Cowan Chapter 2 PDF

The culture that the European colonists created on the Atlantic seaboard of North America is one of the foundational cultures of the United States. Work is an important part---some would say the most important part---of people's lives, and as a result, patterns of work are crucial aspects of all hum...

The culture that the European colonists created on the Atlantic seaboard of North America is one of the foundational cultures of the United States. Work is an important part---some would say the most important part---of people's lives, and as a result, patterns of work are crucial aspects of all human cultures, yesterday and today. Understanding work means understanding at least two things: tools and social relationships. When tools are linked together to get work done, we call that a "technological system." When people are linked together to get work done we describe that as a "work process." As a consequence, understanding the technological systems and work processes of the colonial period of American his- tory provides a good foundation for an understanding of American culture, not just as it was then, but also as it is today. Colonial farming, for example, was done with a technological system that linked together implements like plows and hoes and scythes, as well as a work process that linked together people with very different social, legal, and economic statuses. Some of them (usually adult males, called "husbandmen" in eighteenth- century parlance) owned the land that they worked. However, pre-industrial technological systems, made up of implements like plows, hoes, and scythes, were very labor intensive, so husbandmen needed a lot of assistance to make their land productive. Some of those assistants were women: the landowner's spouse (the "hus- wife") was one, so were his daughters and, possibly, one or more female servants or slaves. Farmers were also assisted by men and boys, some of whom were his sons, some of whom may have been indentured servants (working in exchange for room and board and, possibly, the cost of their passage across the Atlantic). Others may have been temporary laborers employed seasonally or tenants, working the farmer's land, using some portion of what they produced as their rent. Colonial artisanal work, such as printing and blacksmithing and sawmilling, was also done with pre-industrial technological systems that linked together tools like printing presses and ink, hearths and anvils, water wheels and wooded gears. As with farming, some of the people who used these craft tools actually owned The culture that the European colonists created on the Atlantic seaboard of North America is one of the foundational cultures of the United States. Work is an important part---some would say the most important part---of people's lives, and as a result, patterns of work are crucial aspects of all human cultures, yesterday and today. Understanding work means understanding at least two things: tools and social relationships. When tools are linked together to get work done, we call that a "technological system." When people are linked together to get work done we describe that as a "work process." As a consequence, understanding the technological systems and work processes of the colonial period of American his- tory provides a good foundation for an understanding of American culture, not just as it was then, but also as it is today. Colonial farming, for example, was done with a technological system that linked together implements like plows and hoes and scythes, as well as a work process that linked together people with very different social, legal, and economic statuses. Some of them (usually adult males, called "husbandmen" in eighteenth- century parlance) owned the land that they worked. However, pre-industrial technological systems, made up of implements like plows, hoes, and scythes, were very labor intensive, so husbandmen needed a lot of assistance to make their land productive. Some of those assistants were women: the landowner's spouse (the "hus- wife") was one, so were his daughters and, possibly, one or more female servants or slaves. Farmers were also assisted by men and boys, some of whom were his sons, some of whom may have been indentured servants (working in exchange for room and board and, possibly, the cost of their passage across the Atlantic). Others may have been temporary laborers employed seasonally or tenants, working the farmer's land, using some portion of what they produced as their rent. Colonial artisanal work, such as printing and blacksmithing and sawmilling, was also done with pre-industrial technological systems that linked together tools like printing presses and ink, hearths and anvils, water wheels and wooded gears. As with farming, some of the people who used these craft tools actually owned food that was needed for its own sustenance, spin and weave its own cloth, make and repair its own tools, even in some instances mine and forge its own iron. A large plantation might be a self-sufficient community---producing every- thing that was needed to sustain itself, but the people who lived on it were not independent, either of each other or of the marketplace. Many of the tenants, slaves, and servants were specialist farmers, skilled in the unique techniques that each cash crop required: the fertilizing of wheat fields, for example, or the drying of tobacco leaves or the flooding of rice seedlings. Other tenants, slaves, and servants were specialist artisans, who knew how to operate spinning wheels and looms for the production of cloth, or forges for the repair of plows and horseshoes, or grist- mills for the grinding of cornmeal or wheat flour. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the vast majority of European Americans lived and worked on moderately sized mixed farms, farms that were neither pioneer farms nor plantations. Mixed farms were enterprises in which the owner and his family, along with a few servants and occasional laborers, tried to produce some of the goods that the family needed to feed and clothe itself, and additional goods that could be traded for other things the family needed. If all went well, such farms were expected to create a decent standard of living for the farming family---neither exceedingly luxurious nor exceedingly deprived---and to provide a bit of a protective cushion during those seasons in which, inevitably, things would not go well at all. A close examination of the technological systems and work processes on these relatively small plots of land will give us some idea of the effort that had to be expended to achieve what was considered, in its time, a middling standard of living. Colonial farming was done with a set of what appear to us today to be very simple implements; a hoe, a plow, a harrow, and a scythe were all that was needed to plant and harvest the major colonial grain crops: corn, wheat, rye and oats. As simple as they may appear to be, however, these tools required great skill and much experience to be utilized effectively; children were expected to acquire those skills by working alongside their parents. The growing season began in the spring when plows (hitched to an ox or a horse) were used to break and turn over the soil, which had become compacted during the winter, or to uproot and turn over weeds that had developed on a field that had been left fallow. Plowing was men's work. It was arduous labor, for the farmer and his help- ers as well as for the ox; an able man working with a competent beast could not expect to plow more than an acre a day. The colonists practiced extensive rather than intensive agriculture, which means that they preferred to clear and plow fresh land, rather than manure, till, and fallow old land on which the yields were fall- ing. Hence, in any given year, they tended to have more land under plow than European visitors, who were accustomed to more intensive farming, thought appropriate. James T. Lemon, a historian who has carefully examined eighteenth- century Pennsylvania farm records, estimates that an average Pennsylvania farm consisted of approximately 125 acres, of which roughly 30 acres were under plow every spring---a whole month of very difficult work. After plowing, the fields were harrowed, which leveled the ridges the plow had created---and then the seed was planted by being sown broadcast (which means that it was thrown with a sweeping arm gesture) and the field was harrowed again, to cover the seed with soil. Harrows were as heavy