Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn

by Robert Martello

  Once again, Revere exploited his ability to apply one form of technical expertise to new endeavors, broadening the definition of technology transfer. In this case, he pioneered a new field and became the first American to roll sheet copper. Although this path-breaking achievement sounds dramatic, it was not a terribly new experience in his life since he had been jumping into new fields and mastering fresh technical challenges for years. The difference lay in the risk and scale of the rolling venture. Revere had no local practitioners to emulate or consult; British copper rollers were distant and secretive; and the financial risk was vastly larger, threatening the savings he had accrued over many decades of lucrative work. But although he could not rely upon equipment or personnel from Britain, he did draw upon the practices of other metallurgical fields, and after mastering the basic rolling process he gradually refined his techniques by comparing his products to British goods. The rolling mill, like his silversmith flatting mill, was a machine capable of producing fairly standardized output. Familiarity with machine use enabled him to participate in the technical experimentation and modification process, and then step back and teach his laborers to perform the bulk of the work after the major problems had been solved.

  Revere probably did not understand the risks he was about to face because many of them fell outside his own experiences, or indeed, the experiences of any American. He surely appreciated the technical challenges he had to overcome, but confidently and correctly assumed he could master the rolling process. However, he never realized the government would consistently fail to pay him on time, or question the propriety of a loan to private industry after it had been offered. Someone who valued reputation and status as highly as he did probably assumed that an organization as powerful and important as the federal government would honor all of its commitments unquestionably. And in the long run, in spite of painful delays, this is exactly what happened.

  Revere rolled enough copper to repay his loan by May 1802, and successive huge contracts with the navy continued to keep his business profitable for years, although the government’s payments were late more often than not. If this was the price of a relationship with the early federal government, it was one Revere gladly continued to pay. The size of these government contracts dwarfed all his other work and also augmented his reputation. Without the promise of a loan and the assurance of a huge contract that let him repay the loan in goods instead of cash, would 65-year-old Paul Revere have risked bankruptcy to begin a new American industry? The answer is clear: without the U.S. navy, no copper would have been rolled at Canton.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Onset of Industrial Capitalism

  Managerial and Labor Adaptations (1802–1811)

  Writing to Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith on May 24, 1802, Paul Revere mused about the manufacturing startup process: “You must be sensible, that every new manufacture that is attempted in our country will be attended with many dificultys . . . this has been the case with us, but we have succeeded better than we feared, considering that the business was as new as if it had never been done any where; for we could git no information respecting it . . . it can be no wonder if we made some mistakes.”1 As anyone would guess after reading this preamble, bad news was on the way. Revere and his workers had not yet mastered the nuances of the rolling process and many of the sheets in this first shipment were too short. Indeed, saying he faced “many dificultys” was an understatement: he had to confront deep debts, experiment with new equipment, search for skilled laborers, and compete with cheap imported goods, all while maintaining the steady output of bells, cannon, bolts, and spikes from his Boston foundry and Canton mill.

  Revere elaborated upon his tribulations in a December 19, 1803 letter to Joshua Humphreys, a letter that starts warmly with “It gave me Pleasure to recognize my old Friend’s hand writing.” After discussing some errors made in a recent shipment, he offered a frank assessment that mixed the good and bad:

  We are dayly gaining experience. I have had & now continue to have the whole to feel out, for I have not been able to get any information from any person and should I live & be able to take care of the Business for seven years to come I should not get to the Zenith, we are obliged to pick up hands as we can & as they begin to know some thing of the Business they leave us.

  I cannot help acknowledging that I have done better than my expectations. Our sheets are as well finished and as soft & as free from scales & cannot be distinguished from English.2

  By 1809, the situation had stabilized. In response to a government survey on manufacturing endeavors, Revere reported:

  The principle manufacture and that on which we most depend is Manufacturing Copper into Sheets, Bolts, Spikes, Nails, and every article used for fastening and Covering Ships Bottoms and Copper Smiths use. Ours is the only one in the United States . . . Benja Stoddert Naval Secretary as long as he remained in office fostered our manufactures. We manufacture Church and Ship bells of every size and weight cast every kind of Brass ordnance all our manufactures we warrant equal in goodness and manufacture to the English.3

  Although he did not estimate his capital and profits, they were substantial by contemporary standards. He employed more than ten workers and owned a variety of new machines, including two rolling mills, two air furnaces, a trip hammer, a wire drawer, and massive equipment for turning and boring his own cannon. Revere had branched out into new markets for copper sheeting, including cooking utensils and boilers for Robert Fulton’s steamboats while still practicing the casting processes he began in 1792. By this point, he thought in big terms, bigger than his own growing operations, and he strove to convince Congress to raise a protective tariff on imported copper sheets. And at last he permanently cemented his partnership with his son Joseph Warren Revere, who by this point played at least an equal role in all technical and managerial decisions. Joseph Warren shared his father’s technological aptitude and inquisitive intelligence, and added a fresh new managerial perspective that eventually carried the company through exciting expansions and new product lines. In 1811, less than a year and a half after responding to the government survey, Revere retired from the business entirely and lived with his wife on their Canton property, confident that he had left his business in good hands.

  Revere’s journey from his neophyte rolling operations in 1801 to the success he achieved by his retirement in 1811 encapsulates the major issues faced by all American manufacturing concerns during the first forty years of the new republic. As the market economy quickly encompassed all aspects of American life, new business practices enabled the most entrepreneurial shop owners to function on a larger scale. The application of technology also increased throughout this period as manufactory owners tried to boost their productivity and the consistency of their output in scarce labor markets. At the same time, society’s relationship with its natural environment evolved in courts, in manufacturing practices, and in the consciousness of key individuals. All of these changes, occurring in unison, heralded the dawn of the age of industry.

  America’s Transition to Industrial Capitalism

  In 1800 Americans celebrated the arrival of a new century. The year held a mixture of promise and concern because the Revolutionary generation, most active nearly twenty-five years before, had begun to pass on the torch to a new group who had grown up in an independent American nation. Federalists George Washington and John Adams had left the stage, and Jefferson proclaimed the dawn of a new age with his “Revolution of 1800.” These grand political changes echoed overseas events that promised turbulent foreign relations in the years to follow. The French Revolution, which started in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille and promulgation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, had finally run its course, culminating in the ascension of Napoleon Bonaparte to the dictatorial position of first consul in November 1799. Escalating warfare soon overtook Europe and produced major impacts in the New World as well, such as the sale of the Louisiana territory, economic embargos an
d blockades, and a renewed American war against the piratical activities of the Barbary powers. The new century offered countless local developments as well, threatening the upheaval of all aspects of daily life.

  Dynamic revolutions always run the risk of eclipsing the traditional settings from which they spring. Through the first two decades of the 1800s, industrial establishments, cities, and power machinery represented anomalies on the American landscape. In 1810 90 percent of the country still followed agrarian work and lifestyle patterns, and clocks and watches remained rarities. Rural “work time,” determined by natural and seasonal cycles, had a much greater influence than the carefully calibrated “clock time” starting to appear in factories and industrial establishments.4 The individuals operating in this new culture, and particularly the risk takers who first took this leap, constituted a small but active minority that played a primary role in shaping the nation’s future. Paul Revere stands out amid this unusual minority as a prominent participant in the older labor system who nevertheless pioneered the transition to the new industrial mindset.

  America’s government indirectly encouraged the growth of industry by building up nationwide communication, transportation, and marketing infrastructures conducive to new endeavors. The U.S. Postal Service played an essential, if unheralded, role by fostering a new communications network that bound citizens together in many ways. During colonial times, America’s postal system provided a relatively high level of service, especially along the Atlantic seaboard and in the higher-populated northern colonies. Most mail carriers made three trips a week and the cities of New York and Charleston were connected to each other and to England by a naval packet service. The system declined during the war, but the Post Office Act of 1792 set the stage for future development by giving newspapers extremely favorable shipping rates, prohibiting mail surveillance, and facilitating the expansion of postal routes into new areas. As a result the U.S. Postal Service blossomed into a major instrument of local and interstate communication and connection. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the postal network had major impacts upon American life: it facilitated the growth of literacy and an independent press via its support of newspapers; expanded the market economy by disseminating financial information and transporting bills of exchange; and increased participation in government by publishing federal activities and aiding communication between representatives and their constituents. These changes, and particularly the unification of the market economy, made it easier for industrialists to procure funding, recruit a sufficiently skilled workforce, locate clients and suppliers, and carry out the strategic aspects of their business in an informed manner.5

  Transportation networks also expanded dramatically throughout the nineteenth century. At the turn of the century most common roads “were hardly more than broad paths through the forest,” generally poor, unpaved, and seldom maintained, often blocked by stumps, rocks, ruts, or unbridged streams and rivers. The limited repair work required to maintain passability on these roads—primarily bridge building, stump removal, and log laying—remained a community responsibility often performed by farmers after the harvest season due to a shortage of labor and government capital. Most towns had road systems in place to facilitate the transportation of goods to market, but routes between towns or cities were problematic at best. The economic prosperity of the 1790s and nationalist sentiment following the ratification of the Constitution inspired the creation of better roads for transporting people and cargo. State governments sponsored and supervised the construction of some roads but when their resources ran out they sought out private and public companies to build and maintain toll roads, effectively transferring the cost of road construction and maintenance to those who used them. The completion of the Lancaster turnpike in Pennsylvania in 1794 produced a boom in road financing that lasted until 1820 or so, eventually resulting in an interconnected network of quality roads densest in the Northeast and in areas of high population. Rivers offered an additional form of transportation, obviously most useful in the downstream direction. Up to the start of the nineteenth century, most farmers interested in shipping their produce lived near large cities or along rivers. While water transport made more sense for bulky and low-value items, wagons proved more reliable, quick, and efficient for higher-priced items, especially when transported over shorter distances. Manufactured goods often fell into the high-priced goods category, and the improvement of roads facilitated the development of new markets.6

  Building upon these growing transportation and information networks, America’s economy underwent a makeover in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, shifting from the colonial mercantile system to a market economy that promoted capitalist attitudes and industrialization.7 The market economy affected nearly every household: by the late eighteenth century, every rural community had some connections to the greater Atlantic world through shopkeepers and general wholesalers. Even members of predominantly barter exchanges maintained informal debtor and creditor relations and established common prices for goods that eventually interacted with those in more distant markets. The major impact of this shift took place in urban centers. While America’s overall population more than doubled from 3.9 million in 1790 to 8.6 million in 1820, the urban population of the East more than tripled, with the highest increases occurring during times of rapid economic growth and in seaport towns benefiting from thriving foreign trade. By 1800, more than one-third of Massachusetts citizens lived in urban areas. Business changed dramatically throughout this period: merchants and stores grew more numerous and specialized, cash replaced barter exchanges, putting-out work became a common income source for many families, banks and banking increased, and hired labor accounted for a larger proportion of the workforce. Market growth favored industrial development by greatly increasing the demand for manufactured goods and the ability to exchange those goods over great distances. The expanding economy created a series of new problems, opportunities, and government policies that defined the nineteenth century as the age of capitalism.8

  The growth of capitalist practices had both ideological and practical components. Capitalism received a major boost from post-Revolutionary rhetoric, which shifted public thinking away from classical republicanism’s emphasis upon the virtuous pursuit of communal goals. While individuals such as Revere illustrated that communal service still held an important position in the American mindset, liberal republicanism’s prioritization of the freedom to pursue private interests achieved a higher profile. Most Americans considered the enhancement of personal prosperity a major objective of independence, and society became more consumption-oriented and materialistic throughout this period. Capitalism flourished in this fertile environment, since materialistic consumption directly fostered the desire to realize profits and amass capital in order to facilitate future earnings. The early republic period was the era of capitalist transformation, and by the 1830s capitalism penetrated society and cast its shadow over the distribution of income, wealth, and land; legal precedents; technological changes; labor, work, and leisure patterns; political discourse; and many other aspects of American life.9

  Fueled by population expansion, thriving markets, improving infrastructure, capitalist attitudes, and surging consumer demand for manufactured products, industrialization gathered speed in the early 1800s, particularly in New England, where regional circumstances magnified the benefits of machines while minimizing their harmful impacts. Massachusetts farming increased greatly in productivity around the turn of the century due to the better use of labor and the application of new strategies. Thriving agricultural productivity, abundant profits, and a rapidly increasing rural population fostered manufacturing by producing surplus laborers for workshops as well as surplus farm products for sale to urban laborers. Prosperous farmers then purchased urban manufactures in return. Farmers had already occupied most of New England’s arable land by the late 1700s and the population boom produced numerous younger sons who began migrating to the
West. New Englanders often took a positive view of mechanization: machines could not “steal” labor from an agricultural sector that produced surplus migrating workers, but they could increase output and provide new employment opportunities. New England also contained fewer recent immigrants and slaves than other areas, further diminishing the fears of a corrupt and dependent concentrated labor force. By 1800, New England’s manufacturing operations included boots and shoes in Lynn; glassware in Braintree; hats and caps in Danbury; paper in Norwich; wood clocks in New Haven; pottery in Roxbury and Concord; shovels and axes in North Easton; jewelry in Providence; and bronze, brass, and other metal trades in Bridgeport, Wallingford, New Britain, Waterbury, and Meriden.10

  American society increasingly viewed manufacturing as an asset, and celebrated the hardworking laborer’s efficient use of the nation’s natural resources to protect his countrymen from the profiteering foreign merchant. The barriers to industrialization faded significantly by the War of 1812, and Americans started identifying national progress with technological advancement by the 1820s, a trend that accelerated after railroads appeared.11 Of course, industrialization did not have a purely beneficial impact, nor did everyone hail the onset of new technological systems and production methods. Many new industries offered a web of positive and negative consequences, impossible to disentangle or fully understand until years after the fact. Women, immigrants, unemployed rural workers, and other groups often increased their income via newly created employment opportunities such as factory work, but worried about the growing authority of their powerful and exploitative employers. And while artisans might benefit from skilled or supervisory positions in new firms or factories, they had a larger chance of losing their shops and autonomy due to competition from industrial production. Industrialization raised standards of living while simultaneously increasing income gaps and exacerbating class differences. Even though American society had always been hierarchical, in earlier times the limited amount of capital and the importance of labor kept the relationships between classes cooperative and symbiotic even when they were unequal. The great stratification of wealth and the growth of a permanent worker class changed matters, creating one group of people who profited from the labor of a second group, and fewer opportunities to cross that divide.12