THE MILLS OF MANAYUNK: EARLY INDUSTRIALIZATION AND SOCIAL CONFLICT IN THE PHILADELPHIA REGION, 1787-1837

Social historians have scarcely looked beyond New England to explain the nature of early industrialization in America. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, Philadelphia contained a greater number of textile factories than any other manufacturing district in the nation. This is a study of the development of the factory wage-labor system and industrial capitalist society in the Philadelphia region between 1787 and 1837. It focuses upon the mill village of Manayunk and its township of Roxborough, which became the center of the mid-Atlantic textile industry. In the dissertation I examine the interconnection between three developments: the changing relationship between labor and capital as textile production moved from shops to water-powered mills; changes in the relationships of property holding, economic power, and cultural and political authority in Roxborough; and the rise of industrial, political, and religious conflict in the textile town in the 1830s. The argument is based on evidence gleaned from quantifiable and literary sources including tax lists, church records, census schedules, newspapers, and manufacturers' correspondence and records.;The process of industrialization produced wide-ranging social conflict in the Philadelphia region before 1840 and not in New England and elsewhere until a later date partly because of the nature of the city's textile labor force. The urban mid-Atlantic textile capitalists, unlike their New England counterparts, drew from an abundant supply of immigrant workers from Britain's stagnating textile districts. Their skill, poverty, and ideology influenced the timing of mechanization, the nature of mill production, and the conflict that accompanied industrialization in the Philadelphia region. Bringing the militant oppositional tradition of Lancashire's textile districts to Manayunk, mill operatives conducted two years of strike activity and spearheaded the union movement among Philadelphia's laboring classes in the early 1830s. The battles between mill owners and workers galvanized the entire township. Tradesmen and shopkeepers perceived that democratic social reforms and evangelical religion would quell class conflict. And in the process of struggling over the issues of public education, the U.S. Bank, temperance reform, as well as working conditions, the class divisions of early industrial society became more distinct.