Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn
Page 25
Federal contracting had its upside as well. Revere’s second federal contract involved the first American attempt to cast carronades, light, short-range naval cannons that splintered ship hulls in an attempt to kill enemy sailors. Henry Knox asked Revere to board the French frigate Concorde while it was docked in the Boston harbor, and had him sketch these weapons. Revere took his research seriously and wrote Knox: “By post I send you the draft of the Charonade. I have endeavored to make it as plain as possible, as in several things it differs from other guns. I enclose directions translated from a French printed paper. For the use of the seaman, the officers speak very much in favor of the Charonade.”47 Revere had to lobby the government for years until it agreed to fund his project in 1798, requesting ten carronades for the USS Constitution. This contract proceeded more smoothly than the earlier one and in addition to generating profits it helped keep Revere in touch with influential government officials. Revere was far from the only person to find federal work a mixed blessing: many reputable ironmasters who sold their goods to federal government armories thought the government’s “sometimes arbitrary military specifications” counterbalanced the high prices and large sales volumes it offered.48 Revere endured these difficulties with great persistence and energy, and thereby increased his experience while situating himself for future government work.
Once he started working for the federal government Revere found it easy to attract many other clients. Proven cannon casters were rare in the young republic and word spread quickly. The Massachusetts state government immediately became his most frequent client, beginning in April 1794 when he won his first contract to cast twelve brass “three-pounder” cannon. Three-pounders were small cannons frequently used by infantry regiments, so named because they fired three-pound cannonballs. Revere completed this first job in October 1794 and by June 1795 he claimed to have made a total of more than thirty three-pounders for Massachusetts, with pending orders for ten more. He cast at least sixty-eight cannon for Massachusetts between 1794 and 1800, and continued well into the 1800s.49
Revere’s reputation rapidly extended to different states through recommendations from military and government officials familiar with his work. James Lawrason of the Alexandria Artillery Company in Virginia ordered one six-pounder, two three-pounders, and three carriages from Revere in July 1794 upon the recommendation of the Philadelphia superintendent of stores.50 And on May 10, 1798, William Rhodes and Nathaniel Fischer of Rhode Island contacted Revere about his brass artillery after hearing him highly recommended: “We the undersigned being appointed by the Honorable House of Representatives of the State of Rhode Island for the purpose of seeing whether Brass Field Artillery can be procured in this country and to report the expense, we understand by Col. Corliss that you have cast some at your foundry which is equal to any imported.”51 A favorable comparison to imported cannon was lofty praise. The letter then requested Revere’s prices and terms of payment for twelve four-pounders. Revere responded on May 16, advising Rhode Island to buy three-pounders instead of four-pounders: most customers eschewed four-pounders because their ammunition looked similar to three-pound balls, thereby causing “very great dificultys in time of action” when artillery suppliers confused the two.52 The Rhode Island delegation wisely took his advice. By this time he had more experience in artillery matters than most non-military clients, as illustrated by Table 5.3, which summarizes his early production of different artillery pieces.53
With at least eight cannon sales each year, Revere had found a steady and lucrative line of work. But other than his seamless ongoing business relationship with Massachusetts, he encountered difficulty with every contract he accepted. After experiencing the frustration and financial hardship caused by payment delays, Revere implemented a generous credit policy and explicitly stated his terms at the start of each new contract. But no solution seemed equal to this challenge, and each non-Massachusetts contract ran afoul of major misunderstandings about each party’s obligations.
Revere’s interactions with the Alexandria Artillery Company soured almost immediately. James Lawrason expressed interest in buying one six-pounder, two three-pounders, and three carriages from Revere in early 1795. He submitted this order in writing before hearing the prices, and Revere started work at once. By July 1795, Lawrason asked to remove the six-pounder from his order because he had trouble collecting his subscription money. Unfortunately, Revere had already finished and engraved all the cannon, making them hard to resell. Furthermore, he complained that some of his subcontractors, “The Carriage maker & Blacksmith,” demanded their fees for the work they had performed. Lawrason countered that he never definitively asked for the six-pounder, he assumed Revere would not start without an advance, and he would not have ordered any cannon if he knew he needed to pay so quickly. Lawrason attempted to satisfy Revere with partial payments, and eventually paid in full, after a huge delay.54
Table 5.3. Revere’s Ordnance Production, 1794–1800
Now that he recognized this potential ambiguity, Revere clearly summarized his terms at the start of the Rhode Island contract:
The lowest price I can cast & finish them for is fifty cents @ pound, & if the State Arms are put on them, that will be an extra sixpence. I am willing that they be proved by any person who understands the business; the proving is at the expense of the purchaser. Those three pounders I have cast for this State weigh from 412 to 420 lb. each . . . My terms of payment will be one half down when delivered & the other in ninety days. I believe the carriages +c may be procured upon the same terms. I am not certain that I have copper sufficient for twelve pieces should therefore be glad to have some copper procured for which I will allow twenty cents pr pound.55
These policies attempted to pass some unpleasant responsibilities to the client. For example, Revere gladly credited the account for the copper cost if this allowed him to avoid the hassle of buying it. Proving also became the buyer’s responsibility. And the 50 percent payment upon delivery followed by ninety days’ credit seemed a fair compromise, protecting Revere from complete payment delay while allowing the customer some time to raise funds.
