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Revere had no time to engage in his craft, and in the decades after the war he, too, shifted course professionally, becoming an innovator in industrial techniques. He parlayed his knowledge of metalwork into the mass production of simple items like harness fittings and buckles and the large-scale casting of cannon and bells. Eventually, he operated a furnace and rolling mill, which he used to fabricate copper sheathing for ships.
Revere’s waistcoat and the linen of his shirt. (At this date, it is an even bet as to whether these textiles would have been handspun and handwoven or processed with the help of machines.) The silver used to make the teapot might well have circulated in the form of currency, originating in the mines of Potosí (then in the Viceroyalty of Peru, now Bolivia), while mahogany like that in the depicted table came mainly from Honduras. These were both brutal contexts for enslaved workers, some brought there by force from Africa, others indigenous.
eighteenth-century apprenticeship is best understood as a system of coercive poor relief. Most who found themselves bound to a master got that way against their will, as orphans, or children of impoverished families. By law, they were then required to stay and work for very low wages, usually for seven years, sometimes up to the age of twenty-one.
In order to keep up with demand, workshop masters were obliged to impart trade secrets to their apprentices and indentured servants. Once they acquired a basic skill set, young craftsmen found it easier to relocate rather than complete their term of service. They were in a classic seller’s market: The colonies were ever short of capable hands.
industry, a term that originally referred not to factories, but to personal work ethic.
William Bradford, the chronicler and governor of Plymouth (and a silk weaver by trade),
The Wampanoag shaped wampum beads by hammering the hard, brittle shell into small pieces, which were then ground into the desired form with a stone. The stringing channel inside each bead was made using a bow or pump drill, historically tipped with a sharpened stone bit; when metal became available after contact, they used reworked iron nails and awls, or simply imported European drills.
Two different shell materials are used in wampum making: the core spiral of white whelks and the distinctive purple inner surface of quahog clamshells.
(Some present-day Wampanoag return shells to the water after consuming their meat, as an offering of gratitude.) Shells are also extremely hard and durable, surviving archaeologically in burial middens for many centuries, and so represented a temporal dimension beyond, yet intertwined with, the span of human life.16
“Learn of the skillful—he that teaches himself, hath a fool for his master.” “God helps those who help themselves.” (Franklin
Mark Twain later quipped that this aphoristic onslaught had brought untold suffering to generations, “being held up for the emulation of boys forever—boys who might otherwise have been happy.” Early to bed, early to rise, makes the man healthy, wealthy, and wise? “The sorrow that that maxim has cost me through my parents’ experimenting on me with it,” Twain wrote, “tongue cannot tell.”24
japanner (that is, a specialist in imitation lacquer),
Manumitted from slavery in 1770 by his owner, William Hall, a tanner, he took up leatherwork as his trade. Five years later, he and fourteen other African Americans appealed to a masonic lodge of Irishmen who were attached to the British Army then encamped at Bunker Hill. The soldiers, apparently overcoming whatever racial prejudices they may have held, agreed on the spot to initiate them into the fraternal order—though they asked twenty-five guineas apiece for the privilege. Hall and his supporters then promptly organized Provisional African Lodge No. 1, the first Black masonic organization
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picking oakum (that is, untwining frayed ropes into separate hemp fibers to be used in ship’s caulk).
The first step in making the shoes, cutting, was done by cordwainers in small sheds called “ten-footers”—typically in teams of three, perhaps a master and two journeymen.
These men’s wives, and perhaps their children, too, would then stitch together the leather uppers.
In 1794, Philadelphia witnessed the founding of the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers, one of the first American trade unions. Its name indicated an important shift. Prior to the war, journeymen had been relatively few in number, and were legitimately in training to become masters. Less skilled jobs were performed by apprentices, indentured servants, or enslaved workers. But in the 1790s, the overall population of journeymen began to increase, as upward mobility within a shop faltered. Few now had a hope of becoming so-called masters because they lacked the capital to set up large
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Mechanization was only in its infancy, but division of labor and concentration of capital were already well under way. The accompanying shift to a wage-labor system led to a situation in which only men were directly compensated, positioning women in a more economically dependent role than ever before.