as plows, and using them was work for men assisted by draft animals. During the growing season the crops had to be tended in various ways. Some crops had to be pruned, pinched at the top. Worms had to be periodically picked off leaves and stems. The soil between rows had to be hoed regularly to keep down the weeds. Much of this "light" work was done by women, children, servants, and slaves. Hoes were lighter than plows and harrows, but hoeing had to be done regularly, over the space of months, often in extreme heat. At harvesting time, some form of sharp blade was utilized to cut down the crops: a scythe (a sharp blade set almost at a right angle to a wooden handle) or a sickle (a curved blade set into a wooden handle) or some form of knife. Harvesting was arduous work, for it had to be done quickly---just when the crop was ripe--- and it was done entirely by hand. Many hands were required: all those who resided on the farm, male, female, young and old, as well as extra hands hired just for harvesting. In some New England villages, craftspeople were required by law to lend their labor to their neighbors at harvest time. The hard work did not stop even after the crop was safely home, for none of the grain crops grown in the colonies could be consumed by human beings without additional processing. All the small grains, like wheat and rye, grow on a stalk from which they must be separated (threshing and winnowing), and all are covered with a husk that must be either removed or broken before they can be cooked (milling). None of this was easy work. For threshing, the straw (dried stalks with kernels attached) was placed on a barn floor and either hit with a jointed device called a flail or trod by draft animals; this part of the work was most commonly done by men. Then the mixture was placed on a large cloth and women would repeatedly toss it into the air, so that the broken stalks (now called the chaff), being lighter than the kernels, would be blown away; this process, depending on the state of the wind on any given day, might take hours before any given batch was relatively clean of chaff. Following this, the grain was carefully stuffed into sacks to await milling. Wheat was most frequently hauled to a water-powered gristmill, a task that is easy to write about, but much more difficult to do, given the poor (or nonexistent) quality of colonial roads: "I had 14 miles to go in winter to mill with an ox team.... No roads were broken and no bridges built across streams. I had to wade two streams and carry the bags on my back.... i got only 7 miles the first night, and on the 2nd night i reached the mill"---a not-unusual, four-day trip to provide three or four bushels of wheat, perhaps a month's supply.2 Where no gristmill existed, colonial farmers had to contrive a mill of their own with two heavy, polished stones and at least one horse or ox. Corn, which was the grain most commonly used in the colonies, both north and south, was just as difficult to process. Some of it could be eaten fresh after har- vesting, straight off the cob, but most of it was destined for consumption several months later, which meant that it had to be dried, husked, decobbed, and then ground. Husking was tedious but not strenuous work, usually done by men, who sometimes relieved the boredom of their task by turning it into a social event---a husking bee---replete with music and drink. Once husked, kernels were removed from the cob by the use of a simple slicing device, a sharp blade set, slightly at an angle, into a flat board. dried, decobbed corn could be cooked up (with dried beans) over a slow fire for many hours, creating succotash, but in order to become bread in any form, it had either to be taken to a gristmill or to be pounded at home. Home pounding of corn was both time-consuming and backbreaking; in colonial Maryland, fines were instituted to prevent parents from forcing their children to pound corn. With a hand quern (a slab of wood, rotated by hand), two or three hours were required to grind a day's supply; with a spring mill (a hand- guided mallet, attached to a green sapling, which was used as a spring), one day of pounding might supply a family for a week. Frederick law Olmsted, while travel- ing in the West in the 1850s, observed a winch-operated device that may have had its origins in the colonial period: "Two boys were immediately set to work by their father at grinding corn. The task seemed their usual one, yet one very much too severe for their strength. Taking hold at opposite sides of the winch they ground away outside the door for more than an hour, constantly stopping to take breath."3 This task had to be repeated every two days. Yet the men and women of the American colonies did not live by bread alone. Hoes, plows, harrows, flails, scythes, and mills were necessary for the production of grains and for the small quantity of garden crops---potatoes, cabbages, beans, pumpkins, herbs, onions---that the colonists also planted. Other tools were re- quired, however, for other forms of farm production; these average-sized colonial farms are called "mixed" farms precisely because they produced things other than grains and vegetables. If a family kept domestic animals, for example, then it had to provide food for them in the winter. This meant the necessity of planting several fields with English grasses (the native American grasses were inadequate winter feed for horses and cattle) and regularly cutting the grass during the summer months (with a sickle) and transporting it (with a cart) for storage (in a barn). James Lemon estimated that on a hypothetical Pennsylvania farm of 125 acres, at least 20 acres might be planted in grasses, each of which provided about 11⁄2 tons of hay every year. This went to feed roughly seven head of cattle (three cows, one steer, three calves), three or four horses, eight pigs, and perhaps ten sheep. On top of this, the farm animals consumed roughly 215 bushels of grain (mostly corn and oats) during the year, or the total produce of 22 of the 30 acres planted in grain. The animals themselves and the food they ate, as well as the tools required to harvest their food and the barns in which that food was stored were all part of a single technological system, intended, just like plowing and harrowing, to turn land into food, energy, and profit for the use of human beings. Furthermore, horses, oxen, and even cows could not be used as draft animals unless they were harnessed. Steers and pigs could not be turned into roasts, steaks, hams, and sausages without butchering knives---and considerable skill at using them. In addition, the household required barrels for salting away the meat and a hearth over which it could be hung for smoking. Men and boys were expected to do most of the work of getting meat prepared for its final cooking; women and girls were responsible for poultry. Collecting milk from cows required, at the very least, a pail and a stool; making butter meant a churn; making cheese, at least a strainer and maybe also a press (butter and cheese, when salted, were convenient ways to preserve milk after it left the cow); this work was done by women and girls. In addition to food and shelter, farming families needed clothing. Wool and flax were the two substances most commonly found in the bodices and skirts, the aprons and kerchiefs, the shirts and trousers, the leggings and petticoats, the mantles and capes that the colonists wore---not to speak of the pillow covers and bed sheets on which they slept and the rags that they stitched into rugs or with which they diapered their babies. Wool came from one set of domestic animals, sheep; special shears (and a good deal of patience) were needed to remove the wool from the animal (men's work) and special combs (called cards) were required to clean and straighten it (children's work). Spinning wheels turned it into thread (women's work) and looms wove the thread into cloth: men's work if the loom was for wide cloth; women's work if it was narrow). linen, which was derived from the fibrous stalk of the flax plant, required yet another set of tools. Flax grew exceptionally well in the colonies; from two acres planted in flax, a farming family might have been able to derive 300 pounds of plants at harvest time, as well as ten bushels of seeds (which, when pressed, yielded another valuable colonial commodity, linseed oil). Flax did not, however, yield up its thread easily; the plant had to be broken apart (which required a special instrument called