Journeymen

Journeymanship was the second of three stages of craft education. After completing their apprenticeship, young men and women (usually men) were then able to perform most of the tasks associated with their trades, but they lacked the capital and sometimes the complete set of skills necessary to enter into business for themselves. Thus, following a long European tradition, journeymen worked for master artisans as paid workers, sharpening their skills and saving what money they could in order to become independent producers. In 17th - and early 18th-century English America, journeymen generally worked three to four years before they were able to reach the final stage of independence: mastership. In New France, however, ex-AppRENTIces generally bypassed journeymanship entirely, instead building up their savings by joining fur-trading expeditions or by directly entering into partnerships with local merchants or other investors.

The nature of journeymanship in British America changed fundamentally in the mid-18th century. By the

1740s economic disruption brought on by a series of wars with France, growing unemployment, and competition from imported British manufactures made it increasingly difficult for journeymen and women to amass the savings needed to enter mastership and independence. This was especially true of the more lucrative trades that required more than a ?100 investment, roughly equivalent to three to four year’s wages. As the century wore on, journeyman increasingly became a term meaning employee rather than a skilled artisan approaching the final stage of independent mastership. Thus, the colonial period ended on a note of anxiety for journeymen, as increasing numbers of skilled men and women looked forward to the prospect not of independence but of lifelong labor for someone else.

Further reading: Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720-1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

—Ronald Schultz

Kalm, Peter (1716-1779) scientist Peter (Pehr) Kalm was one of dozens of European travelers in North America who recorded their attempts to understand what the 18th-century North American landscape could teach them about the New World and what solutions it might provide for problems in agriculture and ecology in the Old World. A student of Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, who is best known for creating a hierarchical ranking of animal species, Kalm visited Norway, Finland, Russia, and North America on behalf of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, investigating what vegetation might be profitably transplanted to European soil. Traveling through Canada, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania in the late 1740s, he compiled an extensive botanical diary. He also made contact with Americans who shared his interests, especially in Philadelphia, where the scientific community surrounding the inquisitive Benjamin Franklin and the naturalist John Bartram made him welcome. They encouraged his study of many aspects of American society, from architecture to Indian languages, geography, animal husbandry, and economics, as well as insects, agriculture, and plant experimentation. Kalm was especially fascinated with medicinal uses of plants, with vineyards, and with the possibilities for silk farming. Many Philadelphia Quakers, whose connections with men of similar interests in England gave them a rich knowledge of these subjects, willingly exchanged notes with him.

Kalm is best remembered for his insightful reports of his travels, including some early observations on the American national character, which he theorized was born out of the colonists’ interactions with their environment. He assessed their farming techniques as wasteful—“the easy method of getting a rich crop has spoiled [them].” He noted that the abundance of land in North America encouraged his profligacy by supporting mindless population growth, because no one need fear poverty and “a new-married man can, without difficulty, get a spot of ground, where he may sufficiently subsist with his wife and children.” The result, said Kalm, was that the colonists had no incentive to learn efficient farming, hence their knowledge of agriculture was “imperfect.” Kalm’s observations, published in Sweden in 1753, were republished in English in 1770 as Travels into North America, Containing its Natural History and a Circumstantial Account of its Plantations and Agriculture. He is credited with being the first observer not only to catalog American flora and fauna but also to explore the dangers of Americans’ thoughtless use of natural resources.

—Emma Lapsansky

Keith, William (1680-1749) government official William Keith was one of the most competent and popular colonial governors in the 18th century. The son of Jean Smith and William Keith, a baronet, he was born in Scotland. As a young man he supported the return of the Stuart monarchy, for which he was jailed briefly in 1704. Keith won an appointment as surveyor general of the southern colonies in 1714, and three years later was appointed lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania.

Keith wrote several important and influential reports to the British government, warning in particular about the threat of the French encircling the British colonies. He also advocated establishing a stamp tax to raise funds to pay for a standing army on the frontier. As governor, Keith was enormously popular among Philadelphia artisans, whom he courted to the disgruntlement of the city’s wealthy merchants. When replaced as governor by Patrick Gordon, he was never able to regain his power.

Keith returned to Britain in 1728, where he was a Board of Trade adviser. However, he fell into considerable debt, and in 1734 he was sent to debtors’ prison.

Further reading: Gary B. Nash, Quakers and Politics, Pennsylvania 1681-1726 (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1968).

Kieft, Willem (1597-1 647) Dutch colonial governor Willem Kieft became the third director general of New Netherland in 1638. Determined to impose order and discipline in the raucous polyglot colony, he imposed tough new penalties for those illegally involved in the fur TRADE, restricted liquor licenses, regulated tobacco production, and instituted stringent punishments for those engaged in “adulterous intercourse with heathens, blacks and other persons.” Shouldering out local men from decision making, Kieft ruled in an autocratic manner throughout his nine-year tenure.

Kieft’s headaches only began with his unruly colonists. The English claimed title to all of New Netherland, prompting Kieft in his first years in office to purchase most of present-day Queens and Kings Counties from local Indians. Still, Kieft could not stem the flow of English colonists, expelled for heresy by the Calvinist colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, to various settlements on Long Island, nor could he do more than protest against the Swedish settlement on the Delaware River.

Kieft himself exhibited little of the self-control and moderation he expected from his subjects, particularly with respect to the Native peoples in the region. In 1640 he levied taxes on the Algonquin to support soldiers’ salaries and the construction of forts under the pretense that the Dutch were protecting the local Indians from their enemies. When a band of Raritan resisted, Kieft falsely charged them with theft and authorized a raid that resulted in slaughter and plunder. The Raritan struck back, and so began an escalating conflict that plunged most of the Native people around Fort Amsterdam into bloody confrontation with the Dutch for four years. Kieft’s tactics included bounties on Indian heads, surprise night attacks, and raids on friendly Indians. Kieft’s predicament became so grave that he armed the enslaved population, appealed to the English for help, and assembled committees of prominent men to advise him. Instead of rubber-stamping Kieft’s actions, these committees clamored for more local control and eventually condemned the director general for the Indian wars that had decimated the colony. Their complaints resulted in Kieft’s recall. After greeting his successor, Peter Stuyvesant, Willem Kieft boarded a ship that sank off the coast of Wales in September 1647.

Kieft’s Indian policy effectively counterbalanced developments that attracted settlers, such as the loss of the Dutch West India Company’s trade monopoly and new land policies. By the end of Kieft’s administration, New Netherland lay desolate and New Amsterdam’s population had dwindled to 250 souls.

Further reading: Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986).

—Judy VanBuskirk