Introduction and Context: Economic Base-Building: Pennsylvania and Philadelphia:
This module delves into critical elements of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania’s economic base-building. After a short introduction-comment, I address the competitive hierarchical forces that exerted notable effect on character, timing, and effectiveness of Pennsylvania’s economic base development. The major focus of this module, will be an extended discussion of four important dynamics which I think are essential to understanding Pennsylvania’s-Philadelphia’s economic base-building: (1) the self-sufficiency strategy nexus and a description of its export-import fundamental; (2) the rise and configuration of its commercial elite and the early years of its aristocracy; (3) Agglomerations and Clusters: the building blocs of Pennsylvania’s economic base; (4) the background, description and key dynamics of the rise of Pennsylvania-Philadelphia’s Artisan-Scientific proto-class.
First the comment: understanding Pennsylvania’s geography.
Pennsylvania was arguably the last of the major colonies to be founded. New York, Boston, Baltimore, Newport and Charleston preceded Philadelphia by a half-century or more.
Secondly, Pennsylvania geography/climate/topography, and its configuration of Native American tribes, offered opportunities that other colonies did not have at the time of their initial settlement. Pennsylvania east of the Appalachian soils, are especially fertile compared to its provincial rivals.
Pennsylvanians–had at times the fortune and at times the misfortune, to settle on some of the richest land on the globe. For more than three centuries, German immigrants and their descendants, have maintained much of the soil in Berks, York, and Lancaster counties as among the most productive non-irrigated agricultural regions in the world. During the colonial era, Pennsylvania was the leading producer of raw iron in the British Empire, outside of the British Isles themselves [99] Randall M. Miller and William Pencak, Pennsylvania: a History of the Commonwealth (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), p. xxviii
Founded inland or a river, Philadelphia’s waterfront, the door to the European lifeline, could, and did, stretch for miles (not without some disadvantages, however); Atlantic routes to the Chesapeake basin were safer than rival ports, and its mid-Atlantic location was not particularly close to Britain’s chief enemies, France or Spain. Philadelphia, nestled upriver, possessed an extra measure of security, from both enemies and sea-borne natural disasters. Pennsylvania was no “perfect storm” of opportunity, but it had excellent prospects given the opportunity to grow in relative isolation from the Canadian or West Indies battlegrounds. War would catch up to Pennsylvania by mid-18th century, but its first half-century, the childhood of its economic base-building, its location was among the best the colonies could offer:
Of all the northern seaports, Philadelphia was least affected by the turn of the [18th] century wars. The Quaker -controlled government argued shrewdly that the immature state of the colony, the pacifist beliefs of most of its inhabitants, and its greater distance from the zone of Anglo-French rivalry made Pennsylvania participation unfeasible. So Philadelphians contributed virtually no men to the war efforts, and had to tax themselves only lightly to provide token support for what were supposed to be intercolonial campaigns. On a per capita basis they contributed less than one-twentieth as much as Bostonians did in town and provincial taxes…. By 1725 the median wealth left [at death] by all Bostonians except the upper tenth was half or less …that left by Philadelphians.
[99] Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: the Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution(Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 43-4
More than anything the political civil war between Proprietor and Legislature started from nearly Day One of its founding and never completely abated during the colonial period. For most of that period the policy system was hopeless polarized, fragmented, occasionally of the point of incoherence. With the public sector so weakened, the private sector played a considerable, sometimes major role in economic base-building.
Secondly, If the private sector is the key actor in Pennsylvania’s colonial economic base-building, several observations follow: (1) the guiding spirit in guiding private decision-making is making profits (avoiding losses), and private initiatives result from the perceived opportunity to make a profit by assuming risk. An important mitigating factor, however, is the Quaker political culture which tempers pure self-interest with its religious values/beliefs. What coherence there was among actors devolved primarily from the logic of a the colony’s imposed self-sufficiency strategy–which to a surprising extent will be left to each actor.
Thirdly. It is the individual “entrepreneur”, assisted by those who supply him/her with capital and resources, that will be the default principal decision-maker implementing the strategies and initiatives that in aggregate created the initial economic base. Accordingly, there was no basic “plan” (once Penn’s Plan and Society of Free Traders were marginalized); it was the obvious and compelling adoption of a self-sufficiency strategy that led to opportunistic herding by its young, fragile commercial elite. That it followed along paths already paved by Massachusetts in particular predisposed it to trade, particularly trade in the relatively closer West Indies is not difficult to understand as Massachusetts as all British North American colonies confronted.
Fourth, the North American colonies exist in the netherworld in which the early mercantilist/late medieval class structure weaves its way into a “modern” capitalist, diversified economic base. In this module we are well in advance of any “modern” economy or class system. As the new class system is still light years in the future. It’s path in colonial America remains predominantly agricultural.
To be sure this module will focus on its efforts to diversity beyond agriculture, but the reader cannot forget the primacy of agriculture, an agricultural workforce, and a slow fragile urban growth. and away the predominant sector of the era’s economy and workforce. Manufacturing and finance are themselves transitioning from a guild-dominated system, dragging the emergence of modern socio-economic classes in its wake. A major focus of this module is how Pennsylvania’s self-sufficiency strategy as implemented shaped Pennsylvania’s class configuration and dynamics.
What will become somewhat apparent in the course of this module is the appearance and timing, composition, and configuration of migration and immigration into Pennsylvania. Each colony will differentiate itself from its neighbors on the basis of this demographic and ethnic/religious variable. We will deal with immigration in particular in other modules, but reference to it will be made as needed.
Fifth. Self-sufficiency imposed its preference order on the development of the economic base. Agriculture, dominant, assume a default important in that not only is it the chief sector but most Pennsylvanians are in Pennsylvania because they want to be some form of an agriculturalist. For agriculture to function beyond simply local food production, the larger Pennsylvania economy had to necessarily diversify to overcome its wilderness reality.
Some sectors of the economy are central, if not natural, to the survival and development of our self-reliant colonial venture and offshoots, other sectors present at a reasonable risk-reward profile, natural opportunities for risk-takers to enter. Agglomerations and clusters are the building blocks of a diversified economic base; they emerge rather quickly, especially if capital is available. It is not uncommon that as an entrepreneurs achieves scale in size and wealth, that diversification among agglomerations-clusters will follow. Almost by definition this will affect our third dynamic, development of a class system reflective of the economic base.
In early economic history, economists used the term “agglomeration” to describe the aggregate of these individual actions/decisions that surrounded a particular sector or product. We use the term cluster, to include a diverse group of sectors that perform services or produce goods necessary for the creating the final output for sale to others/export. but because of modern cluster concept provides more meaning and insight as to what actually occurred in colonial times. A cluster involves several sectors and business groupings across a variety of products/services each of which serve a function in the final end product of a cluster.
Because self-sufficiency required export-import, each colony had to develop its own or manage access to a port city. Each North American port city focused heavily on the same clusters (because of the self-sufficiency nexus)–and will develop others given the geographical and political context of that colony. What will emerge, however, is that port specific features, for example the productivity of the hinterland, the intrusion of the provincial policy system, and the vagaries of war will affect the cluster/agglomeration. So while we can discern a shared inter-colonial pattern in agglomeration-cluster development, the variations among colonies will be noticeable and deserving of comment.
I further suggest self-sufficiency creates a “natural” priority of agglomeration-cluster development that necessarily follows from the inevitability that both export-import and fostering self-sufficiency must be pursued simultaneously. Accordingly key Philadelphia startup clusters will be home-building nexus (daily life, food production/logistics, residence accessories, health ,safety, utilities), ship-building, and finance-logistics.
Each component of the nexus, will at its particular pace, spin off specialized products (the industry’s sectors). Inevitably, the companies and businesses involved in each nexus will reflect these spinoffs, and competition and supply chains will evolve. The finance cluster for example, will informally, then formally develop capital, fabricate a currency (including barter or exchange) for transactions, issue debt, fabricate insurance, and develop a logistics system with appropriate infrastructure. As the Industry matures, relationships with other industries (companies) will be incorporated into the larger nexus–transitioning into a cluster. All this understandably takes time; time measured in decades not years.
Since the self-sufficiency nexus inherently contains industries/agglomerations-clusters that further two conflicting goals (export-import and self-sufficiency which reduces imports over time, while likely expanding exports to develop excess capital to support further growth, the clusters that focus on self-sufficiency will reflect population and economic growth. If such growth is minimal than these industries will need to expand less, and more priority and emphasis will be diverted to industries associated with economic growth in exports. One might also expect there will be variations between urban and hinterland, as each sub-economic base adjusts to flux and change.
Thus when an economic base achieves reasonable self-sufficiency, a new economic base will take precedence. If population growth creates a need for further augmentation of domestic self-sufficiency industries, than the new economic base will evolve in that direction. This too takes time. Philadelphia-Pennsylvania seems to have achieved self-sufficiency no later than the 1720 (or so), but the impact of sustained immigration-migration did not become fully felt until about 1730, and even 1740.
If so, the new economic base did not take off until war’s end (1752-4). That this would dovetail with a new colonial trade administration program suggest that multiple moving parts will create tensions, imbalances, and unintended consequences will enter into the policy picture as well. Given the fragility of Pennsylvania’s governmental sub-system, one would suspect that the private sub-system is likely to bear much of the burden in dealing with strategy execution and economic base-building.
This is the logic, a theory on the flow of ED strategies and the building of an economic base from scratch in the American wilderness. Now we move to the intrusion of the competitive hierarchies, the world external to Pennsylvania, and to add “their realities” into the Logic of Self-Sufficiency.
The Intrusion of External Competitive Hierarchies
Impact of War–The period 1689 to 1713 enjoyed only five years without war. Conversely, 1714 thru 1739 had no wars. From 1740 to 1770, only about five years were without war (including Pontiac’s Rebellion). War had its good and bad consequences on economic growth. It was expensive in the lives of men/families, and it was expensive imposing burden on a province’s money supply and investment liquidity.
Like a sugar high, certain sectors, artisans and merchants-shippers did well, but war exerted net-net negative impact on shipping and population growth–both key dynamic drivers. Lost in history is the boom and bust, hard times and good times, and the awkwardness as one transitions from one to the other. This impact is not merely background “noise”, but the generator of serious inputs into a wide variety of colonial policy areas–especially economic development.
War puts pressure on provincial policy systems, particularly to issue paper money-currency-debt, which in moderation was helpful; but chronic debt burdens, wage deflation, boom and bust, plus heavy taxation are no friend of economic growth.
The linkage of war with paper money-currency-debt issuance, which in colonial America serves the function of deficit spending, leaps to the highest of provincial priorities the more involved the province is in a war. In this respect, Pennsylvania’s inability to effectively and consistently implement the paper money nexus was not just the civil war between Penn and Legislature or even Quaker pacifism, as much as it did not “need” paper money as early in its development as Massachusetts did. Massachusetts got into warring with its resident Native American tribes–and France wasted little time in egging the latter on.
The transition from war, however, contributed to spasms of inflation, recession, and economic growth. Environmental drivers of ED policy and strategy, always central, exert more effect on new and fragile economic bases and the constituencies of its emerging policy system. In this respect we can see state and local economic and community developers as intermediaries between the macro drivers and the people and jurisdictions served.
Wars meant a lost generation, widows with or without children (this had a serious impact for example on the evolution of colonial community development), business formation and sustained progress. and in the civilian population, disease and loss of investment capital. In the next chapter on Massachusetts, we will be able to more clearly see the impact of war on the economic bases of their provinces. Partly because of its Quaker pacifism, certainly of its Indian relations policy, Pennsylvania will be in the “sweet spot” of war until it hit with a vengeance in 1754.
Interestingly, war and its after effects increased the need for colonial community development. The building of almshouses occurred in economic downturns (1720’s) that followed Queen Anne’s War; let’s not ignore the rise of community development in the immediate aftermath of the French and Indian War, and the effects of refugees from Pontiac’s Rebellion. Likely that Boston was the cutting edge in colonial community development; it needed to be for its chronic economic problems caused by war created tensions and inequalities that needed to be addressed. Pennsylvania, more than a half-century later, will draw from its Quaker predispositions, and the evolution of British poor law–infused by a relatively huge non-English immigration.
Ending wars was especially difficult on the local merchant and laboring community, although artisans were in general less volatile; local economic recession almost all translated into rising demands from the populace and a policy system in some turmoil. During war, the province–Massachusetts–closest to the enemy wound up providing most of the manpower and casualties–and paying for it. Before 1740 each colony paid its own way in a war.
Costs of war produced long-term effects, extending into the peace that followed into the socio-political structure, and wither creating opportunities to take advantage of trade vacuums and being victorious. Massachusetts diverted its shippers into privateers and launched several significant expeditions against French Canada-most of which ended disastrously. New York, but especially Philadelphia took advantage of a West Indies trade vacuum. From this we can see a competitive hierarchy of provinces and the ports had evolved during the colonial period. This set the stage for the Articles of Confederation, and the politics underlying the American Constitution
British Colonial Policy — I continually harp that the period we examine is a transition period–a rather long and indefinite-multi-faceted one–that arguably started with the English enclosure movement, the Protestant Reformation, English Civil War and Restoration. After the Glorious Revolution (1689), and England’s victory in the Queen Anne’s war (1702-14), ENGLAND (my capitalization) had carved for itself the beginnings of a colonial empire, in the West Indies, India and North America. 1650 (Civil War and Cromwell, the year of the first Navigation Act, through 1709, the formation of the United Kingdom. Lurking in further in the background is Louis XIV who died in 1715.
Empires and colonies do not come with an instruction manual, and English politics were fast evolving into British politics with events in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. This shift in “patriotism” surely infected the waves of English-Scots Irish-Scots refugees, of which the Quakers were included. England had developed a severe case of partisan politics (Whig and Tory), and despite the existence of elections, the franchise was grossly limited, and so-called democratic elections produced what can be best described as an oligarchy (aristocracy and upper middle class)) which shared power with the Throne which was not without its power to mightily affect decisions. The immediate issue at hand is the British colonial system inherently injected itself into the both the self-sufficiency strategy nexus–and the province’s economic base-building. Eventually it would permeate into the provincial policy system.
It only added to the dysfunctionality of 18th century colonial administration that this collection of elites hardly deserved the label. Corruption went beyond the simple blurring of private and public. What may be most obvious in a reading of history, however, is simple myopic vision, sheer incompetency, a curious British stubbornness and inflexibility that converted what could have been short-term disputes into long-term frustration that led to Revolution. Oh yes, BTW, the American colonial elite was its own basket of stubbornness and greed, wrapped in proto-capitalism libertarianism.
The larger point of this is the British themselves were in process of forming their own brand new policy system, built on the baggage and happenstance of its previous one. The first British Prime Minister was Robert Walpole whose term commenced in 1721. Before 1721 England did not have a prime minister as such–but in this early period the first five Navigation Acts were approved. In short the basic approach to colony management was set by actors in a previous policy system, a policy system which was overthrown by a new one.
The “bible” on this period (for better and worse) is Herbert L. Osgood’s Vol III, the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Chapter 1) [99] (the MacMillan Company, 1907). Osgood sums it up “… conditions were giving rise i the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to a novel political structure”. The supreme legislature never satisfactorily defined, the relation between the home government and the colonies … It simply legislated for the colonies on certain subjects … and refrained from legislating on a much greater variety of other subjects. There was no judicial tribunal in the British system, except possibly the House of Lords” [99] pp. 10-11. But the provinces were mostly governed by charters issued by the King–most of which were previous to the Glorious Restoration (1689).
The organs of the British government which were called into play in the administration of imperial control over the colonies were … the parliament, the courts of law, and the various executive offices and boards which surrounded the king, and constituted what was officially known as the crown (p12.) The organs of government through which executive control over the colonies were exercised were, besides the sovereign himself, the secretaries of state, the privy council, the lord high treasurer … the lord high admiral [admiralty] [and even as representatives of the Church of England] the archbishop of Canterbury or bishop of London [there was no separation of church and state]. [In the period after 1650, the privy council was the organ primarily responsible for the ‘dealings between the King and the proprietors of the colonies” [p. 16]]
The effect of this fragmentation and flux between the colonies and the Mother Country, and within the “Crown” were succinctly collapsed by Osgood:
Englishmen who, while they remained in the realm, were immediately subject to the control of the executive in all its branches and to all acts of parliament, by removal across the sea escaped from those relations and instead became subject to colonial proprietors, with their legislatures and officials. Behind and above all these were the sovereign rights of the crown and parliament, but the relation in which the colonist now stood to these bodies was no longer immediate, but mediate.
Between the two the proprietors and their officials, or the general court [the provincial legislatures] with the elected officials of the corporate colonies had been interposed. This in the realm of administrative organization was the result which followed from the settlement of the colonies on a remote continent under the impulse of private initiative. An essentially feudal relation had been created, with a large measure of practical immunity.
But from the first, the need of conserving imperial rights was felt; and, as the dominions [empire] grew and the rivalry of other competing motives developed, the strength of this feeling [control] increased. Considerations of national wealth and power as emphasized by the mercantilist theories of the time, enforced the need [for control]. It became apparent first, and chiefly, in the sphere of war and international trade. Out of these general conditions arose the imperialist views of the later seventeenth century, the chief exponents of which were merchants, lawyers, and crown officials. They insisted upon guarding the interests of England in her colonies, and upon subjecting them as a whole to a consistent and far-reaching policy.
This is a mouthful–but as a summary it is excellent to understanding the colonial-mercantile underlying dynamics and structures of decision/policy-making during the colonial period. The flaw in this colonial system, its inherent weakness, however, is contained in Osgood’s next sentence: “But, under the system of chartered colonies, the administrative machinery for accomplishing this was lacking. Without a corps of royal officials resident in the colonies, it would be useless to overcome their particularism, or to establish systematic control over them. The elected officials of the corporate colonies and the appointees of the proprietorship were almost equally useless for such a purpose” [pp. 21-2]
To compound matters , money and profit (i.e. opportunities for corruption) entered into British colonial decision-making, as did the merchant electoral constituency that demanded colonial policy should set up and protect a semi-formal English monopoly over American traders and merchants. And so, the various versions of the Navigation Acts which followed from the original one in 1650, were intended to protect British commercial-finance-shipping interests.
The Board of Trade passed regulations requiring English ships to be used in colonial trade, that American ships must ship first to England (and pay English customs)–from which English merchants would then and take possession to ship and sell wherever the may. The electoral power of these constituencies is sometimes subsumed as part of the mercantilist system, as well it was, but in the toss and tumble English partisanship of the period, it had its own dimension.
It was this exploitation that mobilized the American commercial elite encouraged within them the adoption of practices, behaviors and attitudes [varying in degree and focus among each colony] that protected their interests, those aligned properly with the self-sufficiency strategy nexus (including favorable balance of trade)–and those that served the interests of private profit–smuggling–as the hidden vigorish behind discretionary private and public investment capital.
This implicit Devils’ bargain, smuggling (and the lack of enforcement of Navigation Laws) as a key source of capital (hard and soft), a meaningful generator of private (and ofttimes public) revenues were built into the British colonial system. It would be manageable until 1765 when to this burden was added “taxation without representation”, along with a threatened crackdown on smuggling–potentially ending the hitherto lack of British enforcement of its Navigation Laws.
And so, as far as the American commercial elite was concerned, we can see how things would change in 1765. As we shall see, things were a wee bit more complicated for the “populist masses” of colonial America, however. More on that in later modules.
Contrasting this was an emerging democracy in the Thirteen colonies that, especially in large port cities, was on the cutting edge of democratic and civil rights the typical Englishman, and no Scot, Irish of Welsh resident could quite match. The mismatch did enter into English-British colonial policy. The Privy Council and the Board of Trade were sensitive to letting things get out of hand in America. Paper money issuance and conformity to British trading regulations, support in the war effort were all expectations that were ofttimes frustrated by events in the thirteen colonies. Pennsylvania and Quakers were not shrinking violets in the garden of frustrated colonial expectations., and London willingness to tolerate a failed Proprietary government in Philadelphia often had their limits–especially in wartime.
Mercantile Colonial Goals–This edge between English/British and American colonial provinces was sharpened by the closest thing to a colonial instruction manual: the theory/concepts associated with English mercantile economics. Mercantilism blended international politics with economic growth. As such, each “country”, kingdom, or republic as in the Netherlands, thought in terms of its national boundaries, with anything external belonging to one or another economic-political rival. The notion of “soft power”, economic growth and the prosperity, taxes, and sheer numbers and size mattered greatly.
Interestingly each colony operated within the constraints of British colonial trade policies; each colony reacted to those constraints and rare opportunities, in its own style and direction. For Virginia, with its near-total dependence on English factors (investment, debt, and logistics), capital, and ports, suffered in silence, and its domestic elite was drained of its investment capital. Not so the others who made alliance with pirates and turned to smuggling–not too dissimilar to our contemporary dependency on drug lords and smuggling. This, however, put them at odds with competing London merchants and the royal Board of Trade/Privy Council. In this nugget is an excellent insight of the drift of American commercial elites to opposing British colonial mercantilism.
Hard currency was gold/silver based–and the discovery of a new gold mine (if only the 1607 Jamestown Company had lived up to its dreams) translated into an increase of national power–as it had undisputedly done for Spain and even Portugal. Early English colonial policy vacillated between short term opportunistic trading (furs-tobacco) and long-term settlement. By simple sequence of events over time, settlement won out, and Britain was stuck with a budding, potentially continental set of provinces on a certain collusion course with France, Spain, and importantly Native American tribes.
In 1651 (Cromwell) the English began approving what were a series of “Navigation Laws” that regulated the trading practices of the American colonial elite. The object, among many, was to transform the colonies into inputs into the British economy–and in good measure to keep them from flirting with other mercantile rivals. These Navigation Acts had one fundamental weakness, no matter how powerfully they appear on paper: they were virtually unenforceable.
Suffice it to say, whatever the power of the evolving British navy, it could not extend day-to-day coverage of the trading routes. The West Indies, in particular, haven to pirates (or unemployed privateers), were a vacuum that attracted any potentially blue water ship to smuggle and trade. Much like illegal aliens in today’s politics, American commercial exchanges were no secret to London, or to English merchants and shippers.
The aftermath of the 1689 Glorious Restoration witnessed an attempt by the crown to replace the proprietary colonies with one administered by a royal-appointed governor, with an entourage of administrative officials. As we will see it caused very serious disruption in New England especially, and the “reform” was abandoned in Pennsylvania. When the issue of replacing the Pennsylvania proprietary with a royal governor, an initiative of the Legislature, the Quaker Party under Franklin more precisely, it proved a dead end as well. If nothing else, this is yet one more reason why the colonies-states developed their own individual path through the colonial era–leading us once again to understand why states are different today; they were identical from their start.
North American economic base-building experienced England’s progress to the United Kingdom as well as British domestic industrial economic base-building, and it found its way through the evolution from divine right kings to a rudimentary oligarchy-democracy, not to mention Britain’s almost happenstance drift to world empire. Americans, I think, fail to understand the flux, transitions, and inevitable stumblings and inconsistencies that drove the colonials wild. To be sure there were stupidities, needless inflexibility, and decision-making with more than a tinge of actual corruption–which are not to be forgiven. British colonial policy was not only a expedient at times, it was always somewhat an experiment, but in constant flux, with regulation frequently exceeding its ability to enforce its provisions, and in a period of intense partisanship with a parade of ever-changing ministers and parties in office.
In regards to another concern of this history (drift to Independence and Revolution), the thrust of British colonial administration, emphasizing as it did its mercantilist-English national interests, alienated much of the American commercial elite–certainly its wealthier logistical-finance-export/import element. If the reader is sensing I am making the case that the 1776 American Revolution did not rise solely from the 1764-1765 Sugar and Stamp Acts, nor even from the consequences of the British victory in the 1763 French and Indian War, but also for American colonial commercial elites the Drift drew inspiration from a longstanding dissatisfaction, if not resistance, to British colonial trade policy that inhibited colonial economic growth and adversely affected American commercial profits and opportunities. Loose enforcement, fabrication of bypass mechanisms (inventory logs, for instance), and outright smuggling resulted. That worked until Britain began its crackdown.
Part I–Self-Sufficiency Strategy Nexus 1701-1740–Formation of the Commercial Elite “Class”
the Logic Underlying the Imposition of a Self-Sufficiency Strategy
Imagine being taken to a virgin field, a very large one, in the middle of nowhere, and being instructed by your boss that you must build a human settlement, a town, on it. What’s more you are explicitly tasked with building a strong economic base for that town–otherwise, you are warned that town will die on the vine (talk about a really bad metaphor, except it is an idiom).
Where do I get the stuff I need to do that, you push back; “I can build buildings and make a street plan, but how the hell do I start an economy in an undeveloped wilderness, an ocean away from anybody else”. “That’s your job”, he counters, “but I’ll give you one hint: you either make your own stuff, or you get it from somewhere else”.
Stop reading! Think a wee bit. Let your mind wander. How do you actually do this? Pause for thought please! Congratulations! You have now become a 1681 Pennsylvania economic developer in a primeval New World start from scratch.
There may be other options than your boss gave you, but she forces you on basic reality: either you develop self-sufficiency by innovating, infrastructure, and entrepreneurship to produce life-sustaining products/services OR, you import what you need from somebody, the Indians perhaps (that’s what the Jamestown Virginians and Pilgrims did), or the outside world. The almost inevitable reality is that at first export-import is primary, and over time you built infrastructure, population and markets, and develop clusters-agglomerations of sectors/occupations/jobs.
