Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America, 1946.

THE LABOR POPULATION AND THE SIZE OF THE INDUSTRIAL UNIT

It is virtually impossible to obtain any reliable statistics on the relative extent of free labor or indentured servitude in the colonies. The first general census, the Federal Census of 1790, ascertained the number of free whites, of other free persons, and of slaves, but, undoubtedly the journeyman as well as the indentured white servant was included in the first category.1 A further difficulty is that the status of servitude, as distinguished from slavery, was only a temporary one, nor was the journeyman's status as relatively permanent and fixed as that of the wage earner of the present day. Relatively few indentured servants were employed on the New England farms. The average small farm probably got along with the labor of the proprietor and his large family and one or two hired hands. Of the 12,000 men available for military service in New England in 1665, it was estimated by a contemporary that two thirds were masters and one third were servants.2 This was undoubtedly a high estimate. A report to the Board of Trade in 1721 stated that, out of a total population of some 9,000 people for New Hampshire there were very few white servants.3 However, in Pennsylvania, where by 1755 it was estimated that almost one half of the 220,000 white inhabitants were Germans,4 it is apparent that a very considerable proportion of the population must at one time or another have been bound out to service to pay the cost of transportation to the colonies.5

According to a report of 1697, the bulk of the workmen of Maryland were employed in planting tobacco. The artificers were estimated at not "more than the 60th part of such laborers."6 In early years the ratio of servants to freemen was about six to one, but despite the sizable importations of bound labor this ratio was not maintained. Governor Seymour reported in 1707 that Maryland had 3,003 white servants and 4,657 slaves out of a total population of 33,833.7 Since during this period it is estimated that a minimum of 500 servants were coming into Maryland each year,8 it would appear from his compilation that after the expiration of their service they were listed as freemen in population returns. A Maryland census for 1755 gives the following figures:
Free Servants Convicts Total
Men
Women
Boys
Girls 		24,058
23,521
26,637
24,141 		3.576
1,824
1,049
422 		1,507
386
67
21 		29,141
25,731
27,753
24,584
Total Whites
Total Negroes 		98,357 6,871 1,981 107,209
46,356a
a Greene and Harrington, op. cit., p. 126.
This census fails to distinguish between "hired"
and "indented" servants. The former category
may well have included some free laborers.
While it is apparent that by the mid-eighteenth century the Negro population had outstripped many times the white laboring class, it should be borne in mind that the ratio of servants to slaves was not a proper criterion of the relative importance of the two labor systems, for the term of the slave was for life.9

Figures on the laboring population of Virginia offer wide discrepancies. A census of 1625 disclosed that out of 1,202 English inhabitants there were 487 servants, but actually more adult male servants than freemen. At that early date there were only 23 Negroes.10 One estimate submitted to the authorities in 1665 gave 15,000 men available for muster, of whom two thirds were servants and one third masters, whereas Governor Berkeley placed the total population of Virginia in 1671 at 40,000, including 2,000 Negro slaves and 6,000 short-term white servants.11 Lord Culpeper in 1681 gave 15,000 servants and 3,000 Negroes out of a total population of some seventy or eighty thousand.12 For years the annual average importation of indentured servants ranged between 1,500 and 2,000,13 which would make the Culpeper estimate approximately correct. However, by the end of the century slave importations increased with great rapidity and white servant importations correspondingly declined. In 1712 Governor Spotswood stated that there were 12,501 freemen fit to bear arms and an equal number of Negroes and other servants,14 but the Negro population, which was less than one third of the white in 1715, rose to about 47 per cent of the total by the eve of the Revolution.15 A report of the Governor and Council of South Carolina to the Lord Proprietors in 1708 gave 2,400 adult freemen and women and 200 white servants as against 2,400 adult Negroes.16 However, by the eve of the Revolution the Negro population outnumbered the whites by almost two to one.17

Similar difficulties confront the investigator seeking information on the number of workers employed in typical colonial industrial enterprises.18 In the first place, we do know that the unit of industrial enterprise as compared with modern times was not large. The colonial period was the age of the individual entrepreneur, who, in such industries as the workshop crafts, performed the labor as well as put up the capital for the venture himself. The joint-stock company or corporation was not widely employed for financing industrial ventures. Trading corporations, fire insurance, and water-supply companies, a few of the early mining companies, and the land companies were exceptions rather than the rule. Joint-stock companies for manufacturing were given a fillip in the Revolutionary era, but by and large productive enterprises were sufficiently small that they could be adequately financed by individuals or partnerships.19

