Revere paid most of his employees at the end of each working season, indicating that, like most early manufacturers, he served as a form of bank during the interim. In the early nineteenth century most New Englanders bartered a variety of goods and services all year long and settled accounts with coin about once a year, and employers such as Revere played a key role in these credit networks.42 As an example, on September 13, 1792, he paid Miller, Story, and Carter for eight to sixteen days of “air furnace work.” Story and Carter earned 5 shillings a day each. All three of these men chose to receive 1 pound and let Revere hold the remainder of their earnings. Miller eventually received ninety-five days’ pay for “work at times since May” on December 2, 1793.43 If Revere had a larger operation with a more diverse product line, as in the iron plantations to the south, he might have allowed employees to set up credit accounts and buy some of his products for their own use without ever needing to convert wages into cash. Revere’s workers obviously trusted him with their wages, and his thorough records tell us that he took this responsibility seriously.
Although Revere’s employment patterns approximated a regular work schedule, the expectations of late eighteenth-century skilled laborers required many concessions. His records include one extremely dense page of attendance and absentee information in paragraph form:
Mr Miller came Thursday the 23 at night. Mr White & Mr Story came Saturday the 25 at night. Freelove came Monday night 27.
Capt White Mr Miller Mr Story went home Saturday mor’g June 15. Mr Miller came back Tuesday 18 at night Capt White & Mr. Story came back Saturday 22d @ night. Mr Carter came Friday morning 28, went home 29 @ night—Capt White & Mr Story went home Saturd 29 at night.44
Unlike the careful spreadsheet-like lists of expenses or cash receipts, Revere used a free narrative in this attempt to track employee attendance. The attendance page describes the work habits of Captain White, Mr. Story, Mr. Miller, Mr. Carter, Stephen Metcalf, Mathew Metcalf, and Freelove, who is listed without any title.45 Revere employed between one and five of these workers at a time, usually a minimum of three. The workers started and stopped working at seemingly random dates and times, occasionally beginning at night or on a Saturday, and ending in the morning or on a weekday. The duration of each employee’s labor varied considerably throughout the 146-day period between May 23 and October 15: Miller, White, and Freelove worked approximately 70 to 75 days, Story worked approximately 48 days, and Carter and the Metcalfs worked between 20 and 25 days. The furnace operated in 3- to 5-week shifts, always followed by at least a week of rest. These worker routines mirrored the work patterns of a blast furnace despite the fact that Revere’s operation did not depend on the seasons like blast furnaces did, for example, when they shut down in winter due to waterpower shortages. Perhaps Revere adopted a blast furnace schedule because he learned the trade from Brown and Benson and he decided to emulate their schedule. Alternately he might have worked whenever he received regular shipments of pig iron, which naturally followed the rhythm of blast furnace life.
Workers received benefits other than some control over the dates and times of their work. Revere charged seven rum payments (two of them for “6 days”), two beer payments, and one payment for “Liquor—7 days” to his furnace expenses. This notation attests to a steady liquor allowance for his workers, since rum and liquor could now be measured in units of time. The steady flow of liquor appears in most, if not all, early craft and manufacturing shops whose skilled workers expected certain privileges in exchange for their services, and many owners or workers grew accustomed to such treatment from their own apprentice and journeyman terms. Heavy liquor use on and off the job united early working men across trades, nations, and skill levels. One medical analysis published in 1804 calculated that the average workingman drank eight gills of hard liquor a day: two gills (the equivalent of four small drinks) before breakfast; three gills between breakfast and the completion of the noontime meal; and three large drinks typically taken at 2:00 p.m., in the middle of the afternoon, and upon leaving work at 6:00 p.m. This daily liquor, totaling a quart of hard alcohol, cost approximately 4 shillings, or half a dollar, a fairly substantial sum. The article concluded that although this level of drinking had financial and long-term health implications, in the short term most workers were able to work at their jobs while drinking at this level without showing signs of drunkenness.46
Revere’s overall employment picture combines elements of discipline and freedom: for the most part his employees all arrived at the beginning of one major work period and all left at the end, but they definitely had the freedom to alter their schedule. At least one worker took occasional days off to go fishing, and all the workers adjusted their arrival and departure times by a few days whenever the furnace started or stopped.47 Revere’s laborers received a reasonable set of perks in exchange for their efforts: wages in line with their skill levels, steady liquor on the job, and control over their workload and work dates. As much as he might have wanted to dictate his workers’ attendance patterns to suit a more predictable schedule, the flexible patterns portrayed in the records tell us that labor negotiations were a two-way affair. Revere and his workers both had a say, and growing streams of output imply that this arrangement suited all parties.