To diversify from a wilderness base, you really need tools and people with the skills to use them. Sooner or later, the stuff Penn brought with him would be exhausted, and then rubber had better hit the road. Not much rubber hit the road in Jamestown, that’s why so many died in those first years. Plymouth was a bit better, but not by much. The Indians brought the food for Thanksgiving.
If you want to borrow from someone nearby, than you have got to trade, and finance that trade. Eventually the Indians wanted weapons, and that didn’t seem like a good idea. There were limitations to exclusive trading with your neighbors. So you figure out, I’ve got to import from long distances–but you still have to trade and finance that trade, and you also have to get there (transportation–ships for coastal trade or cross-Atlantic since there are no roads or bridges yet built. Plus oceans need to be crossed. You need tools, and some irritating craftsman that knows how to use them to make planks, masts, and sails, rope/cloth) or wagons, wheels and horses for land transport. Where is Door Dash when you really need them–and Amazon?
You also realize that the flip side of your workforce is a consumer who needs a roof over their head, food to eat, physical safety, and some source of energy to heat and cook, and manufacture stuff like tools and cutting trees into planks-masts for houses and ships. A plow and shovel, saw and hammer, harness and shoes for the cow, oops I mean horse, would be nice, and rims for the wagon wheels. That’s a lot of people, so you need to attract a steady stream of newcomers to fill all the vacancies in your workforce–but that also means more consumers.
I guess that is how economic development starts from scratch. I call it the self-sufficiency strategy. It’s not a permanent ED strategy, but these things don’t occur over night and its going to be around for decades. If you are successful, you can move on to other strategies. But in the first decades of a colony you are on your own, making do with what you have, and importing the rest. As we have seen in our Virginia chapter, that colony did not venture far upstream from self-sufficiency–and today many developing nations are in the same boat, making the same kinds of decisions as Virginia and Pennsylvania did. Today they have fancier and longer names, and you need math, statistics and algorithms to figure things out. Can’t stop progress!
Well that is people-attraction, entrepreneurship, skills development, lots of creativity, innovation (making do, experimenting), and the get up and go to make it all sustaining (that usually requires an organization of some type (EDO), government agency, or a business. And you need a currency to buy stuff, and a barter system to use when you don’t have money. Obviously the Maslowian necessities come first (you’ll worry about empowerment and self-actualization later). In any case this is pretty much what Philadelphia did for the first generation of its existence. It did not really move beyond this self-sufficiency phase until after 1710 or so.
Pennsylvania’s Self-Sufficiency Strategy 1682 to 1720: Underlying Dynamics and Background Context
With hindsight we know Penn’s urban and economic development plans never took root. He had to transplant his capital-export city upriver, and the new geography did not correspond with his “greene” approach or even his long-term street grid (the waterfront was spread out over several miles, into two independent suburbs) so his initial broad streets did not have the impact he desired–and were discontinued in favor of an extensive grid).
His economic development plan came to naught with the collapse of his Free Society of Traders, by default leaving decision-making to an amorphous community of diverse Philadelphia merchants. Finally, whatever any validity is planning efforts has, Penn (and almost everybody else) failed to anticipate the lure that tolerance and willingness to accommodate ethnic and religious diversity not only meant the dilution of his Quaker support/political culture, but invited contrasting cultures and aspirations to enter his poorly-designed policy system. These discordant factors would also affect the direction of economic development as well.
REWORK So the reality of the wilderness, three thousand miles of ocean between the colony and the mother country, and the relative ease of migration from the neighboring colonies–not to forget (as Penn had) that his colony inherited a previous colony in its southwest leaving behind settlements and dispirited Pennsylvanians who wanted as little to do with Pennsylvania as possible, but who had a head start in establishing contacts and trading relationships with outsiders. Threatened by any rise of Philadelphia, they attempted (unsuccessfully in the main) to capture what they could of any opportunities.
Several of these factors complicated our initial conceptual exercise which postulated a ED strategy nexus we called self-sufficiency. The essence of that strategy nexus is that in the short-term Philadelphia-Pennsylvania had to import the bulk of needed recourses, and to pay for those imports, it needed to find something to export.
To lessen the chokehold the initial strategy imposed on future economic growth and Pennsylvania’s hope for sufficient autonomy to implement its Holy Experiment and to generate prosperity for its businesses and residents, a diversified economic base had to be constructed to manufacture increasing variety of resources in the city and its hinterland (a sort of Build Pennsylvania program). That meant town-building (Philadelphia’s as the city with an export port), and people attraction of population, that ensured the key needed skills and a sufficient and growing market/consumption.
Penn was correct about the impact of the latter in his challenged planning. He realized that the bulk of the people attracted to Pennsylvania were not going to live in its urban center, but settle in its hinterland–making their living and sustenance from either homestead or plantation agriculture. That was a fact that was never challenged in Pennsylvania’s colonial history. It was also what Penn believed would pay for his expenses (and hopefully infrastructure). His financial plan was based mostly on land sales to these newcomers.
Only three years after settlement, [Pennsylvania’s] capital city had cut deep inroads into New York’s control of the Middle Atlantic fur trade and tobacco markets. By 1700 Philadelphia was second in size to only Boston in the English colonies. … from the outset Pennsylvania possessed a large number of highly skilled craftsmen who formed the nucleus of a thriving urban community, and gave impetus to the infant economy … the immediate arrival of an experienced body of merchants, men long established in other seaports … men with sound credit and reputation, men whose close mercantile contacts throughout the world of English commerce gave the economy a headstart.
Gary B. Nash, Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania 1681-1726 (Northeastern University Press, 1968),p. 57
As Teaford relates: Penn granted the [unsuccessful] Philadelphia charter in 1691, in order to achieve ‘the more immediate and entire Government of the said Town and the better Regulation of Trade therein’, and in 1701 he established the corporation of Chester [as a borough] ‘ for the better encouragement of settlers and regulations of trade’. Similarly, in 1720, George I, [on the behest of Pennsylvania’s Governor William Keith], incorporated the borough of Bristol Pennsylvania with an intent ‘to promote trade, industry, rule, and good order’. [99] Jon C. Teaford, The Municipal Revolution in America, p. 17.
Penn hoped that an excess of agricultural production above that needed to sustain the residents (combined with fur traded with the Indians) would be the export products that could pay for his imports and provide the credits-loans he needed for investment capital. That hope played out pretty well for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, but not for him personally. With the Society for Free Traders limping along, his ability to tap into the export-import community fell to the entrepreneurial merchants and opportunists that jammed themselves onto Philadelphia’s wharfs, and owned the ships Philadelphia was able to construct and sail. It was this commercial elite that dominated the transshipment facilities and infrastructure on which export-import rested.
Philadelphia did not need to “market itself” to the outside world. As part of Pennsylvania, indeed the major port of entry, Philadelphia benefited from those seeking opportunity in the western world’s “best poor man’s country”. William Penn had done that (marketed to continental Europe) before he ever left London; his religious and ethnic open-door policy system was more than sufficient to sustain a sufficient workforce from abroad–in fact with little effort Philadelphia emerged as the go-to location in the thirteen colonies. Word of mouth, in the form of letters home from the first settlers usually kept the momentum going. Events in Europe were the drivers in Pennsylvania’s population supply; they created the demand for immigration to Philadelphia.
Penn’s liberal immigration policy encouraged rapid development of the region and along with natural increase drove Pennsylvania’s population from about 18,000 in 1700 (from about 500 in 1685) to about 220,000 in 1765. The urbanized Philadelphia region grew from about 2,200 in 1700 to 19,000 in 1760, and then to about 30,000 as the Revolution erupted in 1775 [99] Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 45.
What he did not anticipate was the parade of opportunistic characters that would dribble in from the other colonies–including Barbados and the West Indies. Boston, New York, New Jersey, even Maryland and Virginia arrived and a good number of these folks came, and stayed in Philadelphia, a fodder for an expanding commercial base, and urban residents–also yet another source of trouble for Penn’s plagued policy system.
If [early] Philadelphia commercial competition was intense, it was also controlled. Family and religious connections were primary … in the growth of an aristocracy. Since a single proprietorship or a [family ] partnership was the conventional form of business organization [which required] an initial investment of 1,000 [pounds, a considerable sum] … commerce was by no means open to all [high barrier to entry required initial access to capital from other sources]
[Thus] Many of Pennsylvania’s early merchants came from other colonies where they had already been engaged in trade. Out of the West Indies came the names of Carpenter, Richardson, Norris, Dickinson, while from Boston arrived Shippen, from New York Morrey and Frampton, from Maryland Fishbourne, Preston and Hill, while New Jersey supplied Morris [No relation to the future Robert Morris]. Still in boom times [these] ambitious outsiders edged into commercial ventures, causing established [Quaker] merchants to seek ways of limiting competitors. One method of control was to restrict training in the field to young men who were close relatives or personal acquaintances. … apprentices paid to live with their tutors.
During his first years on his own, the budding trader often served as a “factor”, making his living from commissions on the sale of another’s merchandise. Capital was a necessity … the successful merchant had to have a network of relatives, friends, and agents at other ports; otherwise he would have to consign his cargo to a ship’s captain. … Quakers, who were constantly in touch with one another … and had a strong sense of being ‘a peculiar people’ maintained contact regarding commercial affairs and traded whenever possible with one another. This nexus was reinforced by [continental] family connections [99]Joseph E. Illick, Colonial Pennsylvania: a History (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), pp 106-7.
I see a rough similarity between today’s aspiring startup entrepreneurs and the techniques and practices they employ, and those that were used by their startup precursors three hundred years before. It was these opportunistic migrants who the newly-formed Corporation of the City of Philadelphia alienated with the first decade pursuit of traditional guild-like regulations on “outsiders” to the membership of that Corporation. The Corporation was never able to overcome that bad start with these entrepreneurs, and the ones that were successful became elites outside of the Corporation’s restricted membership.
The Corporation, however, as we described in these early years had a rather rough go navigating their way through the civil war between Proprietary and Legislature/Quaker Party, and a goodly number of these outsiders wound up on the outside of the Proprietary forces. The Legislature, heavily engaged in macro political initiatives, a voting majority based on hinterland delegates, and their version of limited government were not deeply committed to Philadelphia’s agenda.
Thus when the Philadelphia merchant class needed something to be done, they had to do it themselves. Once again we see the dynamics of Pennsylvania privatism inhibiting the commercial elite from obsessively concentrating on business and personal profit. Not Quaker, often Anglican or Presbyterian, these merchants brought into the Quaker “brotherly” perspective by necessity not religion.
Pennsylvania/Philadelphia’s Proto-Development into a Modern Capitalist Economy and a Middle Class-Dominant Policy System
the Background to Philadelphia’s Development of a Commercial Class
From its birth, Philadelphia enjoyed a parade of foreign-owned ships arriving at her port, releasing their precious cargoes of people and resources essential to her self-sufficiency. The Philadelphia entrepreneurs (Shippen and Anthony Morris, for example) more often than not concentrated upon opportunities at hand, and they dabbled in a hodge-podge of ventures ranging from trade, land speculation, housing-inns, tavern owners and brewer, and manufacturing and mining.
They also were attracted to servicing the ships that entered their port–providing ship repairs, goods storage and warehousing, even wharfs to dock on and transfer goods to and from the shore (Samuel Carpenter). In the first decades it was rare that an early business entrepreneur would engage in just one venture in a single sector. Diversification, as in a stock portfolio, was essential to managing the risk, of which there was no shortage. The lack of hard money for investment, the inherent risks of sailing the turbulent and pirate/privateer-ridden seas. In colonial times, just-in-time logistics gave way to never-on-time, let’s just hope its gets here logistics and finance.
The lack of insurance meant for many bust–or the successful venture whose proceeds yielded the foundation for growth. As the noted historian of Philadelphia’s commercial elite noted constantly in his comments, failure was an option, and even early success could eventually lead to failure [99] Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (University of North Carolina Press, 1986)..
Out of the rough and tumble of its first decades, the Philadelphia commercial elite created a community of winners, and their network of business allies, suppliers, and a rough cluster-based network, almost all of which involved some form of trade (and hence finance) to sustain and grow their operations. Newcomers were constant, and failure not merely a threat but a constant reality. They had to work together in tough times and these relationships were maintained in boom times. As early as the 1690’s, a group of them organized a association which met on the top of the waterfront banking, in back of Carpenter’s Long Wharf from which a huge crane lifted the goods from the ship to the wharf, and then up the cliff. Stairways up that bank led to the Globe Inn and Carpenter’s Coffee House.
That last establishment quickly became the headquarters–the Exchange–of the day, where ship captains, merchants, craftsmen and farmers gathered to trade news and commodities … Carpenter’s Coffee House suspended the sale of alcohol altogether in 1703… The [Municipal Corporation of Philadelphia’s] City Council [its lower house] adopted the place as the seat of local government [99] Domenic Vitiello and George E. Thomas, The Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the City it Made (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 3-4.
Until William Bradford’s London Coffee House opened in 1754, the Carpenter’s Coffee House, and several others over the following decades, Incrementally building capacity, gathering experience and contacts, and pursuing opportunities created by events and war, Philadelphia merchants venture deeply in colonial coastal trade, linking the American port cities, and developing trading relationships with the West Indies in particular. The other port cities, Boston especially had been early pioneers in that trade route, and Philadelphia followed in their wake. These extended trade relationships placed more stress on the evolution of Philadelphia commercial practices and the development of trading system.
Trading with these early trading partners meant opportunities in grain, flour, bread, pork, beef, and (wood) shingles, which went primarily to West Indies, Barbados and Kingston, and in return they brought home sugar, molasses, rum; trade with European ships which traveled to Philadelphia more often were furs bartered from Indian tribes in the hinterland, and in return from London and American port cities returned manufactured goods to Philadelphia. Since immigration trade did not “take off” until after the 1720’s (war was a factor), it was almost self-evident that Philadelphia’s export-import strategy meant Pennsylvania’s production of export agricultural products (furs, also) from its hinterland. Still, over the next half-century, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania became known as the “breadbasket of the Atlantic”.
Hidden-in-plain sight in what appears to be an unfolding natural opportunity to trade its hinterland agricultural products, converting them into exports to finance and foster a budding commercial economic base and trading elite, is a major reason why Pennsylvania/Philadelphia departed from the pattern of export trade pioneered by Virginia and Maryland.
England produced her own grain and wheat largely sufficient to her needs. Pennsylvania wheat offered no special attraction to English markets, expensive as it was. So it did not seek to control Pennsylvania’ export of agricultural grains–forcing poor Pennsylvania to develop her own markets of export. As asserted by John Steele Gordon that since
“the middle colonies, like New England, could not rely on a cash crop [tobacco, rice, indigo] that was in demand in the mother country, they did not develop economically as typical colonies of that time did. The planters in colonies such as Virginia depended on so-called factors in England to market their tobacco for them, and to function as bankers and purchase agents, shipping back to Virginia goods that were not obtainable there. Pennsylvania and New York, like New England developed their own merchant class, every bit as sophisticated as that in the mother country and with contacts spread just as widely over the globe [99] John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: the Epic History of American Economic Power (Harper Collins, 2004), p. 40.
And so from this seemingly natural development of the economy flowed a Mason-Dixon line, and north-south bipolar economic bases that spun off two styles of politics and policy systems that gave rise to a regionalism that led to American federalism, and a checks and balances saturated Constitution.
That meant merchants had to involve themselves in developing hinterland infrastructure and supplying the needs of the hinterland agricultural base. Makeshift roads, inns and taverns, mills, even dredging rivers and Indian trading posts. It also attracted merchants into building/owning ships, and manufacturing opportunities connected to shipping (rope and barrel-making, cloth for sails, warehouses, coopers (metal-benders) and the like. A waterfront district formed, with very serious implications on the physical and quality of life in Philadelphia.
With its young maritime industry in formation, sailors and grocers who sold consumer goods to the residents entered into their orbit as well. A waterfront worker-laborer community incrementally developed and required housing, as well as slaughter houses for animal processing. Slave trade was a constant, as Pennsylvania, Quaker notwithstanding, was no exception to ports in the Atlantic community. All these opportunities required capital, but they also expanded greatly the activities discussed in the “coffee house exchanges”. These waterfront-based “finance and logistical institutions” bore the brunt of deal-making. Merchants took shares in each other’s ships; bought and sold each other’s inventory, lent capital to transport and sell goods abroad, and finance venture into the hinterland. Private transactions all, based on handshakes, character, past experience, and simple necessity.
Shared risk made these coffee houses the precursors of the municipal Boards of Trade so prominent a century later. Political discussion, international politics, newspapers interspersed with business negotiation. One can see a glimpse of this in Ebenezer Scrooge’s various business activities (and funeral). Coffee houses filled the bill until the great opportunity afforded by a major war, the French and Indian War in 1754, simply overwhelmed the coffee house. We shall return to that shortly below. But in the meantime:
A metropolitan economy grew up around the activities of the farmers and merchants. Wagoners and flatboat operators carried foodstuffs into the city, and returned with iron tools, textiles, shoes, and other manufactured goods to be sold at hinterland stores and trading posts. On the outskirts of the city, millers and butchers processed grain, lumber and livestock from the country side. In [hinterland] town [and cities], shopkeepers grocers, tailors, and smiths, provided city dwellers with their everyday necessities, while the keepers of taverns, inns and boardinghouses accommodated visitors and recent arrivals. Along the riverfront [Delaware] ship builders, riggers, sail makers and coopers outfitted vessels, and made barrels for shipping dry goods, and the port was crowded with stevedores, carters, and laborers carrying goods between ships and warehouses.
These merchants and their ships integrated Philadelphia into the world economy, building especially strong connections to the West Indies, Europe and other parts of North America [
[99] Domenic Vitiello and George E. Thomas, The Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the City it Made (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 5.
That enhanced risk forced the Philadelphia merchants to spend more time at their coffee houses, and further encouraged their forming business conglomerates, which over time led to merchant winners which in its turn produced merchant aristocracies, and a solid, but volatile, middling merchant community, and the early emergence of an artisan class. The settlement of the hinterland, while not explosive in the two decades that followed, concentrate in the three counties, filling them up with homesteads and a few towns, and the southern three counties deepened their reliance on tobacco and the Tidewater plantation economy. With the exception of the latter, of course, Pennsylvania in this period would be mostly contained within the present-day Philadelphia metro area.
The end of the war in 1714 produced a serious recession, dampened investment capital and consumer demand, if creating some slightly higher rates of immigration. In this period the Proprietary Party had a brief period of influence and legislative power–with James Logan, the Penn Family secretary, in his “glory days”. At that time the pivot of William Penn away from land sales to Indian fur trade (a hinterland-focused strategy), made Logan the wealthiest aristocrat in the Pennsylvania neighborhood–and gave rise to William Allen and the Norris and Pemberton families rise. An embryonic aristocracy was developing. [An extensive module series will discuss the pivot to a settlement strategy, with its associated complexity on Indian relations, and hinterland development into the interior]
Quaker merchants, prone to retirement in hinterland plantation estates, and fractured between Legislature and Proprietary, undergoing generational change, were being diluted by the constant arrival of non-Quaker migrants and immigrants–a diversity which was also reflected in the configuration of the merchant community, no longer dominated economics as they had in the days of yore. “The growth of commerce and population brought about a cultural transformation from a Quaker community to a religiously and philosophically heterogeneous one … With the emergence of a diversity of competing religious dominations and sects, the cultural atmosphere, at least among the town’s bludgeoning upper class, moved away not only from Quakerism, but also from traditional Christianity toward the secularism of the Enlightenment” [99] Edwin B. Bronner, Village into Town: 1701-1746 , Philadelphia: a 300-Year History (W. W. Norton & Company, 1982), p. 43. This will discussed in later modules, as will its effect on Pennsylvania policy-making. During this period, the electoral franchise was expanded by increased landowning of its residents, and hinterland homestead settlement. The Municipal Corporation of Philadelphia stagnated and began its descent into meaninglessness as a municipal government. Yes, the reader knows that led to privatism on steroids.
The Queen Anne’s war activated Quaker pacifism, and that engendered a turbulent period in the Legislature, and with the Board of Trade and Privy Council. In London, Pennsylvania was fast becoming the most disliked colony-province, competing in that favor with Massachusetts. A series of bad, incredibly bad or totally independent Deputy Governors, only intensified the paralysis of government even in a period of somewhat tempered polarization.
Rise of Socio-economic classes: the Commercial Elite, Aristocracy
Quaker entrepreneurs and Anglican on-the-make emigrants had access to capital to start off First Purchasers artisan and sector-company business enterprises. Self-sustaining in those very early days meant not only acquiring necessary goods/materials and bringing in immigrants, but also required that shippers and merchants acquire hard money capacity to pay the bills. In those early days, pirates did some of that–and Philadelphia tapped pirates for their hard currency pieces of eight–and successful trading ventures involving pirates were profitable to Philadelphia merchants.
Trade with the West Indies was supplemented by an incredibly profitable Portuguese wine trade that made Pennsylvania the breadbasket of southern Europe–and which yield profitable spin offs with trade to Pennsylvania’s provincial neighbors. This breakout trade route was made possible by a loophole in British Navigation laws that Pennsylvania shipowners could take advantage of. Trade with the Motherland also benefited, although hard currency remained a serious issue [ A module series will deal with hard currency, paper money and the institutionalization of fiscal, lending and debt, and a colonial version of Keynesian expansionary deficits].
The real gold mine, figurately speaking was trade with the Mediterranean, Portugal and the Madeira Islands. Portugal’s foreign trade had been monopolized by British firms in 1703, and Philadelphia merchants and the English trading firms with whom they worked, saw it to mutual advantage to utilize Philadelphia ships for trade. Because of a loophole in English trade regulations, Portuguese wine could be transported and sold in the colonies without having to stop in an English port. Pennsylvania sent wood for casks, lots of wheat, and Nova Scotian fish sent to Philadelphia by export by New England fisheries. Aside from drinking (it was not viewed as good quality), Madeira was used in quantity for pickling/preserving. A curious trade to be sure, it swelled to serious volumes.
To add to the profit, the Philadelphia-built ship was often jointly owned by the foreign and Philadelphia firms, with the American component sold to the foreign firm on arrival at port, thus becoming part of the transaction. Philadelphia was flooded with Portuguese Madeira, and that was disposed of through an extensive intercolonial trade and shipments to the West Indies. From this peculiar and complicated start, the Portugal trade waxed and waned in response to the difficulty of southern Europe to trade with northern Europe during war–or in famine [99] See Henry D. Berg, Merchants and Mercantile Life in colonial Philadelphia, 1748-1763“, University of Iowa, Iowa Research Online, 1940.
That unleashed serious immigration into Pennsylvania by Germans, Scots Irish, and chunks of all kinds of ethnic and religious groups (Huguenot, Jews). Black slavery, under some challenge from Quakers, did not subside. [a module series on immigrant settlement will develop this topic more fully]. This is the period in which the Philadelphia shipping cluster “took off”. Philadelphia benefited from changes in shipping technology, as sloops and schooners gave way to larger, more profitable brigs that could better cross oceans.
Ships constructed in Pennsylvania increased dramatically [despite many Philadelphia ships being sold abroad as part of the deal in trade with Mediterranean and West Indies] , with sizable increases in employment, market share, and profitability. Twice as many ships were built in 1726 Philadelphia, as in any year before 1723 [99] Edwin B. Bronner, Village into Town: 1701-1746 , Philadelphia: a 300-Year History (W. W. Norton & Company, 1982), p. 9, with Massachusetts growth coming under some pressure, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania began its rise to become the North American most populous city and largest port of immigration.
Self-Sustaining Export-Import Strategy Nexus
An economic developer knows that a cluster-agglomeration is not gadget, a plug-and-play initiative simply installed by the magical economic developer or scholar at the local university. An agglomeration-cluster is an informal aggregate of a lot of moving parts that come together to give rise to the development of a single, or several, sectors, usually in a observable geographic area of varying size. In our history, provinces/states, sub state areas, cities, and macro-regions like the North and South, or New England, Middle Atlantic, Tidewater and South. The North American colonies are a region within the growing British Empire.
It is a fundamental assertion of this history, hopefully to be supported by it, that regions, almost by definition, whatever their scale operated in different places, and therefore are different among themselves–sometimes only in degree or scale, and other times in terms of the role they play in the various sub-regional economic bases. The variation among these regional units can be meaningfully enhanced through formation, evolution and eventual decline or metamorphosis of clusters-agglomerations. The effects of these geographic variations can significantly affect the politics, structures/institutions of the relevant policy system and political cultures.
Cluster moving parts relevant to this module, and to colonial America in general include:
(1) trade and commerce, which in turn is affected by inputs from the global competitive hierarchy (British colonial policy and events, war and peace, and competition/interaction with mercantilist rivals), and the fluctuations of trade, logistics and level of technology, and the pricing of that which is traded. Common sense, if not the stipulations of having to be paid for what one trades, gives rise to a “balance of payments” problem in which the parities involved must find resources to balance their imports with some sort of export– if the trade is to be sustained.
(2) logic and prerequisites of a self-sufficiency ED strategy that is thrust on every newly chartered colony and settled in the wilderness of North America. That strategy contains several sub-strategies from creating a somewhat diversified economic base, the attraction of sufficient population with necessary skills to produce goods and services and then consume what is produced. Entrepreneurship and home ownership (homesteading, plantation development or urban residence). There are several other strategies, maintaining public order and regulation, and physical infrastructure that is required.
