Chapter 2: The history of Robert Owen

Chapter Two: The Historical Setting
The heat is stultifying, oppressive. I am sitting under the triple canopy hardwood forest of the Ohio River basin, and the sweat is running along my sides and down my temples in rivulets. Muggy is a word that comes to mind. Muggy is a word from childhood that my aunts would use to describe a warm, moist day, an uncomfortably damp day. This is way beyond muggy; this is hot, furnace hot. This is Vietnam hot.
Above New Harmony, Indiana, everything is green, almost painfully green. On the slopes above the wide, shallow, fast water of the Wabash River, the white and red oak, the exotic sassafras, the papaw, and the Eastern redbud mingle with the flowering dogwood, the persimmon, and the pecan trees. The shadows grow long, and the cicadas burst forth with their high-pitched chatter. The dark rises from the ground and fills the gaps between the shadows. Suddenly, the dark is broken by a tiny but intense burst of light, then another, and another. My God, fireflies! Hundreds of them. Little insect supernovas. I have never before seen a firefly. I am transfixed and watch them for half an hour without moving.
I begin to realize that these fireflies are not unlike the utopian society I have come to study here at the New Harmony site. Robert Owen and his intrepid band were cultural fireflies that lit up for one brief moment with the promise of a better way of living for mankind, and here I am, 170 years later, chasing that speck of light trying to understand what they sought to illuminate.

Introduction
The following chapter sets the time and place of this study. It introduces the reader to the geography and brief history of the area where the New Harmony community was established. It also provides a biographical sketch of Robert Owen, as well as some acknowledgement of the social and political forces that were in play at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A history of the Owenite community is then explored, that introduces the major historical figures and the events that transpired between the founding and the dissolution of the community.
The Setting
The area of southwestern Indiana called the “pocket” lies between the confluence of the Wabash and the Ohio Rivers. In ancient times, before White settlers came, the area was inhabited by the central Algonquin tribes – the Potowatomies, the Weas, and the Piankershaws. These tribes, by the 17th century, had formed the Miami Confederation in order to defend their tribal lands against encroachment by the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. “By the time the first European settlers came into the area, the tribes were weakened by defeats in war and in the disruptions to their traditional life” (Access Indiana, 2000, p. 2).
During the 1700s the French made claim to the great American Northwest and, in 1750, they built a fort at the mouth of the Wabash. England took possession of the area after France’s defeat in the French and Indian War. The area now known as Indiana was a county of Virginia before the formation of the Northwest Territory. The first settlers began to trickle in sometime between 1790 and 1800. Thomas Jones is credited with building the first cabin in the area, followed by Samuel Black, Nathaniel Miller, William and Isaac James, George Henchat, and Peter Roach, who established a trading post on the Wabash to cater to the flatboat business (Access Indiana, 2000, p. 2).
In 1814, by act of the Territorial Legislature, the forestland located at the juncture of the Till Plains and the Southern Hills became Posey County, named in honor of Tomas Posey who was an officer in the French and Indian, and the Revolutionary Wars. Posey was also the sitting governor of the Indiana Territory at the time. It was during this period that large-scale settlement of the area began. In June, 1814, the town of Harmonie was established on the Wabash by the German Pietist George Rapp and his followers.
Social and political turmoil of the times gave rise to many social experiments. In Europe the bloody French Revolution had dissolved into the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. France and England had been fighting for 20 years; in the Americas, the fledgling United States—the ink just dry on its Constitution—was struggling for direction and unity while trying to avoid getting drawn into the European conflict. The turmoil in Europe brought some good with the bad for the former. Strapped for cash to finance his European war, Napoleon offered to sell to the United States all of France’s holdings in the North Americas for 15 million dollars. Known as the Louisiana Purchase, the land acquired nearly doubled the size of the United States.
Both France and England interfered with the United States’ ability to conduct commerce by stopping, boarding, and sometimes confiscating cargo and crew. President Thomas Jefferson wanted no part of war with England; however, his successor, James Monroe, presided over a congress increasingly impatient with British harassment on the high seas and with British support of border raids in Canada by Indians into the territories. In 1807, the public was outraged when a British warship fired on and boarded the U. S. Navy frigate Chesapeake to retrieve suspected deserters. This event and others precipitated Henry Clay’s War Hawks capturing a majority of the seats in the 1810 congressional election. Two years later, under Monroe, Congress declared war on Great Britain, initiating the War of 1812, which galvanized and united the young republic. Convinced of its invincibility after Jackson’s defeat of the British army in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, the United States issued the Monroe Doctrine, informing all foreign powers that their influence in the Americas was over. Any attempts to colonize or to influence the sovereign nations of North or South America would be considered an unfriendly act by the newly powerful United States of America. One year later, in 1816, the State of Indiana was admitted to the Union, and American cotton began to flow again into European markets (Commager, Cunliffe, Jones, & Horton, 1976).
In addition to wars, and expansions, another kind of upheaval was beginning to take shape, one that would change the world in ways more dramatic and far-reaching than any armed conflict. Recent developments in machinery based on the patents of Arkwright, Fulton, and Watt were revolutionizing the manufacturing industry in Great Britain, principally the cotton industry. In 1816 the population of Great Britain was approximately 17 million; of those “one fourth were producers . . . the wealth of Great Britain and Ireland was produced by the manual labor of four millions and a quarter, assisted by mechanical and chemical power” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 126). In testimony before the House of Commons on Sir Robert Peel’s Factory Bill, a British cotton magnate claimed the amount of manual labor replaced by machinery in cotton spinning alone, “exceed[ed] and supercede[d] the manual labor of a population of eighty millions” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 127). If just one branch of one manufacturer superceded the manual labor of eighty million, then, Owen asked, “w\What must be the amount superceded by all the new mechanical and chemical powers which have been introduced into the operations of industry in the British Islands since the inventions of Arkwright and Watt?” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 127). It was estimated that in the wool, flax, and silk industries, machine production would replace the manual labor of over two hundred million persons (Owen, R., 1854).
The poor and underprivileged flocked to employment in the manufacturing industry, giving rise to the factory town. A cruel and unyielding environment often faced these families, who lived in crowded slums with poor sanitation and bad food, and who suffered long, harsh working conditions. It was not uncommon for children as young as five or six to work ten-hour shifts. High unemployment made families desperate, while investors and other capitalists reaped unheard of and often obscene profits from the labors of the lower class. Into this maelstrom of change stepped philanthropist, manufacturer, and social reformer Robert Owen. Like his competitors, Owen reaped the benefits from the system, but unlike them, he did not seek to squeeze more profit from the laborers who produced the wealth. Owen began experimenting with ways to improve the working and living conditions of his employees, and he began to observe that his changes resulted in an increase in productivity and happiness (Owen, R., 1857). Through these observations, he developed his theory of character formation and education that would lead him to establish the first secular utopian community in the Americas.
Robert Owen
Childhood
Robert Owen was born in Newton, Montgomeryshire, North Wales, on May 14, 1771. His father, Robert Owen, senior, was a saddler and ironmonger and the father of seven children, five of whom survived to adulthood. As young Robert passed his days in school and play, he developed a passion for reading. At the age of ten, he was sent to apprentice for three years with Mr. James McGuffog, a draper in Stamford, Lincolnshire. The first year, while Robert was learning the trade was to be without pay; the second year he would be paid eight pounds; and the third, 20 pounds. Remuneration included board, lodging, and washing within the McGuffog house. The young Owen was quite precocious and learned a great deal about business during his three years while in Stamford. When his apprenticeship ended, McGuffog wanted to retain him, but Owen, then thirteen years old, chose instead to take a position in a retail house in London for 25 pounds a year. Owen worked in the London retail house from 8:00 a.m. until the shop closed at 11:00 p.m., after which he folded and arranged merchandise until 2:00 a.m. The long hours proved to be more than the 13-year-old could sustain, and Owen managed to find a position with another house in Manchester for 40 pounds a year, where he remained until the age of 18 (Owen, R., 1857).
Entrepreneur
While he was working in Manchester, Owen met a young mechanic named Jones, who was convinced he could manufacture the same spinning machines as were currently being brought on line in Manchester cotton factories. Owen borrowed 100 pounds from his brother William to become a partner in the production and selling of what were called “mules” for spinning cotton. Jones and Owen soon had a thriving business that employed 40 men. The business attracted investors who wanted to buy out Owen, and he happily accepted for “6 mules, a reel, and a making up machine, with which to pack the yarn when finished in skeins into bundles for sale. I had now, when about nineteen years of age, to begin the world on my own account” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 25).
Owen soon became very successful making and selling cotton thread for British muslin. It was at this time that a confident Robert Owen applied for the job of superintendent of a large cotton manufactory in Manchester. He was offered 300 pounds a year to supervise the Drinkwater mill; at the age of 20, he was managing this mill, which employed 500 workers. Robert excelled in this new environment where he learned to analyze and improve both the operation and the product. During this period, around 1816, the first American Sea Island cotton was beginning to hit the British market, and mills to process it were springing up all over the British Isles. It was also at this time that Owen began to develop insights into how to handle mill workers, “I early noticed the great attention given to the dead machinery, and the neglect and disregard of the living machinery” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 34). He believed that man did not form his own character and therefore was not a fit subject for praise or blame. This was a radical concept in a world that believed that the poor were poor because they were lazy and creatures of bad habits. With Owen’s view, the unfortunate could not be blamed for their poverty; nor could the wealthy take credit for their station. Owen began to write and to speak on his theories of character formation. He was invited to join the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, and he soon traveled in the most elite section of society.
At the height of his involvement in the Drinkwater mill, fate stepped in in the form of an ambitious son-in-law in the Drinkwater family. The son-in law wanted to take over the family business, and he wanted Owen out. Never one to stay where he was not wanted, Owen tore up his contract and left his then 500-pounds-a-year post to become again the entrepreneur. He developed the Chorlton Twist Company, a partnership that built and managed cotton mills. The company grew and expanded its operations into Scotland. It was on a trip to Scotland that he met the daughter of David Dale, one of the country’s foremost cotton manufacturers and owner of the New Lanark mills. When Robert Owen inspected the New Lanark mill, he said to a friend, “Of all places I have yet seen, I should prefer this in which to try an experiment I have long contemplated and wished to have an opportunity to put into practice” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 46). Owen offered to buy the New Lanark property for 60,000 pounds, and he also offered his proposal of marriage to Miss Dale. Both offers were accepted. Robert Owen and Anne Caroline Dale were wed on September 30, 1799. Robert Owen was 28 years old.
Reformer
The New Lanark mill employed 1300 cotton workers who lived together as families. There were also four to five hundred orphans and pauper children between the ages of five and ten. These children were “from various workhouses from the slums of Glasgow and Edinburgh. To get rid of them, workhouse authorities would send a carload of orphans, ages 6 and 7, to work in the mills” (American Atheists, 2000). At New Lanark, Owen refined his ideas that man’s character is formed for him and not by him. Owen believed one had only to change the environment to change the man, “There will be little difficulty in creating a good and valuable character for all, and in building up society with good conditions only” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 62). He started his reforms with the village, and although, “the working people were systematically opposed to every change which I proposed, and did whatever they could to frustrate my object” (Owen, R., p. 6), Owen pressed ahead with unilateral reform. He got rid of shops that sold inferior goods at high prices. He arranged for “superior” stores that would supply all the needs of the village. He bought goods in bulk and sold to the village at cost. This gave the villagers superior products at a 25% savings. He had the streets cleaned and sewers installed. He forbade the casting of refuse in the streets. He inspected the houses, insisting on weekly cleanings and annual white washings. He established districts with a “principal” in charge of each. He started a savings bank and a sick fund. Communal kitchens were established for working families, and by 1816, he reduced the workday to 12 hours. Over the course of time, New Lanark became a model of reform. Schools were established, and no child under 10 was allowed to work in the mills. When asked about his reasons for this decision in an appearance before a House of Commons committee, Owen said that the children, though well fed, were “deformed, their growth was stunted . . . in general they made very slow progress, even in the common alphabet” (Robert Owen, 2000, pp. 1-5).
Owen’s school became a showcase. He started the first infant school in Britain (a precursor to Foebel’s kindergarten), where students could be admitted as early as one year of age, and where they were taught by people who had “great love for and unlimited patience with infants” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 138). Teachers were “on no account ever to beat any one of the children, or to threaten them in any manner in word or action, or to use abusive terms; but were always to speak to them with a pleasant countenance kind manner and tone of voice” (p. 139). This attitude, along with a system based on natural inquiry and a curriculum filled with music, dance and military drill, was considered very avant-garde. The school became known as the Institute for the Formation of Character and received visitors from all around the world who observed and marveled at its success.
Owen truly loved and respected the common worker. He felt that owners ought to get five per cent return on invested capital, and all other profits above that amount should be returned to the workers in wages and improved working and living conditions. During the cotton embargo of 1806, when other mills were closing and laying off workers, Owen kept his employees on at full wages to perform maintenance on machines. This secured for him much respect and cooperation from his workers. When the embargo lifted, New Lanark, with its workers and its machines ready to go, was able to leap into production ahead of all the other mills. Wages during the down time had cost him 7000 pounds, but the profits he realized by getting a jump on the other factories were three times that, which caused jealous mill owners and investors to harden their opposition to Owen’s ideas of industrial reform.
Owen’s writings and speeches about his ideas regarding character formation and industrial reform, brought him much celebrity. During the period and from 1815 to 1820, he was visited by all the famous and influential figures of the day, including the Prince of Wales, the King and Queen of Norway, and the leaders of the House of Commons. However, this support was countered by mill owner-sponsored legislation designed to prevent the government from interfering with someone’s right to do business as they saw fit. At the heart of the philosophical debate was the question of what creates man’s nature. As this debate intensified under public scrutiny, Owen became convinced that it was the mythology of religion, with its concept free will, that allowed a Christian nation to justify keeping its poorest people in virtual slavery. In a public meeting, Owen declared false religion to be the true oppressor of mankind. This “irresistible power of truth” caused a backlash among the “religions and party underlings” that set them against this “mere cotton spinner and man of trade” (Owen, R., p.157). Owen’s tirades against religion alienated his supporters and hardened the resolve of his enemies. It became increasingly clear that, rather than thinking of Robert Owen as a mere reformer, Britain began to view him as a heretic and a threat to Christianity. The clergy convinced Owen’s New Lanark workers that, as an atheist, Owen was ungodly and a threat to Christianity. When his own workers refused to elect him as their representative in Parliament, Owen resolved to prove his theory on some foreign shore where he could build the perfect utopian community free from European provincialism.
Utopian Dream
In 1824 Owen was considering establishing his proposed utopian community in Ireland, away from the blue noses he had offended by calling all religion “superstition.” At the same time, Father George Rapp wanted to sell the community of Harmonie he and his followers had established in the state of Indiana in the United States. Father Rapp had commissioned Richard Flower, an Englishman from Albion, Illinois, to sell the entire 30,000 acres with its village, its manufactories, farms, and buildings. In August of 1824, Flower met with Robert Owen in New Lanark and mentioned the Rappite property: “Flower was surprised at Owen’s immediate interest, finding it difficult to believe that the Scotsman would abandon his comfortable status and profitable mills for an idealist experiment on a distant continent he had never visited” (Carmony & Elliott, 1980/1999, p. 164).
On October 2, 1824, two months after meeting with Flower, Owen set sail from Liverpool with his youngest son William and Captain Donald MacDonald to visit the Harmonie site. As benefited his celebrity, he met with many of the important leaders of business, culture and politics when he arrived in the United States, including President James Monroe. Owen and his party arrived at Harmonie, Indiana, on December 16, accompanied by Frederich Rapp, the adopted son of Father George Rapp. On January 1, 1825, Robert Owen purchased the village of Harmonie and 20,000 acres of land for $125,000 of his own money. He renamed the village New Harmony and took ownership of 180 log, frame, and brick structures, public buildings, manufacturing establishments, shops and housing for 700 (Carmony & Elliott, 1980). Owen left his son William and Captain MacDonald at New Harmony and set off to return to New Lanark. On the way, he spoke twice at the United States House of Representatives, met with incoming President John Quincy Adams, and stayed overnight with former President Thomas Jefferson.
Perhaps Owen had been swept away by his reception on the continent; perhaps he was just anxious to start on his dream. For whatever reason, he did not formulate any plans to administer his new community. In spite of his reputation as an effective manager and a “hands on” type supervisor, Robert Owen ignored his son William’s advice to exercise caution in admitting persons to the community. While in the East, he “issued a manifesto inviting all who were in sympathy with his aims to proceed to New Harmony to join the New Community” (Carmony & Elliott, 1980, p. 167). Hundreds responded to the invitation, overwhelming young William Owen in the absence of his father. “The enjoyment of a reformer” William confided in his journal “is much more in the contemplation than in the reality” (Owen, W., 1906/1973, p. 129).
When Robert Owen returned to New Harmony on April 13, 1825, he found the village in chaos. Seven to eight hundred individuals already packed the town, and more people arrived every day. Primarily dreamers and ne’er-do-wells, the would-be settlers were woefully short of skilled trades people and willing laborers. They looked to newly-returned Robert Owen to provide the stability that the community was lacking (Wilson, 1964). The next chapter will discuss Owen’s attempts to unify the community.
Summary
The currents of history that swept Robert Owen to the shores of the Wabash in 1825 were numerous. The conditions in Europe cried out for reform, and compassionate men like Owen heeded the call. Without the rising tide of wealth created in textile manufacturing, these men would not have had the resources to attempt to ameliorate the workers’ squalid living conditions. A frenetic global political climate helped to create the burgeoning young democracy whose open-arms policy invited a variety of social reformers to experiment with new community structures. All these elements had conspired to bring this charismatic Englishman to the lush forests of the New World in order to try his hand at creating a new society. What follows is an account of the major historical events that transpired after Robert Owen’s return to the village of New Harmony in the spring of 1825.