Samuel Slater Quotes

Around this time, a young man named Samuel Slater slipped through the tight protective net thrown by British authorities around their textile business. As a former apprentice to Sir Richard Arkwright, Slater had sworn that he would never reveal his boss’s trade secrets. Flouting this pledge, he sailed to New York and made contact with Moses Brown, a Rhode Island Quaker. Under Slater’s supervision, Brown financed a spinning mill in Rhode Island that replicated Arkwright’s mill. Hamilton received detailed reports of this triumph, and pretty soon milldams proliferated on New England’s rivers. With patriotic pride, Brown predicted to Hamilton that “mills and machines may be erected in different places, in one year, to make all the cotton yarn that may be wanted in the United States.” 29 Hamilton

When George Washington was inaugurated as president on April 30, 1789, he wore a simple brown suit with silver buttons, white stockings, and shoes with silver buckles. But he had taken care that the cloth was American made, woven in Hartford, Connecticut. Conscious of symbolism, as politicians always are, Washington wanted to encourage American manufactures, as industrial goods were then called, and virtually all cloth of good quality at that time had to be imported from England. But the industrialization of the British cloth industry in recent decades had given Britain an insuperable competitive advantage, and Britain was determined to keep it. The export of textile machinery was strictly forbidden. If the United States was to develop a textile industry of its own, therefore, it had only two choices. It could reinvent what was then high technology on its own, or it could steal it. The former was not very likely as the United States then lacked people familiar with the intricacies of textile manufacture. So it had to be stolen. Although British newspapers were forbidden to print them, clandestine advertisements—a sort of early capitalist samizdat—circulated by hand in the textile areas of the Midlands, offering big rewards to anyone willing and able to set up working textile machinery in the United States. One person who undoubtedly was aware of these enticements was Samuel Slater, who had been born in Belper, Derbyshire, in 1768, in the heart of the burgeoning textile manufacturing area. Slater was apprenticed in 1782 to Jedidiah Strutts, the owner of a textile mill in Belper and one of the first to make a fortune out of the new technology.