Revere’s early silverwork period portrays the rising fortunes of a young, ambitious, and talented artisan. In the late 1750s, when he first entered the field, he had to continue his technical and managerial education on the job while supporting a growing family in an uncertain economy. By the eve of the Revolution he enjoyed a solid reputation, large and steady sales, and even some extra time for other pursuits in his different organizations. Revere’s success resulted from a combination of artistic talent, technical versatility, and good connections, and bore many similarities to the experiences of his brothers in trade, countless silverworkers who practiced their crafts since the beginnings of human civilization.
From the earliest times, the scarcity and beauty of gold and silver caused their value and prestige to soar above that of more utilitarian metals such as iron or copper. The scarcity of these metals, along with their resistance to chemical corrosion, led to the nickname “noble metals.” Even though silver-working processes have at least as much technological complexity as that of most other crafts, the luxury status of silver placed silverware into the category of art, earning silversmiths a reputation for both technical and aesthetic skill. Returning once more to the Iliad, we see that the stature of silver is reflected repeatedly in lovingly descriptive passages ranging from individual titles such as “Apollo of the silver bow” and “silver-footed Thetis” to longer descriptions of items such as the mixing bowl of Achilles:
Achilles quickly set out prizes for the footrace.
A silver bowl, gorgeous, just six measures deep
but the finest mixing bowl in all the world.
Nothing could match its beauty—a masterpiece
that skilled Sidonian craftsmen wrought to perfection,
Phoenician traders shipped across the misty seas
and mooring in Thoas’ roads, presented to the king.52
Silversmiths across far-flung times and places served as a bridge between the worlds of manufacturing, metallurgy, and art. Silversmiths traveled to America on some of the earliest colonization voyages to Jamestown in the 1600s, but truly cemented their role in American society in the more stable New England Puritan villages later that century. Throughout the later colonial period, only blacksmithing had more artisan practitioners than silversmithing.53
Changing silver styles respond to America’s evolving societal values. New England silver during the early 1600s featured heavy and plain pieces, corresponding to the Puritan emphasis upon simplicity. Many of the pre-1640 Massachusetts Puritans belonged to the middle or upper middle classes and brought family silver with them, ensuring a steady demand for the services of silversmiths to repair or add to their collections. With the rise of merchant prosperity in the mid- to late 1600s foreign silver flowed into New England, Puritan restrictions upon conspicuous consumption relaxed, and silver became a status symbol representing the affluence and good taste of its owner. By the end of the seventeenth century, the increasingly cosmopolitan colonists embraced the vivid, three-dimensional complexity of the baroque style emanating from the court of Charles II, but in the early eighteenth century the Queen Anne (or early rococo) style achieved dominance, promoting a return to simplicity, elegance, and formality. The fully developed rococo of the mid-eighteenth century expanded upon the Queen Anne style with richer decorations usually favoring “natural” forms, such as shells and flowers. Finally, the neoclassical or federal style gained acceptance after the Revolution, and emphasized a return to purity, restraint, and geometric forms.54 American society vacillated in its preferences from one generation to the next, often switching between plainer and more embellished fashions. The finest silversmiths demonstrated their skill and improved their reputation by mastering multiple artistic styles.
Colonial silversmiths served several important functions above and beyond their production of luxury items. The upper classes in urban centers and on southern plantations viewed silver plate as a luxury item and status symbol, but upper-class patronage alone cannot account for the large number of silversmiths, volume of sales, or existence of silversmiths in smaller towns and less settled areas. In addition to luxury silver items, colonial silversmiths also produced many pieces for middle- and even lower-income families as a form of wealth storage and security. American colonists regularly encountered English, Dutch, French, Mexican, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Peruvian, and other silver and gold coins. This confusing array of currency was easily stolen and non-identifiable, major problems in the days before insured banks or a reliable national currency. Customers hired silversmiths to assess the value and purity of coins or other silver sources, and then melt and cast them into usable new forms. Silversmiths customized their work with makers’ marks (the silversmith’s name or initials, which he stamped onto all large silver items) and engravings (such as a family crest or the owner’s initials), thereby adding to the value of silver. Silver plate frequently served as both a mortgageable item and as a form of payment, and colonial newspapers occasionally contained advertisements attempting to identify and reclaim lost silver. The maker’s mark became even more important in America than in England: only a silversmith’s judgment certified the quality and integrity of finished pieces in the absence of English regulatory mechanisms such as guilds and assaying offices. The maker’s mark had more personal value as well: Paul Revere placed six stamps on one beautiful inscribed salver sold to William White in 1760, a clear indication of the pride he took in it.55
Most American silversmiths lived and worked in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, the three largest cities. Urban centers offered access to wealthier and more numerous clients; a larger supply of silver coins and pieces; a network of fellow practitioners to lend labor, tools, and advice; and better information about changing artistic styles and preferences. These cities had more contact with London than with each other until the eighteenth century and quickly adopted and emulated the newest British fashions, although silversmiths in large cities often produced distinctive local interpretations of prevailing styles. Boston and New York led the colonial silverworking movement in the seventeenth century, and Philadelphia joined them in the eighteenth century. In spite of Philadelphia’s leadership in most colonial crafts, many experts believe that Boston produced the finest silver objects, particularly during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. From these cities the craft spread to smaller urban centers throughout the colonies.56 Throughout his career, Revere benefited more from the support network centered in well-populated Boston than he suffered from competition. He found himself particularly dependent on others at the start of his silversmithing.
