Manufacturing Advantage is a study of industrialization in its geopolitical context. It argues that national security concerns shaped the course of industrial development in America. ^{Footnote 1} Consular and congressional papers, federal armory records, and manufacturers’ business letters and account books connect the large themes of political economy—war, trade, state power—with local sites of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. ^{Footnote 2}

Arms and textiles are the focus. Although their stories are not usually told together in a single narrative, guns and cloth emerge as products of national defense. Following the Revolutionary War, the new nation faced tax rebellions, Indian warfare, and European hostilities with a depleted arsenal of imported firearms and uniforms. Without a readier supply of guns, the new nation could not defend itself; without textiles, it was at the economic mercy of the British Empire. In an era when armies literally froze in the field, ideological concerns about dependence had very real ramifications. Americans knew how to grow and slaughter their own sustenance, but substantial manufacturing posed more of a challenge. It was a challenge, however, worth overcoming. Even in times of peace, guns offered the promise of physical safety; textiles, meanwhile, provided a subtler form of security as visible and tactile manifestations of the independence of a properly clothed and productive populace.

Americans’ efforts to overcome this challenge allow us to see the messy distinction between government intervention and private initiative in a new nation struggling to create a political economy that balanced military competence with commercial needs. As Manufacturing Advantage explores the process by which government officials and individual manufacturers made the arms and textile industries guarantors of military and economic security, it connects older studies of industrialization, which have tended to focus on the social implications wrought by economic transformations for the worker, entrepreneur, firm, and community, with more recent work that argues for the centrality of foreign relations, the military, and the federal government for economic development. ^{Footnote 3} In many ways, this intersectional approach to economic development is in line with the new “history of capitalism” ^{Footnote 4} that brings together business, labor, and social and cultural histories to denaturalize capitalism. Manufacturing Advantage contributes to this project by showing how “the economy” is the result of individual decision making at the international, national, and local levels rather than as a set of abstract market forces. While recent historians have been less concerned with defining or locating the origins of capitalism and more focused on showing how a capitalist cultural logic operates in different times and places, it seeks to uncover precisely how and when industrial capitalism emerged in the United States. ^{Footnote 5}

Industrial capitalism had its beginnings in the context of national security in the first decades of the nineteenth century, as government agents and private producers brokered solutions to the problems of power disparities and war. These solutions included a mix of “free” trade policies to appease mercantile interests and foreign trade partners, protectionist tariffs to enable the United States to withstand military and economic conflicts, and federal subsidies to certain industries. The federal government depended on private capital, ingenuity, and risk-taking to create economic development and national security. Entrepreneurs likewise needed federal resources, trade regulation, and diplomacy to generate profit. National security was as much about economic prosperity as it was about diplomacy and battle-line needs, and we should not discount the amount of time members of Congress spent debating tariffs, slavery, and regional development. Neither can we ignore larger geopolitical forces. When we look beyond Congress, we see the War and State Departments as central players in the development of domestic industry. With the executive branch at the helm, the federal government directed public resources to manufacturers and conducted diplomacy that privileged American industrial goods. Industrial development, in turn, bolstered state power.

