In a few years, however, some tanners and shoemakers had been sent over and were at work in Jamestown. But not enough of them came or else (as is more likely) they abandoned their trades to grow tobacco. A 1625 report declared that an extreme shortage of shoes and other apparel endangered the health of the population. Soon thereafter the Virginia Assembly took the first of many steps to promote leathermaking and other manufactures in the colony.
Sometimes with the support of the home government, sometimes without, the assembly passed laws in 1632, 1645, 1658, 1660, 1662, 1680, and 1682 forbidding the export from Virginia of hides, skins, and certain other commodities. They hoped in this way to assure ample supplies of the raw materials and thus encourage colonial craftsmen to make more of the needed products.
The legislation, in actuality, had less effect in Virginia than in England. Colonial craftsmen continued to prefer leathers imported from England, reputed to be the best of their kinds, for quality work—and to prefer tobacco growing to leatherworking anyway. But English merchants and craftsmen repeatedly protested the threat of competition in a market they felt belonged solely to them, so each colonial law in turn was either repealed on orders from London or simply allowed to lapse.
The 1662 effort, somewhat more elaborate than the others, had no greater success in the end. At Jamestown the legislature that year passed three laws intended to increase local manufactures. One barred the export of hides, wool, and iron; another exempted from taxation any craftsman who followed his trade and did not plant tobacco; the third required each county in the colony of Virginia to erect “one or more tanhouses, and ... provide tanners, curryers and shoemakers, to tanne, curry and make the hides of the country into leather and shoes.” The manager of this trade for each county was to allow the people two pounds of tobacco for each pound of dry hide they brought to the tannery, and “sell them shoos at thirty pounds of tobacco [for] plaine shoos, and thirty five pounds of tobacco for [shoes with] wooden heels and ffrench falls of the ... largest sizes, and twenty pounds of tobacco per pair for the smaller shoos.”
Cordonier As the shoemaker needed an assortment of lasts on which to make shoes of differing sizes and shapes, so the bootmaker needed “boot legs” resembling his customers’ calves. The engraving also shows a variety of eighteenth-century boot styles, the more formidable being heavy military boots. Diderot.
BEFORE FREE ENTERPRISE
The seventeenth century ended with legislation of a different tenor. “An act declareing the dutie of Tanners, Curriers and Shoemakers,” passed in 1691, regulated working procedures and set quality standards to an extent remarkable even at a time when detailed governmental regulation of economic activity was normal.
Tanners, this law decreed, were not to leave hides too long in the lime-pits, nor put them into the tan-vats until they had been thoroughly cleansed of lime; curriers were not to work “any hyde or skin not being thoroughly dry,” and were not to skimp on the amount or quality or freshness of the grease they used in currying; cordwainers or shoemakers were to use only leather that was “well and truly tann’d and curryed,” and were to make their boots, shoes, and slippers “well and substantially sewed with good thread well twisted and made, and sufficiently waxed with wax well rosined, and the stitches hard drawn with handleathers.”
The law further required each county to appoint searchers to examine all hides, skins, leather, and leather goods produced in that county. They were to stamp their seal of approval only on items that met quality standards in the “true intent and meaning of this act,” and to confiscate all wares that were “insufficiently tann’d, curryed, or wrought.”