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The Industrial Revolution
in World History

Now in its fifth edition, this book explores the ways in which the indus-
trial revolution reshaped world history, covering the international fac-
tors that helped launch the industrial revolution, its global spread and its
impact from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day.
The single most important development in human history over the
past three centuries, the industrial revolution continues to shape the
contemporary world. Revised and brought into the present, this fifth
edition of Peter N. Stearns’ The Industrial Revolution in World History
extends his global analysis of the industrial revolution. Looking beyond
the West, the book considers India, the Middle East and China and now
includes more on key Latin American economies and Africa as well as
the heightened tensions, since 2008, about the economic aspects of glo-
balization and the decline of manufacturing in the West. This edition
also features a new chapter on key historiographical debates, updated
suggestions for further reading and boxed debate features that encour-
age the reader to consider diversity and different viewpoints in their own
analysis, and pays increased attention to the environmental impacts.
Illustrating the contemporary relevance of the industrial revolution’s
history, this is essential reading for students of world history and eco-
nomics, as well as for those seeking to know more about the global
implications of what is arguably the defining socioeconomic event of
modern times.

Peter N. Stearns is University Professor and Provost Emeritus at George

Mason University, USA.
The Industrial Revolution
in World History
FIFTH EDITION

Peter N. Stearns
Fifth edition published 2021
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Peter N. Stearns to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
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identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Westview Press 1993
Fifth edition published by Routledge 2021
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Contents

List of Illustrations ix
List of Debates x
Acknowledgments xi

1 Introduction: Defining the Industrial Revolution 1

Technology and Work Organization 7
Issues in Interpretation 9
The Range of the Industrial Revolution 12
Chronology and Geography 15

PART 1
The First Phase, 1760–1880: Western Primacy, Global
Contexts, and Global Results 19

2 Britain’s Revolution: New Processes and Economic

Transformation 21
Britain Becomes the Workshop of the World 29
Industrialization Exacts a Price
Change Generates Change: After 1820 39

42
Three Approaches: British/Western, Comparative
and Global 48
Trigger: Why the Eighteenth Century? 50
Britain as a Special Case 51

4 The Industrial Revolution in Western Society 55

France: An Eclectic Course 59
Germany: Heavy Industry and Big Business 60
vi Contents
The United States: Dynamism of a New Nation 62
The Industrial West by the 1880s 66

5 The Social Impact of the Industrial Revolution 68

Life on the Job 70
Forging the Industrial Family 74
Social Divisions and Protest 80
A New Political and Cultural Context 85

87
Pilot Projects: Russia
Pilot Projects: Asia, Latin America, and Africa 90
Restructuring the International Economy 97
The Two Faces of International Impact 102

PART 2
The Second Phase, 1880–1950: The New International Cast 103

105
Second-Phase Trends 105
Why Japan and Russia? 112

117
Early Industrialization: Before the Revolution 118
Social Impacts: Industrialization and Revolution 124
The Industrial Revolution under Communism 128

9 The Industrial Revolution in Japan 134

The Context for Industrialization 137
The Early Stages 139
Social Impacts 144
The Industrial Economy Matures: 1920s–1950s 148

153
Machines and the Drive for Organizational Change 154
The Service Sector 159
Leisure and the Consumer Economy 161
Class Warfare 163
Redefining the Scope of Industrialization 165
The West as New Model 166
 Contents vii
168
The Expansion of Commercial Exploitation 169
Environmental Change 176
Factory Expansion 176
Industrial Sectors: Change amid Tradition 181
Economies of the British Dominions 183
At the Brink of Global Change 185

PART 3
The Third Phase, 1950s–2020s: The Industrialization
of the World 187

189
New Members of the Industrial Club: The 1960s
The New Wave: The 1980s and 1990s and Beyond 191
The Postindustrial Concept 192
Globalization 194
Interlocking Trends 195

197
Israel: Development in the Desert 197
The Pacific Rim 198
Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey: Toward the Next Wave 204
China and India 207
Waves of Change 211

213
Growth Rates 213
Structural Changes: The Postindustrial Thesis 218
The New Industrial Balance 222

225
The New Sinews of Globalization 225
The Multinationals 227
Labor Migration 230
Globalization and Convergence 233
Global Societies 234
Attacking Globalization 235
Inequalities 236
Variety and Inequality 239
viii Contents
241
The Pace Quickens 242
Attempts at Addressing a Large-Scale Problem 245

249
The Great Recession 250
Global Competition 251
The Problem of Inequality Revisited 254
New Uncertainties 255

258
Precedent as a Guide to Prediction 258
History and Changing Contexts 261
The Balance Sheet: A Final Debate 261
The Ongoing Experience 263

265
Europe as Crucible and the Global Context 265
Social Impact: Western Europe and the United States 268
Beyond Western Europe 270
Recent Developments 276

Index 279
Illustrations

Figures
4.1 Annual Production of Pig Iron, 1870 58
8.1 Railroads in Russia, 1860–1900 119
143
9.2 Men and Women in the Late Nineteenth-Century
Labor Force in Britain, France, and Japan 146
156

Maps
2.1 The Beginning of the Industrial Revolution: Great
Britain, c. 1750–1820 31
7.1 The Industrial Revolution in Europe, 1870–1914 106
7.2 The Industrial Revolution in the Wider World by 1929 108

Illustrations
3.1 England’s Nineteenth-Century Industries Expand
and Improve 52
4.1 The Progress of Cotton 64

Photographs
131
157
163
167
171
209
215
239
Debates

Debate #1 Was this a real revolution?2

Debate #2 When did Western Europe become “special” in
relevant ways? Or, how far back must we go to
capture the roots of the industrial revolution?22
Debate #3 Population and industrialization: is there an
optimal balance?27
Debate #4 Why are the causes of the industrial revolution
still in dispute?45
Debate #5 What did the industrial revolution do to the
experience of work?69
Debate #6 Has the industrial revolution fundamentally
altered gender roles?79
Debate #7 Assessing delays in industrialization93
Debate #8 How many industrial revolutions in one place?111
Debate #9 Comparing industrial revolutions123
Debate #10 Confucianism and industrialization139
Debate #11 The future of new dependent economies175
Debate #12 What kind of government industrializes best?202
Debate #13 How can the United States and China compete?253
Acknowledgments

Alexis Frambes was extremely helpful in the preparation of this fifth

edition. I should also acknowledge previous assistance from Laura Bell
and Pearl Harris Scott. Thanks as well to Eve Setch and Zoe Thomson
at Routledge for their encouragement. I am very grateful as well to the
many world history students at George Mason whose work and interests
have contributed to my work on this aspect of the global experience.
1 Introduction
Defining the Industrial
Revolution

Assessing the industrial revolution is a historical challenge, but it also

has a strikingly contemporary ring. In 2019 a number of economists,
concerned about sluggish economic growth rates in the United States
and elsewhere, urged the development of a new “science of progress”
that would identify factors that promote economic dynamism. In prac-
tice, they were urging that the components that launched the industrial
revolution be more clearly identified and updated: industrial history, in
other words, may be crucial to dynamic policy today.
Many people would worry about this connection, urging that we use
industrial history to help identify and explain menacing problems like
environmental change or even some of the limitations of contemporary
family life. Here too, however, they are saying—correctly—that an array
of contemporary concerns cannot be properly evaluated without a grasp
of the earlier industrial transformation. Industrial history is, in part, a
framework for understanding the world around us today. Indeed—and
we will take this up in the final chapter—assessments of the nature of
modern life, its pros and cons, rest heavily on an understanding of what
the industrial revolution has done and is doing to the human condition.

***

The industrial revolution was the most important single development in

human history over the past three centuries. It is not, however, a histor-
ical episode alone. It continues to shape the contemporary world. Even
the oldest industrial societies are still adapting to its impact, for exam-
ple, in dealing with changes in the roles of women. Newer industrial
giants, such as China, repeat elements of the original process but extend
its range in new directions.
The phenomenon began about two and a half centuries ago. It has
changed the world. Focused on new methods and organizations for pro-
ducing goods, industrialization has altered where people live, how they
play, how they define political issues—even, many historians would ar-
gue, how they have sex.
2 Introduction
The industrial revolution was a global process from the first. It resulted
from changes that had been occurring in global economic relations, and
then it redefined those relations still further—and continues to do so.
This book explores what the industrial revolution was and how it recast
world history—even beyond the particular societies in which it developed
the deepest roots. Industrialization was the most fundamental force in
world history in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and it
continues powerfully to shape the twenty-first. Outright industrial rev-
olutions occurred in three waves. The first happened in western Europe
and the new United States beginning with developments in Britain in the
1770s. A second wave spread over of Russia and Japan, some other parts
of eastern and southern Europe, plus Canada and Australia from the
1880s onward. The most recent unfolding began in the 1960s in the Pa-
cific Rim (including China by the 1970s) and, two decades later, in Turkey
and India, and in Brazil and other parts of Latin America. Each major
wave of industrialization quickly spilled over into other societies that were
not industrialized outright, altering basic social and economic relation-
ships. Because industrialization was a global phenomenon from the first,
it helps focus key comparisons: between specific revolutionary processes,
such as the German and the Japanese, and between societies advancing in
industrial growth and those where the process is at least delayed.
The industrial revolution involves fundamental change, but it is an odd
kind of revolution. Indeed, some historians take issue with the term itself.
This is a transformation that spins out, in any given society, for several
decades. In its early stages it may have little measurable impact on overall
production rates, which are still determined by more traditional methods
of work. Yet the use of new machinery and redefinitions of how labor is
organized quickly create a sense of major change, even among groups not
directly involved. Fear of threats to established habits and awe at the pro-
fusion of goods that industrialization produces intermingle. Characteris-
tic early attempts to protest the new system show that the magnitude of
change strikes home—and the failure of these efforts, forcing redefinition
of protest itself, demonstrates how unstoppable this economic machine
becomes. In this sense, and in the broader sense of altering the whole con-
text of life, this is revolution indeed. Ultimately, industrialization’s role in
changing the framework of world history is its most important face.

DEBATE #1: WAS THIS A REAL REVOLUTION?

There are four related reasons to fuss a bit over use of the word “rev-
olution” to describe the process of industrialization that first began in
Great Britain. This is not the most important debate industrialization
inspires, but it reflects some of the complexities involved.
 Introduction 3

Point 1: the word revolution is overused in modern culture. We

are recurrently told about revolutions in skin care or sports equip-
ment. Have historians of industry, eager to highlight the impor-
tance of their subject, fallen victim to verbal hyperbole?
Then there is the fact that people involved in what we call the
industrial revolution did not quickly adopt the term. In the great
French political revolution of 1789, participants began talking
about revolution almost immediately. As early as July, 1789, right
when things were heating up, the popular press in France was
talking explicitly about the revolution that was taking shape. But
in Britain it was a full century before the term “industrial revolu-
tion” was introduced. To be sure, French observers by the 1830s
(accustomed to revolutions) were talking about a révolution in-
dustrielle to describe what they saw in Britain and, often, hoped
could occur in their own country. Still, there was a revealing
lag. Why was it harder for participants to see the revolutionary
qualities of industrialization than to apply the term to political
upheaval?
And historians themselves have muddied the picture in several
important ways. First, as we will discuss further in debate #2, it is
increasingly claimed that major manufacturing changes preceded
the industrial revolution in Europe, and later in Japan, by raising
production levels and intensifying work habits well before “revolu-
tionary” technology like the steam engine. A related complication:
it was once assumed that modern consumerism was the result of
industrialization, but now it turns out that in Western societies it
was the other way around, at least in terms of an initial consumer
push. So was the “revolution” just extending existing trends? And
if so, was it revolutionary?
Most important, many historians, working on the British and
other early cases, have painstakingly demonstrated that measur-
able changes were in many ways surprisingly slow—which is one
reason that even scholars who adopt the word revolution admit that
it takes several decades. The economic historian N.F.R. Crafts, for
example, working on the exemplary British case, has substantially
revised downward any notion of rapid early growth in gross do-
mestic product, and even in industrial production more explicitly.
He sees British manufacturing only growing about 1.5 percent
per year in the four decades after 1760, and less than 3 percent
annually in the three decades after 1800. Similar findings have
been advanced for France, where it is also acknowledged that the
industrial revolution took shape unusually slowly. Obviously, ma-
jor technological change initially impacted only a small part of
(Continued)
4 Introduction

overall manufacturing, and even less of the total economy—hence

the modest growth.
Given these facts—which are generally accepted now for the
early instances—can one nevertheless make the claim that the
term “revolution” fits? The term continues to be widely used, and
while partly this is a matter of habit, the fact is that argument can
still be mounted. Overnight revolution, clearly not, but massive
transformation, almost certainly yes. But how can the hesitations
be batted away? Some suggestions would include: think of cumula-
tive impact over time; think of some rapid, dramatic effects at least
in a few industrial sectors (including effects, through exports, on
economies elsewhere); think of the sheer range of human condi-
tions that would quickly be drawn in, beyond the manufacturing
economy itself. What is the best argument that, despite some cave-
ats, the idea of revolution still fits?
For Further Reading: Peter Temin, “Two Views of the British
Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 57 (1977);
David Greasley and Les Oxley, “Endogenous Growth or ‘Big
Bang’: Two Views of the First Industrial Revolution,” Journal of
Economic History 57 (1977); C.K. Harley and N.F.R. Crafts,
“Cotton Textiles and Industrial Output Growth during the Indus-
trial Revolution,” Economic History Review 48 (1995). And of
course, the rest of this book.

From the beginning, industrialization has been a set of human changes,

and historians’ understanding of this human side has informed some of
the most exciting research findings of recent decades. Researchers note that
among the big factors and large processes there were individual faces, some
excited, some in pain. Early developers in factory industry had to depart
from their parents’ habits, an approach that often required considerable per-
sonal sacrifice and generated familial strain. For example:

• In northern France in the early 1840s, Louis Motte-Bossut set up

a large mechanical wool-spinning factory. His parents had run a
much smaller, more traditional textile operation, manufacturing
with only a simple sort of machinery; they prided themselves on
being able to watch over every detail of their operation and directly
supervise a small labor force. Motte-Bossut, in contrast, aspired to
make France the factory equal of England—during a visit there he
had illegally taken away the plans for state-of-the-art factory equip-
ment. His large factory quickly became one of the leaders in the
region, but his parents would not set foot in it, judging its scale and
its riskiness to be genuinely immoral.
 Introduction 5
• In Germany, Alfred Krupp was born in 1812 into a successful mer-
chant family in the city of Essen. His father, however, a poor busi-
nessman, had decimated the family fortune; Friedrich Krupp had
twice set up steel-manufacturing plants with swindling partners, the
outcome being his failure and public disgrace. Alfred was sent to
work in a factory at age thirteen, while his sister labored as a gov-
erness. In 1826 Alfred began his own firm on the basis of his meager
inheritance, manufacturing scissors and hand tools. No technical
genius, but bent on avoiding his father’s mistakes, Krupp applied
a single-minded devotion to his firm’s success. As a result, he built
one of the giant metallurgical firms during the crucible decades of
German industrialization.
• Chung Ju Yung was a South Korean villager who in the 1940s, at
age sixteen, walked 150 miles to Seoul to take a job as a day la-
borer. He soon moved into modest business activity and began to
help build South Korea’s industrial revolution. By the 1980s, when
Chung was in his sixties, his firm, Hyundai, had 135,000 employees
and forty-two overseas offices, engaging in activities ranging from
automobile manufacture to the construction of huge petroleum
supertankers.

The entrepreneurs who masterminded part of the industrialization pro-

cess came from varied backgrounds. Rags-to-riches stories were not
unknown, but the most consistent thread involved the ability to rec-
ognize the potential of new technology and to break through some of
the economic habits that had dominated the previous generation. This
ability was as characteristic of factory owners from business families,
like Motte-Bossut, as of manufacturers from peasant or worker origins.
Factory owners formed only part of industrialization’s human story,
of course. Workers also shaped the industrial revolution, and they, too,
faced change, often involuntarily, in making their contribution. Children
formed one category. They had always worked, in most social groups.
They assisted their parents on the farm and in the household and pro-
vided some of the menial labor for craft manufacturing, often under
strict employer control. They continued to work in the early factories
but in a much less personal atmosphere, amid the dangers of powered
machinery and the new demands for physical exertion or unrelenting
pace. Government hearings held in Great Britain a few decades after
the industrial revolution began there pinpointed what was probably the
most shocking exploitation of child labor: Children had moved from
providing supplemental labor to being beasts of burden. For the grow-
ing cotton factories in Lancashire—greedy for workers and particularly
interested in the “small and nimble fingers” of children to help tend the
machines at low cost—gangs of children were recruited from the ur-
ban poorhouses. Many came from families displaced from rural manual
6 Introduction
manufacturing by the expansion of the very factories they now served.
As factory hands, they were housed in miserable dormitories and often
beaten to spur production. Shifts of children worked day and night, al-
ternating with time in the dormitory. As an 1836 report suggested, “It
is a common tradition in Lancashire that the beds never get cold.” Not
surprisingly, some children committed suicide, having been driven to
physical and emotional despair.
Women were another category. Persis Edwards came to the new textile
factories of New Hampshire in the 1830s from a farm background. Like
most of the new factory hands, she expected to work only a few years,
saving most of her wages to send back to her rural family or to accumulate
a nest egg for her marriage. In 1839 she wrote to a cousin that she liked
her job “very well—enjoy myself much better than I expected.” However,
she complained (doubtless judging by the standards of labor she had grown
up with) that the work made her feel “very much confined, could wish to
have my liberty a bit more.” Another female relative commented in a letter
a bit more bleakly, noting that factory women had lower status than their
peers who taught school or made dresses in an artisanal shop; her personal
reaction was equivocal: “I was so sick of it at first. I wished a factory had
never been thought of but the longer I stay the better I like [it].”
By 1907, during the first phase of Japanese industrialization, 62 percent
of the factory labor force was female, mostly drawn from distant agricul-
tural villages. As in Europe at an earlier time, a growing population plus
the decline of rural manufacturing jobs made peasant families eager to
send some of their number to the cities, regardless of the stress involved in
adjusting to new settings and new work. Factory recruiters contracted with
fathers or brothers in Japanese peasant families, giving them a fee for the
commitment of a daughter or sister to what was a system of near-slavery.
Factory women worked twelve hours a day, received food and dormitory
housing, and had to buy most of their goods in the company store. They
were granted only a small amount of spending money, because the factory
directors had found that any financial latitude prompted the women to
run away. Most of the women probably hoped to return to their native
village to marry a farmer, but more often they stayed in the cities, marry-
ing a worker or falling into prostitution. An English social worker visiting
Tokyo commented on the lives of these industrial women: “Female factory
workers not only lived in a desert of thought but also their physical envi-
ronment [was] a kind of desert as well.”
The human meaning of the industrial revolution obviously varied in
all sorts of ways. Industrialization that occurred early, like Britain’s,
brought the strains of sheer novelty, as techniques were explored that
had no precedent. Later industrializers could copy, but they faced the
competition of existing industrial nations, which imposed stresses as
well. Industrialization in the context of Japanese culture had an impact
different from that in France, with a distinctive mix of opportunities and
 Introduction 7
problems in each case. Comparison is essential, along with the core com-
ponents. At least as important is the fact that the industrial revolution
varied with the type of group and type of individual involved. Factory
owners could see industrialization in terms of progress and opportu-
nity, though they might, depending on personality, have anxieties and
worries as well. Newly recruited or compelled workers had less margin
in their adjustments to the industrial economy, and they were readier to
think in terms of deterioration and disorientation—though, as the New
England factory women suggested, adjustments were possible, and real
benefits were discernible. Finally, a third group, initially the largest, saw
industrialization developing around them—in Britain in 1800, in Japan
in 1900—and had to decide how it would alter their lives even as they
remained in the countryside or labored in traditional artisanal shops or
commercial businesses.
This book deals with the unfolding of the industrial revolution in its
various major settings around the world and with its international im-
pact outside leading centers. It also, at various points, suggests some
of the debates the industrial revolution inspires, some purely historical
though challenging, some still important in contemporary life. Key top-
ics are the processes industrialization involved, the causes that promoted
it, and the ways in which it transformed a range of international re-
lationships. The discussion will not, however, lose sight of the human
dimension: The industrial revolution meant change—a more decisive set
of changes than most people had ever experienced historically. It meant
opportunity, excitement, stress, and degradation, and these diverse fea-
tures formed an essential part of the conversion from an agriculturally
based to an industrially based society.

Technology and Work Organization

The industrial revolution constituted one of those rare occasions in
world history when the human species altered its framework of exis-
tence. Indeed, the only previous development comparable in terms of
sheer magnitude was the Neolithic revolution—the conversion from
hunting and gathering to agriculture as the basic form of production
for survival. Both the industrial revolution and the Neolithic revolution
brought fundamental changes in how people worked, where they lived
(settled communities rather than nomadic bands, then cities instead of
rural communities and farms), what potential economic surplus was
available, and how many people could be supported around the world.
These changes inevitably had ramifications reaching into almost every
aspect of human experience—into the habits of thought and the rela-
tions between men and women as well as into systems of production
and exchange. The full story of the industrial revolution is precisely the
examination of these multiple impacts.
8 Introduction
The essence of the industrial revolution, however, was fairly simple.
Stripped to its bare bones, the industrial revolution consisted of the ap-
plication of new sources of power to the production process, achieved
with the transmission equipment necessary to apply this power to manu-
facturing. And it consisted of an increased scale in human organization
that facilitated specialization and coordination at levels preindustrial
groupings had rarely contemplated and that often increased the intensity
of work quite apart from technology.
The industrial revolution progressively replaced humans and animals
as the power sources of production with motors powered by fossil fuels
(supplemented by waterpower and, very recently, by nuclear power). The
key invention in Europe’s industrial revolution was the steam engine,
which harnessed the energy potential of coal. Later industrial revolu-
tions also used electric and internal combustion motors (developed by
the 1870s) and petroleum as well as coal. Before the industrial revo-
lution, almost all production in manufacturing and agriculture relied
on equipment powered by people or draft animals, with some small
assistance from waterwheels. Except for waterwheels, used mainly to
mill grain, almost all tools were designed for manual use. Animals of-
ten pulled plows for farming, but planting and harvesting were done by
hand, by workers aided by simple tools like sickles. Looms for weaving
cloth were powered by foot pedals, and the fibers were strung by hand.
The industrial revolution progressively introduced steam or other power
to the production process and steadily increased the proportion of the
process accomplished by equipment without direct human guidance.
Power looms thus not only replaced foot pedals but also crossed threads
automatically after a worker initially attached them to the frame. Ma-
chine tending involved making sure the thread supply remained con-
stant and dealing with snapped threads or other breakdowns; the cloth
itself did not have to be touched by hand until it was gathered. Dramatic
new sources of power—vastly more potent than what people and ani-
mals could provide, and transmitted to the product by semiautomatic
machinery—were the technological core of the industrial revolution.
The organizational facet of the industrial revolution was initially sym-
bolized by the factory, but the organizational principles spread beyond
the factory itself. The industrial revolution brought together groups of
people in the production process. Most production operations before the
late eighteenth century centered on the household, with collaboration
and specialization among ten or fewer people. Even though many early
industrial factories were small, they promoted the grouping of greater
numbers of people for the production process. They also increased the
amount of specialization; tasks were subdivided, so the total production
was increased even aside from the new technology. In contrast, most
work gangs before the industrial revolution—even the large ones like the
slaves in the mines and agricultural plantations of the Americas—had
 Introduction 9
been relatively unspecialized. Finally, industrial-style organization in-
volved more conscious management of workers toward a faster as well
as a more fully coordinated work pace. Here, too, was a contrast with
the more relaxed work styles characteristic of much preindustrial labor,
including a good bit of slave labor. Thus, redefined work discipline and
specialization, along with growth in the size of the work unit, defined
the organizational core of the industrial revolution. Labor systems that
could not match these organizational characteristics, including slavery
and household production, declined or even disappeared during the in-
dustrialization process.
The two central features of industrialization—revolutions in technol-
ogy and in the organization of work—yielded one clear result: a great
increase in the total output of goods and in individual worker output.
Per capita productivity went up, in some cases massively. A spinning
worker in 1820 France or Britain using steam-driven spindles instead
of a manual spinning wheel could produce literally a hundred times the
thread of a preindustrial counterpart. This productivity gain was un-
usual in weaving—early mechanical looms simply doubled output, but
this alone had huge impacts. Increased output could and often would be
used in various ways: to increase inequality in the standard of living, to
support higher tax revenues, to provide for rapidly growing populations,
or to change and possibly improve material conditions for the masses.
These varied results and the balance among them form vital topics to
explore in dealing with the impact of industrialization on individuals
and societies.
The risk in analyzing the industrial revolution is oversimplification,
because its essential features seem simple. Exploring the history of in-
dustrialization involves multiple tasks: tracing why certain parts of the
world were open to new technologies and new organizational forms;
analyzing why different industrial societies established somewhat dif-
ferent policies (for example, varying the role of government in triggering
and guiding the industrialization process); and understanding the host
of different human reactions that emerged, even in a single industrial so-
ciety, as people adjusted to innovations like steam-driven machines and
factories. The full history of the industrial revolution, in other words,
involves variety and complexity. Nevertheless, even as we probe these
richer human meanings, the barebones definition must not be forgotten;
in any industrialization process, the technological and organizational
substratum inevitably looms large.

Issues in Interpretation
The industrial revolution raises all sorts of interpretive issues, including
what caused it in the first place. We will encounter key issues in virtually
every section of this book. A few issues apply even to the basic definition,
10 Introduction
since historians continue to discuss how to come to terms with this wa-
tershed in the human experience.
The industrial revolution involved certain general processes. Partici-
pants in industrialization had to deal with work systems, with the rise
of new kinds of stores, with new habits of time. These changes involved
hosts of individual events: a manufacturer deciding on his factory rules,
a peddler realizing that the growing quantity of goods required a village
shop instead of itinerant hawking, a manufacturing worker learning to
listen for the clock-based factory whistle. These events, multiplied by
the hundreds of thousands of individuals involved, constituted the new
work processes, the rise of new kinds of commerce, the sense of a new
urgency in work time.
The essence of the industrial revolution does not, however, flow from
very many clearly labeled seminal events, such as the inauguration of
a new president or the signing of a major treaty. Event-based history
proceeded as industrialization took hold: Britain fought the armies of
Napoleon, Japan installed a new constitution, Russia was battered by a
1905 revolution. The industrial revolution was involved in these events
and had some obvious events of its own: James Watt’s invention of the
steam engine, the passage of new child labor laws, the establishment in
Japan of a ministry of industry. But fitting industrial history and event-
based history together is not easy, and most students of industrialization
deal with a distinctive set of historical markers.
The industrial revolution does not even have a tidy beginning or end—
unlike political revolutions. For example, Great Britain started opening
steam-powered factories in the 1780s. The change quickly swept through
a few important industries—cotton spinning was almost entirely mech-
anized within a decade—but the economy as a whole changed far more
slowly. By 1850 there were still as many craft workers as factory workers
and as many rural people as urban. Industrialization had changed the
work lives as well as the prospects and outlook of the nonfactory ma-
jority, but it had not yet revolutionized them. And although productivity
had exploded in a few sectors, overall per capita output grew only grad-
ually (about 2 percent per year) because so much of the population still
worked in traditional settings.
Industrialization, in fact, frequently gained momentum several de-
cades after the first serious introductions of new equipment and facto-
ries. Some societies, as we will see, experimented with a few factories
and had no subsequent industrial revolution at all. But even many re-
gions that did industrialize in some manufacturing sectors saw a greater
wave of change forty or fifty years after their initial engagement. What
is sometimes called a “second industrial revolution” in western Europe,
late in the nineteenth century, generated another set of fundamental
changes, and similar redefinitions occurred elsewhere. Thus both Japan
and Russia redefined and accelerated their industrialization processes
 Introduction 11
in the 1920s and 1930s, a half century after their serious involvement
began. Industrial revolutions, clearly, are long and evolving.
Complexities of this sort have certainly dented an earlier schematic
image of the industrial revolution. In the 1950s economic historian
W. W. Rostow sought to create something of a model of industrial revo-
lution, abstracted from particular historical developments but fitting all
industrial revolutions—from Britain’s first effort through Japan’s more
recent drive to possible revolutions in the future (he wrote before the
Pacific Rim’s surge into the fray). Rostow emphasized a few “takeoff”
decades in which the initial introduction of new technology spurred
particularly rapid change in the relevant sectors. More recent work on
industrialization points instead to the variety of changes that occurred
even as the first factories were introduced: Some craft sectors grew, some
industrial sectors remained atypical and small, and no precise pattern of
industrial dynamism existed from one region to the next. Many societ-
ies saw an intensification of production before a full “revolution” took
hold. Furthermore, preliminary phases did not lead, lockstep, to some
standardized maturation. Whereas Germany moved quickly to a focus
on relatively large factories in heavy industry (though this move accom-
panied maintenance of a substantial artisanal sector), France achieved
impressive manufacturing growth rates through a different blend, com-
bining some factories with pressures to speed up craft operations in
industries such as furniture making. But if industrial revolutions are
uneven, slow, and particular, with no one case quite like the next, there
is no need to discard the term revolution. After all, many effects of po-
litical revolutions also unfold slowly, and they never change conditions
as much or as rapidly as proponents imagined. Industrial revolutions
spring from previous changes—this is an obvious aspect of causation
and helps explain why some societies have industrial revolutions and
others, despite considerable effort, do not. Industrial revolutions take
time, and they involve different parts of the labor force in quite different
degrees of change. They do, however, produce some fundamental shifts,
building from the increasing introduction of new technologies and new
organizational forms even if (as in the French case most obviously) the
introduction is not only gradual but somewhat idiosyncratic.
The revolutionary quality of industrialization becomes still more ob-
vious in the world context. British and even French industrialization
proceeded, as we shall see, from earlier patterns of economic and so-
cial change. The introduction of steam-driven equipment denoted a real
shift, but one occurring within an already dynamic context. Industrial
revolutions later on, based in large part on imitation of earlier ones
elsewhere, developed revolutionary characteristics more quickly. Russia
began to form a factory labor force within the same generation as it
abolished rural serfdom and began to spread literacy; Japan produced a
new entrepreneurial class only a generation after abolishing feudalism;
12 Introduction
South Korea launched its industrialization only a generation after the
economic and political oppression of Japanese occupation. The massive
social and political transformations involved in cases like these took
place with bewildering speed, and the industrial revolution played a cen-
tral role in them.
In sum, the variety and unevenness of industrial development make
the concept of industrial revolution undeniably slippery. No initial defi-
nition can substitute for the exploration of actual cases, and no orderly
schema fully captures reality. Nevertheless, the phenomenon does in-
volve revolutionary levels of change, so that societies that have generated
a real industrial revolution differ from those contemporary ones that
have introduced some mechanized manufacturing but not a full revolu-
tion. The debates about the concept properly remind us of its complexity
but need not distract us from the fundamental—indeed, revolutionary—
alterations the process generates over time. The huge differences between
the Britain of 1880 and that of 1780, the United States of 1900 and that
of 1820, or the Japan of 1960 and that of 1880 took shape gradually and
unevenly—but they unquestionably occurred. Indeed, the first use of the
term industrial revolution, by a British observer in the 1880s, belatedly
reflected the powerful alterations in the basic structures of that society
and implicitly anticipated comparable sea changes in other societies in
which the force of new technology and new organizational principles
took root.

