Youngest child John Revere’s inheritance complemented the valuable education he had already received. Paul Revere shared his silver shop with Paul Jr. and his manufacturing activities with Joseph Warren, but spared no expense in grooming John for a higher societal role. Paul sent his youngest son to the prestigious Boston Latin School and then Harvard University and the University of Edinburgh, which awarded him a medical degree in 1811. Dr. John Revere’s long and distinguished career would have swelled his father with pride, as it included research, medical practice, and professorial appointments at different elite universities that eventually earned him a reputation “as one of the best and most learned professors of medicine in the United States.”7 Revere followed a common trend among successful artisans and businessmen who frequently apprenticed their older sons into their own trade as helpers while setting up the youngest son in a more elite calling. Perhaps he lived vicariously through John, who met the obligations of gentlemanly status with far greater ease than his father ever managed.
Joseph Warren, his father’s right-hand man in all business matters, received his personal share of Revere’s inheritance and so much more. Revere delivered his real estate, equipment, and company capital to his son in a manner that helped him carry on the business while managing the family’s overall fortunes. Exercising the option to purchase his father’s share of the company, Joseph Warren oversaw the operations of Revere and Son from the implementation of the will until his own death in 1868. He could not have been better prepared to lead the manufactory. In his youth he worked under his father’s supervision for many years and finally assumed overall management of the Boston foundry while his father ran the Canton operation. Immediately after becoming a full partner, he traveled to Britain and Europe in search of the latest manufacturing technologies and principles of factory management, which he implemented upon his return. Joseph Warren shared his father’s ability to grasp both the technical and managerial details of his operations, and although he had big shoes to fill, the company thrived under his energetic and versatile management.
Revere and Son received an early boost during the War of 1812, when naval demands increased the company’s copper sales to an unheard-of three tons of copper sheathing a week. Playing off of this wartime momentum, Joseph Warren continued expanding the company in the years after his father’s death, gradually bringing it closer to the massive manufacturing operations he had witnessed during his overseas travels. He made a series of strategic decisions that kept the firm profitable in spite of America’s turbulent economy, for example, de-emphasizing and eventually ceasing the production of bells in favor of larger quantities of standardized products such as sheets and bolts, more amenable to machine production methods. He continued casting ordnance thanks to large ongoing military contracts, and started moving that complex process closer to the ideal of standardization as well. In 1828 he took a major step in advancing his firm by chartering it as a corporation, the Revere Copper Company. Joseph Warren used the process of incorporation to facilitate a merger with James Davis & Son, a family-operated brass foundry located in Boston, and he remained president of the expanded joint enterprise in recognition of the Revere Company’s larger assets as well as his greater experience. He also used his growing societal influence to deftly fashion a technological solution to his high shipping costs: according to the Canton Historical Society, Joseph Warren and the Revere family played a critical role in routing a line of the Boston and Providence Railroad through Canton in the 1830s, also arranging for a spur to connect their own facility to the main line. In 1844 Joseph Warren also spearheaded the establishment at Point Shirley, Massachusetts, of a large manufacturing complex that could smelt and refine copper, to maximize the supply available for manufacturing. This vast complex included eight blast furnaces and eight new reverberatory furnaces and used the “German” process to refine copper ore imported from abroad via a fuel-intensive but labor-saving system.8 A public servant like his father, Joseph Warren served several terms in the state legislature and on Boston’s board of aldermen. He died in October 1868 at age 91, in Canton. The Revere Copper Company continued operating under the supervision of other family members and underwent a series of corporate mergers and name changes that eventually joined it with the descendent of Levi Hollingsworth’s company in a massive merger of six copper companies in 1928, culminating in the creation of Revere Copper & Brass in 1929. Versions of Revere’s firm survive today as Revere Copper and Brass Incorporated and the Revere Ware line of cookware.9
Paul Revere’s legacy transcends the corporate progeny of his business. His lifelong career trajectory offers many insights into early American manufacturing and business and serves as a microcosm of the great changes sweeping across the new republic. At last we can return to the questions that initiated this study. Looking at the larger American scene, what can we conclude about the birth of industrial capitalism? And returning to Revere, which factors helped him accomplish his goals, and how did these goals evolve throughout his life?
Industrial Dawn: Proto-industry Revisited
While enjoying the pleasures of his Cantondale cot in the 1810s, Paul Revere proudly watched his son run the family firm in a business climate that bore little resemblance to the colonial conditions that inaugurated his own career. America had come a long way, with new political institutions favoring the centralization of political power and widespread democracy; evolving cultural values in which economic worth and demonstrated merit displaced the value of familial status; and a thriving economy that rewarded competent, well-placed entrepreneurs while increasing the disparity between rich and poor. In spite of the attention focused on the most dramatic new industries or societal institutions, America still retained many values of the colonial society that made these changes possible. Throughout the early 1800s, older elements such as craft practices, barter exchange, and agrarian traditions coexisted with applications and ideals commonly associated with the age of industrial capitalism.
