What Hath God Wrought (81 page)

Besides manufacturing, slave labor also found employment in public works such as digging canals, building levees, laying railroad track, cleaning streets, and lighting the gas lamps that illuminated nighttime cities. Business corporations, municipalities, and state and even federal government agencies all owned or hired slaves. In 1842, the Army Corps of Engineers and Quartermaster Corps reported to Congress their regular hiring of slaves from willing masters. Surprisingly, the City of Savannah hired slaves as firefighters.
⁷³
Insurance companies underwrote the risk that valuable slave property would be injured or killed by industrial accidents. (Free workers, unlike slaves, had no “worker’s compensation” coverage; employers therefore found it prudent to employ free workers for the most dangerous tasks.)

Officially, 5 percent of southern slaves worked in industrial occupations. But the statistic understates the reality. It does not include artisans who worked on plantations making articles for use on that plantation, and thus ignores countless enslaved blacksmiths, masons, cabinetmakers, cordwainers, saddle-makers, plow-wrights, and other craftsmen. Nor are the products of such artisans’ labor included in the calculation that the South contributed 11 percent of U.S. industrial output.
⁷⁴
Even when all such allowances have been made, the South did not industrialize as much as modern economists think would have been cost-effective. When and where they existed, southern industries earned profits comparable to those available in agriculture. The question therefore arises, why did the South not industrialize more?

The price of slaves correlated with that of slave-produced agricultural staples, especially cotton. As a rule of thumb, “the price of slaves could be determined by multiplying the price of cotton by ten thousand (seven cents per pound for cotton yielding seven hundred dollars per slave),” according to the historian Walter Johnson. The world demand for more and more cotton drove up the price of slaves, especially from the 1840s on. Certain kinds of agricultural labor, notably gang labor in the fields, virtually required slaves, because free workers would have demanded astronomical wages to perform it. (After emancipation, gang labor soon fell into disuse, and cotton had to be produced in other, less efficient ways.) When the price of slaves was low, slaves could be diverted into manufacturing and urban commerce, although free labor could perform these jobs too. When the price of slaves rose, their owners pulled them out of marginal economic activities like industry and concentrated them where they were most needed, in gang labor on agricultural staples.
⁷⁵

Noneconomic factors probably also contributed to the reluctance of the South to invest in industry. Perhaps the southern planter class felt averse to taking certain kinds of risks. Growing cotton in the new lands of the West was a risky business, to be sure, but southerners understood those risks; investing in manufacturing enterprises seemed mysterious as well as risky. Industrialization became politically controversial in the South. Some planters feared that it would be harder to perpetuate slavery in a diversified economy than in an agricultural one, while a few argued eloquently that the South should industrialize to make itself less dependent on the North. The Democratic Party in the South continued to preach the superiority of the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal and the evils of city life. No other occupation conferred as much social status as the ownership of land and slaves. Most planters found little incentive to pursue industrial innovation when large-scale staple production brought them not only profits but prestige and political leadership as well.
⁷⁶

IV

However important the early industrial revolution, the fact remains that most of the workforce in antebellum America—North as well as South—labored in agriculture. Although the independent family farm was the American ideal, in reality the Middle Atlantic states had always made extensive use of nonproprietary farm labor: indentured, enslaved, or tenant. In Pennsylvania some immigrant farm laborers still worked under contracts as late as the 1830s.
⁷⁷
With the passing of indentured servitude and the emancipation of their slaves, the big landowners of upstate New York had to rely primarily on tenant farmers to operate their holdings. But beginning in the 1830s, their tenants began to express their own form of labor unrest.

The trouble began on the largest of the estates, the Manor of Rensselaerwyck, dating back to a Dutch colonial land grant, which covered 436,000 acres, that is, most of Albany and Rensselaer Counties. The lord of the manor, Stephen Van Rensselaer III, had been a very model aristocrat. He served his country as a general in the War of 1812 and as a congressman from 1822 to 1829 (casting, in 1825, the vote that made John Quincy Adams president). An enlightened philanthropist, he established at Troy in 1824 a school for “the sons and daughters of farmers and mechanics” that became Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “The Good Patroon” (as he was called) specified as terms of tenancy not only rents determined by the price of wheat but also feudal dues that seemed anachronistic in the nineteenth-century United States, such as a day’s work with a team of oxen. Yet Van Rensselaer persuaded thousands of Yankee settlers to sign such contracts by offering them free rent for the first seven years, and he kept them on his lands by the indulgence with which he tolerated it if their payments fell into arrears. Then the Erie Canal, which Van Rensselaer had supported, undercut the market for the wheat his tenants produced. Some turned to wool-growing as an alternative; Van Buren was bidding for their support with his Tariff of Abominations in 1828. But before long many tenants fell behind in their rent, and the Panic of 1839 hit farm incomes badly. Also in 1839, the Good Patroon died. In his will he specified that the debts he had piled up should be paid by collecting the $400,000 in back rents he was owed. All of a sudden, the old paternalistic structure no longer seemed viable.
⁷⁸
What ensued was the largest farm protest movement in pre–Civil War America.