James W. C. Pennington. He would become the first Black man to attend classes at Yale University, the first to write a history of “colored people” in America.
Denmark Vesey, also known as Telemaque, who tried to engineer a revolt in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822.
St. Thomas (at that time a Danish colony,
In 1834, having just been handed a 15 percent wage cut, the female operatives went on strike. (They also coordinated a run on the local banks, hitting the owners where it really hurt.)
The year 1825 saw not just celebrations in the streets, but also a push by Boston carpenters to have their workday limited to ten hours, and a strike among women tailors in New York—America’s first industrial action by female workers, preceding even those at Lowell. The practices of “outworking” that had been pioneered by the master shoemakers of Lynn were now advancing into many other trades. The word sweatshop entered American parlance.
The first president to hail from the West, and the first to be born in a log cabin,
Jackson’s men called him “Old Hickory” for his toughness.
In fact, the term self-made man was first put into circulation by none other than Henry Clay, who said in an 1832 Senate address, “In Kentucky, almost every manufactory known to me, is in the hands of enterprising and self-made men, who have acquired whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor.”
On the ground floor were twenty steam-powered flatbed presses (introduced to America by Isaac Adams, a former cabinetmaker, in 1830). These were operated by teams of young women, overseen by a single male foreman. Bookbinding, on another level of the building, was also done by women.
He went to Oldbury, to see the Brades Iron and Steel Works, which had taken so much coal out of the ground nearby that the village had sunk eleven feet from its original level.
Burritt’s school for women in New Britain.
Walden, or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854, is an American classic—a masterpiece of nature writing, an aspirational text about living in harmony with the environment, in complete self-sufficiency, “by the labor of my hands only.” It is a foundational text of American craft.
Sarah Josepha Hale, who also gave the world “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
In 1825, Wright began purchasing slaves and housing them at a community in Tennessee, on land that had been occupied by the Chickasaw nation until Andrew Jackson forced them off their ancestral ground. (In fact, it was through Jackson, whom Wright contacted via Lafayette, that she acquired the property.) She called it Nashoba, the Chickasaw word for “wolf,” after the nearby Wolf River. There, she planned to educate the relocated African Americans. She also hoped to pay them for their work, enough to eventually buy their own freedom and that of one other enslaved person. In an essay entitled “A
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Courageous work was done by white abolitionist missionaries such as Rev. John Fee, who in 1855 opened a one-room schoolhouse in Kentucky (then a slave state), promising “an education to all colors, classes, cheap and thorough.” This was the origin of Berea College, the first racially integrated higher education institution in the South. Black intellectuals, too, had long identified education as a primary goal. In 1840, the “fugitive blacksmith” James Pennington had urged the founding of African American schools: “Who lays this stone in a masterly manner, can surely lay another on the top of
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eighteen-year-old coal miner who showed up at the door one day in 1872: Booker T. Washington.
In 1873, Mark Twain coined the phrase “the Gilded Age,”
This was the Centennial Exposition of 1876, marking the nation’s one-hundredth birthday. It was staged at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, with multiple pavilions sprawling over a 250-acre site.
Isaac newton youngs was a perfectionist’s perfectionist. Born in 1793, the youngest of ten children, he was trained in clockmaking by his uncle. He could put one together by the age of six, and “knew the time of day,” he said, “before I could talk plain.” His uncle and his parents were recent converts to the Shaker religious sect.
Youngs, however, managed to be a jack-of-all-trades. After learning clockmaking, he apprenticed as a tailor, and also turned his hand to masonry, tinsmithing, and toolmaking. He made things small and large, from clothespins and buttons, which he turned out by the thousand, to a whole schoolhouse. Also, like the famous scientist for whom he was named, he had a passion for invention. He fashioned a five-nibbed pen in brass to draw staves for sheet music, and a threading machine to carve the handy wooden screw pegs that lined Shaker rooms.