The Range of the Industrial Revolution

The sheer potency of the industrial revolution raises several other defi-
nitional issues, though they can be more quickly handled. First, if an
industrial revolution begins (though often in societies already chang-
ing rapidly) with the widespread adoption of new equipment and the
factory form in several key industries, when does it end? This issue is
closely attached to the warnings against oversimplification. Because
many industrial forms spread gradually, the process does not have a
neat termination point. French peasants, for example, began wide-
spread use of tractors only after World War II. They had previously
adopted new kinds of hand tools and some new processing equipment;
they had certainly increased their production for the market; and they
had used mechanical transportation like trains and steamships. But
their substantial commitment to mechanization in the production
process came surprisingly late (though it was quite enthusiastic when
it finally arrived). Could France be regarded as industrialized before
its vital peasant sector was fully engaged? Clearly, the unevenness
of industrialization means that fundamental changes may continue
for well over a century after the process identifiably began. Further-
more, the industrial revolution generated recurrent change even in the
 Introduction 13
sectors it first affected. Many British cotton workers, faced in the
1890s with new U.S.-devised machines that allowed a single worker to
tend eight to sixteen mechanical looms rather than the two to four of
early industrialization, judged that their work lives were changing in
a far more radical fashion than those of their predecessors. They were
probably wrong, but they had an arguable case. Industrial societies
accept, whether they like it or not, a commitment to recurrent cycles
of technical and organizational innovation—that is, periodic renewal
of a sense of unsettled upheaval.
The most revolutionary period of the industrialization process ends,
however, when most workers and managers (whether in factories or
smaller workshops) use some powered equipment and operate according
to some of the principles of industrial organization. At this point, the
larger society has gained an ability to apply industrial procedures to
most branches of the economy, and although it may not have done so
fully (as with the somewhat laggard French peasants), virtually every
major group has faced some serious adjustment to the impact of the
industrial revolution. Historically, this point has been reached seventy
to one hundred years after serious technological innovation first began.
Thus, for example, it is legitimate to peg the end of the U.S. industrial
revolution at about 1920, when factory production overwhelmingly
dominated other forms in manufacturing and when half the population
lived in cities. Vast economic changes were to occur after 1920, extend-
ing the transformations the industrial revolution had wrought, but the
industrial context was set.
The definition of the industrial revolution, thus, includes a massive
set of changes that begin when radical innovations in technologies and
organizational forms are extensively introduced in key manufacturing
sectors and that end, in the truly revolutionary phase, when these inno-
vations are widely, though not necessarily universally, established in the
economy at large. Subsequent changes, often quite unsettling, are virtu-
ally ensured, but they arise within the contours of an industrial society.
But what, then, is an industrial society? This is a second definitional
issue in expanding the idea of industrial revolution beyond its most basic
elements. What kinds of social alterations followed from new machines,
factories, stores, and offices? The industrial revolution was a systems
change: New technology and organization boosted production and pro-
pelled manufacturing over agriculture as the industrial society’s great-
est source of wealth and employment. To handle factory and related
jobs, and because industrial machines began to take over some of the
production previously performed in the countryside, cities grew rapidly.
By 1850 half of Britain’s population lived in cities, the first such urban
achievement in human history—for even the most effective agricultural
societies had never been able to free more than 25 percent of a popula-
tion from the rural economy.
14 Introduction
A systems change of this sort inevitably, though again gradually, af-
fected every aspect of human and social life. Personal habits changed as
people learned a new sense of time and discipline. The status of old peo-
ple changed. The industrial revolution in Europe and the United States
gave the elderly some new functions, such as babysitting for their work-
ing adult children, but it diminished their status: jobs became associated
with high energy and the ability to learn new techniques, and the elderly
were culturally downgraded because they seemed to lack these qualities.
The industrial revolution changed the nature of war, too, as was obvi-
ous from the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) onward: industrial war meant
more rapid and massive troop movements, devastating weaponry, and
greatly increased death and maiming in battle.
Because of the power of the industrial revolution, virtually everything
was altered, including art, politics, relationships between parents and
children, and diplomatic relations, to name just a few areas of change.
By the 1850s the industrial revolution was beginning to encompass the
whole of history, particularly in societies that were directly industrializ-
ing, but also to some extent around the world. Change was not complete;
otherwise, we could have expected to see in the 1990s each industrial
society virtually identical to the next, which was not the case. Conti-
nuities from preindustrial cultural and political patterns plus different
experiences in the industrial revolution process itself maintained import-
ant differences. Nevertheless, in a real sense the history of the industrial
revolution is the history of the modern world; no factors even remotely
rival industrialization’s influence on explaining what has gone on in the
world—and what still goes on as adjustments to the alteration of basic
human systems continue. Even sweeping shifts in human loyalties, such
as the rise of nationalism, though they follow from new ideologies, can
be traced directly to the disruption of local ties and the intensive con-
tacts among different parts of the world that industrialization fostered:
people became nationalistic to provide themselves identities that might
replace meanings the industrial revolution destroyed.
Yet a focus on the industrialization phenomenon itself must be some-
what selective. To gain a sense of what it involved in terms of new
stresses and new opportunities, we need not march through every sub-
sequent war in which new ships, cannons, and industrially produced
propaganda were put into operation. The emphasis must be on the most
direct human and institutional impact and on some general patterns in
areas such as combat or human aging. We can put this understanding
into play in dealing with the specifics of the world’s military history or
of social welfare developments. Highlighting the kinds of changes that
most directly, almost inexorably, resulted from new technology and new
organization of production during the century or so in which major so-
cieties were intensively engaged in the industrial revolution provides the
guidelines for the most meaningful analysis.
 Introduction 15
Chronology and Geography
Two mistakes in dealing with the industrial revolution are particularly
common, though understandable. First, the phenomenon is too often
pinned to a single time period—the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries—as though because it began at that point it somehow ended
then as well. In fact, the industrial revolution has surged forward in sev-
eral chronological phases—the first, when it began and spread directly
only within the West; the second (late nineteenth to early twentieth cen-
turies), when it matured and began to exceed Western boundaries; and
the third (post–World War II), when it became effectively global. Our
lives today are being shaped by this ongoing third phase. And in each
phase, industrial timetables cut across more conventional historical divi-
sions, such as the French Revolution or World War I. Industrial history
has its own chronology, and it must be seen as an ongoing process.
The second common error involves geography. Because industrializa-
tion began in the West, its treatment is often limited to Western history.
But in fact the industrial revolution arose in a global context, had quick
global consequences, and has now become a global phenomenon. Only
the world-history scale can capture it correctly.
Thus, as early as the 1820s, Latin American economies, newly free
from Spanish control, began to suffer from the competition of British
machine-made goods; both local production and merchant activity de-
clined, with many people thrown out of more traditional manufacturing
work. In the 1830s the economic pressures of industrialization pried
China open, when industrializing Western nations insisted on access to
Chinese goods and markets and had the industrially generated military
might to drive home their demands. Yet the industrial revolution oc-
curred in individual societies and must be understood in this context as
well. Even in Western history, British industrialization, because it came
first, is sometimes sketched as if it preempted the field. Yet it is obvious
that British patterns could not be entirely typical of the process else-
where, even in other European nations. The industrial revolution must
be seen as a basic development that occurred in many different places,
which means that particular national or regional patterns of industrial-
ization must be compared, even though some key elements are shared.
Furthermore, industrialization both united and divided the world,
and this tension also continues. Industrial technologies and expanding
manufacturing output quickly brought all major areas closer together
almost literally. This is the reason that China found its traditional desire
to regulate foreign commerce impossible by the 1830s and that Africa,
its rivers newly penetrable by steamboats, opened perforce to new lev-
els of international trade. The shrinking of the world through indus-
trial forms of transportation and communication has intensified with
every passing decade. Yet the industrial revolution created new divisions,
16 Introduction
separating countries engaged in the process from those that for many
reasons, including the pressures placed on them by the industrial states,
were unable to join the parade. The split between “have” and “have-
not” regions was and is primarily a split between industrial and (at least
as yet) nonindustrial regions, and it is a novel and nasty kind of division.
The cast of characters is not constant. Japan—definitely a have-not na-
tion extensively bullied by the industrial West in the 1870s and 1880s—
obviously managed to grab a seat at the industrial feast. Nevertheless,
the overall tension that industrialization generated in the world at large,
simultaneously drawing regions into closer contact and creating new
and agonizing differences among them, continues to describe much of
the framework of world history. Both aspects, the shared systems and
the stark divisions, must be captured when the industrial revolution is
understood as it should be—as a world process.
The international framework also clarifies why the industrial revolu-
tion must be seen as a process over a long stretch of time, indeed as a
process that is still occurring. An economist put it this way:

During the first two hundred years of industrialization, from the

late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, societies with about
20 percent of the world’s population industrialized directly. Cur-
rently, particularly with the transformations occurring in China, In-
dia, Brazil, and elsewhere, another 40 percent of the world’s peoples
seem to be coming on board, for better or worse. The dynamism of
the industrial phenomenon continues.

Like all major shifts, the industrial revolution has brought with it advan-
tages and disadvantages. For example, industrialization has improved
human health by dramatically reducing infant mortality rates around
the world. Yet it has worsened the quality of our natural environment,
and continues to do so, contributing, for example, to higher rates of
cancer.
Understanding these diverse results is essential for dealing with re-
cent world history and for gaining insight into ourselves. For a final
compelling aspect of the industrial revolution centers on the unresolved
and contested issues this massive upheaval still generates. To be sure, as
we will see, some lively old debates have died down a bit; we no longer
worry as much as historians once did about British workers’ standards
of living in the early nineteenth century because we know they had some
atypical features compared with several other industrial revolutions and
even more because we know the conditions improved in the long run. In-
dustrialization’s impact on the quality of life more generally, however, is
still very much in debate. Almost surely, satisfaction with work declined
for many people—even to the present day. Did other gains compensate?
 Introduction 17
Some debates hinge on shifts in our own social standards. Fifty years
ago, laws that regulated women’s work hours seemed to be pure human-
itarian gain. Now we realize that the laws made women less employable
because they reduced flexibility and that the laws resulted from a blend
of humanitarianism and selfish male interests. Even laws that gradually
removed children from most work situations look different today, as we
see higher rates of child depression and even suicide associated with mal-
adjustments to schooling; maybe factory work was not so bad for some.
Many debates focus on the global aspect of industrialization. Why did
a few countries respond to Western industrialization with industrial rev-
olutions of their own, whereas most did not, at least until recently? Why
are some countries today much farther away from industrialization than
others? These are tough questions to handle without a value judgment
that there must be something wrong with the countries that continue to
struggle. But properly approached, and viewed with a realization that
right from the start industrialization imposed on certain regions new
hardships that would be difficult to overcome, the resulting discussions
are legitimate—and unavoidable.
And what about globalization, the most recent framework for the on-
going industrial revolution? Does it pull more countries toward indus-
trial success, or does it bleed some countries to the profit of others? (Or
both?) Will a few factories that pay low wages and often harm the local
environment lead to fuller industrialization in the future—giving work-
ers new skills, even though offering low pay—or will they merely per-
petuate unequal status in the global economy? Why have debates about
economic globalization taken a nastier turn during the past decade?
Historians and social scientists know a lot about what happens with
industrialization and what continues to happen with the process even
today. But there are still some tough calls, and this book is designed to
encourage intelligent debate as well as to provide up-to-date information
about what we do know.
Ultimately, the big question is this, and it’s really hard to answer:
Given all its changes and problems, and all the shifts that have occurred
in the ways people evaluate their lives, has the industrial revolution, on
balance, been a good thing, or should we focus less on celebrating its
undeniable new technological mastery and more on trying to undo or
remedy some of its key effects?
Part 1

The First Phase,

1760–1880
Western Primacy, Global
Contexts, and Global Results
2 Britain’s Revolution
New Processes and Economic
Transformation

This chapter centers on the question of how Britain first definitively be-
gan to pull away from the economic patterns that were characteristic
of highly commercial agricultural societies. The transformation of key
production sectors proved crucial.
The Background Before the eighteenth century the most advanced
economies in the world featured a combination of craft manufactur-
ing (its most skilled components based in cities) and a large labor force
committed to agriculture. This was true in Europe and India, and also
largely in China, another powerhouse, though there were some bigger
urban shops in the silk industry. Most production, both manufacturing
and agricultural, was based on manual household labor, with larger vil-
lage groups combining for certain operations like harvesting and road
building. The use of slave crews for the commercial production of key
agricultural goods like sugar and tobacco had spread, particularly in
the Americas, with no major changes in technology. Several societies
had developed sophisticated craft skills for the production of luxury
cloth, metal goods, and other items. China, Japan, India, the Middle
East (including North Africa), and western Europe stood at the fore-
front in terms of artisanal technology and the vital capacity to produce
iron and iron products. Africa had a well-established ironworking tradi-
tion, and metallurgy and armaments manufacturing were advancing in
Russia by 1700.
Western European technology had gained ground from the fifteenth
century onward. Western production of guns, based on earlier ironwork-
ing skills developed initially for the production of great church bells,
provided a crucial military edge, particularly in naval conflicts. West-
ern metallurgy generally led the world by the sixteenth century. During
the seventeenth century, growing dominance in world trade spurred the
growth of textile production in many parts of western Europe, and here,
too, technological refinements occurred that made the West effectively
an international leader. Western biases concerning the rest of the world
began to take on a technological cast, with scorn for the many peo-
ples slow to imitate Western developments. A Western missionary in the
22 The First Phase, 1760–1880
seventeenth century described how, in his opinion, the Chinese could not
be persuaded

to make use of new instruments and leave their old ones without an
especial order from the Emperor to that effect. They are more fond
of the most defective piece of antiquity than of the most perfect of
the modern, differing much in that from us who are in love with
nothing but what is new.

Even with all of these developments, however, Western technology was not
consistently superior even by 1700, and it remained firmly anchored in the
basic traditions of agricultural societies, particularly in terms of reliance
on human and animal power. Agriculture itself had scarcely changed in
method since the fourteenth century. Manufacturing, despite some import-
ant new techniques, continued to entail combining skill with hand tools and
was usually carried out in very small shops. The most important Western
response to new manufacturing opportunities involved a great expansion of
rural (domestic) production, particularly in textiles but also in small metal
goods. Domestic manufacturing workers used simple equipment, which
they usually bought themselves, and relied on labor from the household.
Many combined their efforts with farming, and in general their skill lev-
els were modest. The system worked well because it required little capital;
rural householders invested a bit in a spinning wheel or a hand loom, and
urban-based capitalists purchased the necessary raw materials and, usually,
arranged for sale of the product. Output expanded because of the sheer
growth of worker numbers, not because of technical advancement; indeed,
the low wages paid generated little incentive for technical change.
Western Europe in 1700 was an advanced agricultural society, with an
unusually large commercial sector and a great deal of manually operated
manufacturing. The region was developing a certain fascination with
machines but most decidedly was not industrialized. Recent compara-
tive work has emphasized that several other countries, headed by China,
maintained similar economic levels.

DEBATE #2 WHEN DID WESTERN EUROPE BECOME

“SPECIAL” IN RELEVANT WAYS? OR, HOW FAR BACK
MUST WE GO TO CAPTURE THE ROOTS OF THE
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION?

