As a consequence of all this, people stopped putting their money into roads and canals and manufactures, and put it into farming, shipbuilding, and commerce.  Between 1793 and 1807, therefore, our country enjoyed a period of commercial and agricultural prosperity.  But with 1807 came another change.  In that year the embargo was laid, and for more than fifteen months no vessels were allowed to leave the ports of the United States for foreign countries.  Up to this time our people had been so much engaged in commerce and agriculture, that they had not begun to manufacture.  In 1807 all the blankets, all the woolen cloth, cotton cloth, carpets, hardware, china, glass, crockery, knives, tools, and a thousand other things used every day were made for us in Great Britain.  Cotton grown in the United States was actually sent to England to be made into cloth, which was then carried back to the United States to be used.

%282.  “Infant Manufactures."%—­As the embargo prevented our ships going abroad and foreign ships coming to us, these goods could no longer be imported.  The people must either go without or make them at home.  They decided, of course, to make them at home, and all patriotic citizens were called on to help, which they did in five ways.

First, in each of the cities and large towns people met and formed a “Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Manufactures.”  Every patriotic man and woman was expected to join one of them, and in so doing to take a pledge not to buy or use or wear any article of foreign make, provided it could be made in this country.

In the second place, these societies for the encouragement of domestic manufactures, “infant manufactures,” as they were called, offered prizes for the best piece of homemade linen, homemade cotton cloth, or woolen cloth.

In the third place, they started “exchanges,” or shops, in the cities and large towns, to which anybody who could knit mittens or socks, or make boots and shoes or straw bonnets, or spin flax or wool, or make anything else that the people needed, could send them to be sold.

In the fourth place, men who had money came forward and formed companies to erect mills and factories for the manufacture of all sorts of things.  If you were to see the acts passed by the legislatures of the states between 1808 and 1812, you would find that very many of them were charters for iron works, paper mills, thread works, factories for making cotton and woolen cloth, oilcloth, boots, shoes, rope.

In the fifth place, the legislatures of the states passed resolutions asking their members to wear clothes made of material produced in the United States,[1] offered bounties for the best wool, and exempted the factories from taxation and the mill hands from militia and jury duty.

[Footnote 1:  McMaster’s History of the People of the United States, Vol.  III., pp. 496-509.]

Thus encouraged, manufactures sprang up in the North, and became so numerous that in 1810, when the census of population was taken, Congress ordered that statistics of manufactures should be collected at the same time.  It was then found that the value of the goods manufactured in the United States in 1810 was $173,000,000.