The greatest concentration of labor was found on the larger plantations where industrial enterprises were carried on in addition to the production of an agricultural staple. Colonel Scarburgh, a seventeenth-century planter-industrialist, employed nine shoemakers on his plantation alone.20 Robert Carter, the Virginia planter, had an interest in the Baltimore Iron Works organized in 1731; he used part of his shares of the iron to manufacture implements at his own smithy on his plantation. In addition, he set up a fulling mill and employed ten Negro women at spinning wool in a tobacco house assigned for that enterprise. During the Revolution he engaged six white workers who were expert spinners and weavers and proceeded to manufacture cloth. He also built a grain mill, had two bake ovens, and set up complete equipment for the manufacture of salt. Aside from a considerable number of white artisans and laborers employed for these varied enterprises, it is estimated that by the eve of the Revolution Carter employed some 350 slaves on his plantations.21 Washington also had an establishment on his plantations for the manufacture of woolen, cotton, and linen cloth, employing at least one white woman and five Negro girls.

The efficient operation and management of a plantation might very well bring about a certain amount of labor displacement. The speed-up or "Bedaux system" is rooted in the American tradition of efficiency, which antedates Frederick W. Taylor by many generations. Washington carefully calculated that, allowing for a full day's work "from Sun to Sun" and two hours for breakfast, each of his carpenters ought to saw 180 feet of plank, taking into consideration the difference between poplar and other wood.22 In harvesting his wheat he observed that nine or ten cradlers were sufficient to keep the rest of his hands employed, and that two "brisk" stackers would stack as fast as the wheat was cut. He further observed:

From experience it has been found advantageous to put the Cradlers and their attendants into at least 3 Gangs. The Stops and delays by this means are not so frequent, and the Work much better attended to, as every Mans work is distinguishable, and the whole Cradlers not always stopping for every little disorder that happens to each respective one, as is the case when they cut altogether.
If these methods were followed he could get along at harvest time without having to employ extra hands at "exorbitantly high wages."23 The adages of the day held out to masters the advantages of careful supervision. "Not to oversee your workmen is to leave them your purse open." "The diligent eye of the master will do more work than both his hands." 24

Next to the great plantations, the furnace and forge industries called for the greatest concentration of labor of a semiskilled character working along rather specialized lines under one employer. In a proposal drawn up in 1657 by Anthony Langston for establishing an ironworks in Virginia, it was estimated that in order to produce 500 tons of iron annually -- a figure only slightly in excess of the rate of production of the Lynn ironworks25 -- he would need forty men to cord, a similar number of laborers to carry the coal, eight stone-diggers, eight loaders and drivers, three men to dig limestone and nine to transport it, a founder and his mate for the furnace, who "must be good Artists," for upon them "the whole design depends much," a clerk at the forge, another at the furnace, four furnacemen and eight forgemen, and twenty men for emergencies and substitutions, -- in all 144 workmen (not counting a chirurgeon and a minister), involving an expenditure of £2,700!26 Hasenclever's iron ventures involved the operation of six blast furnaces, seven forges, a stamping mill, three sawmills, and a grist­mill. His undoubtedly was the largest payroll of any industrial enterprise in America prior to the Revolution.27 Actually, the iron industry of the Middle colonies and the South was centered on the "iron plantations," tracts of several thousand acres of land which comprised largely self-sufficing, quasi-feudal communities.28

The average colonial shipyard was small, employing from five to ten workers and rarely exceeding twenty-five. At least as many men were employed on an average in the ropewalks, sizable establishments for the manufacture of standing and running rigging.29 Such colonial industries as distilleries and breweries, paper and gunpowder manufacture, and the production of candles required considerable capital for equipment and some concentration of workers for successful operation.

The mill industries in general did not require a large number of employees per unit. A fulling mill to pound cloth required very few operatives. One entrepreneur announced that his fulling mill in Pitt County, North Carolina, had "a workman that is equal if not superior to any in the state."30 The simpler sawmills attended by a man and a boy could in a working day saw one thousand feet of pine lumber. The use of gangs of saws was very common in the colonial period, and actually such mills were looked upon as displacing the labor of sawyers.31 Grain mills were relatively smaller employers of labor than sawmills and iron furnaces. The seventeenth-century gristmills were generally operated by the owner, his family, and one or two assistants. In the course of the eighteenth century the size of these enterprises increased, particularly in the Middle colonies, where the gristmill owner frequently operated a bolting mill to produce high-grade flour, a cooper shop, and at times a bakery.32

The application of power to milling machinery in the colonial period resulted in some displacement of labor. Oliver Evans, a pioneer in the use of high pressure steam, invented a device for cleaning, grinding, cooling, bolting, and barreling grain without the intervention of any manual operation. It cut labor requirements of a flour mill by one half. Where the work of one man was formerly required for every ten barrels of flour, with Evans's invention, one man was sufficient for twenty barrels. It was estimated that six men, mostly employed in closing barrels, could convert annually 100,000 bushels of grain into flour.33 Other pioneers in the use of steam power were William Henry, a Pennsylvania gunsmith who had known Watt in England and was reputed to have devised labor-saving machinery, and John Fitch, the steamboat pioneer, who managed a gun factory during the Revolution.34 Washington observed that Winlaw's threshing machine not only saved labor in the mills, but made it possible to substitute women and boys for men in its operation.35

It is very likely that the introduction of labor-saving machinery was on so modest a scale that workmen had little ground to protest.36 A letter from Baltimore published in the Boston News-Letter in 1772 describes the importation into the colonies by an English manufacturer of machinery which would "spin ten, and others from twenty to one hundred threads at one time, with the assistance of one hand to each machine." The writer shrewdly observed:

These machines are not allowed at home, and so inveterate are the common people against them, that they burn and destroy not only them, but the houses wherein they are found. The Americans being able to purchase cotton to more advantage than the Europeans, a manufactory of this kind will doubtless be properly encouraged by the well-wishers of America.37

The prevailing mode of production in the colonial towns was the workshop craft, employing generally one or two journeymen and a like number of apprentices.38 In such trades as carpentry and cabinetwork there was some concentration of employees, however. The Loyalist house carpenter and joiner of New York City who claimed to have employed as many as twenty journeymen and three apprentices was by no means exceptional.39 In Salem the Sandersons, prominent cabinetmakers, acted as wholesale distributors to foreign markets for the productions of other cabinetmakers, gilders, turners, and upholsterers. In Roxbury a considerable number of craftsmen obtained work from the Willard clockmakers.40 Hewson, a calico printer who emigrated to America around 1772, opened a shop at Philadelphia with six English journeymen.41

The textile industries did not require a large concentration of labor, for, as stated in a Virginia act "for Weavers and Loomes" passed in 1666, "five women or children of 12 or 13 yeares of age may with much ease provide suffitient cloathing for thirty persons, if they would betake themselves to spinning."42 As long as an operative was required for every spindle, there was no economy in applying water power to spinning or incentive to the setting up of factories. Hence, spinning was largely carried on in colonial households. Governor Moore of New York, a shrewd observer of economic trends, reported on the eve of the Revolution that "every house swarms with children, who are set to work as soon as they are able to Spin and card; and as every family is furnished with a Loom, the Itinerant Weavers who travel about the Country, put the finishing hand to the work."43 Indeed, home manufactures made big strides in the Revolutionary era, and were regarded by some as "the Most Direct Road to National Prosperity."44

Weaving required more mechanical equipment and greater skill than spinning. In England clothmaking tended to become specialized and to be produced in workshops or factories. In the colonies the putting-out or domestic system developed rapidly by the end of the colonial period for weaving and in the shoe industry.45 The weaver or shoe­maker would work at home but would be dependent for stock upon an entrepreneur who in some cases furnished implements as well. In the shoe industry there was a considerable concentration of labor in Lynn, which, by the eve of the Revolution, had become the most highly developed center for the domestic system in that field of manufacturing; but other towns in the Bay colony were also by this time manufacturing quantities of shoes for the wholesale trade.46

