When is a ‘traitor’ not a ‘traitor’? When he’s ‘The Father of the American Industrial Revolution’?

Samuel Slater, the son of a Derbyshire yeoman farmer, was apprenticed to Jedediah Strutt, who, in 1771, along with his business partner Sir Richard Arkwright, had established the first successful textile mills, at Cromford, Milford and Belper in the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire. Young Samuel was a brilliant pupil, and learnt the whole method of carding and spinning of yarn, using the machinery designed by Arkwright, and the factory system, by heart, during his indentured service.

Shortly after he had completed his apprenticeship, in 1789, he took ship from London for New York. This was expressly against the law, as England had made it illegal for textile machinery to be exported, or trained textile workers to leave the country, in order to preserve the monopoly in cotton manufacture she held at this time. Slater posed as a farm worker, and was able to seem quite believable because of his family roots and his broad native Derbyshire accent; he had, however, sewn his indenture papers proving that he had successfully completed his apprenticeship, inside his clothes. Samuel didn’t make it in New York, but a canny Quaker merchant in Rhode Island, one Moses Brown, brought him to New England, and funded the establishment of the first mill. Slater constructed machinery from memory, and by 1790, the mill was spinning cotton. Water power from the Blackstone River was added by 1791, and the mill was soon carding and spinning cotton in quantity.

Later, Slater struck out on his own, forming Samuel Slater & Company, and established the mill you see here, Slater Mill, where he instituted the factory system, using children as young as seven to help in the mill. The whole system of child labor, as practised in Europe, with boy chimneysweeps clambering up soot-clogged chimneys, children dragging baskets filled with coal on all fours, deep in the mines, and small children crawling between working machinery to clear up fragments of cotton waste was terrible! Slater was a religous man - indeed, he instituted 'Sunday Schools' at his mills to teach children to read and write - but he had no problems with child labor.

He died in 1835 a wealthy man, owning 13 mills, an iron company and other interests with a total net worth of over $1 million, and having being acknowledged as ‘The Father of the American Industrial Revolution’ by President Andrew Jackson (who had visited him at his home as his health was failing).

The Slater Mill has now been turned into an impressive museum, complete with costumed guides, and the surrounding area has been designated the Blackstone River National Heritage Corridor by the United States government. Strangely, the Derwent River has gone one better, with UNESCO, in 2001, declaring a stretch of the river to the north of the city of Derby to be the Derwent Mills World Heritage Site (Site #1030).

I was born 6 miles away from his father's farm in Belper, and I can tell you that Samuel Slater has a very different reputation in Derbyshire, to that which he holds in New England, even to this day. In Derbyshire, he still called 'Slater the Traitor'!

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