The men of the 6th Massachusetts Light Artillery chiefly hailed from Lowell, Massachusetts and the surrounding environs. They seem to have been a relatively anonymous group of men both before and after the war. Unlike the men of the Washington Artillery, they appear not to have been much inclined to putting pen to paper about themselves or the war; and unlike the men of the Washington Artillery, they do not appear to have gone on after the war to distinguish themselves as important men of the community beyond the importance of mill hands and machine shops and the canals.
Since they have said so little about themselves that has made it to readily available print, it might be helpful to see the context in which so many of these men were born and raised. These 6th Massachusetts Light Battery artillerymen seem to have sprung from immigrant backgrounds and blue collar work, and after the war ended, it would seem they faded back into those lives as well. They rose from obscurity and returned to it. The place from which they rose, however, and the camp in which they trained to become artillerymen, were not so obscure, at the time. The primary portion of the article is used with thanks to the City of Lowell, Massachusetts.
Lowell, Massachusetts
First settled in 1653, Lowell was named for a 19th century Harvard-educated new Englander of the bluest blood in the Commonwealth: Francis Cabot Lowell. While in his mid-30s, Lowell took a trip to England where he memorized the workings of some new textile machinery which pioneered the cotton-to-cloth process. Determined to replicate the machines, he founded a public company that, thanks to his “reverse engineering” of the new machines, designed and built them, and produced cloth industrially. His was the first cotton-to-cloth textile operation in the United States.
The first mill was at Waltham, Massachusetts, and it was highly successful from the start. Lowell died young, leaving the increasingly profitable company to his associates. The capital-rich company began looking for ways to make even more money.
English mills largely used coal to power their factories. New England had the advantage of them with rivers flowing fast enough to provide plenty of water power more economically. Water power necessarily limited industrial development to very particular locations, and the small Charles River at Waltham wasn't nearly powerful enough to support new operations. In the early 1820s, Lowell's associates headed 30 miles northwest of Boston, to the farming village of East Chelmsford, where the fast-flowing Merrimack dropped 35 feet over the course of a mile in a series of rapids called the Pawtucket Falls. That was an ideal site for building their new factory town.
Some of the work had already been done for them. In the 1790s, a 5.6 mile long canal had been built at East Chelmsford to avoid the falls, allowing an all-water route for shipbuilding timber between the forests of New Hampshire and Newburyport, at the mouth of the Merrimack. The canal was obsolete almost as soon as it was built. A few hundred yards upstream, a different group built the Middlesex Canal - connecting the Merrimack with the shipyards of Boston directly. The unprofitable Pawtucket Canal was the Associates' for the taking.
The Pawtucket Canal proved to an enormous power generator, but not without some modification. Uriah A. Boyden installed his first turbine in the Appleton Mill in 1844, which was a major efficiency improvement over the old-fashioned waterwheel. The turbine was improved at Lowell again shortly thereafter by Englishman James B. Francis.
Francis first got a job at the Locks And Canal Company of Lowell, Massachusetts. He became Chief Engineer of Proprietors of Locks and Canals, and remained at the company for the remainder of his career. Francis began his career with Locks And Canal Company working under George Whistler, the father of painter Jems McNeil Whistler (of Whistler’s Mother fame), and his improved turbine, known as the Francis Turbine, is still used with few changes today.
Francis ordered the construction of the Great Gate over the Pawtucket Canal in 1850. He was responsible for the construction of the Northern Canal and Moody Street feeder; and those two canals, built in the late 1840s and early 1850s, completed the 5.6 mile long Lowell canal system which was then able to produce 10,000 horsepower that would eventually be provided to ten corporations with a total of forty mills. In those mills, ten thousand workers used an equal number of looms fed by 320,000 spindles. The mills produced 50,000 miles of cloth annually. Other industries developed in Lowell as well. The Lowell Machine Shop became independent in 1845; and patent medicine factories like Hood's Sasparilla Laboratory and Father John's Medicine opened. Tanneries, a bleachery, and service companies needed by the growing city were established.
Before all of that development came about, though, a great deal of thought went into building up Lowell, Massachusetts. The Associates, Lowell’s company now working as the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, hired some disposable Irishmen and went to work in the 1820s building a new kind of city from scratch. Lowell went up virtually overnight, a planned city. Canals, factories, shops, and housing quickly replaced the small farming community as more and more Boston businessmen opened up operations in Lowell.