Unfortunately, this written clarification did not produce a smooth transaction. William Rhodes and Nathan Fisher, the Rhode Island purchasing agents, asked Revere to cast six howitzers in May 1798, including state arms. By August, Fisher announced he had changed his mind and wanted to buy only four; once again, Revere had already cast all six and placed the Rhode Island arms upon them. Revere won this argument, but the terms of one-half down and the other half within ninety days did not materialize. Of the $1,292 price tag, Revere received only $450 upon delivery at the end of August. The clients should have paid the remainder by November 30, but still owed him $492 as of February 13, at which point the records fall silent. This dispute reiterates the vagueness and lack of commitment in early work agreements, when contractual obligations such as Rhode Island’s inability to reduce the size of the order after it was finished remained unclear, and even Revere’s ninety-day credit policy seemed too strict for a state government to meet.56
Contractual difficulties obviously did not dissuade Revere from continuing his cannon-casting trade. All his expense reports compute a “labor” fee, usually listed as “for casting,” based on the weight of the finished product. For his first federal contract Revere computed a labor fee of $2,897.39 that amounted to 17 cents a pound for 16,917 pounds of ordnance plus $22.50 for the engraving of the U.S. coat of arms on the finished pieces. Revere gradually raised his rate over the years, to 20, 22, 23, and finally 25 cents per pound exclusive of the cost of the raw materials. This simple fee, based only on the weight of the final product, hides the many actual operating expenses incurred by Revere, such as the wages he paid his employees, depreciation, shipping insurance, and fuel. Revere’s labor fee constituted between 45 and 60 percent of finished contract prices for different small contracts with the Massachusetts government.57
Revere’s pricing policy represent
s an interesting simplified method of value determination. Revere estimated all of his costs and aimed for a reasonable amount of profit at the start of the contract, with no attempt to pass on specific costs—other than the cost of metal and customized engraving charges, which always received separate treatment—to the client. For example, recasting a cannon after it burst did not change the weight of the final product, but it did require additional fuel and labor costs that had to come out of Revere’s profits at the end of the contract. This fee structure encouraged casters to correct their wasteful practices and ensure quality products to avoid costly setbacks. Revere’s frequent increases in his “labor charge” from 17 to 25 cents per pound over a period of 6 years represents his improved understanding of the actual cost of running his business as well as a growing confidence in his product. The pricing policy protected the shop from miscalculations in the weight of the final product because the final weight determined the price. A weight-centered pricing approach reflected the uncertainty accompanying every stage of the process: as mentioned above, even though Revere cast 10 government howitzers from the same pattern, the cannons’ final weights ranged from 1,633 to 1,750 pounds. And apart from the federal government, future clients did not even attempt to provide copper or other raw materials, preferring to pass this unpleasant search process on to Revere, which cost him an enormous amount of time and effort as attested by numerous letters to merchants each year.
Two receipts shed light on how Revere interacted with his most highly skilled employees. Nelson Miller acknowledged receiving $24 for 12 days of work for himself and his son ending on June 1, 1795, an extremely high wage reflecting the faith Revere had in him. During his federal howitzer contract Revere wrote a personal letter asking his “Friend Miller” to return to Boston quickly and help him recast the cannon that burst during testing. Later receipts indicate that Miller continued working for Revere for at least two more years and remained one of his highest-paid employees. Revere paid an even larger sum of money to Elib Faxon in August 1795, broken down by task and not by the amount of time he worked. Revere subcontracted some tasks such as artillery boring to Faxon, who owned his own equipment. According to this receipt, Revere paid Faxon for a variety of services between August 1795 and April 2, 1796, that required large equipment and specialized skills.58 Since Revere had just entered the cannon-casting field, he had not yet purchased bulky and expensive cannon-turning and -boring devices. Two early charges from Faxon correspond to the turning and boring work on Revere’s first two contracts (ten howitzers for the federal government and twelve smaller cannon for Massachusetts). Revere counted on Faxon and Miller to perform a range of tasks competently, with minimal supervision, and in Miller’s case, on short notice. Revere also had a trusting relationship with both of these men, illustrated by the faith he placed in their abilities as well as their willingness to defer receipt of their wages, by many months in Faxon’s case. As Revere grew older and more experienced, he continued changing his role from skilled worker to manager and overseer.
Malleable Copper: Bolts, Spikes, and Technical Experimentation
As his experience and ambitions continued to grow, Revere decided to solicit more work from his largest and most influential client, the federal government. This time he sought a steadier and more lucrative relationship by offering to mass-produce vast quantities of copper bolts, spikes, and other ship fittings. This new line of work departed from anything he had previously learned and forced him to implement new technical processes and managerial techniques, develop new contacts, and greatly expand his scope of operations. With a low-cost and high-volume product he stepped farther away from the skilled craft paradigm than ever before, but he knew what he was doing just as he understood the financial and other rewards he could attain. And thus he entered the world of malleable copper.
