Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn: Paul Revere and the Growth of American Enterprise (review)

Robert Martello has written an ambitious book about an ambitious man. His Paul Revere had large appetites for wealth, social status, personal recognition, and technological mastery. He fed this hunger by working silver; casting iron, cannon, and bronze bells; and by the large-scale production of copper bolts, sheathing, and spikes. To assess Revere’s drives, skills, and strategies, Martello followed a wise narrative strategy. Each chapter locates Revere’s shifting desires and opportunities within his adoption of a new technology or market practice. Martello links these discussions by demonstrating how Revere’s early command of a variety of skills shaped his later acquisition of tools, techniques, and profits. But Martello’s story is largely free of technological determinism; instead he does a fine job of placing Revere’s changing fortunes and needs within the relatively fluid economy of the new American nation.

Revere’s tale is hardly one of rags to riches, but he did evolve from an artisan to a manufacturer. He began his career as an apprentice to his father, a silversmith of some distinction. He acquired a good deal of bench knowledge while sharing in the artisanal politics of the Revolutionary era. Martello depicts this period as one of “proto-industrial” production (p. 6), a term he borrows from the early modern European literature on industrialization. In fact, however, proto-industrialization emphasized the formation of an increasingly dependent proletariat through the workings of the putting-out textile trade. Martello would have been better off speaking of a complex, immature, eighteenth-century American industrial economy, in which producers across a wide spectrum of labor relations and output melded craft custom and impersonal forms of manufacture. That said, Martello offers a deeply researched, expert account of the networking skills, accounting practices, and managerial procedures that Revere learned during his years as a silversmith.

At times, Martello’s account has a tone of “ever upward!” as he relates how Revere’s failures taught him hard but essential lessons. For example, Revere’s efforts during the 1780s to become a merchant, Martello contends, led to his attraction to standardized products, new equipment, and novel business practices. No doubt this is correct; but the pain and frustration of this period, including Revere’s inability to earn the merchant’s “Esquire” after his name (p. 100), mattered too. Still, Revere’s edginess and anxieties shine through Martello’s version of his restless pursuit of fresh technologies and greater gains.

Perhaps Martello’s most interesting contribution is his notion of Revere’s technological “versatility” (p. 46). He demonstrates time and again that Revere’s experience with an incredible range of tools and production processes allowed him to move from the silversmith’s shop to the foundry to the copper rolling mill. These transitions were often troubled and costly, but Martello illuminates the interplay of Revere’s fingertip knowledge and the increasing scale and diversity of his enterprise.

For Martello, Revere was a gifted technological mimic. Through industrial espionage and personal observation, he learned the secrets of British producers as well as his domestic competitors. He was more inventive in pursuing the capital necessary for his projects than in designing technological departures. Martello offers a fine account of the subcontracting networks that aided Revere in raising the credit he required early in his career, and an even better depiction of his later frustrating but rewarding dealings with the national and state governments. Indeed, this original Tea Partier profited handsomely by providing copper sheathing for the American navy, reflecting his ethos, according to Martello, that one could do well for one’s purse and do good for the public at the same time.

Martello’s fine study is enriched by his attention to the raw materials, labor practices and customs, capital requirements, and technological dimensions that framed each of Revere’s ventures. But his claim that Revere “comfortably integrated both craft and industrial practices throughout his career” (p. 333...