• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

One key to Phyfe’s increased output was his reduction of the complexities of cabinetmaking to a sequence of elementary steps, making it possible to replace expensive journeymen with semiskilled workers from abroad. (At his peak he employed as many as a hundred journeymen at a time in his large workshop on Partition Street.) Phyfe maintained high standards, nevertheless, but many of his contemporaries, by simplifying designs and standardizing parts, began to mass-produce cheap “stick furniture,” knowing that New York’s wholesale merchants stood ready to purchase entire inventories for shipment to out-of-city markets. In 1795 one master cabinetmaker was able to dispatch five thousand Windsor chairs to the West Indian market.

Duncan Phyfe wasn’t the only New York artisan to break with traditional practices and make a fortune in the buoyant 17905 and early 1800s. Stephen Allen, an enterprising sailmaker, claimed to have amassed thirty-two thousand dollars between 1796 and 1802 alone. Allen’s breakthrough— a by-product of the wartime shipbuilding boom—came when he began buying his materials (sail duck and bolt-rope, marlin and twine) directly from wholesalers and auctioneers, cutting out the ship chandlers who traditionally supplied the city’s sailmakers.

Cowperthwaite’s Chair Manufactory in the 1820s. Although his establishment was less famous than Duncan Phyfe’s, Cowperthwaite’s advertisement conveys both the scale and fierce competitiveness of manufacturing in the city. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

The Lorillard brothers took a different path. During the Revolution, old Pierre Lonllard, the Huguenot immigrant who had launched New York’s first tobacco “manufactory” back in 1760, sided with the patriots, fled town, and was killed by Hessian soldiers. His widow held the family and business together until her sons George and Peter were able, in 1792, to move their production operations to the banks of the Bronx River, where they harnessed its water power to turn the wheels of a wooden snuff mill. (In about 1800 they replaced it with one of native field stone, which sits today in the New York Botanical Garden in Bronx Park.) They added a warehouse and homes for workers, and soon they were operating the largest tobacco-producing unit in the United States. Innovative at marketing, they would later print up broadsides advertising their snuffs, cigars, and cut tobacco and send them to every postmaster in the United States (many of whom also ran general stores). The third brother, Jacob, borrowed three thousand dollars from George and Peter and went into the tanning trade. He too opted for increasing production while lowering costs, investing in newly invented leather-rolling machinery and erecting his own bark mill for making tannic acid. Jacob prospered so rapidly that by the early nineteenth century he owned three houses, two leather stores, and forty acres of Manhattan real estate and was ready to move into banking and politics.

On a less spectacular scale, myriad entrepreneurially inclined master tailors and shoemakers cut costs and raised output by reorganizing the labor process of their trades. They purchased leather or cloth on a wholesale basis—either on their own or with the backing of merchant-investors—and distributed it to immigrant journeymen or poor women to turn into low-quality (“slop”) shoes or shirts, paying them a fraction of the piece rates customarily earned by skilled journeymen. (This, of course, required workers to put in longer hours to stay in the same place, forcing shoemakers, for instance, to peg and stitch from five in the morning till eight at night.) By relying on wage-workers who labored either in the large workplaces of master craftsmen or in their own home or basement shops, artisan entrepreneurs were able to churn out an evergrowing volume of clothing and shoes for the slave populations of the American South and the Caribbean, for farmers in the western hinterlands, and for the laboring poor of New York and other seaboard cities. The new entrepreneurs marketed these