Paul Revere turned 21 in 1756 and could finally run his own silver shop in his own name, formally joining Boston’s silverworking community. But instead of launching his career, he enlisted in the Massachusetts militia in February of the same year as a second lieutenant in an artillery train, to fight in the French and Indian War. Although he might appear to have shirked his duty to run the shop and support his family, Revere probably had their interests in mind when he enlisted. As an artillery lieutenant he received 5 pounds, 6 shillings, and 8 pence per month, an ample cash wage roughly double the salary of a typical enlisted man. In six months he could earn 32 pounds, or two years’ rent on his family’s house, more than a novice silversmith in an uncertain market. Revere joined the only artillery unit in the Massachusetts force, an elite skilled group twice the size of an infantry company, allowing him to gain a prestigious rank at a young age. Impressive military titles certainly carried over to private life, as illustrated by numerous instances of Revere referring to himself or being referred to by his militia title. He remained in the military until November 1756, and although his regiment at Lake George never took part in combat he learned enough about military matters and artillery usage to lay the groundwork for military service during the Revolution and post-Revolutionary cannon-casting work. In addition, his experience serving under the condescending British officers probably altered his perceptions of status
and colonial-metropolitan differences as it did for many of his contemporaries. This brief military stint delayed the start of Revere’s formal silver career: although he began recording his silver shop’s operations in September 1757, his records do not show a regular stream of output until 1762.57
In August 1757, less than a year after returning from his military service, Revere married Sarah Orne of Boston, who also moved into the cramped accommodations of his mother’s house. Less than eight months later Sarah gave birth to their first child, a daughter named after Revere’s mother Deborah. Sarah, or “Sary” as he recorded in the family Bible, gave birth to a new child every second year for the remainder of her life. With a family including a new wife depending on him, with his military adventures behind him, and as a master craftsman legally running a shop in his own name, he could finally devote all of his time and attention to his craft.
From the first day of apprentice training, the complex details of silver fabrication occupied the forefront of every silversmith’s mind. Revere’s surviving records do not contain an inventory of the equipment or raw materials present in his silver shop or of the fabrication procedures he followed at any point in time. He is not alone in this oversight: not a single American silversmith codified these technical details in any records, because this knowledge constituted part of the “art and mystery” of their trade, passed on to apprentices verbally and through observed practice but never in writing. The creative use of historical sources such as probate records or studies of finished silver products strongly suggests that silversmiths’ equipment and procedures remained fairly constant throughout the colonial and early federal periods despite dramatic changes in artistic styles. These tools and the knowledge of their use defined the silversmith profession and circumscribed Revere’s daily routine for many decades. To place ourselves in his shoes and experience the methods and challenges of silverworking as he did, we must re-create the workings of an eighteenth-century silver shop from surviving clues.
Upon first entering a silver shop, one would immediately observe the variety of tools required for common practices, including many versions of certain instruments. For example, an inventory of the estate of Boston goldsmith Richard Conyers performed by two other silversmiths in 1709 yielded eighty unique tools, including anvils, punches, compasses, vices, hammers, swages, stamps, punches, tongs, bellows, files, gravers, chisels, patterns, scales, and many others. John Coney had, at the time of his death in 1722, 116 hammers, 127 nests of crucibles, 80 anvils, and enormous numbers of other tools. Other typical equipment owned by seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century silversmiths included burnishing stones and pumice powder, furnaces, soldering equipment, wire-drawing benches, drop-press and screw-pressure dies, and molds. The primary tools of greatest importance to most silversmiths included hammers, punches, anvils, files, and shears, and each shop often owned dozens of each of these mainstays in different shapes and sizes. Apprentices learned to maintain their tools: for example, they had to keep hammers flawlessly polished and rust-free because they transferred any of their own imperfections to the metal. This vast selection of tools enabled skilled workers to produce silver objects of all shapes and sizes, but fortunately we can simplify the repertoire of silversmith’s fabrication procedures into four basic categories: casting, hammering, seaming, and finishing.58
Casting. First, silversmiths learned to cast silver. Many customers offered silver coins, silver bars, or obsolete silver items to silversmiths for reuse in new purchases. A silversmith placed this silver in a special graphite crucible, along with any copper needed to strengthen the metal and raise it to the “sterling” standard.59 He then placed this crucible in a small, charcoal-fueled or bellows-pumped furnace, or held it in the furnace with a skillet until the metal liquefied. The craftsman poured the liquid metal into a mold, an iron-framed box of dense sand containing an indentation pressed or sculpted into the shape of the final object. The most common molds had simple rectangular indentations that produced silver bars, but more complex molds formed silver into the shape of teapot handles, the legs of a water pitcher, and so on. Instead of sand, some molds consisted of valuable blocks of hard wood or iron with patterns cut into them. The silver cooled and solidified within the mold and the silversmith removed it when ready to shape it into the finished form. Silversmiths rarely formed an entire silver object by casting, but might use molds to produce certain portions, such as handles or legs.60
