Thanks, Bob, for these thoughts. I hope nothing I said above indicated that I thought that any of these gunsmiths looked down on or disparaged their trade or that they were looked down on for practicing this particular trade. As you say, William Henry I--who left the trade (but wasn't orphaned: his mother lived until 1778)--encouraged several of his sons to become gunsmiths. But of course everybody had to make a living, and he wanted to ensure that his sons had a trade by which they could support themselves. What else could Henry, even with his own upward mobility, have done in the 1760s but find an appropriate trade for his sons? (Maybe--I don't myself believe this but maybe--he thought that, since gunsmithing as he practiced it had enabled him to rise quickly to the elite class, perhaps his sons could accomplish the same? I think he just aimed to establish his sons in an honorable trade at which they could support themselves and raise a family.)
I would just reemphasize that one can have respect for a trade, for manual labor, and aspire to leave it behind as well if that possibility presented itself. I think most eighteenth century individuals would have left manual labor behind instantly if the opportunity presented it to them: it presented itself to very few of them. And so most laborers remained laborers.
All of which is to say that upward mobility is certainly not something we value more than eighteenth-century folks did. Eighteenth-century writing is filled with stories about upward mobility, often through marriage (not through work: that is what was hard to accomplish)--and often, because they are written from the "elite" perspective, aiming to punish the upwardly mobile as nasty social climbers. Ben Franklin's autobiography is probably the classic early American book that celebrates such upward mobility. I would say that upward mobility, though, is something that we expect far more than they did.
One of the attractions of early America was the possibility of cheap land and the possibility of supporting oneself and one's family on it--a "sufficiency"--that wasn't possible in the old world that, increasingly, featured crowded cities and large estates (stolen from "common" lands) owned by wealthy families. But remember that many (probably most) colonial Americans before the 1770s aspired to be "more British than British": they modeled their (small) estates here on the grand estates in Britain. All this suggests that colonial Americans, just like us, wanted to be what they were not. It was just much, much harder for them to accomplish self-betterment in the ways that come easily to us. Until recently, we expected every generation to live better than the previous one. That is NOT an eighteenth-century expectation.
I agree that it is foolish to generalize in this case: different gunsmiths surely had different aspirations. But I don't think that one can conclude at all that, because somebody remained a gunsmith all his life, he wanted to remain a gunsmith. This career may just reveal what was possible for this man at this time. And I think it's more than likely (but, still, just informed speculation) that most laborers would be pleased to abandon manual labor for a more "white collar" job if the unusual and unexpected happened and that opportunity presented itself.
