacturing stating that Lowell mills consumed 18,059,600 pounds of cotton in 1839. James Montgomery, A Practical Detail of the Cotton Manufacture of the United States of America; and the State of the Cotton Manufacture of that Country Contrasted and Compared with that of Great Britain; with Comparative Estimates,<\/em> (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1840), 172.<\/p>\n

[36]<\/span><\/a> Arabindan-Kesson uses \u201clowell cloth\u201d or \u201cnegro cloth\u201d as a touchpoint for reflection on the material, embodied experiences of the people who wore it. Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies, White Gold<\/em>, 42-63. For historical sources that reference \u201clowell cloth\u201d see: Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, [1936]. The UMass Lowell Library has collected all the narratives that reference \u201clowell cloth\u201d: \u201cLowell Cloth,” UMass Lowell Library, Revised 19 Apr. 2021, libguides.uml.edu\/c.php?g=546113<\/a>. For examples of published sources that reference \u201cnegro cloth,\u201d see: James Montgomery, A Practical Detail of the Cotton Manufacture of the United States of America; and the State of the Cotton Manufacture of that Country Contrasted and Compared with that of Great Britain; with Comparative Estimates<\/em> (New York: Appleton & Co., 1840), 167; and John MacGregor, Commercial Statistics<\/em>. A Digest of the Productive Resources, Commercial Legislation, Customs Tariffs, Navigation, Port, and Quarantine Laws, and Charges, Shipping, Imports and Exports, and the Monies, Weights, and Measures of All Nations <\/em>vol. 3 (London: Whittaker and Co., 1847), 107, 108. South Carolina\u2019s \u201cNegro Act of 1740\u201d states: \u201cno owner \u2026 shall permit such Negro or other slave to have or wear any sort of apparel whatsoever, finer, other or greater value than Negro cloth.\u201d In Lowell, each manufacturing company specialized in different textile products; the mill that produced \u201cnegro cloth\u201d was the Lowell Manufacturing Company. The terms \u201cnegro cloth\u201d and \u201clowell cloth\u201d are also found in manuscript sources such as account books.<\/p>\n

[37]<\/span><\/a> Levy states that he was in business as a barber in Lowell around 1826 and again from 1833 and 1836. John Levy, The Life and Adventures of John Levy, edited by his Daughter Miss Rachel Frances <\/em>Levy (Lawrence, MA: Robert Bowners, The Journal <\/em>Office, 1871), 41, 47-52.<\/p>\n

[38]<\/span><\/a> Levy, The Life and Adventures of John Levy<\/em>, 48. For a history of Black barbershops see: Quincy T. Mills, Cutting Across the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America<\/em> (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).<\/p>\n

[39]<\/span><\/a> John Lytle Myers, The Agency System of the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1832-1837, and Its Antecedents in Other Benevolent and Reform Societies<\/em> (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Abor, 1961), 205-206.<\/p>\n

[40]<\/span><\/a> \u201cStatistics of Lowell Manufactures\u201d [printed sheet], 1 Jan. 1835, Portfolio 56, Folder 10, Printed Ephemera Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., www.loc.gov\/item\/2021767203.<\/p>\n

[41]<\/span><\/a> Dublin, Women at Work, <\/em>75-76.<\/p>\n

[42]<\/span><\/a> Beth A. Salerno, Sister Societies: Women’s Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America<\/em> (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 29; Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United <\/em>States vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1962), 267. Foner dates the establishment of the Lowell Female Anti-Slavery Society to 1832; Salerno dates it to 1835, immediately following George Thompson\u2019s lectures in Lowell.<\/p>\n

[43]<\/span><\/a> Edward Magdol, The Anti-Slavery Rank and File: A Social Profile of the Abolitionists\u2019 Constituency<\/em> (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986) and Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity<\/em> (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 78. Zaeske discusses Northern womens\u2019 diverse understandings of petitioning as a public political practice, and the high stakes of women\u2019s petitioning activity following the 1836 federal law prohibiting hearings on antislavery petitions.<\/p>\n

[44]<\/span><\/a> For histories of the turn-outs, see Dublin, Women at Work<\/em>, 86-107 and Harriet Hanson Robinson, Loom and Spindle, or, Life Among the Early Mill Girls<\/em> (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Company, 1898), 83-86; \u201coppressing hand\u201d: Boston Evening Transcript <\/em>18 Feb. 1834.<\/p>\n

[45]<\/span><\/a> For discussions of operatives\u2019 and other workers\u2019 comparisons between factory work and slavery in labor reform rhetoric, see: David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class <\/em>(New York: Verso, 1991); Julie Husband, \u201c\u2018The White Slave of the North\u2019: Lowell Mill Women and the Reproduction of \u2018Free\u2019 Labor,\u201d Legacy <\/em>16, no. 1 (1999): 11-21; and Carla L. Peterson, \u201c\u2018And We Claim Our Rights\u2019: The Rights Rhetoric of Black and White Women Activists before the Civil War,\u201d in Sister Circle: Black Women and <\/em>Work, eds. Sharon Harley and the Black Women and Work Collective (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 140-143.<\/p>\n

[46]<\/span><\/a> Joseph Sturge, A Visit to the United States in 1841<\/em> (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1842), 143.<\/p>\n

[47]<\/span><\/a> N. P. R. [Nathaniel Peabody Rogers], \u201cLetter to the Editor,\u201d Herald of Freedom<\/em>, March 1, 1844, 6-7.<\/p>\n

[48]<\/span><\/a> Sarah G. Bagley, \u201cFactory Life As It Is. By An Operative,\u201d Factory Tracts <\/em>no. 1 (Lowell, MA: Lowell Female Reform Association, 1845).<\/p>\n

[49]<\/span><\/a> Sarah G. Bagley, The Voice of Industry<\/em>, September 18, 1846, 2. Reports about Lowell that circulated abroad in the 1820s through 1840s often compared working conditions in Lowell to those of British manufacturing cities like Manchester. People in the U.S. and Great Britain perceived British manufacturing cities of places of suffering and moral degradation, and Lowell was considered an alternative model. Improving on the British manufacturing labor system was part of the designs of Francis Cabot Lowell and Nathan Appleton, the investors who masterminded the development of Lowell and its predecessor mill complex in Waltham.<\/p>\n

[50]<\/span><\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[51]<\/span><\/a> For a detailed description of the financial structures underpinning the development of Lowell and the New England cotton industry, and contemporary responses to the corporation, see Philip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800-1885<\/em> (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13-16.<\/p>\n

[52]<\/span><\/a> In 1845, the owners of the mills who used the Lowell canal system became the sole owners of the Proprietors of the Locks and Canals and subsequently took up projects to maintain the canal infrastructure and increase waterpower. See Patrick M. Malone, \u201cSurplus Water, Hybrid Power Systems, and Industrial Expansion in Lowell,\u201d The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology<\/em> 31, no. 1 (2005): 21.<\/p>\n

[53]<\/span><\/a> Brian C. Mitchell, Paddy Camps: The Irish of Lowell, 1821-1861<\/em> (University of Illinois Press, 1988), 86.<\/p>\n

[54]<\/span><\/a> Malone, Waterpower in Lowell<\/em>, 91.<\/p>\n

[55]<\/span><\/a> Mitchell, Paddy Camps<\/em>, 31.<\/p>\n

[56]<\/span><\/a> Malone calculates that Irish men made up more than half of the Northern Canal workforce by 1848. Patrick M. Malone, Waterpower in Lowell: Waterpower and Industry in Nineteenth-Century America <\/em>(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 92.<\/p>\n

[57]<\/span><\/a> Malone, Waterpower in Lowell<\/em>, 89; Mitchell, Paddy Camps<\/em>, 27, 30.<\/p>\n

[58]<\/span><\/a> Samuel K. Hutchinson, \u201cNorthern Canal, 1846-1847,\u201d Small Notebooks, Proprietors of the Locks and Canals Collection, Lowell National Historic Park, Lowell, MA. Quoted in: Malone, Waterpower<\/em>, 91.<\/p>\n

[59]<\/span><\/a> Mitchell, Paddy Camps<\/em>, 87.<\/p>\n

[60]<\/span><\/a> Mitchell, Paddy Camps<\/em>, 88.<\/p>\n

[61]<\/span><\/a> Mitchell, Paddy Camps<\/em>, 14-15. Mitchell notes that a small number of Irish families lived in the area near Pawtucket Falls before 1822, and Irish men worked as canal builders there in the 1790s, before the Boston investors who developed Lowell took an interest in the area.<\/p>\n

[62]<\/span><\/a> Mitchell, Paddy Camps<\/em>, 87; Dublin, Women at Work<\/em>, 146.<\/p>\n

[63]<\/span><\/a> Using a variety of statistical and literary sources, Mitchell estimates that Lowell\u2019s Irish population was about 500, or 7% of Lowell\u2019s total population, in 1830, and grew to between 1,500 and 1,800, or between 12% and 14% of Lowell\u2019s total population, in 1837. Mitchell also references the 1855 U.S. Census, which lists 10,369 Irish residents of Lowell, or 27.6% of the total population, but this number excludes many American-born Irish-heritage residents. Mitchell, Paddy Camps<\/em>, 34, 58, 83-85, 184.<\/p>\n

[64]<\/span><\/a> Mitchell, Paddy Camps<\/em>, 7, 24.<\/p>\n

[65]<\/span><\/a> J. I. Little, \u201cA Canadian in Lowell: Labour, Manhood and Independence in the Early Industrial Era, 1840-1849\u201d Labour \/ Le Travail<\/em> 48 (Fall 2001): 227.<\/p>\n

[66]<\/span><\/a> Lowell Courier<\/em>, May 9, 1841. Mitchell and others discuss Irish residents\u2019 strong identification with their ancestral counties, which shaped the organization of neighborhoods, work crews, and other aspects of social life.<\/p>\n

[67]<\/span><\/a> George Francis O\u2019Dwyer, Irish Catholic Genesis of Lowell<\/em> (Lowell, MA: Printed by Sullivan Brothers, 1920), 15; Peter F. Blewett, \u201cThe New People: An Introduction to the Ethnic History of Lowell,\u201d in Cotton Was King: A History of Lowell, Massachusetts<\/em>, ed. Arthur L. Eno, Jr. (Somersworth, N.H.: New Hampshire Publishing Company, 1976), 195.<\/p>\n

[68]<\/span><\/a> Mitchell, Paddy Camps<\/em>, 32; O\u2019Dwyer, Irish Catholic Genesis of Lowell, <\/em>15-17.<\/p>\n

[69]<\/span><\/a> Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America<\/em>, 103.<\/p>\n

[70]<\/span><\/a> \u201cRights and Duties of Mill Girls, Chapter X: Reduction of Wages for Factory Labor,\u201d New England Offering, <\/em>July 1849, 156.<\/p>\n

[71]<\/span><\/a> Voice of Industry<\/em>, May 5, 1845.<\/p>\n

[72]<\/span><\/a> Sarah G. Bagley, \u201cIntroductory,\u201d Voice of Industry<\/em>, January 9, 1846, 2.<\/p>\n

[73]<\/span><\/a> Sarah George Bagley to Angelique Le Petit Martin, 13 Mar. 1847, Martin family correspondence, Box 1, Folder 7, Lilly Martin Spencer Collection, Ohio History Connection Repository, https:\/\/libguides.uml.edu\/c.php?g=542883&p=3723895<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[74]<\/span><\/a> Boston Daily Evening News<\/em>, February 23, 1867.<\/p>\n

[75]<\/span><\/a> \u201cA Week in the Mill,\u201d Lowell Offering<\/em>, October 1845, 218.<\/p>\n

[76]<\/span><\/a> \u201cExtracts from a Journal,\u201d New England Offering: A Magazine of Industry<\/em>, November 1849, 265.<\/p>\n

[77]<\/span><\/a> Lucy Larcom, A New England Girl-hood,<\/em> Outlined from Memory <\/em>(Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1889), 183.<\/p>\n

[78]<\/span><\/a> Ibid., 193.<\/p>\n

[79]<\/span><\/a> Almira [pseudonym], \u201cSpirit of Discontent,\u201d Lowell Offering<\/em>, April 1841, 41-44.<\/p>\n

[80]<\/span><\/a> See Tom F. Wright, The Cosmopolitan Lyceum Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America<\/em> (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).<\/p>\n

[81]<\/span><\/a> Lucy Larcom wrote that the \u201cLyceum lectures\u201d in Lowell were \u201cmore patronized by the mill-people than any mere entertainment.\u201d Larcom, A New England Girl-hood<\/em>, 252.<\/p>\n

[82]<\/span><\/a> Dublin, Women at Work<\/em>, 31-32, 54-57, 70; Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads: New England\u2019s Mill Girls and Magnates<\/em> (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), 81-83 [first published in 1949]; Caroline F. Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in Industrial Beginnings<\/em> (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966) [first published in 1931].<\/p>\n

[83]<\/span><\/a> Almira [pseudonym], \u201cSpirit of Discontent,\u201d 41-44.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anne Callahan is a PhD student in American Studies at Boston University studying representations of work and free time in 19th and early 20th century North American media, with particular attention in the opportunistic use of working hours for play, invention, and personal profit, and the creation and theorization of alternatives to managerial workplaces. Noise […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20228,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20228"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1180"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1210,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions\/1210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}