Hammering. After casting the silver, silversmiths had to hammer and reshape it. Labor costs accounted for most of the value of silver plate, and hammering represented the most time-consuming aspect of the silverworking process. Hammering encompassed a series of related processes, including forging, raising, hollowing, and creasing, that made use of numerous hammers and anvils with different-sized and -shaped striking edges. Blows from a flat-headed hammer made a thick piece of silver wider and thinner, while curved hammers and anvils created rounded shapes, indentations, or other three-dimensional forms. Silversmiths used other tools to add depth to a flat item. For example, all cast spoons and other silver pieces began as flat, two-dimensional objects. A silversmith rounded and deepened the bowl of the spoon by placing it over the lower part of a die, a lead block containing a depression in the exact shape of the spoon. He then struck the spoon with the upper part of the die, an iron mallet also curved in the spoon’s shape, and the spoon’s bowl conformed to the shape of the die. Hammering took place at room temperature via a process called cold-working. When cool metal was hammered it became “work hardened,” which means it responded to stress by growing hard and brittle. Fortunately, silversmiths could reverse these undesired effects via the annealing process: they carefully heated metal at a specific temperature to partially soften it, and then plunged it into water or acid. A balanced application of annealing and hammering produced strong metal, neither soft nor brittle. Silversmiths and other craftsmen developed an instinctive understanding of metal properties and practices, developing and passing on these skills through observation, practice, and hands-on understanding.61
Seaming. In the seaming stage, silversmiths created closed hollowware forms such as cups or teapots by fastening different pieces together or connecting the edges of a single curved sheet to form a cylinder. Although silversmiths occasionally used rivets to attach pieces to each other, soldering remained the sealing technology of choice into the nineteenth century. Silversmiths made their own solder in a charcoal furnace from an amalgam of four parts silver and one part brass, combined with borax paste that served as a “flux” material to help the solder flow throughout the seam. Silversmiths applied the pasty solder mixture along the connecting seam between two silver sheets. Because solder melted at a lower temperature than the sheet silver, a precise application of heat from a furnace, blowpipe, or hot soldering iron melted the solder without affecting the silver object. The molten solder filled the space between the silver sheets and fused them together when it cooled. An experienced practitioner such as Revere then used sulfuric acid to remove all traces of the borax paste and produced a virtually invisible soldered seam. Cups required the least time and effort of all hollowware items: silversmiths used one seal to form a curved sheet of silver into a cylinder and a second seal to attach a silver disc to the bottom. A teapot, in comparison, had an unusually shaped body, legs, a handle, and a curved spout that all required careful attention.62
Finishing. Finally, a silversmith needed to finish his silver item by polishing, filing, and adding embellishments such as engraving or chasing. All silversmiths learned to even out the many irregularities marring the surface of unfinished silver items by hammering out indentations (called “planishing”), filing off burrs with small and unusually shaped files, and polishing the entire item with pumice stones or some other abrasive. Once the silver shone in a smooth and unblemished state, silversmiths had a choice of ornamentation techniques. Engraving, the most common of these techniques, involved cutting a design into the silver by gouging line
s with either a pointed tool called a burin or a short V-shaped tool called a graver. Instead of engraving, silversmiths could add chasing to an item. This painstaking process used a steel punch and hammer or dull chisel to dent the outside of a silver sheet with repeated blows, forming a continuous indentation design without removing any metal. To add the far more difficult repoussé ornamentation, silversmiths hammered indentations into sheet silver from the inside with a curved rod called a snarling iron, producing a raised design on the outside of the object.
Figure 1.2. Wire-drawing machine, from The Pirotechnia, Vannoccio Biringuccio’s comprehensive Italian metallurgy text first published in Venice in 1540 by Curtio Nauo & Fratelli and printed by Venturino Roffinello (reprinted in Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi, trans. and eds., The Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio: The Classic Sixteenth-Century Treatise on Metals and Metallurgy [New York: Dover Publications, 1990], figure 72 on p. 379). The illustration indicates that, even in 1540, wire-drawing machinery automated many aspects of the wire production process. The different devices in this image allowed silverworkers to turn cranks and pull a tapered silver wire through a hole. Workers repeated the process with smaller and smaller holes until the wire achieved the desired diameter. Paul Revere probably owned similar equipment, and his familiarity with silver wire drawing helped him master more complex processes many years later.
Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn Page 6