In such industries, as Herbert Heaton has observed, "while much material went to the worker many workers came to the material." The nonimportation agreements proved an incentive not alone to domestic manufacturing but also to the establishment of larger units of production employing more labor. Informal spinning groups made up of ladies who felt the patriotic urge to spin in the company of others or to engage in spinning matches sprang up throughout the colonies.47 Largely as a result of the activities of the New York Society for the Promotion of Arts, Agriculture and Oeconomy in granting premiums for local manufacture and in establishing spinning schools, it was estimated that some three hundred persons were employed in the making of linen alone from the middle of 1765 to the close of the following year.48 In the "Manufactory House" built by the Boston Society for Encouraging Industry and Employing the Poor, a spinning school was opened by William Molineaux in 1769. There were four hundred spinning wheels, many looms for weaving, and furnaces, hot and cold presses for finishing the goods, and a complete dye house. While this machinery was not power-driven, it was concentrated in one establishment and operated under centralized direction by a sizable labor force. As one economic historian remarks, "if this was not a factory, it was a near approach to it."49 The same description would apply to the factory set up by the United Company of Philadelphia for Promoting American Manufacture, the first joint-stock company for the manufacture of cotton goods and reputedly the first in the country to use a spinning jenny; in its initial year, 1775, it employed 400 women.50 A like number of women spinners were said to have been employed by another Philadelphia company formed the same year to encourage woolen manufactures.51 Finally, it should be borne in mind that war industries necessitated by the American Revolution generally involved a considerable concentration of employees in single units.52

Notes

1 The French census of the Illinois country in 1723 included both settlers and white workmen. See E. B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932), p. 186.

2 Greene and Harrington, op. cit., p. 9.

3 Ibid., p. 71.

4 Ibid., p. 115. Franklin in an overcautious estimate in 1766 gave a somewhat lower proportion to the Germans. Writings (Smyth ed.), IV, 415-416.

5 At that time it was estimated that some 60,000 white servants had been imported into the province during the previous twenty-year period,. Pa. Col. Rec., IV, 468. In the early period of settlement Penn stated that there were on an average two servants to a family of five. Until the arrival of the German Palatines in large numbers beginning in 1708 Geiser estimated that at least a third of the early immigrants were servants. The German immigration, especially after 1728, was very largely a redemptioner immigration. K. F. Geiser, "Redemptioners and Indentured Servants in the Colony and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," Yale Rev., Supp., X, No. 2 (Aug., 1901), 26, 27, 36. On the proportion of redemptioners to general immigration, see infra, p. 315n.

6 Md. Arch., XIX, 540 (1697).

7 Md. Arch., XXV, 258.

8 See CSPA, 1697-98, No. 670, p. 390 (1698), in which Governor Nicholson estimated annual servant immigration, chiefly Irish, at 600 to 700.

9 L. C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States (2 vols., reprinted, New York, 1941), I, 348.

10 Greene and Harrington, op. cit., p. 144.

11 Ibid., p. 136; Hening, II, 515.

12 CSPA, 1681-85, No. 320, p. 157.

13 J. C. Ballagh, White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia (Baltimore, 1895), p. 41.

14 Greene and Harrington, op. cit., p. 139.

15 Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on Virginia," Writings (P. L. Ford, ed., 10 vols., New York, 1892-99), III, 187-192.

16 T. D. Jervey infers that "a very substantial portion" of the white settlers had served their terms as indentured servants. "White Indentured Servants of South Carolina," S.C. Hist. and Gen. Mag., XII (1911), p. 165.

17 Greene and Harrington, op. cit., pp. 173, 175, 176. See also estimates of slave population in the colonies in Gray, op. cit., II, 1025. In North Carolina servants were never very numerous. See J. S. Bassett, Slavery in the State of North Carolina (Baltimore, 1899), p. 76.

18 See also R. B. Morris, "The Organization of Production during the Colonial Period," in H. F. Williamson, The Growth of the American Economy (New York, 1944), pp. 58-62.

19 The number of American business corporations rose from seven in 1780 to at least 335 by 1800. J. S. Davis, Essays in the Earlier History of American Corporations (Cambridge, 1917), p. 22.

20 See Northampton, Va., Co. Court O.B., 1682-97, f. 213. He also operated a malthouse.

21 Louis Morton, Robert Carter of Nomini Hall (Williamsburg, 1941), p. 99. For an account of the manufacture of homespun clothing on the plantations, see Governor Spotswood's letter to the Board of Trade in Va. Hist. Soc, Coll., I, 72-74 (1710). See also Broadus Mitchell, The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South (Baltimore, 1921), pp. 12, 13.

22 J. C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Diaries of George Washington, 1748-1799 (New York, 1925), I, 122 (1760).