Manufacturing Advantage moves from the first Congress up through the 1840s, a span of time that allows us to see the United States transition from an aspirational new republic, whose leaders crafted economic policy in the context of waning European mercantilism, to an ascendant nation-state, whose industrial and military powers garnered international attention. The first chapter opens with the United States in the shadow of European empires, as the newly independent nation struggled to establish economic and military security in an insecure world. Even as the United States considered itself a peer of European powers, it was unable to arm its own soldiers or clothe its own citizens. In the face of border conflict, slave uprisings, and tax rebellions, this inadequacy proved a grave threat. However, many American policymakers did not want to turn their republic of small farmers into a nation of industrial capitalists or wage earners, certainly not one with a large standing army. What would the solution be? Despite misgivings about the social ramifications of large-scale industry and militarization, leaders such as George Washington recognized that the surest way to preserve peace was to be prepared—with arms—for war. Guns were more of a military imperative than textiles, but textiles mattered too, especially as visible manifestations of independence. This chapter takes a tour of the economic landscape of the 1790s by following a British textile entrepreneur on his visit to the United States in 1794. As it stops at small factories throughout New England, the chapter connects these first forays into manufacturing with national policies. The year 1794 proved decisive for the new republic. It marked the establishment of the federal armory; the passage of a tariff that offered protection for a variety of manufactured goods; and the signing of the Jay Treaty, which improved commercial relations with Great Britain and staved off war until the United States was better prepared for it. The United States entered the nineteenth century with the infrastructure for national arms production firmly in place, but textile manufacturing proved unsustainable until the federal government waged military and commercial warfare against Britain.

The next two chapters examine federal approaches to domestic manufacturing during and after the War of 1812. Chapter 2 explores the United States’ struggle to be taken seriously as a world power, a struggle that culminated in a second war for independence against Great Britain. Wartime mobilization brought to the fore the nation’s industrial shortcomings, prompting a more aggressive strategy for producing the stuff of war. While the United States now manufactured the majority of its own weapons, the federal armories did not yet produce enough guns to arm the military for war. To remedy this shortcoming, the federal government contracted with private manufacturers, whose guns would arm the nation’s militia. During this period, War Department officials cemented their relationships with a small cadre of reliable manufacturers that received large renewable contracts that came with cash advances. These public funds grew the factories of certain arms makers such as Eli Whitney, and developed the Connecticut River Valley as a technology district akin to today’s Silicon Valley. As the federal government cultivated gun production in western New England, it took a different approach with the textile industry. Beginning in 1806, it limited imports of woolen cloth and ready-made clothing from Great Britain. During the War of 1812, it raised prices to entice factories to switch from civilian to military production. This chapter considers the activities of federal officials such as purveyor of public supplies Tench Coxe, who distributed cloth samples before the War of 1812 and offered to purchase from manufacturers who could match the quality of imported military fabrics. The chapter also looks at the producer side. The Hindsill brothers, for example, built a woolen mill in Bennington, Vermont, during the trade embargo against England. They originally specialized in fulled woolen cloth for civilian consumers, but partway through the war shifted to coarse kerseys and blankets for the military, after the government raised its purchasing prices. During the first few years of the 1800s, it had seemed impossible that American industry could supply an entire army, but, in 1815, U.S. soldiers achieved a stalemate against a major world power with American guns in their hands and domestic textiles on their backs.

With manufacturing no longer a question, American policymakers asked how best they could channel federal resources into public and private industries to ensure national prosperity and dominance over the continent. Chapter 3 centers on the financial strategies used by the executive branch to stimulate industrial expansion in the context of territorial expansion. The expansion of slave country in the years following the War of 1812 provided a boon to New England manufacturing, not just in the form of increased cotton supply or new plantation markets, but also in the form of arms appropriations and financial rewards for men who were just beginning to pivot from mercantile to manufacturing pursuits. When Secretary of State John Quincy Adams negotiated with Spain to acquire Florida in 1819, he agreed that the federal government would assume $5 million of American citizens’ claims against the Spanish government. This chapter considers as financial stimulus the claims payments that a group of Boston merchant-industrialists received as a result of the Transcontinental Treaty, which transferred more than $1 million in federal funds to some of the proprietors of the Boston Manufacturing Company, and were conveniently timed with the founding of new factories in Lowell, Massachusetts. These payments allowed the recipients to buy out smaller enterprises, making possible industrial consolidation in the Merrimack Valley. At the same time as the State Department negotiated for Florida, the War Department orchestrated military incursions along the nation’s borders, which improved the business prospects of weapons manufacturers. In the context of seemingly endless conflict with Indian groups and runaway slaves on the southeastern frontier, the Ordnance Department bolstered the quantity and quality of the nation’s firearms supply by channeling public funds, sometimes beyond what Congress mandated, to individual gun makers. War Department officials imposed production standards on their contractors and worked around congressional spending limits to ramp up American weapon output. The War Department overstepped the checks imposed on its powers by a Congress eager to rein in the expansion of the nation’s military apparatus by, for example, instructing the superintendent of the Springfield Armory to exceed the budget set by Congress in order to keep up supply levels. All of these federal financial strategies helped grow and modernize U.S. industry in the late 1810s and 1820s.