a brake, a heavy log set into frame in such a way as to crush the stem of the plant when lowered); this was men's work. Then the fibrous inner material had to be combed carefully with a special device called a hackle---a task often assigned to children---all this before any spin- ning could begin, or any weaving, for that matter. Spinning and weaving were among the most time-consuming, and tedious, of all occupations. In farm households, the months from December through May were largely devoted to spinning and weaving. We can derive a rough gauge of what a household required from the diary of Elizabeth Fuller, a teenage girl, who in the 1790s recorded having spent the months of January and February spinning and the months of March, April, and May weaving, with the resultant production of 176 yards of narrow cloth. She finished on June 1 and exulted in her diary: "Wel- come sweet liberty."4 if it was of sufficient width, 176 yards of cloth was probably all that her family needed for the year (although it was unlikely to be of the right density for outer clothing), but the sewing---of shirts and sheets, of petticoats and breeches---was, of course, yet to come, all of it, of course, women's work. Most colonial farmhouses were not large structures; the stately colonial homes of such notables as Washington and Jefferson, which have been preserved as part of our national heritage, bear about as much resemblance to an ordinary colonial residence as a rolls royce bears to a Model T. An ordinary farmhouse essentially consisted of one room, called the hall. If the ceiling were high enough in the hall, a loft might have been added or some partitions might have been built to create one or two new rooms at one end or a lean-to may have been constructed at the back, with a door cut through the rear wall of the house. The hall was the busiest room of the house. Here the women of the family cooked, the family sat down to meals, and some members of the family slept. The loft and side rooms were usu- ally used either for storage (bolts of cloth, bags of cornmeal, ropes of onions) or for sleeping. The lean-to, if there was one, was used for storing milk or cider, also for churning butter. As small as these homes were, it was still very hard work to keep them heated in the cold months and to provide the wooden fuel that was necessary for cooking every day of the year. The most striking feature of the hall (in fact, its only built- in feature) was the fireplace, inserted in one wall of the room, framed in brick or stone, topped by a wooden beam, which served as the mantle, with a separate small enclosure (the baking oven) off to one side. The fire burning on this hearth rarely was allowed to go out: during the cold months of the year, it was the only source of heat for the house; every day of the year, it was the place at which cooked meals were prepared. its furnishings were few, but each was essential: andirons were used to keep the logs off the floor of the hearth and improve air circulation; bellows, to encourage the fire; a set of tongs or a fork, to manipulate the logs; a shovel, to remove or rearrange ashes. On a swiveling iron bar inserted in the side wall (called a crane) were hung heavy kettles; perhaps another iron bar was set further up in the chimney for hanging meats to be smoked. The cooking equip- ment was also modest: one or two hanging kettles, perhaps a footed pot with a cover, a skillet or two, and a few wooden spoons of various sizes completed the housewife's set of tools. Many high school graduates go off to college today with more cooking equipment than an eighteenth-century farmer's wife was likely to see in her lifetime. Keeping that hearth fire burning was no easy business. Open hearths are notoriously inefficient. Most of the heat goes straight up the chimney and whatever radiates laterally into the room does not radiate very far; anyone who has tried it can report that when it is cold outside you can sit two feet from a fireplace and be flushed with heat in front and freezing behind. To supply an average colonial farmhouse for a year, more than an acre of woodlot had to be cut down, hauled to the farmyard, chopped, and split to fit into the fireplace. The tools involved were simple---several axes of different sizes, a sturdy cart, a good ox, a wedge, and a mallet---but the work was hard, and unending. Everyone in the household participated, but the heavy part---the cutting, hauling, and chopping---was usually reserved for men and boys; roughly one third of a farmer's time during the year was occupied in fuel-related chores. Men and boys provided the fuel; women and girls cooked on the open hearths of colonial homes. Without the work of men and boys the women would have had no way to cook; without the work of women and girls, the men would not have had meals to eat. As it was with food, so it was with the production of clothing and with the production of the raw materials to be cooked: the work processes of farming with pre-industrial technological systems on colonial-era mixed farms required the hard, time-consuming, and often tedious labor of many different people, oc- cupying many different statuses within the farming household, possessed of many different gender-based skills, working together. The simplest job, the description of which might take no more than two sentences in this text, could take hours, days, weeks, or even months to perform. if a housewife made everything from scratch, she had to combine the skills of more than a dozen crafts: flax and wool spinster, weaver, dyer, fuller, tailor, seam- stress, knitter, baker, gardener, brewer, dairymaid, chandler (someone who makes candles), and soap maker---all this on top of cooking, tending the sick, caring for infants and small children, winnowing, carrying water, and, occasionally, launder- ing. Her husband likewise had to be competent at plowing, reaping, carpentry, wood carving, leatherworking, butchery, stonemasonry, wood chopping, carting, milling, and brewing, not to speak of a bit of blacksmithing and shoemaking. Had a young person been set to an apprenticeship at any one of these crafts, he or she would have been expected to take five years, at the very least, for adequate training. THE MYTH OF SELF-SUFFICIENCY Open almost any American history textbook, and you will read something about the self-sufficient farmers of the colonies, who could produce everything that they needed for their own support and sustenance---all their bread, all their meat, every inch of cloth, every cord of wood---and who never, as a result, had to purchase anything. Listen to any Fourth of July oration, and you will likely hear something about the "independent" life of our fore parents, people who did not need to rely on welfare systems or paychecks but who could, and did, make their way on their own through dint of hard work, self-employed. Our politicians frequently applaud self-sufficiency, whether it be in energy policy, defense policy, health policy, or even farm policy. Independence is a concept to which Americans attach multiple emotional meanings, some of which derive from our sense of our national past, and some of which derive from our respect for that past. Every time it is said that someone doesn't want to take money from her parents or doesn't want to be a renter forever or hopes soon to start his own business, the rest of us respond sympathetically, at least in part because of what we were taught about the people who settled this country and shaped it in its early years, the farmers who "made this country great." In truth, however, colonial farmers and their wives, although famous for their versatility, were never self-sufficient. No one could have performed competently at all these tasks; and there were not enough hours in the day for two adults and their children, even if aided by a servant or a handyman, to produce all of what was required to feed, clothe, and house themselves at the standard that we know to be common for eighteenth-century farm families in the colonies. In fact, colonial farmers specialized. Some owned plows but hired neighbors to do their harrowing. Others grew flax but did not chop their own wood. A farmer who was a reasonably good carpenter might make a chair for another farmhouse and then trade it for the pig that he had not had the time to raise himself. A house- wife might keep chickens and trade the eggs with her counterpart three miles away in exchange for the butter that she had neither the equipment nor the time