Copper maintained a low profile throughout most of America’s history. Early North American settlers, as well as the governments and corporations that sponsored them, hoped to grow rich from gold and silver deposits similar to those located by the Spanish in Central and South America. When these precious metals failed to materialize, prospectors shifted their efforts to more utilitarian resources such as iron and copper. Dutch, French, and British colonists found plentiful quantities of usable iron ore in many colonies but had a harder time locating copper. Unlike iron, copper must be virtually free of contamination before it can be worked, so the rise of copperworking has always been inextricably linked to the ability of copper smelters to remove impurities. Copperworkers often had high expectations each time they started working with ore taken from a new mine: the slow atmospheric oxidation of impurities partially purifies copper ore near the surface. American mine operators learned to perform relatively simple smelting processes to make these high-quality ores usable, and new mines produced the highest profits. After miners exhausted these surface ores, the next extractions of copper contained sulfur and other contaminants that required the far more complex, costly, and time-consuming “pyretic ore” smelting process. This process remained a highly guarded British secret and Cornish miners and Swansea smelters held a virtual monopoly on copper production until the 1830s.59
The first sustained copper mining in the American colonies took place in the early eighteenth century using imported labor from Germany and, to a lesser degree, Britain. British law required that all copper ore be smelted in England, but as we have seen, Americans preferred to look the other way when faced with restrictive imperial legislation. Although several primitive colonial refineries briefly satisfied local copper needs, high operating costs, a lack of skilled workers, low copper demand, and frequent imperfections in the final product prevented these ventures from turning a profit. As a result, colonial copper mines shipped nearly all their copper ore to Britain for smelting and fabrication, and Britain shipped finished copper goods back to America.60
Many Americans still wished to develop a domestic copper industry to keep some of these profits on their side of the ocean. Mines at Simsbury, Connecticut, produced small and undependable quantities of copper ore from 1720 to 1788, and after 1773 the mine became known as the Newgate Prison when incarcerated convicts served as the primary labor force. The Schuyler mine in New Jersey produced the largest quantity of American copper in the decades after its 1715 opening, but its recorded output fell to between ten and forty tons a year by the 1760s and it closed in 1773. The mine reopened after the Revolution, with minimal output. Investors opened other mines in New Jersey and Maryland but failed to find significant quantities of copper. Almost all of these mines relied upon foreign workers, primarily imported from Germany and Wales, and most colonies discontinued all copper mining by the Revolution. The American colonies produced between one hundred and two hundred tons of copper a year in the 1720s and 1730s, and output fell under one hundred tons a year by the 1750s.61 Thus the local supply of copper, never high, started its plunge at a time when population increases, not to mention new applications, drove demand ever higher.
American copper demand increased steadily with population growth, and Americans remained dependent on British imports to meet their needs. Years later in 1814, Thomas Cooper, the chair of natural philosophy and chemistry at Dickinson College, lamented in The Emporium of Arts and Sciences: “Copper is an article so necessary to us at present for sheathing ships, for making distilling vessels, for vessels used for culinary purposes, for plated ware, for coin, &c., &c., that I hardly know of any manufacture of such importance, after that of iron: and yet we have no smelting work for copper, or any copper mine worked in the United States.”62 Copper imports, usually of pots and cooking utensils, increased from under 20 tons a year in the beginning of the eighteenth century to a peak of 350 tons in 1760. Copper items are superior to iron ones for many cooking tasks because of their heat conductivity and imperviousness to rust, but copper’s high cost made iron the metal of choice for most early colonial pots and other utensils. Colonial coppersmiths, typically itinerant laborers who
performed a variety of simple patching or tinkering services, were few and far between. These smiths usually required a second trade to meet their meager operating expenses and might double as tinsmiths and braziers who performed other metalwork. Nearly all copper objects at this time were made from sheet copper, which furnaces produced by casting copper into long and thin molds. Coppersmiths spent most of their time shaping cast copper sheets to produce and mend items such as pans, kettles, pots, ladles, skillets, stills, funnels, and utensils.63
The disparity between copper’s demand and supply became even more exaggerated when America’s shipbuilding activities increased, including vigorous military purchasing under the new government. Shipbuilders relied upon a variety of metal fasteners, such as bolts, spikes, and staples, to hold together the timbers of wooden ships. The ocean environment subjected these fasteners to saltwater, necessitating a rustproof metal such as copper.64 But shipbuilding added new constraints to the copper-making process as well, since metal fasteners also had to withstand the constant strain of a massive ship’s weight and motion pulling it in different directions. Itinerant coppersmiths and metalworking artisans across different trades often struggled to understand and adapt to these challenges: the artisan mentality placed a high premium upon tradition and secret knowledge, but the nation’s new technological demands required a more experimental approach. Fortunately, this was where Revere excelled.