Explaining any major historical development is likely to involve

questions about chronological perspective: how deep in time do
some of the causes lie? In the case of the industrial revolution,
which became such a huge departure from traditional patterns,
 Britain’s Revolution 23

it is certainly tempting to speculate that some underlying factors

must have been lying in wait for quite a while. On the other hand,
as we will see, most of the standard explanations of industrializa-
tion focus on developments in the eighteenth century itself. Is this
approach too limited?
Discussions of deep-seated causes have been encouraged by a
growing twenty-first-century need, among some scholars, to high-
light Western distinctiveness, at a time when several Asian societ-
ies have been outstripping Western growth rates. No one contests
the fact that the industrial revolution did begin in the West, but
there may now be an added temptation to call attention to deep-
seated Western features in response to the Asian challenge.
At least three possibilities warrant attention, not in offering
a full causation package but in contributing some unexpectedly
early ingredients.
An early onset of Western individualism is one candidate. There
is no doubt that Western society was becoming more individualistic
than most by the eighteenth century. But what if this characteristic
took hold earlier? Several studies argue that Western Christianity
formed a seedbed for individualism, perhaps back as far as the
Middle Ages. One recent offering calls attention to Christian efforts
to prevent incest by insisting that, in most cases, close kin should
not intermarry. This contrast with kin-based family arrangements
elsewhere, the argument goes, forced more attention to individual
development, ultimately producing the kind of individual moti-
vation that would prove vital for economic innovation. While the
study does not make a direct connection with industrialization, it
strongly suggests a link by insisting that the family rules of Western
Christianity lie at the base of what the authors called contemporary
WEIRD societies—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and
Democratic. To which one admiring scholar-reader added, “They’re
looking at what created the modern Western world.”
This line of argument of course raises key questions. Was the
West distinctively individualistic before the eighteenth century, as
a matter of fact? And even if so, how does the characteristic lead
into the kind of industrial innovation that would show up deci-
sively only in the eighteenth century? (If individualism is all that
great, why not earlier results?)
Studies of clocks and a clock-based sense of time have also gen-
erated arguments about an early Western advantage. Mechanical
clocks were first developed in western Europe in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries—other societies used other timing devices—
and they were steadily improved. There is no question that the
(Continued)
24 The First Phase, 1760–1880

West led the world in clockmaking literally until the twentieth

century. From this, two arguments have emerged that potentially
connect with the industrial revolution—despite the fact that this
came about much later. First, one powerful study urges that other
societies, and particularly China, simply could not keep up with
the West because there is was inadequate freedom for technical
innovation and scientific inquiry. Clocks, in other words, were the
first sign of the Western advantage that would ultimately spread
more broadly. Second, as use of clocks spread, more and more peo-
ple in the West gained a new sense of time, and the importance of
using time wisely, that would be directly relevant to the kind of
efficiency that would feed into the industrial revolution (perhaps
in combination with Western individualism).
Here too there are questions of fact. Granted a Western lead in
clocks—this is clearly true—does this mean that China and other
societies were technologically laggard more generally? How good
were the clocks, before the nineteenth century, and how many peo-
ple had regular access to them? And how much does a sense of
clock time have to do with industrialization anyway? What kinds
of connections make sense?
A third early-onset argument does not go back quite so far, but
it too argues that the roots of the industrial revolution took shape
well before the eighteenth century. Here the emphasis rests on what
is called the “industrious revolution” that began to develop from
about 1600 onward. Proponents argue that a growing demand for
goods began to motivate more people to produce more for sale on
the market, rather than just for household needs, and that this in
turn encouraged harder work, at the expense of traditional leisure
time. In the long run, this would set up conditions in which major
technological innovation made sense, but the more subtle changes
associated with the industrious revolution were a vital preliminary.
Indeed some go so far as to argue that these more general changes,
including the effort to press for harder work, were actually more
important than the later technology breakthroughs, and this argu-
ment has been applied to modern Japan as well.
Debate here has focused again part on simple facts: some histo-
rians argue that there is little sign that people were actually work-
ing longer and harder before the factory system set in, though there
is some acknowledgment that new levels of consumer demand
emerged earlier than once thought. Beyond this, do the features
of the industrious revolution really help explain the more dramatic
departures associated with the industrial revolution? Again, how
far back do we have to go?
 Britain’s Revolution 25

All of this obviously invites juxtaposition with the more com-

monly discussed causes of the industrialization. In a global age,
it also invites thinking about how much the industrial revolution
had to do with Western-ness, given the obvious fact that many
other parts of the world figured out how to join the process—not
immediately, to be sure, but fairly quickly. And can you think of
any other early Western markers that deserve attention?
For Further Reading: On individualism claims, Jonathan Schulz,
Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, Joseph Heinrich,
“The Church, Individualism, Kinship and Global Psychological
Variation,” Science 366 (Nov., 2019); on the debate over time,
David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the
Modern World (Cambridge, MA, 1983); Robert Finley, “China,
the West, and World History in Joseph Needham’s ‘Science and Ci-
vilisation in China’,” Journal of World History 11 (2000). On the
industrious revolution, Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution
(New York, 2008); Gregory Clark and Y. van der Werf, “Work
in Progress? The Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic
History 587 (1998).

A Changing Context Three changes began to combine during the

eighteenth century to accelerate manufacturing and ultimately generate
the world’s first industrial revolution. They affected much of western
Europe, but particularly Britain, where the revolution first took shape.

1 New agricultural methods and products came into use in the late
1700s. Peasants in many parts of Europe, including Ireland, France,
and Prussia, began to grow potatoes, a New World crop long re-
garded with suspicion. Potatoes offered several advantages over
the grains Europeans had traditionally relied upon as staple food.
Higher caloric value could be produced from smaller and sometimes
less fertile plots of land, and for many decades potatoes were less
subject to periodic diseases than were grains. Increasing adoption
of the potato supported the beginnings of rapid population growth
in Europe by the 1730s. Britain’s population, for example, doubled
between 1750 and 1800, and that of France rose by 50 percent. The
potato also freed a percentage of rural labor for work in other ar-
eas, again because of its caloric yield from small plots. At roughly
the same time, farmers in Holland began to develop new drainage
systems by which swampland could be converted to agricultural
use. They also introduced nitrogen-fixing crops that enabled them
to keep fields in use every year rather than resting them every third
year to regain fertility. With less fallow land and more land in use
26 The First Phase, 1760–1880
overall, food production expanded, which contributed to popula-
tion growth and to the release of new workers for other potential
work activities.
Although agricultural improvements took shape in various places,
they received enthusiastic support in Britain, where aristocratic land-
lords were particularly interested in new and more rewarding pro-
duction for market sales. Draining marshes added cultivable land in
eastern England. Innovators like “Turnip” Townshend spread the
word about using nitrogen-fixing crops to increase production by
eliminating fallow land. As in other parts of Europe, increased food
supplies spurred British population growth and reduced the percent-
age of the labor force required for agriculture.
2 The early eighteenth century provided the context in which the pat-
tern often called protoindustrialization (or an “industrious revolu-
tion”) began to intensify in several areas. Domestic manufacturing
systems spread further as more workers became available. Popula-
tion growth and new consumer interests created new markets, par-
ticularly for textiles. Many rural workers began to farm only part
time, taking orders for thread and cloth from urban merchants at
other times. This capitalist system increased production. Though
the workers involved used traditional methods based on manual la-
bor and cooperation of the family in a household operation, they
began to see themselves as different from peasants—more interested
in urban fashions, for example, which created additional markets.
3 Another set of changes provided a context for new technologies.
Massive strides in European science, in an already active commer-
cial economy, encouraged attention to new devices in the manufac-
turing field. A host of scientific societies took shape that combined
researchers with merchants and manufacturers and led to excited dis-
cussions about down-to-earth technological possibilities. Advances
in chemistry helped trigger the discovery of new techniques for man-
ufacturing and glazing pottery in eighteenth-century England. New
scientific knowledge about the behavior of gases set a context for
considering the possibility of harnessing steam to provide a moving
force to replace unreliable water and wind as power sources. The
first steam engine was invented by a French refugee in Holland in the
late 1600s; several Dutch scientists discussed the prospect of pro-
pelling a boat by steam. Around 1700 the engine was improved in
England by Thomas Newcomen, who applied it to drainage pumps
for coal mines. A steam truck was invented in France in the 1760s,
though it was never put to use. In the same decade, James Watt, a
Glasgow craftsman who produced scientific instruments, perfected
the steam engine, allowing it to be applied to industrial use. In a
poem written in 1789, the English scientist Erasmus Darwin (grand-
father of the evolution-theory biologist Charles) ecstatically praised
the engine’s possibilities:
 Britain’s Revolution 27
Soon shall they arm, unconquer’d steam! afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid carp;
Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear
The flying chariot through the fields of air.
—Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above,
Shall wave their handkerchiefs as they move;
Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowd,
And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.

Along with changes in agricultural production and a stream of new inven-

tions and attendant intellectual enthusiasm came additional shifts in En-
gland’s domestic manufacturing system, initially beneath the surface. The
nation was already a leader in world trade. It had a growing population
by the 1730s, and the public was expressing interest in more fashionable
clothing—an early manifestation of new consumer tastes. This setting
prompted a handful of domestic producers to think about expanding their
operations, in a gradual shift that proved to be the forerunner of a new orga-
nization of manufacturing labor. For example, the Halifax area in Yorkshire
in the late seventeenth century was a significant center for the production
of wool cloth by local artisans in the countryside who often combined their
manufacturing with farming. Output from each worker was low, though
the profits could provide some useful supplementary income. Even substan-
tial farmers put their hand to the loom from time to time or used family
members for textile production. In the 1690s a few workers began buying
more wool than they could handle themselves; they hired others to work the
wool at home for them and, without abandoning their own labor at first,
were on the route to becoming manufacturers. By the next generation, these
same manufacturing families, a minority of the wool workers in the region
overall, were beginning to separate themselves socially from their employed
labor. They were no longer willing to share a beer; they were thinking of
their workers as a class apart. One of them wrote in 1736, during a trade de-
pression, “I have turned off [laid off] a great many of my makers and keep
turning off more weekly.” His “makers,” clearly, had become disposable
subordinates in the process of production, and a traditional manufacturing
system was beginning to yield to a more structured hierarchy.

DEBATE #3: POPULATION AND INDUSTRIALIZATION:

IS THERE AN OPTIMAL BALANCE?

The fact that British and then West European industrialization oc-
curred amid massive population growth is undeniable. But in many
societies, population density and growth seem to retard industrial
development, by consuming resources that might otherwise be
(Continued)
28 The First Phase, 1760–1880

devoted to investment and by increasing poverty and so limiting

demand for manufactured goods. At an extreme, overpopulation
can even lead to food deprivation, damaging the capacity of the
labor force. Many development economists have pointed to popu-
lation trends in parts of the Middle East, Latin America and now
in Africa as a problem for the industrial future. Chinese author-
ities, in moving toward population control after 1978 through
government-mandated limits on births per family, clearly assumed
that too much growth inhibited industrial potential, and the re-
sults seem to have proved them right. Chinese industrialization
has surged as the population began to stabilize. Industrial growth
in Latin America also accelerated after the 1970s when population
growth began to slow.
So was European population growth a “good thing” for industry,
in contrast to these other cases? Population pressure helped force
workers off the land, compelling them to take often low-paying
and unpleasant factory jobs that many might otherwise have tried
to avoid. Unexpectedly large families even motivated businessmen
in some cases, goading them to invest in industrial growth to help
provide income and managerial jobs for their offspring. What
made the European case distinctive?
Here are some possibilities to discuss. (1) European density was
lower than that of some Asian societies when the industrial process
began (and the same would obviously be true in the new United
States); this may have provided unusual flexibility. (2) Even as in-
dustrial growth advanced Europe sent literally millions of immi-
grants abroad to relieve pressure. (3) The population surge may
not in fact have contributed to European industrialization, as the
other key causes of Western industrial progress simply compen-
sated. (4) And by the same token, societies that have been slower to
industrialize, amid population growth, may have been held back
by other factors.
The conundrum of population and industry has of course a con-
temporary twist. Many industrial societies now are seeing a stabi-
lization of population or even a decline—Japan is the most obvious
case in point. What will this do to the industrial future? Is it possi-
ble to come up with a historically informed optimum relationship
between population and industrial trends?
For Further Reading: E.A. Wrigley, Poverty, Progress and Pop-
ulation (Cambridge, 2004); Haiwen Zhou, “Population Growth
and Industrialization,” Economic Inquiry, Western Economic As-
sociation International 47 (2009), 249–265.
 Britain’s Revolution 29
Adding New Technology By the 1730s several of the strands of change—
population growth, protoindustrialization, scientific enthusiasm—were
beginning to combine in England. Protoindustrialization meant that al-
though the total number of agricultural workers grew, even as aristo-
cratic landlords consolidated their holdings and sponsored more efficient
methods, the percentage of a rapidly growing population employed in
agriculture declined. Market opportunities for manufacturing produc-
tion rose, however, despite frequent slumps, through population growth,
expanding international trade, and the growing appetite for consumer
goods like fashionable clothing. As more and more workers and small
businesses began expanding their operations by hiring wage workers, the
profile of a new manufacturing middle class began gradually to emerge.
Finally, new technology began to be developed for the sector that most
obviously invited it: the domestic production system. In 1733 an English
artisan, John Kay, invented the flying shuttle, a new kind of loom for
weaving cloth that automatically moved thread horizontally through a
frame when activated by a foot pedal. This machine was nothing fancy,
and no new power source was involved, but one worker with a child as
assistant could now do the work of two adults. Inventions for automat-
ically winding fiber to make thread followed in the 1760s. New oppor-
tunities and the evolving attitudes of the growing manufacturing class,
plus the excitement surrounding technological change and the resultant
encouragement to invention, were pushing the traditional production
system well beyond its former bounds.
By the 1760s, then, several key ingredients of the industrial rev-
olution had been assembled in England, after several decades of
protoindustrial changes within the domestic manufacturing system.
New entrepreneurs were ready to manipulate workers in novel ways.
Inventions increased the number of industrial processes handled au-
tomatically. The manufacturing sector and its labor force were grow-
ing steadily. Then came a usable steam engine, which by the 1770s
could be hooked up to some of the semiautomatic inventions already
devised for manual textile workers. Because steam power was con-
centrated and could not be transmitted over long distances, workers
had to be assembled near the engines to do their work; small factories
had to replace household production sites. This final change, too,
was developing rapidly in certain key sectors by the 1770s. Britain’s
industrial revolution was under way.

Britain Becomes the Workshop of the World

The initial explicit stages of the world’s first industrial revolution—as
opposed to the previous preparatory decades—involved a number of el-
ements. Rapid innovation transformed several sectors of industry, with
30 The First Phase, 1760–1880
new technology and organization at the core of change. Without this in-
novation, the industrial revolution could not have been identified. At the
same time, many branches of the economy were affected only slightly,
and thus some overall measurements of industrialization remained mod-
est. Within the innovative sectors, intense misery pervaded the experi-
ence of many of the human beings involved; the industrial revolution was
built on the backs of exploited labor. It is vital to note as well that early
industrialization in even a few manufacturing sectors threw thousands
of rural producers (many of them women) out of work, because factory
products were so much cheaper; this is an aspect of industrial change
that would become quite familiar—it persists today—and also further
explains the British ability to form a new, urban labor force. Finally, as
the revolution caught on, it inevitably brought in its wake further change
in both technology and business practices. Most of these developments
occurred during decades when Britain nearly monopolized the new pro-
cesses, winning a growing world role on the strength of its industrial
advantage (see Map 2.1).
A Revolution in Cotton The cotton industry commanded the central
role in Britain’s early industrialization. Compared with other fibers, cot-
ton had characteristics that made it relatively easy to mechanize; it broke
less often than wool and, particularly, linen. Further, cotton was a new
product line in Europe, more open to innovation. It had been widely
used in India, and an Asian market for cotton cloth already existed. In
England, however, its novelty facilitated the introduction of new ma-
chines, though the raw fiber had to be imported. Workers were displaced
indirectly by the rise of cotton because traditional linen production de-
clined. However, the lack of a large established labor force in cotton
obviated the need to prompt many traditional workers to change their
ways directly, which limited resistance. At the same time, cotton had
great appeal as a product: it could be brightly colored for a population
increasingly eager to make a statement through clothing, and it was eas-
ily washed, so it appealed to people who were developing more stringent
notions of personal cleanliness. Cotton was in demand, and this demand
invited new techniques to produce the cloth in quantity. Finally, in the
1730s the British government took a further step to promote the indus-
try: it slapped high tariffs on imports from India, hoping, correctly, that
local production would step in.
By the 1730s a series of inventions began to shift cotton manufactur-
ing increasingly toward a factory system. The accuracy of the flying shut-
tle, designed originally to improve hand weaving, was refined enough
over another thirty years to make possible the application of nonhuman
power. Edmund Cartwright patented a power loom in 1785. His de-
scription of his procedures revealed the new kind of thinking being ap-
plied to technical issues: “It struck me that as plain weaving can only be
three movements which were to follow one another in succession, there
 Britain’s Revolution 31