to churn. Some people fattened pigs and steers for eating but sold the meat on the hoof, only to buy it back again salted away in barrels. Some people raised sheep but traded the wool to others who had wheels and looms, perhaps in exchange for cider or cheese. The market economy flourished in the colonial countryside even where there were no merchants or even storekeepers to manage it. Supplementing this barter economy were the itinerant craftsmen who plied colonial roads, supplying skills and tools that farm households needed. There were, for example, roving shoemakers who would stay for a week and turn the family's hides into boots; neighborhood seamstresses who would come in to do the sewing; midwives who supervised childbirth and cared for the mother and newborn child; knife sharpeners who carried their flintstones on their backs; plowmen who as- sisted when schedules were tight; stonemasons who mended chimneys or built new ones. Farm men and women may have been jacks-and-jills-of-all-trades, but they clearly preferred, whenever such preferences could be exercised, to have spe- cialists take over some of their work. Not surprisingly, the wealthier a household was, the more technological systems it could contain and the more people it could employ to participate in its work processes. As a result, complete self-sufficiency was possible only for those who were rich; only colonists who owned plantations, such as Thomas Jefferson and george Washington, could afford, for example, to have their own gristmills, built with their own funds, located on their own lands, operated by their own millers. Economic independence---complete household self-sufficiency---was thus the province of the very rich. Thomas Jefferson deeply believed in the virtues of self-sufficient farming; as a framer of the Constitution, he tried to ensure not only that the interests of the small farmer would be respected but also that the culture of self-sufficiency---which continues to be called "the Jeffersonian ideal"---would become embedded in American political processes. The concept of self-sufficiency is a crucial component of American culture, but it was a myth---even in its own day. The pre-industrial technological systems of farming in the eighteenth century simply were not up to the challenge; in the world of hoes and harrows, looms and spinning wheels, economic independence for individuals was simply out of the question, unless they were rich. With all the best intentions, even with horses and oxen to help, even if they lived long lives in perfect health, a colonial family simply could not have produced all that it needed for its own sustenance because the tools at its command were not sufficiently efficient. Even Jefferson's contemporaries seem to have been aware of the contradiction between what he advocated and the way they lived. Many wished to be spared, as Jefferson was spared, the long hours and backbreaking labor of farming. Many wished to have, as Jefferson had, more comfortable clothing than that which could be spun, woven, and stitched at home. Many hungered after the varied diet that became possible when there was cash to pay for coffee from Brazil or sugar from the Caribbean or wine from Madeira. Those wishes, for what we would now call a higher standard of living and a more comfortable style of life, stimulated the most profound economic and technological transformation of all time: the industrial revolution. Self-sufficiency is attractive to those of us who are nostalgic for what we think were simpler, preindustrial times, but it didn't seem particularly attractive to most of the people who lived in those times. They understood precisely how much hard work, and how much discomfort, was really required. ARTISANAL WORK IN THE COLONIES Most of the remaining 10 percent of the adult colonial population were artisans, people trained in one or the other of the crafts: blacksmiths and printers, cordwainers (people who made shoes) and seamstresses, coopers (people who made barrels) and shipwrights, midwives and tanners, joiners (people who made furni- ture) and millwrights (people who constructed water mills), apothecaries and iron smelters. Although small in numbers, these artisans were big in impact. Artisans manufactured the tools that farmers needed to work the land; they also provided the services and skills that were essential for the growth of cities. The political activities of artisans helped to foment the revolution; and, as we shall see, the eco- nomic activities of artisans laid the groundwork for industrialization. Some artisans were rural, living and working in the small villages that dotted the countryside from Maine to georgia. Many of these rural craftspeople were indistinguishable from the farmers who were their neighbors; they owned land and grew some crops, but acquired a lot of what they needed in trade for the services they could render: a barrel of salted pork in exchange for mending a clock, five pounds of butter in trade for two yards of handmade cloth. rural ar- tisans frequently practiced several trades at once, specializing in none: one long island craftsman, for example, advertised himself as a wheelwright, clockmaker, carpenter, cabinetmaker, toolmaker, and a repairer of spinning and weaving equipment as well as guns---all the while collecting fees for the pasturing of other people's cows. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the vast majority of colonial artisans lived in cities. during the colonial period transportation was very expensive; artisans needed to be located in cities so that they could minimize their transportation costs, both on the items they needed to buy (such as iron and wood or wool and hides) and on the items they intended to sell (such as nails and guns or carpets and shoes). Artisans congregated in Boston and New York, Newport and Philadelphia, Charleston and Baltimore---competing with each other, learning from each other, joining together in organizations intended to advance their common interests. In cities, artisans could be specialists and they could also subdivide their work by hiring several assistants so as to become more productive. The silver and pewter bowls, the mahogany dining tables and armchairs, and the elegant flintlock rifles that are preserved in museums as examples of colonial creativity and elegant design are all products of colonial America's artisans. THE APPRENTICESHIP SYSTEM AND LABOR SCARCITY There were only two routes by which a person could enter the crafts in the colonies: emigration and apprenticeship. Artisans were relatively well paid in Europe, which meant that, except for those who had suffered religious persecution, they had no particular incentive to brave the fearsome oceans. Yet the colonies desperately needed artisans, people who could make and repair farm implements, people who could operate sawmills, people who could compose type and publish newspapers. As a consequence, communities often offered special inducements for artisans to emigrate. in 1656, for example, the town of Scituate, Massachusetts, offered a free mill site (in Europe these would have been very expensive pieces of property) as well as free lumber to any indi- vidual who would build and maintain a sawmill there. Seventy-five years later and many miles away, the government of South Carolina offered £175 (approximately \$25,000 today) to any individual who would set up a print shop and pub- lish a newspaper in Charleston. Over the years, thousands of people responded to these and similar inducements, bringing german ironworkers to Pennsylva- nia and New Jersey, irish weavers to Massachusetts, danish and Swedish sawyers to Delaware and New York, French seamstresses to Virginia. However, despite the inducements, the supply of emigrant artisans was never equal to the demand for colonial skilled labor; European artisans, by and large, preferred to remain at home. As a result, by the end of the eighteenth century, most colonial artisans were native-born men and women who had learned their trades by serving an apprenticeship. An apprentice was a young girl or boy being trained to practice a skilled craft. informal apprenticeships occurred when the son or daughter of an artisan was taught, so to speak at a parent's knee or when a young child, often a girl, was sent to work for wages in someone else's house. Formal apprentice- ships were almost always for boys; they depended on a contract (called the articles of indenture) between the boy's parents and the craft