Millionaires in the Making
In the year after ‘Mr. Madison’s War’, writes W.I. Cunningham, three Massachusetts businessmen helped to transfer the Industrial Revolution from England to America.
Francis Cabot Lowell and Patrick Tracy Jackson met with Nathan Appleton in 1813 on the Boston Exchange for an historic meeting; historic, because it implemented the transfer of the Industrial Revolution from England to America, and, as well, launched the first major industry in the United States—the manufacture of textiles from raw cotton to finished cloth under one roof.
The assembled gentlemen on that morning were not strangers either in their persons or in the intent of their meeting. All were important people in the community. In their commonality of money, power, and blood relationships, as they married and inter-married, they took over the places of the aristocratic Tories who had fled Boston for Halifax with Howe in 1776; and, while the rest of the country, following Jefferson’s philosophy, was emphasizing agriculture, these men and their associates stressed and controlled manufacturing in New England for two centuries.
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