The Drummer in Early American Merchandise Distribution

Extract

After the Revolution merchandise locally manufactured was largely custom-made for the consumer. America's colonial merchants had combined the rôles of importers, exporters, bankers, middlemen, and shopkeepers. Only gradually, in the larger eastern centers, manufacturing other than for direct consumer use developed. It continued as a handicraft, however. The employer disposed of his surplus over local requirements through peddlers who scoured the adjacent countryside on foot or in peddlers' carts. As New England factories and mills developed, shoes, dry goods, tinware, cloth, clocks, firearms, hats, salt, and all the miscellaneous output of its infant industries were peddled throughout the land. Experience as a peddler was the school for the Yankee youth of the day destined for a mercantile career. Out of the towns each spring poured a hoard of young men with flowered carpetbags or with tin trunks strapped to their backs, afoot or with horse and wagon, headed for as distant a point as the Canadian border to the north or as far as Georgia to the south.