Home > Blogs > Post Content

Early American Iron Production (446 hits)

"I have chosen the iron industry as a window through which to view and understand the industrious and industrial revolutions as they unfolded in early Anglo America. I have done so partly because iron manufacturing created a microcosm of early Anglo American society. It brought together tens of thousands of workers--African and African American slaves, British and Irish convicts, indentured servants from the British Isles and central Europe, and free white immigrant and American-born tradesmen and laborers. Ironworks, like crucibles, functioned as melting pots of a sort in which capital, people, and ideas from Europe, Africa, and North America met, collided, and melded to form something new and uniquely American. Work helped to acculturate ironworkers by introducing them to each other and to many of the dominant values of the society in which they lived, much as factories and other workplaces have for immigrants since. In this sense early ironworks foreshadowed the industrial capitalism that would employ millions."

"The colonial iron industry's expansion owed directly to unfree labor, principally slavery. Despite abundant natural resources, iron production proceeded fitfully during the seventeenth century and grew rapidly after 1715. By 1775, Britain's North American colonies turned out one-seventh of the world's iron. This surpassed England and Wales and made the colonies the globe's third largest producer of raw iron. The most rapid growth occurred within a broad arc which swept south from northern New Jersey through Pennsylvania to central Virginia. Most of those furnaces and forges depended principally or heavily on slave labor. Iron production in the South remained largely or mostly in slaves' hands into the Civil War. By 1830, slavery had nearly become a memory in the North, the industry's center. But its legacies still influenced adventurers' relations to employees, and the lives, aspirations, and attitudes of ironworkers white and black."

John Bezis-Selfa
Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution