Pressures From Below: Pauperism, Chattel Slavery, and The Ideological Construction of Free Market Labor Incentives in Antebellum America

Pressures from Below: Pauperism, Chattel Slavery, and the Ideological Construction of Free Market Labor Incentives in Antebellum
America
Jonathan A. Glickstein
The constant war which the pauper has to wage with all who employ or pay him, is destructive to his honesty and his temper; as his subsistence does not depend on his exertions, he loses all that sweetens labour, its association with reward and gets through his work, such as it is, with the reluctance of a s1ave.l
Thus did Britains Poor Law Commission Report of 1834, authored principally by Nassau Senior and Edwin Chadwick, justify the famous-or notorious-Poor Law Amendment and its assault on the English allowance system. Such assertions as this one have prompted historians to detail how political economists, capitalists, and other elites in Britain naturalized and idealized work incentives in a labor market of putatively free competition, one in which the laborer would maximize his work efforts precisely to the extent that he was rewarded according to the true market value of his labor.2 These historians have emphasized the degree to which this naturalization and idealization of free-market incentives was embedded in a commensurate liberal capitalist, anti-paternalist animus for both pauperism within England and chattel slavery in the British West Indies. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, this elite animus decisively configured pauperism and chattel slavery as crushing the incentive of laboring populations, thereby demoralizing them, by guaranteeing and fixing their recompense and in other respects as well upsetting the natural correspondence between performance and reward. Increasingly during this period these two institutions were represented as artificial drags on the formation
RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW 69~114-1591997
116/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW
of a wage-labor market that honored individual initiative, healthy competition, and freedom of ~ontract.~ This essay examines how conceptualizations of the countermodels of chattel slavery and pauperism likewise contributed to the social construction of wage incentives and extrinsic rewards generally in antebellum America, a more neglected subject of investigation. The paper suggests ways in which what oftentimes did amount to moral rationales for early industrial capitalism in the United States deviated, rather than strictly conformed to, expressions of capitalist ideology in Britain. Yet the paper nonetheless underscores the important role that economic necessity and the fear of such necessity-the theme of free market tough love-assumed in the American as well as the British rationales for capitalism. Also receiving attention is the periods competing discourse of wage slavery, as well as the conflicting interpretations of relevant developments offered by recent economic historians and labor historians. In considering some of the antebellum labor as well as elite voices that articulated important elements of a formative free market, free labor, ideology, this article also raises questions about the salience that recent scholarship in cultural studies has given to white working-class racism in early nineteenth-century society. The paper concludes by briefly relating cultural formations and anxieties regarding free labor and economic dependence and degradation in this period to current debates about the meanings of work, poverty, and the underclass. Joseph Tuckerman and American Anti-Poor Law Discourse Nothing was more transatlantic than the early nineteenth-century discourse over labor incentives and pauperism. Segments of the British Poor Law Commission Report, including the assertion quoted above, found its way into any number of like-minded American commentaries, such as The Principles and Results of the Ministry A t Large, in Boston (1838), written by the leading Unitarian clergyman and visitor to the poor, Joseph T~ckerman.~ Although Tuckerman was a prominent individual in matters of poor relief, one who rode the wave of a decade-old American elite antipathy for all compulsory outdoor assistance, he was not notably more successful than others had been in getting his proposals implemented as public poliCY.~ His views are especially important, however, because they illustrate how an elite figure could express and somehow retain a commitment to a supply-and-demand free labor ethic and doctrine of wages in the face of an evolving capitalist labor markets manifest
PRESSURES FROM BELOW/117
inability to provide subsistent wages for all who sought them.6 None of the early nineteenth-century American anti-poor law commentaries, Tuckermans included, had the English allowance system per se to berate and dismantle in their own states and towns.7 Nor did Thomas Malthus specter of the overpopulation of the laboring poor, which had at least earlier in the century fed so much of the British alarm and antipathy toward poor relief, figure so significantlyin the American anti-poor law narratives, directed as they were to a much newer country of relatively wide open spaces. Still, these commentaries were convinced that general outdoor relief practices in the United States, above all compulsory or public outdoor assistance to able-bodied recipients, offered sufficiently demoralizing parallels with England under that nations pre-1834 poor laws. It was not merely a case of Tuckerman and other American commentators excerpting the statements, and invoking the economic expertise and quasi-Parliamentary authority, of Senior and Chadwick to support their own claims for a drastic curtailing of outdoor relief.8 Borrowing from postmodern insights into the evolution of working-class consciousness, historians might now more greatly appreciate how the very language castigating and linking pauperism and slavery, which was exemplified in the British Commission Report, was itself influential. That language helped to inform and structure the perceptions, and the very experience, of Tuckerman and other middle-class Americans in interpreting the behavior of their own dependent The transatlantic discourse over pauperism and labor incentives was also scarcely a one-way street-the British Commission Report itself, for example, drew on earlier contributions from such sources as the Whiggish American Quarterly Review,as well as from Tuckermans own earlier writings.1 True, the American anti-poor law commentary was on the whole derivative and secondary to a classical economic, liberal free market British tradition. But the American contributions did add at least one distinctive feature: a mythology of American exceptionalism that further justified the removal of demoralizing impediments to a competitive labor market. American commentators accomplished this by coupling paeans to national economic growth with persistent references to extraordinary social fluidity and unrivaled popular access to the burgeoning economic opportunities. The severest, most alarmist critics of American pauperism tended to be Whiggish, and many of these accordingly insisted (unlike the Jacksonian Democrat voices of inevitable class conflict) that economic competition in America was
benignly indirect and not a zero-sum game. In the relatively fair and inclusive economic race that distinguished the United States from the Old World, prizes were both multiplying and widely enjoyed by its industrious participants.ll Senior trumpeted in 1841 that "the general result" of the Poor Law Amendment Act was that the English laborer, "finding himself no longer entitled to a fixed income, whatever be his idleness or misconduct, and no longer restricted to that income, whatever be his industry and his integrity, becomes, as is always the case in a state of freedom, stimulated to activity and honesty by the double motive of hope and fear."12 The power of the mythology of American economic exceptionalism was such that the American critics of poor laws were inclined to attach still greater weight to the former motive-the positive incentive of hope of material improvement-in their own campaigns for the "emancipation" of able-bodied paupers. Few of Joseph Tuckerman's British counterparts would have been so quick to make his claim that "there are those who are perpetually passing from the ranks of the poor into those which we distinguish as the higher classes."13 Yet Tuckerman immediately added the warning that social fluidity in the United States, or at least in such urban centers as Boston, was also marked by the reverse movement: the continuous swelling of the ranks of the poor from even the affluent classes-the nether side, so to speak, of what Joyce Appleby has termed the nation's "popular culture of enterprise."14Because one of Tuckerman's objectives as a reporter on American poverty was to diminish the "otherness" of the urban poor, to shock elite elements out of their sense of moral superiority and impregnable well-being, in some basic respects he hardly figures as a complacent American exceptionalist. Nor, as several scholars have related, did Tuckerman in fact regard himself as an uncritical American spokesman for British political economic values. In keeping with early nineteenth-century American Unitarian "moral philosophy," Tuckerman attached overwhelming primacy to the place accorded the "original," "inevitable misery" paradigm of Malthus and Ricardo in British political economy, and he believed the latter to be excessively pessimistic and hard-hearted, as well as overly materia1i~tic.l~ Superficially regarding the working classes as wealth-producing "machinery," it slighted their moral capability to effect their own spiritual and material uplift.l6 Scholars agree that the single greatest influence on Tuckerman's thinking was Thomas Chalmers, the Scottish evangelical theologian and preacher who did pioneering work among the poor in
G1asg0w.l~ his sermons and writings Chalmers adopted an In extreme version of Malthus doctrine of overpopulation: he regarded the wage fund as a form of providence, a means of encouraging sexual abstinence and other good behavior among the lower orders. In some respects, Chalmers epitomized the gloomy fixation of British clerical economics in this period upon themes of sin and evangelical retribution. But his almost fanatical opposition to all legal assistance for the poor, and his preference for voluntary charity that would bring out the best moral qualities in givers and recipients alike, also anticipated the optimistic self-improvement creeds of later popular writers like Samuel Smiles and political economists such as Senior.18 In fact, Chalmers emphasis on working-class agency was part of his general apologia for the economic and social status quo. Many are, perhaps, still accustomed to thinking of the early Industrial Revolution as the age of the aggressive and masculine capitalist entrepreneur: the individual who, intuitively divining the relationship between cause and effect in the marketplace, took the initiative, created new opportunities, and seized control of the ~ituati0n.l~ in a time of labor turmoil it suited Chalmers purYet poses to frequently dwell instead on capitalist impotence and innocence. At the conclusion of his three-volume, The Christian and Civic Economy o Large Towns (1826), he wrote: It is not in the power of f master manufacturers to realize, for any length of time, any undue advantage over their workmen. Recurrent declines in profits proved that depression in the wages of operatives was not attributable to the extravagant gains of their employers. Far from being oppressors, the capitalists are quite innocent.. .. And it is further well for the spread among .. . the working classes ... of virtuous, and temperate, and elevated habits, that they should be thoroughly possessed with the true doctrine of wages; that they are themselves their own deadliest oppressors.20 It is always difficult to pin down influences with a thinker like Joseph Tuckerman who so clearly reflected the intellectual ambiance of a period. But Tuckermans writings on poor relief were a typical formulation of a rather extreme position, and as such they clearly bore the imprint of Chalmers views. Tuckerman subscribed in part to the common American view of the time that major eastern cities like Boston had become dumping grounds for paupers and vagrants from abroad. But he regarded as no less alarming the number of nativeborn dependent poor, and he accordingly regarded the persistence and spread of pauperism in the United States as symptomatic of internal malfunctions and disease.21To address the problem, Tuckerman
argued that all legal provision for "outdoor" recipients in Massachusetts should be abolished because compulsory, and hence undiscriminating, charity discouraged industry, forethought, and selfdenial on the part of the laboring poor, and would ultimately prove ruinous to their self-support. Able-bodied paupers, who almost invariably came to view assistance as their right, were among the most grievous "victims of our poor laws."22Tuckerman shared the common elite perception that the division between the undeserving and the deserving poor roughly corresponded to the de facto division between public and private charity. Nor did he depart from the conventional view that the great bane of intemperance was an overwhelming cause, rather than merely a result, of extreme poverty and pauperism among the "able bodied."23Tuckerman would compel all members of this group to earn their assistance in workhouses. Workhouses entailing some labor regimen were also the proper institutions for that murkier category of the "undeserving"-those men and women who had so enfeebled themselves through drink and other "vicious" habits that they were incapable of contributing more than "something" to their own support. Voluntary, outdoor charity, informed by a discerning, visiting ministry, was the appropriate mode of assistance only for those "deserving" working-class families that were trying to make ends meet but that, for varying periods of time, and for "reasons beyond their control," lacked the employment and the wages to subsist completely on their own. If these "virtuous poor," above all the aged and others requiring permanent support, proved too numerous to be relieved by private charity, then they should be accommodated in houses of charity, or almshouse^.^^ Tuckerman's belief in the pauperizing tendencies of public relief, together with his condemnation of obtrusive human laws for destroying the "natural" bonds of affection between the poor and the more affluent, owed much to C h a l m e r ~Tuckerman furthermore followed .~~ Chalmers and orthodox political economy generally in pronouncing himself a believer in the ruling force of supply-and-demand market forces. He dismissed as "artificial" and "useless" various schemes to raise the wages and otherwise relieve the wants of Boston's laboring poor.26 The law of supply and demand that set wage rates in the various trades was both inevitable and legitimate-did it not, after all, exercise the same power over capitalist profitsF But Tuckerman's writings are also notable for the more subtle ways in which they deviated from Chalmers' more moralistic and doctrinaire pro-capitalist renderings of "wage justice."28As in the case of modern-day social workers and others whose personal expe-
rience with welfare dependency-their confrontation with complex and intractable social problems-prompts them to challenge the easy negative public stereotypes of welfare recipients, so Tuckerman's extensive dealings with Boston's "deserving" poor and their circumstances reduced his comfort level with respect to freemarket homilies and nostrums.29Along with his Philadelphia contemporary and correspondent, Matthew Carey, Tuckerman was among the first elite Americans to identify underemployment and structural unemployment, particularly among seamstresses and other working-class females-married, widowed, and single-as signal features of early industrial c a p i t a l i ~ mThese women's mea.~~ ger earnings were rendered all the more inadequate by the absence of effective male breadwinners. Tuckerman's defense of voluntary charity that would supplement these earnings suggests that any lingering commitment he retained to such conventional middle-class domestic ideals as female conjugal dependence was tempered by the recognition that the male-earned "family wage" was a fiction, and would likely remain so among the poorer members of the urban laboring classes.31Like others who were deeply hostile to poor laws and pauperism, Tuckerman exalted the virtues of economic self-support. Whatever ambivalence he felt about permanent wage labor did not, accordingly, reflect some abstract early nineteenth-century "republican" distaste for the "servile" economic dependence that such labor supposedly embodied. Rather, that ambivalence sprang from firsthand observation as to wage labor's genuinely erratic capacity to sustain the Boston poor in their self-support. A series of venerable propositions undergirded Tuckerman's social philosophy: that there were significant natural disparities in physical and mental capacities among individuals; that these natural inequalities, which were divinely ordained, inevitably gave rise in civilized societies to sharp economic contrasts; and that God's purpose in the appointment of riches and poverty was a Christian brotherhood of men distinguished by virtue and the absence of selfi ~ h n e s sThe~most interesting of Tuckerman's writings reflected his .~ sporadic efforts to incorporate the more modern and secular political economic shibboleth of supply and demand into this schema. Ultimately, Tuckerman's "experience" with Boston's virtuous and deserving female poor would yield little more than a rather lame hedging of his support for the supply-and-demand principle: it was the role of Christian love, and of that alone, to enter the hearts of capitalists and blunt the harsher wage-determining effects of that principle. More forthright than Chalmers in condemning as
