The Conversion to Factory Production.

In 1880 Census official Carroll D. Wright reported that of the nearly three million Americans working "in the mechanical industries of this country," at least four-fifths were working "under the factory system." Large-scale factories, in other words, were replacing artisanal shops and handicraft production. The trend had begun in the early 1800s in the textile industry. Over the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s the transformation rippled outward to a host of other industries. Surveying the economic landscape, Wright found that factory production methods had overhauled "the manufacture of boots and shoes, of watches, musical instruments, clothing, agricultural implements, metallic goods generally, fire-arms, carriages and wagons, wooden goods, rubber goods, and even the slaughtering of hogs."

The Scale of Production.

These factories did not yet operate on the scale of modern national and multinational industrial complexes. Even...