| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution. By John Bezís-Selfa. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xiv, 279 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8014-3993-0.)

A decade ago Charles Dew used the surviving records of the Buffalo Forge in Virginia to elucidate the important place of slave labor in prewar rural southern ironworks. From his Bond of Iron we learned how furnace and forge proprietors depended on the skills of slaves, many hired from plantation owners and rewarded for overwork by cash payments or other perquisites. John Bezís-Selfa has expanded the study of slave labor in ironmaking to the middle Atlantic states and from colonial times through the years of the early republic. By exhaustive study of account books and other employment records, he has been able to follow the careers of many individual ironworkers and the staffing history of selected ironworks. His research begins with the failed seventeenth-century attempts of colonists in British North America to establish production of iron for export, and it turns to the revival of ironmaking in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Throughout Virginia and Maryland, and to a lesser extent in Pennsylvania, slaves not only did the routine work of hauling and carrying but also mastered the highly skilled and difficult art of converting pig to bar iron in finery forges. They worked alongside indentured servants and free workers in an environment that, while it had rewards not accorded to plantation slaves, placed more stress on family continuity and security.

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