Antiques - artisans and craftsmen in 18th and 19th century America

Magazine Antiques, May, 1994 by Wendell garrett

On entering the house of a respectable mechanic, in any of the large cities of the United States, one cannot but be astonished at the apparent neatness and comfort of the apartments, the large airy parlours, the nice carpets and mahogany furniture, and the tolerably good library, showing the inmates' acquaintance with the standard works of English literature. These are advantages which but few individuals of the same class enjoy ... in Europe.

Well before the beginning of the nineteenth century, urban American practitioners of the mechanical arts--distinguished by their leather aprons and fierce pride in their skills and products--were producing goods that were favorably compared to the finest English workmanship. In 1775 the British general Thomas Gage wrote to Lord Barrington that Americans were manufacturing more goods than they were importing from the mother country: "Cities [along the seacoast] flourish and increase by extensive Trade, Artisans and Mechanicks of all sorts are drawn thither, who Teach all sorts of Handicraft work before unknown in the Country, and they soon come to make for themselves what they used to import. I have seen this Increase."

In their attempt to gain respectability in the eyes of the community, artisans and craftsmen placed a premium on achieving independence. In some crafts they organized friendly societies "to Promote mutual fellowship, Confidence, good Understanding, and Mechanic Knowledge;" to offer financial support to needy families; and to settle disputes among members. Economic independence also meant making the transition from apprentice to journeyman and then to master craftsman. This evolution from servitude to self-employment was critical to artisans, for in addition to economic rewards it gave them the freedom to control their working hours and enabled them to have an autonomous existence outside the workplace.

America was the land of opportunity for the wage earner. Not only were workers well paid, but in 1831 it was asserted in a newspaper that "there is no more honorable character...than that of the independent American Mechanic." In the very first sentence of Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville was beguiled by "the general equality of condition among the people." Augmented by Jacksonian democracy, this trait baffled, amazed, horrified, and occasionally delighted British and Continental visitors to the United States after about 1820. The English actress Fanny Kemble declared her American inferiors "never servile, and but seldom civil," although she rather liked their independence of mind. The novelist Frances Trollope felt that the penchant for equality was "a spur to that coarse familiarity, untempered by any shadow of respect, which is assumed by the grossest and the lowest in their intercourse with the highest and most refined."

In America the skilled craftsman was the aristocrat of labor, who expected to earn a "decent competency" and did not anticipate the grinding poverty of the laboring poor in Europe. "What a contrast between Europe and America!" exclaimed the French socialist Michel Chevalier in 1838. "After landing in New York, I thought every day was Sunday," he wrote, when he found everyone on Broadway dressed in their Sunday best in this "land of promise for the labouring class." The high wages allowed workmen to wear what the English traveler Harriet Martineau described as "sleek coats, glossy hats, gay watch-guards, and doe-skin gloves!... Happy is the country where the factory-girls carry parasols, and pig-drivers wear spectacles."

America was bursting with ideas, experiments, and inventions, offering an almost ideal setting for tinkerers and ambitious entrepreneurs. "Our greatest thinkers," it was said "are not in the library, nor the capital, but in the machine shop."