Confronted with demands for outstanding rents that some of them had no means of paying, Van Rensselaer’s tenants declared a rent strike and organized to prevent collections. They demanded the right to buy their farms (usually they themselves had paid for all the improvements), but the new landlord, Stephen Van Rensselaer IV, refused the price they offered. The anti-rent movement spread to other estates. The newly elected Whig governor, William H. Seward, sympathized with the tenants’ wish to obtain title to their farms, which was congruent with his party’s vision of America as a country of middling property owners. Reasoning that only as freeholders could the tenants obtain the credit they needed to switch from raising wheat or sheep to more profitable dairy farming, Seward proposed to use the state’s power of eminent domain to buy out those landlords who refused reasonable offers. His plan, however, rested on a reconstituted national bank providing New York state with credit and the distribution of federal land receipts to the states. When the national Whig victory in 1840 did not fulfill these hopes and the state’s highest court ruled against such use of eminent domain, Seward’s plan died. Meanwhile, he had no alternative but to call out the militia to enforce the law against the anti-renters in December 1839. The tenants credited Seward’s intentions rather this action: Their elected state legislators entered into an alliance with the Whigs. While awaiting redress from the legislature, bands of anti-rent militants, masked and disguised as Indians, continued to harass process servers and to intimidate any tenant who broke ranks. The Whigs, as the party of law and order, were embarrassed by the behavior of their anti-rent allies and reluctant to press for further help to them. The federal constitutional prohibition against states impairing the obligation of contracts severely limited options.
⁷⁹

Although Stephen Van Rensselaer III had been a Whig, most other landlords, including their spokesman, the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, belonged to the Democratic Party, identifying their political interests with the planter aristocracy of Virginia. Nevertheless, when the Democrats gained control of both the statehouse and the legislature in 1844, Governor Silas Wright conceived a secret plan to help the tenants: a law authorizing them to pay to convert leaseholds into freeholds upon the death of a landlord. Wright, however, subordinated this policy to partisanship; he wanted to bring the anti-rent voters over to the Democrats. He did not lay out his plan in his initial annual message for fear the Whig legislators would simply endorse it too, depriving his party of exclusive credit. But later in the session, the complicated scenario he had devised to pass it did not work out when conservative Democrats defected. Wright went down to defeat in 1846 at the hands of a Whig who enjoyed anti-renters’ support.
⁸⁰
George Henry Evans’s National Reform Association continued to point to the anti-rent protests as an example of why America needed a homestead act.

The return of agricultural prosperity in the mid-1840s undercut the militancy of the anti-rent movement (as returning prosperity has been wont to do to American farm protests). Although public opinion generally sympathized with the tenants, it also supported the rights of contract. Neither the legislative nor the legal system responded effectively to the demands of the anti-rent movement for relief. Yet antebellum economic reality and the lack of coercive power in the hands of authority favored the will of white settlers on the ground, in this case as in that of squatters on the public lands or the Georgia-Cherokee controversy. Sheriffs elected in anti-rent districts seldom showed much enthusiasm for pressuring their constituents to pay back rent. Sporadic rent strikes continued into the postbellum period. Worn down, the landlords tired of the game and grudgingly consented to sell their holdings, parcel by parcel, as a way of realizing needed cash. In the end, Stephen Van Rensselaer IV accepted terms less favorable than those he had rejected in 1839. The New York constitutional convention of 1846 outlawed feudal leases and any agricultural leases running more than twelve years, but these prohibitions applied only to the future, not to existing contracts. To this day, it is said, people who buy homes in the Albany area may find themselves “required every year to pay a nominal rent charge to some remote assignee of Stephen Van Rensselaer.”
⁸¹

V

A huge labor force unrecorded in the economic statistics consisted of women and children working at home or on the farm for their own families. In Europe, middle-class households typically included one or more live-in servants, but visitors to the antebellum United States often commented on the scarcity of domestic help available for hire. The census of 1840 recorded only about 5 percent of the total U.S. labor force engaged in domestic service, compared with the British 13 percent in live-in domestic service in 1851, the earliest year for which information is reliable.
⁸²
In both countries, domestic service was an overwhelmingly female occupation. A Philadelphia man spoke for middle-class America in 1822: “In these United States nothing would be wanting to make life perfectly happy (humanly speaking) had we good servants.” In the South, the situation resembled that in Europe: 16 percent of the enslaved workforce engaged in domestic service in 1840. There, even nonslaveowning white families could hire slave women from their owners to perform the heavier domestic tasks. But in the North, middle-class women had to do more of their family’s housework, cooking, and child care.
⁸³

Even more than the scarcity of domestic workers, their attitudes surprised observers. As Catharine Maria Sedgwick correctly explained in her didactic novel
Home
(1835), native-born American farm girls preferred to be called “help” rather than “servants.” Women willing to work in someone else’s home could demand decent treatment and pay. Often they ate with the family; sometimes they chose to preserve more independence by living out. When Catharine Beecher published her
Treatise on Domestic Economy
in 1841, she advised employers of domestic employees to treat them as fellow citizens and responsible agents. Domestics simply expected the market value for their services, she explained. “Why is it not right for domestics to act according to a rule allowed to be correct in reference to all other trades and professions?”
⁸⁴

Industrialization, competing for the labor of working-class women, sharpened the shortage of domestic help. Increasingly, native-born white women found alternative employment, leaving domestic service to immigrants and African American women. Only the great waves of immigration from Europe that commenced in the mid-1840s would address what middle-class Americans called “the servant problem.”

The new economic conditions fostered a new defining characteristic for a proper household. Instead of being a household with servants, a proper household became one where the wife did not need to earn money. The household continued to survive on the basis of a mixture of paid and unpaid work, with the husband now concentrating more on market activities and the wife, ideally, on activities outside the market, named with the new word “housework.”
⁸⁵
Although working-class and farm women more often than not still participated in market production (for example, through put-out piecework or preparing butter, eggs, and chickens for sale), within the urban middle class a married woman was expected to be a full-time mother and homemaker. In midcentury America, while 11 percent of free females over the age of sixteen worked for wages, less than 5 percent of married women did.
⁸⁶
Men, on the other hand, more often left daily for employment elsewhere, in a factory or office building, rather than working at home as artisans, farmers, and shopkeepers did. The new model household became a unit of consumption rather than production.