In the eight bales of cotton, grown on a Georgia plantation, sent over to Liverpool in 1784, and seized at the Custom House on the ground that so much cotton could not be produced in America, but must come from some foreign country, lay the seed of a new movement in labor, in which, from the beginning, women have taken larger part than men.  By 1800 cotton had proved itself a staple for the Southern States, and even the second war with England hardly hindered the planters.  In 1791 two million pounds had been raised; in 1804 forty-eight million; the invention of the cotton-gin, in 1793, stimulating to the utmost the enthusiasm of the South over this new road to fortune.

It is with the birth of the cotton industry that the work and wages of women begin to take coherent shape; and the history of the new occupation divides itself roughly into three periods.  The first includes the ten or fifteen years prior to 1790, and may be called the experimental period; the second covers the time from 1790 to 1811, in which the spinning-system was established and perfected; and the third the years immediately following 1814, in which came the introduction of the power loom and the growth of the modern factory system.

The experimental stage found an enthusiastic worker in the person of Tench Coxe, known often as the “Father of American Industries,” whose interest in the beginning was philanthropic rather than commercial.  Bent upon employment for idle and destitute workmen, he exhibited in Philadelphia in 1775 the first spinning-jenny seen in America.  He had already incorporated the “United Company of Philadelphia for Promoting American Manufactures,” and they at once secured the machine and made ready to operate it.  Four hundred women were very speedily at work at hand spinning and weaving; and though the company presently turned its attention to woollen fabrics, a large proportion of women was still employed.

Till the building of the great mill at Waltham, Mass., in which every form of the improved machinery found place, spinning was the only work of the factories.  All the yarn was sent out among the farmers to be woven into cloth, the current prices paid for this being from six to twelve cents a yard.  American cotton was poor, and the product of a quality inferior to the coarsest and heaviest-unbleached of to-day; but experiment soon altered all this.

To manufacture the raw product in this country was a necessity.  For England this had begun in 1786; but she guarded so jealously all inventions bearing upon it that none found their way to us.  Our machinery was therefore of the most imperfect order, the work chiefly of two young Scotch mechanics.  In 1788 a company was formed at Providence, R.I., for making “homespun cloth,” their machinery being made in part from drawings from English models.  Carding and roving were all done by hand labor; and the spinning-frame, with thirty-two spindles, differed little from a common jenny, and was worked by a crank turned by hand.