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Updated: June 20, 2025
Steam-engines, to the number of 40,191, and of 1,215,711 horse-power all of the stationary variety, and exclusive of nearly half as many that traverse the country and may be classed among the rural population have succeeded the websters and spinners who were wont to clothe all the world and his wife, and who survive only in the surnames of some of our statesmen and financiers.
In 1836, in a Manchester mill, nine frames, each having three hundred and twenty-four spindles, were tended by four spinners. Afterwards the mules were doubled in length, which gave each of the nine six hundred and eighty spindles and enabled two men to tend them. There we have the naked fact of the elimination of the workman by the machine.
Then word came from England that the Manchester spinners had found the ginned cotton to contain knots, and this was sufficient to start the rumor throughout the South that Whitney's gin injured the cotton fiber and that cotton cleaned by them was worthless. It was two years before this ghost was laid. Meanwhile Whitney's patent was being infringed on every hand.
These objections are easy to be answered, though that is not my present business; but thus far it is to my purpose it is the factor's business to keep himself within compass: if the goods cannot be sold, the maker must stay till they can; if the poor must be employed, the manufacturer is right to keep them at work if he can; but if he cannot, without oppressing the factor, then he makes the factor employ them, not himself; and I do not see the factor has any obligation upon him to consider the spinners and weavers, especially not at the expense of his own credit, and his family's safety.
Hence those wonderful little poems, the carnival songs of the gold-thread spinners, of the pastry-cooks, of the shoemakers, which give us so completely, so gracefully, the whole appearance, work, manner, gesture of the people; give them to us with ease and rapidity so perfect, that we scarcely know how they are given; that we almost forget verses and song, and actually see the pulling, twisting, and cutting of the gold-threads; that we see and hear the shoemaker's hands smoothing down the leather of the shoe in his hand, to convince his customers of its pliability; that we see and smell the dear little pale yellow pasties nestling in the neat white baskets, after having stood by and watched the dough being kneaded, chopped, and floured over, the iron plates heated in the oven, the soft, half-baked paste twisted and bent; nay, we feel almost as if we had eaten of them, those excellent things which seem such big mouthfuls but are squeezed and crunched at one go like nothing at all.
We have been so accustomed to regarding the Fleming as a sluggish boor, that it comes in the nature of a surprise when we read of the part these burghers, these weavers and spinners, took in the great events that distinguished Flemish history.
His woods furnished timber and plank for the carpenters and coopers, and charcoal for the blacksmith; his cattle killed for his own consumption and for sale, supplied skins for the tanners, curriers, and shoemakers; and his sheep gave wool and his fields produced cotton and flax for the weavers and spinners, and his own orchards fruit for the distillers.
These story-and-a-half cottages, executed along simple Federal lines, are owned by the families who occupy them. They look out on a street lined with fine old elms and at the end is the stone mill with its belfry where still hangs the bell that once ruled the lives of spinners and weavers with its clanking iron tongue, morning, noon and night.
The single strand yarn for material from the spinners was coming to the Twist Frame to be turned into twines and fishing lines.
With this decrease of export the import of food has decreased, although the population, has increased; but, at the present day, the aggregate value of the exports of all the British West Indies is now nearly as great as it was in the palmiest days of slavery, while on an average the free blacks now earn far more for themselves than they formerly did for their masters, and are therefore 'better off. Even those who regard the negro, whether a slave or free, as fulfilling his whole earthly mission in proportion to the profit which he yields Lancashire spinners, have no just grounds of complaint.
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