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felt paternal tribute that Foote in a particularly effective chapter, "Creating a Myth," describes as "one that
would alter the way Americans viewed the Civil War
and African Americans" (p. 121).
His son's death and his own vision of the freedman's
future led Frank Shaw back to his initial starting point
at Brook Farm, with its promise of true individual
freedom combined with communal responsibility. But
his wartime lessons had taught him the indispensability
of government. Out of his conversion to the principle
of government action came Shaw's intense loyalty to
George's call for a national single tax program. Shaw
became an avid follower and loyal advocate of "the last
great remedy" until his death in 1882.
The immediate future of American reform, however, lay with Shaw's beloved daughter Josephine Shaw
Lowell, a grieving Civil War widow who turned to
urban charity organizations as an outlet for her benevolent impulses and who trained an entire younger
generation in the techniques of scientific Progressive
reform. In this sense, perhaps, the Civil War belatedly
split the American nineteenth century in two-if not
for Frank Shaw himself, at least for his children. It is
precisely this fascinating cross-generational account
that makes Foote's book such a lively and compelling
piece of narrative history.
JOHN L. THOMAS
Brown University
STEPHEN P. RICE. Minding the Machine: Languages of
Class in Early Industrial America. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press. 2004. Pp. xiii,
230. $49.95.
In this highly original and creative book, Stephen P.
Rice uses a number of unusual sources to address the
question of how "members of a nascent middle class
manage[d] to promote and defend their social authority in the face of troubling and divisive questions about
work and mechanization" (p. 4). In doing so he brings
new insights to three well-studied aspects of antebellum American history: labor relations, class formation,
and the impact of industrial technology.
Analysis of what might be described as the "head
and hand" analogy forms the core of this volume.
Daniel Webster used a variant of it when he told the
Boston Mechanics' Institution about the need "to
facilitate the co-operation of the mind with the hand"
(p. 57). Rice convincingly demonstrates that these and
other observations made at mechanics' institutes
should be understood to refer to cooperation between
managers ("heads") and workers ("hands"). Similar
concerns animated antebellum educators who created
manual labor schools such as Lafayette College to
insure that future managers worked with their hands as
well as their minds. Popular physiology textbook writers and speakers such as health guru Sylvester Graham
also stressed the importance of physical exertion in
coordinating mental and manual functions. For Rice,
these and other examples represent a conservative,
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middle-class movement to emphasize social harmony
and downplay conflict between mental labor( ers) and
physical labor(ers). Unlike working-class radicals such
as Seth Luther, who stressed the opposition between
laborers and managers, these generally middle-class
proponents of cooperation between head and hand
hoped to legitimate their managerial authority while
acknowledging the important role played by the hands.
Rice explores a second set of analogous relations,
between man and machine, in the opening and closing
portions of his book. The first chapter brilliantly
encapsulates this issue using Johann Maelzel's automaton chess player as a symbol. This machine, first
displayed in the United States in 1826, tantalized
audiences for more than a decade with the mystery of
whether it was truly a chess-playing machine or merely
a sophisticated hoax. For Rice, this enigma illustrates
the developing ambivalence of humans' relationships
with machinery and provides the ambiguity in his title,
which leaves open the question of whether the worker
was "minding" the machine's commands or merely
watching over it. In other words, was the human
subordinate to the machine or the machine to the
human?
The final chapter, on steam boiler explosions, further explores this ambiguity. The antebellum public
was fascinated by these deadly events, and newspapers
frequently reported on them in gruesome detail. Because contemporaries often understood steam power
as providing something of a life force to otherwise
inanimate machines, such deadly explosions were perceived as analogous to worker revolutions. To be
properly controlled, steam boilers must be properly
managed, middle-class writers believed. Therefore,
steam engineers must become trained experts"heads"-in order to superintend their machines properly. Rice concludes, "The image of the steam engine
properly regulated by the qualified engineer thus
enabled antebellum Americans to conceptualize the
relation between human and machine, between head
and hand, and between manager and worker in terms
that would ensure the authority of the former over the
latter" (p. 144). Rice's argument is largely convincing;
his few transgressions tend to be sins of omission
rather than commission. He might have traced continuities with earlier language that emphasized the
natural harmony between the three preindustrial orders of mechanics, merchants, and farmers. He might
also have considered workers' reactions to the head
and hand analogy. Stimulating one's mind might not
have been considered conservative by people such as
Seth Luther who were anxious to use their heads to
construct a more egalitarian society. After all, Karl
Marx himself envisioned a communist utopia in which
men were not confined to use of head or hands but
might "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear
cattle in the evening [and] criticize after dinner."
Finally, besides head and hand, orators and writers
often included a third body part in the analogy: the
heart. Pursuing the subtexts associated with the inclu-
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Canada and the United States
sion of the heart in the head and hand analogy might
have allowed for more consideration of issues such as
manliness, femininity, and the cult of sensibility in the
construction of antebellum working and middle-class
culture.
Still, Rice has largely succeeded at a very tricky
project, teasing out meanings from rhetoric that at first
glance often seems, at best, tangential to his central
concerns. This is a book that anyone interested in class
in the antebellum period should read. It is made all the
more pleasurable by Rice's well-polished and entertaining prose.
LAWRENCE A. PESKIN
Morgan State University
ANGELA LAKWETE. Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine
and Myth in Antebellum America. (Johns Hopkins
Studies in the History of Technology.) Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 232.
$45.00.
One of the most enduring myths in American history
concerns Eli Whitney. Countless textbooks recount
how slaves cleaned the seeds from cotton by hand until
Whitney miraculously invented the cotton gin in 1794.
Central to this myth is the old dichotomy of the
industrial (and industrious) North versus the agricultural (and lazy) South: it was Whitney, the Yankee
inventor, who brought mechanical progress to technologically inept southern planters and slaves. Thanks to
Whitney's invention, planters began growing huge
cotton crops and slavery became economically viable.
Following the simple causality found in too many
textbooks, Whitney's gin sustained slavery and led
inevitably to the Civil War.
Remarkably, while American historians have overturned similar myths, Angela Lakwete is the first to
probe the connections among the cotton gin, slavery,
and innovation in the antebellum South. By examining
how cotton was cleaned-or ginned-Lakwete reveals
that Whitney did not invent the cotton gin and that
southerners could be quite innovative.
Lakwete traces ginning from the fifth century C.E.,
when women in Africa, Asia, and the American Southwest cleaned cotton using a long thin roller on a flat
surface. By the seventeenth century, artisans in India
had developed a hand-cranked churka with two rollers.
Seeing cotton as a potential cash crop, British colonizers transferred the churka to the Caribbean and North
America. Since there was a shortage of labor and a
strong demand for cotton, Lakwete shows how white
mechanics and enslaved Africans in the Caribbean
built larger, foot-powered models.
Demand for cotton grew rapidly at the end of the
eighteenth century as inventors in England mechanized cotton spinning. Recognizing this demand,
southern planters turned to cotton and employed
roller gins. Hoping to cash in on this shift to cotton,
Whitney patented a wire-toothed gin in 1794. Whitney's gin, however, produced tangled, low-quality fi-
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ber, prompting southern mechanics to replace the wire
teeth with circular saw blades. Whitney sued these
rivals for infringing on his patent, and although he won
several court cases, he was unable to stop them from
manufacturing saw gins. In scrutinizing Whitney's
technical contributions, Lakwete joins Edwin A. Battison, Merritt Roe Smith, and Ken Alder, who have
previously demonstrated that Whitney did not invent
interchangeable parts for firearms; interchangeablity
originated in France and was perfected in America by
other gun manufacturers.
Having dealt with Whitney, Lakwete chronicles the
experiences of antebellum gin manufacturers in New
England and across the South. Since most gin makers
were small, evanescent enterprises, Lakwete found
them by combing through newspapers, patent litigation, census records, city directories, and credit reports. In several cases, she takes us inside these
enterprises to show how gins were built by both white
and slave workers. Lakwete documents that the South
should not be considered a technological backwater; in
terms of gins, at least, King Cotton stimulated innovation.
In chronicling gin manufacture, Lakwete suggests
how the design of gins was shaped by several tensions.
However, because she organized her material into
chapters on different gins-saw and roller-it is difficult to understand how planters-perhaps the key
social group-made strategic choices in deploying the
cotton gin. Depending on location, a planter might
grow long or short-staple cotton; while the roller gin
was used with long-staple crops, short-staple planters
preferred saw gins. It is unclear whether these preferences were based on plant biology, culture, or economics. A planter wrestled with a tradeoff between quantity and quality; textile manufacturers paid more for
long fibers, but it was hard to produce quality cotton in
volume. Over the years, gin makers introduced innovations promising to increase both quantity and quality, but Lakwete does not clarify whether these innovations effectively addressed this tradeoff. Planters
must also have evaluated gins in terms of the skill
needed to operate, and one wonders if they sought gins
that could be run by unskilled slaves. Finally, cotton
prices declined during the antebellum era, and Lakwete does not explore how price changes affected how
planters deployed gin technology. Lakwete could have
balanced her investigation of the gin manufacture with
a closer look at how these machines were actually used
by planters. Only by looking at how planters made
choices about technology and labor can we understand
why slavery survived as an institution.
Nevertheless, Lakwete has achieved an important
goal-to lay to rest the myths surrounding the cotton
gin. She has demonstrated that Whitney did not heroically invent the cotton gin and that southerners actively improved a technology so necessary for King
Cotton. Through close study of the technology itself,
Lakwete challenges us to revise our understanding of
slavery in American history, and for this reason, her
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