Map 2.1 The Beginning of the Industrial Revolution: Great Britain, c. 1750–1820.
32 The First Phase, 1760–1880
would be little difficulty in producing them and repeating them.” In-
deed, mechanization involved isolating parts of the production process
that could be accomplished through highly standardized, accurate mo-
tion and then applying to such motion equipment that could be linked to
power sources. Weaving turned out to be among the more complicated
activities to mechanize, and Cartwright’s loom had to undergo substan-
tial improvements before it could be widely used, by around 1800.
More impressive developments occurred in the preparatory phases of
making cotton. In about 1764 James Hargreaves invented a spinning
jenny device, which mechanically drew out and twisted the fibers into
threads—though this advance, too, was initially applied to handwork, not
to a new power source. Carding and combing machines, which ready the
fiber prior to spinning, were developed at about the same time. Then,
in 1769, Richard Arkwright developed the first water-powered spinning
machine. It twisted and wound threads by means of flyers and bobbins
operating continuously. These first machines were useful for making only
the cheapest kind of thread, but other devices invented by 1780 began to
make possible the spinning of finer cotton yarns. These could be powered
by steam engines as well as waterwheels. The basic principles of mecha-
nized thread production have not changed to this day, though machines
grew progressively larger, and a given worker can now tend a far greater
number of spindles. Other inventions pertinent to the industrialization of
cotton cloth production included new bleaching and dying procedures (in
the 1770s and 1780s) and roller printers for cloth designs, which replaced
laborious block printing by hand—another new method that increased
production a hundredfold while reducing workers’ skill requirements.
Cotton production by the 1790s was advancing with extraordinary
rapidity. New machines required a factory organization, for the power
could not be transmitted widely. Workers had to be removed from
household production and clustered around the new machines; cotton
spinning was entirely concentrated in factories by this time. Because me-
chanical weaving lagged, this initial industrialization spurred a massive
expansion of domestic looms. The thread produced was distributed from
huge warehouses in the new factory centers such as Manchester. Power
weaving came into general use in the Manchester area only after 1806.
Its full conquest of the cotton industry began after 1815—to the im-
mense distress of the hundreds of thousands of workers who had been
drawn into the surrounding countryside to do the weaving: the rise of
factories meant a further deindustrialization of many rural areas and
small towns. At the other end of the scale, there were massive fortunes
to be made in the industry. Robert Owen, a store assistant, began his
Manchester factory in 1789 by borrowing £100, and by 1809 he was in
a position to buy out his partners in his New Lanark Mills for £84,000
in cash—this in a country where only about 4 percent of the population
earned more than £200 per year.
 Britain’s Revolution 33
Sales of manufactured cotton goods soared, for with the new machines
output increased and prices plummeted. Exports were essential, and by
1800 approximately four pieces of cotton cloth were sold abroad for
every three disposed of at home. As late as 1840 cotton continued to pro-
vide about half the entire value of British exports. Continental Europe
was a major market, but it consumed only about a third of Britain’s ex-
port production in this field. Latin America was seized by British cotton
exports after Spanish rule was cast off early in the nineteenth century.
By 1820 the impoverished region was buying a quarter as much cotton
cloth from Britain as was Europe, and by 1840 the figure had risen to
a full half. India and Southeast Asia were deindustrialized by a com-
bination of British factory competition and colonial policy as foreign
machine products beat out domestic hand labor; cotton imports from
Britain rose by 1,500 percent between 1820 and 1840. Africa was an-
other major market. Of the major nations, only China held out—until its
economy was forced open in the early 1840s.
Other Sectors Until about 1840, Britain’s industrial revolution cen-
tered substantially on changes in the cotton industry, its massive results
being expanded production and world outreach, but other developments
were vital as well. Mechanization of wool spinning and weaving was
well under way by 1800, impeded only by the higher cost and greater
fragility of wool fiber. New machines and procedures were introduced
into beer brewing; the big factories established include the great Guin-
ness brewery in Dublin. Pottery manufacturing concentrated important
developments in industrial chemistry during the late eighteenth century,
and new methods reduced the work required in processes such as glazing
and cutting. Several of these innovations created major health hazards
for the workers involved. New grinding methods, for example, “hath
proved very destructive to mankind, occasioned by the dust suckled into
the body which … fixes so closely upon the lungs that nothing can re-
move it.” But productivity per worker increased immensely, to the bene-
fit of new pottery magnates such as Josiah Wedgwood. In the 1830s new
printing presses were developed that could be powered by steam engines,
and thus production in such fields as daily newspapers greatly expanded.
A few commercial bakeries also introduced important new methods.
The most striking mechanical strides outside the growing textile
sectors occurred in metallurgy and mining. During the eighteenth
century, British manufacturers learned to produce coke from coal (by
heating and concentrating it in special ovens) and to use coke instead
of wood-derived charcoal for smelting iron ore. Coke production, in
turn, depended on advances in furnace design and steam blasting (in-
troduced by John Wilkinson in 1776). As coke supplies grew, furnace
design for smelting and refining iron was also reconsidered, resulting in
larger furnaces and higher output per worker. Henry Cort’s reverbera-
tory furnace for refining iron (developed in 1784) saved fuel but above
34 The First Phase, 1760–1880
all increased productivity by 1,500 percent. Steam-powered machines
for rolling metal, which replaced manual hammering, soon followed.
The iron industry began to expand rapidly. Britain had produced 25,000
tons of unrefined iron (called “pig iron”) in 1720; by 1796 the figure was
125,000 and by 1804 was 250,000.
The growth of the iron industry had several further consequences.
Coal mining surged to provide the fuel for iron smelting and for steam
engines generally. Major advances in work methods at the coal face did
not develop, though there were important improvements in timbering
mine pits to allow deeper shafts. Transportation from the coal face did
demand attention. Wooden and metal rails were laid down to facilitate
carts of coal being pulled by horses or people; soon after 1800, exper-
iments with steam-driven engines to pull the carts began. At the same
time, the number of miners increased rapidly because this vital industry
remained extremely labor-intensive.
At the other end of iron production, machine building expanded
steadily. Inventions of new equipment, from spinning machines to the
steam engine, did not always translate readily into production methods
beyond the prototypes. Twelve years passed, for example, between Watt’s
construction of a working model engine (1765) and usable cylinders that
could be widely manufactured. Before 1800, machine building was scat-
tered in small shops and was performed with hand methods. Even after
this date the industry long demanded highly skilled workers laboring
with relatively little sophisticated equipment of their own. But attention
in France and the new United States to the manufacturing of guns led to
the development of precise patterns for designing machine parts, so that
these parts could be interchangeably used on a given machine. Several
machines were designed to bore and turn the machine pieces, and their
industrial use gradually spread in Britain (and the United States and
western Europe) during the early decades of the nineteenth century. The
same systems were deployed to allow factory production of clocks and
watches, where Europe and the United States would lead the world for
over a century.
Headed by advancements in the cotton industry, Britain’s early indus-
trial revolution featured dramatic new methods that subsequently gen-
erated improved productivity and more standardized products in a host
of industries. Heavy industry—mining and metallurgy—gained ground
rapidly, though the importance of the labor force and the total product
long lagged behind textiles. Vast numbers of new workers were drawn
into factories and mines. Some were relatively unskilled, for many of
the new processes required only modest training compared with older
methods; but some, as in machine building, applied extensive skills
to new products. Developments were not uniform. Many production
branches, as in the manufacturing of brass and other small metal goods,
were scarcely touched, though they often expanded because of growing
 Britain’s Revolution 35
demand. Nor was progress steady. Great lags often intervened, as in
mechanical weaving, between the initial devices and their widespread
applicability. Britain’s industrialization was a revolution, but it neither
occurred overnight nor was it tidily packaged.
The revolutionary quality, however, showed through in a host of
ways. Urban growth was one of these. Cities of various sorts exploded
in Britain in the late 1700s and early 1800s, the result of burgeon-
ing banking operations, growing port activities, and so on. The big-
gest expansion, however, occurred in the factory centers as factories
were built near energy sources and a large labor force accumulated
there to facilitate factory operations. Manchester, Britain’s cotton cap-
ital, grew from a modest town of 25,000 in 1772 to a metropolis of
367,232 by 1851. Leeds, Birmingham, and Sheffield—centers of tex-
tiles or metalwork—grew by 40 percent between 1821 and 1831 alone.
Britain’s industrialization revolutionized where many people lived by
drawing work increasingly into the big-city context (and of course by
making agriculture more efficient, thus less labor-intensive). During
this period the majority of British families changed their residence and
much of their framework of daily life as they shifted from reliance on
agriculture to involvement with industry.

Industrialization Exacts a Price

The industrial revolution, even in its early phases, prompted major
changes in business scale. Many operations started small; because ini-
tial textile machinery, in particular, was not costly, many small-scale
innovations could draw on a wide array of available business talent. But
there was obvious challenge. Traditional textile equipment for a domes-
tic manufacturing operation cost a fraction of what was required to set
up an early factory. By the 1780s British textile mills were valued at
£3,000–£4,000, many times the £25 cost of a good hand loom. The
first multistoried factory powered by steam, established in 1788, was
valued at £13,000; its steam engine alone, large for the time at thirty
horsepower, cost £1,500. Plants for metallurgy and mining operations
were more expensive still.
Businesses did not immediately have to adopt radically new methods
of capital formation and management systems, but the pressure to inno-
vate was quite real. Many firms were established as partnerships because
necessary capital was unavailable otherwise. Many factories, launched
under the eye of an ever-present owner, had to generate a small bureau-
cracy when it became clear that directing the labor force, providing the
necessary technical expertise, arranging for the purchase of raw mate-
rials, and selling the goods simply escaped the capacity of any individ-
ual. Borrowing arrangements became steadily more elaborate, although
abundant capital kept interest rates fairly low in early British industry.
36 The First Phase, 1760–1880
Family firms had to branch out to hire outsiders to participate in more
specialized management structures. And although massive profits were
possible—Robert Owen’s achievement was replicated in a host of cases
as a new class of wealthy factory owners began to emerge in the 1820s—
the possibility of failure was ever present. Sales recessions were frequent,
particularly in industries like cotton that depended on exports. Poor
harvests reduced income at home and cut deeply into industrial sales.
Significant economic crises occurred at least once a decade; a particu-
larly severe recession followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.
Workers suffered most in these catastrophes as unemployment soared,
but many manufacturers collapsed financially as well.
Conditions of Work The early industrial revolution in Britain was
built on the backs of cheap, mercilessly driven labor. In rural areas,
the standard of living fell for many workers, who were pressed both
by population growth and by competition from machine-made goods
that quickly cut into branches of domestic manufacturing. Many rural
women, for example, lost their manufacturing income when spinning
was mechanized. With less land available for small farmers, less supple-
mentary employment, and competitive pressure on agricultural wages,
stark misery spread in many agricultural districts. Although hand weav-
ers enjoyed some real prosperity before 1800, when thread production
soared but mechanized weaving had yet to take hold, their pay began
to plummet thereafter. By 1811, wages were down one-third from their
1800 levels, and by 1832, when hand weaving in cotton was dying out
in Britain, they had fallen by a full 60 percent. Industrialization was not
entirely to blame for this collapse—population pressure and displace-
ment of small farmers by aristocratic landlords played a role—but there
can be no doubt of the massive hardships involved. Further, although
the worst misery was centered in areas remote from the factories, the
widespread deterioration also cut into the standard of living of industrial
workers, who faced growing competition for jobs.
In the factories proper, however, wages in some sectors held up some-
what better, for new workers had to be drawn in. Mining wages, for ex-
ample, seemingly improved during Britain’s early industrial revolution.
Skilled workers, needed to set up and maintain the new machines, also
did well, often winning long-term contracts and other benefits. On the
other hand, many employers—desperate for workers, but desperate also
to keep costs down to protect their expensive investments and allay their
fears of business failure—looked for labor shortcuts. This search was the
inspiration for hiring orphans who were shipped in droves from London
and other large towns to the factory centers in return for employer provi-
sion of food and barracks housing. Extensive use of child and female la-
bor was not in itself novel—families had always depended on work by all
members to survive—but use of children and young women specifically
because of the low wages they could be pressed to accept reflected the
 Britain’s Revolution 37
pressures of early industrial life and unquestionably constrained the na-
scent working class in the factories. To be sure, factory-produced goods
such as clothing and utensils fell in price, but there were drawbacks,
too. Urban housing often was costlier than its preindustrial rural coun-
terpart, and food costs fluctuated. Historians of Britain’s industrial rev-
olution have debated the standard-of-living question for many decades
without definitively agreeing about whether conditions grew worse or
better. Certainly there was variety, and factory workers were not the
worst-paid group in the British population. Certainly also, however,
particularly before about 1819, there was widespread suffering in the
factory cities, where few workers were able to afford much above a bare
subsistence even as more of their employers grew fat from the fruits of
the new industry.
Other pressures added to the burdens on the new factory workers.
No regular provision for illness or old age cushioned industrial life, and
factory workers, unlike many small farmers, had no plot of land to fall
back on for at least a modest food supply if their strength began to fail.
The frequent economic slumps often caused unemployment rates to soar
as high as 60 percent for several months or even a year, even for skilled
workers, and food prices often went up in these periods. Not surprisingly,
many workers, even those capable of improving their earnings, found
industrial life extremely unpredictable, even nerve-wracking, and in the
worst slumps, death rates rose in the factory centers. Furthermore, and
again even for workers whose pay might have increased modestly, the in-
dustrial revolution cut into leisure time. The labor force was prodded to
work harder than its preindustrial counterpart, and work hours inched
up as employers sought to maximize use of the expensive machinery.
Some textile factories drove their workers sixteen hours a day, Saturdays
included. Traditional festival days, when rural workers had taken time
off, came under attack as the new factories fined workers for unautho-
rized absences. Finally, factory jobs exposed many workers to new phys-
ical dangers, such as dust from textile fibers, accidents in the coal mines,
and maimings by the fast-moving—usually unprotected—machinery.
The early industrial revolution depended on the jobs that growing
numbers of workers needed in order simply to survive. Necessity, not
attraction, lay at the root of the formation of Britain’s new factory labor
force. Relatively low pay—declining pay in some circumstances—helped
subsidize the investment in new machinery and supported the gains that
motivated successful entrepreneurs; increased work time contributed to
growing output along with the machines themselves. And although the
misery was worst in the early decades of industrialization (real wages
and urban health conditions began to improve in the 1820s or at least in
the 1830s) and although debate continues about exactly how bad things
were, there is no doubt that desperately hard work and scant reward
were characteristic of the early industrialization process in Britain.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
be found in any swamp. We went out Montague Street and followed
it mile after mile till we were out of the city and into the Little
Cypress Swamp, so-called to distinguish it from the Great Cypress
which we saw when in the Teche country. We found acres of the
stuff, and soon had all we could lug back. We got back in time for
dinner and then the broom manufacture began. Some of them are
fully as well made as any in the market, and all look as if they would
do good service.
After dinner I went at the company returns so as to be ready for
January 1st, when we expect to get our pay. What if my leave of
absence should come before pay day? I don't suppose there is
money enough in the whole outfit to pay my fare to New York. Jim
Brant from Company B, 128th, came in to-night. He has a furlough
and is going home by the first boat. Recitation came again to-night
and we all had good lessons. I am going to try and sleep to-night,
for I need it.

December 30, 1863.

Wednesday. Rain all day, and at it yet, 10 p. m. Have been getting my
company affairs settled up so as to be ready to turn over in case I
go home. Have also been looking up so as to be ready for the tactics
recitation to-morrow night.

December 31, 1863.