master. According to the terms of an apprenticeship contract, the parents gave up their rights to the child's labor; the child in question may have been as young as six or as old as thirteen at the time. In exchange, the master promised to provide food, shelter, clothing, religious instruction, and, of course, training in a craft. In effect, the master presumably received seven to ten years of very inexpensive labor from the child, while the child presumably received seven to ten years of instruction from the master. The apprenticeship system had developed in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. By the time that Europeans began settling in America, it was an in- grained part of their culture; all the European residents of the colonies understood how it worked and accepted its basic premises. One of those basic premises was that the local guild---an association of master-craftsmen---would both create and enforce the rules governing apprenticeship. Another was that the child-apprentice was going to have to work, and work hard: ten- or twelve-hour days, six days a week. Younger apprentices were not expected to manage particularly heavy jobs (such as raising and lowering printing presses), but they were expected to handle everything that was routine and monotonous in the shop and to act as if it were a privilege to be allowed to do so. Which is precisely what apprenticeships had been in Europe for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries---a privilege. in Europe, where prime agricultural land was scarce, there was always an oversupply of labor on the land: more people than could be adequately fed, more children than most households could support. land-owning or land-working parents sought ap- prenticeships for their younger sons and daughters as a way of keeping them out of poverty: the sons who would not be able to inherit the land, the daugh- ters who could not be provided with an adequate dowry. As apprentices their futures looked somewhat brighter, and in gratitude for this change in their for- tunes, they were expected to respond willingly to the demands of their masters and mistresses. In the colonies however, guilds did not exist, so there was no authority in a position to enforce the terms of an apprenticeship; in addition, parents had no particular reason to want to set their children to apprenticeships, because land was abundant. Many colonial parents owned parcels large enough to divide among their children and their children's children for several generations. Other parents knew that when their children reached maturity, just a small inheritance, or even a small gift, would purchase a suitable parcel of land---just a little bit farther west. Under such circumstances, parents had no incentive to set their children to ap- prenticeships, and those few young people who were indentured to colonial mas- ters rarely served their full terms. Apprentices were important in the organization of work in a craft shop because they provided extremely cheap but extremely necessary manual labor. Colonial master craftsmen tried all kinds of devices for solving their endemic problem of labor scarcity: some tried to import European journeymen (people who had finished an apprenticeship but had not yet set themselves up as mas- ters); some tried to indenture young people who needed to pay off the cost of their passage; others tried using slave labor. But the labor shortage did not abate; where land was cheap, craft labor was bound to be scarce. imported journeymen were likely to notice the attractions of cheap land themselves, and indentured servants had a penchant for running away before completing their terms of ser- vice, often to the frontier, where the short arms of the colonial law could not reach. The net result was that throughout the entire colonial period, from the first decades of the seventeenth century to the last decades of the eighteenth, there were never enough apprentices and journeymen to keep colonial masters happy and never enough masters to supply the manufactured goods that an ex- panding population needed. One important consequence of the scarcity not just of skilled artisans but also of the unskilled labor that the artisanal production process required in the North American colonies was that when technological change occurred in the colonial crafts, it often occurred through the invention and introduction of labor- saving devices. Unable to increase production by increasing the number of their apprentices and/or employees, master craftsmen in the colonies sometimes chose to invest their profits in labor-saving machinery, machinery that would make their workplaces more efficient, able to produce more goods using less human labor. This process had already started in the middle decades of the eighteenth century (think of the American ax, described in the previous chapter), and it began to accelerate at the end of the century, when, after independence, the mer- cantilist restrictions that had hampered American entrepreneurship were finally lifted. Because of the unique work processes that had developed in artisanal colonial crafts---that is, because there was a scarcity of both skilled and unskilled labor--- when American business owners began to industrialize, in the early de- cades of the nineteenth century, they did so in a manner quite different from their counterparts across the Atlantic. We will explore the unique character of the American industrial revolution in a later chapter; here we will explore two crafts---printing and iron smelting---in order to fully understand the technologi- cal systems and the work processes that characterized the American colonies in the eighteenth century. PRINTERS AND PRINTSHOPS Every colony needed at least one printer, probably more. Printers published news- papers; they broadcasted the acts of colonial legislatures; they created the legal and business forms that people found necessary. The potential for profit as a printer was high, but establishing a printing business in the colonies was not an easy matter. Printing required the construction and/or importation of some fairly com- plex, fairly expensive pieces of equipment; it also required a workforce that was literate. Few master printers emigrated. Massachusetts Bay had a press by 1638, but Virginia did not get its first one until 1682, almost sixty years after the founding of the colony. New York lacked one until 1693, over seventy years after the Dutch first settled there; even Massachusetts did not get a second press until 1674, forty years after its first one was established. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the various obstacles had been overcome and print shops abounded. Almost all eighteenth-century print shops were located in cities and were operated as family businesses. The shop itself was built onto the master printer's home---and everyone who lived there (the printer, his wife, his children, his apprentices) also worked there. The shop contained one, or possibly two presses: huge, heavy contraptions, made of four- by-four beams, designed to exert pressure by means of a lever. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, presses had to be imported from England, as no colonial carpenter was capable of producing such a complex device. Close by the presses were wooden boxes filled with type, small pieces of metal, each with the raised form of a letter on it. Composing---slipping pieces of type into rectangular wooden forms so as to create words and sentences as prescribed by a manuscript---was relatively light work, which young boys and girls could easily learn to do if they were literate. Once the forms were filled with type, they were placed on a table and locked into a frame called a galley, which was then carried (this was very heavy labor) to the bed of the press. The galley was then inked by being beaten with two soaked leather balls (work for an apprentice) and a piece of paper was placed on top of it. An impression was made on the paper by lowering a very heavy wooden block onto the galley, and then moving it across the galley on a carriage. When the press was raised, the paper could be pulled; then the galley was inked again and the whole process was repeated. Only a master printer or a journeyman (who worked for wages) was able to operate the press, the hardest and the most highly paid work in the shop. Two good pressmen working together and, alternating stints, could print 240 sheets of paper in an hour, or 2,400 in an average