unselfish and unchristian the buy-cheap-and-sell-dear mentality of sweatshop and other employers, Tuckerman could nonetheless only insist that justice and benevolence-words he frequently usedremained beyond the scope of political economy itself. In paying out better wages than they could get away with-in observing a just price for labor-capitalists would capture societys plaudits and lead the way in practicing a constructive, voluntary charity.33 Yet as Tuckerman still perceived, the successful functioning and even the legitimacy of the modern marketplace-which merely perpetuated, after all, the ages-old disparities in property-did not absolutely require such charity and wage justice. No one better than Tuckerman illustrated the tensions, even the contradictions, that resided in Unitarian philanthropys twin commitments to capitalism and compa~sion.~~ Tuckerman himself explicitly recognized only those contradictions and discrepancies arising from the different kinds of dependent poor-hence his efforts at a systematic c l a s ~ i f i c a t i o n . ~ ~ Rhetorical strategy may also have diverted him from attending to inconsistencies and conflicts within his own social doctrine, and here we touch on the issue of Tuckermans intended readership, which did not include any of the poor themselves. In his desire to marshal1 public sentiment for ministries to the poor, Tuckerman thought he was steering his own middle course between latitudinarian elements that would perpetuate and even extend public outdoor relief practices, and a contingent of yet sterner moralists than he, who disapproved of even a coordinated, systematized voluntary charity to the laboring poor, and who maintained that in a land of plenty the latter might always earn a livelihood if they truly wished.36In his writing Tuckerman may well have constructed this second group of critics particularly, inflating its significance, to render his own criticisms of outdoor relief more reasonable and palatable. However, there was a real undercurrent of criticism of charitable societies here, one which raised genuine issues that fueled Tuckermans defensiveness. Tuckerman was convinced that voluntary relief provided vital supplementary assistance to female seamstresses and other poor victimized by a market that generated inconsistent and insufficient demand for their unskilled labor. But some of Tuckermans middle-class contemporaries, including the critics to his right, suggested that such supplemental home relief itself distorted natural market forces and imposed an additional downward pressure on wages.37Such relief offered both a disincentive to employers to maintain subsistent wages on their own, and a
disincentive to wage earners to move (either geographically or occupationally) out of glutted labor markets. After all, private charity, like public relief, could encourage indolence and improvidence by removing the all-important, salutary apprehension of want from No less than Tuckerman, these critics could the minds of the draw on a large transatlantic discourse to support their position.39 But whether any form of outdoor relief-and by implication, such ministries of the poor as Tuckermans-in fact served in some degree and in some locales to depress wages is an empirical question that carries less relevance here than the symbolic significance of the antebellum controversies over outdoor assistance. At the very least, such controversies reinforced existing patterns of social stratification by embedding in the public mind a deep and obvious association between pauperism and all-dependent poverty, on the one hand, and the rewards earned, on the other hand, by free waged laborers, who were comprising an ever-growing proportion of the work force of the free states.40No such association could plausibly be made between pauperism and the rewards earned by American entrepreneurs or lawyers.41More particularly, and notwithstanding both his ambivalence with respect to orthodox political economy, and his more forgiving attitudes toward the deserving, working poor, Tuckerman was among the important American voices reinforcing Britains free market, tough love tradition.@He added the weight of his authority to the transatlantic mythology in which poor laws, by fostering a debilitating and servile pauperism among ablebodied wage earners, effectively poisoned the labor incentives and work habits that existed naturally in a capitalist free market. William Ellery Channing and American Antislavery Discourse While Tuckerman was establishing his reputation as an authority on pauperism, his close friend, and the foremost Unitarian minister in the United States, William Ellery Channing, published his controversial volume Slavery (1 835) .43 Where Tuckerman articulated a countermodel of pauperism that figured significantly in representations of free market, free labor wage incentives, Channing exemplified northern elite figures who prominently employed the countermodel of chattel slavery to nourish and legitimate the same representations. Consider Channings enumeration of the evils of southern bondage:
The motive from which he [the slave] acts debases him.It is the whip. It is corporal punishment.... I know it is sometimes said, in reply to these remarks, that all men, as well as slaves, act from necessity; that
we have masters in hunger and thirst.. . . Still the two cases are essentially different. The necessity laid on us by natural wants is most kindly in its purpose. It is meant to awaken all our faculties ... to give us a new consciousness of the powers derived to us from God .... We are further told, that the slave is freed from all care, that he is sure of future support .... This is true; but it is also true that nothing can be gained by violating the great laws and essential rights of our nature.. .. God created him to provide for the future ... and he cannot be freed from this care without injury to his moral and intellectual life.. .. Be it also remembered, that the same provision which relieves the slave from anxiety cuts him off from hope.. .. It is true that the free laborer may become a pauper; and so may the free rich man, both of the North and the South. Still, our capitalists never dream of flying to slavery as a security against the almshouse. Freedom undoubtedly has its perils. It offers nothing to the slothful and dissolute. Among people left to seek their own good in their own way, some of all classes fail from vice, some from incapacity, some from misfortune. All classes will furnish members to the body of the poor. But in this country the number is small, and ought constantly to decrease.44
Much can be said about Channings antislavery, free labor assertions beyond the general sense in which, as an elaboration of the moral superiority of work incentives in a capitalist free market, they dovetailed both with Tuckermans strictures against Massachusetts pauperism and with the remark from the British Commission Report that opened this inquiry.45 They suggest that Thomas Haskells provocative and influential thesis regarding the relationship between the market economy and the emergence of antislavery sensibility requires, at the very least, some filling out. Haskell posits that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the market placed a premium on such bourgeois virtues as forethought and calculation, that it led to a widening of causal horizons, and that it habituated British and American reformers to a greater sense of empowerment: they developed a new consciousness of their capacity-and of their moral obligation-to relieve forms of suffering that societies privileged classes had hitherto accepted as i n e ~ i t a b l e Even granting .~~ Haskells questionable claim that his thesis effectively precludes class interest as a driving force of the new antislavery humanitarian sensibility, Channings remarks illustrate the presence of a crucial mediating variable. The privileged classes market-derived consciousness of cause and effect, and of their own power to alter existing social institutions and conditions was, preeminently in the case of antislavery, attended by an equally novel, and equally essential consciousness that the group to be acted on, the individuals whose suffering was to be relieved, in fact possessed a higher natureGod-given moral and intellectual sensitivities and capabilities that
were worthy of recognition and d e ~ e l o p m e n tQuite striking here, .~~ it should also be emphasized, is Channing's relative color-blindness-the environmentalist conviction that he shared with immediate abolitionists that the institution of chattel slavery had an absolutely unique capacity to stunt and destroy individual agency, irrespective of the race to which slaves happened to belong4* In the particular manner that Channing's remarks damn chattel slavery for its irremediable hostility to the unfolding of the bondsman's "nobler" faculties, they also champion an ethic of beneficent and "honorable" sternness, even harshness-the term "tough love" again seems appropriate. Humanitarian "compassion" for Charming, as for the Anglo-American free-market tradition generally, entailed a withdrawal of crippling paternalist restraints and protections that prevented individuals from becoming self-directing and from developing their higher faculties through confrontation with a "stern nature."49For all the economic support they ostensibly enjoyed in old age, southern slaves, like Tuckerman's able-bodied paupers, would be better off-spiritually and intellectually, if not materially-without a guaranteed subsistence. And this is in great measure due to something else in which Charming devoutly believed: the salutary impact on personal character that is generated by anxiety over the need to earn one's own livelihood. This belief, a cultural underpinning of nineteenth-century economic orthodoxy, has not received nearly the attention it deserves from historians. Our own culture is acutely alert to the ways in which personal stress can create health and "productivity" problems inside and outside the workplace. Dozens of adult education programs today offer management and other self-improvement courses on how to "rechannel" such stress into productive and constructive avenues. Certainly there were contemporaries of Channing-including some of the labor radical and proslavery critics of "wage slavery" to whom he was in part responding-who recognized, if only inchoately, that stress emanating from the fear of poverty and starvation might prove similarly negative, paralyzing and crushing the capitalist wage laborer rather than prodding him in a "positive" direction.50Channing himself might have given greater recognition to this possibility in other contexts. But instead he was intent here, in rebutting the wage slavery defenses of chattel slavery, to counterpose the "necessity laid down by our natural wants" with the uncivilized, and unnatural, character of the slaveholder's lash.51 Channing's remarks, like similar specimens of elite commentary, illustrate one of the central paradoxes of the period: the tendency of social values that exalted the cognitive potential and "nobler faculties" of
laboring populations to simultaneously sustain an economic competition that frequently exploited free wage laborers in particular. Channing provided an eloquent and lofty analog to the cruder and not infrequent contemporaneous attempts by northern entrepreneurs and employers themselves, when directly confronted by labor "combinations" demanding higher wages, to defuse such agitation by investing the developing urban wage labor market with "supernatural sancti0n."5~ Channing was not some kind of socialist, despite his undeniable revulsion both for the general pecuniary orientation of nineteenthcentury capitalist societies and for such specific economic developments as factory division of labor.53But can one go further to conclude that such commentary as Channing's actually reflected capitalist class apologetics and interests in the manner that it legitimated legally free labor?54 Such a conclusion is strengthened by Channing's other dismissals of working class economic deprivation, as in his insistence on the "struggles" and anxieties suffered by hard-working "professional and mercantile men." Here the minister's response had one obvious context in the political climate of Boston and the larger society: following the lead of the labor movements of the 1820s, the Second American Party system had embraced poverty, inequality, and working-class victimization as major issues of discursive contention. Yet in offering his own "Whiggish" refutation of such victimization, Channing was not entirely given over to self-deception: American capitalists and professionals did work long hours under competitive pressures, just as the "lash of hunger," along with ambition, did generate at least modest movement up the American economic ladder by many working-class and lower middle-class families. Channing, it is also true, was, like Tuckerman, a sometime critic of British political economy, and particularly of the notoriously "unfeeling" Malthusianism that decreed poverty's inevitability, reproved the Christian "duty" of charity, and disclaimed responsibility for the "starvation" of the laboring poor. But this does not in itself compellingly speak against his commentary as a form of capitalist apologetic^.^^ Along with so many other antebellum middle- and upper-middle-class Americans, Channing was quite instinctively drawn to perpetuating and attacking the conventional, demonic portrait of British political economy for purposes of promoting his own more "humane," and socially interventionist, version of the free-market ethos.56 Yet Channing's own insistence on the ethical superiority to bondage of the individual's "failure" on the free market through
indolence, vice, even "incapacity" and "misfortune," remained sufficiently severe. Despite his suggestion that the number of poor should be especially minimal in the United States, the substance of Channing's idealization of the free laborer's formal autonomy hardly rested on the mythology of American economic exceptionalismon an invocation of the uniquely favorable life chances that ostensibly attended formal autonomy in the free states. In his reliance on more universalistic possessive individualistic assumptions, in his emphasis on the value for laboring populations everywhere of bare legal self-ownership, Channing was closer to many of his radical abolitionist contemporaries than to the later antislavery Republican politicians who trumpeted northern economic ~ p p o r t u n i t y . ~ ~ Indeed, there is also a close affinity in this regard between Channing's perspective and that of Josiah Conder, whose pamphlet attacking slavery in the British West Indies was cited repeatedly in the parliamentary debates on emancipation, and that conceivably influenced Channing as well.58In its conflation of economic and moral considerations, Conder's Wages or the Whip (1833) was one of the quintessential specimens of British antislavery " i d e ~ l o g y . " ~ ~ Justice, Conder argued, always accords with what is gainful: "Doing right is, in the long run, cheaper than doing wrong." Thus slave labor was both immoral and a "blunder in arithmetic." Just as it had demonstrated already on the British mainland, free wage labor, as performed by emancipated West Indies blacks, would prove more profitable than the economically backward institution of chattel slavery, which Conder conventionally characterized as a coercive system that supplied no effective motives for labor and precluded alike "the stimulus of competition, the sense of gratitude, or the immediate prospect of advantage."60 Channing has left us with statements indicating that he, no more than William Lloyd Garrison and other radical abolitionists, could ever so completely or so comfortably as Conder reduce the case for emancipation to dollars-and-centsterms. This was particularly so during the period when it became as apparent to Charming as to other observers, that ex-slaves in the British West Indies were not maintaining the islands' previous levels of sugar production. Channing's Emancipation (1840) is an eloquent declaration, in light of the post-1834 economic patterns, that moral considerations might indeed conflict with pecuniary ones, and that the former by themselves justified Britain's eradication of the domestic and other abominations he believed inherent in chattel slavery.61Anticipating the argument of John Stuart Mill, among others, Charming also insisted: "Allow that
the freed slaves work less. Has man nothing to do but work? Are not too many here overworked? If a people can live with comfort on less toil, are they not to be envied rather than condemned?62 Yet Channing could never relinquish his faith in the work ethic and in the salutary character of free-market labor incentives. Accordingly, he also insisted that slacking off by the freed slaves was both predictable and short-term. How natural it was to anticipate that men who had worked under the lash, and had looked on exemption from toil as the happiness of paradise, should surrender themselves more or less to sloth, on becoming their own masters! It is the curse of a bad system to unfit men, at first, for a better.63And by 1842, the year of his death, he was adding of the West Indies ex-slaves that In general, they resumed their work after a short burst of joy. The desire of property, of bettering their lot, at once sprang up within them in sufficient strength to counterbalance the love of ease. Some of them have become proprietors of the Channings intellectual flexibility, as reflected in his shifting defenses of the British Emancipation Act of 1834, was his own. Nonetheless, Channing still shared something basic with Conder, and indeed with many of his British and American middle- and upper-middle class contemporaries: a receptivity to what Stanley L. Engerman and David Eltis have termed the two related strands of the free labor ideology. Both of these strands affirmed the legally free wage earners inducements for superior industry and productivity. The first strand was the celebration of the prospect of advantage, the self-interest and the positive opportunity for the worker that resided in his formal autonomy. That opportunity included the free laborers capability of escaping altogether from wage labor and capitalist authority into independent proprietorship, a condition to which Channing referred in the above remarks, and which, we have been told by recent historians, was in fact the only sense in which exslaves and many white wage earners alike in this period thought of labor as being truly free.65But there was also the more negative strand of the free labor ideology, one which at the very least implied that the superior productivity of the legally free wage earner, and the material needs that drove his industry, might admittedly redound less to his benefit than to that of his capitalist employer. This implication, and the related appeal to the hirers of labor, that the profitability of free wage labor derived from its cost-cutting cheapness, was more pronounced in antislavery pamphlets such as Conders than in anything Channing ever wrote.66Yet this negative strand of the free labor ideology retained a presence in