23 Ibid., pp. 338, 339 (1769). Jefferson was constantly on the lookout for labor-saving machinery adaptable to farm operations, and prepared schedules to determine "the proportioning the labor to the size of the farm" to assure "a more judicious employment" of such labor. E. E. Edwards, "Jefferson and Agriculture," U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Agric. Hist. Series, No. 7 (1943). pp. 39, 75, 76.

24 Briggs, Ames Almanacks, p. 412 (1770). Cf. Winthrop Papers, III (Mass. Hist. Soc, 1943), 248 (1636).

25 Even before the middle of the 18th century the larger Pennsylvania furnaces at Warwick and Reading were producing 800 tons annually. Maryland furnaces averaged better than 300 tons annually. Bining, Col. Iron Industry, p. 27.

26 WMCQ, 2d ser., I, 100 et seq.

27 The Sterling Iron Works advertised in 1763 for "founders, miners, mine burners, pounders, and furnace fillers, banks-men, and stock-takers, finers of pigg, and drawers of bar; smiths and anchor smiths, carpenters, colliers, woodcutters, and common labourers." N.Y. Gazette and Weekly Post-Boy, Supp., Nov. 4, 1763. In 1766 Samuel Ogden of Boonetown, Morris County, N.J., advertised for fifteen or twenty persons who could work flat iron into kettles. N.Y. Gazette and Weekly Mercury, Aug. 12, 1776. Cf. also N.J. Arch., XXVI, 361, 368 (1769). The Loyalist Samuel Smith, who, on the eve of the Revolution was the overseer of an ironworks in New Jersey, testified before the Royal Commission on Loyalist Claims that fifty of his workmen signed a paper opposing independence. H. E. Egerton, ed., The Royal Commission on the Losses and Services of American Loyalists, 1783-178; (Oxford, 1915), p. 320. Hundreds of workers were employed at the royal smelter and forges of St. Maurice, in French Canada, on the eve of the French and Indian War. L. H. Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, V (New York, 1942), 18.

28 See A. C. Bining, "The Iron Plantations of Early Pennsylvania," Pa. Mag. of Hist, and Biog., LVII (1933), 117-137; C. S. Boyer, Early Forges and Furnaces in New Jersey (Philadelphia, 1931), pp. 26-33, 225, 226; Joseph Turtle, "Hibernia Furnace," N.J. Hist. Soc, Proceedings, 2d ser., VI, 150. In the South slaves were extensively employed on the "iron plantations." See Kathleen Bruce, The Virginia Iron Manufacture in the Slave Era (New York, 1931), pp. 12-16.

29 J. G. B. Hutchins, American Maritime Industries and Public Policy, 1789-1914 (Cambridge, 1941), pp. 105, 125. Cf. also Mass. Centinel, April 30, 1785.

30 N.C. Gazette, Nov. 14, 30, 1778.

31 Clark, Hist, of Mfgrs., pp. 176, 177; J. L. Bishop, A History of American Manufactures from 1608 to i860 (3 vols., Philadelphia, London, 1866), I, 105.

32 N.Y. Weekly Post-Boy, May 20, 1745; C. B. Kuhlmann, The Development of the Flour Milling Industry in the United States (Boston, 1929), ch. i. In the environs of Wilmington and Baltimore the most extensive developments in this industry took place in the later period. See also M. Tyson, A Brief Account of the Settlement of Ellicott's Mills (Baltimore, 1870).

33 The mill elevator was not in operation until a few years after the close of the Revolution. The Ellicott brothers on the Patapsco River were among the first to introduce Evans' improvement in their mills. See Oliver Evans, The Young Mill-Wright and Miller's Guide (9th ed., Philadelphia, 1836), pp. 203, 239; G. and D. Bathe, Oliver Evans: a Chronicle of Early American Engineering (Philadelphia, 1935), pp. 11, 23, 24, 26, 29. Due de la Rochefoucault, Travels through the United States of North America (2 vols., London, 1799), II, 250-253; Clark, Hist. of Mfgrs., pp. 179, 180. Another labor-saving device was Evans's invention in 1777 or 1778 of a machine which could complete 150 pairs of cotton or wool cards from wire per day. Bathe, op. cit., p. 8.