Thursday. The last of the year 1863. A year ago we were at the
quarantine station seventy-two miles below here, hardly any well
ones among us, and from one to three deaths every day. All were
discouraged and ready for any change, no matter what, for nothing
could be worse than the condition we were in. We were about as
hard hit as any regiment I have yet heard of. What a heaven our
present quarters would have been to us then! Then we came up to
Chalmette, just below here, where several more died, and then on to
Camp Parapet, where I was so sick that Colonel B., then Captain B.,
wrote his father I would probably be dead before the letter reached
him. But God was good to me. The next the captain knew I was
better, and I have never seen any one get well as fast as I did.
Before I was discharged from the hospital I followed the regiment on
a scout to Ponchatoula, and that completed the cure. We then went
to Port Hudson and through the siege of six weeks before the works
there, and were rewarded by being one of the seven regiments to go
in and receive the surrender. Then after marching back to Baton
Rouge, we went to Donaldsonville, and then by easy marches up the
river to Plaquemine, and from there to Baton Rouge again. Then
came the split up, the 128th to remain where they since have been,
and a few of us sent back to this city for discharge from the 128th
and for muster into the Corps de Afrique. An exciting trip to the
mouth of the Sabine River and back, and then a run up the Teche
country and back here, brings me round to the present time and
place. Thus I have summed up the most eventful year of my life. I
have captured no medals for bravery, neither have I had a single
reprimand for cowardice or lack of duty in any place I have been
put. This much I am telling you, diary, and don't you ever tell how
many times I have been scared most to death in the making up of
this record. It is not one to brag about, neither is it, from my
standpoint, one to be ashamed of. I have been on duty as officer of
the guard to-day, but the duties are so light, and the sergeants so
well drilled, I have found plenty of time to write. One of the officers
—I won't mention his name, but will say he is the one responsible
for our muster rolls being sent to the paymaster—got on a spree and
forgot to send them. Colonel B. has talked him sober and he has
gone to deliver them personally. If he don't get going again on the
way, we stand a good chance of getting paid off to-morrow. To-night
is recitation night, but being on duty excuses me. However I have
the lesson at my tongue's end, for we have not yet got beyond what
Colonel Smith pounded into us at Camp Millington. I shall never
forget how, as knowledge rolled in, the sweat rolled out while in that
hot and dusty school camp at Millington. Good night, 1863.
 January 1, 1864.
Friday. Good morning, 1864. How do you do, and have you a leave
of absence for me on or about you? This is the coldest day I have
seen in Louisiana. Ice formed on every puddle. The natives say it
has not been so cold in seventeen years. Good! I have seen ice once
more. Now for a snowstorm and then it will begin to seem like
home. What are our folks at to-day? It is easy to guess, that they
are together somewhere, probably at home to eat some of the good
things mother knows so well how to cook. Then after dinner they
will talk the afternoon away and then go home. But I forget that the
roads may be blocked with snow, and the mercury too low for
comfort in going out. At any rate it is safe to say they will have a
good time somewhere and somehow. This idleness is going to be
the ruination of us, I fear. Three officers are absent without leave,
and Gorton was sent to round them up. He came back first and I
mistrust he came on after giving them a caution. Soon after the
runaways came back and were placed under arrest by Colonel B.
and they now have only the limits of the camp. As nothing more is
likely to happen to-night I will stop writing and try and plan how to
sleep warm.

January 2, 1864.
Saturday. As might have been expected, our half-burned tent kept
out but little of the cold. To-day we have drawn a new one and put it
up in a place more protected from the wind, and have left the old
one standing for a store room. It has been a busy day in camp, for
all hands have been trying to make themselves comfortable in any
way they can think of. Tactic school again to-night, and that is all
there is to say for the miserable day it has been.

January 3, 1864.
Sunday. There was preaching in the quarters as promised. After a
good sermon by an old man whom Colonel Parker had got hold of,
the colonel gave a first-rate talk to all hands. I wrote several letters
to home folks and had to tell them I had heard nothing more about
my leave to go home. Good night, all.

January 4, 1864.
Monday. Pay day to-day. I had $205.25 due me, and now let the
furlough come. I am ready for it and if it had come before this I
could only use it by walking.
Gorton has said so much about a fortune-teller he has several times
consulted, that I went with him and had my fortune told. I found the
fortune-teller to be an old woman, whether white or black I am not
sure. She was black enough, but her features were not like an
African's. Whether Gorton had given her any points about me or not
I don't know. He says he didn't tell her a thing. She took me in to a
room dimly lighted and sat me down at one side of a table while she
took the other. Then she spread out a pack of common playing
cards, and began. First she said I had received a letter from a near
relative that had caused me trouble of mind. That this near relative
had also seen trouble on my account. That brought to mind father's
letter and I thought, and wanted to say, "Go it, old gal, for you are
correct so far." Next she told me I was going on a journey and would
start within nine days. That it was partly by water and partly by
land, but mostly by water. Also that I was going to meet with a great
disappointment soon. These are the things I remember, and are the
ones I feel most concerned about. The journey, provided she can
read my future, and which I don't yet believe, may be the long
expected trip to Matagorda Island. That order has not been
countermanded yet. Or it may be I am really and truly going home.
Either one would be by water and land both, but mostly by water.
About the letter that had caused both myself and a near relative
trouble, it must have been the letter from father, and Gorton may
have told her of it. The disappointment is what troubles me most. I
know of nothing on earth that would be a greater disappointment
than the disapproval of my application. Gorton knows all about that
and may have told her, though he swears he did not. He says there
is another fortune-teller he knows about, but has never seen, that
has a greater reputation and charges a greater price. My old woman
charged a dollar and the other one has five times that, but all the
same I am tempted to see her just to see how they agree. If they
should agree I would have to own up they knew something, and if
they disagreed I would throw the whole thing off my mind, that is, if
I can.
Lieutenant Reynolds wanted to go to the theatre to-night and I have
taken his place on guard. A white regiment has moved in with us for
winter-quarters. There is room for several regiments, and provided
we agree, it will be pleasanter for all.

January 5, 1864.
Tuesday. We had a cold wet rain this morning and then the rain
stopped. The cold, however, kept right on and we are expecting to
shiver all night. Sol, our commissary, had to go up town on business,
so with his authority I went to the post bakery and drew bread for
the regiment. Towards night Sol, Jim Brant, who is still waiting for a
boat, and myself went up town and filled up on raw oysters, getting
back in time to say our lessons to Colonel B. The run home, or the
oysters, or both, warmed us up so the weather seems much milder,
and we had a much more comfortable night than we looked for.

January 6, 1864.
Wednesday. Another rainy morning, and so cold the water freezes on
the trees and looks real homelike. The natives say it will kill the
orange crop and the bananas also. Also that the sugar-cane crop will
be a failure. From all I can learn this is very unusual weather for this
part of the country. What about the soldiers that are out in tents,
lying on the ground. They say nothing of them, but I cannot help
thinking of and pitying them.
Colonel B. has been to headquarters to-day and heard that our
Texas trip is likely to come off yet. Just how soon he did not find out,
but it is not given up. I suppose it would really be the best thing for
us, for camp life is a very demoralizing life for soldiers. What we will
be by spring if we stay here is hard to tell, but deviltry of one sort or
another is sure to get a good start. Just at night I went to the post-
office to have a look in box thirteen. There were some letters, but
none for me. But I always think no news is not bad news, and then
go to looking for the next mail. Sergeant Brant is here yet waiting for
transportation. His furlough will run out while he waits, but he
doesn't seem to care. I am sure I would be an uneasy mortal if I
was in his place.

January 7, 1864.
Thursday. Officer of the guard again and in camp as a natural
consequence. The weather is quite mild. Rain keeps coming. It is the
rainy season for this country, and we must put up with it. Lieutenant
Ames is celebrating his full pockets. I am saving mine until I hear
from my application and maybe then I'll celebrate.

January 8, 1864.
Friday. The anniversary of the battle of New Orleans, and a great
day for the place. They tell me it is nothing to what it used to be
before the war. Still there is lots of noise and the bands are all
playing as the people march by on the way to Chalmette.
At night I went to the first show I have attended in New Orleans. It
was at the Academy of Music and was fine. There was a troop of
trained dogs that did everything but talk, and I expected that would
be the next thing. Some were dressed like ladies and were posted
around the ring on little chairs. A coach, drawn and driven by dogs,
and with other dogs inside, came round making calls on the ladies.
The coach would pull up opposite a lady, the footman would jump
down and hold the horses while the lady inside got out and rubbed
noses with the lady in the chair, and then on to the next until the
circuit was completed. People could not have acted the part better.
All that was lacking was the chatter and the smack that would have
been heard if humans had acted the part. The rest was good but the
dogs suited me best.

January 9, 1864.
Saturday. Two letters to-day. Aunt Maria and Jane were the senders.
They had just got my letters, written Dec. 9, so it takes just a month
for a letter to come and go. I went up town and had my phiz taken
again. Jane didn't like the one I sent her. Coming back I met with a
strange adventure, and although there wasn't much to it, it
someway impressed me so I have thought of little else since. A fairly
well-dressed man, old and venerable-looking, tapped me on the
shoulder and asked for five cents to buy some crackers. He did not
look or appear like a beggar, and something about him and his
manner struck me as no other such plea ever did. I had spent nearly
all the money I had with me, but what I did have I handed over, and
was going on when he stopped me to know if I would receive an old
man's blessing. I stopped, not knowing what to say or do, when he
raised his hands above my head, and as near as I can recall the
words said, "God Almighty bless and protect you and yours. The
Cross of Christ shall stand between you and all harm, a bullet shall
never hit that head; you have helped a poor old man, and as you
have helped him so shall you be helped. You have cast bread upon
the water and though it be late in life, your reward shall come." I
thanked him and hurried away. Quite a crowd had collected while
this was going on. I was all togged out in my new uniform, having
been to have my picture taken, and I suppose the sight was a little
unusual. I haven't told a soul but you, diary, for anyone but you
would laugh at me. But you and I are confidants and you have never
yet betrayed me. Lieutenant Gorton is about sick to-night, and I
have been doctoring him up the best I know how. Have got him to
bed and given him a part of my covering, for though the night is
cold he needs it the most. I don't feel a bit like sleep. In spite of me
I can't get the old man and his strange conduct out of my head.
By way of experiment a squad of sergeants was sent out to-night to
try their hand at recruiting. They have come in with about sixty
good-looking negroes. This shows they can beat us at the business,
and if they are kept at it we will soon have a full regiment.

January 10, 1864.

Sunday. Sergeant Brant thought sure he would go to-day and after a
good-bye all round started for the boat. He came back soon after,
saying he had given up the trip for to-day. It seems the boat is held
back for some reason and will sail to-morrow. That will give me time
to write some more letters. The quartermaster and I went to church
to-day. He knew where to go, and though it was a long walk there
and back, I felt well paid for going. As near as I could tell it was a
Methodist church. At any rate the language used was United States,
while those I had before attended used Latin. We were seated in a
pew with a handsome young lady, who gave us a hymn book, even
finding the place for us. I was never more sorry I could not sing.
After church she invited us to come again, saying how glad she was
we had come to-day. We promised her we would, and came back. If
I can find the way there I certainly mean to go again. We now
expect to start for Texas this week sometime. Only a part are to go
and we are all impatience to know who will be taken and who left. If
I knew my leave of absence wouldn't come I should want to go, but
suppose it did come and had to follow me up, the time would be up
before I could get started. I am very often thankful for the things I
don't know.

January 11, 1864.

Monday. I sneaked off this morning, and hunted up Madam Black,
the "Great Indian Astrologist," as the papers call her. I had been
boiling over with curiosity to know how near she and the other one
—I have forgotten her name—agree as to my future. I found her
without trouble, and was surprised to find her, not a squaw, as I
expected, but one of the sweetest-looking and most motherly-acting
old women I have seen since I saw my own dear mother. She simply
took me by storm. I couldn't disbelieve her if I tried. I had always
been an unbeliever in fortune-telling, but in the state of mind I was
in I was ready to catch at any straw she held out. She took me into
an elegantly furnished room, and the only question she asked about
myself was the day and month of my birth. This I told her, and she
sat down before me and closed her eyes as if going to sleep. Soon
she began, and gave me as good a history of my past life as I could
have told her, without going into particulars more than she did. Of
course I was then ready to gulp down anything she might say, and
was tempted to run away and leave my future as it had always been
to me, a closed book. But my desire to hear about my going home,
or going to Texas was strong upon me, and I held my breath while
she continued. She told me I was born to disappointment, that my
plans had been upset as fast as I made them, and this would
continue until after my forty-fifth birthday; that happily for me I was
also born with a disposition that did not allow disappointments to
sink in as it otherwise would, and for that reason I had never been
so discouraged as not to try again. After my forty-fifth birthday
things would change and I would wind up rich and contented. As
she said this she added, "but it won't take as much to make you rich
and contented as it does most people." She told me I was to have
two wives (she didn't say both at one time) and five children. Then
she said, as the other one did, that I was going on a journey in a
few days, from which I would return to New Orleans again; that
inside of seven months I would go on a journey from which I would
never return to this place; that after that I would be happy and the
world would be kinder to me than ever before. Aside from a chat we
had on other subjects, that was all I got for my $5. I believe now I
am to go somewhere very soon, but whether to Matagorda or to
Dutchess County I know no more than before. I came back and
went to work getting ready for a start, because that was what the
others were doing, but to save me I couldn't put much heart in my
preparations. It rained to-day, as usual. Altogether it has not been a
cheerful day for me. I am five dollars poorer and the little knowledge
I swapped it for does not cheer me as I hoped it might. Good night,
diary. Remember you are not to tell a living soul of this, and when
Gorton next proposes my going to consult my future, I shall tell him
I don't believe a thing in it, and that the whole thing is a swindle.
The question, Texas or home, is still unanswered.

January 12, 1864.

Tuesday. "Glory, Hallelujah!" I'm going home. Just as I was crawling
under my blanket to-night, after a miserable cold, wet day of routine
duty, the colonel's servant came and said the colonel wanted me to
come to his tent. I got up and dressed, wondering what it could
mean. Just then I recalled hearing a horseman ride in and out, and I
said to myself—that means Texas sure. I found pretty much all the
colonel's family packed in his tent and all with long, sober faces on
them. The colonel asked me what sort of a caper I had been up to
when out on a pass yesterday, adding, before I could reply, that I
was the last one he expected to get such a report about from
headquarters, at the same time handing me an official-looking
document and requested me to read for myself. In a sort of a daze I
opened it and at a glance saw it was my leave of absence. I came to
life then. Whether they are glad to be rid of me for a while, or what,
I don't know, but they all appeared as glad as I was. Appeared, I
say, for it is not possible they could feel as I did, and do, about it.
We kept the colonel up until he drove us off and then the most of
them went home with me, and we kept up the clatter of talk until
almost morning. The errands and the messages I have promised to
do and deliver will make a hole in my vacation, but I don't care, for
anyone of them would do the same for me. The day had been so
dull that I was not going to write a word about it, but the wind-up
was too momentous not to mention it on the day and date thereof.
And now for a nap, or a try for one.

January 13, 1864.

Wednesday. In spite of late hours last night I was up early, and as
soon as I had eaten, was off to look up the matter of transportation.
If a transport is to sail soon I can go through for nothing. I found it
was barely possible one might go this week, but it was quite
uncertain. Knowing how very uncertain these army uncertainties are,
I went to the office of the Creole and found she sails on Friday. I
engaged passage and came back and have since been getting ready
to go. Gorton wants me to take his Henry Holmes along to help Mrs.
Gorton, and says I can pass him through as my servant free of cost.
I told him if that was the case I would take him along, and the
darkey is almost as glad to go as I am. Marching orders came to-
day, and preparations for a move are already under way. Two
regiments of mounted infantry have come in to camp with us and
this makes neighbors pretty close.

January 14, 1864.

Thursday. Night. Camp is torn up, and the men and officers have
gone. Part started for Franklin again, for recruits, and Colonel B. with
the rest have started off towards Lake Ponchartrain, what for,
nobody here knows. If I have the good luck that was wished me, I
shall certainly have a fine time. I have got my ticket, and my
baggage is on board the Creole. She sails at 7 a. m. to-morrow
morning. I am back in camp to stay with Sol and the quartermaster,
who are left to go on to-morrow with the stores. Colonel B. rode in
for some final directions. He says they encamp at Lakeport to-night,
and will receive orders in the morning what to do or where to go. He
says there is a prospect of our being transferred to the
quartermaster's department.

January 15, 1864.

Friday. On board the steamer Creole, at South West Pass. Have
taken on a pilot and will soon be across the bar and into the Gulf.
We left at foot of Toulouse street at half past eight this morning.
Gorton had managed to get in, in time to swing his hat as we
started down the river.
Whether he had something of importance to say I don't know, for he
was too late for anything but the farewell swing of his broad-
brimmed hat. The boat is so nice I don't feel a bit at home. The
table and staterooms are likewise. However I shall try and endure it.
The most of the passengers are army men with a sprinkling of men
and women, some of the latter being Sisters of Mercy. No place
would look right without them, for they seem to be everywhere. We
are in the Gulf now, and the pilot has just left us. The sea is getting
rougher every minute and my dinner and supper seem to be
quarreling about something. I did not expect to be seasick, but the
symptoms are all here and I think I will go below.
 January 17, 1864.
Sunday. Yesterday I did not write. I had other business to attend to.
Friday night I went below, thinking I might the better escape an
attack of seasickness, which I felt coming on. But I did not. After a
night as full of misery as one night can be, I found myself alive at
daylight, but perfectly willing to die, if I only could. The stateroom
was first swinging around in a circle, and then going end over end.
First I would go up, as if I was never going to stop, and then sink
down until it seemed as if I must strike bottom. My clothes, hanging
across from me, were going through the same motions. I was soon
gazing at my breakfast, dinner and supper of the day before, and I
think I saw traces of my New Year's dinner. Life or death, York State
or Louisiana, peace or war were all the same to me then. Whether
the ship was on its way to New York or to the bottom didn't interest
me a particle. Anything would suit me. After a while of this I fell
asleep, and about 3 p. m. I came to life again, and began to take
stock, as Sol says. I felt like a dishrag, thrown down without being
wrung out. Soon a knock came at the door, and I was surprised to
find I could say "come in." A colored individual with the boat's
uniform on came in, and after a look at me and then at the floor
went after the necessary tools for house-cleaning. There were two
berths, one above the other, and I was in the lower one. He helped
me into the upper berth and began operations on the one I had
occupied. After a while he claimed things were once more
shipshape, and left me saying I would soon be all right. I soon after
got out on the floor and managed to get into my clothes. From that I
ventured into the cabin, where I sat down in a chair I could not
possibly fall out of, and soon got into conversation with a man,
whom I found to be a sea captain, on his way to New York to take
out another vessel. He didn't seem to be worried about me, and said
there were many others on board that had been sick and had not
yet showed up. He got me a cracker, which I ate, more to see if my
stomach was still there than because I was hungry. This helped me
wonderfully, and after visiting a while I went back and slept sound
all night.
To-day I have been on deck almost all day. The water is not smooth,
but it is nothing to what it was night before last. I looked up Henry
Holmes, and found he had been as sick as I, and that he was not
over it yet. His color had changed to a gray, which did not improve
his looks at all. All I could do was to tell him how sorry I was for
him, and that he would soon feel well again. But he said he would
"never live to see the Noff, he just knew he couldn't." The day was
perfect, almost everyone was on deck, and though some were rather
pale, all seemed to enjoy themselves.

January 18, 1864.

Monday. I was all over my sick spell this morning, and although
there was quite a breeze, and the water quite rough, it did not
disturb me. Henry was still sick, and wished himself back on the old
plantation. I wished I could help him in some way, but was told
there is nothing to do but grin and bear it. About 10 a. m. we saw
something they called Florida Cape, but if it had not been pointed
out I should not have seen it at all. Altogether the day passed very
pleasantly for me.

January 19, 1864.

Tuesday. The same thing to-day. Henry is sick yet, though I think I
see some improvement. We don't seem to move, but I suppose we
do. There is nothing in sight but water, and it seems to go up hill in
every direction. The Creole keeps chugging away, but there is
nothing by which I can tell whether we move or not.
Night. The captain says we are off the coast of Georgia, but how he
knows I don't know. If we were near enough, I would feel just like
jumping off and going on foot to New York and telling them the
Creole is coming.
 January 20, 1864.
Wednesday. To-day the wind has been against us. At noon we were
said to be off Charleston. The sea-captain passenger has had fun
with the landsmen about staggering as we go about, but he is
laughing no more. This afternoon he was getting up from a nap in
his room, when a sudden lurch of the vessel pitched him head first
against a mirror opposite, and smashed it fine. He called all hands
up for something at his expense. We have spent the evening playing
euchre and had a very pleasant time.

January 21, 1864.

Thursday. The day has been warm and pleasant, we are past Cape
Hatteras and with good luck will be in New York by to-morrow at this
time. Henry is coming round all right but he has been dreadfully sick
and shows it.

January 22, 1864.

Friday. Was up early, for at night, or before, we were to reach New
York. I saw that Henry was ready to grab his little bundle, and then
kept an eye out ahead. The first I saw was Sandy Hook, and soon
we were in sight of land and numberless other vessels. At 2 p. m. the
Creole tied up at pier 13, North River, and not long after, Henry and I
were in an express wagon bound for the 26th Street depot. I had to
call at 197 Mulberry street to deliver a message for John Mathers,
and his people urged me to stay all night and tell them about John
and the war. From there we went to Brook Brothers to do an errand
for Colonel Bostwick and then on for the station. A man jumped on
the wagon and wanted to hire Henry for a cook in a restaurant, but
Henry had all the job he wanted, and refused. He offered him $25 a
month and board, but Henry said no. At 26th Street we found the
train would soon start and I hustled for tickets. I had given Henry a
dollar, telling him to get something to eat at a place opposite the
station and looked all around for him after I had my ticket and trunk
check. I went to the restaurant and hunted all about until the cry "All
aboard" came, and then giving his ticket to a policeman, to send him
along on the next train, got on board, and at 8.20 p. m. landed at
Millerton. No one knew of my coming, and the people gazed at me
as if I had risen from the dead. I was still five miles from home, and
as the roads were it might as well have been fifty. There was no one
in the place from our way, and as I had to be there when the train
came next day to look for Henry, there was no other way but to stay
all night. This I did, at Sweet's Hotel.

January 23, 1864.

Saturday. I visited about until train time, and managed to send word
home that I would be there at night or before. I took dinner at
Jenks' and was scolded for not coming right there the night before.
At 2 p. m. when the train came I was on the platform, but no Henry
got off. I then gave him up as lost in New York somewhere, but for
what reason he had left me as he had I could not imagine. I had
seen him enter the Dutchess County House after a lunch, and in ten
minutes I was back there looking for him, but he was gone. That is
all I could tell Mrs. Gorton, or the lieutenant, when I saw him again.
I jumped in with Joe Hull, stopped at the Center and told Mrs.
Gorton about Henry, went on, stopping at Mr. Hull's for a short call,
and was soon after at home. I found little change in the dear old
couple. I thought they looked a little older, but it was the same
father and mother who had never been absent from my thoughts
since I left them a year and a half before. They had been told I was
at Millerton, on my way home. There had been no time to notify
them by letter for I left New Orleans before a mail steamer did, after
my furlough came. What was said and what was done concerns only
us three, and we are not likely to forget it. It is enough to say we
were all happy, and that we talked until late bedtime. I found my
room just as I left it. So far as I could see, nothing had been
disturbed. It was a long time before I slept, but I did at last, and I
suppose they did also.

February 27, 1864.

Saturday. From January 23 on I was too busy, visiting and being
visited, to do more with my diary than keep notes enough to remind
me, when I got time, to write up again. Time was too precious to
even write about, I had the free run of everything. Horses and
wagons, or sleighs as the case might call for, were free, and the
houses of my friends were all open for me either night or day. Many
times the younger set met somewhere for an evening and in that
way I did much wholesale visiting. I feel ashamed now, as I look
over the list, to think I spent so much of the time away from home.
But there seemed no other way. The main object of my coming, that
of getting a place for father and mother to live after April, was
accomplished by buying the place opposite Mott Drake's, with which
they are well pleased. They will be among old and tried friends, and
about central for the girls to visit them—near the church and store,
and where the mail passes every day. With land enough to keep the
cow, and to raise all the vegetables they need, they have never been
so comfortably situated since my time began. Through Mr. Bostwick's
kindness I was able to accomplish all this, and I go back to my task
with a lighter heart and a heavier debt of gratitude then I came
home with. I cannot mention all the people I visited and that visited
me. It would be easier to tell those I did not meet. Those who had
dear ones in the South that I could tell them about were never tired
hearing about them. Some whose dear ones lie buried where they
fell were the hardest for me. I could not tell them the worst, and the
best seemed so awful to them I was glad when such visits were
over.
Almost at the last I got track of Henry Holmes, and left him with
John Loucks to pass along to Mrs. Gorton. He told me the man who
tried to hire him in New York followed him into the restaurant and
told him I had left a trunk on the Creole, and that I wanted him to
go and get it. He jumped in the same wagon that had brought us
there and was taken down town to a recruiting office, where he was
asked to enlist. His being lame prevented that, and he was turned
out in the street again. He asked everyone where the depot was
where Lieutenant Larry went for tickets. Finally he told his story to
someone who was humane enough to help him, and in that way got
back to the 26th Street depot. There the policeman to whom I had
given his ticket saw him, and, as there was no train that night, sent
him to some place for the night, and saw him on the train the next
day. He was asleep on the train when it reached Millerton, and was
taken through to Albany, where he kept up the search and inquiry
for Lieutenant Larry. Some kind-hearted people then set about
quizzing him for my last name, and hearing the name Van Alstyne,
which is common in Albany, he at once said it was Lieutenant Larry
Van Alstyne. After a while he recalled Major Palon and Colonel
Bostwick to mind. As neither of these names were of Albany, and as
the Palons were known to live in Hudson, he was sent there. The
Palons got him a place with a farmer at Johnstown, below Hudson,
and also put an advertisement in the paper giving the particulars as
Henry had given them. One of these papers fell into the hands of
Colonel Bostwick's mother, who sent for me. John Loucks then went
to Johnstown and found Henry, who had a good place with people
who were good to him, and he refused to go, saying he had been
fooled so many times he had rather stay where he was. As John was
about to leave he happened to say in Henry's hearing, "I don't know
what Larry will say." At the name Larry, which it appears had not
been spoken before, Henry at once asked if he meant Lieutenant
Larry, and upon being told he did, he said, "If you know Lieutenant
Larry, I'll go with you." And so it came about that we came together
only the night before I was to start for the South again. I was
certainly glad to see Henry, and if actions are any guide, Henry was
glad to see me.[8]

FOOTNOTES:

[8] After the war I became a citizen of Sharon, and soon after
Henry Holmes came there to live and so conducted himself that
only good can be said of him. In the book of Sharon epitaphs,
published in 1903, appears the following:
"Henry Holmes
Died May 19, 1887
Free at last."
"Henry Holmes was probably about seventy years old at the time
of his death. He was born a slave and so remained until freed by
the Civil War. He was last owned by a cotton planter in Louisiana
from whom he took his name. He came north in the winter of
1864-5 and lived nearly all the remainder of his life in Sharon. He
was a Methodist, and was buried from that church. The ministers
from both the other churches attended and requested the
privilege of taking part in the services. They each in turn gave
testimony to the help and encouragement they had received from
the words and example of this good old man. He was entirely
self-supporting and at his death it was found he had laid by a
sum sufficient to defray the expenses of his burial, and to pay for
the enduring monument which marks his grave in Hillside
Cemetery."
 CHAPTER XIII
On Board the McClellan
The start for Dixie—The McClellan is not the Creole—A tough
crowd—Man overboard—Martial law proclaimed—Arrest of the
rioters—Storm at sea—Stop at Key West—In New Orleans again.

I
REACHED New York on my return journey Feb. 23, and sent my
trunk to the Creole, which was to sail the next morning. Returning
to the Washington Hotel for the night, I found Daniel McElwee,
who told me if I would wait until Saturday he would send me
through free of expense. This was inducement enough for me to
send and get my trunk and wait. Sixty dollars saved in three days
was not to be missed even at the risk of a slower boat and poorer
accommodations. John Thompson was also there. With a letter from
Daniel to George Starr, the head of the transportation department,
we went and gave him a call. He seemed glad of a chance to do his
friend McElwee a favor, telling me to be on board the transport
McClellan on Saturday morning and he would do the rest. I had
promised Mrs. Gibson to call on my way back and tell her more
about her brother, Lieutenant John Mathers, and we next went
there. From there to Brooks Brothers to find out about Colonel B.'s
clothes, and then back to the Washington, where I met several old
acquaintances and spent a very pleasant evening. The next morning
I got to thinking of a donation party that was to come off at the city
that night, and how nice it would be to drop in and surprise them.
By train time I had figured out a programme that would cost no
more than waiting in New York, and at 8 p. m. I was in Amenia, and
in one of the worst storms of the whole winter. Rain, snow, and hail,
and a high wind to drive it. There was nothing to do but go to
Putnam's and stay over. The next day I took the stage to the city
and and found out the donation party did not come off. The storm
continued and for all I could do it would not stop. I put in the day as
best I could and the next morning went back to Amenia and took
the train for New York, having been within five miles of home, when
they supposed I was somewhere on the Atlantic. I put up at the
Washington but found no one with whom I was acquainted. I spent
a dull enough evening, and went to bed disgusted with everything,
but mostly with myself for putting such a miserable finish to the
vacation which I had so longed for and had so much enjoyed.

February 27, 1864.

I was on board the McClellan at 10 o'clock, as agreed upon, and
found Mr. Starr already there. He introduced me to the captain, the
surgeon, and the purser, as his friend, whom he wished them to give
as good as the boat afforded, and to land me safely in New Orleans,
as a personal favor to him. They appeared to know him well, and
seemed glad to do him the favor. I told Mr. Starr I felt under great
obligations. He said as he could not fight for his country himself, he
was happy to help those who could, and said: "If you ever get the
chance, just give the Rebellion one blow for George Starr." But after
all said and done, the McClellan is not the Creole. It is a government
transport, much after the pattern of the Arago. There are a dozen or
so of military officers on board, one of them with an eagle on his
shoulder, several with one and two bars, and the rest like myself,
second lieutenants, with their bars to get. I was given a stateroom
to myself, but not very much like the one I had coming home.
However, beggars must not be choosers. The cargo so far as I could
see was commissary stores and other warlike material. We went a
little way out into the stream and anchored, and soon a smaller
vessel came alongside with the toughest-looking lot of people I had
ever seen together. There were four hundred of them, and they
were counted as they stepped on board, as sheep are, running
through a gate. They were stowed in below, just as we were on the
Arago, only there being so few they had plenty of room. I had never
seen such evil-looking faces on human beings as some of them had.
The purser told me they were conscripts, deserters and bounty
jumpers; that they had been in close confinement, and for safety
were not brought on board until we were away from the dock. Their
language was as vile as their faces, and they seemed to have neither
fear nor respect for the officers who had charge of them. Not all
were like that, but there was quite a sprinkling of them. There was
perhaps a company of soldiers in uniform and with arms, which I
found to be men who had been sick or wounded, and were now
returning to their regiments. The last to come on board were a
couple who it appears had gotten away while on their way from
prison to the boat, and had been rounded up by the police. One of
these was accused of robbing another of a hundred-dollar bill, and
as the accuser had some proof the fellow was stripped on deck, but
no money was found on him or in his clothes. Just as he was to be
released, one of the soldiers I have mentioned stepped up and
running his finger in the thief's mouth hooked out what I supposed
was a chew of tobacco, but which proved to be the hundred-dollar
bill. He was then allowed to go below. Then we started for Dixie.
The wind blew like a hurricane and we were soon in rough water.
Rain kept falling, and altogether it was a most dismal setting out.
Soon a great rumpus was heard below, and something that sounded
like shooting. The officers in charge of them paid more attention to a
demijohn of whiskey they had than to the men. So it went till night.
Cries of murder were heard and such cursing and swearing and
quarreling I never heard even in the army. A man came in the cabin
with a broken arm, and told who broke it, but nothing was done
about it. A little Dutch doctor undertook to set it, but both the doctor
and the patient were drunk and got to quarreling, and the man was
hustled back with the broken bone unset. Altogether it was the
blackest picture I had ever looked upon. I shut myself in my little
coop wondering how it all would end, and hating myself for
deserting the Creole, for a free ride on this old tub. If I had a chance
to swap the $60 I had saved for a berth on the Creole, the bargain
would have been made then and there.
 February 28, 1864.
Sunday. The wind continued strong and against us, and all was quiet
below. The whiskey had given out. The man with the broken arm
was sober now. He had suffered all night, and his arm was swollen
badly. The Dutch doctor was seasick, as were many others. The
ship's surgeon fixed up the broken arm as well as it could be done in
the condition it was. The day passed off after a while, and nothing
worth noting happened.

February 29, 1864.