Channing's own exaltation of the stimulating "natural" economic necessities to which the wage laborer is exposed by his formal freedom. Channing genuinely sought to "elevate" the laboring classes, and in the process to change the world for the better, but these aims carried endorsement of the therapeutic utility of even the most negative work incentives in a capitalist labor market. We could attempt to pursue this analysis a bit further, and inquire whether the critics of wage slavery merely exposed Channing's true "capitalist" colors and commitments, or whether they instead, in a kind of validation of Clifford Geertz's emphasis on the role of psychological and cultural "strain" in ideology formation, pushed Channing into mounting an exaggerated and distorted defense of his "true" commitment^.^^ Such a question, however, remains unanswerable, if only because it would at least partially turn on the unconscious, and therefore especially elusive and unverifiable, motives that drove Channing's defense of free waged labor. But taking the commentary as it stands, one can certainly go beyond the conclusion that he had little or no quarrel with the wage system per se; as suggested, even low or ungenerous wages retained value for Channing insofar as they stimulated the worker to develop all his faculties through confrontation with "hunger and thirst."@ Having said this, we should note one other basic fact that has been rather neglected in the recent scholarly debates. Pronounced moral enmity to chattel slavery only lent reinforcement to a more widespread ideological tendency to sanction emerging relationships between northern capitalists and workers. Screening out and glossing over class inequalities in the free states, that is to say, was hardly the exclusive province of Channing and like-minded abolitionists. From the 1830s and well into the 1850s, there were innumerable privileged and wealthy middle-class northerners who, because of their economic and political ties to the South, or for a variety of other reasons, remained unequivocally hostile to antislavery objectives. And throughout the antebellum period, these individuals also happened to share the faith of Channing and many of the abolitionists in a competitive economic order, especially as it operated in the free states. The social attitudes of these "gentlemen of property and standing" should remind us that there were always countertendencies that muddied and circumscribed the distinctive role played by intense moral antipathy to slavery in legitimating northern wage labor and capitalist hegemony.
Resistance to Free Market, Free Labor Ideology: The Discourse of Wage Slavery And what of the critics of wage slavery? In striking contrast to the Norths gentlemen of property and standing, this large and diverse group often vehemently and bitterly contested the kind of celebratory terms in which Channing constructed free-market labor incentives in the antebellum free states, attacking the rhetorical assault that Channing and the abolitionists made against chattel slavery. Historians who minimize ideological differences in antebellum America often maintain that many critics of wage slavery, such as northern trade union activists, remained part of a broad bourgeois or liberal consensus and characteristically sought only to make the market fairer, by rendering its distribution of rewards less skewed in favor of capitalist entrepreneurs and professional^.^^ What often seemed to arouse the most intense outrage among antebellum labor activists and organizations was not the unfettered operation of market processes, but rather particular forms of government intervention, such as the chartering of corporations and the creation of state workshops in prison labor. In their view, such interventions systematically rigged market processes to benefit capital or otherwise undermine free labor.70Nonetheless, historians should neither ignore nor understate the hostility these labor activists, and other contributors to the discourse of wage slavery, harbored for the basic market mechanisms that were commodifying labor, even as they typically retained a simultaneous attachment to private property itself. Between Channing and such critics of wage slaveryincluding unabashedly proslavery southern conservatives as well as northern radicals-there existed a truly significant, and even insurmountable, philosophical gap. These commentators considered the basic distinction insisted upon by Channing between the slaveholders lash and the lash imposed by our natural wants, to be hopelessly arbitrary and specious. They considered this to be particularly true when the spur to fulfill ones material needs and wantsthe spur that at some level nagged at all human beings-was conjoined, in the person of the wage or hireling laborer, with a condition of pronounced economic dependence and vulnerability to exploitation. Representative of this commentary, already several decades old, was an 1847 editorial from the ~ u r t ~ Democrat ~ u ~ ~ m ~ (Massachusetts), one of the voices for the periods land and labor reform movements:
There are many among us who talk loud and long of the the unrequited toil of the black slave ... but they have nothing to say in
behalf of those whose toil brings them a much smaller recompense in proportion to the labor, when it is done from fear of starvation and other evils more serious than the drivers whip, as though it were more sinful for others to live on the unrequited toil of the black slave than it is for us on that of our white brother.. .. The black female is sometimes obliged to yield to the licentious desires of their owners ... and we are told it is our duty to step in between them and take the part of the defenseless; but when our own white sisters and daughters are obliged to submit to the same evil in order to procure a comfortable living, we must point the finger of scorn at them and bestow our sympathies farther from home .... How benevolent and how much better it would be to change the system and compel the poor black ... to labor for one-fourth less than he now does!... why not emancipate white slaves and allow them to become their own masters [by giving them the means of subsistence-a portion of the soil], and then talk about black slavery?71
The Northampton Democrats charity at home first theme was typical of the wage slavery position. In their crusade against southern black slavery, the argument went, northern abolitionists were guilty of practicing a distant, and unjustified, selective compassion; they should redirect their energies to alleviating the more pressing plight of white wage laborers-our brothers and sisters-in their own backyard.72In light of current events, one might characterize this argument as the antebellum version of angry white males lashing out against affirmative action for minorities. It is certainly possible that racially based animus, and some sense of racial superiority (as embodied in the ambiguous reference to poor black), fundamentally drove the Northampton Democrats remarks; possibly it pinned the misguided nature of the abolitionist crusade on blacks incapability for freedom. Moreover, it is certainly true, as historians now emphasize, that race and class (along with gender) do not in fact operate as discrete, competing categories or identities. They necessarily interact and operate together, and for this reason alone one cannot truly divest the Northampton Democrats own perspective of whiteness from its comparison of northern and southern labor systems. But different hierarchies of values and objectives still develop in different historical situations, and one could plausibly argue that white-centered race consciousness did play a subordinate role to issues of class in the Northampton Democrats particular formulation. The newspaper editorial primarily conceptualized the evil as one of northern wage slavery rather than white slavery, unlike, for example, some of the Irish immigrants and other members of the working class who made their own contributions to this discourse.73 Although the paper did invoke the white slavery term, it appears
to have done so for routine descriptive and tactical purposes.74The term had, after all, a certain surface accuracy and plausibility-the vast majority of northern wage earners did appear to be "white"while the invocation of "white slavery" might additionally retain some shock value for the newspaper's readership. Yet the editorial's avowed, doctrinal objection to the abolitionist crusade remained fundamentally class- rather than race-oriented insofar as it was predicated on the essential similarities, and not on any inherent differences, between the southern black bondsman and the northern white hireling. They were both eminently exploitable beings. It was precisely the southern chattel slaves' relatively good fortune to be victimized by a slightly less exploitative system. Like many other examples of the counter-discourse of wage slavery, the Northampton Democrat engaged in its own kinds of appropriation and exploitation-hostile borrowings, so to speak, from the rival, contemporary discourses that added up to what scholars characterize as a "discursive tran~formation."~~ paper appropriated The the language of religious abolitionism when it repudiated as "sinful" the economic exploitation of free wage laborers and the wageearner's fear of starvation-an integral labor incentive of the capitalist free market. And it exploited the cost-cutting superior "cheapness" arguments favored by such free-labor advocates as Josiah Conder by turning them directly against the antislavery cause: withgut,the containment and extirpation of the capitalist-employee wage relationship, "emancipating" the black slaves would merely serve to introduce them into this yet more predatory arrangement. The Northampton Democrat's focus upon the theme of economic exploitation did not directly confront the more basic argument of Channing and some of the other antislavery voices of the 1830s and 1840s. Those voices proclaimed the ultimate irrelevance of the possibility that chattel slaves retained a higher proportion of the fruits of their labor than northern wage earners did; it was the guaranteed and fixed character of the bondsmen's remuneration that was objectionable for its devastating effect on their moral and intellectual devel~ p m e n tBut ~ substance of fundamental disagreement between . ~ the the Northampton Democrat and such antislavery voices should nonetheless be apparent. The Northampton Democrat editorial typified the discourse of wage slavery by insisting, contrary to Channing, that formal autonomy required an absolute bedrock of economic independence and security for it to prove at all morally, intellectually, and materially elevating for the laborer. It further insisted that the hunger and the fear of starvation that drove many
northern wage earners in the absence of such economic independence and security was at least as degrading, and as morally illegitimate, as the slaveholders whip. But did the Northampton Democrat in fact regard the slaveholders whip as morally objectionable? A May 1847 editorial attacked southern slavery as an outrageous violation of natural law, affirmed its opposition to slaverys extension, and offered implicit support for the Wilmot Proviso, which would exclude slavery from the territories acquired as a result of the Mexican War. Consistent with the papers outstanding priorities, however, the editorial tempered this antislavery message with the declaration that the Northampton Democrat equally opposed the extension of white slavery within the existing states and territories, which was the result of speculation in and monopoly of the There were, of course, labor radicals and reformers in this period whose consuming hatred for capitalist wage labor and exploitation did not prevent them from being genuinely antagonistic to chattel slavery as well, Karl Marx being the premier example. The Northampton Democrats antagonism was perhaps similarly genuine. Yet the papers editorials raise the same sort of basic questions about the motivation and function of commentary as do Channings writings. For if Channings exaltation of free wage labor incentives advanced the cause of northern capitalist hegemony (whatever his conscious or unconscious intentions may have been), was it not also possible that the legitimation of southern chattel slavery constituted, at the very least, an unintended by-product of the prioritization that the Northampton Democrat insisted on giving the eradication of northern wage slavery? I am unpersuaded by the poststructuralist position that class conflict and class ideologies are merely discursive formations, that language creates ideology and defines peoples interests and consciousness far more than it reflects these. But discourse can often take on a life of its own apart from the intentions of its producers, and can play into the hands of others seeking to further their own objectives. A basic part, indeed, of discursive struggle, past and present, consists of those frequently hostile borrowings and twisting of arguments and language alluded to earlier.78 the On other hand, one could, in the case of the wage slavery critiques made by the Northampton Democrat and like-minded northern labor reform voices, be exaggerating the ideological distance between such critiques and the blatantly proslavery uses that were made of them in this period.79Perhaps the legitimation of southern chattel slavery was indeed among the subliminal motives driving the
Northampton Democrat's brand of labor reformism, even if slavery's legitimation remained peripheral to this brand of labor reformism. Scholars continue to debate the nature of the correspondence between the interests of an individual or group and social consciousness and attitudes. Why do individuals of similar backgrounds and "class locations" often embrace widely divergent attitudes and ideologies?8O Certainly this issue bears on the commentary considered here. The Northampton Democrat was one of a host of northern voices in this period that, through the discourse of wage slavery, manifested a "republican" commitment to landed and other forms of economic independence, or even to various socialist blueprints, and in so doing contested the justice and legitimacy of ascendant market capitalism and competition. Yet a substantial number of these labor reform and labor radical voices were themselves middle-class and professional and, with the possible exception of religious affiliation, otherwise differed unappreciably in background and status from the mercantile and industrial elites supportive of the status quo.81Why some privileged elements and not others in the antebellum free states developed a marked animus to capitalist market mechanisms remains an elusive question. More certain is that this animus was predicated on one particular, overriding perception: that in the antebellum North, as in the Old World, the more negative of these market mechanisms or incentives-hunger and the fear of hunger-were increasingly dominant among the northern laboring population. Furthermore, this mechanism held a strong symbiotic relationship with the dependent, servile, and permanent wage-earning status that was also a growing part of the economic landscape. One fed upon the other in generating vulnerability and an imbalance of power within the workplace. As reform parlance commonly expressed this phenomenon, the individual wage earner was obliged to contract for exploitative terms precisely because, in contrast to the employer, his needs were immediate and even desperate-he "could not wait" for better terms.82But the conviction that northern free-market labor incentives were going the way of Europe-the conviction at the heart of the wage slavery critiquedistinguished middle-class radical and reform activists not merely from the majority of elite northerners. It also set them apart from those "ordinary Americans," particularly young white males of working-class and lower middle-class background, who continued to equate northern market capitalist arrangements not with impoverishment, but with the existence of abundant and widespread opportunities for their economic im~rovement.~~
