1775 (28 page)

The final convergence of maritime resentment came in 1775. In late March, Parliament passed the New England Restraining Act, details of which soon arrived in Boston. Effective July 1, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island could trade only with the British Isles and the British West Indies. Vessels caught going elsewhere would be seized. Also in July, New England ships (except those from Nantucket) were to be barred from the North American fisheries. By July 1, as things turned out, large numbers of Massachusetts fishermen had enlisted in the provincial army. Before year’s end, many others would soon sign up with privateers.

Without the Sons of Neptune, the American Revolution would have been quite different—if, in fact, there had been one.

Artisans, Mechanics, and Manufacturers

Artisans and mechanics, neither a very precise job description, roiled Philadelphia politics between 1774 and 1776, and with Congress assembling there, they also swayed national politics. Their pro-Revolutionary activities mattered less in the other cities—in Boston, because of the 1774–1776 British occupation, and in Manhattan because of the late 1775 and 1776 exodus as invasion threatened.

Philadelphia’s particular urban culture has also fascinated historians alert to early glimmerings of manufacturing and labor economics. One study discussed a “Republic of Labor.”
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But a case can also be made for the emergence within the large artisan community of an economic “middle class” politics in the Philadelphia of 1775.

If the four principal urban centers had a combined workforce in the neighborhood of 25,000 men, somewhere between one third and one half were estimated to be artisans and mechanics. The maritime sector was almost as large, but seamen were hard to count, and in any event, the two vocational cultures had a large overlap on wharves, in shipyards, warehouses,
ropewalks, sail lofts, ships’ chandleries, and distilleries, and in cooperage, portage and hauling, fish processing, tavern keeping, and numerous other pursuits.

In sea-fronting Boston, artisans and mechanics unrelated to maritime enterprise probably totaled under 10 percent of the workforce, fewer than in the other major cities. The maritime coloration dominated, but with the British Army in occupation until General Howe’s departure in March 1776, the Patriot population was in any event substantially dispersed or constrained.

New York had 3,000 seamen in 1772, by one estimate. No census of artisans exists, but 300 carpenters were supposedly on hand in 1765 during the Stamp Act riots “to cut down the Fort Gate” if any redcoats fired.
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Here, too, a considerable portion of the artisans and mechanics would have been marine craftsmen. Skilled craftsmen were prominent in the Sons of Liberty from the 1760s on. Leaders in 1775 included men like John Lamb, an instrument maker, and Marinus Willett, an upholsterer, both of whom became middling figures in New York’s Revolution. To city historians, the formation of a Mechanics Committee in 1774 was a milestone. As “a plebeian counterpart to the Chamber of Commerce, it confirmed the growing sophistication of the city’s working people. Its leaders over the next few years had hitherto been on the fringes of political affairs. Now they were at the center.”
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But not for very long. If the influence of the “Body of Mechanics” grew during the second half of 1775 and into 1776, it was partly because many better-off residents were fleeing the city, unnerved by an August 1775 broadside from the 64-gun HMS
Asia
and the expectation of an invasion. As those redcoats arrived in 1776, the mechanics’ importance dissipated, and in the words of one chronicler, autumn’s actual “British occupation scattered and broke them, and not until the end of 1783 would they be in a position to intervene collectively.”
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Of the three largest cities, then, Philadelphia is rightly singled out for the economic and political importance of its artisans. Printer Benjamin Franklin became an early spokesman, and from the 1730s to the Revolution, artisans and mechanics in the Quaker City had substantially higher incomes and wealth levels than their urban compatriots elsewhere.
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The City of Brotherly Love also had distinctly fewer riots, lacking either soldiers barracked locally or naval press-gangs.