Monday. The last day of winter. The wind kept dead ahead and blew
strong. The waves were higher than any I ever before saw. I got
acquainted with a Captain Reynolds, and was surprised to find him a
brother to Captain Reuben Reynolds of our regiment. He was much
surprised to find I knew his brother and to hear so direct about him.
He is so much like his brother I seem to have known him a long
time. The performance below has begun again. The officers have
but little influence over them. One of them, a captain at that, went
down to quiet them and was hit with something and his eyebrow cut
open. There is so little light below, it is dangerous going about
among the devils down there. Some have money and the others
steal it like highwaymen. A man who looked and acted like a crazy
man came in the cabin and declared he was afraid for his life. As the
day wore on the deviltry grew worse. Captain Gray told the officers
in command that unless they could control them he would stop at
the nearest port and land them. He is afraid of fire, as they smoke
and have open lights all the time. Several of them are known to
have revolvers, and to have fired them. The officers I think are
afraid of them and I don't know that I wonder. There are six or eight
ringleaders, and the peaceably inclined have to submit to anything
they say. At least a dozen complaints were made to-day and all were
against a few, of whom they are in terror.
 March 2, 1864.
Wednesday. After breakfast, and as we were mostly on deck
smoking, a man rushed up from below and went out upon the guard
in front of the wheel house as if to have a wash up from the tub
standing there. His manner, and the look upon his face, attracted the
attention of several. He pulled off his coat, and throwing up his
hands sang out, "Good-bye, all," and jumped off directly in front of
the wheel. We rushed to the rail in time to see him come up behind
the wheel, and strike out to swim. He had hit something, for his
head and face were bloody. "Man overboard," was yelled by
everyone, and chairs or any other thing handy was thrown towards
him. The vessel was stopped, but by this time the man was far
astern, and only to be seen as he rose on the waves, which were
quite high. A boat was lowered and put out after him, and that, too,
was hidden from view about half the time. The man, as near as I
could judge the distance, was a half mile away by this time, though
by watching the place he could be made out every time he came up
in sight. Those who had glasses watched him until the boat seemed
almost to him, and said that as he lay in plain sight on the uphill side
of a wave he suddenly went down. One of the crew said sharks were
always prowling about near a ship at sea, watching for anything
thrown out, and if one of them crossed the trail of blood which the
man must have left, it would follow him like a streak of lightning. He
thought it strange he had been let alone so long, and had no doubt
that a shark was the cause of his going down so suddenly. The
McClellan had come round so as to face the wind, and waited for the
boat to come back, which it did just before noon. A rope was thrown
out and caught, and after several times trying, the boat was got
close enough to be hauled up, men and all. While this was going on,
nearly everyone on board had come on deck. A few, with the best-
looking faces, were brought to the quarter-deck and questioned, and
the stories they told of the doings below could hardly be believed.
Everything short of murder had been done. The worst of the lot had
so terrorized the rest that they dared not report them for fear of
what might happen to themselves. The man who jumped overboard
had been so abused for coming to the cabin the night before, that
he took the only other course to get rid of it that seemed open to
him.
Now that the whiskey was gone, the most of them were willing and
anxious to be decent, but were in such mortal terror of the
ringleaders that they dared not make a move to bring them to
justice. After hearing the stories, which were all of one kind. Colonel
Zotroski (that's the way it sounds), being the ranking officer on
board, took command and declared martial law. He summoned every
military officer and the armed soldiers to the quarter-deck. These
soldiers had, by the way, kept apart from the others and had not
been molested. After taking the names, he appointed an officer of
the day, and I was almost paralyzed to hear my name called as
officer of the guard. A guard was detailed from among the armed
men, and then I got orders to station them at different places below,
and to arrest and put in irons any who created a disturbance or
disobeyed an order given them. Also to allow no smoking between
decks. Scared most out of my wits, I took the first relief and went
below. I posted them where they could see all parts of the room
they were in, and one on the next deck below, in a smaller room
where the cooking was done, giving them the orders I had received
from the officer of the day. I then started back up the ladder, when
some one caught me by the feet, just as I had my hands on a brass
railing that ran beside the opening to the deck above. That hand-
hold saved me. I yanked one foot loose and with the heel of my boot
jammed the knuckles of the hands holding me so they let go and I
was free. I said nothing, out loud, but went straight to my room for
my revolver. I came back just in time to see the guard I had posted
in the kitchen tumble out on deck, all spattered with hot potatoes
which had been thrown at him, some burning him severely. He was
mad clear through and was ready to shoot, and I wished we were in
the open where loaded guns could be used. I took him back to the
same post and told him to bayonet the first man that attempted to
lay hands on him. A great big hulk of a fellow stepped out from the
crowd and coming close up, said, "Good, old hoss, if you want any
help just call on me." I made all the allowance I could for his
manner of speech, thanked him, and went where I could see what
went on without being seen by him. Pretty soon he started as if
going past the guard, and when opposite him made a quick grab
and got hold of the gun barrel, and the fight was on. Before I could
get there the guard was down and ready to be tumbled on deck
again. It was just what was needed to bring my Dutch up to the
fighting point. I grabbed the tough by the collar with one hand and
with the other jammed the muzzle of a cocked revolver against his
ugly face, telling him to climb that ladder or die. He was a coward
after all and went on deck as meek as you please, where I
handcuffed him to the rigging and went back after more. Another
was pointed out and when I beckoned to him he came right along.
The well-disposed took courage and in a little while had two more on
deck, where I handcuffed them fast in different places. I now had
four, but the worst one of the lot could not be found. He was said to
be the leader in all the deviltry that had been going on. The men
said they would watch for him and let me know the minute he was
found. I went on deck, where I found several men who had been
robbed by the man yet at large, of sums totaling $211. Another said
the one I got first had stolen a shirt from him and was then wearing
it.
My orders said nothing about restoring stolen property, so the
matter was carried up to Colonel Zotroski, who told me to act my
pleasure about it. It was my pleasure to take off the handcuffs and
let the owner of the shirt take it off the thief's back. After locking
him fast again, I went on with the search for the missing one. I
wanted to find him while my gritty spell lasted, for, from all
accounts, he was a desperate character and the leader of the gang.
Just before dark one of the watchers came and told me they had
located him under a berth, and they thought he was asleep. Sure
enough he was, sound asleep between the floor and a lower berth. I
took him by the leg and had plenty of help to haul him out. He had a
revolver and a cheese knife with him, but in the narrow quarters,
and in the jiffy of time it took to get out, had no chance to use
either. There were as many hands as could get a hold, and by the
time I reached the deck he was there. A madder man I never saw.
The men he had robbed were there and I told them to go through
him and see what they could find. Although he was handcuffed, he
was so handy with his feet that shackles had to be put on before the
search for the money began. Wrapped around one ankle was the
money, just two hundred and eleven dollars. As that amount was
what the victims claimed to have lost, it was given back to them to
divide up. As I fastened the villain to the pump, the handiest thing
there was, he swore all sorts of vengeance on me, saying he would
see my heart's blood if he had to wait twenty years for it. Besides
the knife found on him, his revolver had three empty shells, showing
he had used it, and probably would have used it again if he had
been found while awake. I was mighty glad sleep overtook him
before I did, for if it had not the day's doings might read differently.
All was quiet now, and at the supper table I found myself to be quite
a somebody. Some with whom I had not spoken before took pains to
speak now and to congratulate me on the result of the day's work.
But if they had known how scared I was when I went at the job, and
how little bravery was really necessary to arrest four cowards and
one sleeping bad man, they might have thought differently. But I
hope never again to feel as I did when I arrested the first man.
There was murder in my heart, and the man's wilting as he did is all
that saved me from being a murderer. If that is bravery, I am glad I
have so little of it.
After supper Captain Gray asked me to use his room on deck for my
headquarters, and as I must be up all night I was very thankful for
such a nice place. The captain's bunk was in a room adjoining and
he turned in, leaving me alone. A map of the ocean's bottom lay on
a table. The depth of water all along the coast and for a distance
from it was marked on the map. The wind came up between nine
and ten o'clock and howled terribly. The captain came out and
looked at the barometer hanging on the wall. He said it was all right
yet, but if it got to a certain point, which he showed me, it would
mean a much bigger blow. I went the rounds about once an hour,
and found it very difficult to walk on the deck. The prisoners were
where I put them, and in spite of all I began to feel sorry for them.
But not knowing what to do with them I left them to suffer a little,
thinking it would be no more than they deserved.
To stop smoking between decks was not so easy as it might seem.
On every round I made I had smelled tobacco smoke, but had not
located a single smoker. Finally I saw what I knew was a lighted
cigar in an alley along the outside tier of bunks, and where the light
from the lamp did not reach. It was after midnight, and all but those
on duty were supposed to be asleep. This fellow did not see me until
I was right upon him. I took the cigar from his mouth, dropped it on
the floor and put my foot on it. Neither of us said a word, and I
found no more smoking after that.
At midnight the wind was something awful to hear or feel. After one
of my rounds I came in and found the barometer pointing to the
very place the captain had pointed out. When I told Captain Gray of
it, he jumped up and pulled a bell handle. Soon another officer came
and they consulted together. A change of direction was decided
upon, and then there was more pulling of bell handles, and they
both went out. Soon after this the ship seemed to be going over. A
tremendous thump, a smashing of timber, and a great rush of water
all came together. I thought the ship was sinking or had run afoul of
something. I started out and was glad to get under cover again. The
deck was wet and water was dripping from everything. The deck
was so high from the water I did not think it possible the waves
could reach it, and yet as it was not raining I had to think they had
been very much higher, for the water was running down from
everything. The prisoners were alive yet, for I could hear them yell
and swear. After a little the ship stopped rolling and only pitched and
dove. I ventured out and found it raining and the wind blowing
harder than ever. The poor wretches fast to the rigging were
repentant now and begged for some better place. I looked about
and found a sheltered place, and with the help of the sergeant of
the guard moved them to it.
Morning finally came, and with it better weather, though the sea was
something awful to look upon. What I heard in the night was now
explained. A great wave had gone clean over the vessel, taking
every loose thing with it. It also smashed some of the timbers that
form the guard in front and back of the wheel-house. These had
gone clear over and out on the other side. They looked to be six
inches square and solid at that. The rail was broken where they
struck it going over. I thanked my stars I was inside when that
happened. Such waves I had never seen. As the bow climbed up
one, the stern would sink down in another, until a solid body of black
water stood up all around it, and seemed ready to fall upon and sink
the ship, but instead, the bow would go down and the stern go high
up in the air; at the same time a sheet of water would come
swashing over the deck, and running off at the sides. I had often
wished I might witness a storm at sea, and here I was right in one. I
asked Captain Gray if this was the real thing and he said it was
"pretty stiff weather."
Eight o'clock came and I was relieved. After a wash-up and breakfast
I turned in and slept till dinner, and since that have been writing up
my diary. Everything is quiet on board. No more cutting up between
decks has yet happened. I am glad now I had just the part I did in
bringing about this state of affairs, but to tell the honest truth I
didn't suppose it was in me to go through the part I did. There was
a whole lot of good luck, as well as some good management. As I
look back over the last twenty-four hours I see much more to feel
thankful for than to feel proud of.

March 3, 1864.
Thursday. Before the wind for the first time since leaving New York.
The sea is still rough, the vessel pitching and diving all the time.
Everything quiet and well behaved in the lower regions. At night the
captain says we are off Savannah, Ga.

March 4, 1864.
Friday. A fine day and fine weather. Have spent the day on deck,
smoking, reading and thinking about my two homes, the one I am
going to, and the one I have so lately left.

March 5, 1864.
Saturday. Have been in sight of Florida all day. The day has been
plenty warm enough for comfort, the water smooth and I suppose a
good run made.

March 6, 1864.
Key West, Florida. Sunday. We stopped here for coal about 9 a. m. I
have been on shore and looked about. To me it is like being in
another world. Everything I see is different from anything I ever saw
before, unless it be the people, and they talk a language I never
heard, even in the French quarters of New Orleans. Cocoanuts grow
here, and pineapples. The place appears to be the tip end of Florida,
as the sea shows in all directions but one. The buildings are low,
squatty, wooden buildings, but the streets are clean and the people
look so. A few can speak English, but the most of them, black or
white, talk more like geese than anything else. I saw a great many
strange sights in the markets and shops. Nearly every building is a
store on the ground floor. Great turtles, some of them a yard long,
were sitting up on end in the markets and helplessly waving their
feet, or fins rather, for that is what their feet look like. So much
misery made me sorry I had seen the place. I suppose they are kept
that way until they are sold, or die. Last night there was a quarrel
among the men, and Colonel Zotroski interfered and got some talk
back that made him mad. He ordered the man to be brought on
deck, and to be bucked and gagged. This was done, and when it
was time to release him he was not to be found, and has not since
been found. It is supposed he rolled overboard, but I don't see how
that was possible. More likely his friends got him and have hid him
away.

March 7, 1864.
Monday. We left Key West about ten last night. We are now out of
sight of land, and I suppose are in the Gulf of Mexico. The weather
is hot as blazes. So hot an awning has been put over the quarter-
deck, and it is now a most delightful spot to sit and watch the
porpoises play.

March 8, 1864.
Tuesday. Another perfect day. A shower passed over just at night
and sprinkled the boat with warm water. I have been off my feed for
several days, but begin to be myself again and think I will be able to
crack a hard-tack by the time I get into camp. My vacation, or leave
of absence, that seemed so like heaven to look at, is over now, and
the stern realities of a soldier's life are looking me right in the face.
Well, I have a lot to think of that I didn't have then, and a whole lot
of things to talk about, too.

March 9, 1864.
Wednesday. When I woke up this morning, we were outside the bar,
waiting for a pilot. About six o'clock one came and we were soon
steaming up the river on the last stage of our journey. I was again
detailed as officer of the guard, and so it came about that I was the
first and the last to have charge of the prisoners, who were still in
irons. The fellow who threatened me with such dire vengeance was
quite docile, and said no more about killing me.
At quarantine we were halted and a medical man came on board to
look us over. He must have found us all right, for he soon went
overboard and we proceeded up the river. It called up sad memories
as we passed the little graveyard where so many of our boys are
lying.
I wondered if such a used-up mess had ever struck the place before
or since. About noon a sharp shower came upon us, and drove
everyone under shelter. It lasted nearly all the afternoon. At 8 p. m.
we tied up at the foot of Josephine Street. I turned the prisoners
over to the provost marshal and I suppose they were soon in jail. I
wonder what their punishment will be. I was soon relieved from duty
and went ashore. I went first to the Murphy House, where I found
Dr. Warren's and George Drury's names on the register. They were
out, but I secured the room next to them and went out to see if I
could find any one I knew. I went to 184 Gravier Street and found
the house shut up. Got a shave and then went to the St. Charles.
Coming out I met a fellow passenger looking for a place to stay and
took him with me to the Murphy House. There I found Drury and
from him got the first trace of Colonel Bostwick and family. He said
they were at Lakeport, nine miles away.
 CHAPTER XIV
The Red River Campaign
Camping on The Laurel Hill—At Port Hudson again—Meeting the
128th—Up the Red River to Alexandria—Two trips to Grand Ecore
—The river falling—The dam at Alexandria—The burning of
Alexandria.

March 10, 1864.

T
HURSDAY. Was up early, and after breakfast started for the
McClellan to get my trunk. I bargained with an expressman to
take it and myself to the Ponchartrain Railroad, where I met
Hallesay, our sutler. He said the boys had heard of my arrival and
were on the way to meet me. Soon after this we were together
again, and such volleys of questions as were fired at me was a
caution. They didn't give me time to answer one before several more
were asked. The train was ready for the return trip and we soon
reached Lakeport, where I found Sol and Matt Smith both having a
tussle with the chills and fever. The regiment had been across the
lake at Madisonville nearly all the time I had been away. Had had
some cases of smallpox among the men, but no deaths. Tony was
overjoyed to see me, and almost the first thing wanted me to write a
letter to his wife. I was kept so busy answering questions I hardly
had a chance to ask any, but I found out that the regiment was
under marching orders and expected to break camp that day. I felt
quite flattered to think every white man, not sick or on duty, had
gone out to meet me. After dinner in camp, we all hands took train
for the city again. Sol and I switched off and went to do some
errands on our own hook, after which we joined the regiment at the
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