Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn
Page 1
Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn
Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology
Merritt Roe Smith, Series Editor
Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn
Paul Revere and the Growth of American Enterprise
Robert Martello
© 2010 Robert Martello
All rights reserved. Published 2010
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martello, Robert, 1968–
Midnight ride, industrial dawn : Paul Revere and the growth of American enterprise / Robert Martello.
p. cm. — (Johns Hopkins studies in the history of technology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-9757-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8018-9757-2 (hardcover. : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-9758-0 (pbk : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8018-9758-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Silversmiths—United States—History. 2. Metal-work—United States—History. 3. Revere, Paul, 1735–1818. 4. Industrial revolution—United States. 5. Industries—United States—History. I. Title.
HD8039.S5262U665 2010
739.2’3092—dc22 2010006885
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Contents
Introduction
Paul Revere: Patriot, Artisan, Manager, and Recordkeeper
Craft, Industry, and the Proto-industry Transition
1 Artisan, Silversmith, and Businessman (1754–1775)
Growing Up in Colonial America
Paul Revere: Artisan
Paul Revere: Silversmith
Paul Revere: Networker and Businessman
2 Patriot, Soldier, and Handyman of the Revolution (1775–1783)
Patriot Resistance and the Role of Artisans
“Listen my children and you shall hear . . .”
After the Ride: Martial Longings and the Pursuit of Honor
Mechanic for the Revolution: Engraving, Mill Design, and Cannon Casting
3 Mercantile Ambitions and a New Look at Silver (1783–1789)
Quest for Gentility: The Would-be Merchant
Return to Silver: Products, Methods, and the Shift toward Standardization
Technological Advances: The Rolling Mill and Sheet Silver
Labor Practices: Combining Old and New
4 To Run a “Furnass”: The Iron Years (1788–1792)
Iron from Antiquity to America
Revere the Founder: Climbing the Iron Learning Curve
Technology: Equipment, Production Methods, and Products
Labor in the Post-Artisan Mode
Raw Material Availability and Environmental Impacts
Capital Concerns: Sales, Profits, and Management
5 Bells, Cannon, and Malleable Copper (1792–1801)
Becoming a Bell Maker: An Art and a Science
Cannon Founding and Government Contracting
Malleable Copper: Bolts, Spikes, and Technical Experimentation
6 Paul Revere’s Last Ride: The Road to Rolling Copper (1798–1801)
The Early Federal Government and Benjamin Stoddert’s Navy
The Tentative Growth of American Manufacturing
The Search for Sheathing
The Road to Rolling Copper
7 The Onset of Industrial Capitalism: Managerial and Labor Adaptations (1802–1811)
America’s Transition to Industrial Capitalism
Investment Capital, Managerial Practices, and the Role of Government
The Changing Face of Labor
8 Becoming Industrial: Technological Innovations and Environmental Implications (1802–1811)
Technical Practices and Improvements
Standardization and a Tour of Revere’s Product Lines
Revere and the Environment: Raw Material Shortages and Procurement Strategies
Conclusion
Industrial Dawn: Proto-industry Revisited
Tools of the Trade: Components of Revere’s Success
The Pursuit of Happiness: Revere’s Goals and Identity
Acknowledgments
Appendixes
1. Major Events in the Narratives of Paul Revere and America
2. Four Proto-industrial Production Factors and Major Linkages
3. Prevalent Craft and Industrial Practices in the Proto-industrial Period
4. Selected Revere Engravings
5. Furnace Startup Expenses for 1787–1788
6. April 1796 Payments to Faxon
7. Revere’s Second Letter to Benjamin Stoddert, February 26, 1800
8. Employee Salaries, 1802–1806
9. Typical Stages in the Growth of a Large Technological System
Notes
Index
Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn
Introduction
On the 18th of April in 1775, Paul Revere became a hero.
