Liberty Tree

Ordinary People and the American Revolution

Alfred F. Young

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814729359
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

With the publication of Liberty Tree, acclaimed historian Alfred F. Young presents a selection of his seminal writing as well as two provocative, never-before-published essays. Together, they take the reader on a journey through the American Revolution, exploring the role played by ordinary women and men (called, at the time, people out of doors) in shaping events during and after the Revolution, their impact on the Founding generation of the new American nation, and finally how this populist side of the Revolution has fared in public memory.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, which include not only written documents but also material items like powder horns, and public rituals like parades and tarring and featherings, Young places ordinary Americans at the center of the Revolution. For example, in one essay he views the Constitution of 1787 as the result of an intentional accommodation by elites with non-elites, while another piece explores the process of ongoing negotiations would-be rulers conducted with the middling sort; women, enslaved African Americans, and Native Americans. Moreover, questions of history and modern memory are engaged by a compelling examination of icons of the Revolution, such as the pamphleteer Thomas Paine and Boston's Freedom Trail.

For over forty years, history lovers, students, and scholars alike have been able to hear the voices and see the actions of ordinary people during the Revolutionary Era, thanks to Young's path-breaking work, which seamlessly blends sophisticated analysis with compelling and accessible prose. From his award-winning work on mechanics, or artisans, in the seaboard cities of the Northeast to the all but forgotten liberty tree, a major popular icon of the Revolution explored in depth for the first time, Young continues to astound readers as he forges new directions in the history of the American Revolution.

Part I

The People Out of Doors

1

The Mechanics of the Revolution
“By Hammer and Hand All Arts Do Stand”

In the 1790s, when Paul Revere put down an account of his since famous ride of April 19, 1775, to warn the countryside that a British army was en route from Boston to Lexington, he began with, “I was one of upwards of thirty who formed ourselves into a Committee for the purposes of watching the movements of the British soldiers.” After he completed the sentence, he went back, inserted a caret mark after “upwards of thirty,” and added “chiefly mechanics.” It was a wonderful marker of the way Revere, a silversmith before the war, thought of himself as engaged not in an act of solitary heroism but as part of a collective effort with his fellow mechanics. In 1795, Revere became the first president of the Massachusetts Mechanics Association.¹

Had he written his account in 1775, Revere might have referred to himself and his fellow artisans as “tradesmen,” the most common term in colonial Boston. In 1783, he spoke of himself as “very well off for a Tradesman.” Through the colonial era in most American cites, “mechanic” was a term laden with condescension when used by the “better sort.” The change in Revere’s choice of words measures the way in which artisans had taken a term of derision and worn it as a badge of honor, in much the same way that others would take back words like “Jacobin” or “democrat” or “black” and use them with pride. The old usage was not abandoned: in 1788 Revere was a member of a committee that issued a call to “tradesmen, mechanics and artizans” to assemble. Including “mechanics” was an indicator of a shift in consciousness between the 1760s and the 1790s that symbolized the arrival of mechanics as a presence in public life in the era of American Revolution. This essay explores this process.²

The long era of the Revolution, as historians now think of it, extended beyond the period of political conflict with Britain from 1765 to 1775. It included the war waged from 1775 to 1783 and the period of nation-building, 1783 to 1815, during which internal conflict was renewed over the fruits of the Revolution—in all, almost half a century. This essay focuses on artisans in this long era in the three major seaports of the north—Boston, New York, Philadelphia—with an excursion to Charleston, the largest southern city, and glances at Baltimore and other cities. It addresses these questions: First, who were the mechanics and what were their aspirations? Second, what was their “agency” in public life over this half century? Third, how did artisans’ consciousness change as a result of their experience? Fourth, can we measure their impact on American public life? Lastly, what was the artisan legacy and how was it appropriated by later generations?

Pat Lyon at the Forge epitomizes a proud, independent working artisan who lived by “the sweat of his brow” as he wanted to be portrayed. Lyon, a successful Philadelphia manufacturer of fire engines, asked the painter, John Neagle, to depict him at work as a blacksmith, the way he started out. He wears the craftsman’s leather apron, his tools around him, a young apprentice in the background. The view out the window is the jail in which Lyon was falsely imprisoned, a reminder of the injustice he successfully fought as a citizen. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

My argument is that mechanics played a major role in the shaping of events in the revolutionary era. Their aspirations for personal independence became entwined with American aspirations for national independence. As artisans became a presence in political life, their traditional consciousness of themselves as craftsmen and producers broadened to include a keen awareness of themselves as citizens and a “mechanic interest.” Taken as a whole, the four strands of consciousness can be called artisan republicanism. The impact of artisans on American politics in the new nation was measurable: they were the urban counterpart to the yeomanry deemed essential to a democracy by Thomas Jefferson, but how much they were recognized as such is open to examination. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, as a developing capitalist economy began to transform the country, the artisan system eroded, rent by a conflict between journeymen and master mechanics. Later generations of workers losing their independence, as well as aspiring entrepreneurs, reached back to appropriate the artisan heritage.³

1. Who Were the Mechanics? Distinctions and Dependencies

Two artisans, Paul Revere and Benjamin Franklin, dominate the popular memory of the artisans of early America, yet the common images by which they are known misrepresent the reality that historians have uncovered. Revere is popularly known as the intrepid courier glorified by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” (1861), or as the skilled silversmith in John Singleton Copley’s portrait. Franklin is known from his Autobiography as the apprentice printer who went from Boston to Philadelphia and from rags to riches or is known from his almanac as the author of the maxims of the American gospel of success, like “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” But the American way of glorifying the individual at the expense of the group he was part of is at work here: Revere was nothing if not a leader of the mechanics of Boston’s North End, and in Philadelphia the young printer Franklin swam in a sea of artisan culture: the club of artisans he organized was first called “The Leather Apron,” after the common garment of working artisans.⁴

The surviving artifacts of skilled craftsmen can also be misleading. Revere’s silver bowls and Duncan Phyfe’s chairs grace museums, but most museumgoers have never seen a leather apron. And the cozy restorations of craftsmen’s shops in outdoor museums like Colonial Williamsburg and Old Sturbridge Village, for all their authenticity, mislead in a larger way. Unintentionally, they convey a sense of a secure, prosperous artisan world, free from hard times and the tumultuous political activity that was the hallmark of city artisans.⁵

Words also get in the way. Artisan and craftsman, the common terms today, were infrequently used in colonial America, while today “mechanic” has been narrowed to refer to an automobile mechanic. Americans are uncomfortable with “tradesman” because it carries some of the snobbery of its English origins. But in the colonies, “tradesman” seems to have been the most common term: a tradesman was a man who followed a skilled trade, which he learned as an apprentice and usually practiced as a journeyman before he became a master. He may have pursued his trade in a workshop, from which he sold the products that he made, but he did not think of himself as a “shopkeeper,” a word for a retailer who sold merchandize made by others. “Manufacturer” could mean an artisan or the owner of a large-scale enterprise like an iron forge or a ropewalk, or the merchant investor in a would-be “manufactory.” In the 1770s, when men in the trades became active in politics, they might address a call to a meeting to “mechanics, manufacturers and tradesmen” (as they did in Philadelphia) to make sure they were inclusive. In the revolutionary era the terms were in flux—a clue to the way the artisans’ collective sense of themselves was changing.⁶

Artisans were the largest proportion of the population in the colonial cities, and although cities were not a very large segment of the overall colonial population, they were important in public life out of proportion to their size. In the decade before 1776, in a total population of about 2,500,000, which included 500,000 slaves, about 100,000 people lived in the largest cities on the Atlantic seaboard: Philadelphia, the largest, with 33,000 people; New York, 25,000; Boston, 15,000; Charleston, 12,000; Baltimore, 6,700. By 1800, the population of these cities had more than doubled to about 200,000 in a total population of 4,000,000. Within the three largest cities, easily two-thirds of the free adult males were in the laboring classes as a whole, and about 45% of the total population were artisans. In Boston in 1790, when occupations can be counted with some precision, there were 1,271 skilled artisans out of 2,754 adult males, almost half.⁷

About 20% of the free adult males were workers outside the skilled hierarchy of tradesmen: merchant seamen (highly skilled in the ways of ships and the sea but not by formal apprenticeship); common laborers such as sawyers, ditch diggers, and dockworkers; itinerant workers such as chimney sweeps, peddlers, and hawkers; and cartmen (or truckmen or draymen), who owned their own horse-drawn carts and hauled cargo about town. Close to the bottom in New York and Philadelphia before the Revolution were indentured servants, almost all migrants from the British Isles or northern Europe.