Raw Material Availability and Environmental Impacts
The switch from silver to iron brought Revere in contact with a new assortment of customers, suppliers, and raw materials. A silversmith dealt with merchants, other silversmiths, and upper-class clients when buying silver and selling pricey silverware, but a foundryman interacted with blast furnace operators, colliers, other metalworkers, and anyone who needed iron goods, watching tons of iron and charcoal enter and leave his shop. The price of silver depended upon tariff, mercantile, and political factors, while the prices of iron and charcoal primarily depended upon their local abundance. And while a silversmith’s activities had an impact upon his clients, suppliers, and fellow practitioners, an iron founder’s labor left its mark upon the face of the land itself.
Neither Paul Revere nor anyone in early America thought about the environment as an entity, let alone one facing endangerment from human activities. Beginning with the first New World colonists, Americans focused upon the specific local conditions, such as forests or rivers, that might aid or hinder their struggle to survive and prosper. One of the main compensations for America’s isolation and lack of European civilization was the abundance of natural resources, such as land and timber, valuable commodities in light of England’s dense population and almost total deforestation. Colonists saw forests as infinite and inexhaustible and viewed other natural resources in almost the same light. Postwar Americans gradually realized the finite extent of these resources, leading to variations in prices, occasional shortages, competition, and eventual conservation. Manufacturing firms of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had a growing impact upon their natural surroundings, leaving imprints such as dammed or polluted waterways, slag heaps, and air and noise pollution. Paul Revere’s evolving environmental practices and attitudes mirror that of the nation as a whole, although he always stayed one step ahead of the multitude. While he had minimal resource needs during his early career as a silversmith, he became increasingly dependent upon raw materials as his endeavors grew in number and size, starting with his ironworking practices.
Although he purchased large quantities of coal, limestone, and clay for his furnace, the lion’s share of Revere’s raw material efforts and expenses centered upon iron. In a pattern that foreshadowed his upcoming copperworking experiences, Revere and his purchasing agents cast a wide net in search of cast, bar, and “old” recycled iron, often making purchases in Rhode Island and New Jersey as well as Massachusetts to meet the various needs of his manufactory. Pig iron directly fed the furnace, and served as his primary and most fundamental purchase. Bar iron cost more than pig iron, reflecting the extra labor needed to refine the pig iron into this stronger and tougher metal. The fa
ct that Revere purchased bar iron implies that he may have performed or subcontracted blacksmith operations in addition to his casting, reshaping the bar iron into tools and common household products. “Old” iron commonly referred to a variety of recycled iron goods Revere purchased from merchants or accepted from customers as a credit, though he disliked its dubious and inconsistent quality. Revere purchased a large quantity and variety of raw materials between 1792 and 1794, including at least 32 pounds spent on coal, 11 shillings for arsenic, 36 pounds for copper, 29 pounds on tin, and an unknown amount (probably more than 50 pounds) on iron.48 Raw materials for iron casting and all his other endeavors cost a lot of money, but natural resources had many other impacts upon his operations, and Revere influenced his environmental surroundings in many ways as well.
With the exception of silverworking, all of Revere’s endeavors repeatedly slowed or stopped their operations because of raw material shortages. A lengthy correspondence record illustrates his endless quest for iron. He started searching for iron sources more than a year before he announced his foundry’s operation. J. Blagge, his purchasing agent, quoted pig iron prices at the Alsion and Batson furnaces (10 pounds and 9 pounds, 10 shillings per ton, respectively) in November 1787, but reported that both furnaces had ended their yearly production and could not sell any goods until they restarted in the spring. Brown and Benson wrote Revere in April 1788, offering six tons of pig iron at $28 per ton, although they had trouble shipping it to Boston and asked if he could pick it up in Marblehead.49 Revere tried his best to procure a regular supply in the November 3, 1788 letter to Brown and Benson: “Mr. John Brown when in Boston informed me your Furnace was to go soon. I should be glad that you would ship as soon as possible ten tons of Pigs . . . We are desirous to have a constant & regular supply of Piggs from your furnace, & in order to do it we think there cannot be a more effectual way than by interesting you, or some of your gentlemen owners of the Hope furnace, in our furnace, for that end we are willing to sell either one quarter or one third of it.”50 Revere would not offer to relinquish one-third of his newly finished furnace for anything less than a critical component of his operations. The Hope furnace produced fairly consistent output and had a solid reputation by this point. Revere could have secured a permanent iron supply if Brown and Benson accepted this offer, but they turned him down. Revere wrote another letter to Brown and Benson in September 1789, repeating many of the details and more formally requesting up to one hundred tons of pig iron a year, a staggering quantity of metal in a time when most blast furnaces produced less than one thousand tons annually.51 In spite of his foundry’s small size, Revere adopted the perspective of a large technological system because he hoped to minimize uncertainty by expanding his operations to incorporate and control environmental factors such as raw material sources. Revere disliked uncertainty and correctly identified iron shortages as a continuing thorn in his side. As bad as they were, supply uncertainties grew far worse when he later worked with copper, a scarcer material than iron.