The last two chapters explore America’s transition from industrial backwater to rising global producer by focusing on the acquisition of export markets for manufactured goods and on the development of new manufacturing processes. Chapter 4 moves outside U.S. borders to Latin America during and after the region’s independence wars in the 1810s and 1820s. As Iberia’s colonies transitioned into independent states, they served as testing grounds for U.S. commercial diplomacy and manufactured exports. Prior to the establishment of formal diplomacy, U.S. consuls cultivated amicable relationships with patriot leaders and facilitated the sale of weapons and other goods; following the war, U.S. agents lobbied aggressively for, and achieved, trade policies that privileged U.S. manufactures. The independence wars were especially advantageous for arms producers. At the end of every production year, the U.S. federal armories and their contractors usually had on hand a quantity of guns that failed inspection for military service. ^{Footnote 6} Most of this surplus, on the one hand, was disposed of through agents and auction houses in Philadelphia and New York, but domestic markets for guns were limited. South American patriots, on the other hand, were cut off from European supplies by the Napoleonic Wars, and looked to the United States for weapons. Although the U.S. federal government could not itself arrange for the sale of weapons to colonies in rebellion, no law prohibited private merchants from doing so. For example, the superintendent of the Springfield Armory negotiated with a network of merchants in the United States to sell armory surplus in South America, which one year netted more than $100,000 for the Ordnance Department. ^{Footnote 7} These gun sales laid the foundation for increased commercial exchange following the wars. It was not a given, however, that U.S manufactured goods would find easy outlets in newly independent South American countries, especially in the face of foreign competition and South American manufacturing initiatives. The sales of U.S. textiles depended on the U.S. State Department. William Tudor, for an example, was an American consul (an agent of the State Department without the formal treatymaking powers of a minister plenipotentiary) who not only marketed American fabrics in Peru, but also negotiated reductions in duties on American textiles. Nathan Appleton, a Boston-based merchant and textile entrepreneur, sent Tudor factory samples to test out in South American markets in the 1820s. Tudor wrote back to Appleton with information about which consumers preferred which fabrics. In addition to providing marketing services, Tudor actually improved the market for certain types of cloth in South America by negotiating with Peru’s minister of foreign affairs for a reduction in protective duties on textiles produced in the United States. Tudor’s career reveals the critical role of the state in launching American industrial production, as well as the fact that economic independence depended so heavily on diplomatic initiatives and military actions pursued outside the nation’s borders.