day. The work was difficult because considerable upper-body strength was required as well as considerable skill in appropriately adjusting various parts of the device; printers were known for their special gait, a result of muscular overdevelopment on the right side of their bodies, the side they used when applying weight to the lever. In printing, terms of apprenticeship tended to last for eight or nine years; Benjamin Franklin began serving when he was nine; John Peter Zenger when he was ten. A young apprentice printer began as a go-fer: responsible for sweeping out the shop, making the leather balls (by soaking goat's skin in urine), stirring the vats in which ink was made (by boiling lampblack in oil), hanging newly printed sheets to dry, or just generally running errands. He might then graduate to com- posing type and cleaning galleys when they were ready to be broken up. Only when he was sufficiently grown might the apprentice be put to work on the press itself; some apprentices never went this far, either because their masters decided not to let them or because they never developed sufficient strength. Huge quantities of type had to be readily at hand for composing every galley: an average printshop required about 1,200 pounds of type, or roughly 1,200 indi- vidual pieces. Sets of type, called fonts, were very valuable. Each piece was used and reused until it was too worn to make a good impression, and then the metal was melted down and recast. Type was not made by the printer himself, but rather by an especially skilled craftsman, called a type founder. Type was always in short supply in the colonies; until 1768, when Abel Buell of killingworth, Connecticut, entered into the business of type founding, every font had to be imported from England. The technological system of printing thus had many links---presses, galleys, fonts, inks, not to speak of paper---some of which were very expensive to build or buy. All in all, a colonial printer could not set himself up in business on even a modest scale without an investment of something on the order of £75 to £150 (\$11,000 to \$22,000 today). The printing house of Franklin & Hall in Philadelphia, one of the most impressive in the colonies, was valued at £184 in 1766 (\$27,000 today). Had sums of this dimension been invested in the land, colonial printers would have been farmers, not among the richest of their contemporaries but far from the poorest. Journeymen printers were also paid well; Benjamin Franklin paid his journeymen 6 pence for every thousand letters that they composed and 12 pence for every 240 pages that they printed at the press. This comes out to roughly four times the daily wages of an unskilled laborer. The print shop---like most artisanal shops in the colonial period---was as much a living space as it was a working space. Business roles and domestic roles were interchangeable: being the wife of an artisan meant feeding the apprentices as well as your family; training your children to your trade was considered part of being a parent; working very hard in the family business was what children were expected to do. Many of the people who worked in these shops but were not members of the family were treated as if they were members of the family anyway: apprentices were fed and clothed by the master's wife; indentured servants slept in quarters provided by their employers; at midday everyone in the shop ate together; not infrequently they also went to church together. Such close relationships between employers and employees were not always mutually satisfactory; like all close relationships, even today, they had their ups and their downs. Sometimes a young apprentice was able to report to his par- ents, as Elisha Waldo wrote to his father in 1785, a few weeks after beginning an apprenticeship to the Massachusetts printer isaiah Thomas, that he liked his trade "exceedingly well" and that his master and mistress were "very kind."5 Other times the results were not so positive. Benjamin Franklin's master (who was his older brother) beat and mistreated him so regularly that he ran away (fleeing from Boston to Philadelphia) before the legal end of his apprenticeship. John Fitch, who was apprenticed to a clock maker in 1762, recalled with more than a little bitter- ness that on one occasion his master's wife boiled up a mutton and bean broth, but "when it came to be about one week old i began to grow tired of eating it constant twice a day and frequently three times and began to complain. To which she found an immediate remedy by adding water."6 A colonial print shop is an example of a preindustrial urban residential work- place, based on the apprentice-master-household system of production that had originated in medieval European cities. Silversmiths, milliners, carpenters, and masons produced items very different from the newspapers and business forms that printers made, but the organization of work in their shops was very simi- lar. The people who worked together also lived together, just as farm households did. in addition, just like the work processes of pre-industrial farming, the work processes of pre-industrial printing required co-operation between people of very different social statuses, possessed of very different, gender-based skills. IRON FOUNDRIES AND IRON WORKERS Colonial iron foundries differed from other artisanal businesses, like printing, milling, and gunsmithing, because these manufacturing establishments were not owned by the skilled craftsmen who worked there. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the start-up cost of an iron foundry was roughly £3500---forty-six times what was required to become a master printer. The apprentice printer or the journeyman miller could have expected eventually to become a master-owner, but such an expectation was essentially out of the question for the furnace man or the collier at a foundry. The element iron is never found naturally in a pure state, but rather as one of several forms of iron oxide mixed with other minerals. Under very controlled con- ditions, extreme heat can drive the oxygen out of the oxide and the other minerals out of the ore; this is called smelting. Small quantities of ore can be smelted in an ordinary hearth, using charcoal as the fuel and a hand-operated bellow to increase the heat; the resulting red-hot iron has a pasty consistency which a skilled artisan (a blacksmith) can then hammer into various small, useful items: plowshares, pul- leys, horseshoes, or ax blades. In the eighteenth-century colonies, the workshops in which this was done were called forges. Forges served the needs of rural populations; they were small craft shops precisely akin to printing houses and gristmills. However, North America had very rich deposits of iron ore on or right near the surface of the land, but small-scale forges could not exploit these effectively. To make large quantities of iron, either for export or for the use of domestic artisans (like wheelwrights and gunsmiths) who did not want to smelt, a much larger enterprise, with a specialized kind of hearth, was needed: a foundry. That special kind of hearth was then (and still is) called a blast furnace. In the colonial period, American blast furnaces were large structures of stone or brick, located on huge tract of land, so large that they were called plantations. An iron plantation was a very complex technologi- cal system. it was also an almost self-sufficient community, consisting of an iron deposit ready to be mined; a blast furnace, a forge, and a waterwheel (together, these were called the "foundry"); acres of forest to provide the charcoal for the furnace; housing for all the ironworkers and their families; and fields on which food for the workers could be grown. Most plantations were located on navigable rivers so that the iron they produced could be transported to market at the lowest possible cost. In order to start production at an iron plantation, the land had to be pur- chased and the foundry had to be constructed. A plantation usually belonged to a group of entrepreneurs who pooled their resources to finance all this activity. The first colonial plantation was organized just outside of Jamestown early in the 1620s, but it was not successful. A group of Indians attacked and massacred the ironworkers just after the furnace had been "put into blast" for the first time; we can only speculate upon what the Native Americans thought the colonists were doing with a fire that lit up the skies of the forest