Formal apprenticeship of Negro slaves was not uncommon, and many examples can be cited of Negroes who became skilled workers even without the formality. The largest number in and around Williamsburg seem to have been carpenters, but other crafts had skilled and semi-skilled practitioners who were slaves. Peter Scott, for example, owned “two Negroes, bred to the Business of a Cabinet-maker,” and Anthony Hay owned a “very good” slave cabinetmaker even after he turned from that trade to innkeeping. However, no instance has come to light from colonial Virginia of a Negro, even a freedman, who became a journeyman or master of any craft.
GREENER GRASS
As we have seen, Virginians who wanted fine furniture probably ordered it from England. But competition from across the Atlantic was not the local cabinetmaker’s only burden. A very large amount of furniture left the busy shops of New England, New York, and Philadelphia in the eighteenth century, consigned to southern ports or the West Indies. No precise figure can be stated for the size or importance of this coastwise trade, or for its importance in the life of Williamsburg cabinetmakers; it could not have made things easier for them.
The interior of an eighteenth-century French marquetry establishment, with the workers using various tools. At the left is a type of vise called a “donkey”; against the wall may be seen a large cabinet bookcase, a slant-top desk, and a chest of drawers. These would have been made in a cabinet shop and brought here for inlay decoration.
DIDEROT
Whether outside competition was the cause, or simply the narrowness of the Virginia market in the first place, Williamsburg cabinetmakers—like the practitioners of other crafts—found ways to augment their incomes. Anthony Hay became proprietor of the Raleigh Tavern and Benjamin Bucktrout turned storekeeper and state functionary.
The change in Hay’s case was clearly not motivated by poverty; he must have been well-to-do or at any rate well respected to have acquired backing, perhaps to the extent of £4000, to buy the Raleigh—and without selling his house, cabinet shop, and timber yard.
Coffin-making was a normal part of the cabinetmaker’s business, and many cabinetmakers took what was the logical next step of serving also as funeral directors. When the popular Lord Botetourt, Governor Dunmore’s predecessor, died in Williamsburg, two of the town’s cabinetmakers were involved in the burial. Joshua Kendall made the three nested coffins, and Benjamin Bucktrout provided the hearse and four days worth of attendance in connection with the ceremonies.
Bucktrout was one of the several Williamsburg cabinetmakers who did upholstering; he also sold upholstery materials in his shop on Francis Street. By 1774 that shop had become a store—stocked with beer, cheese, spices, woolens and cottons, hats, boots, women’s and children’s shoes, gloves, guns, pistols, saddles, whips, and a number of other things—and Bucktrout had to advertise that he still did cabinet work.
Eventually, however, Bucktrout seems to have abandoned his own business to put all his time and effort into serving as purveyor to the public hospitals of the state. A powder mill he devised and erected in or near Williamsburg early in the Revolution did not function for lack of saltpeter, and Bucktrout’s efforts to gain compensation or subsidy from the Assembly were in vain.