The "Optimistic" Model of Economic History Versus the "Hardship" Model of Labor History Were such ordinary Americans in fact more correct in their assessment than disaffected middle-class labor radicals who railed against wage slavery? Recent economic historians certainly appear to believe so. Some of their number do agree with Marxist-oriented labor historians that the period of mercantile and early industrial capitalist growth in the United States-the period 1800-1860-witnessed a growing maldistribution of wealth and, above all, an unprecedented concentration at the top rungsB4 And others have acknowledged that despite extensive research efforts, the inadequacy of primary data has meant that "surprisingly little is known of the behavior of wages during the antebellum period."85Yet many of these same economic historians still insist that the impressive increases in overall wealth and labor productivity attending market expansion during early industrialization did translate during this period into gains for free workers at all skill levels-that in fact "all discernible segments of the manufacturing labor force" in the Northeast "realized substantial increases in real wages over the period" 1820-1860.86 Whether or not this optimistic scholarly assessment indeed dovetails with the perceptions of the majority of ordinary Americans who lived through this period, it would hardly seem to accurately describe the experience of significant segments of the unskilled labor force-the female seamstresses of New York or Philadelphia, for example, who appear as an occupational group to have been as impoverished in 1860 as they had been in 1830, even if some were indeed better off having escaped famine in Ireland. But what the optimistic perspective of economic historians may even more pointedly slight, in contrast to the "economic hardship" model of labor historians, is the crisis experienced by urban skilled workers in this period.87 Master and journeymen artisans in luxury and other trades that largely escaped skill dilution may have indeed been market "winners": individuals who kept up, at least in relative terms, with the gains in wealth and status enjoyed by craft entrepreneurs and other members of the business and professional classes. And to make an acknowledgment of a different sort, "high craftsmanship" in the United States, sustained by "an effective system of long apprenticeships," had never enjoyed the strength of tradition that it possessed in Europe.88Nevertheless, technological advances, subdivision of labor, the growth of mass markets, and other features of "metropolitan industrialization" did trivialize skills in key trades and rendered truly skilled craft work an increasingly small segment
of the total manufacturing picture.89 The journeymen members of such trades were among the biggest market "losers": skill dilution both reduced their bargaining power for better wages and eroded their chances of attaining prized self-employed status in an "honorable" trade. These and other developments fueled the major themes of the early nineteenth-century trade union movements, including the complaint that the "property" of journeymen artisans-their labor expertise and their legitimate recompense-was being violated by the "parasitic" entrepreneurs who either directly employed them or, perhaps even worse, chose instead to operate competing enterprises that were wholly reliant on the "dishonorable" labor of unskilled women, children, and immigrant^.^^ In part, too, the concerns of some journeymen over their "personal well-being" were shaped less by any absolute decline in living standards than by resentment over their increasing "relative" poverty-over their failure to keep up in income with the craft entrepreneurs and others (many of whom were former workers) who had most successfully manipulated and monopolized the new economic opport~nities.~~ The northern antebellum occupational structure was a relatively open and flexible one for white males, and possibly any dislocation and erosion in living standards experienced by even some of the most malcontented skilled journeymen was short-term. Some no doubt did migrate to areas where they could satisfactorily practice their crafts, while others managed in time to enter other trades, including semi-skilled factory work in newer and expanding industries, which in fact paid better than their previous craft The experience of all such artisans would support, in a sense, the longterm, aggregate wage findings of the economic historians. But much of the discourse of wage slavery, including that contributed by the period's trade union movements, was addressing the here and now. And like other protest discourses and movements in American history, it was a discourse of anxiety and disappointed expectations, one centering on the perceived immediate and accelerating crisis of urban skilled labor. Furthermore, the position of some of the commentators who developed the most sophisticated models of labor exploitation-Marx again comes to mind-was that even journeymen craftsmen who, along with factory workers and other wage earners, did manage to make real wage gains under early industrial capitalism remained economically servile wage slaves-they were simply better-paid slaves.93 But as suggested earlier, a central thrust of wage slavery commentary also insisted upon the "Europeanizing" of labor incentives
in the free states-the impending ascendance of absolute poverty and the fear of want as the incentives driving the artisans whose skills were being undermined and devalued in the marketplace. And here we come to one sense in which the more non-elite, laborgenerated contributions to the discourse of wage slavery, for all their own criticisms of recent capitalist developments, actually shared with mainstream views like Channings at least a limited acceptance of free-market labor incentives. Some Non-Elite Voices on Free-Market Labor Incentives and the Unskilled Other Consider the following attack on Philadelphias newly established House of Refuge, a juvenile reformatory, that one Simon made in the Mechanics Free Press, the official organ of Philadelphias trade union movement and Working Mens Party of the late 1820s and early 1 8 3 0 An institution having for its object the protection of vagrants ~~~ and the o f a k of society, from whose gratuitous labour they enrich the institution, and deprive the honest, moral, and virtuous mechanic of his hard earned labour, must be viewed in a serious and apprehensive light, Simon wrote. He continued that the House of Refuges vagrants promise to perform at one half of the present given price, and in so doing these idle, lazy, indolent, house-breaking scoundrels will labor to profit not themselves, but the directors of the institution, who will thereby monopolize all description of work, and deprive the regular taught hatter, brush-maker, shoe-maker, tailor, &c. &c. of his living, aye his very existence, to establish their aims, and pocket the crumbs that ought to fall to the poor-and all for what-to support vagabonds!! ... the very refuse of society.95 Simons animus for the inmates of the Refuge, which accommodated around one hundred and fifty during this period, derived some of its strength from a coexisting animus for the officials who would, ostensibly, share in the exploitation of the inmates labor by indenturing them out to local entrepreneur^^^ Institutional records reveal that the reformatory children whom Simon attacked as vagrants and offals were predominantly of poor and indigent working-class families; their fathers tended to be day laborers, sailors, tailors, or other unskilled and semiskilled workers. Most of the children, furthermore, had committed only minor crimes.97Of Simons own identity and background we are likely to remain far more ignorant-a standard problem for historians who seek to extract meaning from the writings of such anonymous contributors to journals like the Mechanics Free Press.
Yet Simons bitter complaints regarding the competition and underbidding that was likely to result from this new source of cheap labor suggests that he belonged to the ranks of small master mechanics and journeymen for which the Mechanics Free Press spoke. His complaints were thoroughly of a piece with the protests that the male craft labor organizations of the antebellum decades lodged against a whole series of cheap and dishonorable sources of manufacturing labor: female and immigrant sweatshop, or slop, workers; boy apprentices and helpers in various trades; and adult convict and almshouse laborers, to name but a few.98Each of these conflicts has its own distinctive history and features, shaped by the traditions and conditions of different crafts.99For example, the vociferous protests that journeymen tailors and members of certain other trades lodged against the participation of working-class women in the competitive marketplace commonly encompassed protective, patriarchal considerations, as well as the more narrowly economic, self-serving ones that figured more prominently in the discrimination that white nativeborn workingmen supported against immigrants and free blacks.100 Historians have also pointedly argued that the complaining skilled artisans were in many cases exaggerating the seriousness of the competitive threat, or were even scapegoating the more disadvantaged, unskilled workers.lOlBut the primary concern here is with a somewhat different issue: the implications for capitalist ideology and its diffusion carried by skilled laborers antagonism toward a wide variety of unskilled laborers, and by their attendant frequent indifference regarding the plight of the unskilled-both impulses suggested so clearly in the diatribe by Simon.lo2 Various manifestations of this sometime antagonism and indifference have not gone unnoticed by labor historians. These included the pains that masters and journeymen took to proudly differentiate their own skilled and manly competence from more subsistent, unskilled drudge labor, including the latters supposed servile and unrepublican readiness to be exploited by capitalists, and the irrelevance of the equal education and other humanitarian reforms of the early workingmens party platforms to the immediate needs and condition of unskilled, largely immigrant labor. They also included the general failure of the leaders of these parties, and of the craft labor movement as a whole, to extend more radical anticapitalist versions of the labor theory of value to justify greater earnings for the unskilled segments of the work force-even as they invoked that creed in their own behalf when contesting the superior material rewards and status enjoyed by the so-called mental labor of employ-
ers and professional men.lo3In noting such manifestations of the division between skilled and unskilled, labor historians have pointed out some important institutional implications: primarily, the absence of a more broadly based, sweeping, and effective organized labor challenge to developing capitalist structures and prerogatives in the antebellum, as well as in later periods.lo4 But I would draw attention here to a different, and rather neglected, ideological underpinning-or what was at least an ideological manifestation-of the ascendant power and authority of the capitalist order in this period. Simons attack on the laziness and the moral turpitude of the Philadelphia House of Refuge inmates included, as was noted, an attack on the officials and other privileged elements who would profit from their labor. Nonetheless, that attack simultaneously contained an implicit acceptance of the value of putting the unskilleds feet to the fire-of rendering them more industrious, self-supporting, and respectable-although, of course, in constructive ways that would somehow not bring them into competition with the skilled and other laboring people who were already virtuous and independent.lo5We have here, I would suggest, a partial, and in all likelihood unwitting, endorsement of the fundamental bourgeois perspective of a Tuckerman or Channing: not that perspectives open endorsement of labor market competition and of want and the fear of want as essential and salutary components of that competition. Such an endorsement, and the dominated consciousness it implies, was antithetical to the wage slavery critique explicitly embraced by Simon and his cohorts. But we do have, in the besieged labor elitism of these spokesmen for skilled workers, the elements of a more amorphous, inchoate intersection with bourgeois individualist competitive values-an intersection that reinforced market capitalism through its signification that there were, indeed, morally and culturally inferior, even contemptible, elements of the laboring population, consisting overwhelmingly of the unskilled and dependent poor, who needed to be driven.lo6 To suggest that Simons harsh attitudes were common among members of the labor strata to which he likely belonged is not to claim that they were universally or even consistently held throughout that strata. Antipathy for developing market arrangements could and did lead some prominent activists in the antebellum labor movement to take a relatively tolerant view of the poor relief extended to the most disadvantaged elements of society. In 1844 the printer and land reform leader George Henry Evans characterized public charity as partial retributive justice, and around the same
time Democratic Party populist Mike Walsh added that "crime and pauperism are the legitimate and ever-existing progeny of a corrupt and blasphemous state of society where honest labor is legally robbed, by various indirect means, out of more than two-thirds of its just and hard earned reward."lo7 Significantly, however, Walsh was also following in the tradition of Simon. His characterization of crime and pauperism appeared in the context of an attack on a proposal by the hTew York City Almshouse Commissioners to increase state revenue by contracting prisoners and paupers at a few cents a day to private manufacturing enterprises. This process would bring these institutionalized populations into competition with self-supporting laboring men. "So long," Walsh insisted, "as any portion of the working classes are unable to obtain employment, every shilling earned by a prisoner or a pauper, for the County or the State, is more than a shilling stolenfrom the famishing families of the unemployed laborer." The "public authorities" had a higher priority in finding "remunerated employment" for all such honest and independent, if unemployed, laborers.lo8 The Irish-born Walsh spoke, or so he claimed, for the "unwashed" and mostly unskilled, newly arrived immigrant Irish laborers, as well as for other segments of the New York working classes.109 Still, he was among those who, along with Simon, captured the antagonism that skilled craftsmen harbored for the employment of House of Refuge inmates, adult paupers and convicts, and other pools of cheap labor, in ways that would take the bread out of their own mouths. In large part because of that antagonism, and to the extent that they accordingly excluded the unskdled as beneficiaries of their demands, activist skilled artisans and their spokesmen in fact proved less radical than many upper-middle-class proponents of communitarian socialismthe clerics, writers, and other intellectuals who could indulge more generous attitudes toward the unskilled segments of the laboring population, and who tended to more readily include them along with skilled labor in their blueprints for reform, precisely because they did not live under the shadow of economic competition from these unskilled segments. lo Historians have long argued over whether skilled craft workers and other members of the upper echelon of labor-the so-called labor aristocracy in nineteenth-century Britain particularly-significantly strengthened capitalist hegemony by embracing and internalizing the "middle-class" creed of industriousness, temperance, individual selfimprovement, and "respectability," and by generally identifying more with groups above them than with ones below them.lll My focus on
perceptions of labor market incentives sheds a bit more light on this long-standing issue. The "encounter" between craft worker and mainstream capitalist middle-class culture, and the limited intersection of perceptions with respect to the unskilled and their moral and economic deficiencies, did not constitute a case of clearcut bourgeois ideological hegemony. Too many skilled labor activists in the antebellum period resisted the notion that the market was achieving, or could ever achieve, true distributive justice. Nor, for that matter, could the same activists accept the fatalistic bourgeois argument, advanced by Joseph Tuckerman among others, that market forces and their distributional results were more or less inevitable, even oftentimes a necessary evil, with which members of civilized nineteenth-century societies had to reach an accommodation and could at best modulate through a more generous Christian spirit. On the contrary, along with communitarian socialists and participants in the land reform and cooperative movements (and indeed with their Chartist and other counterparts in Britain), activists in the craft trade union movements of the early nineteenth century shared the counter-hegemonic belief that market-driven industrial changes were still reversible. The United States in particular seemed to them a relative tabula M S Q where undesirable institutions were not yet so entrenched that they could not be replaced with radically different social arrangements. For many of the same reasons, we cannot regard as more satisfactory a common alternative interpretation to the top-down, hegemonic thesis: that the objective existence of abundant economic opportunity throughout the early nineteenth-century United States rendered skilled workers, along with other Americans, instinctive "Lockeians"-as naturally individualistic, acquisitive, and "liberal" as the entrepreneurial and professional middle-class elements above them in the social scale.l12 The evidence suggests, instead, that it was their sense of sharply declining economic opportunity for themselves, and their attendant alarm over the decreasing social and economic distance between them and unskilled labor-in other words, the pressures and perceived needs that were sharply distinctive to the urban craftsmen of this period-that led these more advantaged workforce segments to more readily share bourgeois condemnation of the character of the unskilled. Such pressures and perceived needs led them to embrace, in effect, bits and pieces of the ascendant middle-class market ideology. A growing number of cultural studies exploring the nature of identity construction in the United States have emphasized, in particular, how white working-class racism, and whiteness itself, have