34 E. B. Greene, The Revolutionary Generation, 1763-1790 (New York, 1943), p. 65; Bining, Col. Iron Industry; Lord Sheffield, Observations on the Commerce of the American States (6th ed., London, 1784), p. 14. For Silas Deane's proposal in 1785 to introduce the steam engine into the United States as a labor-saving device, see N.Y. Hist. Soc, Coll., XXIII, 460.

35 Diaries, IV, 72, 73 (1790).

36 In England fear of technological unemployment caused widespread discontent and brought on riots and property destruction in the 17th and 18th centuries. See G. N. Clark, Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton (New York, 1937), p. 97; Beloff, Public Order and Popular Disturbances, pp. 88, 155.

37 Boston News-Letter, Feb. 20, 1774. The manufacturer also planned to bring six journeymen along with him, doubtless to operate this machinery.

38 See Lechford, Note-Book., p. 91 (1639).

39 Loyalist Transcripts, XIX, 281. See also infra, p. 422; Boston News-Letter, March 10, 1768; Pa. Packet, March 1, 1794; Daily Advertiser (New York), July 9, 1798. Silversmiths and jewelers increased their staffs and expanded their facilities considerably after the Revolution. See Pa. Packet, July 8, 1795. This was also true of hatters once the Hat Act was technically inoperative. See Cole, op. cit., p. 21.

40 Essex last. Hist. Coll., LXII (1934), 323-364.

41 Clark, Hist, of Mfgrs., p. 547.

42 Hening, II, 238 (1666).

43 Docs. Rel. to the Col. Hist, of N.Y., VII, 888, 889 (1767). See also letter of Comptroller Weare to the President of the Board of Trade, Mass. Hist. Soc, Coll. 1st ser., I, 74, 79. An idea of the magnitude of such household manufactures can be gained from estimates of the production of cloth for the town of Lancaster alone between May, 1769 and May, 1770. During that period it was reported that 27,790 yards of cloth were woven, with an additional six or seven thousand yards still on the looms and sufficient yarn in the homes of the inhabitants to weave another thousand yards. N.Y.J. or Gen. Advertiser, June 28, 1770; J. O. Knauss, "Social Conditions among the Pennsylvania Germans in the Eighteenth Century, as Revealed in German Newspapers Published in America," Pa. German Soc, Publications, XXIX (1918, Lancaster, 1922), p. 132. For impressive production figures in such communities as Woodbridge, N.J., and Newport, R.I., see N.Y. Gazette or Weekly Post-Boy, Jan. 18, 1768; N.Y. Gazette and Weekly Mercury, Feb. I, 1768.

For silk manufacture as a household industry, see Mass. Spy (Worcester), Dec. 24, 1789, where it is asserted that one woman, assisted by two or three children could tend sufficient silkworms to make ten or twelve pounds of silk. The difference between the old and new spinning processes was described by Washington in 1789 when he contrasted a duck manufactory at Haverhill conducted by Samuel Blodgett, an inventor, where "one small person turns a wheel which employs eight spinners, each acting independently of each other, so as to occasion no interruption to the rest if any one of them is stopped," with a duck factory at Boston where "each spinner has a small girl to turn the wheel." Diaries, IV, 47 (1789).

45 Winslow, Amer. Broadside Verses, pp. 198, 199.

46 For the domestic system of production of cotton thread and cloth, see Mass. Spy (Worcester), April 16, 1788; Jan. 29, Aug. 27, 1789.

46 See Blanche E. Hazard, Organization of the Boot and Shoe Industry in Massachusetts before 1875 (Cambridge, 1921), p. 29.

48 N.Y.J., Dec. 17, 31, 1767; A. M. Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763-1776 (New York, 1917), p. 77.

49 E. C. Kirkland, A History of American Economic Life (rev. ed., New York, 1939), p. 91.

50 J. L. Bishop, History of American Manufactures, 1608-1860 (rev. ed., Philadelphia, 1866-1868), I, 384. See also Scharf and Westcott, Hist, of Phila., Ill, 2314.

51 Ibid., p. 2301;

52 A gun factory in Virginia employed at one time 19 workmen and 5 apprentices. Col. Va. State Papers, III, 305 (1782). See also Md. Arch., XII, 519 (1776). Unemployed Negro workmen to the extent o£ one hundred were required for the Aera Furnace erected in South Carolina during the Revolution. Charleston Gazette, Jan. n, 1780. See also infra, pp. 301-303.