Like all manufacturing operations, Revere’s foundry impacted its natural environment through the raw materials and pollutants that entered and exited his premises. The pig iron from Brown and Benson and other sources, as well as charcoal, stone, sand, and wood purchases, all had an impact on the local ecosystems and landscapes from which they were taken. And Revere affected his immediate environment in at least one documented way, by producing a large plume of smoke from his burning charcoal. J. Callendar’s 1788 copper plate engraving of Boston includes and almost highlights a plume of smoke emanating from Revere’s foundry.52 In a very real sense he changed the Boston landscape.
Even though Revere’s records delineate the foundry’s raw material usage, we cannot connect his many activities to specific environmental consequences. Revere’s foundry operated alongside thousands of other small craft establishments in the Northeast. All of these manufacturing impacts competed with other uses of New England’s then-abundant natural resources, particularly fuel use and agricultural land clearing, which eliminated more forestland each year. Revere contributed to deforestation, air pollution, and the depletion of local and distant ore supplies, but his direct effect upon the environment cannot be quantified: each of his raw material suppliers also made sales to many other customers and Revere’s environmental impacts had plenty of company. Direct impacts, however, are not the whole story. Revere’s continual orders of pig iron, when added to the purchases of other founders like himself, provided a reliable local market for blast furnace owners who wanted to avoid the unreliability of overseas shipping and competition from British furnaces in distant markets. Revere’s presence in the network of blast furnaces, foundries, fineries, blacksmiths, and other local metalworkers enabled the entire community to supply the needs of the growing American market more efficiently, and therefore, he indirectly contributed to increased iron production and all of its side effects.
By supporting blast furnaces Revere did contribute to deforestation, because blast furnaces did more damage to the wooded environment than any other existing operation. Blast furnaces used about an acre of old growth wood or a larger amount of secondary growth wood each day to make charcoal, a fuel that burned hotter and faster than wood. Total wood usage doubled if the ironworks included a finery. The high sulfur content in coal made it difficult to use, and plentiful forests enabled American ironmasters to continue working with charcoal until the rising price of wood encouraged conversion to coal-based ironworking practices, such as puddling in the 1830s. Even so, charcoal fuel still accounted for nearly 100 percent of all American pig iron production at that time, and charcoal still accounted for 87 percent of iron production by 1860. In contrast, British ironmasters had to switch to coal as soon as the 1770s to remain in business, enabling a renewal of England’s beleaguered forests.53
Despite blast furnace operators’ seemingly wasteful wood practices, they recognized some of the perils of deforestation to the extent that they affected operations. American federal and state authorities in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries never attempted to regulate natural resource use and gave ironmakers free rein over their environment. Even though business owners usually focused their efforts upon maximizing labor efficiency because they identified labor as the scarcest resource, blast furnace operators often pioneered woodland management techniques. Most operators attempted to procure twenty thousand acres of timber per furnace, assuming that they consumed one thousand acres each year. This strategy allowed every harvested portion of the forest to re-grow for twenty years before using it again. Unfortunately, erosion and other problems occasionally inhibited the second growth, and when it did appear it often contained smaller amounts of poorer quality wood. To mitigate wood shortfalls, some ironworks initiated rudimentary forest management policies. Notations in a small number of ironwork ledgers indicate that some owners paid to fence, protect, and transplant “sprouts,” or new saplings, that started to re-grow from previously harvested areas. While forward-looking, blast furnace forest management was not surprising: if a blast furnace ran out of wood, it closed its doors.54 Ironmasters adopted these resource protection measures out of the most pragmatic reasons, because they wished to avoid causing irreparable harm to vital ingredients of their business. In this sense they heralded the conservation mindset that gained prominent advocates at the start of the twentieth century when America’s growing population and industrial development visibly endangered many natural resources.
Although he did not operate a blast furnace, Revere impacted the environment by helping to expand the growth of the metalworking community and increase its use of natural resources. Environmental limitations impacted him in return. Raw material scarcity played a much greater role in his foundry activities than in his silverworking trade. As a silversmith, he purchased silver from overseas merchants or local customers, and used small amounts of wood, charcoal, and other materials. His production depended more upon the affluence of the local population than u
pon the availability of materials. The opposite circumstances applied to ironworking. Revere never alluded to any problems obtaining sufficient fuel for his operations (although fuel prices rose steadily), but iron shortages became a continual impediment. Seasonal patterns of iron production forced Revere to stop his production during the winter months and he constantly asked merchants and purchasing agents to locate new iron sources. He often resorted to purchases of “old” iron that he melted down and reused in spite of its questionable quality. Customers and large clients paid some bills in old metal, a practice that expanded when Revere shifted to copperworking. From this point forward, metal availability and quality played a primary role in all of his managerial and technical decisions, and he increasingly acted in a capitalist-industrialist manner, treating the environment as a commodity and limitation. This trend reached its apex years later, when he operated a rolling mill complex in Canton.
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