historically been "relational" phenomena. Irish and other European immigrant laborers, most notably, defined themselves in relation to blacks.l13But with respect to the antebellum skilled master craftsmen and journeymen, it could hardly be said that they expressed their class interests primarily in racial terms.l14 The responses these skilled workers gave to the evolving market economy suggest that their self-definition involved a good deal more than issues of whiteness-that in their case the relational thesis needs expansion beyond any narrow racial base. On the one hand, the artisans clearly and continually defined themselves in relation to the capitalists and professional men above them-the individuals who appeared through artifice, cunning, and exploitative practices to be further increasing their social and economic distance from "honest" laboring men. It must be said, in fairness to the race-based cultural studies, that although they downplay this particular relational phenomenon, they do not exactly overlook it. It is implicit in their model, according to which white working-class racism in the North was, after all, largely a form of psychological compensation that white wage earners developed in tandem with, and in response to, the economic vulnerabilities and indignities imposed on them by competitive capitalism and capitalist discipline. The more critical shortcoming of the race-based cultural studies is their general failure to sufficiently consider other relational phenomena centering on the various groups of low-status "others," in addition to free and enslaved African Americans, whom many skilled male artisans viewed as actual or potential threats to their own social and economic well being.115 Such perceptions were shaped by a multitude of factors, including the demographics of a city or region, the economic health of its skilled trades, and the inclination of newly arrived groups to actually attempt intrusions into these t r a d e s F In Baltimore, Norfolk, or any number of other southern cities, it was the sizeable black populations-in some cases free, in others slave-whom native-born white artisans sought to exclude from their trades, and to restrict to menial or domestic work. But in northern cities and towns where the black presence was more negligible, or where, in any case, there was no powerful slaveholding interest to force the issue of its employment in trades, a phenomenon such as economic nativism enjoyed greater salience. Nativeborn skilled artisans-or in other instances their sons who had been reduced to semiskilled occupations-were commensurately more hostile to the immigrant Irish, either for directly invading or for otherwise "degrading" or threatening to degrade traditional crafts.l17
PRESSURES FROM BELOW/ 143
Identity formation remains a many-sided, often dynamic, and elusive phenomenon. But the self-definition undergone by northern white male craftsmen during the antebellum decades of incipient industrialization-during the so-called crisis of skilled labor-was likely shaped less by skin color than by confrontation with a general assortment of negative reference groups of varying age, ethnicity, and gender. These groups were linked together by their ostensible lack of a respectableeconomic expertise or competence.11s Connections Early nineteenth-century skilled workers commonly shared the bourgeois disdain for unskilled laborers undisciplined and economically dependent character. Even as they feared and resisted competition from the unskilled, craft workers affirmed, if less consistently than Tuckerman, Channing, or other elite commentators, the value of economic compulsion for groups other than themselves, most of all for those below them in the social scale. To the extent that they did so, craft workers lent support to the periods formative free labor, free market ideology. There is more than antiquarian irony in the fact that their own distinctive concerns and anxieties over declining economic opportunity could impel early nineteenth-century skilled laborers to share with elite commentators certain perceptions of the dependent and undeserving poor, and to accordingly accept, despite all their anticapitalist resentments, basic market mechanisms. That impulse also suggests parallels to current discourse about work and poverty. In fact, it constitutes one of several strands pointing to what a number of scholars of the modern discourse and attendant welfare reform have discerned: specifically, the centuries-old continuity in moralistic attitudes toward the dependent poor, and the persistence in poor relief policies of the symbolic and social regulation functions of the work requirement, uppermost of which are the reaffirmation of the work ethic and the morality of low-paying work.l19 Of course, the most conspicuous feature of the current debates is racialist; it turns on the putative values and behavior of, above all, the unemployed young black males and single mothers who comprise a disproportionate number of the welfare poor. One of the most fascinating questions is how the race factor-how attitudes toward these groups-has come to reinforce moralistic stereotypes about the dependent poor and, with these stereotypes, the equally venerable conviction that state compulsory relief inexorably destroys work incentives and fosters indolence. As Michael B. Katz
has recently observed, the concept of the underclass itself reflects the centuries-old preoccupation with dividing poor people into categories of moral worth. As a modern euphemism for the undeserving poor, it reinforces the tradition of slighting the structural underpinnings of extreme poverty and blaming the victim for his or her material circumstances.120 Distinctive to the modern discourse is its reliance on a racial and even ethnic code word to stigmatize and distance many of the recipients of assistance, thereby continuing the war against the poor.121 The race factor has grown to a position of unprecedented centrality in the modern debates over dependent poverty. This much is consistent with the argument made above that, at least for an earlier period of American history, race-based cultural studies have in some ways overstated the importance of race vis-&vis other relational categories. At the same time, one could hardly claim that the race factor is unique to the modern debates. In fact, it predates the current invocations of the underclass as a conceptual tool with which to hammer the modern liberal welfare state. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the American Colonization Society extensively publicized and exploited northern free black pauperism, vice, and crime-less for purposes of discrediting and curtailing institutional relief to African Americans than for the considerably more ambitious purpose of removing both free and enslaved blacks altogether from the United States. The web of intellectual, religious, political, economic, and social circumstances that inspired ACS literature, and its foreshadowings of the modern fixation on the economically dependent and socially deviant black underclass, remains of course different in innumerable ways from the twentieth-century circumstances prompting the modern fixation.122 Yet there are still fundamental, underlying parallels. Neither the early nineteenth- nor the late twentieth-century context offers much of a case that antiblack racism is merely epiphenomenal. Its tenacity and depth reflect the likelihood that at some point in Western and specifically American society, long prior even to the emergence of the ACS, cultural if not hard biological racism had acquired a life of its own and become an autonomous social format i ~ n . As ~ ~ ~ M. Fredrickson has rhetorically asked in arguing George for the depth and autonomy of current racism: would the kind of conditions that exist in our inner cities today be tolerated to the same extent by society as a whole if the victims of these conditions were E~ro-Americans?~~~ But the targeting of the black poor by both the ACS and modern
critics of the welfare state suggests another parallel, one that might well offer some contradiction with the first. If the targeting of blacks, and the white racism it embodies, cannot be construed as merely a "byproduct" of "class relationships and anxieties" or of some other "basic social and economic reality," it nonetheless seems evident that American racism in both the early nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries has performed certain critical functions. It has enabled white politicians, commentators, and members of the general public to simplify and evade those other social and economic realitie~.I*~ Racial scapegoating and animosity have enjoyed a long and persistent history in America as a force for denying, or at least assuaging, class divisions and economic inequalities that run across racial lines. Corporate welfare and tax breaks for the rich, and the spectacle of CEOs earning hundreds of times more than the wage of their typical employees, are but a few of the causes and symptoms of the redistribution of wealth that has occurred since the 1980s. This redistribution has made American wealth's historical concentration in the upper rungs all the more striking in certain respects. Yet for large numbers of the white working and lower middle classes who have borne the brunt of declining economic opportunity and corporate "downsizing," it is not the rich and the members of the upper middle classes, but rather black welfare recipients and the minority beneficiaries of affirmative action, who have remained the most visible and frequent targets of their criticism and reproach. This paper can offer no real explanation for "the recurrent propensity among whites to make the characteristics of African Americans, whether viewed as innate or acquired, the explanation or excuse for social evils that do indeed have other causes.''126What can be stated with some confidence is that, in part owing to genuine frustration over the intractability of urban destitution and attendant social problems, modern criticisms of "welfare as we know it" have furthered all previous tendencies to fixate on the moral and cultural deficiencies of impoverished blacks. Yet despite this, these modern criticisms also share one particularly striking feature with earlier, nineteenth-century attacks on both pauperism and chattel slavery: a frequently facile, and highly problematic, confidence in the therapeutic effects of capitalist "tough love''-an unwarranted faith in the alchemy, both economic and moral, that can be worked by the free market whiplash of economic necessity.
Notes Portions of earlier versions of this article were presented at an Interdisciplinary Humanities seminar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, May 1996, and at
the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, July 1996. I am particularly grateful for Randolph A. Roth's suggestions, and for those made by the readers for the Radical History Review: Kevin Murphy, Adina Back, Ellen Noonan, and the two outside readers. I also thank Douglas R. Egerton, Mary 0. Furner, and the graduate students comprising Professor Furner's spring 1996 seminar in American political and intellectual history. Financial assistance was provided by a University of California President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities. 1. Report from Hs Majesty's Commissionersfor Inquiring into the Administration and i Practical Operation ofthe Poor Laws (London: B. Fellowes, 1834), 87. 2. For reference to some of the important ways in which "free competition" was qualified ideologically and practically, in the U.S. and Britain during this period, see Jonathan A. Glickstein, "The World's 'Dirty Work' and the Wages That 'Sweeten' It: Ideological Constructions of Labor's 'Extrinsic Rewards' in Antebellum Society," in Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry, eds., Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming). 3. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 2770-2823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 356-66, 458-68. See also Patricia Hollis, "Anti-Slavery and British Working-class Radicalism in the Year of Reform," 303-06, and Stanley L. Engerman and David Eltis, "Economic Aspects of the Abolition Debate," 284-86, both in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher, eds., Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform (Kent, England: William Dawson, 1980). 4. Joseph Tuckerman, The Principles and Results of the Ministry at Large, in Boston (Boston: James Munroe & Co, 1838), 269. David J. Rothman's otherwise fine study, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1971) is marred by a rather striking indifference to the transatlantic, particularly Anglo-American, dimensions of early nineteenth-century commentary on pauperism and poor relief policy. 5. In 1827 the Executive Committee of the American Unitarian Association authorized the establishment of the Boston Ministry to the Poor, and appointed Tuckerman to the post of Minister at Large to the Poor of Boston. Tuckerman served in this capacity for several years, issuing regular published reports on his work. In 1832 he was appointed by the Massachusetts Assembly to a committee of four to review the findings of the 1821 Quincy committee on the state's poor relief policies. Despite the institutional movement toward "well-regulated" almshouses, which he endorsed, Tuckerman's objective of a total abolition of poor laws and public outdoor relief was not realized; nor was his general hope that state regulation and involvement in social issues such as poverty would be reduced and replaced by the Christian"vo1untarism" of individual citizens; Daniel T. McColgan, Joseph Tuckerman. Pioneer in American Social Work (Washington, D. C.: Catholic University Press of America, 1943), 197-98. On the almshouse "institutional" movement in this period, see Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, 165-67; 175-205; and Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 10-25. The movement to abolish all public outdoor relief went further in some states, such as Pennsylvania and Delaware, than in others. For the general "persistence of outdoor relief," see Benjamin Joseph Klebaner's dissertation, Public Poor Relief in America, 2 790-2860 (New York: Arno Press, 1976; 1952),chap. 3. 6. Tuckerman (1778-1840), Daniel Walker Howe observes, "was as close as an American of his day could come to being a genuine aristocrat. His family had been prosperous Boston businessmen and Anglicans since the seventeenth century. His father, an ardent patriot, left the Church of England for Liberal Congregationalism and became an officer in Washington's army.'' Joseph attended the Boston Latin School and then Harvard College. His father had turned over much property to him, and he gained more by each of his two marriages. He chose, however, to depart from family tradition and became a minister rather than a merchant; Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 2 805-2 862 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988; 1970), 313.
7. How widespread the practice of making up wages by "allowances" from the poor rates ever actually became in pre-1834 England remains a matter of scholarly dispute. Far more certain, a variety of alleged ills, including the demoralization and excessive growth of the English laboring population, was increasingly attributed to the allowance "system" (and above all, to the relief policy contributions of the Speenhamland "Act" of 1795); and just as certain, the practice of allowances was increasingly viewed as the logical and calamitous outcome of the whole system of relief under the old Poor Law, even though the latter in fact encompassed a variety of expedients. Those attaching great, and possibly inflated, importance to the allowance system, and to Speenhamland particularly, included later historians like Karl Polanyi, who was in fact deeply critical of the ascendant market economy, and who viewed Speenhamland as "a system erected by a doomed paternalism to prevent the labourer from becoming a mere commodity in a new labour market;" J. R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism: English Ideas on Poor Relief, 1795-1834 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969),xxiv, 79. 8. For the "interconnecting processes" through which the ideas of intellectuals like Senior came to influence the British government, and to be translated by it into "practical effect,'' see S. E. Finer, "The Transmission of Benthamite Ideas, 1820-50," in Gillian Sutherland, Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Government (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 11-32. 9. See the essays in Lenard R. Berlanstein, ed., Rethinking Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); and for an illustration of how the postmodern feminist stress on the primacy of language is attended by skepticism regarding the objective, foundational nature of "experience," see Joan W. Scott, "Experience," in Judith Butler and Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2240. But I would not wish to push the postmodern emphasis on language too far. There were more conventional reasons for Tuckerman's invocation of the views of the commission Report. His publication of Principles and Results followed a long visit to England, where he encountered firsthand many of that country's prevailing ideas about pauperism and poor laws; E. E. Hale, "Introduction" to Joseph Tuckerman, On the Elevation of the Poor. A Selection from His Reports as Minister A t Large in Boston (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874), 9-10. Moreover, Tuckerman's hostility to legally mandated outdoor relief predated the 1834 commission Report, and was a reflection of the transatlantic alarm and frustration regarding the "disease" of pauperism of which the British report was the most signal product. 10. Commission Report, 348; McColgan, Tuckerman, 218. 11. Jennifer L. Hochschild, What's Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 80; Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, 158-63. 12. [Nassau Senior], "Poor Law Reform," Edinburgh Review 74 (October 1841): 32-33. 13. Tuckerman, Elevation, 62. 14. Ibid.; Joyce Appleby, "The Cultural Underpinnings of Capitalist Development in the Early National Period," 16; paper delivered at UCLA Center for Social Theory and Comparative History. Annual Colloquium Series: The Meaning of the Market Theory and History, 27 February 1995. 15. For more extended discussion of the pervasive ideological tendency of early nineteenth-century American commentators to ignore or slight the degree to which British classical economists-including Malthus himself-tempered the "gloom and doom" thrust of his famous A n Essay on the Principle o Population (1798), see f Glickstein, "World's 'Dirty Work."' 16. Tuckerman quoted in Howard M. Wach, "Unitarian Philanthropy and Cultural Hegemony in Comparative Perspective: Manchester and Boston, 1827-1838," Journal of Social History 26 (Spring 1993): 544; Tuckerman, Elevation, 56. At the same time, Tuckerman insisted (88) that "I should esteem that to be a false and injurious principle in political economy which is not in perfect consistency with Christian morality." For Tuckerman's criticism of Malthus for underestimating the laboring poor's capaci-
