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Manufacturer's Drummer, 1832
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2012
Extract
The drummer's rôle in American merchandising prior to the Civil War has already been pointed up in a number of articles in this BULLETIN. To the picture already presented may be added detail taken from reports on trips, to the area west of the Alleghenies, made by two sales representatives of a Connecticut manufacturer in the 1830's and the 1850's. The present article is devoted to the circumstances of the sales trips made in the 1830's. The traveler's letters cast light on the prevalence of eastern buying trips by merchants, the similar prevalence of long-established ties between western merchants and jobbers or other merchants in the eastern cities, also the further difficulties which a salesman encountered when freight and postal services were highly uncertain and banking facilities permitted eastward remittances to be made only with difficulty.
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- Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1948
References
Author's Note. A grant from the Princeton University Committee on Research has been of assistance in final preparation of material for this article.
1 Lee M. Friedman, “The Drummer and Early American Merchandise Distribution,” vol. xxi, no. 2 (April, 1947), pp. 39–44; Lewis E. Atherton, “Predecessors of the Commercial Drummer in the Old South,” vol. xxi, no. 1 (February, 1947), pp. 17–24; and Lewis E. Atherton, “Itinerant Merchandising in the Ante-bellum South,” vol. xix, no. 2 (April, 1945), pp. 35–59.
2 Background with respect to middlemen in brass and button merchandising was presented in an article by the writer, “Commission Agents in the Brass and Button Trade a Century Ago,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, vol. xvi, no. 1 (February, 1942), pp. 8–18.
The general pattern and organization of merchandising in this period is reviewed in Jones, Fred M., “Middlemen in the Domestic Commerce of the United States, 1800–1860,” Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, vol. xxi, no. 3 (May 25, 1937)Google Scholar; also in Atherton, Lewis E., “The Pioneer Merchant in Mid-America,” The University of Missouri Studies, vol. xiv, no. 2 (April 1, 1939).Google Scholar
3 J. M. L. Scovill to W. H. Scovill, March 6, 1832. Correspondence herein cited is from the archives of the Scovill Manufacturing Company. Acknowledgments are due the Executive Offices for facilitating examination of the documents. A more general picture with respect to the Scovill activities is presented by the writer in “Brass Button Making, 1802–1852, The Early History of the Scovill Enterprise,” Quarterly Bulletin of the National Button Society, vol. v, no. 1 (January, 1946).
4 Anderson, Joseph, editor, The Town and City of Waterbury, Connecticut (New Haven, 1896, 3 vols.), vol. ii, p. 323.Google Scholar
5 An index of domestic trade for this early period (1837 = 100) has been computed and shows a drop from 109 for 1831 to 103 for 1832. See Smith, Walter B. and Cole, Arthur H., Fluctuations in American Business 1790–1860 (Cambridge, 1935), p. 73.Google Scholar
6 The Philadelphia prices of non-ferrous metals and their products, as computed in recent years, are shown to have maintained the December, 1831, level during most of 1832; the low point for the year was reached in April at the time of Scovill's discouraged letter to his brother. See Bezanson, Anne, Gray, Robert D. and Hussey, Miriam, Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia, 1784–1861 (Philadelphia, 1936), p. 380.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 The value of such contacts as a means of maintaining a hold on customer business is discussed by the writer in “Imperfect Competition in Brass Manufacturing during the 1830's,” Journal of Economic History, vol. iii, Supplement (December, 1943), pp. 33–37.
8 This aspect of customer initiative was suggested with respect to the service of sales agents as intermediaries in the writer's “Commission Agents in the Button and Brass Trade a Century Ago,” p. 14.
The advantage which early Connecticut Yankees may have gained in this way from peddling their own wares could, perhaps, be emphasized more than has been done so far. It is indirectly suggested in Wright, Richardson, Hawkers and Walkers in Early America (Philadelphia, 1927), p. 23Google Scholar, and in Atherton's citation from that volume, concerning Collis P. Huntington's employment by Connecticut clockmakers “peddling clocks and collecting notes for Connecticut clock makers….” See his “Itinerant Merchandising in the Ante-bellum South,” p. 43.
9 Letter of Merit Welton, July 12, 1832. The ten-year population growth of these three cities is drawn from Sixteenth Census of the U. S., 1940, Population (Washington, 1943), vol. i, p. 32. For Pittsburgh and Louisville the ten-year increase was more than 100 per cent; for Cincinnati it was slightly over 90 per cent. The rôle of Cincinnati as entrepôt, as well as its later loss of leadership, is placed in perspective by Gras, N. S. B. in An Introduction to Economic History (New York, 1922), p. 293.Google Scholar
10 Welton reported on the cost and travel time but not on the number of stages daily, which is here cited from Hutchins, Sarah, History of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, 1906)Google Scholar. The schedule in 1835 provided daily stages and two daily canal packets.