The primacy of this particular strategy over all other in which it competes for priority and attention is obvious to every North American settler who sits in her/his tent the night after they scampered over Plymouth rock and set foot from their ship after a long voyage in which survival was a daily issue. They have already seen death, and all they now see is a seemingly endless dark forest, populated by who knows what–and that usually includes mosquitos and blackflies. BTW, Winter is Coming! In this colonial world, Maslow is king and recreating the structures, and business-consumer-legal-political institutions and practices is a sensible start. Plans are nice on board the ship, but Penn’s 1681 plan was in tatters by 1682.
Accordingly, each colony or province devised its own self-sufficiency strategy nexus within its newly formed policy system, and hacked a port city out of a dark forest and shoreline. The logic of that wilderness self-sufficiency strategy meant that agriculture (feed settlers and surplus for export); a home settlement strategy (with hinterland and urban variation), and a trade-logistics-finance export-import nexus must be found-created to operationalize self-sufficiency.
Diversifying Beyond Agriculture: Transition Away from Self-Sufficiency to a Growth Strategy
After the Queen Anne’s War (1714), and the subsequent transition to peace recession, the self-sufficiency strategy nexus increasingly gave way to a more simply strategy that focused on economic growth, and in particular the approval and installation of institutions, such as debt, currency and paper money, infrastructure, some accommodation with the effects of population grown on the City of Pennsylvania (physical and community development) that compelled the provincial policy system to intermittently and inconsistently respond.
Public opinion, as we know it today, formless, expressed more in the Quaker meeting house than any place else. With an electoral franchise restricted to those holding moderate property assets, established residency, and tax payers, and faced with an appointed sub-state bureaucracy/court administration and local officials disgruntled residents avoided the lower levels of government and usually headed to make its appeal to an unsympathetic provincial government.
From the proprietor’s perspective, its policy tilt was toward a more aggressive settlement of its hinterland, while the legislator’s sustained determination was to institutionalize its own body, and better achieve its aspiration of being the legitimate representative of the people’s will. To be sure the political civil war mellowed a bit from the horrendous divisiveness it displayed previous to 1710. Warfare between the branches had evolved some procedures and parameters–and with Penn gone, his sons unable to secure the Pennsylvania sinecure until the late 1720’s, the legislature marinated itself in the values and priorities of an emerging political culture that was still in evolution. That evolution would really pick up steam after 1740.
One tenet of that culture, perhaps two or three, indisputably made their appearance: limited government and its bed companion, very, very low taxes and hence few public services. The Pennsylvania provincial policy system kept to its own lane, fighting London and its colonial trade policy, and with rare exceptions, unwilling to participate in sub-state governance unless drawn in by the interests of its members who from time to time were able to form a legislative majority sufficient to support an initiative or two. Sub-state political bodies were like buffers against political, social and economic change increasing making their presence known to whoever would listen.
The physical landscape of Philadelphia revealed a greater number, internal diversity and differentiation into neighborhoods with distinctive housing, demographics, and physical and social needs. Philadelphia and its two suburbs squabbled amongst themselves, and the Municipal Corporation of Philadelphia entered into a period of detachment and a pronounced hesitancy to govern, not unreasonably as it still was checked and usurped by the hinterland-dominated provincial legislature/counties and the Quaker Party.
What could not go unnoticed with the sustained flow of immigrants disembarking from its piers, creating markets as consumers, and workforce for both the urban trades and hinterland homesteading. There were profits to be had from either. But also discomfiture and side effects of grown, noise, pollution (in the broadest sense), and public safety (fire and disease, especially) prompted ever increasing anomic response, and much coffee house chatter.
Part II — Clusters and Agglomerations: Who Cares?
Agglomerations-clusters are the building blocks for our regional economic base. These conceptual and physical terms house employment, GNP, and private actors that are involved, and they give to them a geographic expression. Economists have compiled a list of sectors (each with sub-sectors) into which the entire aggregated mess can be sub-divided. Self-sufficiency favored-required that certain sectors are primary, and others can wait.
In this module we shall see agriculture, home settlement, and export-import nexus meant that home and ship building were essential, agricultural settlement also, and the formation of a port city as well. From each of these macro “agglomerations”, sub-sectors, ranging from mining-ironmaking, timber cutting and processing, flour and grist mill, and finance and logistics with all their varying infrastructure had to be dealt with simultaneously, so interwoven were the necessitude of time and self-sufficiency. There were others, but these are dealt with in this module. These sectors are the arenas in which agglomerations and clusters played.
Having said all this contextual ballyhoo, I must stress that, in my mind at least, an agglomeration can be visually seen, experienced, if not touched; the operations of a cluster much less so–at least without a computer. I should also stress that if a cluster is more or less virtual, it is computer generated. The colonial era was not known for its computers, although no one has gone down Franklin’s cellar of recent. But cluster company interrelationships and their underlying geographic sector agglomerations are, as shall be demonstrated below, real life colonial abstractions with a strong visible geographic presence in a given economic base.
Cluster is an economic concept that while dominates may be too strong a word, permeates current economic development strategies, initiatives, organizational goals, and academic thinking. Clusters, one might suppose, are an evolution from the turn of the 20th century concept of agglomeration (a more simple aggregation of a single sector into a particular geographic region or district of a region). Clusters permit us to include individual companies, their strategies and production-workforce practices, and their leadership. It is the leadership that is most affected by their political culture, and hence more variation in cluster formation, than agglomeration which is usually thought of in economic and locational determinants, through a comparative advantage prism.
Clusters-agglomerations, this history insists, come with lifecycles. We are witnessing in this module the birth of agglomerations-clusters. My father always insisted the slap on the butt that comes with birth sets the kid off on their individual path through life. We shall see in this module and the next chapter on Massachusetts-New England, that the butt-slapping of agglomerations did vary enough to make my father’s observation valid–especially when impacted by other dynamics. Provinces, then states, and their cities would necessarily differ in the centuries that followed.
Agglomerations (as a concept) did not stress the sub-sectors within a sector, nor was it particularly sensitive, to the interplay and structural interrelations of companies in other sectors. Economic base-building requires us to be mindful of how agglomerations can affect other sectors (and the policy system), and we are very concerned with different populations (for example, slaves, immigrants) enter into/exit agglomeration-cluster formation. We may see agglomerations and clusters tilt toward Mainstream or Community ED.
The larger end goal, I might add, of cluster initiatives are usually job creation/retention, and regional revitalization or growth; agglomerations offer insight into specific place-based economic development strategy, and land use planning as well. Agglomerations, more place-specific, could involve land use and prescriptions, and logically involve placement of infrastructure. In any case, cluster or agglomeration, each sector (and even sub-sector) can, and does, differ in meaningful ways form other sectors and sub-sectors, not only among geographic regions, but across geography. Iron making is not agriculture, and making chemicals is not finance. Retail is not wholesale, and you usually don’t mine in cities (bitcoin not withstanding). The “style” of agglomeration-cluster formation will be affected by the characteristics, markets and technology of each sector. Economic developers may not be able to apply the lessons of one sector/cluster onto another gratuitously.
Cluster is much more sensitive, to the extent one sees ties among corporations outside the sector and the region–clusters are more company focused, and that offers opportunities to assist firms to take advantage of the more simple agglomeration–although agglomeration can do a reasonably good job at identifying sector spinoffs. Colonial America may not be the best time period to examine clusters, but we shall reach outside pure economic agglomeration to insert our sense of cluster formation dynamics.
If you focus on the economic base of a geographic area, an agglomeration is fine–and for the most part that is what we have in this module, although from time to time I make usually unsupported assertions that wander over into cluster formation. Mostly, I want to show to those focused on contemporary economic development, that all this colonial stuff does have some relevance to current economic development paradigms.
The Story Begins in Pennsylvania
When Penn left town in 1701, Philadelphia merchants had already developed inter-provincial coastal and West Indies trade. That is to say, for the twenty years since its founding Pennsylvania had pursued its self-sufficiency strategy in what was politically its darkest days. As argued previously the Free Society of Traders, after about five years of trying, faded gently into the good night, replaced by private initiative and aggressive risk-taking by its expanding and exceeding diverse Philadelphia commercial elite. As we shall see the incorporation of the City of Philadelphia Municipal Corporation only injected more confusion, and less coherence into any public role in economic base-building and the implementation of self-sufficiency.
Interestingly, and ironically, Philadelphia trade with England was a one way street, with Philadelphia merchants lacking the hard currency that London merchants required, were unable to trade in volume with the Mother Country. In any event just after Penn left (1702) the Queen Anne War erupted; it lasted for more than a decade, and was highly disruptive of West Indies trade in which Philadelphia merchants and shippers had been expeditiously drawn by the success of New England and New York commercial predecessors.
But before Philadelphia commercial and export-inclined merchants could move into the West Indies, they had to address a more immediate self-sufficiency need: to eat. The simple numbers, if not a Maslowian hierarchy of needs, thrust Pennsylvania into its hinterland for agricultural settlement. Most of the early immigrants were agriculturalists in aspiration and experience. They came for homesteading and for the affluent, plantation agriculture. In future topics we shall deal with settlement, agricultural and hinterland development and politics more comprehensively.
Suffice it to say at this point, self-sufficient hinterland settlement will generate need for artisans, and most certainly manufacturing. “From the very beginning of settlement, it was clear that income and wealth could be extracted, more directly and immediately from the wilderness than by planting and harvesting crops. Indeed fishing, fur trapping and timbering not only preceded agriculture as major extractive industries, but also remained important through the entire colonial period” [99] John J. McCusker & Russell R, Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 ( University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 310. Congruent with our present trade and export focus, however, we shall commence our discussion with fishing–the first step to coastal and then export trade.
Fishing–
For their own reasons, Virginians were not much attracted to sea and fishing, but the New Englanders were. Accordingly, we shall discuss this early first step, fishing and early shipbuilding more fully in the next chapter. We can assume that by the time our Pennsylvania folk began tackling fishing as a self-sufficient strategy initiative, Boston and Salem fishermen (not to ignore Newfoundland and New York) had departed from agriculture and into an early artisan occupation. As we shall learn the province of Massachusetts (and even Virginia (license), p. 313) did encourage and provide assistance to the development of a fishing cluster, if only to encourage the trading of furs to Europe.
Fishing required constructing its own boat, with limited range and size sufficient to reach nearby fishing banks. Surprise! This required wood, i.e. timber, wood processing, and hemp (for ropes). At first this was a byproduct of homestead farmers who cleared their homestead and turned to homestead crafts during winter, but demand provided more commercial opportunity. British colonial policy, the “Naval Stores Act of 1705” set quotas for masts, pitch, and planking which were in short supply in England, and great demand in the Nine Years War (1688-97). Little known, colonists built ships to use for export, selling the ship itself in the export port to pay the debt of both export and shipbuilding (hence shipbuilding included a huge balance of payment bonus to the self-sufficing colonial economy, and also provided capital for the self-sufficiency infrastructure).
The colonists built ships both for local use and for the West Indian trade almost from the start of settlement. The industry received a major boost in the 1680’s and after when war-induced increases in demand for ships permitted penetration of the British market [minimized counter productive regulation] Shipbuilding apparently slumped in the immediate postwar decade … but grew fairly steadily after 1730, with a significant quickening again in the period of the French and Indian War
The need of urban areas for firewood meant river shipping. New housing required furniture, shingles. The most expedient currency of a barter economy was rum–and so farmers developed their home brew and off it went to the piers. BTW, rum meant barrels or casks. Casks were absolutely essential to an export/import trade. In that it was hard to move a cask from hinterland to pier, wagons, sledges sleighs and then carriage production followed. Accordingly, homesteading, the housing, timber production shipbuilding, fur trading and fishing were joined at the hip, developing almost simultaneously in rather quick time frame. These are all artisan occupations.
In a very few years, as furs from wilderness trading with the Indians appeared at the piers awaiting their shipment abroad. Thus before foodstuffs, furs were the prod for larger ships because furs were not needed in the Americas, but were inherently an export product requiring shipment across oceans.
Fishermen also wasted little time in going after the most profitable fishing opportunity: whaling (oil for lamps, ambergris for perfume, whalebone for fasteners, and spermaceti for candles). This meant fishermen required sea-faring ships (not boats). By the time Philadelphia entered into the self-sufficiency fray, their regional predecessors had already developed their export-import clusters, and they were able to borrow their technology, innovation, and trade experiences in developing their own clusters.
The most glaring opportunity that first arose on the trading horizon was caused by the Queen Anne’s War, which opened up the West Indies. Easier to get to than England (if more volatile), it was the West Indies trade that fueled Pennsylvania’s first take-off economic growth. English victory expressed in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, opened up Nova Scotia, Gibraltar (entrance to the Mediterranean), but also the “Asiento”, monopoly rights to transport slaves.
The vacuum left by ravaged Massachusetts shipping was filled by boats from New York and Philadelphia. The rise of the English slave trade generated a series of routes for American merchants that yielded consistent profit, whichever colony pursued it. That was the compelling dynamic that underlay the formation of a powerful commercial-trading economic base in the thirteen colonies–and the rise of a increasingly robust commercial elite that would play no small role in the forthcoming Revolution–and yield enormous input, as argued by Beard, in the making of the American Constitution in 1789.
Flour-Making (Grist Mills), Wheat & Grains Agglomeration: the Lynchpin of Pennsylvania’s Export-Import Self-Sufficiency
The shipbuilding cluster that followed from fishing is usually credited with a foundational role in the economic growth of Pennsylvania (and the New England/Mid-Atlantic regions). It was. You simply could not export without ships in the seventeenth century–there were no major roads that early in North America. But easily pushed aside was the equally necessary requirement that something had to be laden onto the ships, and it was to be transported and sold in order to rectify the overriding need to financially balance one’s exports with one’s imports. Pennsylvania’s and Penn’s economic development plan always assumed it would be wheat and grains (yes, furs also) grown by Pennsylvania homesteaders and plantation owners. Because New England, Massachusetts in particular, pioneered this cluster–and it is core to its future economic base, we will defer our discussion on shipbuilding to the next chapter on Massachusetts.
Little appreciated was that Penn relied on wheat/grains not because he was prescient but because the wheat/grain agricultural nexus preexisted his founding of Pennsylvania. Before he ever stepped foot in Pennsylvania, his new province was already exporting grain. The Swedish/Dutch founded New Castle area was already shipping grain, and Pennsylvania Quakers wasted little time in setting up their own mills to grist the grain and prepare it for shipment.
Brandywine Village: a flour-grist mill cluster
Brandywine Village on the Brandywine and Delaware River Fall Line had its first known mill, owned by a Swede in 1687. Not unsurprisingly, Brandywine Village was Pennsylvania’s first commercial (not town) mill complex, founded by the Quaker Shipley family in the early 1730’s. Elizabeth Shipley was major player, among several Quaker investors, who built an eight building commercial mill complex that exported grain, labeled/branded as “Brandywine Superfine” directly to Europe and West Indies. That complex was greatly expanded in the 1760’s and took over during an after the American Revolution. Brandywine and the surrounding area developed into a major industrial center during that period–achieving its golden years in the first half of the 19th century.
As demand for Pennsylvania flour increased larger merchant mills [commercial mill complexes] appeared. Merchant mills differed from custom [town-centered] mills in that they purchased unprocessed wheat seeds from the farmers and sold the rendered flour at market themselves or through agents. The most famous of these merchant milling centers developed on the banks of the Brandywine River, where shallops (ships slightly smaller than sloops) were loaded directly at the mill with two hundred barrels of flour at a time for shipping to Philadelphia. By the 1770’s the Brandywine mills featured prominently in travel accounts as ‘must-see’ destinations. Their round-the-clock operation contributed to the growth of a symbiotic industrial town. Brandywine Village provided a ready supply of skilled workers such as coopers, millwrights, and ship captains [99] Jennifer Green, “Flour Milling”, https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/jennifer-l-green/.
The son of an original founder (Quaker Thomas Canby) converted an older mill into the area’s first textile mill, and then linked it to the outside world founding and serving as the first CEO of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad (1831) which is leased today by Amtrak. These early flour and textile mills justified, necessitated, the integration of the area into the developing national transportation system. Brandywine Village as it evolved from its original investment in 1731 to the time of the American Constitution (1790) is a wonderful example of one of America’s earliest manufacturing “clusters” as well as amassing a natural sector agglomeration of grist mills.
Colonial cluster development, which today is customarily directed by local-university- state governments, formed or resulted in the incorporation of the local government after having first established a powerful and robust economic base. The process of cluster development consumed over a half-century in colonial days before it achieved its break out glory days; Cluster break out seldom occurs in our contemporary era, and when it does it seldom starts from scratch but comprises a “district” within a world city such as New York, or a national “Silicon Valley” found in China, Israel, and European developed nations.
From such humble town beginnings, entrepreneurial town millers extended their geographic reach by setting up subsidiaries in other towns, and by the 1720’s-1730 establishing the first privately owned commercial mill complexes-such as the 1735 Elizabeth Shipley mill/complex in Brandywine Valley. In 1770’s similar mills were built on the north side of the stream, opposite the older ones (Joseph Tatnall, Delaware’s first great industrialist. Between 1770 and 1816 the Brandywine Mills … increased in number from eight to fourteen. “During this period Oliver Evans introduced the idea of automation to the flour mill industry, and subsequently the mills at Brandywine were mechanized” [99] Peter C. Welsh, the Brandywine Mills: a Chronicle of an Industry, 1762-1816 (Delaware History, March 1955, Vol VII, No. 1, pp17-35), p. 19
By the 1790’s in the vicinity of Wilmington, businessmen had set up along the Brandywine more than sixty gristmills, several fulling mills, a half-dozen saw mills, four paper mills, two snuff mills, a barley mill, a cotton mill, and iron-slitting mill, and a bolting-cloth ‘manufactory’ … The work of Oliver Evans ‘one of the earth’s most famous inventors’ [located in Brandywine Village] … had by 1787 fully automated the flour milling process, the first instance in history of a completely automated production facility [99] John J. McCusker & Russell R, Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 ( University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 123-4
Our Brandywine Village tale is abbreviated in this module, but one additional fact significantly adds to its importance to us. Brandywine Village is a historic district of today’s Wilmington Delaware–which annexed that suburb in 1869. Thomas Penn previously incorporated Wilmington in 1731 as a borough and county seat of New Castle County, citing its confluence with the Brandywine Grist Mill cluster. The Mill area was then redesigned by Frederick Law Olmstead. In our discussion of Brandywine’s evolution from grist mill to commercial export mill-complexes we are talking about the initial economic base of the City of Wilmington Delaware–Delaware’s present day largest city. Wilmington’s own historical description ignores this period; it has bigger fish to fry: the DuPonts.
Grist Mill as Lynchpin in Export-Import Self-Sufficiency Strategy
I reassert the grist mill was the lynchpin linking the agricultural produce of the hinterland with the urban commercial shipping complex, and thus the key to Pennsylvania’s self-sufficiency strategy nexus. Its success in grain production and export created the foundation for the next leg in Philadelphia industrialization as a textile manufacturer, and then chemical producer. That is a heavy burden of serving as the entry level foundation for Pennsylvania’s future industrial revolution, which will be shared by Iron producers to be discussed shortly. As the reader who trucks on will realize that grist mill is the key artisan institution from which sprang the town centers of hinterland Pennsylvania, and the generator of one of Pennsylvania’s largest and widespread artisan occupations..
“Gristmills appeared in every colonial community almost as soon as the first harvest, they remained necessary as long as farmers were in the area” … bringing with them the lines of communication that linked every colonial farmer with the wider world. … The miller [an artisan occupation] made it his business to keep aware of the basic facts of the market economy … because the local farmers for who he ran his mill, usually paid him in kind. He might keep enough for his own needs, but he then hoped to trade the balance [99] John J. McCusker & Russell R, Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 ( University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 321-2.
These town or two-story custom mills “serviced a geographic radius of five to ten miles–the distance a farmer could travel with a wagon in one day”. Pennsylvania grist mills were unique in North America. The grist stones and wheel was located within the mill and thus was able to operate during the winter [99] Jennifer L. Green, “Flour Milling”, https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/jennifer-l-green/. Innovation was no stranger to Pennsylvania’s grist mills and this one gave to the province a decided advantage in shipping in bulk through all seasons, key to the southern European trade route.
The town miller, himself became the hinterland’s key export agent, and from that he often pivoted it to enlarge his interests to found the town’s first merchant storeowner running the small town’s first department store–which meant in a barter economy he would purchase rum, farm handicrafts-furniture, niche homestead exports to Philadelphia markets. In a barter economy his ledge books were the source of agricultural investment capital, and his grist and then store was the equivalent of the Philadelphia coffee house–the place to go to find out what was going on.
Mills, including grist mills, were always a target for public regulation in each of the colonies. Partly this was based on the use of water power from rivers and streams which was deemed public by its nature, and partly because grist mills were central to agriculture and homesteading, and to the production of foodstuffs. The medieval and guild heritage also lent itself to an established set of customs that raised public expectations of fairness, honesty and quality–i.e. weights and measures as well as access by all farmers to the grist mill services. The reader will not lack for examples of grist mill public regulation. It was common throughout the states that regulations to protect consumers were pervasive, and a matter in which the public had high expectations.
More salient to our purposes were the efforts by public authorities to “inspect” or set quality standards for grist output that was meant for export. Caught in the Export-Import Self-Sufficiency ED strategy, grist mills “enjoyed” a good deal of “we’re from the government and we are here to help” during a time period where public regulation is often described as limited. Quality and inspections were an important provincial ED tool, one not used vigorously for Virginia tobacco, but elsewhere was commonly practiced. New York’s 1684 Bolting Act set the standard for such regulation. While this history tends to be less involved in the matter of colonial public regulation, the reader might be warned that manufactures of all types encountered serious regulatory practices and initiatives from the earliest days of colonial life straight through the Revolution. Taxes were indeed limited, but no political culture, save the Tidewater, seems to have hindered the imposition of guild-like regulations on manufactures and their businesses.
Thus flour was inspected in the middle colonies. In Pennsylvania laws for this object were recommended repeatedly in the governor’s messages to the assembly, and several such statutes were enacted.. Both New York and Pennsylvania introduced a standard system of grading, using the official term ‘superfine’ for four of the highest quality; each barrel was tested by boring … the size of barrels was likewise prescribed. Packages must bear both the colonial inspector’s brand and name of the maker. Ships’ bread [i.e. eaten onboard] … was subject to similar regulations [99] Vince Selden Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States, 1607-1860 (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1912), p. 65.
However central to urban life, the sheer volume of grist mills in the hinterland means the cluster, if it is indeed a cluster, was diffused province -wide. Mill complexes, like Brandywine, were on the outskirts of developing cities, and most Philadelphia mills were close to the fields on its outskirts as well. River power was key, and that meant river locations were a prerequisite. “Newport was the only [large] town besides New York where much flour was milled. … Most Pennsylvania flour was milled outside of Philadelphia, brought into town to be bolted or baked, and then shipped away to the islands in the sloops of Quaker merchants . Urban artisans engaged in processing output of grist mills were, of course, diverse and plentiful, and was a central element of Philadelphia’s economic base. Bridenbaugh confirms that by 1717 the Corporation of Philadelphia approved 434 licenses (i.e. “freedoms”), eighty-eight of which were to persons directly connected with the preparation of food to market and export [99] Cities in the Wilderness, pp, 183-4
Core urban business areas, the market places, auctions,. and even city fairs disproportionately were engaged in the flour-marketing, distribution and sale. Not fully appreciated was that the port of Philadelphia was from its start a “regional”, i.e. multi-provincial asset. Not only were western New Jersey towns shipping through, but also Maryland and Pennsylvania’s southeast three counties. Maryland, in fact, perceived itself victimized by this Philadelphia trade advantage trade and approved “discriminatory duties, and laws against export of specie to Pennsylvania in 1694, 1695, and 1704” [99] Cities in the Wilderness, p. 181. Pennsylvania’s road system, whatever its weaknesses, was adequate, and in 1695 the province formally made an effort to improve its “cartways” into the southeast, and ferries were in place as well.
Iron-Making: the Mother Lode of Future Industrialization
Pennsylvania, one of the later founded colonial provinces, was not the first by far to forge iron in colonial America. In fact, to some degree each colony developed its own “self-sufficient” cluster(s)–if only because an ordinary blacksmith forge could be used to produce small quantities of iron capable of being wrought into tools, nails, and basic fixtures. During the seventeenth century about a dozen true iron works were founded, and only one, the New Jersey iron mills (we discuss Triton Manor Iron Works) were the only ones that achieved productive operation outside of New England [99] https://www.tintonfalls.com/visitor/history by the end of the seventeenth century.
The iron and steel complex got off to a rough seventeenth century start, but the Great Northern War (1700-1721) challenged and then eliminated the importation of Swedish iron, and Britain focused on using colonial iron as its substitute for Swedish imports. For the first half of the eighteenth century this spurred the construction of “iron plantations”, chiefly in each province’s “hinterlands” where raw materials were accessible. After 1750, especially during and after the French and Indian War, iron forges/complex were in operation in Philadelphia, and an extensive artisan trade based on iron-derivatives (carriage, Franklin stoves, tools, construction and shipbuilding) flourished. Whatever the impact of the global competitive hierarchy, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia iron-related cluster development came out as a colonial winner.