The Shakers—officially, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing—believed in a cosmic consummation. They held that the first Messiah, the son of a carpenter, found his successor in “Mother” Ann Lee, the daughter of a blacksmith.
She preached that her own appearance was a harbinger of the end, and after her death in 1784, the sect readied itself for the apocalypse. When this did not transpire, they simply carried on, within constant sight of ultimate redemption, living by Mother Ann’s famous injunction, “Put your hands to work, and hearts to God.”
The followers of George Rapp, a German weaver and mystic, had settled in Harmonie, Indiana, in 1814; a decade later, the visionary philanthropist Robert Owen bought the town from the Rappites, rechristened it New Harmony, and attempted to construct an ideal society there. There were also the Fourierist phalanxes, inspired by the voluminous visionary writings of an eccentric Parisian Communist; the Amish and Mennonite communities of Pennsylvania; and the Perfectionists (in this case, the term refers to the eradication of sin), led by John Humphrey Noyes.
Quite apart from its commercial importance to separatist communities, craft also served their immediate needs, both utilitarian and symbolic. A famous example is the scrap quilting undertaken by the Amish, particularly Amish women, in the decades after the Civil War. Contrary to popular belief, this was a new craft for them, not an inheritance from Colonial days, though they did adopt it partly because it matched their traditional self-image. Ironically, too, quilts might never have caught on in the famously technology-resistant community if it were not for the availability of cheap
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“Community of True Inspiration,” at Amana, Iowa. Founded in 1842 by a group of dissenters who had fled Germany, the group was initially led by a carpenter, Christian Metz. In community terminology, he was considered a Werkzeug, “a tool in the hands of God.” After Metz died in 1867, he was succeeded by the seventy-two-year-old Barbara Landmann, another German immigrant, who led the Amana settlements with stern discipline for fifteen years. Even as the Shaker villages were disintegrating, the Inspirationists thrived, in large part thanks to their printed wool textiles, leather goods, and other
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Maria Longworth Nichols, founder of the Rookwood Pottery Company in Cincinnati.
The company also featured particular artists, notably the Japanese-trained master Kataro Shirayamadani, as a way of emphasizing individuality and originality.
Art Pottery found its most ambitious exponent in Adelaide Alsop Robineau, born in 1865, the daughter of an engineer. She, too, started out as a china painter, teaching herself from manuals. In 1899, together with her husband, a Frenchman who collected Chinese porcelains, she founded a new journal entitled Keramic Studio, aimed primarily at other amateur decorators.
The Apotheosis of the Toiler, completed in 1910, one of the most extraordinary feats of craftsmanship ever realized in America. Robineau spent more than a thousand hours making the carved porcelain vase, only for it to crack in its initial firing. She persisted, filling the tiny fissures with a paste of ground porcelain and firing it again, this time successfully. She also selectively glazed the piece, to highlight its delicate openwork structure. Robineau had essayed various revival styles previously, and here employed a rather unusual Egyptian idiom, occasionally seen in architecture at the
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regarded with lofty indifference. Arts and Crafts advocates tried to slip this logical noose however they could, but in the end, they always felt it tighten around them. Exemplary in this regard are the careers of Candace Wheeler and Gustav Stickley, two of the movement’s best-known protagonists. Wheeler was born on a New York farm in 1827 and brought up in an atmosphere of rural self-sufficiency. Her grandmother was a seamstress, her parents made hats, and the whole family earned extra money by making cheese, butter, candles, and various preserved foods. Her father, a staunch abolitionist,
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For some years, she had been assisting friends—“gentlewomen in distress,” many of them war widows—by quietly selling examples of their needlework. (One of her recruits to this scheme was Elizabeth Custer, whose husband had just been killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.)
And so, supported by a group of luminaries that included Louis Comfort Tiffany and Lockwood de Forest, Wheeler founded the Society of Decorative Arts.