Chapter 5 looks ahead to American superiority in firearms and textiles. In between the framing of the Constitution and London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, when American manufactures received their first significant international accolades, the U.S. government instituted a piecemeal program for incentivizing improvements in machines and processes that included technological importation, permissive immigration policies, patent rights, and public research and development. ^{Footnote 8} Up through the early 1800s, the United States relied on the mechanical knowledge of immigrants and on pirated spinning and weaving technologies from Britain and gunmaking processes from France. The nation’s first patent acts in the 1790s encouraged domestic invention by making inventors eligible for monopoly rights to their inventions after submitting an application to the State Department. Despite lax enforcement of these rights, the federal patent market offered Americans the lure of profits from royalties and patent sales. The ease of infringement did little to deter inventors, and actually helped spread and generate further innovation. For this reason, the patent system worked. The federal government, however, took a more direct approach to arms innovation by funding experiments at the national armories and working closely with private contractors to shape improvements to weapon production. ^{Footnote 9} A key figure was Colonel Decius Wadsworth, an example of a mid-level bureaucrat who worked with manufacturers to shore up industrial capacity. During his term as chief of ordnance from 1815 to 1821, Wadsworth pushed an aggressive agenda of improving arms production. Prior to Wadsworth’s service, the War Department lacked a coordinated set of standards for its arms contractors. Wadsworth spearheaded a system of inspection that required all arms produced by the two federal armories (in Springfield, Massachusetts, and in Harpers Ferry, Virginia) and by federal contractors to match the model provided by the Springfield Armory. He renewed the contracts of successful private arms manufacturers and altered contract terms to conform to new standardization policies. Wadsworth helped mitigate the uncertainty of innovation by offering rewards for technological improvements. ^{Footnote 10} He, for example, advocated that Simeon North, a successful arms manufacturer in Middletown, Connecticut, receive additional funding, on top of the advance-sum contract payments he received from the War Department, to subsidize machine improvements. These sorts of interventions helped achieve interchangeability in weapon manufacturing, a process that enabled manufacturers and soldiers to substitute one part for another and promised to make both factory production and field repair more efficient. After receiving additional funds, North went on to develop one of the nation’s first interchangeable rifles. ^{Footnote 11} This rifle became part of the “American System of Manufactures,” a label likely originating in 1850s England that described the methods of interchangeability and mechanization that put U.S. manufacturing on par with Great Britain’s. ^{Footnote 12}

The sum total of these federal policies was an industrial revolution that lasted many decades but that nonetheless contributed to the United States’ rising global strength. By 1840 U.S. industrial output rivaled that of Great Britain and France, and by 1865 the Springfield Armory was the largest arsenal in the world. ^{Footnote 13} Nevertheless, the relationship between public and private changed. Once the Ordnance Department had met its goals of standardization and the federal armories could fill both immediate and reserve needs, the regular letting of large, advance-sum government contracts to private arms manufacturers ceased. ^{Footnote 14} The government issued its last five-year contracts to its cohort of Connecticut Valley manufacturers in 1840 and stipulated that the contract could be terminated at any time. ^{Footnote 15} The firms that had risen to prominence under federal patronage and paved the way in innovation and national service faded into obscurity. ^{Footnote 16} They either ceased operations or downsized production and sold their guns to consumers elsewhere. ^{Footnote 17} In general, these firms had difficulty adjusting to post-contract production. In their place, patent arms firms, most notably Winchester Repeating Arms Company and Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing, became the face of private arms manufacturing. ^{Footnote 18} These new firms built upon the decades of improvements in arms manufacturing in the Connecticut Valley and took advantage of a more lucrative patent market following the 1836 reforms. ^{Footnote 19} They positioned themselves to take advantage of growing frontier demand, as more and more Americans who moved west wanted guns. With the quality of American guns now surpassing that of the British and French, they sold well in European markets.

During and after the Mexican American War and Civil War, the government still turned to private gun manufacturers to boost its arsenals, as it had before 1840. ^{Footnote 20} It also contracted out to the commercial sector for military clothing. ^{Footnote 21} Although robust domestic output was a slower achievement in the textile industry than in arms, the United States became entirely self-sufficient in textile production by the Civil War with the help of immigrant labor and increasing mechanization. For the first time in the nation’s history, the federal government was able to provide its troops with uniforms made exclusively at home. ^{Footnote 22}

The work that had gone into industrial development during the first half of the nineteenth century paid off militarily as the nation entered the second half. The United States was now not only capable of equipping a well-regulated army, but its arms and textile technologies also became the envy of European onlookers. It would never again be completely dependent on the Old World. Independence was predicated on a strong executive and a general populace that was eager to take advantage of the state’s national security capitalism. Industry and the military were no longer anathema to the American experiment. They now made it work.