Even though profit-seeking entrepreneurship had a long history by Paul Revere’s time, the progress of American industrial capitalism faced many barriers. America’s shortages of investment capital, cutting-edge technology, and skilled labor slowed the rise of large-scale manufacturing and capital accumulation. The young republic’s long and slow transitional period stood in stark contrast to the experience of Britain, which dwarfed all other nations’ industrial progress thanks to advantages such as large reserves of skilled craftsmen, well-developed infrastructure, and naval and mercantile dominance. Until the late nineteenth century British technological advancement and manufacturing output outstripped America’s, but its strong guilds and deep-seated craft traditions engendered great pride in unique quality items and craft conservatism, containing the seeds of obsolescence. Insightful British observers noticed in the 1840s that many American shops used fewer specialized skilled workers by substituting machinery for labor. While America still lagged well behind Britain in terms of capital, technology, and labor, its thriving economy, abundant natural resources, and favorable legal environment enabled investors and manufacturers to expand their operations and steadily close the gap as they shifted from craft to industrial production methods.10
Proto-industry emerged as a middle state between craft and industrial practices, a transitional period in which each manufacturer borrowed and combined methods for managing capital, labor, technological, and environmental resources in order to best suit the ever-changing local conditions. Appendix 2 portrays many of the connections between these four factors, illuminating the limitations and challenges facing the early manufacturers who struggled to overcome America’s capital and labor shortages, technological backwardness, and limited access to trade networks and resources. Appendix 3 recaps the primary craft and industrial options available to Revere and his contemporaries.
Paul Revere’s example exposes the fallacy of rigid dichotomies, because he comfortably integrated both craft and industrial practices throughout his
career. He engaged in machine use, the employment of salaried laborers, subcontracting, and double entry accounting as a supposedly preindustrial artisan, and relied upon verbal contracts, room and board arrangements, information exchanges with fellow manufacturers, and family funding and labor sources when operating as a nineteenth-century manufacturer. Even taking into account the many times he became an early adopter of cutting-edge technologies and managerial strategies, Revere never abandoned all of his colonial methods and principles, nor was he alone in this regard. A broader study of Revere’s fellow manufacturers turns up other individuals who changed with the time as he did, alongside large numbers of artisans whose adherence to earlier practices resulted in downsizing or unemployment, as well as firms such as blast furnaces that started their operations in a nearly industrial manner from an early point. As exceptional as Revere may have been, being both a forward-looking innovator and a prominent leader of the craft system, every American manufacturer lived in this transitional realm to some degree and we cannot fully appreciate the complexity of early American manufacturing—or of early American history—without appreciating the turbulence and dynamism of proto-industry.
Entrepreneurial manufacturers such as Revere repeatedly crossed what we consider the boundary between crafts and industry, not as an intentional business strategy, but simply because it made sense at the time. Revere’s society combined old and new elements and his business followed suit. Everything in early America took place on a small scale: undersized urban centers limited the size of labor forces and markets; incomplete transportation networks raised the price of non-local raw materials and made it harder to compete in distant markets; information disseminated at a slow rate; and small, tightly knit communities knew each other intimately. Traditional craft elements had evolved in a similar European setting and fundamentally suited this small-scale environment, enabling artisans to strengthen bonds with workers and clients while ensuring that their labor and raw materials produced only the goods that customers wanted to purchase. Newer industrial practices responded to the growing population, expanded market economy, and improved networks of information and transportation by helping manufacturers expand their operations: more laborers, more and bigger machinery, more raw material inputs, stronger power sources, and greater output for more customers. In a tumultuous economic climate featuring technological advances and shifting societal conditions, success depended on one’s ability to adopt or pioneer new processes while maintaining continuity with familiar methods.
The value of a proto-industrial approach remains clear today: even our globalized twenty-first-century economy, productive and specialized beyond Paul Revere’s wildest dreams, offers examples of craft practices that often appear as solutions to contemporary challenges. Skilled craftpersons still ply their trade and create unique items according to their customers’ specifications, often with hand tools and traditional methods that might even predate Revere’s. Many trades feature versions of an apprenticeship period, allowing new members an opportunity to work alongside a mentor and forge a personal connection while mastering elusive skills. Family-run businesses thrive in many settings and maintain close reciprocal ties with their communities. “Green” firms minimize their environmental impacts by relying upon efficient and sustainable processing of local resources. And even the most revolutionary segments of high-tech industries acknowledge the merit of certain craft practices each time a startup company offers its workers control over their time, workplace perks, and the opportunity to work alongside the owner of the company with minimal managerial oversight. Industrial and craft practices coexist quite effectively, and proto-industry still holds an important position in a dynamic, heterogeneous society.
Tools of the Trade: Components of Revere’s Success
Revere’s career makes a little too much sense when viewed in its entirety. His different business endeavors, and specifically his many successes, seem to fit perfectly into a seamless plan. After all, he started as a well-positioned silversmith and built a solid reputation, patron network, and stockpile of capital. Ironworking gave him the chance to perfect his casting skills while earning a steady income from cast iron sales. Better yet, he constructed a versatile iron-working furnace that opened the door to the fields of bell and cannon casting, which further augmented his income while also familiarizing him with copperworking and government contracting. Malleable copper production such as bolt and spike drawing easily followed, and introduced him to new metallurgical techniques and a much larger scale of production. After mastering that line of work he had amassed all the technical and organizational qualifications required for copper rolling, his highest-profile and most advanced endeavor. All in all, a most excellent strategy.
Of course this simplification is false. Revere did not possess oracular powers and could not chart such a fortunate string of events, but he does deserve credit for fostering the components of success throughout his career. Ambition remained one of his defining characteristics and at every stage of his personal and professional life he sought ways to improve his social position, expand his business, extend his professional network, or learn something new. Ambition, while obviously important in this dynamic, opportunity-rich age, did not guarantee success in any endeavor, let alone in a series of endeavors. Revere combined ambition with competence: his powerful set of skills and attitudes allowed him to exploit any prospect that arose. His abilities had the greatest impact in three areas where his fellow Americans lacked experience: management, capital collection, and technical capability.
Revere’s managerial savvy set him apart from most of his contemporaries in colonial and post-revolutionary America. More than 90 percent of the population worked on small farms and relied primarily upon barter and credit interactions within close kinship and community networks. Urban craft shops had more access to the expanding market economy but remained small and closely tied to traditional practices. Despite the short supply and high value of skilled labor many craft shops failed, often because of managerial incompetence. The apprenticeship tradition focused on technical art and mystery and not upon accounting, pricing, advertising, budgeting, inventory control, short- and long-range planning, or many other important business elements. As a result, large numbers of artisans found themselves unprepared to change with the times.
Revere displayed his sharp business skills in many ways, beginning with the careful recordkeeping practices that make him such a rewarding historical subject. His methods certainly changed over time, becoming more comprehensive, more quantitative, and better organized, but even his most primitive and incomplete early records reveal his attempt to document major transactions and periodically assess his financial status. Careful recordkeeping epitomized his desire to scrutinize and improve his operations: he never accepted the status quo, and looked for new ways of expanding his business or increasing his efficiency. Revere’s analytical approach allowed him to make well-informed changes to his methods by gathering data, seeking trends, and making projections. After recording all his shop transactions, he periodically computed profits and losses; he also tracked his interactions with each client or in each branch of his business and made regular tallies of stock on hand. This approach reaped many benefits, ranging from his short-term ability to set prices or purchase raw materials to long-term strategic choices about adding new product lines or expanding his business.
Revere also developed an effective managerial leadership style, built upon many years of skilled labor and his immersion in craft traditions. Revere saw himself as a gentleman manager and tried to separate himself from the actual labor process wherever possible, but still sympathized with his workers and knew how to maintain their motivation. In spite of new machinery that changed the form and pace of the labor cycle, he continued offering his workers perks such as room and board subsidies, some control over the days and hours they worked, competitive salaries, and the ability to serve different roles in his shop and apply their own judgment. He had the natural ab
ility to blend old and new managerial principles, offering some of the earlier benefits accorded to skilled craftsmen while maintaining control over the work process and enforcing enough discipline to maintain output quality and quantity. His background in craft production also made him an expert in the technological aspects of manufacturing, which allowed him to identify knowledgeable workers, teach them to improve, and recognize the challenges and burdens of this type of labor. Revere’s managerial excellence sprung from his intimate understanding of the labor and technology that underlay all manufacturing.
Second, Revere’s success hinged upon his ability to procure capital funding throughout his career. In colonial and post-Revolutionary America, debilitating capital shortages often inhibited the establishment of new operations or the expansion of existing ones. The majority of artisans began their careers as apprentices and upon the completion of their craft education possessed few resources other than their tools. After serving as journeymen for several thrifty years they might amass enough money to purchase their own shops, but even the most ambitious entrepreneurs often curtailed or canceled plans due to a lack of funding. A would-be manufacturer’s ability to raise and deploy capital was second to nothing: success allowed a shop to expand and thrive while failure led, quite frequently, to bankruptcy. Revere used his networking abilities to raise capital from numerous sources at every stage of his adult life. He cultivated a wide network of family and friends and demonstrated a great facility for converting acquaintances into customers, investors, or skilled laborers. When some of his friends eventually assumed influential positions in the army or government they further helped him secure contracts and loans.
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