Jumping counters in white collars: Manliness, respectability, and work in the Antebellum city

Journal of the Early Republic

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 173-219

  Luskey, Brian P ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN COLORADO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950270224     PISSN: 02751275     EISSN: 15530620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jer.2006.0032     Document Type: Article

References (191)

1. For more on how clothing signified, mediated, and blurred class differences in this era, see Jonathan Prude, The Appearance of Class: The Visual Presence of American Working People from the Eighteenth Century to World War I (forthcoming), ch. 3
2. Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-1920 (Chicago, IL, 1990)
3. and Clark Davis, Company Men: White-Collar Life and Corporate Cultures in Los Angeles, 1892-1941 (Baltimore, MD, 2001)
4. Southworth Diary, June 4, 1850; June 13, 1850
5. See The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York, 1989)
6. Henry Ward Beecher, Lectures to Young Men, on Various Important Subjects (1846; new ed., Boston, MA, 1863), 218-19
7. Brian P. Luskey, '"What Is My Prospects?': The Contours of Mercantile Apprenticeship, Ambition, and Advancement in the Early American Economy," Business History Review, 78 (2004), 665-702
8. John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago, IL, 1965)
9. Also see Beecher, Lectures to Young Men, 218-19
10. For the Jewish presence on Chatham Street, see Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880 (Baltimore, MD, 1992), 80
11. C. G. Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861: A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War (1915; 2nd ed., Washington, DC, 1919), 209-10
12. Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York, 2002), 25
13. James Sidbury, "Slave Artisans in Richmond, Virginia, 1780-1810," in American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750-1850, ed. Howard B. Rock, Paul A. Gilje, and Robert Asher (Baltimore, MD, 1995), 50
14. Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 252
15. Shane White, " 'We Dwell in Safety and Pursue Our Honest Callings': Free Blacks in New York City, 1783-1810," Journal of American History, 75 (1988), 456
16. Juliet E. K. Walker, The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (New York, 1998), 89
17. Shane White and Graham White, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY, 1998), 114-19
18. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992), 438-39
19. W. Caleb McDaniel, "The Fourth and the First: Abolitionist Holidays, Respectability, and Radical Interracial Reform," American Quarterly, 57 (2005), 129-51
20. Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, IL, 1961), 229
21. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery (Cleveland, OH, 1969), 43-44, 179-80
22. Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends (1857; Baltimore, MD, 1997), 292
23. Walter Johnson, "The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s," Journal of American History, 87 (2000), 38 (quotation)
24. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991), 43-92, 133-63
25. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995), 97-98, 110, 112
26. L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, DC, 1971), 31-32
27. Patterson Diary, Apr. 20, Aug. 7, and Oct. 17, 1838
28. For the advent of the clerk as a drumming and dunning agent for firms, see Timothy B. Spears, 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (New Haven, CT, 1995), 27-28
29. Tailer Diary, Dec. 14, 1848; May 11, July 22, July 26, 1850; Apr. 7, 1849; Jan. 21, 1850
30. For an example of clerk-porter tensions escalating to the point of attempted murder, see National Police Gazette, Oct. 7, 1847, 15. Relationships between textile mill overseers and mill workers could also oscillate between tension and friendship. See Prude, Coming of Industrial Order, 82-84, 117, 134
31. Patterson Diary, Nov. 21, 1838
32. Tailer Diary, Jan. 29, 1850
33. Herald, July 2, 1850, 7
34. Also see Hodges, New York City Cartmen, 153
35. M[athew]. Carey, Appeal to the Wealthy of the Land (1833; 2nd ed., Philadelphia, PA, 1833), 8
36. Home Journal [New York], Apr. 26, 1851
37. [Joseph A. Scoville], The Old Merchants of New York City. By Walter Barrett, Clerk (New York, 1863), 194-95
38. Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 1998), 76-77, 82
39. Spears, 100 Years on the Road, 30-31
40. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 1-55
41. "Rockhill and Wilson, Tailors & Clothiers of Men and Boys Wear" (Philadelphia, PA, 1857), LCP
42. For the nineteenth-century discourse about domestic life that made the home women's "business," see Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: 'Woman's Sphere' in New England, 1780-1835 (1977; 2nd ed., New Haven, CT, 1997), 73
43. Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 64-65, 97
44. and Resseguie, "A. T. Stewart's Marble Palace," 131-62
45. [Greene], Perils of Pearl Street, 26
46. A Peep into Catharine Street, or the Mysteries of Shopping. By a Late Retailer (New York, 1846), 7
47. Harper's Weekly, Apr. 25,1857, 272
48. Vanity Fair (New York), Mar. 10, 1860, 172
49. Shinning It, 6
50. For a similar strategy employed by soda fountain proprietors, see Wendy A. Woloson, Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, MD, 2002), 90
51. Godey's Lady's Book, 48 (Jan. 1854), 82 (quotation)
52. The Lady's Book, 24 (Mar. 1842), 139 (all Godey's articles at http://www.accessible.com)
53. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 200
54. The Lady's Book, 14 (Apr. 1837), 165
55. Also see Hoffman Diary, Jan. 8, 1849
56. Tribune, Oct. 20, 1857, 6
57. Shinning It, 7-14
58. For more on the sales techniques that merchants and clerks used when dealing with female consumers, see Rotundo, American Manhood, 209-11
59. The Rake (New York), Sept. 10, 1842
60. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of Frances Anne Butler (Philadelphia, PA, 1835), I: 92-93, at http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/NWLDlive
61. Isabella Lucy Bird, The English-Woman in America (London, 1856), 340 (thanks to Jonathan Prude for alerting me to this source)
62. For a description of the peddler as both "seducer" and "teacher" of female consumers, see Lears, Fables of Abundance, 96-97
63. Elias, Alexander T. Stewart, 48
64. Resseguie, "Alexander Turney Stewart and the Development of the Department Store," 309-10
65. and Tappan, Life of Arthur Tappan, 70-73
66. The Polyanthos, and Fire Department Album (New York), May 4, 1839
67. Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (New York, 1997), 92-139
68. Polyanthos, May 4, 1839
69. Whip (New York), July 30, 1842
70. Vanity Fair, Feb. 4, 1860, 84
71. Sunday Flash (New York), Sept. 19, 1841
72. Also see An Address Delivered by Henry M. Western, Esq., in Behalf of the Tailoresses' and Seamstresses' Benevolent Society, at the Broadway Tabernacle, December 28th, 1836 (New York, 1837)
73. William Burns, Life in New York, In Doors and Out of Doors (New York, 1851), n. p
74. Anne G. Myles, "Queering the Study of Early American Sexuality," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 60 (2003), 200
75. Clare A. Lyons, "Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture: Homoeroticism in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 60 (2003), 124-26
76. Renée M. Sentilles, Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity (New York, 2003), 97-106
77. Cohen, Murder of Helen Jewett
78. Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Chicago, IL, 2003), 45-59
79. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2002), 172
80. Myles, "Queering the Study of Early American Sexuality"
81. and George Chauncey, Gay New York: The Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (London, 1995), 13
82. Godey's Lady's Book, 45 (Oct. 1852), 371
83. The Lady's Book, 17 (Oct. 1838), 180
84. Patrick Kelly, Retail Dry Goods, 613 Third Ave., New York, vol. 209, p. 96
85. John Clark, Dry Goods, 8th Ave., New York, vol. 209, p. 99
86. David Leopold, Dry Goods & Fancy Goods, 13 1/2 Carmine, New York, vol. 210, p. 117
87. Marcus M. Lichtenstein, Ribbons, Silks & Laces, 387 Broadway, New York, vol. 210, p. 146
88. William McKenna, Hosiery & Fancy Goods, 237 Greene, New York, vol. 210, p. 150
89. Peter Ziglio, Millinery, 67 Division, New York, vol. 210, p. 151
90. A. Berk, Dry Goods, 197 Canal, New York, vol. 210, p. 176
91. Hugh Laing, Retail Grocer, 97 Washington, New York, vol. 264, p. 8
92. Amy Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 1995), 45-60
93. Stansell, City of Women, 96-99
94. and Ava Baron, "An 'Other' Side of Gender Antagonism at Work: Men, Boys, and the Remasculinization of Printers' Work, 1830-1920," in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 51
95. For the varied career trajectories of the clerks discussed in this article, see Henry C. Southworth, New York, vol. 216, p. 800 a/86