Lowell attracted men of ideas and vision. In 1828, Paul Moody developed an early belt-driven power transfer system to supersede the unreliable gearwork that was utilized at the time. In 1830, Patrick Tracy Jackson commissioned work on the Boston and Lowell Railroad, arguably the oldest railroad in America. It opened in 1835, just five years later, making the Middlesex Canal obsolete. Soon, lines up the Merrimack to Nashua, downriver to Lawrence, and inland to Groton Junction, today known as Ayer, were constructed. Lowell was the home of the inventor of rubber heels, Humphrey O'Sullivan.
The grand Lowell Experiment was well underway.
All they lacked were people who would be willing to work the new factories. Wanting to be different from England, where poor, uneducated types worked dangerous and crippling jobs for starvation wages, they brought in Yankee mill girls and set them up in company housing, promising good pay and a virtuous life.
Up to 1840 the mill hands, with the exception of English dyers and calico printers, were New England girls. The Corporation, as the employers were called, provided from the first for the welfare of their employees, and Lowell was always notably free from labor disturbances.
Soon, the same forces that led to the founding of Lowell led to its first major collapse. Taking advantage of the Irish Potato famine in the 1840s and facing stiff competition from other cities, uneducated Irish men, women, and children were employed to work exceptionally long hours at a dangerous job for starvation wages - just like England. The part of the Lowell Experiment where people got wealthy was working, but they dropped the part about providing a good life for the workers.
The original Irish that came to help build the canals were followed by a new group after the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. Soon after, Catholic Germans would follow them. Ethnic tensions to the point of riots were not unheard of, and in the 1840s, the American Party (often called the Know-Nothing Party) with its Anti-Slavery Plank and its Anti-Catholic Plank won elections in Lowell. By the 1850s, the cheap labor provided by the immigrants increased competition as more manufacturing centers were built elsewhere, and strikes caused the breakdown of the Lowell System. In its place, densely populated ethnic neighborhoods grew around the city, their residents bound to their churches and communities more than the factory corporations.
By 1850, Lowell was New England's second largest city with a population of 33,000, and America's largest manufacturing center. Workers from all over the world were flocking to the mill yards of the Spindle City. However, realities of the market often strike in boomtowns - and hard.
The Civil War shut down many of the mills temporarily when they sold off their cotton stockpiles, which had become more valuable than the finished cloth after imports from the South had stopped. Many jobs were lost, but the affect was somewhat mitigated by the number of men serving in the military.
Lowell has several distinctions in Civil War history. Many wool Union uniforms were made in Lowell; General Benjamin Franklin (“Beast” or “Spoons”) Butler was from the city. Finally, members of the Lowell-based Massachusetts Sixth Regiment - Ladd, Whitney, Taylor, and Needham - were the first four Union deaths, killed in a riot while passing through Baltimore, Maryland on their way to Washington, DC.
[Note: Regarding the changing nature of its population and the mindset of the community which surely affected the men of the 6th Massachusetts Light Battery, it should be noted that the character of the early employees of the mills, later largely displaced by French Canadians and Irish, and by immigrants from various parts of Europe, is clearly seen in the periodical, The Lowell Offering, written and published by them in 1840-1845. This monthly magazine, organized by the Rev. Abel Charles Thomas, pastor of the First Universalist Church, was from October 1840 to March 1841 made up of articles prepared for some of the many improvement circles or literary societies; it then became broader in its scope, received more spontaneous contributions, and from October 1842 until December 1845 was edited by Harriot F. Curtis, known by her pen name, " Mina Myrtle," and by Harriet Farley, who became manager and proprietor, and published selections from the Offering under the titles Shells from the Strand of the Sea of Genius (1847) and Mind among the Spindles (1849), with an introduction by Charles Knight. In 1854 she married John Intaglio Donlevy.
Famous contributors to the Offering were Harriet Hanson and Lucy Larcom, both early activists. After the war, Harriet Hanson wrote Early Factory Labor in New England and Loom and Spindle, an important contribution to the industrial and social history of Lowell. Before the war, however, Harriet Hanson was prominent in the anti-slavery and woman suffrage agitations in Massachusetts. In 1848 she married William Stevens Robinson, who from 1856 to 1876 wrote the political essays signed :Warrington” for the Springfield Republican.
Lucy Larcom, born in Beverly, came to Lowell in 1835, where her widowed mother kept a "Corporation" boarding house, and where she became a "doffer," changing bobbins in the mills. She wrote much, especially for the Offering; became an ardent abolitionist; left Lowell in 1846, and taught for several years (first in Illinois, and then in Beverly and Norton, Massachusetts). She was an important and ardent abolitionist.]