Shortly after 9:00 p.m., he responded to a summons from Patriot leader Joseph Warren. Warren’s spy had just confirmed some gossip that had set the town on fire: a force of British regulars assembling on the Boston Commons would soon march to Lexington to capture Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Within the hour Revere was on the move. After asking several friends to notify waiting allies in Charlestown by lighting two signal lanterns in the steeple of the Old North Church, he met another two colleagues at the waterfront and retrieved his concealed rowboat. With muffled oars they rowed north across the silent Boston Harbor toward the Charlestown landing, cloaking themselves in the shadow of a British warship. Charlestown Patriots provided Revere with “a very good horse” and he raced toward Lexington, stopping to wake Patriots along the way. He soon ran into one of many British patrols, but maneuvered the first pursuer into a clay pond and left the second in his dust. By midnight he reached Hancock and Adams, who decided that the true purpose of the British must have been the capture of the cannon and ammunition at Concord. With two companions Revere rode toward Concord, but a second British patrol captured him, interrogated him at gunpoint, and took his horse. Thinking quickly, he bluffed them into believing that hundreds of minutemen would soon descend upon them and the British patrol fled the scene. Returning to Lexington on foot, he helped Hancock and Adams safely leave the town and then carried Hancock’s chest of Patriot correspondence to a concealed hiding spot. As he struggled to lug the massive trunk into the woods he heard a single shot ring out across Lexington Green behind him, followed by mayhem. America’s Revolutionary War had begun.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s inspirational poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” ensured that the midnight rider is the Paul Revere that Americans have come to know and love. Americans idolize their heroes and use them as markers for larger trends, as symbols for sweeping cultural values that define and enrich national identity. The midnight rider might stand for resourcefulness, mobilization, and courage, but this is not the only Revere. Longfellow’s simplified and occasionally in
accurate retelling of the Midnight Ride sidesteps several vital questions. Why did the Patriot leaders choose Revere for this mission, and what enabled him to do such a fine job? In a less positive vein, why was Revere carrying a trunk of papers at the end of the day while others took over the resistance movement’s political and military leadership? The answers to these questions, which explain his successes and failures during and after the ride, lie in his artisan status. However spellbinding the Midnight Ride might be, it represents only a small piece of the larger story of Revere’s life and times. One historian records the anecdote of a wealthy American woman returning to Boston after years lived in Paris. Upon discovering a statue of Paul Revere, she reportedly remarked, “I suppose it is proper to erect a monument to a silversmith, but why the horse?”1 His manufacturing career began with acclaimed and sophisticated silverworking activities before and after the war, but silver was only the tip of the iceberg. An accurate accounting of Revere’s lifelong contributions to his nation’s welfare must start and end with his career as a craftsman, manufacturer, and entrepreneur.
On the 18th of April in 1800, twenty-five years after his midnight adventures, Paul Revere embarked upon his final “ride,” in a manner of speaking, on behalf of his country. In the years following the Revolution he tried and failed to ascend into the gentry class by becoming a merchant or federal appointee, and then successfully redirected his efforts into manufacturing activities. Never content to rest on his laurels, Revere added new equipment, processes, and product lines to his business throughout his life. Beginning with a more mechanized approach to silverworking, he branched into iron casting, bronze bell and cannon casting, and the large-scale production of copper bolts and spikes for clients that included the young American government. By April 1800, at the age of 65, he set his sights upon the most advanced, elusive, and urgent technological limitation facing the young Navy Department: rolled copper sheathing. If he could master the complicated production process, he would enrich himself while helping his nation field a strong navy in a time of international turmoil. Success depended on his ability to apply all the resources he had amassed over his long career: technological tools, machines, and knowledge; a pool of skilled laborers as well as practical managerial experience; investment capital for the purchase of property and new equipment; and the ability to secure steady supplies of environmental resources such as raw materials, fuel, and waterpower. The story of his success, as well as the failures that surrounded it, provides the driving narrative of this book.
Revere’s last ride received less attention than his earlier patriotic service, due to its complexity and lack of drama. In history, as in life, beginnings and endings often intertwine and it becomes difficult to point to one event, to one essential moment, that defines a person or an era. Did Revere’s successful copper-rolling experiment take place on the unrecorded date when a first sheet of malleable copper emerged from his mill? Or from his meeting with Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Stoddert in 1800, when he first received the contract to roll copper? Should we celebrate the moment when he first hit upon the idea to roll copper, or when he painstakingly gathered sufficient experience from his many earlier endeavors to understand the concepts of annealing, work hardening, and malleability? Longfellow chose his subject wisely: his rousing poem succeeds because it describes an event of finite duration and obvious impact, whose Revolutionary context is immediately understood and appreciated by all American readers. The story of Revere’s artisan and manufacturing exploits is not as simple or unequivocal as Longfellow’s great work, and Revere’s halting attempts at poetry (if one can call it that) are a far cry from “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Fortunately, the complexity and larger framework of this story only add to its value. We cannot separate Revere’s lifetime of technological and managerial experiences from America’s, and by dissecting the constantly evolving hopes and fears, the triumphs and setbacks, and the overlapping and occasionally contradictory identities of this highly intelligent entrepreneur, we learn about a different nation than the one inhabited by the elite statesmen in America’s pantheon of founders.2
Paul Revere: Patriot, Artisan, Manager, and Recordkeeper
Throughout his life, Paul Revere benefited from a combination of external factors that fostered early America’s voyage toward industrial capitalism as well as personal attributes that helped him exploit these ever-changing conditions. To put it more simply, he lived in exciting times and acted accordingly. Late eighteenth-century Americans undertook two simultaneous revolutions: a political struggle against British domination and the ongoing industrial revolution that transformed all aspects of its society and culture. Revere had the rare opportunity to play a pivotal role in both revolutions, and the synchronicity of these great social upheavals was no coincidence: freedom from British regulation inspired a number of manufacturing endeavors as well as a general spirit of enterprise and experimentation.3 America’s growing population, maturing market economy, precedent-setting government, tumultuous relationships with European powers, fluid and ill-defined social classes, and nascent manufacturing institutions produced a turbulent and uncertain climate. Revere’s intelligence, drive, and creativity allowed him to identify and seize the opportunities presented by his surroundings: he adeptly learned new technologies, networked, and sought new business venues even at times when his operations flourished. Versatility, perhaps his most defining and prevalent trait, allowed him to circulate freely in the worlds of mechanic and merchant, politician and Patriot. This versatility and the consequent social mobility make Revere such a compelling historical subject: he walked in many worlds.
Revere’s life’s work helped America close the technological gap with Britain and moved the nation closer to the ideals of industrial capitalism. Similarly, his growing professionalism in both technical and managerial arenas became a microcosm of America’s. His ability to epitomize larger national trends seems somewhat peculiar if one considers that he was a highly atypical American in almost every way. Revere crafted or manufactured metal goods and lived in a large city at a time when most of the country’s population practiced agriculture in rural areas. He hired and managed a relatively large labor force when most workers were self-employed in small shops or farms. And yet, the minority segment of society that he did represent formed a dynamic and growing constituency that played an essential role in political, economic, social, and technological movements throughout America’s history.
Revere offers one final, invaluable credential that makes him a wonderful historical subject: he was a meticulous and literate pack rat with accounting and organizational practices ahead of his time. Revere’s recordkeeping methods help us re-create his footsteps. After finishing his breakfast he might head to one of his workshops to supervise his workers and interact with customers. On any given morning he could grab his notebook and jot down instructions for making silver paste or the recipe for mud for a bell mold, next to a doodle of a furnace design or an informal labor agreement specifying the salary and terms of service of one of his workers. When clients arrived he opened his “wastebook,” a record book used to document orders taken, payments received, or goods dispensed. Every few months he tallied up his wastebook entries for each client in a ledger, recording all payments and the value of the goods received in order to compute his accounts receivable. On many days he traveled to the dockyard to take orders from the naval purchasing agent or discuss contracts already in progress, and on the way home he might visit the bank to make a deposit or withdrawal. After dinner or as time permitted he drafted a few letters in his letterbook, a bound volume that allowed him to polish up the writing on each piece of outgoing correspondence before he copied the final version onto a pristine sheet of paper to be mailed. These letters ranged the gamut: personal messages to family and friends, letters soliciting raw material shipments, requests for loans or payments of past debts, responses to customer complaints, or the exchange of technical advice with fellow practitioners. All of these activities ge
nerated a paper trail, and Revere’s surviving correspondence and business records, along with those of his sons and other family members, now occupy several shelves at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Collectively titled the Revere Family Papers, these fifty-seven volumes and boxes of loose manuscripts provide an invaluable study of pre- and post-Revolutionary business and manufacturing methods. In spite of the great size of this collection, Revere could not and did not document everything. He never recorded information that he considered a trade secret, for example, nor would he write down anything that struck him as obvious or banal, never guessing the inestimable value of this information today. He also had no reason to commit to paper anything constituting a verbal agreement or “handshake deal,” business methods that Revere learned in his youth and continued to use throughout his life.
Paul Revere’s many surviving records provide the vital raw materials for a study of larger societal questions. He could not answer, and indeed, could not even frame such questions within his own lifetime because he was too focused on practical matters and too caught up in the turbulent flow of events to grasp the larger picture. Revere became one of the first Americans to shift from the role of a skilled artisan-laborer into the new one of a manufactory owner-manager, and many of his colleagues attempted to duplicate his transformation, with varying degrees of success. More than anything else, his example shines a light on America’s late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transition from the world of crafts to industrial capitalism.
Craft, Industry, and the Proto-industry Transition
The term industrial revolution conveys an important message at the cost of oversimplification. Hindsight confirms that the long process of industrialization had certain revolutionary facets, as it upended the earlier craft-based production system and irrevocably altered nearly every aspect of human existence. But industrialization was in other respects non-revolutionary, as the emerging industrial system took shape in a gradual and inconsistent manner. For these reasons I portray industrialization as a transition with craft-based roots in the distant past, industrial implications that continue to unfold, and a middle “proto-industrial” state that mixes elements of both crafts and industry. Each of these stages involves a complex set of intertwined factors: craft and industry describe comprehensive systems of production that include labor, managerial, technological, economic, and cultural practices. A craft-centered manufacturing system generally denotes a pre-capitalistic mode of fabrication and management with features such as barter exchange; personal connections between owners, workers, and customers; apprenticeships; custom-made output in small shops; the predominant use of hand tools by skilled workers; and a dependence upon agricultural employment and spending cycles. In contrast, an industrial manufacturing system typically involves extensive use of machinery by wage laborers, cash transactions, large-scale factory production, high volumes of inexpensive standardized goods, division of labor, extensive market networks, and the establishment of separate classes of owners, managers, and workers.4