The experience of those employed in the arms industry’s pursuit of mechanized interchangeable production, in what would later be called by historians, the “Second Industrial Revolution,” differed significantly from that of factory workers employed in the manufacture of textiles, in the so-called “First Industrial Revolution.”

For both, however, the first half of the 19^th century was a time of rapid change from a rural society, where most people adapted their lives to natural cycles, to a society in which people responded to factory bells, where work was the same year round and did not cease at nightfall. Such was the case at the cotton mills that grew in Lowell, Massachusetts, and at Springfield Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts. Successive waves of immigrants came to each to work alongside the indigenous Yankees. All kinds of Yankee, Irish, French-Canadian, and Polish names, still found in these cities today, slowly appeared on the pay rolls as the century progressed.

In 1790, the first permanent American cotton spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island were established. Four years later, in 1794, the first national armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, was established. Both factories employed new technology developed in the Blackstone River Valley where Pawtucket was located and elsewhere. These two types of industries, however, differed from each other in important ways.

Producing firearms for the nation’s armed forces in the unhappy event of war, Springfield Armory created a high-value product for the government. Its workforce employed highly skilled men and some boys at relatively high wages. Only during the early 1820’s, when Armory wages fell behind those being offered by the textile industry for a few years, was this pattern altered. Workers in the private arms industry soon found themselves also competing for workers with Springfield Armory. The result was competition for labor resulting in higher wages. Competition between workers was also fostered by a system of “piece work” whereby arms workers were paid by the specific number of products they produced.

With increased mechanization during the period, however, armory workers experienced, as did the textile workers to an even greater degree, some loss of control over the work environment. Production machinery increasingly determined the pace of production. However, wages for arms worker continued high, blunting limited worker dissent in the 1830s and 40s. Generally, the high scale of wages allowed workers to afford the purchase or rental of homes in the city and region. Mill housing, as found in the textile industry, never existed for arms industry workers though some factory housing was built by some private arms manufacturers. Work at Springfield Armory was so valued that many men spent their entire working lives at the Armory, often passing on their position to family members and friends.

The cotton industry, by contrast to the arms industry, manufactured massive amounts of low cost textiles for mass consumption. Initially employing a workforce of nine children between the ages of 7 and 12, the mechanized cotton industry expanded from Pawtucket to Lowell in the early 19^th century and adults as well as children soon peopled the massive brick and stone mills. Young women, known as "mill girls", were an innovation of the early textile industry in New England. Lowell's mill workforce in the antebellum decades consisted largely of young single women from the farming communities of northern New England. Most were between 15 and 25, signing on for short stints that rarely exceeded a year at a time. Overall, they averaged about three years of employment before leaving the mills for marriage, migration to the west, other employment, or return to their hometowns.

Dissatisfaction with the work environment was a major reason for leaving the mills. In the 1830s and 40s, women workers protested against mill conditions. Their labor movement was not a narrow lobbying effort, but a broad reform campaign embracing a wide range of issues and underpinned by firm ideals. In return for monthly cash wages, female workers in Lowell agreed to regulations that varied little from company to company: work for at least a year live in a company boardinghouse, attend church. Many worked for a year and went back to the farm, some repeating this pattern two or three times.