Through sheer necessity, colonial Americans engaged in a large variety of crafts. Initially, only the most basic craft services were available, with artisans such as blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and house carpenters providing the products essential to everyday life. As the colonies expanded, so did the variety of trades followed by settlers. At the time of the Revolution, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Charleston contained a substantial number of artisans offering manufactures from silver sauceboats to schooners. Fewer artisans lived in the countryside, and backcountry settlers relied more heavily on home manufactures. Many of the poorer farmers were unable to afford the more expensive products of urban artisans, including mahogany furniture and jewelry that were purchased mostly by wealthy merchants and planters.
America’s artisans were as diverse as their wares. Ranging from affluent master artisans with 10 or more employees to impoverished journeyman workers who roamed the country in search of a job, New World “mechanics” belonged to different classes. They also came from different races. Thousands of enslaved artisans, or “handicraft slaves,” lived in the southern colonies working as carpenters, tailors, shoemakers, wheelwrights, and blacksmiths, and laboring either on the properties of their planter owners or in the workshops of their mechanic masters. Slaves also fashioned common items like pottery and grass baskets for their own use, incorporating African traditions into their products.
Native Americans constituted a third significant group of artisans in colonial America. The pottery, mats, weapons, and clothing produced by America’s first peoples reflected the distinct cultures and customs of their various societies. Because Native Americans rarely left written records of their lives, these crafts have become tremendously important, as occasionally they are all that remain of the precontact and early settlement eras.
Further reading: Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (Mineola, N. Y.: Dover Press, 1990).
—Emma Hart
World History
