¹ Many careful studies document the ability of textile marketing agencies to dictate policy to manufacturers. See for example Knowlton, Evelyn, Pepperell's Progress (Cambridge, Mass., 1948CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and Siegenthaler, Hansjörg, “What Price Style? The Fabric Advisory Function of the Dry Goods Commission Merchant,” Business History Review, XLI (Spring, 1967), 36–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Wherever the term “finished products” appears in this study, it means those goods that require no further manufacturing processes (except assembly) before being put to their intended use. In general, semi-finished (or intermediate) products were producers' goods, while finished products tended to be consumers' goods. This was not invariably the case, however. For example, yarn sold to frontier housewives was a semi-finished product, and a retail good; railroad rails were a finished product and a producers' good.

For the purposes of this study I have divided all iron manufacturing processes into three categories. The first, “smelting,” involves the reduction of iron ore to pig iron. The second, “iron refining,” refers to those processes employed to convert pig iron into purer, more workable forms. These include hammering, puddling, and rolling which produced wrought iron bars or rough slabs called “blooms.” During the 1830's puddling and rolling gradually began to replace hammering as the most important methods of iron refining. This change is discussed in Temin, Peter, Iron and Steel in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 100–101.Google Scholar The third category, “iron processing,” comprises all other forms of iron manufacture except machinery making, and includes all producers of finished products, whether producers' or consumers' goods.

This paper is not and does not attempt to be a comprehensive history of the pre-Civil War American iron industry from either a technological or an institutional viewpoint. No such histories exist of the American iron and steel industries in any period. The material lies scattered in primary and secondary sources. The best attempts to pull them together are in Clark, Victor S., History of Manufactures in the United States (New York, 1929Google Scholar), and Temin, Iron and Steel.

³ The detailed story of the Saugus works is in Hartley, Edward N., Iron Works on the Saugus (Norman, Ok., 1957Google Scholar).

⁴ Detailed statistics of colonial trade in iron are in Historical Statistics of the United States from Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C., 1959), 762–65Google Scholar; see also Johnson, Keach, “The Baltimore Company Seeks English Markets: A Study of the Anglo-American Iron Trade, 1731–1755,” William and Mary Quarterly, XVI (January, 1959), 37–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Sometimes the furnace had its own store in a nearby city to dispose of its wares. This practice declined, however, after the Revolution as specialization íncreased. This discussion is drawn primarily from Pierce, Arthur D., Iron in the Pines (New Brunswick, N.J., 1957), 132Google Scholar; Noble, Henry J., History of the Cast Iron Pressure Pipe Industry in the United States of America (Birmingham, 1940), 17–18Google Scholar; Ransom, James M., Vanishing Ironworks of the Ramapos (New Brunswick, N.J., 1966Google Scholar); Cappon, Lester J., “Trend of the Southern Iron Industry Under the Plantation System,” Journal of Economic and Business History, II (1930), 730Google Scholar.

⁶ Morison, Samuel Eliot, Oxford History of the American People (New York, 1965), 143Google Scholar; May, Earl C., From Principio to Wheeling (New York, 1945), chaps. 4–6.Google Scholar

⁷ For evidence of the growth of interest in manufacturing see Rezneck, Samuel, “The Rise and Early Development of Industrial Consciousness in the United States, 1760–1830,” Journal of Economic and Business History, IV (1931–1932), 784–812Google Scholar. The part played by the Federal government in creating a congenial environment for manufacturing is felicitously described in Bruchey, Stuart, The Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607–1861 (New York, 1968Google Scholar), especially chapter 5.

⁸ Transportation costs were especially high if they involved wagonage. Precise comparisons between the costs of various forms of transportation are excruciatingly difficult to make in pre-Civil War America due to rapidly fluctuating rates. It is clear, however, that a landlocked ironmaster had no chance to compete in a market served by colleagues with access to water transport. The best estimates of relative transportation costs are Taylor's, George Rogers. An example is in The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York, 1968), 442.Google Scholar

⁹ An additional reason for locating the furnace near the charcoal ricks was the fact that charcoal, if hauled very far over rough surfaces, breaks down into a grit unusable in furnaces. Landes, David S., The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge, 1969), 90.Google Scholar

¹⁰ This pattern continued even after the shift from charcoal to anthracite coal as smelting fuel, a practice that became common in eastern Pennsylvania in the 1840's.

¹¹ There were some exceptions to this generalization. Sometimes a single family owned more than one establishment, but these usually functioned as independent operations, not stages of a coordinated, integrated whole. See May, Principio, for a description of the multiple enterprises of the Whitaker family. Hunter, Louis C., “Financial Problems of the Early Pittsburgh Iron Manufacturers,” Journal of Economic and Business History, II (1930), 520–544Google Scholar, lists a number of Pennsylvania iron masters who controlled more than one firm concomitantly.

¹² Temin, Iron and Steel, 111. Henceforth the term “integrated iron firm” is used to describe only those producing units which combined more than one of the three stages of production: smelting, refining, and processing.

¹³ In general both forges and rolling mills were refiners because they rarely made finished products. The most significant exception was those rolling mills which produced railroad rails.

¹⁴ These self-sufficient communities were called “iron plantations.” Temin estimates that a furnace owner needed at least 3,000 acres to have adequate supplies of fuel and ore. Temin, Iron and Steel, 83–84.

¹⁵ The remaining five included one firm in each of the following categories: nails and hoops, firearms, glass, salt, and hydraulic equipment. U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Documents Relative to the Manufactures in the United States (Washington, 1833Google Scholar). This survey is commonly referred to as the McLane Report, and it covered only eleven states. These eleven, however, contained the preponderance of extant manufacturing units.

¹⁶ Computed from data in the Census of Manufactures, 1820.

¹⁷ Commercial directories show that there were specialized iron merchants in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore by the 1820's.

¹⁸ McNair, James B., Simon Cameron's Adventure in Iron 1837–1846 (Los Angeles, 1949), 48Google Scholar; Hunter, “Early Pittsburgh Iron Manufactures,” 537; Keeler, Vemon David, “An Economic History of the Jackson County Iron Industry,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, XLII (April, 1933), 145Google Scholar; Stout, Wilbur, “The Charcoal Iron Industry of the Hanging Rock Iron District – Its Influence on the Early Development of the Ohio Valley,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, XLII (January, 1933), 98–99Google Scholar; Cappon, “Trend of the Southern Iron Industry,” 373; Bruce, Kathleen, Virginia Iron Manufacture in the Slave Era (New York, 1930), 160, 190, 203–204Google Scholar; Armes, Ethel, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (Birmingham, 1940), 30–79Google Scholar; Lander, Ernest M. Jr., “The Iron Industry in Ante-Bellum South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History, XX (1954), 337–355CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reiser, Catherine, Pittsburgh's Commercial Development, 1800–1850 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1951).Google Scholar

¹⁹ Iron smelters also depended heavily on middlemen as sources of capital, as did most processors and refiners. The role of independent wholesalers as manufacturing capitalists is examined in detail in Harold C. Livesay and Glenn Porter, “Middlemen as Financiers of Ante-Bellum American Manufacturing,” forthcoming in Explorations in Economic History.

²⁰ Clark, , History of Manufactures, II, 197Google Scholar; Bining, Arthur C., Pennsylvania Iron Manufacture in the Eighteenth Century (Harrisburg, 1938), 57Google Scholar; Miller, Frederick K., “The Rise of an Iron Community: An Economic History of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania From 1740–1865” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1948), 141–42, 213.Google Scholar

²¹ Incoming correspondence of the Cornwall Furnaces for the 1850's and 1860's, Cornwall Furnace Papers, Pennsylvania State Historical and Museum Commission, Bureau of Archives and History, Harrisburg, Pa. Hereafter cited as Cornwall Furnace MSS.

²² Computed from Pig Iron Order Book, Cornwall Anthracite and Donaghmore Furnaces, 1866–1881, Cornwall Furnace MSS. See also the Pig Iron Sales Book, R. W. and W. Coleman, 1858–1878, and the incoming correspondence for the 1860's, all in the Cornwall Furnace MSS.

²³ Manuscript collections containing extensive Cabeen correspondence include (in addition to the Cornwall Furnace MSS), the Lukens Steel Collection and the Alan Wood Steel Co. papers, both in the Eleutherian Mills Historical Library, Greenville, Del., and the Lobdell Car Wheel Company papers in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. These collections are subsequently cited as Lukens MSS, Alan Wood MSS, and Lobdell MSS (Pa.), respectively. The same collections listed above also contain much correspondence from the firm of Enoch Pratt and Bro. Virtually every manufacturer's collection cited in this study has copious commission merchant correspondence. Among the most useful for developing a picture of the business relationships between producers and their agents are the exchanges between Gibbons and Huston and Kemble and Warner; the Lobdell Car Wheel Co. and Cabeen, as well as others to be cited subsequently.

²⁴ Detailed negotiations culminating in a future contract at a fixed price can be seen in a series of letters between Richard Borden, Treasurer of Fall River Iron Works, and Enoch Pratt, especially Borden to Pratt, August 23, 1853, Fall River Iron collection, Manuscripts Division, Baker Library, Harvard University. Hereafter cited Fall River Iron MSS. Pratt agreed to supply 2,400 tons of pig iron over twelve months at $32 per ton. Merchants met market prices by sending trusted customers blank invoices, telling them to fill in the lowest price offered by any competitor. See Cabeen to Gibbons and Huston, August 29, 1857, Lukens MSS.

²⁵ Integrated rolling mills of course required very much larger capital investments. See Temin, Iron and Steely Chapter 5.

²⁶ Haldeman's activities are recounted more fully in Livesay, Harold C. and Porter, Patrick G., “Iron on the Susquehanna: New Cumberland Forge,” Pennsylvania History, XXXVII (July, 1970), 261–68Google Scholar.

²⁷ Incoming Correspondence, 1805–1821; and Orders for Iron, 1801–1830, Jacob Haldeman Papers, Eleutherian Mills Historical Library, Greenville, Del. Hereafter cited as Haldeman MSS.

²⁸ Although production data in the Haldeman Papers are incomplete, the firm appears to have had an annual capacity of about 650 tons. This was probably above average for such Pennsylvania establishments through the 1820's, and about average in the 1830's. Size comparisons in this era can only be approximated, as the material for them is imprecise. See Billing, Pennsylvania Iron Manufacture, 85; Coxe, Tench, A Statement of the Arts and Manufactures of the United States of America for the Year 1810 (Philadelphia, 1814), 50Google Scholar; Census of Manufactures, 1840, p. 358.

²⁸ Christian Haldeman to Jacob Haldeman, February 23, 1829, Haldeman MSS.

³⁰ Taylor, Transportation Revolution, Chapter 3, contains a comprehensive summary of canal construction in the era.

³¹ See, for example, Hugh Boyle to Haldeman, June 28, 1817 and July 15, 1817; Ballard and Hall to Haldeman, June 5, 1818, February 22, 1819, April 21, 1819, and May 3, 1819; David Kizer to Haldeman, April 22, 1820; J. W. and E. Patterson to Haldeman, January 2, 1824; Evan T. Ellicott to Haldeman, December 31, 1823; Lambert Gittings to Haldeman, February 14, 1829 and April 22, 1829, Haldeman MSS. Most of these were general commission merchants; however, Joseph W. and Edward Patterson specialized in iron. See Matchett's Baltimore Directory for 1827 (Baltimore, 1827).Google Scholar

³² Nothing deterred the competitors, not even death. When an agent died his competitors hastened to take over his accounts. “My object in visiting the towns of the Susquehanna is in part in pursuit of commission business,” Edward Palmer wrote Jacob Haldeman in 1819, “supposing that since the death of our lamented friend Mr. Ballard you have no agent in Baltimore.” Palmer to Haldeman, October 20, 1819. See also George Winchester to Haldeman, October 14, 1819, and the circular from the late Ballard's partner, Andrew Hall, to Haldeman, December 31, 1819.

³³ Ballard and Hall to Haldeman, April 23, 1819 and October 5, 1819; Wilmer and Palmer to Haldeman, April 28, 1825 and May 19, 1825; Lambert Gittings to Haldeman, May 1, 1829 and October 10, 1830, Haldeman MSS.

³⁴ Good examples are in Lambert Gittings to Haldeman, May 1, 1829 and September 12, 1829, Haldeman MSS.

³⁵ James Keys to Haldeman, July 29, 1805; Isaac McPherson to Haldeman, September 22, 1825 and April 1, 1826; David Kizer to Haldeman, April 14, 1826; Joseph M. Patterson to Haldeman, April 15, 1826, Haldeman MSS.

³⁶ Ballard and Hall to Haldeman, May 3, 1819; Thomas Janvier to Haldeman, August 1, 1827; Lambert Gittings to Haldeman, February 14, 1829; Christian Haldeman to Jacob Haldeman, February 23, 1829, Haldeman MSS.

³⁷ See the correspondence in 1829 between Haldeman and Lambert Gittings of Baltimore, Hollingshead Platt of Philadelphia, and Haven and Smith of Philadelphia, especially William F. Smith to Haldeman, November 17, 1829, Haldeman MSS.

³⁸ Census of Manufactures, 1860, p. clxxii.

³⁹ The Gibbons and Huston material is part of the Lukens MSS. I am indebted to my friend Julian Skaggs of the University of Delaware, who is currently writing a history of Lukens. He not only shared his unique knowledge of this firm's affairs, but also directed me to relevant parts of the collection.

⁴⁰ Accounts of Sales by Agents, 1840–1885, Lukens MSS; Curtis Bouve to Gibbons and Huston, July 9, 1857.

⁴¹ Evaluating the fixed capital assets of pre-Civil War manufacturers is tricky business indeed due to the variety and inconsistency of contemporary accounting methods. With no Bureau of Internal Revenue to answer to, and usually no stockholders to demand detailed accounts, firms used whatever system satisfied the proprietors. Sometimes the cost of buildings and machinery can be discerned; often it remains unknown. Accounts such as “Real Estate,” or “Machinery” may indicate original cost, replacement cost, or simply what the proprietors thought they were worth to them. In addition, there was rarely any provision for depreciation in the modern sense. Occasionally there is a “Contingency” account, but it is often uncertain exactly what such an account implied. Many items which would be considered capital improvements today were often charged to an all-purpose “Repairs” account. The railroads pioneered in developing guidelines to separate current expense from capital investments, but the most satisfactory way of doing so remained a matter of debate among railroad managers well into the twentieth century. See Acworth, W. M., “Railroad Accounting in America vs. England,” North American Review, CXCI (1910), 330–39Google Scholar. It was scarcely an issue in iron manufacturing until the separation of ownership from management took place in integrated rail mills. One hopes that mill owners, when supplying data for government reports such as the Census, used original or replacement costs in calculating capital invested, but it is by no means certain that they did. For a discussion of the accuracy of Census data, see Walsh, Margaret, “The Census as an Accurate Source of Information: The Value of Mid-Nineteenth Century Manufacturing Returns,” Historical Methods Newsletter III (September, 1970), 3–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

In the case of Gibbons and Huston, however, it can be “seen” that the investment was small. Model builders at the Hagley Museum, Greenville, Del. have constructed a model of the mill from information in the Lukens MSS. The entire plant consisted of a small, one-room building (which the firm rented), a water wheel, sundry gears and shafting, two pairs of rollers, a set of shears, and furnaces for heating the iron. Whatever the actual value of this may have been, it was obviously small compared to that of an “iron plantation.”

⁴² Correspondence between Gibbons and Huston and Charles Bailey, C. E. Pennock, and others, Lukens MSS. See also letters to and from Fall River Iron, 1840–1860, especially Richard Borden to Crocker and Co., March 2, 1848, Fall River Iron MSS.

⁴³ William Kemble to Lukens and Gibbons, January 7, 1845, Lukens MSS. Price fixing was common practise among ante-bellum metal manufacturers. For example, Abram Hewitt of Trenton Iron, and Henry Washburn of Washburn and Godard (Worcester, Mass.) conspired to control the price of wire in the 1850's. Anson Phelps and his successors entered into price-fixing agreements with other copper and brass manufacturers. See Nevins, Alan, Abram S. Hewitt, With Some Account of Peter Cooper (New York, 1967Google Scholar), and Lowitt, Richard, A Merchant Prince of the Nineteenth Century: William E. Dodge (New York, 1954).Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Nevins, Hewitt, 109.

⁴⁵ Kemble and Warner to Charles Huston, July 8, 1857, Lukens MSS.

⁴⁶ Kemble to Lukens and Gibbons, January 7, 1845, Lukens MSS.

⁴⁷ Kemble and Warner to Huston, Nov. 25, 1857; same to same, Dec. 14, 1857; same to same, Jan. 20, 1858; Charles Bailey to Huston, Nov. 23, 1857; Kemble and Warner to Huston and Penrose, November 18, 1852, are examples of the large quantity of such correspondence in the Lukens MSS.

⁴⁸ Kemble and Warner to Lukens and Gibbons, Jan. 17, 1848, Lukens MSS.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Worcester was the center of wire manufacture in the U.S. Census of Manufactures, 1860, p. clxxiv. Washburn and Godard was the largest such firm in Worcester.

⁵¹ Washburn and Godard Bill Book, Inventory, and Record, 1833–1848, American Steel and Wire Co. Papers, Manuscript Division, Baker Library, Harvard University. Hereafter cited as American Steel and Wire MSS.

Commission merchants continued to sell most imported iron and steel throughout the nineteenth century. For example, Thomas Prosser, a New York broker, was the U.S. agent for Krupp Steel in the 1880's and 1890's. Another New York commission house, Naylor and Co., supplied English and Norwegian steel to Samuel Colt in the 1850's, and British steel rails to American railroads in the 1880's and 1890's. This was long after the roads had stopped using intermediaries in purchasing domestic rails. See Prosser Letter File, James Reese and Co. Papers, Inland Rivers Collection, Cincinnati Public Library, Cincinnati, O.; Colt correspondence cited in note 53, below; Steel Rail File, Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago, III. Hereafter cited CB&Q MSS.

⁵² The appearance of jobbers can be traced in city directories, and the number and variety of them serves as a rough measure of a town's importance as a regional distribution center. This significance depended on the number of customers within effective reach of the town's merchants. This in turn was not simply a function of regional population, but also of the intra-regional transportation facilities available.

⁵³ Correspondence, 1847–1860, Samuel Colt Papers, Connecticut Historical Society, and Connecticut State Library, Hartford, Conn.

⁵⁴ Nails represented 10 per cent (by weight) of U.S. iron production in 1856. Lesley, J. P., The Iron Manufacturer's Guide (New York, 1859), 764.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Iron Invoices; Invoice Books; Annual Accounts of the New York Agency of the Fall River Iron Works, Fall River Iron MSS.

⁵⁶ Census of Manufactures, 1860, p. clxxxvi.

⁵⁷ For examples see Pierce, Iron in the Pines, 140–41; Letter Books and Unbound Papers, C. G. and H. M. Plimpton Papers, Manuscripts Division, Baker Library, Harvard University.

⁵⁸ Unbound Correspondence, 1851–1860; Bill Files, 1853–1857, Builders' Iron Foundry Papers, Manuscripts Division, Baker Library, Harvard University. Stove jobbers frequently sold at wholesale and retail, and dictated styles and price ranges to manufacturers.

⁵⁹ Lobdell Car Wheel Co., Catalog and Price List, 1891, Lobdell MSS (Pa.).Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Christian Haldeman to Jacob Haldeman, March 5, 1829, Haldeman MSS.

⁶¹ Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., ed., The Railroads (New York, 1965), 34.Google Scholar

⁶² Tonnage for the “Coatesville Mills” from Lesley, Iron Manufacturer's Guide, 233; miles of track laid from tables in Chandler, Railroads, 14; the figure fifty-four miles was computed using Robert Fogel's estimate of the weight of rails per mile of track laid in 1856. I also used Fogel's figure for total tonnage of rail consumption. Fogel's estimates are approximations at best, but serve well enough for the purposes here. See Fogel, Robert W., Railroads and American Economic Growth (Baltimore, 1964), 182, 194.Google Scholar

⁶³ Both firms eventually had to integrate backward by adding blast furnaces in order to meet the competition of other integrated firms, but this took place after the Civil War.

⁶⁴ The Whitakers also integrated the Principio works by adding a pipe foundry. May, Principio to Wheeling, Chapter 13 ff.

⁶⁵ Griffin was a West Chester, N.Y. farm boy who learned the iron trade while working in an unintegrated, water-powered nail mill in Norristown, Pa. Prior to Griffin's innovation, it cost $3.00 per ton of iron produced to drive the mill with coal-fired boilers. See Corning, Howard, ed., “A Letter from John Griffin, Ironmaster,” Journal of Economic and Business History, IV (1931–1932), 687–703Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Corning, “Letter from John Griffin;” Fritz, John, Autobiography (New York, 1912Google Scholar). Fritz describes the perfection of the engine driven rolling mill in Chapter 15. The book also contains explanations of various ironworking processes such as puddling. See also Billinger, R. D., “Beginnings of Bethlehem Iron and Steel,” Bulletin of the Pennsylvania Department of Urban Affairs, XX (1952), No. 1, 3–7; No. 4, 7–10; No. 5, 13–18Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Temin, Iron and Steel, 109, 110, 117.

⁶⁸ Lesley, Iron Manufacturer's Guide, 228, 233, 237, 247.

⁶⁹ Just how much of a minority is debatable. According to the Iron Manufacturer's Guide (764), rails accounted for 17 per cent of U.S. tonnage in 1856. This is also the figure Fogel cites as the average annual consumption for all railroad purposes in the period 1840–1860. (Railroads and Economic Growth, 232.) The exact figure is of no importance here.

⁷⁰ This point is important, for it illustrates the dangers inherent in using aggregate statistics as tools of growth analysis. Data showing total output for an entire industry, or even total production for sectors of that industry, often conceal the potency of individual units. This can lead to false evaluations of the importance of various types of manufacturing firms to long-run economic growth. As David Landes has pointed out, it is indeed difficult to “balance macrostatistical calculations that attribute only a slight effect” to some development within the economic fabric “against what could easily be a myriad of individual examples” showing that the change had profound consequences. There is no easy way around these difficulties, but they can be minimized by disaggregating statistics as far as possible, and by using quantitative data as the starting point rather than the goal of historical analysis. See Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 512 ff. for a perceptive discussion of this problem.

⁷¹ An informative collection of these reports from John Griffin, General Manager to David Reeves, President of Phoenix Iron in the Phoenix Iron Co. Papers, Eleutherian Mills Historical Library, Greenville, Del. Hereafter cited as Phoenix MSS.

⁷² Billinger, “Beginnings of Bethlehem Iron.”

⁷³ Corning, “Letter from John Griffin,” 691.

⁷⁴ Temin discusses changing patterns of iron and steel consumption in Iron and Steel, Chapter 10.

⁷⁵ Corning, “Letter from John Griffin,” 691.

⁷⁶ Annual Report to the President, 1872, Phoenix MSS; Nevins, Hewitt, 104–105.

⁷⁷ By the end of the nineteenth century, the U.S. iron and steel industry was dominated by a small number of giant firms. These firms all made a wide range of products; all were integrated backward to control their raw materials; all were selling their products directly to consumers. See Porter, P. Glenn and Livesay, Harold C., “Oligopolists in American Manufacturing and Their Products, 1909–1963,” Business History Review, XLIII (Autumn, 1969), 282–298Google Scholar; Livesay, Harold C. and Porter, Patrick G., “Vertical Integration in American Manufacturing, 1899–1948,” Journal of Economic History, XXIX (September, 1969), 494–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar.