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Aboard the King's ships, the ropemaker was a Senior petty officer, directly under the boatswain, and was responsible for the condition of all the lines, shrouds, sheets, and stays on the ship.[538] But on land, the situation was different.
At the Colonial ropewalk, there was a distinct hierarchy. If you were the owner of the ropewalk, the chances are you weren't directly involved in making rope. You hired people to do that. The owners often had several other businesses going at the same time. One of which might include renting lodging to the wage earning employees. The ropewalk owners were in the top one percent economically.[273]
This advertisement in the Virginia Gazette, from 1777, gives an idea of the next two steps down the economic ladder.
"The new Ropery now erecting at this Place by Archibald Cary & Co. is in immediate Want of a Manager who perfectly understands the conducting and managing that Branch of Business, also two or three good Spinners, to whom extraordinary Wages will be given, and proper Dwelling Houses provided for them convenient to their Work. The Company proposes that the Manager shall be (if he chooses) interested in one Share, and the Money advanced him clear of Interest, until he finds it convenient to repay it, also to furnish him with a complete Dwelling-House, with all other convenient Outhouses, Garden, and Pasturage, Rent free, either for a single Man or Family, Provisions for the same, at the expense of the Company."[881]
The "spinners" were the men who added the new fibers to the ever lengthening yarn while walking backwards. They were the most skilled workers.
Below the spinners came everyone else. These were the people who worked the tar pots, cleaned the hemp, and turned the cranks.
The King's soldiers quartered in Boston in 1770, were allowed to seek day work to augment their pay. A favorite place to pick up short term work was as an unskilled day laborer at the ropewalks. The regular workers objected to the soldiers taking work away from them, often for reduced wages. This accounts for some of the animosity between the soldiers and ropemakers in the days leading up to the Boston Massacre.[063] [100] [345]
But not all workers in Colonial Virginia worked for wages. There were actually four different groups of laborers.
Labor in the cities was in short supply, and men willing to work with their hands could demand reasonable pay. A man could live with a small degree of comfort on a ropemaker's wage. Comfort being a very subjective term. In Boston, in the Winter time, the ink in rich people's houses would often freeze.[273] A married couple could squeak by. A large family would have a hard time living off of a laborer's pay.
Before the Revolution, and for a long while after, most people did not live in cities. The ideal was to have a piece of land to call your own, raise your family and your food, and not be subjected to the rules of an employer. At the lower end of the pay scale, the laborers were trying to earn enough money to escape the city.
But paying wages for workers wasn't the only option for business owners.
Slavery was legal and not-uncommon in Massachusetts from the mid-1600s until it finally died out after the Revolutionary War.
In Virginia,
"By 1705, and the passage of 'An act concerning Servants and Slaves', slavery had become ensconced at all levels of Virginia society..."[915]
But owning slaves was a long term investment. Slaves were fed, clothed, and housed, from birth through childhood, into the productive adult years, and then through infirmity, old age, until death. While farming offered kinds of work that could be done by different aged workers, a ropewalk was mostly vigorous work, less suitable for the very young or very old.[605]
Wage earners were not happy to compete with slave labor.
"Throughout the colonies white mechanics joined forces to protest against black competition, but the problem seems to have been especially critical in Charleston, South Carolina. There, in 1744, the shipwrights complained that they were reduced to poverty owing to black competition. Their protest, supported by white mechanics in other trades, persuaded the town authorities to enact an ordinance forbidding the inhabitants from keeping more than two slaves "to work out for hire as porters, labourers, fishermen or handicraftsmen." This resentment on the part of white mechanics was also evident in most Northern towns."[612]
One ropewalk in Fredericksburg, Virginia, wanted to borrow the labor of slaves for six months, in exchange for teaching the enslaved workers the valuable skills of ropemaking and flax processing.[135]
At the end of the indenture, the master was obligated, by the terms of the contract, to give the servant severance fees, usually including a new set of clothes, a gun, a hoe, and a certain amount of money or food. Sometimes a Bible.
In many cases, like at a ropewalk, an indenture could be bought, and the master only had to feed, clothe, and house the servant during their prime working years. Unlike slavery, the owner of an indenture was only contracting for the prime labor years of the worker.
Another incentive for importing indentured servants was the "headright". In Maryland and Virginia, anyone who paid for the transportation of an indentured servant from Europe was entitled to petition the government for fifty acres of land. [854] [915] The headright system was in place from 1618, right through to the Revolutionary War. "It has been estimated that the redemptioners comprised almost eighty per cent of the total British and continental immigration to America down to the coming of the Revolution."[612] Each indenture could represent 50 acres of land. Sometimes the ship's captain who transported the servant, and the purchaser of the indenture both claimed the headright, for the same person. The masters used the headright to acquire the good land near the rivers and ports, so the indentured servants, at the completion of their contract, had to go further and further west to find unclaimed land for their own farms.
By law, crimes punishable by death received a fourteen year indenture, those convicted of less serious crimes were only sentenced to seven years.[612] An estimated 10,000 convicts were sent just from Old Bailey in the sixty years before 1775.
"Convict laborers could be purchased for a lower price than indentured white or enslaved African laborers, and because they already existed outside society's rules, they could be more easily exploited."[740]
City ropewalks produced "white", un-tarred, ropes in addition to those used for ships. As these were intended for domestic, household, and farm use, they did not have to be anywhere near as long as the tarred ropes for ships. This meant the ropewalk could be smaller, the equipment smaller, and the workforce could be smaller. City dwellers seldom had direct access to raw rope materials, and did not need to make their own rope.
But the Lees weren't your typical independent farmer. The ordinary settler, free of his indenture, with a gun, an ax, and a hoe, would start his farm even further from the major cities than Richard Bland Lee, and his labor force was his household. Colonial farms were more independent and isolated than those in England and Scotland. Although a farmer may have participated in community ropemaking back home, in the Colonies, he was on his own until the next trip to the nearest trading town.
Away from the cities and major trading towns, there wasn't enough business to support a full time ropemaker. Just like every farm did their own carpentry, butchering, cooking, sewing, etc. they also had to make their own rope.
The itinerant peddlers who supplied pins, scissors, tinware, ribbons, etc., dealt with small, light, items of value.[218] Finished rope is heavy. One hundred feet of quarter inch rope weighs just over two pounds. One hundred feet of two inch diameter rope weighs over one hundred pounds. Carrying the wide range of rope sizes that might be needed is totally impractical. Moving just one rope became a famous incident of the War of 1812, the "Great Rope Carry".[064] [293] But a travelling ropemaker could provide expertise and use of specialized tools for barter. A ropemaker might be a farmer for most of the year, only coming out to practice his "trade" at nearby fairs, where he could make custom ropes to order, and other rope based items.
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