Forging a new order: Slavery, free labor, and sectional differentiation in the mid-Atlantic charcoal iron industry, 1715-1840

This dissertation examines the organization of work within the mid-Atlantic charcoal iron industry from 1715 to 1840. It uses business records, correspondence and newspapers to compare how northern and southern ironmasters managed labor, and how ironworkers shaped efforts to mold them into a disciplined work force. By comparing how proprietors and ironworkers contested the meaning of industrial order, I illustrate how the North and the South became distinct regions during the colonial and early national eras.;The dissertation contains four parts. The first examines the unique demands that charcoal iron production placed on humans. The second situates the colonial iron industry in an Atlantic economy and compares how colonial ironmasters in the North and the South organized work. The third examines the development of the charcoal iron industry from the Revolution to 1840 and explores how proprietors and ironworkers contested initiatives to make iron more efficiently. The last section compares work and life at two ironworks, one in Virginia that exploited slave labor exclusively and one in New Jersey that depended solely on free labor.;The voracious appetite of ironworks for capital and labor compelled ironmasters to make production efficient and predictable. In the colonial Chesapeake, the proprietary quest for control quickly wedded slavery to industrial order. In the North, colonial ironmasters relied on waged hands, but ironically found that they could not mold free labor to suit their needs without slavery. After the Revolution, most southern ironmasters still held that slavery offered the best way to forge a disciplined work force. Gradual abolition forced northern proprietors to devise new means to harness waged labor to the routines of charcoal iron production.;This study examines how proprietors and workers within one industry negotiated the terms of labor over more than a century. By comparing how northern and southern ironmasters encouraged, persuaded and coerced others to make iron for profit, it explores how one region in British North America became two during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.