At the very bottom in the cities were African Americans, almost all enslaved, a small number free. While they were a declining proportion of the total labor force, in the pre-revolutionary era there were about 5,000 slaves in the three major northern cities: 750 in Boston, 670 in Philadelphia, 3,000 in New York. In Charleston, a city in a slave society, there were about 6,000 slaves—half the population. Master artisans might own slaves: they made up about a third of all slave owners in Philadelphia and an even larger share in New York. Some slaves became artisans: in Charleston, white artisans constantly petitioned to exclude or limit skilled slaves hired out by their masters.⁸

To refer to this heterogeneous group as a “class” or to use the nineteenth-century term “working class” seems anachronistic, whatever one’s concept of class. People spoke of “sorts” (lower, middling, and better) and “ranks.” “Class,” however, came into use in the late 1780s and 1790s. “Laboring classes” (in the plural), which I use in this essay, avoids this double anachronism. “Petty bourgeois,” while theoretically accurate for property-holding urban artisans, is not especially helpful as an analytical category. A master artisan, as Karl Marx pointed out with some acuity, had a double character: he was a capitalist who “does indeed own the conditions of production—tools, materials, etc.... and he owns the product. To that extent he is a capitalist.” But “within the process of production he appears as an artisan, like his journeymen, and it is he who initiates his apprentices into the mysteries of the craft.”⁹

In the 1760s and 1770s, most artisans were native born and of English ancestry. The migration of indentured servants from Europe and the British Isles to the middle-Atlantic colonies was heavy in the decade before the Revolution, adding to the numerous Scots, Scotch Irish, Irish, and Germans already in Philadelphia. New York was polyglot in a different way; Boston was considered a very “English” town. (Paul Revere’s father changed the spelling of his name from the French “Rivoire” because the bumpkins could not pronounce it.) In an overwhelmingly Protestant society, all but a handful of artisans were Protestant. And the trades were male. In the big towns one might encounter many women in a score of skilled “female” trades, for example, the needle trades or the care-giving trades, but only a sprinkling of women in “male” trades, invariably inherited from their husbands. In a typical small craft workshop located in a home, women worked as “help-meets” to artisan husbands who assumed the prerogatives of patriarchy.¹⁰

The big cities were seaports. Their well-being rose or fell with “navigation”—the ocean-going import-export trade conducted in each city by from one to two hundred merchants who owned the ships, wharves, and warehouses. You almost always knew you were in a port: you saw the tall masts of ocean-going vessels at the end of the streets that ran to the docks and you heard the din of shipyards. In these commercial centers, one can distinguish roughly four major “branches” of tradesmen based on the market for their labor: (1) the maritime trades: workers in shipyards, rope-walks, sailcloth lofts, and a score of trades that built and outfitted ocean-going ships; (2) the building trades: house carpenters, masons, and the like who thrived when the cities were expanding; (3) trades producing consumer goods for the local, naturally protected market like the proverbial “the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker”; and (4) trades producing consumer goods in competition with manufactures imported from Britain, which included both the “luxury trades” (fine furniture makers, carriage makers, etc.) and trades selling to a broader consumer market (metal smiths and leather workers).¹¹

Artisans were very conscious of a range of economic and social distinctions both within “the trade,” among trades, and between the trades and other classes. First, of course, came rank within the trade hierarchy: master, journeyman, apprentice. A typical master was a small-scale producer who owned and worked in his own shop. He usually had an apprentice or two who lived under his roof and worked for “keep” for the customary seven years of a formal indenture while learning the “arts and mysteries of the trade,” in t...