In Philadelphia, the terms
artisan, manufacturer,
and
mechanic
were
all
used, if not quite interchangeably. In those days,
manufacturer
referred not
just to a capitalist but also to a workman or master—usually in one of the crafts like metalworking, brewing, baking, textiles, and leather making that were moving toward “industry” status.
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References to manufacturing grew steadily during each of the city’s nonimportation controversies: 1765–1766, 1767–1770, and 1774–1775. Interestingly, British General Thomas Gage, no great shakes militarily during his 1774–1775 command in Boston, in an earlier 1768 role had been a sage analyst of comparative urban economies. “During my Stay in Philadelphia,” said Gage, “I could not help but be surprized at the great Increase of that City in Buildings, Mechanicks and Manufactures…They talk and threaten much in the other Provinces of their Resolutions to lessen the importation of British manufactures; and to manufacture for themselves: but they are by no means able to do it. The People of Pennsylvania lay their plans with more Temper and Judgment, and pursue with more patience and Steadfastness. They don’t attempt Impossibilities or talk of what they will do, but are silently stealing in Mechanicks and Manufacturers; and if they go on as they have hitherto done, they will probably within a few years Supply themselves with many necessary articles which they now import from Great Britain.”
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To colonial historian Carl Bridenbaugh, Philadelphia was “a prime example of a city that had large enterprises requiring substantial outlays of invested capital, which was what Englishmen meant by manufactures rather than the small handicrafts that produced articles used in daily living.” Three stood out—flour, iron, and shipbuilding.
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Leaders in those businesses were capitalists with wealth far beyond artisan levels.

Record keepers, though, clung to the old eighteenth-century categorizations. According to one seasoned Philadelphia watcher, 1,682 of the 3,350 taxable males in 1772—well over 50 percent—were artisans. A second survey of the city’s tax lists found that of 3,432 listed property owners in 1774, 30 percent were artisans. Based on the vocations listed in
The Philadelphia Directory
in 1785, a third study reported that more than one third of the household heads were “mechanics.” A fourth, based on 1774 tax assessment ledgers, categorized 47 percent of the city’s taxables as artisans (and marine crafts were only one subcategory out of seven).
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Bridenbaugh, who had found artisans constituting 30 percent of 1774 property owners, added that “this figure only represents heads of families, possessing real estate, servants, slaves and domestic animals, and does not even indicate the total number of master craftsmen, let alone journeymen and apprentices.”
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Clearly, they were a large group of taxpayers and voters.

Before continuing with pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia, let us briefly detour to wealthy Charleston, which also had a substantial artisan community. The census of 1790 counted 1,933 (white) heads of families, and listed 429 master craftsmen and mechanics. In 1775, an unusual ratio of the artisans practiced luxury trades—cabinetmakers, upholsterers, silversmiths, painters (limners, painters, and gilders), coach makers, chaise makers, and wheelwrights. Aside from tailors, who imported expensive English fabrics and were more likely to become Tories, a number of luxury-craft artisans were members of the Sons of Liberty and Patriot faction and frequent attendees at the meetings convened by Christopher Gadsden under the Liberty Tree.
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Each of South Carolina’s nonimportation movements—in 1765–1766, 1768–1770, and 1774—saw them in the van of efforts seeking to bar British imports and to promote American manufactures. This made artisans important, albeit subordinate, allies of the planters whose extralegal organizations assumed much of South Carolina’s de facto governance in the early 1770s.

Center stage, however, clearly belonged to Philadelphia. Its artisans and mechanics not only reshaped local politics but helped to remold the 1775–1776 ideology of a pivotal province and to influence the national Congress meeting there. Part of the foundation had been laid by Benjamin Franklin, who had nurtured Pennsylvania artisan power and pride constantly from the 1740s forward. His role in supporting the cause of manufacturing and, more important, in turning artisans and mechanics into the core of a politically active volunteer provincial militia, had much to do with the Patriot faction’s provincial triumph.

Artisan politics went way back in Philadelphia. The city had been prosperous almost from its founding, and even during the 1720s artisans and mechanics were numerous enough to be courted by an unusual governor, Sir Robert Keith, known for his populist politics. Echoing some of the ideas of English Civil War radicals, he organized a Leather Apron Club and said that instead of favoring the wealthy, “Civil Government ought carefully to protect the poor laborious and industrious Part of Mankind.”
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Keith’s ideas lingered into the 1730s, and Franklin in some respects picked up his political baton. Artisans and mechanics began to win some low-level offices during the 1760s, and then came into their own during the 1770s.

Economic conditions in Philadelphia, like those in other cities, boomed during the French and Indian War years, then slipped into a postwar depression in the early 1760s. Then, after gains later in the decade, another
downturn began in 1772. Economic historians—and Philadelphia has drawn its share—tend to emphasize how upper-income groups managed in these difficult times far better than ordinary artisans, mechanics, and journeymen. The latter, by this argument, “suffered through a prolonged depression that saw the gains of the past thirty-five years quickly wiped away.”
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Wages dropped even as food prices climbed. Purchasing power shrank.

The effects on different economic strata can be gleaned from public records. As the eighteenth century got under way, middling craftsmen held 17 percent of the city’s recorded wealth. By the 1726–1736 decade, that share had dropped to 12 percent, and by the decade before the Revolution, to just 5 percent. A vocational notch down, the share of lesser artisans and unskilled laborers slid to a mere 1 percent. The richest Philadelphians, during the same period, increased their share of citywide wealth from 25 percent to 56 percent.
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The pre-Revolutionary decade was the one during which ownership of a carriage—and more tellingly, multiple carriage ownership—soared among the same stratum.

Quite a few artisans would have been middle class, and among the 500 taxpayers in the top tenth, perhaps 60, 80, or 100 would have been successful builders, bakers, ironmongers, and master craftsmen. However, most artisans would have been in the middle third; and many of the poorest sort—cordwainers, weavers, and the like—would have been in the lower third, where breadwinners were losing purchasing power. A majority would have lost ground while the “class” tensions of Philadelphia in 1774–1776 heated up.

Historian Richard Ryerson, whose book
The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765–1776
(1978) is unrivaled for its portraiture of the city’s unique committees, divided their rise to power into two main periods. The first ran from roughly 1770 to the summer of 1774, which he labeled “the revolution of the elite.” The second, from mid-1774 to 1776, represented “the legitimization of radical politics.” It became “the revolution of the middle classes” in early 1776, and Pennsylvania politics reached its truly radical stage that May.
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In places, Ryerson’s account lists committees, conventions, and associations in an abundance that evokes the English Civil War or even Jacobin France. Yet they have been distilled into clear and revealing portraits of the social upheaval in political decision making occasioned by the changing memberships of six successive citywide “umbrella” committees. Their very
names specified their expansion—the Nineteen of May 1774 became the Forty-three of June 1774 and then the Sixty-six of November 1774. The First One Hundred of August 1775 gave way to the Second One Hundred of February 1776. One powerful graph illustrates the religious change: a sharp reduction in Quaker participation. A second displays the pronounced decline in the average wealth of committee members. A third identifies the groups whose inclusion declined—merchants especially, but also professional men—alongside the principal vocation whose inclusion ballooned:
mechanics.
Their membership on the successive committees soared from 5 percent to 40 percent, while merchants dropped from 60 percent to 30 percent.
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If this represented a “revolution of the middle class,” others have described the final stage in somewhat Marxian terms. Left-leaning historian Steven Rosswurm concluded that “artisan consciousness in Philadelphia far overshadowed that in New York and Boston. A secret ballot provided these mechanics with the means, which their New York counterparts lacked, to assert their interests.”
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However, his principal emphasis is on the circumstances that abetted the rise of a radical militia. “That Pennsylvania did not have an established militia system created the opening for the lower sort. Since there was no militia to be under gentry domination, the laboring poor did not have to struggle with those above to have their voice heard. Perhaps more important, since militia rules had to be established anew, the laboring poor were able to place their imprint on the association as no other rank and file was able to do during the Revolution…the Philadelphia lower sort transformed and politicized the militia and made it, among other things, the institutional embodiment of their growing power.”
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Marxist-sounding, but institutionally descriptive.