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Artisanal Production

The history of American manufacture is complex. Diversity in products and work environments is a hallmark of the country’s industrial past. Americans produced a fabulous array of both specialized and standardized goods in many different kinds of settings. Scholars can delineate various stages of development, but the history of American manufacture is not linear. Old practices persisted as new revolutionary methods of production were introduced. Conflict — often bloody — between managers and workers shaped the process. America’s industrial history was multifaceted and contested.

Before the commercialization of manufacture, the spread of wage labor, and the advent of the factory system, America manufactured goods in profusion. The home was a prime site of production. In the colonial period especially, family members produced cloth, garments, tools, and furniture for their direct use. Division of labor by generation and sex prevailed; adults and children, males and females had respective tasks. Families fashioned wares for their own use into modern times, in the countryside and in cities. All of this production went unrecorded in official counts of the coujntry’s gross domestic product.

The artisan shop was another prime location of manufacture before greater industrialization. In cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, master silversmiths, cabinetmakers and tailors produced fine items to order. The craftshop was a household. Living with masters and their families were apprentices and often journeymen who served for fixed periods of time. The apprentices labored for their masters and received lodging, board and education in the so-called mysteries of the trades. Journeymen who completed their apprenticeships gained further instruction and experience as part of their passage to masterhood. The artisan shop represented an ideal of a society of yeoman producers whose very autonomy and dignified work made for their wise citizenry. Masters and their charges were hardly equals, but they shared a vision that service was but a step toward independent producership. The breakdown of craft practices in the early 19th century would generate the first labor protests in the country.

Protest first emerged in the artisan shops of the new republic. Increased market activity and demand for manufactured goods at the turn of the 19th century forced changes in the organization of work in the craftshop. Enterprising master craftsmen soon opted to produce coarse goods. They were joined by merchants who gathered outworkers into new centralized shops. Both affected divisions of labor in their enterprises, hiring workers on a daily basis and assuming no other obligation to them than compensation for specific completed tasks. Change did not occur suddenly or evenly, but general transformations signaled an end to craft practices and customary relations between masters and their journeymen and apprentices.

Journeymen responded. At the turn of the 19th century, journeymen tailors, carpenters, and shoemakers launched isolated, short work stoppages to protest deteriorating conditions. They and other skilled workers began to transform fraternal societies they had formed into bargaining agencies. The Federal Society of Cordwainers, established in Philadelphia in 1794, evolved into what is considered the nation's first bona fide trade union and conducted the first organized strike of American workingmen in 1799.