11 Harris' Pittsburgh Business Directory, 1837 (Pittsburgh, 1837). It is surprising, in view of the general prejudice which the merchants are reputed to have held against sales through auction, that buttons should have been placed on consignment with a commission merchant who was also an active auctioneer!
12 Information on the sequence of firms succeeding those Welton noted is from Correll, H. W., Pioneer Pittsburgh Concerns (Pittsburgh, 1929).Google Scholar
13 This is cited from the proceedings of the convention by Hunter, Louis C. in “Influence of the Market upon Technique in the Iron Industry of Western Pennsylvania up to 1860,” Journal of Economic and Business History, vol. i, no. 2 (February, 1929), p. 266.Google Scholar
14 Harris' Pittsburgh Directory, passim.
15 Lane, Knox & McKee was engaged in forwarding prior to 1818. Presumably it was this firm to which Knox & McKee traced its origin. After 1818 the earlier firm opened a commission business which included drugs of Temple & Smith, Philadelphia. Atherton, in The Pioneer Merchant in Mid-America, p. 77, cites from a Temple and Smith letter book. By 1837 a firm called M'Kee, Harding & Co., of Wheeling, placed an advertisement as general forwarding and commission merchants in Harris' Pittsburgh Directory.
16 May, Earl Chapin, Principio to Wheeling (New York, 1945), p. 100.Google Scholar Perhaps Welton just wasn't much impressed.
17 Damage by flood was a normal loss at Cincinnati, but in 1832 the river reached 38.2 feet following a heavy fall of rain upon an extensive frozen surface. William H. Harrison, “A Discourse on the Aborigines of the Valley of the Ohio,” Transactions of the Ohio Historical and Philosophical Society, Part Second, vol. i, p. 226. Also Way, Frederick Jr., The Allegheny (New York, 1942), p. 205.Google Scholar
18 The Cincinnati Directory for the Year 1831 (Cincinnati, 1831), pp. 182 and 187.
19 Mrs. Trollope, Frances M., Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York, 1832), pp. 85, 55, and 54.Google Scholar
20 Otis, Richard W., Louisville Directory, 1832 (Louisville, 1832)Google Scholar has not been available to the writer, but the material drawn from it has been made available by courtesy of Mr. Richard Hill, Secretary of the Filson Club, Louisville, Kentucky.
21 Merit Welton to J. M. L. & W. H. Scovill, September 5, 1832.
22 This assistance rendered the firm by Hildreth was perhaps characteristic. His interest in local resources led also to his recording the presence of petroleum in association with salt springs; he published a good deal on local history. See Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1946, 22 vols.), vol. ix, p. 21. Welton reported (Welton to J. M. L. & W. H. Scovill, August 30, 1832) that Hildreth would not take compensation for his assistance: “Dr. H. would take nothing but said he was glad if he could be of any advantage to you and if this was worth anything he wished to have American Man profited by it.”
23 See the writer's “Brass Button Making at the Scovill Enterprise, 1802–1852, Part IV, Assembly, Finish, and Packing,” Quarterly Bulletin of The National Button Society, vol. v, no. 4 (October, 1946), pp. 261–262.
24 Compare Atherton, The Pioneer Merchant in Mid-America, pp. 11 and 61.
25 Merit Welton to J. M. L. & W. H. Scovill, August 18, 1832.
26 Welton does not indicate where the smaller merchants had been in the habit of purchasing. Unless they had been purchasing from the Cincinnati or Louisville wholesale houses one wonders where those firms sold their goods. Atherton indicates that during this period a change was getting under way with smaller merchants or retailers in the process of shifting their business from the seaboard houses to midwest wholesalers. See his The Pioneer Merchant in Mid-America, pp. 49 ff. and 76 ff.
27 Compare Atherton, The Pioneer Merchant in Mid-America, pp. 47 ff. and 66 ff. on overland routes from Baltimore and Philadelphia. Also Johnson, Emory R., Van Metre, T. W., Huebner, G. G., and Hanchett, D. S., History of Domestic and Foreign Commerce of the United States (Washington, D. C., 1915, 2 vols.), vol. i, pp. 212–216 and 227 ff.Google Scholar For 1818 the rate between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia is given as $6.50 per hundredweight, and the Philadelphia to Wheeling rate tended to equal this, also the Baltimore to Wheeling rate. The downward trend is indicated by an 1843 rate of $1.00 per hundredweight between Wheeling and Philadelphia.
28 Compare Larson, Henrietta M., “S. & M. Allen, Lottery, Exchange, and Stock Brokerage,” Journal of Economic and Business History, vol. iii (May, 1931), pp. 424–445.Google Scholar
29 Merit Welton to J. M. L. & W. H. Scovill, February 10, 1834.
30 Atherton, “Predecessors of the Commercial Drummer in the Old South,” p. 22.