First City. Gary B. Nash
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Penn realized the importance of attracting skilled craftsmen to Pennsylvania, and in this he succeeded. By 1690, about 120 craftsmen were practicing their trades in the city. Eighty years later, on the eve of the Revolution, about half of Philadelphia’s households were headed by craftsmen—or “leather-apron men,” as they called themselves. The craftsmen took pride in their skills, knowing them to be indispensable to the community. They believed in the dignity of laboring with one’s hands and regarded their skills, to be passed on to apprentices and journeymen, as a form of property. “The humblest workman thinks nobly of his trade” went the French saying in the eighteenth century, and it applied equally in Philadelphia.10
The dignity conferred by craft labor had its basis not only in the Protestant concept of calling, which held that in God’s eyes the mason was as worthy as the merchant, but also in the awareness that no community could exist without the products of its dexterous artisans. Craft skill represented indispensable knowledge, and upon that knowledge rested a claim to a certain authority in the community. Moreover, craft skill was a form of capital, nonmaterial to be sure but at least as important as cash or real estate. Artisans invested their skill in products, and these handcrafted objects, to the craftsman’s way of thinking, always bore his personal stamp and therefore, in an indirect way, were his possessions.
Conditions in North America fostered a corollary attitude that intensified this belief in the dignity of labor. In the seaboard cities, the incentives for industriousness went beyond a search for “a decent competency,” as the phrase went in this era, because the availability of land and the persistent shortage of labor produced a more fluid social structure than in Europe. Penn’s open-door policy and the liberal terms for purchasing land brought a rich array of skilled artisans to the Delaware, and in the early decades many forged ahead. The Bristol Factor that landed at Chester in October 1681, a year before Penn arrived and even before Philadelphia was laid out, brought Cesar Ghiselin, an eighteen-year-old silversmith who prospered; Thomas Wharton, a tailor whose sons would become important merchants; Nehemiah Allen, a cooper whose business thrived; Josiah Carpenter, a brewer who became a large landowner; Thomas Paschall, a pewterer who made a small fortune; and Abraham Hooper, a cabinetmaker who could hardly keep up with the demand for his furniture. In this single ship arrived the core of the artisan and commercial enterprises of the early decade. Each established a family that prospered.
Such generally favorable conditions encouraged unremitting labor as men found they could rise from journeyman to master more swiftly than in the German Palatinate, Ulster, or East Anglia. One result of the new attitude toward industriousness was the abandonment in Philadelphia and other cities of “St. Monday,” the English artisan’s habit of taking Monday as well as Sunday off from work. If more work meant only lower daily wages, as was often the case in England, where a surplus of labor existed, then a shorter workweek made perfect sense. But in the seaboard towns of colonial America, where labor was often in short supply, St. Monday fell victim to the conviction that laboring people, by the steady application of their skills, could raise themselves above the ruck.11
Working in their small shops, Philadelphia’s diversified artisans created fine silver hollowware, exquisitely carved furniture, and much more. Seen from one perspective, these artifacts are a tribute to the good taste of the wealthy families who commissioned them. But seen from another, they become a lasting reminder of the imagination and skill of the craftsmen who created them.
FIGURE 21. Iron stoveplate with German inscription, 1741, PMA. Pennsylvania’s rich reserves of iron ore made possible a flourishing iron industry that demonstrated craft traditions, cultural preferences, and American ingenuity. This stove plate, forged at Durham Furnace in Bucks County, displays an inscription in German that translates as “Cain killed his brother Abel.” Many other stove plates told moral stories. One with a war and peace motif shows two grenadiers with guns facing off while two short bearded men with broad-brimmed hats shake hands. Another portrays a family quarrel inspired by the devil himself where husband and wife, encouraged by their children, trade blows. Benjamin Franklin fused two fireplace traditions—English and German. His “New Invented Pennsylvania Fireplace” of 1744 combined the German tradition of cast iron heating stoves and the English tradition of open fireplaces with iron firebacks to protect the masonry and throw heat into the room. Franklin’s fireplace—widely copied down to the present day—fitted an open-fronted stove into a fireplace opening.
Philadelphia’s many craftsmen produced articles on demand for urban customers, then called “bespoke work,” but they produced as well for the entire Delaware River valley. For example, a Philadelphia blacksmith or cabinetmaker was intimately tied to the countryside surrounding the city not only because of the demand for his handicrafts but also because that is where he got the materials for fabricating his products. The stove plate shown in Figure 21 was made from ore refined in one of the thirty-nine furnaces and forges that operated in Philadelphia’s hinterland. These operations drew heavily on slave and indentured servant labor for the incessant work of cutting timber and making charcoal.
FIGURE 22. William Russell Birch, Preparation for War to defend Commerce, engraving, LCP. Though this scene of Joshua Humphreys’s shipyard in Southwark was captured in about 1799, shipbuilding had not changed since before the Revolution. The frigate Philadelphia is under construction. Workmen at the top of the scaffolding use ropes and pulleys to lift a curved beam aboard the ship’s prow. In the background is Gloria Dei Swedish Lutheran Church. Birch’s engravings were commercially successful, but buyers of this one probably prized it for the rustic scene and patriotic overtones, not the representations of artisans’ work.
Many Philadelphia artisans worked in small shops with only a few other craftsmen, and they prided themselves on fashioning their product, whether pewter bowl, ladder-back chair, or suit of clothes, from beginning to end. But some artisanal activities required the cooperative labor of many different craftsmen. The most important and complicated involved the construction of ships and buildings. Among the artisans involved in building and outfitting a vessel were ship carpenters, caulkers, wood carvers, painters, mastmakers, sailmakers, ropemakers, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, glassmakers, instrument makers, and ship chandlers. The products of these construction craftsmen’s hands were hardly collectible, and the endless impulse to modernize has wiped away almost all traces of the eighteenth-century ropewalks and shipbuilding sites, so documenting the work of such craftsmen is difficult. In the background of William Birch’s Preparation for War to Defend Commerce (Figure 22), we have one of the few glimpses of ship construction as it was carried out in the preindustrial period.
House construction tradesmen, like shipbuilders, worked in groups with a premium placed on coordination and cooperation. In overall charge was the master carpenter, who was often the architect and general contractor as well. He subcontracted work to bricklayers, stonemasons, plasterers, painters, glaziers, joiners, and laborers. Edmund Woolley was such a master builder in Philadelphia, engaging and coordinating the labor of scores of artisans in the construction of the State House, later to be called Independence Hall. His supervision of the job was long—“a quagmire of contention, shortages of funds, and interminable construction.”12 Started in 1732, the interiors of the State House were not completed until 1748, and the brick tower, lodging the now iconic Liberty Bell, was finally finished in 1753. In an example of how the passing of time can alter public memory, Woolley for many years was credited as the master builder of the State House but not as its architect. Andrew Hamilton, speaker of the state assembly and famous for his defense of the New York printer John Peter Zenger, was for many years credited with designing the State House. But receipts found in the Penn Papers at the Historical Society in the early twentieth century suggest that Woolley prepared the drawings from which the State House was built.
Most of the products from the hands of Philadelphia’s preindustrial artisans that have survived come from the luxury trades, whose craftsmen produced fine house