ty to control their numbers through moral restraint, see McColgan, Tuckerman, 216-18; and Howe, Unitarian Conscience, 240-41. 17. McColgan entitled chapter 6 of his biography of Tuckerman "The Disciple of Chalmers;" Howe, Unitarian Conscience, 246. 18. For a study emphasizing the compatibility of Chalmers' moral paternalism with laissez-faire individualism, see Boyd Hilton, The Age o Atonement: The Influence f o Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 2 795-2 865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, f 1988); see also A. M. C. Waterman, Revolution, Economic and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 2 798-2 833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 19. The interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution in terms of the risk-taking, "heroic" entrepreneur, in the manner of Joseph Schumpeter's writings, has fallen into decline since the 1960s. In its place are interpretations stressing underlying structural developments in the economy. But some studies, particularly ones in cultural history, have continued to highlight the period's ethos of masculine aggressiveness and competitiveness; Pat Hudson, The Industrial Revolution (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), 21-23; Anthony Howe, The Cotton Masters, 1830-2860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Vol 111: The Cultivation of Hatred (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5-6; 3540, 213, 447, 499-506 ff; and for the mid-nineteenth-century United States esp., see David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America : A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 21-27 ff; and E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood : Transformations in Masculinityfrom the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York : Basic Books, 1993). The last study argues, (somewhat problematically, in my view), that in the United States "competition had no part in the ideal traits of manhood until the late nineteenth century" (245); 175-76 ff. 20. Thomas Chalmers, The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns, vol. I11 (Edinburgh: William Whyte & Co. and William Oliphant, 1826),405-06. For a friendlier interpretation of Chalmers' social views in light of his pressing concerns for the state of men's souls, see Mary T. Furgol, "Chalmers and Poor Relief An Incidental Sideline?" in A. C. Cheyne, ed., The Practical and the Pious: Essays on Thomas Chalmers (2 780-2847) (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrews Press, 1984),115-29. 21. Tuckerman claimed, specifically,that the overly generous and lax nature of poor relief laws and practices in Boston, together with the widespread fame of its charity, made it a magnet for the undeserving poor, including the "accumulation of foreign poor;" Tuckerman, Elevation, 91-92. In describing part of his work for the Massachusetts Commission Report of 1833, Tuckerman noted that he visited sixty-eight towns, with a population of 264,327. The number of these assisted by the Overseers of the Poor was 12,331-a ratio of approximately one in twenty-one and a half of the population, which Tuckerman found "astounding" given the nation's "resources of selfsubsistence." Of these 12,331, 5,967 were "State's poor"-that is, poor from other countries, or from other states; and 6,063 were "Town's poor," making the excess of Town's over State's poor only 497. A large proportion of these state's poor were in Boston; Tuckerman, Principles and Results, 279-80, 306. One can certainly take issue with commentators like Tuckerman and question the magnitude of dependent poverty as an objective phenomenon or "problem," particularly among the native-born population, in the 1820s and 1830s. Still valuable in this regard is David J. Rothman's interpretation. His starting point was that apprehensions over pauperism expressed by elite commentators like Tuckerman during the Jacksonian period were almost strikingly disproportionate to the actual numbers of paupers, both inside and outside Massachusetts; see his The Discovery of the Asylum, chap. 7. Yet Tuckerman also had a prescient sense of structural unemployment as a cause of urban pauperism. 22. Tuckerman, Principles and Results, 280; Tuckerman, Elevafion, 14149, 159-66, 185; Howe, Unitarian Conscience, 251. 23. Wach, "Unitarian Philanthropy," 543; Tuckerman, Elevation, 104; Tuckerman, Principles and Results, 166-68. 24. Tuckerman, Elevation, 55, 168-86; for a slightly different classification scheme,
see Tuckerman, A n Essay on the Wages Paid to Females for Their Labour (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1830),42-52. 25. McColgan, Tuckerman, 284-85; Tuckerman, Elevation, 93, 153-62; Tuckerman, Principles and Results, 278-84; David Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840-1 925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989))22-23. 26. Tuckerman, Elevation, 84-86; Tuckerman, Principles and Results, 300. 27. Tuckerman, Essay on Wages, 35-37; Tuckerman, Principles and Results, 299-300. 28. This is not to deny that Chalmers' extensive writings on political economy included various criticisms of the moral failings of British capitalists. Yet the central tendency of Chalmers' writing remained a vindication of orthodox political economy, and with it the activities and interests of capitalists. This vindication highlighted the British laboring population's moral and intellectual needs and shortcomings. 29. See, for example, Mark Robert Rank, Living on the Edge: The Realities of Welfnre in America (Columbia University Press, 1994). For the functions such stereotypes serve, see Herbert J. Gans, The War Against the Poor: The Underclass and Antipoverty Policy (New York Basic Books, 1995). 30. Tuckerman, Essay on Wages, 5-18, 37-38. Ahead of a host of later thinkers who developed much more explicit and systematic notions of structural unemployment, Tuckerman fastened on unemployment phenomena that represented something more than a cyclical function, or "phase," of fluctuating business activity. Similarly, and despite his articulation of supply-and-demand shibboleths, he seemed to downplay the self-correcting tendencies of the economy in his discussions of pauperism and the laboring poor; Wach, "Unitarian Philanthropy," 544. See also David N. Ashton, Unemployment under Capitalism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987), 3949. 31. Tuckerman, Elevation, 64-79; for a different emphasis, see Wach, "Unitarian Philanthropy," 544; on the concept of the "family wage," see Wally Seccombe, "Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain,'' Social History 11 (January 1986): 53-76. Compare Tuckerman's ambivalence toward market forces and his accompanying doubts regarding the viability of an economically based "patriarchy" in many working-class households with Michael Meranze's recent, Foucauldian-inspired characterization of elite antipathy to poor relief in Pennsylvania during the 1820s. That antipathy, Meranze argues, reflected the determination "to strengthen paternal authority and familial discipline," and to "reconstruct the working-class family ... by reasserting [italics mine] its dependence" on the "rigors of the market;" Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-2835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996),269-70. 32. Tuckerman, Principles and Results, 227,231,302,310,313. 33. Tuckerman, Elevation, 81-82; Tuckerman, Principles and Results, 301-02; Tuckerman, Essay on Wages, 38-41. In an editorial comment in the latter (n. 38), Matthew Carey took Tuckerman to task for naivete: against Tuckerman's claim that the rate of wages did not fortunately depend upon those employers most inclined "to grind the poor," Carey noted that indeed it did, at least when there was an abundance of laborers prepared to underbid one another. In noting the operation of a Gresham's Law with respect to the influence wielded by unscrupulous employers, Carey offered an early formulation of a theme that would become much more prominent during the late nineteenth century. 34. Howe, Unitarian Conscience, 250-52,255. 35. Tuckerman, Elevation, 78-79,16748; Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, 177. 36. Support for both these positions extended, of course, beyond Massachusetts. Despite his many agreements with Tuckerman regarding the plight of the female laboring poor, Matthew Carey was a prominent member of this first group. He opposed Pennsylvania's 1828 legislation banning almost all public outdoor relief on the grounds that many of the industrious poor, deprived of their customary allowance by the Philadelphia guardians, had been reduced to begging. These peoples' aversion to becoming almshouse inmates should have been encouraged, in Carey's view, contrary to the effects of the action favored by Tuckerman and those in
Pennsylvania. Carey, Essays on the Public Charities of Philadelphia (1828),repr. in Carey, Miscellaneous Essays (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1830), 163-64; and Carey, Appeal to the Wealthy of the Land (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1833),21. For references to the common argument that employment in the United States was available to all, see Carey, Public Charities, 171, and Benjamin J. Klebaner, Poverty and Its Relief in American Thought, 181541, Social Science Review 38 (December 1964): 382-89. For Tuckermans many attempts to answer the second group that used this argument, and for his defense of the coordinated and efficient efforts of benevolent societies, see Tuckerman, Elevation, 77,90-91; and Principles, 124-25,305-07. 37, The supplemental outdoor relief extended during this period was characteristically meagre, whether offered by private agencies such as Tuckermans or by state or local government overseers of the poor. This was regardless of whether it was provided in the form of cash or noncash (food, clothing, or wood for fuel were the favored forms, on the ground that they reduced recipients discretionary power to spend assistance on liquor). Matthew Carey, for example, noted that in 1830 the relief extended to Philadelphias 549 outdoor paupers averaged less than forty-seven cents a week. Of course, the recompense earned by this population-or that part that engaged in gainful employment at all-was itself meagre. Carey and Tuckerman reported that the seamstresses who benefited from home relief in Philadelphia and Boston could at the very best earn a dollar and a half a week from long hours of piecework. But that outdoor poor relief could therefore comprise a significant proportion of a households income is not in itself proof that all such relief generated the kind of disincentives and downward pressure on wages suggested by Tuckermans critics. Like other antebellum employers, subcontractors in the clothing trade set wages by what the market could bear, and when they were pressured by their own thin profit margins, they lacked the means if not the generosity of heart to appreciably raise the rates they paid seamstresses and other unskilled labor in the event that all supplemental aid was foreclosed to the latter. As for many of the recipients of relief, a variety of circumstances-lack of job skills, old age or disease, responsibilities for disabled or otherwise dependent family members-severely restricted their ability to move either occupationally or geographically out of glutted labor markets. For the elderly seamstresses who worked out of their homes, outdoor poor relief provided some minimal security against starvation, not a disincentive to finding better economic opportunities. On the other hand, there were grounds for the complaints of Tuckerman and others that the somewhat greater ease of obtaining relief in Boston and other urban centers contributed to their overstocked labor markets by attracting certain kinds of would-be paupers. These included indigent immigrants from abroad and male day laborers from the countrys interior who had been thrown out of employment during the winter months. Mathew Carey, A Plea for the Poor, 7th ed. (Philadelphia, n.p., 1837),5-14; Carey, Public Charities, 154, 167; Tuckerman, Essay on Wages, 14; Tuckerman, Elevation, 65-83; Klebaner, Public Poor Relief. For the implications that agricultural-rural seasonal unemployment had for urban wage levels in the mid-nineteenth century, see Carville Earle, Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 180-88 ff. 38. Quote from an 1837 memorial from the Philadelphia guardians of the poor to the Pennsylvania legislature, in Klebaner, The Home Relief Controversy in Philadelphia, 1782-1861, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 78 (October 1954):420. This memorial, like most such criticisms of the pernicious effect of outdoor relief on the habits of the poor, directed most of its fire against compulsory, public assistance. But again, Tuckerman was sensitive to the hostility that such criticisms could also carry for the voluntary relief that he championed. See also Klebaner, Poverty and Its Relief in American Thought, 393; Klebaner, Public Poor Relief; 4042; William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828-1843 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 150-51; William Howe, An Address before the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, March 1,1840 (Boston, 1849), 10-11. 39. For a recent review of key issues and positions taken with respect to England,
see George R. Boyer, An Economic H i s t o r y of the English Poor Law 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 40. In 1850, as Eric Foner has recently reminded us, the number of wage earners in the United States surpassed the number of slaves for the first time. By 1860, according to one estimate, wage laborers outnumbered self-employed members of the labor force. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil W a r (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xv-xvi; see also David Montgomery, Citizen Worker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),13 ff. 41. Significantly, on the other hand, antislavery, free labor discourse, blending such themes as the power and the parasitism of large southern slaveholders, came increasingly to attack them as tyrant paupers. 42. In this essential respect Tuckerman remained no different from orthodox elite and officialvoices in New York and other northern cities. This is notwithstanding the possibility that his accompanying ambivalence toward capitalist market forces was part of an ethos particularly distinctive to cultured, elite segments of New Englandand specifically Boston-society. 43. In comparison to his pronouncements on pauperism, Joseph Tuckermans published criticisms of modern chattel slavery were both rare and mild. Possibly Tuckerman did not wish to antagonize the Boston commercial and industrial interests that were, at the least, mildly proslavery and upon which his urban missionary efforts strongly depended for financial support. Family sensibilities were also involved; his second marriage was to the daughter of a West Indian planter. Tuckerman, Elevation, 173; Tuckerman, Principles and Results, 256; Howe, Unitarian Conscience, 280-81, 287-94, 311, 313; McColgan, Tuckerman, 223, 259. Channing (1780-1842), for his part, publicly spoke out against slavery only after a long period of hesitation. But although he could never bring himself to endorse either the militant rhetoric or the uncompromising solutions of the abolitionists who had been pressuring him to take a stand, his diagnosis of the moral and intellectual evils of slavery was identical in nature to that of the abolitionists. Channing grew up in Newport, Rhode Island and graduated from Harvard College. He started out as a liberal Congregationalist, but under the leadership he assumed in 1803, the relatively young Federal Street Church in Boston became the most important institutional center for the Unitarian religion outside of Harvard during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. Charmings family fortune was consolidated by a marriage to his first cousin. As his antislavery views grew in intensity and visibility, he became increasingly estranged from his congregation. 44. Channing, Slavery (1835), reprinted in The Works of William Ellery Channing (Boston:American Unitarian Association, 1896), 709, 710,719. 45. I distinguish general endorsement of a capitalist free market and the natural economic forces that defined it from what that endorsement might or might not include, and which it in fact tended not to include in Charmings case: advocacy of a laissez-faire,minimal government capitalist model. 46. Thomas L. Haskell, Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, in Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate :Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) 107-60. 47. Some of the other contemporaneous social and moral reform movements did not, obviously, require this consciousness of a higher nature to the same degreee.g., the movements to correct the human abuse of pets and other animals, though these too were inspired by a new compassion or sentimentalism, that incorporated increased appreciation of the victims sensitivity to pain; James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 125-66; see also Jonathan A. Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 26,193-94. 48. Indeed, to the extent that Channing may have exemplified the periods