night. Almost twenty years passed before another group of entrepreneurs proved willing to try again, but this and succeeding trials were more successful: productive blast furnaces were established in Taunton and Braintree, Massachusetts, in the 1640s; New london, Connecticut, and Providence, rhode island, in the 1650s; and Shrewsbury, New Jersey, in the 1670s. Iron making was a difficult enterprise in the colonies throughout most of the seventeenth century because the export market for American iron was not stable and the American market was still very weak. However, when the English econ- omy began to expand in the early decades of the eighteenth century, one of the commodities that it craved was unfinished iron bars. At the same time, rich lodes of iron ore were being discovered all over the western frontiers of the Mid-Atlantic colonies and trading networks between the mother country and her colonies were becoming more firmly established. All of this gave a tremendous boost to the colonial iron industry. Plantations sprang up all across the countryside, and by the middle of the century, iron had become the third leading colonial export---behind only wheat and timber. On a plantation, the smelting process began with the production of charcoal, the fuel for the furnace. Charcoal is partially burned wood; an average blast furnace consumed fifty to one hundred acres of wood a year. To make it, hundreds of logs were carefully laid, one atop the other so that as little air as possible could penetrate the inner layers of the stack. A mixture of mud and leaves was laid over the stack and then ignited; over the course of several days, if the stack was carefully monitored, the inner logs turned to charcoal while the outer logs were reduced to ash. The men who did this work were called colliers; their work was considered skilled labor, requiring several years of on-the-job training. Colonial-era blast furnaces were stone towers between twenty-five and forty feet high, shaped like truncated pyramids, and usually set into the side of a hill to make loading (which was done from the top) easier. When a blast was about to begin, the foreman would organize the stacking of the furnace with alternate layers of ore, charcoal, and limestone (which was also mined on the premises). Once the stack had been ignited, its internal heat was increased by successive blasts of cold air from a huge leather bellows (operated by a waterwheel) until the ore was molten. During smelting, some of the impurities in the ore were driven off as volatile gases, creating a flame that could be seen for miles around, which the foreman monitored to determine how the blasts should be regulated. Most of the remaining impurities in the ore combined with the limestone to form a mixture, slag, which floated on top of the liquefied iron. After several days in blast, the foreman decided that the smelting was completed and a special hatch at the bottom of the furnace was opened, allowing the molten iron to run out into sand troughs that formed the hearth in front of the furnace. Usually there was one central trough with many offshoots, resembling (or so some ironworker must once have thought) a sow with nursing piglets, and so the iron bars formed in the troughs when the molten mate- rial cooled were forever after called "pigs." Other times the sand could be shaped into rectangular molds, so that stove plates (or other simple objects) could be cast. Pig iron had a certain amount of carbon dissolved in it and a certain amount of slag; as a result it was both harder and less malleable than iron from a forge. in order to make it more useful on the commercial market, it was refined at a forge before it left the plantation. A foundry forge was a raised hearth accompanied by a very large trip-hammer (which often operated off the same waterwheel that ran the bellows for the furnace). A block of pig iron was heated on the hearth until it was red and almost molten, then it was lifted with special tongs, placed on an anvil and beaten with the trip-hammer, thus altering its crystalline structure, driving off some additional carbon, and redistributing other impurities. The end product, bar iron, was more ductile and less likely to fracture than pig iron; it was the mate- rial that plantations offered most frequently for sale to secondary processors. Bar iron might be exported to the English owners of rolling mills (where it would be squeezed into thin sheets useful for making machinery), or it might be cut into strips for subsequent shaping and welding by blacksmiths. The affairs of an eighteenth-century iron plantation were managed by one individual, the ironmaster, who exercised patriarchal authority over the entire plantation: he hired and fired workers; supervised all aspects of the production process; determined when the furnace would be "in" blast and when it would be "out"; decided what crops would be grown in the fields and what prices would be set for them in the company store; he decided what religious services, if any, would be conducted on the plantation and kept an eye on the behavior of all the workers and the members of their families. The plantation was essentially a world unto itself, usually far distant from any center of population. The work was arduous for all parties, and heavy drinking was endemic. All this meant that the ironmaster, like the captain of a ship, had to be a production supervisor and a police force rolled into one. Some of the members of the workforce were unskilled and more or less tran- sient laborers (unless they were slaves or indentured servants): they mined ore with pickax and shovel or managed the carts and wagons with which it was hauled to the furnace. Others had served lengthy apprenticeships in their crafts: the colliers, who knew how to make charcoal from wood; the furnace men, who knew how to build, maintain, and operate the furnace; the chafers, who knew how to refine the product of the furnace. The colonial iron industry was plagued by labor scarcity, just as all artisanal businesses were. ironwork was hard labor, and the iron plantations were not re- garded as pleasant places to live; hence few colonial parents saw much reason to set their children to apprenticeships there. As a result, wages were high, and those workers who chose to stay in the trade were constantly moving from plantation to plantation on the offer of better wages or better living conditions. ironmasters tried to solve their labor problems by importing ironworkers from Europe, but that was rarely a successful strategy since the immigrant workers began demanding higher wages soon after their arrival. "They pretended to have their wages raised," one iron- master complained about a dozen germans he had recently hired, "Which I refused. They made bad work; I complained and reprimanded them; they told me they could not make better work at such low wages; and, if they did not please me, I might dismiss them. I was, therefore, obliged to submit, for it had cost me a prodigious expense to transport them from germany; and, had I dismissed them, I must have lost these disbursements, and could get no good workmen in their stead." Indentured servants and slaves did not solve the problem either; once trained, they could run away easily since most ironworks were located in isolated places. Throughout the colonial period, labor problems remained the ironmaster's greatest difficulty. In all its forms, iron production was labor intensive. Had the average blast furnace (and its associated forges) been kept in operation twelve months of the year, a colonial plantation might have produced between 1,000 and 2,000 tons of iron a year (roughly what a modern blast furnace produces in a few hours), but the furnaces were rarely in continuous operation; one blast period lasted from October to december, another from late April to July or August. When the furnaces were shut down, some workers were assigned to repairing and rebuilding them, but others were sent either into the fields for plowing and harvesting or into the woods for chopping and hauling. Wage arrangements varied from plantation to plantation, and even from indi- vidual to individual on any one plantation. Some ironworkers were paid by a piece rate when they were working iron and by a daily rate when they were chopping wood or plowing fields; others were paid an annual wage, which was partially in kind and covered all the varied activities that might be demanded; "Agreement \[from the New Pine Forge, in New Jersey\] with