A History of the American People

man to raise a family. The towns, he said, abound with young tradesmen and the hospitals are full of the ancient. The country is replenished with new farmes, and the alehouses are filled with old labourers. Many are those who get their living with leaving burdens; but more are fain to burden the land with their whole bodies. Multitudes get their means of living by prating and so do numbers more by begging.' He complained thateven the most wise, sober and discrete men
go often to the wall, when they have done their best.' He and others pointed out that a skilled
young man in England had a poor economic future, and no status at all, since status was entirely
dependent on land, which he had virtually no hope of acquiring. In America, he could get higher
wages, and his raw materials were cheap. And there was a strong likelihood he could get land
too.
So there was no shortage of craftsmen in the colonies. Carpenters and joiners were particularly
fortunate. Not only was wood plentiful and in great variety: it was also cheap in sawn lengths.
One of America's earliest innovations was the rapid spread of water-driven sawmills. England
had no real tradition of mechanical sawing. America by contrast had masses of timber located
near fast-flowing streams. So mills were built everywhere but particularly in New England. They
saved labor-the biggest item in furniture-making. One small waterpowered mill could produce
seven times the output of two skilled sawyers. There was waste of material-so what? Timber was
plentiful; it was human labor which was scarce. Settlers were moving from an economy of
scarcity to an economy of plenty, where men were valuable to a degree unknown in Europe. It
was this fact which shaped the early culture.
Excellent furniture was made in 17th-century America, and a surprising amount of it has
survived. There were skilled glassmakers from the start, for glass was difficult to transport with
safety and had if possible to be manufactured on the spot. We know there were professional
glassmakers on the first Virginia voyage of 1608. They flourished because raw materials,
particularly wood, were cheap and easily available. The shortage of skilled labor attracted
foreigners as well as Englishmen: the first glass-factories in America, both in Jamestown, were
run by Venetians and Poles. The same principle applied to pottery. Suppliers were unwilling to
ship pots across the Atlantic, saying there was no money in it. So potters went instead. The
skilled English ceramicist Philip Drinker was in Charlestown, Massachusetts, by 1635 working
away. The Dutch 'pottmaker' Dirck Clausen was turning out ware on Manhattan Island by 1655.
Redware was the quintessential American pioneer ceramic, dictated by the clays available
(porcelain was not successfully manufactured in America until the 19th century). It came with
simple abstract geometric patterns, rather like protoclassical Greek pottery of the 8th century BC,
then with written mottoes: Mary's Dish,'Clams and Oysters,' and `Pony Up the Cash.' But very
little survives from the 17th century.
Records exist of dozens of other categories of craftsmen at work in America by the mid-17th
century. Thus, by the 1630s, two expert shoemakers, Henry Elwell and Philip Kirkland, were
already settled in Lynn, Massachusetts, later to become a major shoe-manufacturing center. They
specialized in women's shoes. Church silver was in demand from early on-even the Puritans
liked it. In fact by the end of the 17th century superb silver, almost on a par with the European
best, was being made in Boston. One of the interesting points about New England craftsmen is
that they came from all ranks-something impossible in 17th-century England. The best Boston
silversmith-goldsmith was Jeremiah Dummer, born in 1645, the son of a leading landowner. He
was a member of the Boston elite and invested in shipping, but he was not above slaving at his
bench making candlesticks for prominent families and Boston churches. That was the kind of
social mobility which augered well for America’s future.