romantic racialism (and was to this extent not color-blind), he believed that members of the black race possessed innate, superior moral and Christian capabilities that rendered their victimization by slavery especially tragic; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 2827-2924 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971),105-08. 49. Channing, Slavery, 710. This is not to deny the strong tradition of moral paternalism in education, as well as the impulse, highlighted by Foucault, to wield power and enforce hierarchy that Victorian institutions typically embodied through their systems of moral surveillance. Yet even the most extreme of such institutions and blueprints, such as Jeremy Benthams Panopticon, had free market objectives. They sought to instill their predominantly lower-class inmates with the character traits that would enable them to respond effectively and predictably to labor market incentives. Rendered more compliant and docile, this population would also ideally, and somewhat paradoxically, emerge more self-directing, competitive, and self-supporting; for further discussion of the qualities that the Anglo-American middle classes sought to develop in the laboring population during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, see Glickstein, Concepts, esp. chap. 7. 50. For an explicit statement of the paralyzing fear of starvation that inflicted English day laborers, see John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ed. W. J. Ashley (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1920), 285-86. 51. Recent scholarship has made us increasingly aware of a number of concurrent and complex Anglo-American cultural currents, including the redefinition of pain and suffering and the growing animus to corporal punishment, which Channings perspective also likely drew upon and reflected; see Elizabeth B. Clark, The Sacred Rights of the Weak: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America, Iournal of American History 82 (Sept 1995): 463-93; Karen Halttunen, Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture, American Historical Review 100 (April 1995): 303-34; Adam Jay Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992),38-39,104 ff; Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue. 52. Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism:The Knights o Labor and Class f Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 31. 53. Glickstein, Concepts,56, 72. 54. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.s bludgeoning of Channing years ago on this general grounds retains, for all its facile character, a strong element of plausibility, one that is largely missing in Haskells more subtle and brilliantly argued thesis that exemplars of the new Anglo-American humanitarian sensibility, among whom we would certainly include Channing, shared an elective affinity for highlighting the evils of formal slavery which in no significant degree incorporated the intention (at any level of consciousness) of advancing capitalist class interests and hegemony. Haskells principal object of criticism is David Brion Davis thesis that the selective focus of British antislavery leaders-their relative blindness to the exploitation of free wage laborers-represented a collective engagement in unconscious, social self-deception. Although Haskell bases his thesis of humanitarian sensibility on a generally mercantile model of capitalistic practice, he is using this thesis to criticize Davis interpretation of the motives of Britains early industrialist, antislavery entrepreneurs. For this reason alone, Haskells thesis is fair game in an analysis of Channings own responses to early nineteenth-century industrial capitalism; Haskell, Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility,111ff; and for his subsequent acknowledgement that class interests likely played some role in the new humanitarian sensibility, see Haskell, Convention and Hegemonic Interest in the Debate over Antislavery: A Reply to Davis and Ashworth, 200-59; Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Iuckson (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1945), 146, 271-73; Channing, letter to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, September 1840, in Peabody, Reminiscences of Rev. Wm. Ellery Channing, D.D. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1880), 415. 55. For one such attack on the doctrine of overpopulation in political economy, see William E. Channing, Lectures on the Elevation of the Labouring Portion of the
Community (Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1840),54-58; see also Memoir of William Ellery Channing, with Extracts fiom His Correspondence and Manuscripts (Boston: W. Crosby and H. P. Nichols, 1848), vol2: 74-79. 56. Charming was, for example, a strong supporter of child factory labor legislation in Massachusetts. 57. Eric Foner has accordingly argued that Lincoln and other Republicans, following various labor leaders, articulated the "classical republican" conception of liberty, which rested on economic independence. Abolitionists, on the other hand, embraced the distinct "liberal" conception of liberty, highlighting the value of formal self-ownership apart from real access to economic opportunity. Such a broad distinction is useful but perhaps inevitably misses certain shadings and complexities. The mythology of American economic exceptionalism, as Foner well recognizes, was not altogether absent from the radical abolitionist rebuttals of the wage slavery critique made by labor leaders. By the same token, the vision of Lincoln and other leading Republican politicians contained a healthy dose of professional, liberal capitalist success values; their speeches and writings often attached primacy not to "republican" economic independence per se but rather to upward occupational mobility out of the ranks of artisan proprietors and freehold farmers altogether. Foner, "Abolitionism and the Labor Movement in Antebellum America," in Bolt and Drescher, eds., Antislavery, 266-67; Foner, "Liberty in the Age of Emancipation," in Joseph Klaits and Michael H. Haltzel, eds., Liberty/Liberte': The American and French Experiences (Washington, D. C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1991), 101-02. 58. Hollis, "Anti-Slavery and British Working-Class Radicalism,'' 305. 59. Engerman and Eltis, "Economic Aspects,'' 273; and for the similar point regarding the free labor ideology of the Republican Party, see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 9-10,309-10. 60. Josiah Conder, Wages or the Whip. A n Essay on the Comparative Cost and Productiveness of Free and Slave Labor (London: G. Woodfall, 1833),1,2,91. 61. Channing, Emancipation (1840),in Works, 828-32. 62. Ibid., 832; John Stuart Mill, "The Negro Question," Fraser's Magazine 41 (January 1850):25-51. 63. Channing, Emancipation, 830. 64. Charming, "An Address Delivered at Lenox, on the First of August 1842, being the Anniversary of Emancipation in the British West Indies," in Works, 916. For economic conditions in the British West Indies during this period, see Engerman and Eltis, "Economic Aspects," 285-88; and Thomas Holt, The Problem o Freedom: Race, f Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 2832-1 938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 65. Charles Stephenson, "'There's Plenty Waitin' a t the Gates': Mobility, Opportunity and the American Worker,'' in Charles Stephenson and Robert Asher, eds., Life and Labor: Dimensions of American Working-Class History (Albany: State University of New York, 1986), 81, 89; Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 15-57; Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4 ff. For a perceptive discussion of the variety of possible reasons why ex-slaves in Jamaica turned from waged employment to free proprietorship, see Holt, Problem of Freedom, 146-50. Because wage-earning opportunities outside the home relaxed the constraints of patriarchal authority and increased their economic independence, white female wage earners did not, it appears, share to the same degree an antipathy for wage-earning status. Jean Mathews, "Race, Sex, and the Dimensions of Liberty in Antebellum America," Journal of the Early Republic 6 (Fall 1986):283-84. 66. See also Charles Stuart, The West India Question (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1832),42 ff. Yet even in many of these antislavery writings the more negative strand of free labor ideology-that underscoring the free wage laborer's superior exploitability-remained unstated, subordinate, and something that many of the authors in question would have in fact disclaimed. It was left to the Anglo-American
critics of "wage slavery," such as the Northampton Democrat discussed below, to highlight this strand and, in the process, to exaggerate its significance in the abolitionist ideological arsenal. 67. I am drawing here one possible inference from Geertz's observation that, under the strain theory of ideology (as distinct from the Marxist/interest theory, by which "men pursue power"), individuals "flee anxiety." Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973),201. 68. Even William Lloyd Garrison could be more unequivocal than Channing in condemning unjustly low wages, while still defending the wage system itself from the attacks made by northern labor radicals. "Free and Slave Labor," The Liberator (26 March 1847); Foner, "Abolitionism and Labor Movement," 264-65; Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism (New York: Random House, 1969), 249-50. 69. John P. Diggins, "Comrades and Citizens: New Mythologies in American Historiography," American Historical Review 90 (June 1985): 626-28; and William E. Gienapp, "The Myth of Class in Jacksonian America," Journal of Policy History 6, 2 (1994): 252. Alternatively, such historians often maintain that northern critics of wage slavery, insofar as they were truly "radical," were a tiny minority, decisively alienated, and marginalized from the mainstream of American workers. Gienapp also makes use of this argument (251-52, 278-81), as does Peter D. McClelland, The American Searchfor Economic Justice (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 3 8 4 3 ff. 70. For a recent argument that antebellum labor activists were in fact quite accepting of judicial "conspiracy" rulings that would restrain their own collective action so long as the state also moved to weaken capitalist "monopolies" and otherwise offset previous "antilabor," "antirepublican" government intervention, see Victoria C. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism i the United n States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 8,19-20,85,103-05. 71. "Freedom of the Public Lands," Northampton Democrat (26 January 1847). During this period, land reform leaders like Lewis Masquerier contributed to the paper, which was edited and published by J. E. Thompson. 72. This reform mentality was famously satirized by Dickens as the "telescopic philanthropy" practiced by Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House. The critics of wage slavery varied in the degree of hypocrisy in which they grounded abolitionist "compassion." The more extreme of these critics claimed that abolitionists were typically wealthy individuals whose driving objective was to divert attention from the plundering and abuse that they committed against domestic servants and other wage earners in their own employ. See, for example, the polemic by Kentucky writer Henry Field James, Abolitionism Unveiled! Hypocrisy Unmasked! and Knavery Scourged! (New York T. V. Patterson, 1850). As Elizabeth Clark has recently reminded us, abolitionists favored a different interpretation of charity at home in issuing their own charges of hypocrisy: the American critics of wage slavery were guilty of "'oozing sympathy"' for Europe's white masses while ignoring the plight of their own nation's black chattel slaves; Clark, "'Sacred Rights of Weak,"' 475. 73. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1991). 74. Once, moreover, both the "wage slavery" and the "white slavery" terms had entered the American public domain by the early nineteenth century, individual usage of one rather than the other may simply have not carried the intricate and heavy implications that David R. Roediger and others ascribe to such usage. 75. Marc W. Steinberg, "Talkin' Class: Discourse, Ideology, and Their Roles in Class Conflict," in Scott G. McNall, Rhonda F. Levine, and Rick Fantasia, eds., Bringing Class Back In (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 261-84. William Lloyd Garrison indeed perceived the editorials from the Northampton Democrat as hostile borrowings, placing them in The Liberator's "Refuge of Oppression" section; "Black Slavery and White Slavery," National Anti-Slavery Standard (5 August 1847). The magnitude of these discursive appropriations and borrowings is illuminated in a recent collection of newspaper articles and editorials, Philip S. Foner and Herbert Shapiro, eds., Northern Labor and Antislavery (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994). 76. That the remuneration of many mid-nineteenth-century slaves was in fact nei-
ther guaranteed nor fixed-hence the abstract and somewhat tenuous nature of the argument being made by antislavery voices like Channing-has become increasingly evident in the growing body of scholarly work on the subject, all of which point to a considerable diversity in slave conditions and earning patterns. 77. "The Wilmot Proviso," Northampton Democrat (11May 1847). 78. This is not to claim, of course, that the discursive borrowing and co-opting of arguments engaged in by individuals and groups is always, or even most of the time, deliberately done for hostile purposes. 79. To cite one of the many blatant examples: Alabama Senator Jeremiah Clemens' bemoaning in 1850 of the "slavery" afflicting New England's female factory workers. For the resentment provoked in one of these workers by Clemens' remarks, see Nancy P. Healey, "Letter to J. Clemens from a Factory Operative,'' Stark Mills, Manchester, N. H., 12 Februry 1850, repr. in National Era [Washington, D. C.] (17 October 1850). 80. The anti-foundational thrust of poststructuralism, its effort to locate in language the source of people's interests, ideologies, and "reality," reflects, in particular, dissatisfaction over the failure of Marxist materialist and other older approaches to resolve such questions of ideology formation. 81. For example, middle- and upper-middle-class antebellum Americans who remained Old School Presbyterian, Episcopalian, or Catholic tended to be particularly hostile not only to the abolitionist attacks on southern slavery, but also to the labor and utopian socialist movements that directed their fire against prevailing social and economic arrangements in the free states. 82. This was a phenomenon that was not in itself inevitably incompatible with orthodox economic, "rational man" models, even if "A story of exploitation, [as] the neoclassical economist avers, should tell us why exit did not work" [italics mine]; Donald N. McCloskey,"The Economics of Choice: Neoclassical Supply and Demand," in Thomas G. Rawski et al, Economics and the Historian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 131; see also Alan Ryan, "Exploitation, Justice, and the Rational Man," in J. Gay Tulip Meeks, ed., Thoughtful Economic Man: Essays on Rationality, Moral Rules, and Benevolence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), 37. 83. Appleby, "Cultural Underpinnings of Capitalist Development;" Gienapp, "Myth of Class." At the same time, we should not assume from the absence of a widespread pronounced and explicit anticapitalist mentality the existence of a commensurately widespread, uncritical acceptance of the mythology of American economic exceptionalism. Apropos is the remark of the historian Dirk Hoerder with respect to immigrant attitudes: "With access to letters from emigrant to friends and kin describing living and working conditions after migration, emigration researchers never fell for the now-outmoded U.S. discourse strategies of unlimited opportunities, the openness of the one-and-only frontier society, or American exceptionalism;" A H A Perspectives (February 1996):10. 84. Quantitative evidence of these wealth trends, lending support to labor historian claims, was notably provided by the economic historians Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert in American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 3 3 4 6 . Their methodology and conclusions have since been challenged by Carole Shammas, "A New Look at Long-Term Trends in Wealth Inequality in the United States," American Historical Review 98 (April 1993):412-31. 85. Claudia Goldin and Robert A. Margo, "Wages, Prices, and Labor Markets before the Civil War," in Claudia Goldin and Hugh Rockoff, eds., Strategic Factors in Ninefeenth Century American Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),69. 86. Kenneth L. Sokoloff and Georgia C. Villaflor, "The Market for Manufacturing Workers during Early Industrialization: The American Northeast, 1820-1860," in Goldin and Rockoff, eds., Strategic Factors, 31. 87. Economic historians like Sokoloff and Villaflor are hardly uninformed about the competing pessimistic claims of the "new labor historians;" their overall position