Thus, with the possible exceptions of New Jersey and Massachusetts, iron cluster formation seriously commenced after 1710 and “skyrocketed” through 1750–when Britain clamped down and started to enforce colonial regulations which required shipment of iron to Britain, the processing of pig iron by British forges and refineries, and their sale to final end users. In this module, I concentrate on Pennsylvania’s earliest cluster development because it is clear to me there were two distinct phases in the formation of the Pennsylvania iron cluster: (1) the proof of concept phase, in which Pennsylvanians constructed iron forges and sophisticated iron plantations whose output could be depended upon; and (2) the infusion of capital by Philadelphia merchant capitalists that permitted the iron cluster to expand and develop considerable capacity relative to most other colonies of that period,
Technically, the first iron venture was from Virginia, probably at Falling Creek (near Richmond). Virginia iron ore had been shipped by John Smith to England for testing; the East India Company subsequently reviewed the tests and determined the ore was high quality. Accordingly the Company invested in the facility in 1619. The forge started producing in 1620, but an Indian raid in 1622 killed all twenty-five workers, and destroyed the forge. Other forges were opened in later years but most were little more than a blacksmith’s facility and served local needs at best–although Virginia did export iron to England in small quantities.
Establishing an iron plantation in Massachusetts was close to being a signature project for its first Governor, John Winthrop. He returned to England in 1641 specifically to successfully form a company (the “Company for the Undertakers for the Iron Workes (sic) in New England” ) with investors to finance the facility. The term “iron plantation” is of uncertain heritage but it is heuristic as a more precise description of the complex of functions, buildings, operations, management and workforce that were characteristic of an early colonial iron work in the seventeenth century to the Revolution, and the use continued into the early 19th century until technology and production innovations made the plantation obsolete and non-competitive.
The first Massachusetts facility in Braintree opened in 1645 after receiving from the General Court (the Massachusetts Legislature) a tax abatement and a twenty-one year monopoly. For anti-tax abatement diehards, this was by no means the first tax abatement in colonial America. Tax abatement, it should be understood, is as American as an apple pie, whose orchards, no doubt, were also tax abated. The due diligence for the facility, however, proved faulty as no iron ore was ever found in the riverbanks and swamps nearby (bog iron). (I never said tax abatement works all the time).
True to form, the Braintree facility failed almost immediately and was closed and a new manager was sent in from England by the Company’s Board of Directors. He quickly found a great source of bog iron around Lynn (Saugus was part of Lynn at the time). The Saugus Iron Works (The Hammersmith Works)were constructed and opened a years later in 1645-6. The Massachusetts facilities were extraordinarily elaborate, consisting of a blast furnace, forge, rolling mill, shear, slitter and a quarter-ton hammer, all propelled by seven large water wheels–with a wharf to load the output down the Saugus River t0 neighboring coastal Lynn. Accordingly, Saugus is rightly claimed to be America’s first colonial integrated iron facility. They closed however, because of labor shortages, outright mismanagement, if not corruption, in 1670.
We shall tell that tale of labor shortages in the next chapter, but in this module our attention turns to the Tinton Manor Iron Works that was founded in 1665 by an original patent-holder of New Jersey’s new colony, James Glover. Glover’s due diligence correctly determined that a facility not too far from Atlantic City, in Burlington County–which BTW stretched to the Delaware River not too far from where Philadelphia would be founded sixteen years later. Glover constructed an iron works, but needing more capital to operate it, sold half his company’s interest to yet a Lewis Morris.
The young Tinton Falls Iron Works that opened up in nearby New Jersey in 1674.. Iron-making flourished in southern New Jersey due to the abundance of necessary raw materials needed for both the fire to melt and the iron ore itself. Bog Iron was harvested from river beds and swamps, a no doubt delightful endeavor, and nearby forests of hardwood trees were converted into charcoal, and infused with coastal shells from which were extracted lime vital to the process. The self-same creeks that yield the bog iron could then be used to transport the finish product down river to the Delaware–on which, of course, Philadelphia was established. Which then raises the question of how does 1682 Pennsylvania founding fit into the development of iron-making in British North America?
As well as sufficient capital, Morris had solid political connections and he used them to secure a seven year tax abatement. With sufficient capital the works at Triton Manor, whose workforce was primarily 60 slaves (used for wood-cutting and bog gathering), and was a true example of what was called “an iron plantation”. The machinery used at the Iron Works were “made in America”, almost certainly the first to do so. On Lewis Morris’s death in 1691, his nephew of the same name took over. He was appointed in 1738 as New Jersey’s first royal governor. Another Lewis Morris descendant was a member of the Continental Congress and signer of the Declaration of Independence.
At some point in the 19th century which I could not definitively determine, the Iron Works were closed. It is possible that Tinton output did ship to Philadelphia for local consumption but the quantity was no where sufficient to be crucial to her development. In short despite serious initiatives in Virginia, Massachusetts, the other New England colonies, and New Jersey had not by the end of the seventeenth century established the foundation, at least, for the development of viable colonial iron clusters? Only Virginia and Maryland (whose Principio Works, founded only in 1715 by Virginia/Maryland investors, including George Washington’s father Augustine) exported small quantities of pig iron to England [99] Harry Schenawolf, “Iron Forge in Colonial America” Revolutionary War Journal, September 6, 2016 http://www.revolutionarywarjournal.com/iron-forge-in-colonial-america/. What about Pennsylvania when it became a colony in 1682?
Pennsylvania Iron Cluster
Little appreciated, Pennsylvania was the vanguard in American iron cluster development. As an aggregate, colonial America by the 1770’s produced almost one seventh of the total world production. “The colonial iron industry grew rapidly during the eighteenth century. In 1775, at least 82 charcoal-fueled furnaces were in operation, each capable of producing an annual average of 300 tons [and competitive with the technology and scale of English forges]. There were also 175 forges that produced the more ductile bar iron … by refining iron ore itself [refineries that could produce high quality iron to be refashioned into end products]. The industry, whether measured by number of forges and furnaces or by total output, was larger than England and Wales [combined] [99] John J. McCusker & Russell R, Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 ( University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p.326
It is no accident that Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh specifically, is considered the home base of 19th century iron-steel industrialization. It achieved post-revolution first advantage from the scale that Pennsylvania amassed during the colonial period. That advantage, based on its considerable iron ore deposits, vast forests (charcoal), and later coal beds, and the water power to operate the machinery allowed the state to “take off” in the period following the Revolution. “Pennsylvania led the colonies and the nation in iron production [previous to the Revolution].
“By the time of the Revolution Pennsylvania ironmasters “had erected more than seventy iron furnaces and forges, all fueled by charcoal, in the Schuylkill, Delaware, and Susquehanna River valleys. Iron furnaces smelted iron ore into iron, and forges reheated and hammered this iron into various wrought-iron products. By the early 1800’s ironmasters had followed settlers and demand for iron westward, and firmly established the industry in the Juniata River region and west of the Alleghenies” … After independence the nation’s output of iron grew enormously from 54,100 tons in 1810 to 286,000 tons in 1840. During [that] era Pennsylvania consistently produced half of the nation’s total. In 1870 Pennsylvania manufactured $123 million worth of iron, more than twice that of New York, the second-ranking state [99] https://explorepahistory.com/story.php?storyId=1-9-17. While New England, and later New York captured the commercial export and import sector sectors, Pennsylvania developed an iron-steel making nexus that overcame any deficiency caused by the relative decline of Philadelphia as the nation’s import-export center.
William Penn owned a forge back in England, and in the course of establishing his Proprietary, he made several attempts to jump start iron works to develop a profit-making venture for himself. His quest continued for a number of years, and James Logan was sent on several ventures, which in the end came to naught. The best that could be found were blacksmith fires using imported bloom or sponge iron could be fashioned into implements.
Accordingly, Pennsylvania, and most of the other colonies by 1700 lacked the forges, refineries and furnaces to create “cast or pig” iron from which more high-quality products could be made in volume with some efficiency and cheaper. They needed bloomeries to produce pig iron, and refineries to prepare it for further production necessary for wrought iron end products. That raises the question of how Pennsylvania blacksmiths got their pig iron previous to 1700. That pig iron had to be imported–but from where?
Look to the the colonies global competitive hierarchy for an explanation.
Swedish Ore— Britain, whose iron needs were huge imported 80% of its iron in 1700: most of it from its mercantile ally Sweden. It was Swedish iron that the colonies imported. During the 1600’s Sweden was the Baltic Sea powerhouse empire that extended to the Gulf of Finland and into the coastal regions of today’s Germany, Russia and the three Baltic states. In 1700, however, Peter the Great, Denmark, Norway, Prussia and Poland allied and waged the Great Northern War until Sweden’s defeat in 1721. For most of this England/Britain was neutral and Sweden’s principal trading partner. In 1717, Britain entered the war against Sweden after Sweden, seeking allies, supported the Jacobite Scotland in their succession from the United Kingdom. Over the decade and half of that war Britain had to pivot from Sweden for its iron.
What Britain wanted was the colonies, which had sufficiently demonstrated that the resources needed to run full scale forges and blast furnaces could be found throughout the colonies were to be encouraged to establish the capacity to make cast and pig iron in volume sufficient to British needs, and then to ship it to England where British firms and workers/artisans would convert the pig iron into plates, nails, firearms, wagon wheels, steel, and a large variety of household products.–which would be sold to British and American consumers. The Iron Act of 1705 cemented this into official British colonial trade policy–over the loud objections of Americans who had an interest in developing their own comprehensive iron works enterprises.
The iron capacity that America had developed to that point was from “bloomeries” “the most primitive form of smelting [which] reduced the [iron] ore into a porous mass of iron slag called bloom or sponge iron”. The investment and technical barriers to entry to construct bloomeries were relatively low given the number of potential sites available to colonial entrepreneurs that had ready access to iron ore, and forests to feed the fires necessary to smelt it into sponge iron. Considerably more investment and technical expertise–plus a more sophisticated transportation system to move the product around–was much harder to get.
The British anticipated in providing those resources, but less than a decade after the Iron Act American entrepreneurs from the commercial and planter elites committed sufficient capital to colonial resident entrepreneurs so that the latter could built full scale refineries and blast furnaces that could assume the middle-man function in iron-making, and therefore control the sale of their output. The belief of these entrepreneurs is that once they satisfied the requirements of the Iron Act, they would be free to sell directly to American consumers.
While not exactly smuggling, the dodge used by the commercial elite, the sale of American iron to American end-users was at best in tension with British colonial trade policy–from its start to the Revolution. It seems the most common “dodge” was to divert production after it was forged into pig iron, but previous to its being “hammered” or rendered into a form suitable for shipping. The un-hammered iron was sent to local blacksmiths or merchants who had contracted for it. Diverted iron, never having been considered as final output, was not entered into official logs or inventory.
The 1714 Iron Plantation Land Grab Movement
In 1716 Pennsylvania’s first bloomery, and by 1720 its first forge/refinery were built by a founder of the Pennsylvania iron cluster, Thomas Rutter. Rutter has acquired much of the fame as an “Iron King”, the “team” he was part of is the real story. Four individuals (Rutter, Samuel Savage, Thomas Potts, and Samuel Nutts proved to the the key leaders of Pennsylvania’s pre-1750 first phase of cluster development.
Rutter, a Quaker who arrived in 1682 with Penn, a blacksmith, who quite likely along with his wife resided and was employed by William Penn on his personal estate, had longstanding interest in iron and the establishment of an iron works, is today regarded as sort of the founder of Pennsylvania’s iron industry. It is certainly evident that he, and the herd of merchant investors that secured part interest in his iron works, were watched by others. The success of his ventures resulted in a flurry of other iron works/plantation projects throughout and after the 1720 was completed. Most of these early projects were in hinterlands in very rural areas in Pennsylvania’s southeast, and in later periods it was necessary to construct road access to these sites when water transport need be supplemented. Nutt actually returned to England and came back with indentured workers possessing skills. Rutter was the iron master, and his son-in-law, Samuel Savage was his construction manager in the first projects.
To build and successfully run an iron works in a constantly fluctuating economy, ironmasters needed considerable funds, expertise and managerial talent. Before 1840 the great majority of ironmasters formed partnerships to generate capital and spread liability among several partners. They often relied on partnerships with relatives, friends and previous business associates. Thomas Potts and his son John, who established the largest ironmaking empire in colonial America, were masters of partnering with relatives to buy and build ironworks. Many ironmasters were also merchants who diversified their holdings and risks by branching into iron manufacturing [[99] “The Philadelphia Iron Industry: Furnace and Forge of America”, Chapter 2, Iron Plantations, and their Masters and Workers, 1716-1840, https:// explorepahistory.com/ story.php?storyId=1-9-17.99]
It should be little surprise then to find Rutter’s initial ventures (Rutter’s Bloomery and Colebrookdale Furnace were financed by partnerships in which Rutter was a minority partners (3/8), The next largest partner was Anthony Morris (I) who held a 1/8 interest. Morris, a Quaker, preachers, brewer, real estate speculator, judge, and former mayor of Philadelphia. Behind Morris with an equal 1/8 investment was Alexander Wooddrop who at the time was a businessman/merchant in St Kitts, and who moved to Philadelphia in 1721. Wooddrop formed a iron and nail business which built many a fine mansion in Philadelphia. He also served on the Municipal Corporation City Council [99]. http://www.amphilsoc.org/bulletin/20011/stief11.htm.
George Mifflin, yet another Philadelphia merchant who founded a family that made the highest levels of the Social Register; Samuel Preston (1/8), jurist, longstanding Pennsylvania provincial treasurer, merchant and mayor of Philadelphia, a Quaker and close associate of James Logan and a trustee of William Penn’s will; and William Attwood, a future mayor of Philadelphia. My reaction to the members of this partnership closely it is tied to Quakers, the Proprietary, and the Municipal Corporation of Philadelphia. My belief is no one from the Lloyd faction or its Quaker Party participated in these ventures. It is also of note that a second major initiative by former Governor William Keith–no friend of Lloyd or the Proprietary–formed his own partnership (Rutter, however, was) [99] Forges and Furnace’s in the Province of Pennsylvania, the Committee on Historical Research, National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1914, https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/forgesfurnacesin00nati, p. 15
A reasonable review of the literature associated with these projects, certainly over the next decade and even more, reveals a legally sanctioned “land grab” (acquisition of considerable acreage in multiple parcels in backwater hinterland, by a number of individuals, such individuals usually participants in the Pennsylvania policy system). Rutter, a blacksmith by lifelong trade, for example when he purchased the land and built the bloomery was a sitting member of the Pennsylvania Legislature (1713-16) who took a “leave of absence” with legislative concurrence to conduct his iron-making activities. Rutter, the Bailiff of Germantown who succeeded Daniel Pastorius its founder, was a person with considerable local influence.
Samuel Nutt, his ofttimes Philadelphia-based investment/ownership partner was the closed thing to the CEO and the principal “deal-maker”, and Thomas Potts an eventual son-in-law, were also a members of the Legislature at some point during this period, and the latter among several other offices included the Proprietary Council; William Keith, a former governor and powerful and disruptive political leader also developed several iron plantations during this period). Potts, a man of substantial interest was interestingly a subscriber to Benjamin Franklin’s Lending Library in 1732. Present day Pottstown PA is named after him. A flurry of other iron works soon followed. A friend, neighbor and fellow iron investors, Samuel Nutts and Thomas Potts combined to establish the first of many “iron plantations”, Coventry Forge in Chester County, 1732.
That several participants were devout and practicing Quakers–Rutter was a minister at one point in his life and a religious activist during the turbulent 1790’s, and an outspoken abolitionist as well–there is little sense that any participant felt conflicted by ethics or conflicts of interest–and amazingly both legislative and proprietary officials took part in investment, the boards of companies, and the sale and transfer of land titles (by William Penn to Rutter in 1714 for instance). I inject this aspect of the period into the history as descriptive of an economic development policy process that poorly fits into our present day sense of professional ethics and political conflict of interest.
The 17th century “art of the deal”, so critical to economic development today has certainly evolved since 1715. I repeat that I was not able to discern concern by anybody that any “red line” had been crossed. I had earlier noticed the rather loose nature of public private partnerships in Samuel Carpenter’s ownership/construction of the Philadelphia Long Wharf–complete with tax abatement and land use rights–during William Penn’s first tenure in Pennsylvania.
The reader is cautioned that this assessment is my own–it is found in no history or article I have read–all the information cited above is drawn from these conventional histories and is available for the reader’s evaluation [See in particular, “Forges and Furnaces in the Province of Pennsylvania“, the Committee on Historical Research, National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1914, https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/forgesfurnacesin00nati; Daniel A. Graham, “Rutter’s Bloomery, 1716-1720 Berks County Pennsylvania’s First Iron Work, 2003; Melissa Pilar McValley, “Pine Forge Iron Plantation“, Masters Thesis University of Pennsylvania, 2002.
Once Established Investment in Iron Becomes Attractive–Finally, while the very earliest ironwork ventures were formed by by partnerships, mostly composed of Quakers often with friends and associates developed during the bitter political years previous to 1720, it did not take very long for the cluster to “open up” to all manner of entrepreneurs.
While the first Pennsylvania ironmasters were Quakers, the group soon became a diverse one. Men of initiative and enterprise from various countries, often with little capital, ventured into the industry. Thomas Rutter, Samuel Nutt and John Taylor represented those from England, James Morgan, Thomas Potts, and James Old were of welsh origin. Henry William Stiegel [more on him shortly], John Probst, and Peter Schoenberger were German. Robert Grace, Robert Coleman and George Taylor were Scotch Irish descent”. Others were French, Scots. Certainly eighteenth century ironmasters were more native born [99] Arthur C. Bining, “Early Ironmasters of Pennsylvania“, Pennsylvania History, Vol. XVIII, No.2, April, 1951), p.96.
The key to Pennsylvania’s formidable development of a iron cluster before 1750 was the willingness of its Philadelphia merchant and Quaker plantation elite to invest in the partnerships formed to found iron plantations. The closeness of that community to the iron innovators and pioneers was quite remarkable. Indeed, Victor Selden Clark, the dean of colonial manufacturing states “It was the presence of capital, as well as natural resources that caused the iron industry to get so firm a foothold in Pennsylvania and New Jersey … [in Pennsylvania] were formed the first strictly local companies [i.e. partnerships] for undertaking ironworks on a scale large enough to give a capitalist character to this industry” [99] Victor Selden Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States, 1607-1860 (Carnegie Institution of Washington. 1916), digitized by the Microsoft Corporation by Internet Archive in Toronto, 2007, p. 173. The same can be said for investors. Investor-owned partnerships dominated the sector-cluster, and as diverse a motley crew as could be assembled, from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Penn, invested in different partnerships.
The shift from early stage, startup iron cluster investment to the post-takeoff mature iron cluster is not necessarily dramatic, but seems to have been woven into the fabric of iron plantation life cycle. A goodly number of the ironworks established in the Rutter post 1721 wave had their ups and downs; Rutter’s furnaces closed down relatively early. Potts’s Reading Furnace was more successful but it too had its ebbs and flows.
Some assert the second major ironwork built after Rutter’s 1721 furnace was the Durham Ironworks in Bucks County. It opened in 1726-7 and its investment partnership was led by none other than our James Logan, with a 1/4 the interest. Like Rutter’s investment group, the partnership was drawn from Logan’s vast network of allies, friends, co-religionists, and a smattering of opportunists. Durham, unlike Rutter’s furnaces continued well into the 19th century–but herein we can see how different investment groups enter the picture, and the nature of these investment groups change subtlety.
Durham was sold several times during the 18th century, and during the Revolution it was confiscated from its loyalist-inclined owners. These periodic sales and full-scale modernization that accompanied them all required new injections of capital and new investment groups. In that Durham persisted into a period in the early 19th century, technological and logistical change meant huge injections of new capital. Surprisingly, investment in the very early furnaces was modest relative to the new furnaces built decades later.
The iron plantations expanded, and when the shift of fuel from charcoal to coke occurred, for instance, this required new furnaces, new fuel logistics, and even a new workforce. In order words the capital requirements for a iron and steel furnace changed considerably over time, and unsurprisingly so did the investment groups. The first major shift came after the 1750’s and picked up steam after the French and Indian War. This shift, within the time frame of this module and chapter, In the 1750’s we can see, as Doerflinger traces, the movement of Philadelphia merchants and particularly Philadelphia shippers into the iron cluster investment groups.
In that period before the Revolution, Doerflinger assets that over two dozen wealthy Philadelphia merchants. He considers that involvement in iron manufacturing a bit remarkable in that it cut against the grain of the business strategy and organization of these typical wealthy merchants. They usually ran small companies, with a few moving parts as needed, and with few employees, clerks and sea captains. Ironworks investment got them involved in enterprises that held thousands of acres of land, hundreds of employees, technology volatility (and Indian attack), and compared to a construction of a ship, furnaces were six times more expensive [99] For this section see Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 151-7
Doerflinger senses the motivation of these wealthy merchants was but a variant of that we see in the Boston merchants (the future cotton Whigs), who shifted at the same time into cotton-textile manufacturing as an investment for these mature wealthy individuals that promised a healthy return of the investment over a sustained period of time–in short the gazelle-like growth potential of an iron mill had made the investment in it attractive to investors with deeper pockets–and that was well because to be a gazelle meant sustained heavy investment–iron making was capital intensive by this point.
All this suggests that colonial clusters were not insensitive to time, environmental change, or transformations in technology and markets. The growth and the decline of iron plantation alerts us that “deindustrialization” (by which I mean the breakdown, even collapse, of a sector cluster) was not unheard of in colonial days. Seldom is noted when these occur (collapse of whale oil, for example, which brought New England’s whaling industry to a screeching halt). But as we shall see in this and other modules, this is all too common even in colonial America. That clusters have life cycles, can be seen less clearly through the mists of history, but the iron-making cluster in Pennsylvania certainly went through several major transformation, leaving a much reduced cluster in present-day Pennsylvania. My work, As Two Ships, devotes more than a few pages to this topic.
There was a second reason that was also attractive to these shipping merchants. To run a successful balance of payment, agricultural exports were not sufficient. For shipments to England to overcome the import deficit, Philadelphia shippers could not fill their ships with unwanted grain; rather lumber and iron proved to be what the British wanted. Since most Pennsylvania iron production served Pennsylvania (or American) consumption, Shipper ownership of ironworks could endure a cost-effective and secure access to iron for shipment to England. In the period before the Revolution, the timing of such investment was perfect, and at a critical juncture in the evolution of the iron culture, the investment capital so vital to its future–and to Pennsylvania’s future as the leader of American 19th century industrial development–fell into place.
Economic Development Implications of Pennsylvania Iron Plantations–The very earliest iron plantations of Rutter, Nutt, and Potts were less robust, smaller in footprint, and their management and ownership more fluid, their interlocking corporations, spread across a number of seemingly discrete plantations, created the mass volume needed to prove iron making could be profitable and technically competitive in the hinterlands of Pennsylvania. They evolved, became more complex and “institutionalized” their procedures, management and operation. Part of an iron cluster “movement” that followed the decade or so after 1720, it was this earliest vanguard that we credit most in settling Pennsylvania down on its industrial path.
Iron Plantations were found in each colony-province that constructed an Iron Works during this time period. At each of the “iron plantations” there were many buildings, ranging from various production sites, fire pits, refinery forges and hammering building. Dorms for the workers, and iron master mansion were also on site. Associated buildings like a grist house and logistics focused infrastructure were common. Similar in function and internal agglomeration of facilities from various sectors relevant to the budding cluster to an agricultural plantation, they were in effect a small town almost, privately governed–i.e. a colonial era company town.
As they matured these iron plantations generated some literature that firmly suggests a sort of medieval or feudal society took root, with all its socio-economic warts and dysfunctions. Both types of plantations were located exclusively in rural areas, apart from villages or towns/counties although legally within their boundaries, they did little to prompt meaningful urbanization. [99] See Arthur Cecil Bining, “the Iron Planation of Early Pennsylvania”, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol 57, No. 2 (1933), pp. 117-37. Their glory days waned after 1840, and as modern iron and technology innovation transformed the industry sector, the cluster shifted to areas, like Pittsburgh west of the Alleghenies. Today they are historical districts, with ruins and recreations hopefully perpetuating the heritage and memory of a foundation economic cluster that formed our nation, and set the Middle Atlantic (and northern Midwest) states down a 19th century industrialization.
While iron was exported from Pennsylvania, in quantities that were meaningful to the province’s balance of trade, the great bulk of its pig iron and refined iron were used in local, province, and coastal trade to other colonies. Pennsylvania departed from other colonies who were unable to satisfy local demand for bloomery or pig iron, and whose local blacksmiths and iron-relevant artisans were left in need. Not surprisingly, Pennsylvania was able to satisfy some of that through intracoastal trade.
During the later colonial period iron and ironware were among the most important coastwise commodities ,,, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland shipped pig iron to Massachusetts where it was cast into pots and kettles, and refined into bars, and manufactured into nails and implements, part of which were reshipped to the central and southern colonies. New England manufacturers were also insistent buyers of nail rods from Philadelphia forgemen. Pennsylvania likewise exported manufactured iron. In 1752 more than 4600 tons of bar and iron were shipped from Philadelphia, mostly to other colonies and the West Indies, the greater part of which must have been manufactured in America as the imports of Pennsylvania and the neighboring provinces never exceeded a few hundred tons per annum. In the eighteenth century Pennsylvania stoves were advertised in Boston, Before the adoption of the Constitution [including the years of the Articles of Confederation] tools and agricultural implements made in Philadelphia were sold extensively in other colonies … [and the West Indies] [99] Victor Selden Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States, 1607-1860 (Carnegie Institution of Washington. 1916), digitized by the Microsoft Corporation by Internet Archive in Toronto, 2007, pp. 114-5
An important reason why pig iron export never took off in the colonial period was that it was exceedingly difficult to get it to Philadelphia. Accordingly, “Ironmasters frequently asked the colonial assembly to improve roads and transportation … Petitioners from Lancaster County noted in 1736 that they suffered from a ‘want of Passable Roads’, and appealed for a ‘Great Wagon Road from the Town of Lancaster to the Ironworks in Coventry and a t Reading Furnace” . [99] “The Philadelphia Iron Industry: Furnace and Forge of America”, Overview, https:// explorepahistory.com/ story.php?storyId=1-9-17. https://explorepahistory.com/story.php?storyId=1-9-17.
As we shall later see, building road infrastructure was not a priority for the provincial legislature. They built these highways only when majorities could be assembled in the legislature, and that was both infrequent and usually confined to the geography favored by the legislative majority, and not to the greater provincial welfare or economic interest. Even by the early nineteenth century, transportation to Philadelphia was still a problem. Accordingly, “ironmasters began to transport more products father afield, sending iron on horseback to Pittsburgh, or down the Juniata and Susquehanna Rivers to [– of all places–] Baltimore. Poor transportation deterred sales in wider markets, however, until the spread of canals and railroads” [99] “The Philadelphia Iron Industry: Furnace and Forge of America”, Overview, https:// explorepahistory.com/ story.php?storyId=1-9-17.
Until 1750, enforcement of the 1705 Iron Act was uneven to non-existent, and since local and provincial officials were often official or unofficial participants in the iron plantation or its ownership, there were incentives not to look too closely. In 1750 new legislation attempt to close the loopholes, and it generated considerable hostility among relevant interests. As such it was a small but congruent part of the resistance to the British colonial trade characteristic of the last decade or so previous to the Revolution. One wonders how this sector fared during the period of non-importation after 1770.
As the colonies moved towards rebellion [in 1775] [American] iron forges expanded their capacities beyond merely shipping smelted pig iron to England. Refineries were built. Blast furnaces made bar iron and steel that produced high quality products ranging from pots and pans to cannon and musket barrels. By the start of the American Revolution, the colonies had a highly developed iron industry. If the colonies were taken as one country, they were within the top five iron producers of the world, and third in terms of exports .[99] Harry Schenawolf, “Iron Forge in Colonial America” Revolutionary War Journal, September 6, 2016 http://www.revolutionarywarjournal.com/iron-forge-in-colonial-america/.
the Glass-Making Cluster: Clusters don’t necessarily conform to political boundaries–One final brief case study on the formation of the glass-making cluster.
A major reason we discuss the glass-making cluster is that it drew from German immigrants, and benefited immensely from their entrepreneurism and some expertise they brought with them. It does not appear that glass-making provided any material economic prosperity to the typical German immigrant, not did it offer employment in their neighborhoods and communities. Rather German immigration was important to the founding and sustenance of the cluster. The “style of that cluster-formation is likely to be different than that observed in either fishing or iron-making.
Glass-making required forges and furnaces similar to those of iron-making. Forests nearby were needed to fuel the furnaces and that was central to their original location. Glass-making, did not need iron ore, of course, but it did need sand and clay from which glass was made. Besides windows and mirrors, glass was used for bottles and high quality tableware. All were essentially personal and household products, which was biased toward urban households but to some degree desired by the hinterland population as well.
Glass-making is also a second stage consumer-led cluster that will come late in the transition from the export-import nexus to an economic base dominated by domestic concerns and priorities. That is a reason why the southern New Jersey cluster included Philadelphia and its immediate hinterland as the need was always to develop a sufficient market area to support the cluster. If present day cluster formation can benefit from colonial experience, we may see different styles of cluster development emerge from our discussion, and we may become more sophisticated in our cluster development strategies as they take into account new dynamics that affect their development.
From the get-go we can observe from the glassmaking cluster that in colonial America clusters did not necessarily require an urban economic base. The iron and now glass-making cluster required access to forests for charcoal production the fuel that fed its furnaces. These were hinterland-resident clusters that only later made their appearance in urban areas. With the glass-making cluster we can offer one more insight; clusters did not necessarily conform to political boundaries. This glass-making cluster overlapped two provinces. It began first, and persisted the longest in New Jersey. Philadelphia was its closest urban center, and export port. The eighteenth century glass-making cluster’s home base was southern New Jersey–but it extended to include Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania.
Seventeenth century colonial glassmaking did not fare very well–in any colony. It started and failed first in Virginia, and it did not enjoy commercial success in New England. So glass was imported mostly from Venice and from the Continent. The issue behind cluster stagnation was not the lack of basic resources necessary to production; rather it seemed to be a lack of technical glassmaking expertise, and not evident at the time, the lack of a sufficient market to purchase the output of a growing cluster–that inhibited entrepreneurship and possibly investment.
Glassmaking was no not doing well in Mother England during this period either–indicating that glass expertise was not yet firmly acquired by the English or their emigrants. If expertise was missing, the story below alerts us that the founder of America’s first glassmaking cluster had never been trained in glassmaking, but rather was a Philadelphia merchant and brass manufacturer. In this tale of cluster development, it was the entrepreneur, not the glassmaking master that started things off. There are cultural hints that his German approach to company management set him apart from American clusters such as our iron-management cluster. Wistar’s “glassmaking plantation” also different in important ways from the American iron plantation.
The first known Pennsylvania glassmaker was Lars Persson Cock, a Swede, who lived in the Swedish settlement at today’s Kensington/Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia. He is known in 1680 to have written the King of Sweden to send masters of glassmaking to him [99] http://historical-american-glass.com/pennsylvania-early-glass.html. Technically, Pennsylvania’s glass-making experience started with its founding in 1682. Glassmaking, a target of Penn’s Free Society of Traders, was included in the Society’s 1683 ED provincial plan. Penn expressed at that time his desire for the enterprise–and later commented about its establishment.
Accordingly, the Traders recruited an English glassmaker, Joshua Tittery (who arrived in Philadelphia, September, 1683, as an employee of the Society. Tittery was tasked, according to James Claypoole his boss, “to set up a glass house for bottles, drinking glass, and window glass” for the Quaker colony. His glassworks location is not known for certain, probably along the Delaware near the village of Frankford, or perhaps near Kensington/Fishtown, more a Philadelphia suburb. It mattered little because the endeavor quickly ran afoul of the bad fortune enjoyed by the Society for Free Traders. By July, 1685, Society records indicate it was no longer able to pay Tittery’s salary. Whatever followed we know not, but by the 1690’s Tittery was a potter [99] Jack McCarthy, “Glassmakers and Glass Manufacturing“, 2019 https:// philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/ archive/category/jack-mccarthy/ . Strike One against government-planned cluster development.
There are hints that other Pennsylvania glassmaking ventures followed Tittery (over the next several decades), but they were evidently not successful either. It was not until 1738 that the first commercially successful glassmaking enterprise was founded–in Salem New Jersey by a resident-investor-entrepreneur of Philadelphia. Caspar Wistar, a Palatine German, born in 1696, who emigrated arrived in 1717 Philadelphia. He is going to be the father of the first successful North American glassmaking cluster.
Caspar Wistar–Wistar walked off the Philadelphia pier at age twenty-one. A German Palatine, whose family was forester by profession, a profession inherited by Wistar. A forester apprentice he was turned off by pay cuts from his noble employer, and by the incredible devastation of Palatine during a series of wars. So in 1717 he left behind his hereditary title and position and crossed the Atlantic. He arrived broke (supposedly with nine cents and a rifle), registered for naturalization under the name Wistar, and worked at various entry positions in soap and then brass button making. He became a citizen in 1724, converted to Quakerism in 1726, and in between married a wealthy Quaker, Catherine Jansen, and eventually fathered seven children.
Wistar’s breakthrough venture was opening a retail goods store in Philadelphia, near Franklin’s home. They became good friends, very good friends–which was quite an achievement as Franklin was no Germanophile. In a relatively short time Wistar became somewhat wealthy, probably from his real estate speculations, and his purchase of a button and brass making furnace-facility. On a sales trip to sell his brass buttons, Wistar discovered that in nearby Salem County New Jersey the township of Alloway had easy access to the necessary resources for glassmaking. Why glassmaking? I don’t know–he had no expertise or training in it, but I suspect, as an owner of a brass works, he was aware that facility and its technology overlapped with that of glassmaking, and his strong retail background no doubt made him sensitive of potential market demand.
His glassmaking venture began in 1737 by buying 2,000 acres in Salem County, NJ, and starting construction of a glassmaking facility from scratch. In 1738, he leased fifty acres of land for wood, and then contacted experienced glassmakers from his former home in Palatine. The German artisans contacted were interested and Wistar made them a deal they could not refuse.
He offered to share profits from the facility with them, and formalized it into a legal joint venture. Four interested German glassmakers moved to the New World each believing they would manage their own glassmaking syndicate within Wistar’s glassmaking conglomerate. From my research I have found this to be an extraordinary form of business organization for that time period, and I suggest Wistar’s openness to it may be a derivative of his German values that included a greater respect for artisans, and a willingness to decentralize management and production in his company. Part of the deal was these masters would teach Wistar the skills and technology of glassmaking–but they would not teach anyone else.
The four artisans arrived from Rotterdam in September 1738. Wistar then evolved a corporate structure for the facility in which each master had a significant ownership interest, and a specific subsidiary firm to conduct their own approach to glassmaking. Wistar also recruited his brother, and set him up in a retail store in New York City–while he would sell the facility output in Philadelphia. Again this was a departure in that the typical retail business of the time did not compete in other provincial markets (Franklin, it must be said, also devised his personal method to do the same for printing/newspapers–both were departures. Wistar never moved to New Jersey, rather he continued to reside in Philadelphia and operate out of his retail shop. His sons did the same. The facility complex in Salem County New Jersey was left to the oversight of his artisan joint venture partners.
In Salem County, Wistar built up what we could call a glass-making plantation. The German joint venturers hired other artisans to supplement their operation. Indentured servants were brought in to operate production, dorms and other housing followed. A mansion for the factory foreman, which Wistar used when he wandered by, was built. A company store for the workers and township residents suggested a different approach to worker management and town relations than the typical iron plantation.
There seems to have developed a local identity with glassmaking and the township of Alloway. Apparently it takes a village to start a glassmaking facility. The heart, if not the soul of the Pennsylvania glassmaking culture was always based in a home in southern New Jersey. When the time came, spin offs and new glassmaking-associated ventures agglomerated in that area. When the village was formally incorporated as a township in 1878–nearly a hundred years after the Wistar facility had closed up shop–they adopted the name Glassboro.
With organization such as this, the venture was successful. The venture and all its subsidiaries began trading at the Philadelphia proto-stock market, under the name of “United Glass Company. Wistar’s facility produced about 15,000 glass bottles per year. Inexpensive, with low-cost raw materials nearby, the factory also produced window glass, rum flasks and tableware. Interestingly, revealing Wistar’s sound retail skills, from the start the Wistar glass brand imported Bristol glass from England. His customer base seems to have always been drawn to the English brand, and Wistar balanced his domestic production with foreign. He also developed his own brand based on the color and style, as well as differences in production of his own glassware. Wistar bottles are identifiable today and are collectors items.
It is claimed that the Wistar Salem County facility was the first successful glassmaking company in all the thirteen colonies. Franklin was a client, he designed and Wistar made his experimental tubes and glass globes, and they worked together in his study of electricity–Franklin is alleged to have conducted his first kite experiment at Wistar’s house. Other Philadelphia scientists (David Rittenhouse for one) also used his experimental glass products. Wistar died in 1752, and his son Richard continued his management of the facility and company.
Like a chip off the old block, Richard continued the traditions of progressive and enlightened management. With sales good, several of his artisans spun off a production facility in a nearby locations, becoming the cornerstone economic base that attracted a nexus of other facilities and businesses to support the budding cluster. The history of this cluster strongly supports an assertion that artisans developed working for the Wistar company, and spun off to other glassmaking companies, if not to ownership than to advance their careers. The half-century dominance of Wistar facility in the proto-cluster literally meant it was the “womb” of the larger cluster that followed.
As we shall see other major glassmaking companies entered into competition around the the Revolution. While not discussed in this module, the glassmaking cluster really set down its two-province roots during the early nineteenth century, and the Philadelphia metro area developed its own sub-cluster in the Kensington/Fishtown district. The mother facility, however, entered into tough times during and after the Revolution. A major problem for Wistar’s adjacent township was the area suffered from deforestation, and Wistar’s glass works did not survive Richard’s personal troubles, his remote management, the turbulence of the Revolutionary War, and presumably the competition from other firms. After 1781 it declined significantly, and was sold in parts to members of the Wistar family–the facility itself ceased functioning in 1793. The center for the cluster shifted a few miles up the road to present day Glassboro.
Leaving behind Glassboro and the southern New Jersey sub-cluster for another day, the next known Pennsylvania major glassmaking facility was the Hilltown Glass Works in (Perkasie) Bucks County. Today this is outside the boundaries of the Philadelphia metro area, and that suggests its development might have been inspired by its own dynamics. That is supported by land sales which indicates the area was owned by our James Logan and was sold by him and others to English and Welsh Baptists.
In later years, German immigrants also established residence in the area after the turn of the eighteenth century. Of certain is that on August 31, 1750, the ship Nancy arrived from Rotterdam with passengers, two of which played an important role in subsequent Pennsylvania glassmaking: Johann Georg Musse, and Heinrich Wilhelm Stiegel. It is asserted that German residents in the Perkasie area recruited (somehow) Musse to construct a glass works for the benefit of the local German population–employment and bottles. Musse opened his glassworks in 1752, and from 1753 it produced glassware of distinctive style for purchase.
Musse died in 1760, but glassware production continued to the Revolutionary War when production seems to have stopped.–the area did suffer from intermittent raids and minor battles. The glassworks were acquired by a new ownership (Peter Maurer aka Mason, a German). A second facility was built (whether it substituted for the first or was an addition is not known). At some point in the eighteenth century it failed as well. The inclusion of this works in this history is partially motivated to its apparent role as a likely German community development initiative, that in its way may have followed a Wistar model.
Our final example of Pennsylvania’s glassmaking cluster is Mannheim the obsession of the charismatic celebrity, Henry William Stiegel. The other glassmaker on board the 1850 Rotterdam ship Nancy was Henry William Stiegel. From Cologne, Stiegel upon arrival from Germany, assumed a position, probably clerks, with the firm that owned the “Nancy”. Whether there was a prior relationship with the Stedman brothers (owners of the firm), or he developed a relationship from employment, the Stedman Brothers were to be Stiegel’s go-to financing sources for at least three decades.
After two years, in 1752, Stiegel took a position in an Lancaster iron works owned by Jacob Huber, a Mennonite German. Huber had founded his own ironworks, probably funded by his father who had also moved to Lancaster County sometime in 1730. The foundry was founded around 1750. Stiegel married Huber’s daughter, Elizabeth, and Huber seemingly educated Stiegel in ironmaking. It seems he sold at least one portion of his complex to Stiegel in 1757. Huber died in 1759, and his daughter Elizabeth died in giving Stiegel his second child in 1758.
Enter the Stedman Brothers who together with Stiegel purchased a iron forge in Berks County, which he called “Elizabeth”, and shortly after purchased a second iron plantation, Charming Forge near Lancaster. Stiegel at this point was one-third owner of the two iron works, and the general manager. Through hard work, the Elizabeth works in particular flourished. The volume of output was high and exceptionally diversified. Within two years after acquiring ownership, Stiegel employed about seventy-five works, many of which were German Redemptionists transported by the Stedman Brother ships.
His market was principally local, Reading to Philadelphia (stoves, pans, pots, kettles,, and sugar refining utensils for sale in the West Indies, and he improved upon Franklin’s stove and evolved a competing brand bearing his name–which seemingly was quite effective and successful. Stiegel like Wistar created opportunities for residents in his surrounding area, and through the Stedman Brothers opened up a frontier trading store with imports from their ships. In particular, he developed extensive contracts with homestead farmers for both cut wood and wood for his furnaces–the area, to be sure dependent upon his iron plantation, also entered into prosperous times. By the early 1760’s (during the French and Indian War) employment at his facilities reached over two hundred–a very sizeable employment base for that period.
Stiegel was a devout Lutheran, with a close working and personal association with Henry Melchior Muhlenberg who was to become the Lutheran Bishop of Pennsylvania–and arguably the major leader of the German Pennsylvanian population–and the formal head of Pennsylvania’s Lutheran congregation. Stiegel donated land in Mannheim Pennsylvania for Muhlenberg to build a church, and Stiegel was to be a founding member of the German Society of Pennsylvania organized in 1764; he also led the fundraising for to construct the Society’s first building.
So far no glassmaking. Stiegel was an iron lord through the early 1760s. At that time, however, he sold his interest in Charming Forge back to his Stedman Brothers partners, and they sold one-third interests in their Mannheim problem to him. At the war’s conclusion between 1763 and 1764 Stiegel built up a complex of facilities and forges at Mannheim, including a Lutheran chapel in which he preached–and a concern facility at which he formed an instrumental orchestra. He used the facility to make glass, a commercial idea which soon became Stiegel’s personal obsession–and obsession was what it was.
As the reader will discover in a future module, the period after the French and Indian war was a turbulent one, both politically and economically. If the war years had been profitable, the post war was challenging. Stiegel’s earlier fortune was from iron making, but in the post war he sold off his ironmaking and poured the proceeds into his glassmaking venture at Mannheim. The quality and style of his glass was exceptional for the time period; its gentle imperfections giving it character and attractiveness (like ripped and varying colored jeans) are highly collectable in today’s markets.
At this point, the reader might be made aware of Stiegel’s charismatic, but equally erratic or quirk some personality. He called himself a “Baron”–which he was not–spent money in a very elaborate and materialistic lifestyle that included a castle resident in Mannheim. His larger-than-life personality made him attractive to many, a hero to his Lancaster county fellow residents, and a very difficult businessman, employer and partner. For nearly a century after, the local communities celebrated his annual Festival of the Red Rose, which is still held in the local Zion Lutheran Church originally built on land donated by Baron Stiegel whose only payment was to be a “solitary red rose”.
In that his glassmaking venture-obsession (almost like space travel today) was a venture capital endeavor floated on other people’s money and an image of innovation and creativity, the reader might consider today’s batch of colorful investors and innovators could also be found in colonial America, even without mass/social media. The Russian immigrant Musk stands on the shoulder of the German immigrant Baron Stiegel.
His longstanding partners, the Stedman’s, were outraged at his new obsession, and his growing lack of interest in managing their profitable iron making facilities. Their partnership broke apart, and in response, Stiegel double down and borrowed huge sums with Mannheim as collateral, to expand his glassmaking production. His constant expansion plans interfered greatly with the efficiency of his glass and iron facilities and profitability suffered, From his most profitable year in 1772, he went into bankruptcy in 1774.
To make matters worse, the Sugar/Stamp Acts generated such an uproar, to which English reaction resulted in great instability in the capital and export-import markets. Stiegel could not find any buyers for the remaining iron interests and so, lacking financial liquidity, he wound up defaulting on the loans and was sent to debtor’s prison. Bailed out by friends and family–and an act of pardon by the Pennsylvania General Assembly–he remained in poverty, moving residences constantly, until he died in 1785. He was 56, and to this day his grave site is unknown.
From this the reader might conclude that glassmaking was not successful in Pennsylvania. This is simply untrue. Glassmaking had a difficult start, beginning as it did in the half-century previous to the Revolution and the Constitution– a period characterized by drift to wars, wars, and the transition from wars. Pennsylvania was a major ground-zero in both the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars–and lest it be forgotten, battleground for the longest and most brutal of Indian wars. That the fledgling industry was dependent on German immigrant entrepreneurs, their fragile capital sources, and the growing, yet erratic nature of their political and economic cohesion as a market and owner of skills and expertise also presented early challenges to its rise.
After the Revolution, glassmaking took over and did quite well in Pennsylvania and its suburbs and hinterland. The nineteenth century glassmaking cluster, considerably smaller in scale than its ironmaking cluster, still played a notable role in the Pennsylvania economic base. The Pennsylvania-south New Jersey glassmaking cluster was an important one for the early United States, and while it has had its share of troubles and downsizing in the twentieth century, that cluster remains in muted strength today.
Last Thoughts on Pennsylvania cluster-development– First let’s state the obvious but still rather fundamental lesson from our first venture into colonial clusters: the British North American colonies were too distant to be closely integrated into Britain’s economy or its budding clusters. From day one American colonies had to start their own clusters from scratch or simply import. Of more interest to me was British companies did not often seek to establish a branch or subsidiary in the thirteen colonies. Moreover, there was a strong element of protectionism that inhibited the exportation of skills and technology. Mercantilism of the seventeenth century meant American settlers and their settlements had to fend for themselves to fill any gaps that were created by the dangers, timeliness, and logistical encumbrances of 3,000 miles of water.
Whatever else that meant, it did shape the perspective, and mentality, of the American entrepreneur–and it came at the birth of the economic base of each province-colony. The mercantilist slap on the butt of colonial economic bases and their agglomerations and clusters at their founding created a new batch of companies, artisans, and entrepreneurs who had to beg, borrow and steal (literally) what they needed to start an agglomeration-cluster. The economic class that these folks lodged themselves in were leavened with a stiff-necked, autonomous, on-my-own independence that will ill-suited to British colonial policy as it evolved. When one thinks about a “drift to independence” that supposedly started after 1763, I argue independence was “seeded” into colonial economic base-building from the start of the colony by English mercantilism. It was felt most keenly among entrepreneurs and artisans who were daily affected by its tensions–and was reflected in the colonial legislatures in which many of that sat.
Instead of one or a few British companies setting up an iron forge complex or ship-builder in one or several suitable colonies, each colony had to establish its own–all thirteen of them over different time periods. While such duplication might have been necessary during much of the seventeenth century, one can question its continuation into the eighteenth. The effect was to sharpen the differences, the varying capabilities and economic capacities of each colony. Coastal trade developed from this, but so did thirteen separate colonies with little interlocking economic bases built around comparative advantage. Each colony’s agglomeration tilted toward vertical integration, and conglomerate business entities, and scale and inequality was fostered within thirteen distinct groups of colonial elites. Whatever Britain was doing in colonial economic base-building, it was not nation-building. It was province-building. It is no accident the 1789 Constitution was saturated with and build on “federalism”. Now we have 250 years of it.
These are simple observations, to be sure, but they are fundamental to the colonial approach to economic base-building. The British East India Company handled this matter differently. More on the Hudson Bay Company in later chapters. Perhaps now we can see the heritage left behind by pre-1689 proprietary colonies.
It think it apparent from our agglomeration/cluster examples that each developed somewhat distinctively, at different time periods, and for all too obvious reasons concentrated (agglomerated) in different locations in Pennsylvania. Interestingly grist mills were distinctive from iron forges and glassmaking developed after ironmaking. Neither were urban, and for the most part shipbuilding was suburban and river-bound hinterlands. Finance and logistics, however were naturally urban and as it matured it extended itself in the countryside. Retail also followed that path. Agglomerations and political boundaries are quite distinct and non-related in the sense that economic base building does not respect political boundaries–and just the opposite may utilize them for profit-making advantage. Agglomerations in colonial America are more likely to create political subdivisions that follow them. It was only later than mature agglomerations overlapped political boundaries–and that was not always to their detriment. Today as we co-link clusters/planning with regionalism or metropolitanization we might be sensitive that things are as they are for reasons.
In each of the agglomerations we can see the impact of business organization, entrepreneurial strategies and competition, and even personalities. We can see how each agglomeration was incorporated into a larger commercial/manufacturing elite–and how hinterland and urban played into both settlement and immigration dynamics. Capital investment was critical, and we see that Pennsylvania capital, if not resident in Philadelphia was the core “office” for capital investment. Critically, we can see Philadelphia business elites were remarkably open to what was venture capital equity positions–and different groups of them formed and fostered different companies and projects. The path to merchant conglomerations was a natural outcome. We can also see that Quakers played a very significant role in investment–alongside Anglicans and Barbadian investors. Not all colonies had such access to capital–Massachusetts had to go to Britain for investment for its Saugus Iron Works. Rutter did not. Nor did Wistar or our Brandywine grist mills. Shipbuilding was a bit more complicated–but not timber cutting, nor those sectors involved in housing and homesteading.
We were able to explain much of these agglomerations without having to include the public sector. Today we have come full swing and cannot conceive agglomeration-cluster development without government–and sometimes in some clusters we tend to be on the verge of state capitalism, and if micro-management is the right word, we often target the correct technologies for investment. Where agglomeration meant some cities and regions had less or even none of the agglomeration development, today we seemingly strip away geographic agglomeration and instead substitute a cluster decentralized to virtually every economic base in every state (think shift-share).
Nothing could be more apparent than to contrast this with colonial America and see the former wanting or irrelevant. One wonders, wildly I suppose, if we lose the advantages that come with geographic concentration–or if in decentralizing it to the point everybody has some that we may impede cluster-agglomeration development. As we shall see, however, economic base building in America has been privately led and managed. Today’s conventions are a departure. If nothing else entrepreneurism is being redefined, and past entrepreneurialism and the patterns associated with it pushed off to the margins. Just an observation! There are a lot of similarities to venture capital, entrepreneurial problems and personalities drawn from colonial experience. I think Sam Adams would agree.
Glassmaking cluster jelled and grew from the success of a single commercial venture: Wistar’s United Glass Company. While it could be said that Rutter’s two forges were the starting gun for Pennsylvania’s ironmaking agglomeration, they did not play the sale role as Wistar’s, or even Brandywine Mill complex. Literally within several years of Rutter all sort of forge projects went into development. Wistar’s company for nearly a half-century was the mother-house of the Pennsylvania-New Jersey Cluster, and the model of German entrepreneurism that dominated the culture. It is worth a thought this compares with William Shockley’s Fairchild Semiconductor’s path to spinning off the famous Silicon Valley semiconductor cluster of the 1970’s?
Annalee Saxenian’s tale of Shockley answers that the cultures were so different-diametrically the opposite. Shockley’s Fairchild did not “spin off” Intel, or the other nine semiconductor companies over an eight year period, as much as he drove them out of Fairchild. Shockley was no Wistar. “Thirty-one semiconductor firms were started in Silicon Valley during the 1960’s, and the majority traced their lineage to Fairchild. Only five of the forty-five independent semiconductor firms in the United States between 1959 and 1976 were located outside Silicon Valley. An emerging infrastructure of suppliers provided an important advantage to the startups of the region … in a spin off process that was increasingly common in the region, engineers left more established companies to start new ventures that produced the capital goods and materials needed for semiconductor design and fabrication” (pp. 25-6). [99] Annalee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard University Press, 1996), see pp. 25-7, and see Ann Markusen, Profit Cycles, Oligopoly, and Regional Development (the MIT Press, 1985), pp. 109, 115-117
Despite a totally opposite business culture, the same could be said for Wistar’s United Glass Company. The Brandywine grist complex, not championed by a single company, still was able to produce a commercial flour processing export behemoth similar to Silicon Valley (in the context of the time period). By 1790, the multitude of ironmaking plantations, forges, and refineries located east of the Pennsylvania Alleghenies spun off a mighty trans-Allegheny industrial sector resident in and adjacent to Pittsburgh. If Pennsylvania was not the mother of American democracy (and I’m not saying that), it certainly was the mother of critically important industrial sector agglomerations, agglomerations that led America to industrialization in the nineteenth century.
The infusion of a German entrepreneurial culture into the developing glassmaking cluster yielded a mixed profit-making enterprise tempered with strong links to a decentralized management structure, to reasonably well-treated workforce, its surrounding community and a larger budding national independence movement–tilting noticeably to CD objectives and values. Not so the more magnificent, gazelle-like iron making cluster whose iron plantations and slow innovation but strong ties with local capital and fluid ownership structure possessed a single-minded drive for profit and expansion.
Part III–Artisans: Who are They?
Western Continental Europe, especially the UK, had begun diversifying from medieval-feudal agriculture and supporting feudal class system at points throughout the sixteenth century, and in the early seventeenth century it gathered considerable momentum. Wonderful you think, but how in the hell does this become a concern in a history of American state and local economic development? Actually, it is when modern American economic development first assumed form in womb of our sainted old mother, Merrie England.
When our initial thirteen states became colonies, way back when, they were instilled with the DNA of what had transpired in England, it was their frame of reference, their historical culture, and for their inhabitants their lifelong experience up to emigration. After emigration, England was, of course, their colonial, i.e. imperial master. In any event we, “over here” in America, inherited the course of English evolution as it emerged from the throes of Henry VIII to Charles I.
It is that evolution from feudal medievalism and its class structure to something that at some point developed into British urbanism, mercantilism, industrialism and capitalism, and the embryonic class structure that it was based upon. This is the womb of American state and local economic development. In this module, I focus on the development of the scientific-artisan movement that led the break away from traditional, Catholic, Renaissance philosophy and humanism. It is to this movement that we owe our pretention to be a nation, a policy system that is of the people and dominated by its middle class democracy.
A good deal of what is usually included in so-called American exceptionalism has its roots in this transition period. In polite society we no longer talk about this stuff. The period was obscure, boring, and led to nothing of consequence, which is exactly what our forbearers in the scientific-artisan movement thought of the ancient traditional classical Renaissance humanist paradigm!
So lets skip all that movement for the moment, and focus on us i.e. the USA, to see how that scientific-artisan movement hit the beaches of the thirteen colonies. It was a massive D-Day like invasion that started at Jamestown and moved to Plymouth Rock, our two bookends of early settlement. Literally hundreds of Englishmen (and some women) found vacuum-like land without evident Indian tomahawks and they built a settlement and our colonial history was off and running. They carried over with them the seeds from which our political and economic development sprang. The typical English immigrant, of all religions, political cultures, and regions of the British state, shared, in varying degrees and styles, the experience of “movement” and understood quite well that they first settlement would be copying, as much as possible, that experience into the new order, society, economy, and socio-economic class configuration that they were to create in that settlement. American colonial history, it seems, did not really “start from scratch” as I suggested in the opening paragraphs of this section.
Populated mostly through the seventeenth century with British emigres, the challenge of the wilderness ripped off old Merrie England class distinctions and instilled an egalitarianism characteristic of the hostile forested unsettled frontier. The need to survive in that frontier, however, put on steroids the pace and the parameters of social and economic change in order to settle and build the new communities. Three thousand miles of hostile water gave us a measure of autonomy to figure it all out ourselves and make what departures were necessary to accomplish our goals, outlined in our self-sufficiency economic development strategy.
In Pennsylvania we learned what happened was the literally immediate rise of a commercial class (elite) that assumed leadership in the policy system, and practical dominance in setting up the economic base and implementing the self-sufficiency strategy. That commercial class was already well established in England, and without thought or much planning it was transplanted to America. The commercial-plantation class in America fit comfortably within the class distinctions of the old order, and so our discussion of that elite in previous sections above raised few of the issues that we now must discuss; what about everybody else that was not to be a commercial or plantation elite?
In this module we concern ourselves with Philadelphia and Pennsylvania’s small county seat towns which is where many of feudalism’s lowest classes (serfs, former freeman householders, yeomen) had pitched their tents. Their break with the English medieval order was more abrupt and transformational; they had to form into socio-economic classes for which there were few models or even a vision of the future–they were after all in a transitional period of change and had no real sense of where all this change would lead.
They were risk-takers, otherwise they would still be in England, and they had the hopes and skills that the scientific-artisan movement had carved out to that point. They were founders of the artisan and scientific (i.e. professions) occupations and trades of an emerging new economy, political-economic, and class system. They will become the working and middle class of colonial urban society.
They were the Mob, or the “middling sort”, who, in the British world, were thoroughly infused with the values of Protestantism. Most were content to a new life as independent agricultural homesteaders in the new world; a minority, however, turned in another direction, towards crafts and mechanics, learning through trial and error, not dissimilar with the scientific approach which was breaking away from traditional humanist classical studies.
Early English artisans entered into a variety of economic sectors and concerns. Health, education, as well as business of every sort and sector. Tinkering with established technology soon overlapped into mechanics and inventions, and finding new uses for old commodities (whale oil, for example), and new-fangled glass “bulbs” for Franklin’s electric experiments. Franklin’s tinkering led to a Franklin stove, which was further tinkered with by the Baron Stiegel of glassmaking cluster fame (whose stove outsold Franklin’s unpatented stove).
Rather than broad, macro metaphysical concerns, artisans focused themselves on middle-range experiments and knowledge that could enter into daily life, affect one’s lifestyle, budget and comfort, while expanding avenues for economic growth and personal profit. Artisan experiments sooner or later focused on machines, clocks, and mechanical widgets, and production techniques, leading to innovations that could light a dark room, heat a cold house, cure a sick child, travel faster and more safely, and grow more food, goods, and services and transport/distribute them where they were highly valued.
In short artisan initiatives, knowledge, experiments, and machines brought value added to their user, and the knowledge upon which they were based served future generations, who frequently benefited from their improvement.
From the start artisans were either freeholding agriculturalists or adventurers in a new economy. The former, upon arrival in Pennsylvania headed for the hinterland; the latter split between hinterland and cities/hinterland towns. In this module we are concerned with the latter. Their rise, almost unchecked in the wilds of North America, over a relatively short period of time, developed into what we now call middle class America or the working man. Big City Urban in sheer numbers, they were also essential to hinterland economies, and its policy system in general. Artisans were everywhere in colonial America, and from the founding of a colony, they carved for themselves a place in the new economic base and its society..
Many were indentured “servants”, others were sons and daughters of English artisans without capital for the most part, looking to continue in the trades of their fathers. In the new world, they mixed craftsmanship with entrepreneurism, and started new business, partnerships, and family-based enterprises, in a land where the old medieval guild could not find solid footing. Through these activities they entered into our American state and local economic development history.
Of concern, these artisans do not play a role on the fringes; they are central players in my historical drama. To complicate matters, over the course of the colonial period, urban artisans will become arguably one of the two major players in the “making of America” and the American Revolution. Ah! But we get ahead of ourselves, yet again. In any event we must examine in some depth who and what artisans were and believed, to understand their plight as they tried to break into the New World economic base, its society, and eventually, its policy system.
It was in the course of American colonial history, fueled by the Bunsen burner of the American wilderness, that they acquired and then experimented in using a class consciousness. That consciousness and American artisan’s first leadership arose in Pennsylvania, mostly, but by no means exclusively in Philadelphia. That was no accident by the way. It was Quakers that provided the “cultural” and political opening for the emerging artisan class.
It was the failings of that religion as applied to politics, that created the opportunity-vacuum that its amazing leader of the Leather Apron Club was able to fill. Through his efforts, creativity and inspiration, Benjamin Franklin not only barged into dominance of its policy system, but redefined the budding dynamics of American privatism to include artisans, professionals, and middle class small business. Perpetuated into today’s Midlands political culture, artisans were the leaders of the “average man”, the bulwark of the American economic base, and the core of its work force.
More interested in their trades and business than in abstract religious/philosophical topics or morals; they were pragmatic, and remarkably non-political. More interested in their families and local communities, they lacked a macro vision which they left to others–until they feared their “system” and “the world they knew and drew benefit from, was threatened. Then they would step in, sometimes with a vengeance. In that context, they were the leaven in the bread that we call “populism”. Coming out from behind the curtains in numbers no one knew existed, they provided the muscle and the legitimacy as the vanguard of the amorphous thing we refer to as “the American People”. They are the wielders of the American mandate from heaven.
The reader can now see we have opened up a very large can of worms. Not all aspects of the rise of the artisans can, or will. be dealt with in this history. It is not in my job description to provide a comprehensive treatment of the transition of English Traditional Renaissance Classical Humanism and the breakaway of the Scientific-Artisan Movement. But we do need to understand its outline in the development of English urban communities, industrialization, and capitalism to understand the underlying new class system they produced. Professions and Artisan trades would take their seat alongside the commercial elite in the policy system and economic base.
The prism as always is economic development, and in this module Pennsylvania and Philadelphia is the location being observed. Of necessity since economic development is a policy made by a policy system, we will examine how the artisans affected the Pennsylvania (colonial) policy system. We also need to see how these folk participated in the colonial economic base. And since Pennsylvania’s artisan class was well-led by its scientific-artisan Lenin, we shall delve into Benjamin Franklin’s vital role in this very important transformation.
First, the part we skipped earlier:
the Rise of Artisans in England and America: the Artisan Paradigm
By the time they arrived in Pennsylvania, England had experienced several generations of artisans-scientists. That will explain how the artisan trades and skills, in particular, were imported into Pennsylvania’s economic base. Suffice it to say, Franklin’s grandfather was an artisan, and so was his chandler (candles-soap) father. As the reader shall see, there is not a perfect consensus among historians as to who specifically and when/where specifically, artisans first appeared, but we can see they contributions in diversifying the English agricultural base–so we will talk about that. After that we will deepen our knowledge about the artisan-scientific paradigm, and how it got a welcome-mat treatment in Quaker Pennsylvania.
Two simple statements serve as our intro into artisans/scientists. First this grouping formed in reaction to the hitherto dominant–pervasive-Catholic traditional Aristotelian classical natural philosophy and Renaissance humanism. Second the artisan-scientific movement was an important element in the transition from the medieval agricultural class structure to something akin to our modern capitalist-industrial-urban based class configuration. That movement achieved an unplanned reception in America so significant that it became a hallmark of the American economy/economic base and the typical American policy system. Our modern forms of economic development policy and strategy have been greatly impacted.
It is easier to trace advocacy of ideas/values associated with artisans. It is helpful to link them to the founding institution, in this case the Royal Society of London, to understand how the artisan-scientific community developed a paradigm counter to that of the dominant Renaissance Humanists. Experimentation was always fundamental to the movement. Experimentation as we understand it in science was one definition used then, but another was “testing a hypothesis” and see if it is valid. The expression of the time for “testing a hypothesis” was experimentation.
One can test a hypothesis about anything; it does not have to be a science, medicine, astronomy, or math-physics. Besides sheer utilitarian interest, there was a stress on “useful”–that word was pervasive in the debate of that time. There was also a stress on “improvement”–which calls attention to adding benefit derived from “stuff” already in use.
From agricultural tools to household goods and lifestyle-occupational technology, reducing cost, improving efficiency and effectiveness, using different materials-composites, and adding to the infrastructure to what today we call the “power” or energy sector were all hot buttons of interest. The benefit was to be immediate, and cumulative as one improvement could lead to others. Useful knowledge was intended to increase mankind’s ability to master the forces of nature–and in so doing offer opportunity, meaning, and yes material profit to those performing these experiments. As Bacon said early on in the movement, improvement of one’s personal estate was an accepted reason for experiment. Knowledge no longer was confined to the classroom where only the elites could enter; it was meant to be accessible to all to the degree possible.
Hence, the effects of the scientific-artisan movement were felt most intensely in academic curriculum. Universities and colleges were certainly ground zero for change, but arguably even more central to the movement was to bring useful knowledge to the general population. K12 curriculum, religious or in public school systems, was tasked with teaching what was to be of use to their students in the course of their life. Ingrained in the scientific-artisan movement was an egalitarianism which assumed that non-elites can develop/produce useful knowledge, and that they should be consumers of its products, machines, and services.
Basic skills, reading, math, as well as such science and technology commonly used were high priority–with a clear diminution of ancient languages, particularly in higher education. The general idea was to improve among the general population an understanding for and appreciation of skills and principles most helpful to life, career, and the community at large. In later years of this period, much of the dialogue embraced ideas and content that would today be thought of as vocational, and for colleges to adjust to purposes congruent with today’s American community college. Basic skills, an essential for today’s workforce curriculum, were a first order priority of the useful knowledge and improvement advocates.
And so as this ethos permeated from scientific and artisan elites to the general population experiencing change/pressure on their hitherto agricultural life in first half of the seventeenth century an avenue of opportunity seemingly was opening up. Applying the Protestant ethic’s alleged thrust to hard work, the less present-minded of them assumed risk that allowed them to change residences, abandon the life and work of their fore bearers, and to acquire new skills, and to assume risk in hopes for future reward. I suspect strongly, that America captured more than its fair share of those with this mentality–and that is proved, I assert, by the role played by immigrants in startups, and acquiring new trades and occupations.
Francis Bacon, an prominent sixteenth century politician (he was at one point Lord Chancellor of England (1618), who today is often credited as the founder-promoter of the “scientific method”– is our first official scientist. Implicit within his “method” was that knowledge derived from it should be “useful”–its ends should be utilitarian or put to good use in practice and business; “the public good and the relief of man’s estate” is how he put it [99] Richard Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Method in the Seventeenth Century (2nd Ed, 1961), pp-59-60
Part of the reason Bacon and other proto-scientists/artisans stressed this “usefulness and improvement” was to literally break away from the sterility of the existing paradigm of Renaissance English intellectual life. Metaphysics, Aristotelian thought and methodology, natural philosophy and humanism with its concern with morality and “correct thinking”, saturated to the point of paralysis both in intellectual thought and the conclusions it reached. Bacon, in challenging the Renaissance traditional classical paradigm was simultaneously battling, and seeking reform of, the English educational curriculum and its principal educational institutions (Cambridge, for example).
Lost in the mists of time and smush was a very bitter and important struggle by the scientific-artisan movement in asserting its right to depart from the Renaissance paradigm. Keep in mind, Galileo, the path-breaking astronomer and “father of modern science and physics, had his books banned then burned by the Pope/Inquisition, was placed under house arrest, threatened with burning at the stake, for almost twenty five years (1615-1638) until his death.
When Jamestown and Plymouth/Boston were being founded, and England was heading into its Civil War, scientific experimentation and artisan “improvement” were breaking away from the Renaissance-Catholic universal laws (“traditional classical paradigm)–no more would the intellectual world be focused on how many angels danced on the head of a pin. The Cromwell Puritans who came to power as this struggle intensified, Bacon died in 1626, and this struggle took a secondary place during the Civil War and the Cromwell Protectorate–daring only to reassert itself in the post-1660 Restoration.
The Artisan Movement from its ambiguous birth had ignored county and religious boundaries. Its membership were composed mostly of scientists, physicians, and “natural philosophers” who were moving onto new ideas. England, protected by its Protestant Reformation, and the political influence of scientific leaders such as Bacon, the Artisan-Scientific Movement evolved without conscious/sustained interference of politics or the Anglican Church. Its break through was their formation of the Royal Society of London in 1660.
But before I start singing America the Beautiful, one cannot ignore the role played by England’s elites and their children in developing and advancing the scientific-artisan movement–and making explicit its prevailing tenets and aspirations. Examining in some depth the development of one man, the son of a squire (landed gentry–i.e. an non-aristocrat/noble, but a lower level elite), born in 1632, who came of age in the period of scientific-artisan ascendancy, in rural Wiltshire County (Stonehenge). His elite status set him off as he had access to education, but how that educational experienced adjusted to the dynamic forces of change at play in this time is not atypical of many of this man’s cohort.
He started out studying the old paradigm, learning Latin and studied the works of Aristotle, but in his mid-teens experimented with new ideas and interests like anatomy, and using some math and drawing skills to create anatomical drawing of the human brain. That drawing wound up in a medical textbook which coined the term “neurology”.
At eighteen, he arrived at Oxford (1650) where he studied “the old school” Aristotle and moral philosophy, but also became a protégé of his math teacher, who was also a Dean. From his mentor our young man developed an interest with the design and construction of mechanical instruments. So he changed majors and got a degree from Oxford in science and mathematics with a specialty in surveying. He followed up with a Masters. Oxford hired him as a teaching Fellow (1653, he was twenty-one), and by 1657 he held a professorship in astronomy.
During this time in academic, his mentor, the Dean, had assembled a campus group that included some well-known and formidable intellectuals all of whom were infected with the scientific-artisan mentality, Our young scholar met with that group for over a decade from 1650-1661–the Cromwell Protectorate) in a study-discussion club, similar to Franklin’s later Junto. His ability and drive canceled out his young age. They developed the core of the scientific-artisan paradigm, which a fellow club member, Robert Boyle, as early as 1646, wrote was applying dedicated to experimentation in ‘mechanics and husbandry [agriculture]” [99] Meyer Reinhold, “The Quest for ‘Useful Knowledge” in Eighteenth-Century America”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 119, No. 2 (Apr 16, 1975), p. 109.
and gathered their strength to await the day they could advance it against the old paradigm. In 1661, our young man gave a lecture to the group, after which the group adjourned to a tavern and formally decided to print its paradigm up, go to the new Restoration King, and get a charter to set up an public-private organization to achieve the scientific-artisan goals.
At the first opportunity (1662, 1664), this group could meet with the Restoration King Charles II. He thought it a bonny idea and issue a charter to form an organization to implement and achieve that paradigm. So skillful in surveying and constructing new buildings, he was appointed in the same year by the King to be his Surveyor of Works (his construction manager); he held that position for forty-nine years (until 1718).
Between 1662 and 1664 the group formalized into a professional “Society” whose founding Board of Directors included the luminaries of the scientific-artisan movement, and, lo and behold, our classical humanist, turned medical neurologist, astronomy professor, now architect-surveyor and the King’s Surveyor of Works.
His name was Christopher Wren.
When the Great Fire of London hit in 1666, it was Wren that conducted the rebuilding of Old London. It destroyed over four days the Old London within the city walls–over 13,000 homes, displacing 70,000 of the 80,000 London residents. The rebuilding, according to the old plan of London, took three decades. The Rebuilding of London Act (1670) conveyed to the City of London Corporation many of the powers associated with a modern city–including zoning and building codes. The restoration plan set as its primary goal the resettlement of displaced Londoners, and eschewed any significant attempt to reconstruct the area with more grandiose design–as did Paris in the 1870’s. Our present day St Paul’s Cathedral was the signature restoration project of the King, and became the symbol most recognizable by Londoners. Wren –one might say he was the Robert Moses of London’s first urban renewal, a urban renewal project not without its controversy, but one that worked, and whose goals were resident-oriented.
Over the next half century, he was the third President of the Royal Society, a Member of Parliament, a founding master of London’s highly prestigious Free Mason Lodge. His architectural style became a rage of the time (St Paul’s Cathedral), and it heavily influenced the design of our Capitol Building, home of our Congress.
This is the path of the gentleman, a Renaissance man in his own right, who is the acknowledged founder of the present day Royal Society of London, the oldest and arguably most prestigious society of scientists, in the broad sense of those who test hypothesis, in the world. I convey upon him the title: First Artisan,
The King’s chartered new society: the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. The Royal Society, the Society promulgated by the King, became the trade association of the now well-positioned counter paradigm to the traditional classical humanist paradigm. If I may offer a somewhat cynical observation, whatever its historical merits, the creation of the Royal Society set up a “big tent” under which a wide variety of individuals, striving in professions, business, and science could join. That the professional classes, scientists and physicians, brought some measure of public acceptance to the businessmen and mechanics who also became members, and that many were of high status in English society.
The unifying consensus behind the Society was that useful knowledge could be expanded through experimentation, a new science previously called for by Francis Bacon: “a utilitarian end for knowledge; the public good and the relief of man’s estate”. The Royal Society was not a organization of scientists as defined by today’s definition of science; it was the society of experimentation–tinkering if you will. Under its aegis the scientific-artisan movement became legitimate, and the gateway to patent issuance for new technologies and methodologies, and machines–like the combustion engine and the American steamboat.
Well over a hundred members were admitted into the Society in its founding years. The Society’s first editor, in 1664, promised that there would be ‘profitable discoveries‘ grounded in ‘solid and useful knowledge‘–an expression that seems to have acquired popularity in public discourse. In 1739, after the twenty-four year tenure of Sir Isaac Newton as its President, its membership was over 300. In 1753, Franklin received from the Society, its most prestigious medal, the Copley Award (he was the second winner), and in 1756 Franklin was admitted as North America’s first “Fellow” to be admitted into the Society. The Royal Society was the gateway to Franklin’s status as a global scientist–all this for flying a kite in a storm.
Handicrafts: the Economic Womb of Artisans?
Many technological changes expressed themselves in making new tools, often using different materials, such as iron as a proxy for wood. New tools (and repairing tools) meant adding expertise in those areas to the occupation vocabulary of the agricultural household. Such diversification of skills and varieties of work did not necessarily require any change in residence. One sees the incremental development of a “cottage industry”, with non agricultural activities entering into the daily, certainly seasonal, activities of the rural agricultural household.
These activities have acquired the moniker of “handicrafts”–and in this area we see one of the first concrete manifestation of the rise in an artisan class. Immigration to America drew heavily from these folk, and a considerable number who, if asked, were hoping to homestead and set themselves up in a new agriculture in a new world without the barriers of the old one. Much research has already observed the Puritans (and a core of Quakers) were middle class merchants and professionals, but German and Scots Irish for example came straight from the countryside, seemingly without non agricultural skills. Let’s explore if in fact that was correct.
Arguably, Franklin Mendels formally exposed this handicrafts movement and saw in it the first phase of the industrial revolution. He called it “proto-industrialization”, and for him it was an solid first step in that transformation.
Well before the beginning of machine industry, many regions of Europe became increasingly industrialized in the sense that a growing proportion of their labor potential was allocated to industry. Yet that type of industry–the traditionally organized, principally rural handicrafts–barely fits the image of a modernizing economy. There is, however … advantage in thinking of the [handicraft] growth of ‘pre-industrial industry’ as part and parcel of the process of ‘industrialization’, or rather, as the first phase which preceded and prepared modern industrialization proper [99] Franklin F. Mendels, “Proto-Industrialization: the First Phase of the Industrialization Process, the Journal of Economic History, Vol 33, No. 1 (Mar, 1972), p. 241
For various reasons, European historians had some degree of difficulty with seeing this handicraft movement as the first phase of the industrial revolution. It did not fit well into the prevailing view of the evolution of social-economic class, and it did not correspond with any substantial movement into cities. No “machine tooling” sector or even agglomeration/cluster appeared, save for Flemish textiles, and handicrafts were absolutely agriculturally focused and practiced by feudal serfs and freemen households. For many there were more vital early manifestations of early industrialization than handicraft cottage driven production.
Whatever the merits of these concerns, I and others suggest the hinterland handicraft movement assumed a huge importance to developing nations (which certainly the wilderness colonial North America was), and this handicraft movement transported into the American wilderness was a foundation (not the only foundation) for the rise of manufacturing in the thirteen colonies.
Moreover, handicraft skills, were not only foundational for the development of industrial sectors in America–but was the route that produced America’s vibrant, innovative artisan class. This dynamic toward industrialization was intensified and expanded due to the needs and prerequisites of the American self-sufficiency economic development strategy. In a colonial America dotted with small towns and hamlets one would see the almost miraculous appearance of small scale artisans in the smallest of villages, as well as newly founded port cities. Transported into a wilderness, their crafts skills were elevated in prominence, status and priority to become something more than yeoman–they rose to a lower, if not middle class–essential to the success of any self-sustaining colonial ED strategy.
Carl Bridenbaugh picks up on this proto-industrialization without mention–for a good reason. He wrote his classic “the Colonial Craftsman” in 1950, not Mendels 1972. His opening sentence in Chapter 1 asserts “Crafts–and the artisans who practiced them–played a most important part in early American life; even more than historians have generally supposed. Next to husbandmen [small tenant farmer or landowner, a master of his homestead, whose status was below yeoman], craftsmen comprised the largest segment of the colonial population; whereas the the former made up about eighty percent of the people, artisans constituted about eighteen percent“.
When they spoke of a ‘craft’, our forefathers and the English and German ancestors thought of a skill, an art, an occupation. or they meant a calling requiring special training and knowledge, or possibly even the members of a given trade or handicraft taken collectively … The craft system, then, was a method of producing articles used in daily life, and this activity, by its very nature was at the same time artistic …’creative… Among the thousands who went to Continental colonies in the seventeenth century was a large proportion of skilled artisans who took with them the medieval English craft tradition, as part of their cultural baggage. … It is of profound significance that in the development of class of colonial artisans many English craftsmen bred in Old England during its great age of village life shared in a migration to the New World [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, the Colonial Craftsman (Dover Publications, 1990; first published 1950 New University Press), pp. 1-4
Role of Quakerism, Penn and Pennsylvania in the American Artisan/Scientific Movement
The artisan/scientific movement, and its paradigm, were a threat to the established intellectual-university order, which the highest social classes (aristocracy, land gentry, and commercial elite in particular) had been educated. The higher status group could not forget that on the main, the artisan-scientific movement was saturated with transformed members of the former self-lower class deplorables of that time period, and their knowledge of the classics was a higher form of education than that received by the typical artisan. The problem of the upper classes with the artisan-scientific movement was that the latter generated considerable innovation, comfort, positive lifestyle changes, and in general economic prosperity and some social stability. The artisan-scientific stress on “improvement” brought visible-felt benefits to the community.
When transported into the settlement of the new colony/provinces of America, artisans in particular were no longer merely a mixed-bag of discordance and prosperity, they were an absolute necessity if the colony were to achieve its goals associated with self-sufficiency. Except for Virginia/South Carolina and to some extent Maryland, which of course installed the old feudal serf economy), we shall find artisans were in a position of some importance, with whom not only must some sharing of power be accepted, but also some commitment must be made to its socialization and education if the relationship was to be sustainable, and bring stability to the new policy-making, and yield population and economic growth to the province.
This doesn’t sound particularly earthshattering, I suspect, but it was a breathtakingly different approach to that found and employed in Olde Merrie England. It was part of the so-called egalitarian atmosphere frequently attached to “frontier” settlement. That America was perceived as receptive to the emerging former medieval class, was without any doubt the best people-attraction economic development strategy for the thirteen colonies.
That it depended on word of mouth and the experiences of those who took the risk, found some success, and wrote home made it inexpensive. Likely, the local church in the English village, was the source of much positive news, i.e. a socialization-economic development intermediary, religion and charitable/ missionary religious practices played no small role either–in Pennsylvania George Fox’s missionary pilgrimage and the imposition of his beliefs and values upon rank-in-file Quakers, predisposed that province to affecting a more facilitative and tolerant approach to artisan immigration-emigration. The first colony created after the Cromwell period, was Penn’s Pennsylvania in 1681–little more than a generation after the founding of the Royal Society and the acceptance of the scientific-artisan paradigm by the Restoration monarchy.
On this side of the Atlantic, there emerged an explicit concern for ‘useful knowledge’ in the second half of the seventeenth century, particularly in the middle provinces, where the classical curriculum was in least vogue …. It was in Pennsylvania, among the Quakers, that the first impulse toward a definition of ‘useful knowledge’ in America was given. The utilitarian direction of Quaker thought first charted by the founder of the Society of Friends, George Fox, who introduced the ‘guarded education’ of the Quakers, and whom William Penn characterized as a man ‘ignorant of useless and sophistical science … {and who] had in him the grounds of useful and commendable knowledge and cherished it everywhere” [99] Jonathan Lyons, the Society for Useful Knowledge (Bloomsbury Press, 2013), p. 110.
The Quaker religion differed noticeably from Anglican and Puritan notions of Protestantism. The distinctions between these religions are not subtle, but they have been lost in the smush of Protestantism abounding today. All relied on the Bible, but Anglicans “knelt before a great and noble Pantocrator who rule firmly but fairly over the hierarchy [Great Chain of Being] of his creatures“. Puritans on the other hand possessed a very different tone or style to their God. Drawing from both Old and New Testaments their god “was equally capable of love and wrath–a dark, mysterious power who could be terrifying in his anger and inscrutability” and who possessed an all-encumbering plan to which humans were held accountable . [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press 1989), p. 426
Quakers, however, relied chiefly on the New Testament, repudiated the “Five Points of Calvinism“, and their God was “a God of Love and Light whose benevolent spirit harmonized the universe“. Of all three forms of Protestantism, Quakers were on the whole more inclined to a future in which progress based on individual human will and action could be achieved. I assert the artisan-scientific movement had more room for acceptance in the Quaker religion than in the other two [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press 1989), p. 426
Hackett-Fischer also asserts that whatever effect their religion had on conventional mercantilist policy systems, Quakers were far from anarchists in their internal organization, and were quite accepting of leadership (by elders within the Society), but held that authority was derived from the Quaker Society itself. Quaker authority over its members was legitimized and exercised through a “complex structure of meetings–men’s meetings and women’s meetings, meetings for worship, and meetings for business, monthly meetings, quarterly meetings and yearly meetings“. Quakers created a parallel set of religious structures to those of the civil policy system, and it infused their members with the charge of carrying over to the latter the values and predisposition of the Society. “Special attention was given to the the rearing of the young–an important factor in the survival of Quakerism, and in the culture that it created in the Delaware Valley” [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press 1989), p. 428 .
While civil libertarian-oriented historians stress Quaker predispositions toward religious toleration, democratic individual freedoms, strong (unbending, Inner Light driven) individualism, social (ethnic and even racial) pluralism–and of course, pacifism– I extend that list, congruent with Hackett-Fisher, that Quakers were predisposed to concerns for “basic literacy, and their contempt for higher learning [which placed scientific inquiry on its back foot in Pennsylvania–Quakers were actually forbidden in England to attend a university (p. 465,Albion’s Seed)], but placed great stress on the “sanctity of property … as well as their ethic f work, their ideal of worldly asceticism, their belief in the importance of family, and their habits of sexual prudery” [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press 1989), p. 429.
These cultural predispositions contained latent implications that shaped Penn’s policy system, and extended to its dealings with and policies toward the artisan-scientific group. In England most Quakers were not gentlemen or drawn from England’s higher classes (Penn the notable exception); “most male Quakers called themselves husbandmen. A majority in urban areas tended to describe themselves as manual workers, artisans, tradesmen and small shopkeepers … In marriage records of Philadelphia … only one man in ninety called himself a gentleman, and only one a laborer. The rest were mainly craftsmen, tradesmen, and merchants” [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, p. 436-7. When the time came to immigrate to Pennsylvania, Penn’s citizens, excepting his First Purchasers, overwhelmingly Quaker in the first decades, had no natural affinity to the traditional classical Renaissance humanism of the old paradigm, and were reasonably open to artisan (not scientific) thought.
Moreover, the bias against government, meant reliance on the Quaker meetings structure was likely to be their preferred policy-making guide and implementer. Inward looking, individually rooted, anti-elite, this belief system was not only tilted strongly to an egalitarianism that would be passed on to their offspring. Education in Pennsylvania was religious; Pennsylvania did not establish a public education system until 1834 (Boston Latin, established by the Town of Boston in 1635 funded by land sales and donations, and the first taxpayer supported, the Mather School in Dorchester, 1639). These biases, not surprisingly, also reflected the Proprietor’s approach to Pennsylvania governance and policy.
William Penn, in 1682, presided over the writing of guidelines to policy-makers, and his Frames (structure of his proposed government). In particular he expressed his thoughts for his colony’s hoped for education system. Calling for grants to be paid to ‘authors of useful sciences and laudable inventories” he personally added as Proprietor, ‘ I recommend the useful parts of mathematics, as building houses or ships, measuring, surveying, dialing, and navigation‘ [99] Jonathan Lyons, the Society for Useful Knowledge (Bloomsbury Press, 2013), pp. 11-13. No Latin or Greek here, and Aristotle was not likely to be stressed. No call for higher education either. In a subsequent letter, Penn reinforced his commitments to useful education writing…
We press their memory too soon and puzzle and strain and load them with words and rules to know grammar and rhetoric [attacking classical education] and a strange tongue or two [language] that it is ten to one may never be useful to them; leaving their natural genius to mechanical, physical or natural knowledge uncultivated and neglected, which would be of exceeding use and pleasure to them through the whole course of their lives [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, p. 534.
Instead , there was stress on vocational-occupational skills, vital to the self-sufficiency proposed as his economic development strategy. The ship-making cluster, a cornerstone in the at strategy, benefited from the education systems’ workforce tilt. Interestingly, Penn formally empowered the Governor and his Council of Advisors “to erect and order all public schools“; and, in 1683, the year of its founding, the legislature approved an act that required all students to be taught to read and right by the age of twelve AND, concurrent with basic education all students would be trained in a useful trade or skill, no matter whether rich or poor. Fines were applied to those negligent [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, p. 534 . The legislature, however, did not establish any public education system then in 1683, or at any time during the colonial period (again 1834 it was finally set up).
Also included in Penn’s Frames was his explicit call for “premiums” (scholarship grants) to authors of useful sciences and laudable inventions”–a remarkable example of a public-private initiative. If Penn did not require a K-12 public education, the values and English experiences of his Quakers, permeated their thoughts on who should do the teaching.
In England’s North Midlands … many humble people who became Quakers, regarded educational institutions as alien growths. Throughout that region, churches and schools were in the hands of a foreign elite. As a consequence, ordinary people tended to be strongly hostile to institutions of formal education … [and] contributed tot he Quakers suspicion of a learned [i.e. university-certified, as in Harvard] , and indeed of learning itself… Pennsylvania and West Jersey [dominated by majority Quaker populations] had nothing like New England’s school laws, or the comparatively high rates of enrollment that existed in Massachusetts. .. Schooling was perceived in Pennsylvania as a matter of [individual] conscience, which every sect, family and individual was expected to work out in his own way” [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, p. 533.
What happened instead was most Quaker congregations of sufficient size commenced their own school system, handled by their own leaders. To satisfy, the public requirement that poor receive an education, the Friends established “a Friends Public School” to the Quaker poor. By 1776, about sixty such Quaker schools existed, and an equal number of urban “neighborhood” schools were also set up. What followed over the next ninety years was that each religious sect/group would set up its own religious-based education system.[99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, p. 536-7
Interestingly, when given the chance in the 1780’s, during the Revolutionary Articles of Confederation when the Pennsylvania province had transformed itself into an American state, the Quaker Annual Meeting “authorized a broader scope for the education of Quaker youth, [and] many Quaker communities began to reassess their commitment to education. Many were content to reaffirm their obligation to provide instruction for the youth in ‘useful learning’, which contented itself with practical subjects in … [lower education] [99] Jonathan Lyons, the Society for Useful Knowledge (Bloomsbury Press, 2013), pp. 111.
Already, I once again remind the reader, it is evident that from the beginning of each colony, it was evident that a cultural prism would exert influence on policy decisions, inevitably leading to considerable, if subtle, differences among the colonies. The differenced in education policy were not subtle, however, and the practical, egalitarian bent of Quakerism was to be socialized in its future generations, with its artisan and anti-scientific bent, its reliance on private–religious–education one more expression of its unwillingness to empower a potential hostile government with such a critical policy area.
Higher education in particular suffered. “Of all the major Christian denominations in early America, the Quakers were the slowest to found colleges. Every major Protestant denomination was more active in this field. Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, Dutch Reformed, and Methodists all founded colleges before 1800–only one, however, existed in Pennsylvania during this period–the present University of Pennsylvania (instituted by a coalition led by Franklin), which had very little support from Quakers. [[99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, pp. 536-7). That institution, however, as stressed by Franklin himself, would be based on “useful knowledge”, reflecting Franklin and the Quaker artisan roots. Moreover, as we shall soon see, Franklin also recognized the deficiency of those attracted to the sciences and professions (health, and to those who served the poor–an overlap). In short order we shall discuss his founding of a replica to the Royal Society in Philadelphia–again through private action.
England and its colonies again entered into a period of political-economic disruption, the Glorious Revolution which gave the boot to the Stuart King, James II, and welcome in a new branch, the Hannover with Mary and William as Queen and King. Parliament was the instrument of this hereditary monarchical transaction, and it instigated both domestic turmoil and foreign reaction and intervention that intermittently disrupted the following several decades. From our perspective, the new regime and its Parliamentary allies possessed different views than the Stuarts on the management, indeed purposes, of the colonies, and the relations between Mother England and the thirteen colonies were both “complicated”, involved several serious wars and very disruptive to the political development of the colonies.
The swarm of issues, events, and dynamics that followed during these years pushed aside those associated with the Royal Society and the rise of a scientific, professional and artisan proto-classes. By no means did it stop, or seriously inhibit the evolution of any of these groups, but rather had the effect of both making them less controversial, and in their own way, useful to the larger dynamics that had displaced them. Our next topic transfers our attention to the transplanting of artisans and scientists to the North American colonies, and then to its rise in Philadelphia in particular.
“Useful Knowledge” the Value Added that Brought Legitimacy to Artisans
In the minds of some contemporaries, Artisans were mostly a “bottoms-up”, rags to riches group of aspirants. This is decidedly not the case, at least for pre-1750 artisans. Proto American aristocrats of the colonial period shoved their sons (and some daughters) into professional classes, providing them with an English experience, a serious American education, and providing offspring with financial sustenance in their endeavors. Tench Coxe fit into this, and Benjamin Rush might have if fortune had been so kind , Albert Gallatin’s father was a wealthy aristocratic commercial Swiss merchant. Entry of these young aristocrats into an artisan endeavor obscures an aristocratic tendency to depreciate artisans and business, and an unwillingness of at least some artisan offspring to engage in artisan businesses–Tench Coxe again is an example. It is not hard to dig up comments by high status and wealthy disparaging the artisan, and including him in “the Mob”. Notwithstanding this tension, sons (and daughters as Tench Coxe’s mother) did find themselves in the artisan community for a variety of reasons.
But most artisans usually were offspring of the middling sort, from artisan households. Working class and peasant offspring customarily wound up coming to America as indentured, and lacked sufficient contacts to attain an apprenticeship, or a live-in work experience.
This seems to have drawn support from the more practical, and less conceptual Quakers who set off to America. In fact Franklin’s first employer in Philadelphia, the printer Samuel Keimer advertised his newspaper as “the richest Mine of useful knowledge ever discovered“. [99] Jonathan Lyons, the Society for Useful Knowledge (Bloomsbury Press, 2013), p. 14.
“Useful Knowledge” often linked with “improvement” became a sort of synonym for both a body of knowledge, experimentation, progress and improvement of society and economy. That expression applied to most anything associated with artisans, and it not only legitimized their skills, knowledge, businesses, and tempered their frequent failures, but it also added to their commonly shared identity, creating a bond with those who were committed to its values and practices. In an America dominated by the self-sufficiency ED strategy, it extended its artisan big tent status to the embryonic start of what would be a social-economic class so vitally needed in the wilderness of North America.
The shortage of skilled labor in colonial America, the accompanying high wages, and the lack of restrictive regulations meant that many a master craftsman or mechanic could aspire to become an independent entrepreneur, with considerable economic security, social standing, and political influence … ‘Hence, it is that Artisans generally live better, and more easily in America than in Europe, and such as are good Economists make a comfortable Provision for Age and for their Children’ [99] Jonathan Lyons, the Society for Useful Knowledge (Bloomsbury Press, 2013), p. 15.. [The last quote made by Franklin in his “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries“, He concludes that sentence with “Such may therefore remove with Advantage to America [i.e. leave England for America].
The expression and the meaning attached to it was not restricted to Quaker Pennsylvania, but extended to each colony, and it embedded itself with each passing decade. In May 1783, for example, at the inauguration ceremonies of Phillips Exeter Academy, its principal speaker and trustee noted that “A growing taste for useful knowledge is an important characteristic of the people of this new world“.
What he was telling his audience was that Phillips Exeter “that everyone in America favored useful knowledge (even if few could formulate or agree to a precise definition) or that the concept was not a native product but a British transplant increasingly cultivated in the new country”, but rather Exeter was to serve not the advancement of useful knowledge but was to impart the older traditional classical curriculum” that useful knowledge had marginalized in the new world. By the founding of our Early Republic, the principles and approach of the Royal Society, and the artisan class that followed in its wake, had come full circle to become the paradigm for education and individual aspiration in the new world [99] Meyer Reinhold, “The Quest for ‘Useful Knowledge” in Eighteenth-Century America”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 119, No. 2 (Apr 16, 1975), p. 108.
Advancement of Artisans/Scientists in Pennsylvania
Simplistically, individuals were left to make their own decisions and determinations, act on them or not, and each of these groups attracted their share of consideration and accordingly spread through England and through immigration into the various colonies. In Pennsylvania, Penn’s open door policy certainly encouraged immigrants and brought “a rich array of skilled artisans to the Delaware. Penn’s first ship sent from London in 1781, the Bristol Factor, brought on it Cesar Ghiselin, an 18 year old silversmith, Thomas Wharton, a tailor, Nehemiah Allen, a cooper, Josiah Carpenter, a brewer, Thomas Paschall, a pewterer,, and Abraham Hooper, a cabinetmaker … In this single ship arrived the core of the artisan and commercial enterprises of the early [first] decade. Each established a family that prospered … Working in their small shops, Philadelphia’s diversified artisans … [and] Philadelphia’s many craftsmen produced articles on demand for urban customers, called ‘bespoke work’, but they produced as well for the entire Delaware Valley [99] Gary B Nash, First City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 54.
As their numbers increased the different institutions and players crafted their own accommodations–including the Anglican Church which reciprocated with its “Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK). SPCK, led by the Anglican divine, Thomas Bray organized many public lending libraries in England, Wales and North America. Bray defined his vision of “useful knowledge” broadly, with a bias toward religious professions (clergy), but also to physicians and lawyers–the professions. By 1730, SPCK had established 39 lending libraries in the colonies, and sent over 34,000 books to them. All this caught the attention of our Franklin.
As we might suspect, Franklin, an Anglican (if he was of any religious persuasion) was aware of all of this, and his own 1726-9 adventure in establishing his own lending library, defined in his terms to a mostly artisan, but also scientific (James Logan) constituency. Franklin we might remember, spent the better part of two years previous to this in London, and his diary records ample contact, meetings, discussion, and even group sessions with the great names of the English scientific, professional and artisan community. His was a laundry list of names that one wonders how a young man in his early late teens could access. This guy really knew how to network. By 1727 he as back in Philadelphia and there his career took off like a subtle rocket.
[Franklin] began to encounter on his early forays into London’s intellectual world, a world comprised of physicians, clerics, artisans, scholars, nobles and businessmen in and around the Royal Society. And it was from this circle that Franklin first gleaned a real appreciation for the value and power of science, and intellectual pursuits in general [99] Jonathan Lyons, the Society for Useful Knowledge (Bloomsbury Press, 2013), p. 33
Diffusion into Popular Culture–Two sympathetic dynamics seeped into the artisan movement from society and politics. First, a popular culture that stressed topics touching upon self-improvement that generated a host of “how to”, i.e. characteristics to develop, clothes to wear and proper manners, and attitudes congruent with rise of the individual in society. Bookstores had them for sale. Quick to follow were artisan trades and techniques handbooks associated with the budding clusters (bookkeeping, surveying, navigation, for example) that were jelling in the various colonies.
True to form, a “night school” cottage industry of courses, speakers, and semi-formal artisan-relevant offerings were available, and no doubt advertised at the local tavern. This popular culture flourished in each of the thirteen colonies–with oddly enough, Virginia where Rev. Hugh Jones a professor of math and natural philosophy developed a curriculum of the most “useful branches of learning” for the benefit of the “young gentlemen of the plantations”.
The second dynamic, quite the opposite from the first, was political, in the form of Governor, then ex-Governor, William Keith.
Keith, Pennsylvania’s governor, appointed by Hannah Penn at the suggestion of James Logan (1718) was a decidedly bad choice from the Penn family perspective. Able in his own right, he fitfully navigated through the political civil war, causing his own disruptions in it and taking personal advantage when he could, Keith was his own man in Pennsylvania. By 1724, the forces arrayed against him, assembling a momentum that would cause his dismissal by the Penns in 1726.
In that period and after, Keith looked for support for his projects and ambitions where he could find it. That meant a serious entry into “populist” electoral politics–what Logan would describe as the politics of the “Mob”. Over the course of several years, Keith involved all sorts of our artisans, workers, merchants, political dissidents, and dissatisfied urban residents and not only mobilized them against the Municipal Corporation of Philadelphia (Logan’s proprietary leaning government), but got folk elected into the provincial legislature.
Keith’s key entry issue was soft/paper money. with the goal of creating a general, Keynesian like, prosperity in the Pennsylvania economy. Franklin, who knew Keith (it was Keith that sent him off to London), got significantly involved in the issue (to be described in another module), and along with him his Junto, his newly owned newspaper joined in. Franklin’s rivals joined the fray. In essence, Keith played an important role in developing artisan self awareness and the development of its internal leadership.
Franklin himself, got a boost in this direction by his first employer once back in Philadelphia, the printer Samuel Keimer. Keimer announced his intention in 1728 to promote “useful knowledge” to help dispel Ignorance and Superstition for the Publick Good” [99] Jonathan Lyons, the Society for Useful Knowledge (Bloomsbury Press, 2013), pp. 113.– a rather controversial and business killing idea that may likely have been prompted by Franklin himself. Franklin in that year bought the remains of his newspaper ( a peek into Franklin’s dark side here).
From this point on for sure, Philadelphia artisans had a taste of Pennsylvania-style politics, some leadership and an increased willingness to make itself known and “felt”. Franklin, using his Junto as an activist wedge, had a distinct organizational advantage, and his brilliance and his inspired agenda–which embraced an encyclopedia of issues and interests–made itself felt in Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania legislature, of which he was clerk, and record-keeper.
His jaw-dropping networking, his pen and growing national ascendancy–he was appointed Philadelphia superintendent of the postal services, a British colonial office–and his ability to navigate among the factions of the political civil war without burning any bridges was remarkable testimony to his personality and charisma. The years between 1728 and 1743 were truly foundational for him and his constituency–and by the early to middle 1740’s Franklin, Philadelphia artisan community, were coming of age and in 1743 was seemingly the breakout year. The issue Franklin chose was to mobilize his own Royal Society-like organization whose ambitions were to unify the scientific-professional-artisan communities across all the colonies.
A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations“
was written and promoted by Franklin in 1743. The missive was a call to form an association of those who sympathized with and those who produced such useful knowledge in the several colonies. This association, a society, could be the vehicle under whose auspices the British North American scientific-artisan community could maintain contacts with each other, and provide support to one another. It could be taken as an extension of Franklin’s Junto, or the Lending Library, but a look into why Franklin wrote the Proposal tilts us in another direction. Franklin, it appears, was sympathetic to the plight of Pennsylvania’s most prolific scientist, his Quaker friend and arguably North America’s leading botanist , John Bartram.
Bartram’s tale sensitizes us to those colonials who were interested in more scientific endeavors (pure experimentation/classification of natural phenomena) than artisan (machine, tinkering with existing tech-production processes, consumer end-user products/services). Using Bertram as an example, his tale exposes the little known underside of colonial scientific innovation. It may be surprising to contemporary innovation commentators that an innovation “industry” linked American inventors/scientists to the Royal Society–and that industry contained many of the features, business models, and relationships found in current innovation discovery and funding.
In any case, it was Bertram who prodded Franklin–for more than a decade–to organize an American Royal Society equivalent. Bertram was not the author of “a Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge …, Franklin was, but Bertram was its inspiration and its principal driver. Who the hell was John Bertram?
Rummaging Around the Basement of Colonial innovation: John Bertram–Bartram discovered and classified North American flora and fauna by the wheelbarrow, and sent them to contacts with the Royal Society. They were well appreciated by such as Linnaeus who was then a member of the Royal Society; Linnaeus described Bartram as “the greatest natural botanist in the world” [99] Jonathan Lyons, the Society for Useful Knowledge, p.68. Well, Linnaeus, who was Swedish, connected Bertram to Sweden’s Queen, an avid gardener, and she in return for his seeds and cuttings conferred on him membership of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science in 1769–the British Royal Society, however, preferred an arms-length relationship with its American counterparts. If you get my drift, the British Royal Society had its issues with its loyal colonial compatriots. The British rather enjoyed the status and near-monopoly of the Royal Society, and they welcomed no threat to its position. “For the Royal Society, members of this tiny American [scientific] vanguard were little more than helpmates … ill-prepared for the rigors of true natural philosophy [99] Jonathan Lyons, the Society for Useful Knowledge, p.63.
A more egregious example of abuse was suffered by Pennsylvanian poet, glazier, and inventor of Hadley’s Quadrant, a double reflecting mirror quadrant that made its use effective at sea. In 1730, Pennsylvanian Thomas Godfrey, after extensive experimentation on the Delaware and a voyage to Jamaica. Through our James Logan he sent them to the Royal Society, he developed a prototype and master details of its construction. In short order the Royal Society published both and claimed its Vice President John Hadley was the inventor. Hadley’s Quadrant revolutionized English marine navigation and therefore in effect the Royal Society had stolen a significant advance for its own. Logan reacted and led a campaign to give Godfrey his credit–which was successful, although Hadley still got the prestige of Hadley’s Quadrant. Godfrey’s mistreatment is enormously relevant to our history as future events would tell–he was a member of excellent standing in Franklin’s Junto, and a close personal friend.
Bertram, said and done earned his living as a household-level farmer. Bertram developed a working relationship with James Logan (who at minimum was Pennsylvania’s leading intellectual/scientist, and held allegedly the largest private library in America). and he attached himself to Franklin’s Junto–and was granted free access to his Lending Library. Why this convoluted entry into the province’s scientific community–he was a rural, self-taught rube. He supplemented his meager income with plants, seeds and samplings that the elites of the Royal Society paid for. They were shipped by a Quaker merchant, Peter Collinson, who developed a multi province network of scientists such as Bertram–his was the access into the Royal Society membership. Through him the South Carolina physician, Alexander Garden, sent flowers and seeds to Linnaeus–who in gratitude named the gardenia species after our friend Garden.
Collinson, however, had his dark side; the did not question the various discriminations practiced upon American scientists–his business model was rife with them. Several Royal Society books of flora and fauna were published without any credit to the Americans who actually did the reports, and sent the seeds and cuttings to Britain. Today this would be called plagiarism. This was not an uncommon practice [99] Jonathan Lyons, the Society for Useful Knowledge, p.69.
Collinson actually developed an English network of funders, which from time to time, included King George III, the last who actually funded one of Bertram’s gathering expeditions. Knowing what his Royal Society clients were interested in, Collinson actually planned projects, expeditions, and fused North American findings into British experimental projects. Collinson actually was able to raise sufficient funds to offer a permanent salary to various American scientists, such as Bertram. Bertram was in operation from the early 1730’s and his private middleman venture capitalist business plan lasted until his death in 1768.
Back to “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations“– Franklin put a lot of himself and his network of contacts behind the launch of The American Philosophical Society in 1743. Despite Collinson’s opposition to the idea–conveyed to Bertram–, Bertram and Cadwallader Colden, a botanist (an a full time politician)–he was the Royal Governor of New York), from New York, finally got Franklin to assume leadership of an organization whose function and purpose, as well as its constituency, was an American version of the Royal Society. The American popular phrasing “useful knowledge” was embraced and served as a organizational tent-legitimizing name to capture innovation within colonial America–and its scientific-artisan communities in each province.
The Junto was heavily involved, led by Thomas Bond, a leading Philadelphia physician (and with Franklin a co-founder of Philadelphia’s Hospital, the America’s first in 1751), and our earlier mentioned friend, Thomas Godfrey. Several other noteworthy names from other colonies were garnered as activists and members of the new organization. A scientific journal, the American Philosophical Miscellany, was founded, and published several issues. Colden, ever the politician publicly wrote the organization was off and running in mid-1744, but the reality is the American Philosophical Society never got off the ground. “The project was virtually stillborn” In an “Update” he published in 1745 Franklin “blamed the habits of his fellow colonials, in particular those from the upper crust whose discipline, he suggested, compared unfavorably to that of the Leather Aprons. ‘The Members of our Society here are very idle Gentlemen, they will take no pains”. Bertram suggested (I am not kidding) that it could be revived if they met in a tavern or club, and offered chess and coffee–that offers another insight into the quality of activism within the Philadelphia group [99] Jonathan Lyons, the Society for Useful Knowledge, p 70.
Truth be told, Philadelphia and colonial America just were not yet ready to assume leadership. The Royal Society, heavily backed by the Crown was not about to back down, and the Philadelphia and its colonial port city allies were just too few and far between-Philadelphia was not yet a well-connected urban society that could counter London’s–and for what it was worth, the Proprietary or Legislature remained uninvolved.
And, let’s not forget, America was a system of colonies–dependent from the get to. Add to this the lack of any meaningful cooperation among provinces, their leadership and governments, or even their residents–AND–equally important Philadelphia Pennsylvania politics soon entered into a very turbulent period–a period in which Franklin himself, no less, would organize “the Association” a province-wide militia to defend Philadelphia and the Delaware River Valley. For the next several years, Franklin’s first priority was the Association–and it was also the period in which he retired formally from printing–i.e. lifestyle change and his version of retirement.
The timing as terrible.
If the timing was terrible it did not mean the British North American “useful knowledge” movement had failed, relegated to the trash bin. First, New York in 1748 created its version headed by William Livingston (future governor of the STATE of New Jersey), William Smith Jr. and john Morin Scott). Essentially it suffered the same fate as Pennsylvania–informal and short-lived. American innovation did not cease, as American scientists worked out their own relationships with the Royal Society, and the latter in some cases did, while continuing its depreciation of the American role, continue to finance and utilize American research.
Franklin moved on–and that points out the critical role provided by a leader capable to sustaining action. Franklin gravitated, due to public events to forming a militia, the Association is what he called it. Since Pennsylvania would not create a public militia to defend itself from the Spanish bombarding Delaware River cities, then he did. It consumed the better part of two years, and it probably pushed him more into a public career (he was a retiree after 1744) than he first thought.
Although Franklin’s greatest period of success as a scientist lay before in the late 40’s and early 50’s, he got elected to public office in 1748 and then to the provincial legislator in 1751. His leadership role in the Quaker Party, his prominent stand against the Proprietor in 1755-6–and then his mission to London as a lobbyist through 1762 (not to mention his 1753 Deputy Postmaster General position) clearly had to have impacted his time commitment.
Still, it would be incorrect to think of the American Philosophical Society as dead and buried after 1745. It did serve as a reason for various scientists to keep each other informed, and to render what assistance and support they could. And it still admitted new members to the original group; Charles Thompson, an individual we shall hear about in other modules (he is sometimes entitled the Sam Adams of Pennsylvania), was admitted in the 1750’s. During this period, since a goodly number of Franklin’s initial Junto had passed to their reward, a Young Junto attached itself to Franklin.
Like the older version, the Young Junto met and conducted its affairs in secret, and informally. Franklin was in London most of the time and his was a more distant relationship. That grouping masked the arrival of a new generation cohort, and it used the aura of Franklin as much as he found it helpful. There was, as we shall discover, a substantive shift in its agenda and research focus. In fact it was Thompson and others like Tench Coxe and Benjamin Rush that would start a process in 1765 (Stamp Act) that led to the formation of the Society for Promoting and Propagating Useful Knowledge in 1768.
That promoted an original American Philosophical Society member, Thomas Bond, to resuscitate the rather sedate remains of the older organization. Eventually the two would merge–but I would rather leave most of that to another module. It might also be mentioned, that immediately previous to the Revolution, 1774, Virginia formed its own Society for Promotion of Useful Knowledge. In the mid to late 1780’s a virtual flood of attention focused on Societies of Useful Knowledge, and the reader should sense the “timing” for American useful knowledge movement was during that time period.
One, hopefully final observation for this module, is the matter of useful knowledge versus the traditional classics moved after 1750 into the curriculums of American colleges and universities–and punctuated the proposed curriculums- and purposes–of American colleges founded during that time period. It starts, as always, with Franklin’s post 1748 project to begin advocacy for “an Academy and College” for Philadelphia. Through years of dialogue and point-counterpoint, the Academy and the College were founded–and the discussion and debate of useful versus traditional classical (and language) curriculum fleshed out a hybrid model that with nips and tucks became a hallmark for pre-1800 higher education [99] For an excellent summation see Jonathan Lyons, the Society for Useful Knowledge, pp. 114-18.
The Diffusion of Artisans through Geography and Economic Base
While we all expect Philadelphia to become “the Mecca” for artisans and commerce, we ,might be surprised to know many artisans will be found in the towns around the City. In fact, we shall see that several vital manufacturing clusters (flour processing, and iron and glassmaking) were until the eve of the Revolution exclusively hinterland clusters–with iron and glass plantation employing several hundred workers each–alongside a host of associated occupations and business that lived off that cluster. Shipbuilders located along interior rivers, and nearby timber mills and wagon makers. In 1773, there were 107 mills (grist works) in Philadelphia County alone, and Wilmington (part of Pennsylvania) was the leading milling town in the thirteen colonies on the eve of the Revolution.
All of this was not government-driven; it was entrepreneurs taking advantage of an expanding market, offering new products and processes that in food-agriculture fit into the self-sufficient strategy. This meant artisan-driven clusters and the development of industries and sectors in these early years was by no means confined to the port cities–in fact it became a vital element of the economic bases of the larger, county seat, hinterland towns
This, as you might suspect, is tribute to the handicraft skills of is homesteading settlers. Germantown, founded by Germans during Penn’s first stay in the colony, was nine miles from Philadelphia at the time. By 1774 106 master artisans in twenty-seven crafts were paying taxes out of a total 481 taxpayers. Leather related trades accounted for 31 (including 14 cordwainers -i.e. shoemakers and 5 saddle-makers, 14 coopers (cask-barrel makers). two coach/wagon makers, several clockmakers, bookbinders, chair and furniture makers. Germantown was known for its warm, wool stockings–a specialty that employed a goodly number of women and young girls [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, the Colonial Craftsman (Dover Publications, 1990; first published 1950 New University Press), p. 55.
Another town, also settled initially by German Moravians was Bethlehem. In 1774, it held nineteen master craftsmen in eleven trades, from a total of 145 taxpayers. Adjacent Durham Ironworks had fostered a small cluster of millwrights who specialized in water pipes, and “self-acting water pumps” with a triple crank. On May 2, 1755 water was forced up into a Bethlehem’s newly-built seventy-five foot high water tank, and by June 27, that tank became the first operating municipal water system in the thirteen colonies [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, the Colonial Craftsman (Dover Publications, 1990; first published 1950 New University Press), p. 56.
The kingpin in Pennsylvania’s hinterland was York, founded in 1741 held about 2,500 residents, mostly German, by 1774. It presided over an agricultural hinterland, and was a launching point for those who set out down the Great Wagon Road to points south and west. In 1779, there were thirty-nine trades that employed fully half of the borough’s taxpayers. “Seventeen shoemakers, as many tailors, eleven blacksmiths, nine hatters, nine weavers, and seven hosiers [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, the Colonial Craftsman (Dover Publications, 1990; first published 1950 New University Press), p. 57.
The point of all this detail is the amazing ubiquitous of Pennsylvania’s artisan class, and to dispel any notion that non-agricultural sectors, occupations, and clusters were an urban phenomena. “Rural artisans … undertook the trades ‘in all their branches’. In a village a man [or woman] was not called upon to subdivide a craft [i.e. specialize], or to develop minute, specialized skills. A carpenter could perform all operations involved in woodworking” [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, the Colonial Craftsman (Dover Publications, 1990; first published 1950 New University Press), p. 65. That distinction was a major driver of the evolution of the artisan class–and it resulted from the density of population resident or accessible, the prominence of export-import, and the discretionary wealth of the top sectors of Pennsylvania.
the Urban Artisan — the typical American, to the extent he/she is aware of their colonial past, see it through an urban prism. Historians also focus on the urban artisan. So there is no lack of literature on famous urban artisans, for example Benjamin Franklin or Sam Adams. John Adams was a lawyer, a professional which tend to be lumped in with artisans, although professionals (not Adams) possess strong links to offspring of an emerging aristocratic class (for example Benjamin Rush or Trench Coxe). The port city markets were a great place to sell hinterland handicrafts, and fair days and specialized market districts were a customary place for hinterland artisans to sell their products.
Still the port cities of colonial America are the prism by which we understand colonial artisans, despite their oversized presence in hinterland towns. The most obvious reason is their sheer number. Without giving anything away, in 1774 the tax assessor’s list for Philadelphia and its two suburbs, Northern Liberties and Southwark contained over 3400 names in a city of about 40,000. These were the eligible voting population of the city corporation [one can see at the eve of the Revolution most of the city residents were disenfranchised]. But of this rather concentrated electorate almost 1,000 were craftsmen (about 30% of the voting population). Although the huge number of indentured, apprenticed, slaves, and even most journeymen were not property-owners, they were somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of the city population. [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, the Colonial Craftsman (Dover Publications, 1990; first published 1950 New University Press), pp. 95-6. As we shall see by the end of this chapter, artisans are going to be the vanguard of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. It is they who will launch a coup that will replace the provincial state government, and write (along with hinterland homesteaders) Pennsylvania’s first Constitution.
Pennsylvania’s Constitution of 1776 was the sole instrument of the Revolutionary era to translate the hopes and aspirations of the craftsmen into fundamental law, for it was in that state alone that the old ruling class was completely divested of power. This document was drawn up by Benjamin Franklin, David Cannon, George Bryan, David Rittenhouse, and Dr. Thomas Young–representatives of the middle class, who fully understood what the craftsmen and their farmer allies wanted [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, the Colonial Craftsman (Dover Publications, 1990; first published 1950 New University Press), pp. 180-1.
No wonder then historians have focused on Philadelphia’s artisans! There are, however, several less obvious reasons for why historians and Americans in general appreciate urban artisans over their hinterland comrades.
First the concentration of population, i.e. density, in port cities combined with the centrality of the export-import strategy in the port city meant that artisans were able to specialize in their trades, acquiring more specific expertise in a narrow range of products/aspects of a larger trade. Hinterland artisans were generalists; urban artisans could establish a market presence–a brand-over production of specific products (furniture, home construction, household products (clocks and watches), gendered markets for apparel sale. We will discuss this aspect more in the Massachusetts chapter where we shall introduce the reader to Lynn Massachusetts. In 1774, the Philadelphia tax rolls demarcate 334 master shoemakers in Philadelphia [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, the Colonial Craftsman (Dover Publications, 1990; first published 1950 New University Press), pp. 74-5.
The export/import function in waterfront-logistics provided first advantage to cask makers, rope makers and sail riggers, anchors, foodstuffs for maritime use and export, ship repair, wagons, and a host of more sector-specific artisan expertise. Being a port city, urban artisans were able to cull the cream of the indentured immigrant crop and attract apprentices from other artisan families (Franklin, for example). The fur trade was particularly impactful on urban “hatters”.
By 1732, New York and Boston alone made 10,000 hats annually–prompting Parliament when informed of this competition, passed the 1732 Hat Act, which restricted American hatters to only two apprentices per company, and which prohibited the export of American hats period. No fear, Americans ignored the ill-enforced Act and in every city, including Philadelphia the hat industry did well [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, the Colonial Craftsman (Dover Publications, 1990; first published 1950 New University Press), p. 72-3.
Some ethnic immigrants, Huguenots for example fled from European cities and were disposed to establishing an urban residence. Paul Revere was of Huguenot extraction); surprisingly silversmiths were well-represented in Huguenot immigrants and they settled in all port cities. When Quebec fell, its wigmakers and hair dressers moved out to other American port cities. Tench Coxe observed in his 1794 book, “View of the United States of America” that … a large proportion of the most successful manufacturers in the United States consists of persons that were journeymen, and in a few instances were foremen in the workshops and manufactories of Europe; who having been skillful, sober, frugal, and having saved a little money have set up for themselves with great advantage in America” [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, the Colonial Craftsman (Dover Publications, 1990; first published 1950 New University Press), p. 69.
The second major reason why artisans did well in urban areas was these areas concentrated the more wealthy-affluent elements of the colonial population. With their enhanced personal discretionary income they could purchase newspapers (and need to read them), jewelry (silversmiths and and clock makers, fine furniture and household goods, and of course all forms of shoes and apparel (tailors), were a particular example).
Tailors found that starting up a business in Philadelphia was a gold mine (and New York City as well). By the time of the Revolution there were at least 121 masters of the profession and tailors comprised 14% of the city’s artisans. “In 1771 over forty master tailors met at Carpenter’s Hall to form the Taylor’s Company of Philadelphia, an employers organization designed to fix prices and limit wages paid to journeymen”. Along with tailors came cleaners and dyeing [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, the Colonial Craftsman (Dover Publications, 1990; first published 1950 New University Press), pp. 70-1.
Philadelphia, because it was the largest port city of America, had a constant influx of new residents that needed a place to live. “The growth of colonial cities and towns stimulated the building trades in which carpenters and housewrights joined with masons, bricklayers, plasterers, painters and allied artisans in raising and decorating mansions for merchant aristocrats”. Carpenters in particular, constantly employed in building working and artisan housing were in steady employment, and from them evolved master carpenter architects who assumed leadership of the larger building trades–remember Philadelphia’s Carpenters Hall [99] Carl Bridenbaugh, the Colonial Craftsman (Dover Publications, 1990; first published 1950 New University Press), pp. 75-6.
Artisans Interact with Commercial Merchants and Share in the Lot of the Working Poor
Bridenbaugh observes that:
Side by side with shops of those who bought to sell again {i.e. retailers] were the establishments of those who offered for sale the results of their own labor, or the product of their particular craft. [A watch maker would manufacture, design, repair and upgrade, and sell an assembled watch]. A very large part of the population of each town consisted of artisans and tradesmen, many of whom possessed ‘Land and Some Estate’ [i.e. potentially eligible to become freeholders and eligible for the electoral franchise]. This class naturally fell into two groups: tradesmen occupied in the food and provision business, and craftsmen or artisans who worked all other trades [and specialized niches] [99] Bridenbaugh, Vol I, p. 190
In the old world economy these groupings were common, often tied into the guild system, and for whom workforce institutions such as apprenticeship and indenture were the customary route to certification by guilds for inclusion in their membership and once standards and qualifications were met and satisfied were eligible to set up their own shop. Absence the guild in America, these folk were grafted onto an now independent private merchant commercial community populated by individual entrepreneur merchants of trade, logistics, wholesale and retail.. We know from Benjamin Franklin’s biography that he was a “leather stocking” apprenticed” artisan-printer, who eventually bought a newspaper.
In later years, historians tend to concentrate (because of their political role] on artisans who worked in the manufacturing-iron working sector, and/or conflate them with working class (sailors=marine sector and laborers) artisans are today’s equivalent to small business, composed of a great number of sectors, occupations, products and services. The reader is not encouraged to think of this grouping as a straight line evolution from any one place–black slaves were a serious element [probably a majority] of Charleston’s artisan community, and a surprising role of women in managing retail stores/taverns/inns, catering from which a specialization in funerals developed, and their role in the early rise of the textile industry challenges us to the danger of ignoring the almost inevitable inclusion of all groupings into a hardscrabble and incremental building of our economic bases to achieve regional self-sufficiency.
In one sense, aspirations and pretensions of artisans [to rise to wealth and status] combined with the means to attain land and some estate marks artisans as members of the emerging lower middle class. In other sense their gradual and hardscrabble rise in their chosen field and specialization meant they were subjects to the whims of a volatile economy and buffeted by those whose wealth and economic/political concentration.
Wealth did not inevitably flow into the artisan community; one could set type for lifetime and never own a newspaper. Indenture and apprenticeship left their mark on the finances of their early years, and the reality was artisans, especially younger ones, as far as income and wealth goes, were working class on the edge of poverty if displaced injured, widowed or bankrupted. That means artisans overlapped emerging socio-economic classes, potentially members of both during their lifetime.
As such artisans have been grist for many a community development author asserting their bona fides for inclusion into the downtrodden and deserving of help. This may be an insight into contemporary community development which still displays an ambivalence to small business as not quite capitalism, and not quire worker–the plight of the Uber driver, the Mexican-American landscaping company whose workers are picked up daily on designated street corners, the minority-owned small business, physical trainers in gyms, and the franchised MacDonald hamburger maker. The list goes on and on–as it did centuries ago as David Copperfield confirms.
Artisans historically were/are neither fish nor fowl, both CD and MED in their needs and demands. Accordingly, we can, and will, find strategies and initiatives within each approach. Artisan occupations have always been a path, an imperfect path, to personal independence that promised social and economic success. The artisan path was chosen by a majority of colonial urban residents and their succeeding generations whatever ethnic, immigrant, religious and, when possible, racial background.
The obstacles encountered by the artisan engaged in his/her personal path could be painted as a “rags to riches” tale if successful, or yet one more instance of structural impediments leading almost inevitably to systemic inequality if success eludes the seeker. Not much, it seems, has changed since colonial times, as contemporary artisans engender the same bipolar discussion. Why?
To me it is an embedded characteristic of a career path that overlaps sectors of the economy, a path in which a key element involves skill at retailing one’s product, service, or good, and which the mastery of skills is achieved by workforce skill transfer EDOs-institutions like apprenticeship, mentoring, compulsory employment as condition of skill transfer (indenture is the colonial example). Geography becomes a salient factor in that low population densities cannot usually support many artisan opportunities, hence urban centers occupy a prominent advantage is attracting artisans–concentrating them in hyper-competition with each other.
Given individual variation in time and skill level, the variety of individual personality and decision-making dynamics (ambition after all, seldom reflects one’s perceived capacity), and the inability to predict-link demand for the artisan’s output with the level of output required for self-sufficiency. The low barriers to entry typical of artisan occupations also can supply too many artisans at any one time, driving wages lower. So an artisan can be a worker on his or her way into the future–or headed for or mired in structural poverty that could not be escaped. That offers historians some flexibility on which outcome to comment upon.
In colonial times artisans could be an indentured ‘servant’, a single person business while engaged as a day laborer (colonial gig economy), an independent entrepreneur with their own stall in the marketplace, an apprentice residing inside a family partnership and housed with the family. Oh for the simplicity of being an agricultural homesteader.
Even in colonial times artisans could be an indentured ‘servant’, a single person business while engaged as a day laborer (colonial gig economy), an independent entrepreneur with their own stall in the marketplace, an apprentice residing inside a family partnership and housed with the family. Oh for the simplicity of being an agricultural homesteader. Gary B. Nash dwells on the former in his [99] “the Urban Crucible: Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution” (Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 161-6. Over several pages he gives fascinating examples of artisans, their work and residence option, standard of living, and the volatility caused by the city’s economic environment–which, of course, was none of the artisan’s responsibility.
He offers a tantalizing insight the artisans breaking away from residences provided by employers as a component of their payment, as a significant transition movement to a free labor force employable for currency salary as setting the foundation for the future factory workforce, and American citizen. His concentration is upon those artisans who were in rags or engaged as laborers–they are for him a future working class that if sufficiently stressed could achieve some level of class consciousness that sustained a masses against the luxury elite mobilization–such as the 1775 American Revolution offered.
Perhaps not surprisingly we shall see this in the behavior of Philadelphia (and her urban suburbs) leading up to the Declaration of Independence. Artisans could be a bourgeoisie in aspiration, and a lumpenproletariat in frustration. One wonders if the hollowed out American economy of 2021 presents similar opportunities and threats as the fluid, mobile and buffeted “deplorable” and Bernie/Black Lives Matter young activists find little fit for achieving their aspirations. On the other hand, as cited by Bridenbaugh (Vol II), p. 283 [99] “events and conditions that were causing mutations among the mercantile gentry [and the stagnating artisans] were also elevating the middle class to a prominence and influence which ultimately led to a thrust for political power, the most portentous development in the urban life of this era. The largest segment of the city population, artisans, shopkeepers, and tradesmen and their families, composed of two-thirds of the inhabitants of each Northern community … contemptuously branded ‘Mechanicks and Tradesmen’ by the upper classes, as though they were somehow really of ‘the inferior sort’; their best label … [however, considering future events was] citizens.
What this concentration ignores is important–but for some, a number fewer than those who were unable to achieve success, became winners on the artisan path, achieving at least middle class and for others a solid entry into the commercial or manufacturing sector elites. What he also misses is the practical flexibility of an artisan path which embraced the smallest of niches, from silver smiths, to wigmakers, to clock repair, tailors, bricklayers, barbers, painters, gardeners, seamstress, and a spectacle maker. That list is also endless–and equally fascinating. Occupying some limbo among sectors, artisans could seize on opportunities and skills acquired by chance, interest or skill and achieve a living of some independence and comfort, but unlikely security.
American colonial artisans, found in varying degrees and types in each of the thirteen colonies, were the vanguard of a emerging mercantile-capitalism, and a new social economic class structure that was replacing the one in seventeenth century England, carried to America in the hearts, minds, and experience of the various ethnic and colony settlements. In essence, then American artisans, certainly during the seventeenth century were transplanted English artisans. who evolved in England, in part from the rise of hinterland handicraft industry, and from the interplay of several English economic dynamics that, among other features, fostered increased urbanism, and the formation of English agglomerations-clusters.
Ron W. Coan 