John Shaw, July 23rd. 1761 to stock the upper forge and at any time to assist in stocking at any of the other two forges when he has not stocking to do at the said upper forge. The said Shaw is to be paid for the faithful performance of the above agreement eighteen pounds and a pair of shoes if he does not get drunk above once in three months, a pair of stockings and his diet." Some foremen were subcontractors, receiving monies from the ironmaster, which they then distributed as they saw fit to the men who worked under them. Some ironworkers received their housing free of charge; others paid a fee, which was deducted from their wages. Wives of ironworkers and their children were paid a daily wage when they worked in the fields. Apprentices, indentured servants, and slaves received nothing but their sustenance, some clothing, and whatever training was contractually required. All this was determined by the discretion of the iron- master in negotiation with the individual worker (or, in the case of apprentices, with the young man's parents); there was no guild, or any other kind of organiza- tion, to protect the workers' interests. HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COLONIAL CRAFTS As it was on the iron plantation, so it was in some of the other colonial workplaces that were neither farms nor small craft shops: the shipyards that employed ship- wrights, caulkers, cordwainers, sailmakers, and carpenters, as well as day laborers; the merchant flour mills that might be the workplace for several millers, coopers, and bakers; the occasional weaving or spinning establishment that employed a dozen or so workers to operate the equipment belonging either to a wealthy master or to a group of entrepreneurs. We have no way to estimate what portion of colonial artisans worked under these more centralized conditions, employed for a wage, operating equipment that they did not own, and, in some cases, living in houses that belonged to their employers. Nonetheless, this kind of craft enterprise has great historical significance because it provided a model on which industrialized manufacturing would subsequently be based; the early nineteenth-century owners of the first full-scale factories of the American industrial revolution had no diffi- culty copying the employment practices of their eighteenth-century predecessors. Despite their small numbers, colonial artisans played a significant role in the movement for American independence, for it was their political activity that helped foment the revolution. Urban artisans differed from the rest of the colonists because their fortunes, like the fortunes of the merchants, were tied to the politics of trade rather than the politics of landholding. land prices and land taxes worried those who practiced husbandry; but export quotas and import duties, ar- rangements for credit, and the stability of currency worried those who practiced the crafts. After 1760, it was precisely these matters that disturbed the relations between the home country and its colonies. Artisans, like merchants, found their business hampered first by the Currency Act (1764), which reduced the value of the paper money that had been issued by colonial legislatures, and then by the Stamp Act (also 1764), which increased the cost of the documents necessary to conduct busi- ness. The Townshend duties (1767) led merchants to organize a boycott of im- ported British goods, a boycott supported, in their own self-interest, by American craftspeople. in the early 1770s, in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, master printers and carpenters and smiths were happy to supply the crowds of appren- tices and journeymen that radical politicians needed to harass British troops and customs officials. Once Parliament passed the so-called Coercive and Intolerable Acts (1774), urban artisans were enthusiastic once again in their support for the non-importation movement organized by the first Continental Congress. Artisans did not occupy positions of political leadership in the colonies, but as valued and respected members of the communities in which they lived, their views carried considerable weight. Having objected for decades to the mercantilist structure of the British tariffs and duties, these colonists understood that they had many things to gain and very little to lose from independence. CONCLUSION: REASONS FOR THE SLOW PACE OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE During the colonial period, the pace of technological change was as slow as the proverbial tortoise. American craftspeople adopted the technological systems and work processes with which they had been familiar in Europe, making only minor adaptations to the new conditions in which they found themselves. Technological change is not an independent variable, a self-propelled social engine; quite the re- verse, it is a dependent variable propelled by a host of other factors. Many of those factors were missing in the North American colonies. The English government had no interest in helping colonial artisans become more productive; indeed, quite the opposite was generally the case. Mercantilist doctrine dictated that a colony should supply raw materials that could be worked up into finished products in the home country. The English government had only a few mechanisms for encouraging technological change: issuing patents, award- ing prizes for innovations, creating protective tariffs. it chose to use these mechanisms very rarely, governments being less attuned to such issues in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than they are today. In any event, these mechanisms were used in support of technological change only at home, not in the colonies. On top of this, the density of artisans in the colonies was too low to encourage technological change. Such changes tended to proceed fastest, as the creators of in- dustrial-research parks and incubators clearly know today, when and where there is a high density of skilled people willing and able to talk together, compare notes on how they are solving the problems in their work, and collaborate with each other. Separated by long distances, lacking a guild or any other social institution that could facilitate communication between them, their products always in high demand---colonial artisans were unlikely to feel much impulse toward changing the tools with which they did their work. Nonetheless, the farmers and artisans of the colonies laid the foundations for a flourishing economy. There was a reason why so many recent immigrants re- garded the colonies as "the best poor man's country," a place where ordinary people could, by working hard, create a reasonably comfortable life for themselves.8 Over the course of the eighteenth century, as the owners and residents of mixed farms became increasingly prosperous, they also became increasingly healthy, which meant that the size of the population grew as much by natural increase as by im- migration, thereby creating more consumers and increasing consumer demand. In addition, as farming families became increasingly prosperous, they began to require more and more manufactured goods of all sorts, scythes and pots, barrels and churns, horse shoes and hunting rifles, stove plates and pewter bowls, mundane goods that made their work more productive and their standard of living a little better. And as their work became more productive, they also began to produce surpluses of butter and cheese, corn and wheat, hams and chickens, which meant that the population of cities---where artisans and merchants could flourish---also increased. Thus, once independence came, once colonial artisans were freed from the shackles of mercantilist policy, the stage was set for technological change to accelerate. Artisans may have been small in number, but the skills that they possessed--- the mechanical aptitudes of the millwrights, the business acumen of the sawmill- ers, the organizational insights of the ironmasters---were the skills that the new nation needed as it sought to meet the pent-up consumer demand following what amounted to twenty years of war-related deprivation and as it began to compete on world markets with the old nations of Europe. In addition, the work processes to which at least some artisans had become accustomed---working in places that were not their own homes and for an employer rather than for themselves---would become the social foundation on which in the nineteenth century a mighty indus- trial economy would be built.