AMERICAN INDUSTRIES SINCE COLUMBUS. 461 



art. But the industry, there and elsewhere, was essentially of the 

 home, and never went far beyond it, notwithstanding the pains 

 which the General Court of Massachusetts took in 1656 to foster 

 spinning by penalties. " Fearing that it will not be so easy to im- 

 port clothes as it was in past years, thereby necessitating more home 

 manufacture," the General Court ordered the selectmen in every 

 town to turn the women, girls, and boys to spinning and weaving, 

 each family to be assessed for one or more spinner, or fractional 

 part, according' to its size, and " that every one thus assessed do 

 after this present year, 1656, spin for thirty weeks every year 

 three pounds per week of linen, cotton, or wooling, and so pro- 

 portionately for halfe or one quarter spinners, under the penalty 

 of twelve shillings for every pound short." Legislation of this 

 character shovrs how promptly the colonists recognized the ad- 

 vantage that must accrue to them from independence of the 

 mother-counti y in their clothing supply. It also shows them 

 apt pupils of the English system of stimulating special indus- 

 tries by patriarchal legislation. The stimulation thus effected 

 was not without its results. The increasing production of home- 

 made fabrics, while it still supplied hardly a twentieth of the 

 needs of the colonists, nevertheless alarmed the home Govern- 

 ment toward the close of the century. In 10!)!) a stringent decree 

 was laid upon the movement of all woven fabrics within or with- 

 out the plantations. The manufacture was not prohibited, but 

 nothing was left undone to embarrass and check colonial enter- 

 prise in the pet British industry of wool manufacture. This pro- 

 hibition extended to " wool, woolfells, shortlings, morlings, worst- 

 ed, bay or woollen yarn, cloath, serge, bays, kerseys, says, frizes, 

 druggets, shalloons, : or any other drapery, stuffs, or woollen manu- 

 factures." This enumeration reveals something of the character 

 of the goods the colonists were then making around their firesides, 

 and of the names then applied to them. 



Following the industry down through the eighteenth century, 

 we find little or no modification of the primitive conditions indi- 

 cated above. At the anniversary of the Boston Society for the 

 Promotion of Industry and Frugality, August 8, 1753, three hun- 

 dred " young female spinsters " spun at their wheels on the Com- 

 mon, and the movement for popularizing the home industry went 

 so far as to be nicknamed "the spinning craze." In 1766 Gov- 

 ernor Moore reported that there were two kinds of woolen made 

 in the province of New York ; " one coarse, of all wool, the other 

 linsey-woolsey, of linen in the warp and wool in the weft." The 

 Stamp Act troubles afforded a distinct stimulus to the industry, 

 and appeals to patriotic pride in the weaving of home-made cloth- 

 ing were common. The president and fipst graduating class at 

 Rhode Island College are immortalized in history by their ap- 