is that their sophisticated empirical techniques and use of quantitative sources reveal the existence of considerably greater economic opportunity for skilled and other northeastern manufacturing workers than does the qualitative, impressionistic evidence more heavily relied upon by the labor historians. Ibid., 30. Readers will have to judge for themselves the various merits of the two positions. 88. George Grantham, "Economic History and the History of Labour Markets," in George Grantham and Mary MacKinnon, eds., Labour Market Evolution (London: Routledge, 1994),7. 89. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1 900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 75-76. 90. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language o Labor from the Old Regime to f 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Friedrich Lenger, "Beyond Exceptionalism: Notes on the Artisanal Phase of the Labour Movement in France, England, Germany and the United States," International Review of Social History 36, n. 1 (1991): 1-23. In questioning the accuracy of the artisan "declension model," Richard Stott has suggested that the surge of journeymen protests in the 1820s and 1830s reflected the degree to which industrialization may have actually empowered such workers. It did this by removing the inhibitions imposed on an earlier generation of journeymen and apprentices by the family-based structure of the small pre-industrial shops. This interesting argument fails to address the extent to which the protesting journeymen were nonetheless animated by a sense of their impotence, by their perceived inability to effectively check the developments cited in the main text-most of all, perhaps, the seeming impunity with which craft entrepreneurs and other capitalists both commodified and degraded journeymen skills by subdividing work processes and tapping into pools of cheap and "dishonorable" labor. Stott, "Artisans and Capitalist Development," Journal of the Early Republic 16 (Summer 1996):270. 91. Richard A. Easterlin, "Will Raising the Incomes of All Increase the Happiness of All?" Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 27 (June 1995):3547. 92. Bruce Laurie, Theodore Hershberg, and George Alter, "Immigrants and Industry: The Philadelphia Experience, 1850-1880," in Richard L. Ehrlich, ed., Immigrants in Industrial America, 1850-1 920 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 130-35. 93. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 2844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 117-18; George Catephores, "Marxist Alienation: A Clarification," Oxford Economic Papers 24 (July 1972):133n. 94. Philadelphia's House of Refuge was founded in 1828 by Quakers who disapproved of the city's practice of incarcerating juvenile vagrants with adult criminals in prisons. Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Welfare and the Poor in the Nineteenth-Century City: Philadelphia, 1800-1 854 (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), 123-24; Negley K. Teeters, "The Early Days of the Philadelphia House of Refuge," Pennsylvania History 27 (April 1960):165-87. 95. "House of Refuge," Mechanics' Free Press: A Journal of Practical and Useful Knowledge (18 October 1828). 96. Clement, Welfare and Poor, 124. 97. Ibid., 123-24; Rothman, Tke Discovery of the Asylum, 261. 98. Ava Baron, "An 'Other' Side of Gender Antagonism at Work Men, Boys, and the Remasculinization of Printers' Work, 1830-1920," in Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 47-69; Kimmel, Manhood, 31-32. It also remains possible that Simon was one of the larger and more "respectable" manufacturers whom he characterized in his piece as similarly opposed to the Refuge's labor policies. 99. Christine Stansell notes that in New York City, journeymen belonging to the cordwainer and other trades with a "strong tradition of family-based production," and ones in which "a rigid sexual division of labor protected men from female com-
petition," tended to be more supportive of wage-earning women's presence and own organizational efforts in those trades. Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 2789-2860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 142. 100. Here the language of domesticity that skilled workers shared with capitalists obscured, in many cases, different values and ideological objectives. Eric Lott observes that "Radical workingmen's masculinist opposition to women's labor outside the home resisted rather than capitulated to bourgeois norms [of "respectability"], since workers thought the very necessity of female wage work was evidence of the class oppression they protested." Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 196; Stansell, City of Women, 138. We should also note, in this connection, that Simon's diatribe is not without its interesting particularities. Prominent among the groups he cites as most immediately threatened by undercutting from the unskilled Refuge "vagrants," are "virtuous" "young girls" who currently earn $3.00 a week in trades, much of which goes to the support of "aged parents." Simon, in other words, exhibited no antagonism to such employment, and evidently did not regard these particular female workers as themselves constituting a dishonorable threat to the livelihood of Philadelphia's skilled male mechanics. At the same time, Simon denounced the threat posed by the Refuge to these independent female laborers as only "the first step to set in operation an enemy to our mechanics," and here he did perfectly exemplify that "manly" mentality of the period, which prioritized and exalted the protection of skilled male artisan labor. 101. Walter Hugins, Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 155-61; for a discussion of the range of interpretations of nativism among skilled artisans, see Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 2844 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984),41-77 ff. 102. For the continuing protests of Philadelphia mechanics against labor competition emanating from the House of Refuge, and for the assurances from the institution's directors in 1830 that they were indenturing the boys to rural masters to "'obviate the evil of competition,"' see Dennis Clark, "Babes in Bondage: Indentured Irish Children in Philadelphia in the Nineteenth Century," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 101 (October 1977):480-81. 103. Voss, Making of American Exceptionalism, 23-24, 35, 46-52, 232-33; Cynthia S. Shelton, The Milk of Manayunk: Industrialization and Social Conflict in the Philadelphia Region, 2 787-2 837 (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 126. 104. This is, in a sense, a variation of one of the standard "American exceptionalist" arguments, stating that the ethnic divisions encouraged by continuing immigration have made it particularly difficult to unionize and otherwise unite the American workforce. Historians have also noted, however, that the growth of the major antebellum umbrella labor organization, the National Trades' Unions (NTU), to a peak membership of some 300,000 by 1836 (between one-fifth and one-third of all urban workers) reflected a substantial broadening of the labor movement to include some of the unskilled elements previously scorned and excluded. One of the most recent students, Kim Voss, observes that "'Half-trained,' sweated, and immigrant journeymen were welcomed in some trades as journeymen became more radicalized in the course of the movement." Yet despite this broadening of solidarity, Voss concludes, the NTU's "inclusiveness did not generally extend too far beyond the ranks of the skilled;" Voss, Making of American Exceptionalism, 30; see also Walter Licht, Industrializing America (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995),57. 105. As suggested in n. 100, skilled workingmen had little desire to make, in particular, working-class wives and other females more industrious in the sense of being economically self-supporting and independent. Their overriding vision was that of a working-class home sustained by men's wages and women's domestic activities. Stansell, City of Women, 138. 106. Again, popular attitudes toward lower-class blacks differed in significant ways from those regarding native-born white, working-class females. Nor is this to deny that the conviction that the laboring population should be induced in some manner to be industrious was in some respects residual, bearing a pre-industrial, and
even a precapitalist, history, although it should not be underemphasized that Simon and others were affirming the validity of this notion within a nineteenth-century, early industrial-capitalist context. 107. Evans, Working Man's Advocate (7 September 1844),quoted in Klebaner, Public Poor Relief, n. p.; Walsh quoted in the New York newspaper he owned and edited, "Moses G. Leonard and His Prison and Poor-House Project of Preying upon the Working Classes," The Subterranean (19 December 1846). 108. Ibid. 109. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 327-35; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York Routledge, 1995), 77-79. 110. It remains true, however, that economic depression and adverse economic changes induced considerable numbers of skilled workingmen to bolster the rankand-file membership of various radical communitarian enterprises of the 1840s. Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca; Cornell University Press, 1991), 6-67 ff; Christopher Clark, The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 64 ff. 111. One of the major points of contention continues to be the extent to which such character traits had genuine roots within nineteenth-century working class traditions. A recent revisionist study that summarizes the large literature for Britain is Trevor Lummis, The Labour Aristocracy 2852-2924 (Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1994). 112. A recent example is Gienapp, "Myth of Class." 113. See, for example, the comments on Alexander Saxton's and David R. Roediger's work in Earl Lewis, "To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas," American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 784; and Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White. 114. In their emphasis upon whiteness as a relational phenomenon, some of the cultural studies, drawing on the work of the anthropologist James C. Scott, have suggested that white, working-class racism and racist language functioned as a kind of "public transcript" for underlying class grievances. It was safer and more expedient for relatively powerless and low-status white laborers to employ violence and to 0thenvise act out their frustrations and hostilities against still more impotent and lowstatus African Americans, as well as against marginalized white abolitionist elements, than it was for them to directly challenge the classes that monopolized economic and state power. By defining their own class interests in racial terms, subordinate whites could more openly and acceptably articulate their opposition to domination and injustice. Some of the same studies, deviating from Scott's "hidden transcript" concept, suggest the unwitting nature of this process-the degree to which white workers embraced racism to conceal from even themselves their growing subordination to capital. Such models do not describe the behavior of antebellum skilled artisans particularly well. Rather than stifling or concealing their economic hostilities from the more economically and politically powerful, and certainly rather than concealing their subordination to capital from themselves, these workers decisively incorporated anticapitalist, class-exploitation themes into their public language of protest. Their expression of such economic hostilities was hardly embedded in a racialized "hidden transcript." For discussions, see Lott, Love and Theft, 263 ff; Robin D. G. Kelley, "An Archaeology of Resistance," American Quarterly 44 (June 1992): 292-98 (a review of Scott's Domination and the Arts ofliesistance); Noel Ignatiev, "The Paradox of the White Worker: Studies in Race Formation,'' Labourbe Travail 30 (Fall 1992):23340. 115. Roediger himself suggests something along these lines in an essay aptly subtitled: "Race and the Working-class Past in the United States: Multiple Identities and the Future of Labor History," International Review of Social History 38 (1993), supplement, 12743. 116. Economic antagonisms in modem-day New York and other urban centers are likely reduced by the phenomenon of ethnic "niche" employment: the propensity of Korean and Indian immigrants, for example, to avail themselves of family ties and
ethnic networks and to cluster in occupations and enterprises (in these cases the operation of fruit markets and stationery stores, respectively) that the general culture has already ceded to them. 117. Recent relevant studies include Christopher L. Tomlins, "In Nat Turner's Shadow: Reflections on the Norfolk Dry Dock Affair of 1830-1831," Labor History 33 (Fall 1992): 494-518; Carol N. Toner, Persisting Traditions: Artisan Work and Culture in Bangor, Maine, 1820-1860 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), 98; and more generally, W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 160-85. 118. See particularly A. T. Lane, Solidarity or Survival? (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 15-32. For a contrasting perspective, see Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 106 ff. I include the term "ostensible" here to underscore the extent to which "skills" may in fact have been ideological or social constructs, rather than objective entities. These constructs were designed precisely by those who monopolized various trades to minimize competition from other social groups (a much-discussed example being the efforts of "skilled" male mule spinners in Britain to bar women from the trade). Some of the groups of low-status "others" in antebellum America, notably Irish immigrants and free black laborers, were as often hostile to and at odds with one another as they were commonly disdained by native-born white artisans. These conflicts lie beyond the scope of this paper. However, one of the most recent discussions of the negrophobia of New York's growing Irish immigrant laboring population in the late antebellum years does not so much deny that the "fear of Negro job competition" was a major component of that negrophobia, but rather that there was no objective basis for such fears. Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 1994), 194 ff. Much less has been written on the reciprocal attitudes of antebellum free blacks; for a brief treatment of the black press and the views of "Negro leaders," see Jay Rubin, "Black Nativism: The European Immigrant in Negro Thought, 1830-1860," Phylon 39 (Fall 1978): 193-202. 119. Joel F. Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, The Moral Construction o Poverty f (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1991),38-41. 120. Michael B. Katz, Improving Poor People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 97. 121. Gans, War Against the Poor, 59-61. 122. For example, the ACS perspective was marked by a pronounced cultural and fatalistic environmentalism. In sharp contrast to the modern attacks on the black underclass, the organization identified white racial prejudice-which it held to be inexorable, permanent, and divinely ordained-as the principal cause of the "degraded and miserable" condition of free blacks in the United States. Standard accounts of the ACS include Leon F. Litwak, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1 860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 18-25; and Fredrickson, Black Image, 6-21. 123. The literature on the constructions of race and the origins of antiblack racism in Western culture continues to grow in depth and sophistication. See, for example, the various articles on "Constructing Race: Differentiating People in the Early Modern World," in the William and Mary Quarterly 54 (January 1997). 124. George M. Fredrickson, "Comment on David Brion Davis, 'Reconsidering the Colonization Movement: Leonard Bacon and the Problem of Evil,"' Intellectual History Newsletter 14 (1992): 18. 125. Ibid., 18, 20. Here and in the main text I continue to be deeply indebted to Fredrickson's insights, as well as to Davis' original paper preceding these. 126. Ibid., 18.

Pressures From Below: Pauperism, Chattel Slavery, and The Ideological Construction of Free Market Labor Incentives in Antebellum America

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Pressures From Below: Pauperism, Chattel Slavery, and The Ideological Construction of Free Market Labor Incentives in Antebellum America

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Pressures from Below: Pauperism, Chattel Slavery, and the Ideological Construction of Free Market Labor Incentives in Antebellum

RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW 69~114-1591997

116/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/117

118/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/119

120/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/121

122/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/123

124/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/125

126/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/127

128/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/129

130/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/131

132/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/133

134/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/135

136/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/137

138/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/139

140/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/141

142/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/ 143

144/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/145

146/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/147

148/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/149

150/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/151

152/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/153

154/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/155

156/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/157

158/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

PRESSURES FROM BELOW/159

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen