Slater, Samuel (1768-1835)
Role:Dates:
Portrait Location: Deaccessioned in 1980
Artist: Lincoln, James Sullivan (1811-1888)
Portrait Date:
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 41
Framed Dimensions:
Brown Portrait Number: 10
Brown Historical Property Number: 2230
Samuel Slater is known as the "father of American Cotton Manufacture." This entrepreneur and founder of Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, might also be known as the patron saint of those who profit by stealing industry secrets. Samuel Slater was born in Derbyshire, England, in 1768. At this time, of course, what once was the British countryside was increasingly covered with the textile plants castigated by William Blake as "dark satanic mills." Whatever their spiritual status, however, these plants were proving to be sources of immense profits as well as industry innovation. Slater was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to the mill owner Jedidiah Strutt (who was also the business partner of the inventor Richard Arkwright). In the tradition of apprenticeship, Slater learned every aspect of the textile production business, and became the overseer of Strutt's Derbyshire plant. During the course of this education, he gained an understanding of how Arkwright's famous, fast, and efficient cotton processing machines were engineered.
Slater sailed in disguise for New York City in 1789, aware that he was violating laws that prohibited people with certain training and knowledge from leaving Great Britain. He arrived in 1790, and soon learned that Moses Brown was attempting to set up a mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, based on Arkwright's system. Slater was one of many experts that Brown consulted in his attempts to resolve the problems of the Almy and Brown mill, but he was the only one who knew exactly how the Arkwright system worked. Slater, Brown, and Brown's business partner, Almy, rebuilt the mill according to Arkwright's method. In 1792, Slater became a partner with Brown and Almy, and what is now called Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, opened. In 1798, Slater built his own independent mill on the Blackstone River. He died a millionaire in 1835, a part owner in thirteen textile mills. In forty-three years he had seen the birth and rise of a textile industry in America, increasingly supplied by cotton produced in the slave economy of the South. The Slater empire was maintained and expanded by his son, Horatio Nelson Slater during the Civil War and the nation's postbellum industrial boom. Slater Mill is now a museum.
This portrait was painted by James Sullivan Lincoln, who copied it from another painting he made of the same subject. Lincoln was born in 1811 in Taunton, Massachusetts. When he was fourteen, he was apprenticed to a Providence engraver. He began painting as well, and eventually became the first president of the Providence Art Club. After 1837, his work consisted entirely of portraits. He died in Providence in 1888.