96. E. N. Tailer & Co., vol. 203, p. 700QQ
97. R. McCoskey Graham, New York, vol. 343, p. 400L
98. Northup, Hoffman & Co., New York, vol. 319, p. 469
99. Hoffman Bros., New York, vol. 322, pp. 752, 758
100. Daniel Hoffman & Co., New York, vol. 322, p. 800N
101. Grace Aguilar, Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters (New York, 1851)
102. and Ik. Marvel [Donald G. Mitchell], Reveries of a Bachelor; or A Book of the Heart (New York, 1850)
103. Catherine E. Kelly, In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 19-63
104. Boydston, Home and Work, 120-41
105. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (1979; 2nd ed., New York, 1993), 63-71, 109
106. Mary H. Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910 (Urbana, IL, 1988), 54, 69
107. Jonathan Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT, 1991), 11, 27-29, 62-69, 260-61
108. Gary J. Kornblith, "Becoming Joseph T. Buckingham: The Struggle for Artisanal Independence in Early-Nineteenth-Century Boston," in American Artisans, 129-30
109. idem, "From Artisans to Businessmen: Master Mechanics in New England, 1787-1850" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1983), 497
110. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 157-68, 182-90
111. Ileen A. DeVault, '"Give the Boys a Trade': Gender and Job Choice in the 1890s," in Work Engendered, 210-11
112. Laurie, '"We Are Not Afraid to Work,'" 64-65
113. and Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (Chicago, IL, 1995), 85
114. The first quotation comes from Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, 33 (1855), 394
115. Also see Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 182-83
116. Baron, "An 'Other' Side of Gender Antagonism at Work," 50
117. and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), 82
118. Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, 26 (1852), 648
119. Tribune, July 20, 1850, 4
120. The Monthly Cosmopolite (New York), Oct. 1, 1849
121. William A. Alcott, The Young Man's Guide (1833; 10th ed., Boston, MA, 1836), 41-42
122. Alexander, Merchant's Clerk, 6. The Genesee Farmer published several essays about the ways that family members could convince their sons and brothers to remain in the country
123. Kett, Rites of Passage, 94
124. William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York, 1980), 222-37
125. Augst, Clerk's Tale, 220
126. Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor, 10, 181, 301
127. and Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 96, 113-16, 123
128. "Dry Good Clerk" and "Counter Jumper" (n.d., ca. 1840-1870), Comic Valentine Collection, LCP
129. Alexander, Merchant's Clerk, 17-18
130. For more on the comic valentines, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 77-85
131. Herman Melville, White-Jacket; or The World in a Man-of-War (1850; Oxford, 2000), 239-40
132. Thomas Augst, The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, IL, 2003), 1-61
133. Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA, 2005)
134. Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001)
135. Allan Stanley Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes: The Social Control of Young Men in New York (Lewisburg, PA, 1975), 147-78
136. Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York, 1977), 93-102
137. and Rodney Hessinger, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America (Philadelphia, PA, 2005), 125-47
138. Luskey, "The Marginal Men: Merchants' Clerks and Society in the Northeastern United States, 1790-1860" (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2004), 178-79, 395
139. idem, '"What Is My Prospects?'"
140. and Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, NY, 1990), 92
141. Augst, Clerk's Tale, 6-7, 52, 59, 220
142. Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 114-15
143. See Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 120-21
144. For the evidence that suggests a bifurcation of prospects for different groups of clerks, see Luskey, "Marginal Men" and "'What Is My Prospects?'"
145. Harry E. Resseguie, "A. T. Stewart's Marble Palace - The Cradle of the Department Store," New-York Historical Society Quarterly, 48 (1964), 155-56
146. idem, "Alexander Tur-ney Stewart and the Development of the Department Store, 1823-1876," Business History Review, 39 (1965), 314-15
147. and Paul Erickson, "New Books, New Men: City-Mysteries Fiction, Authorship, and the Literary Market," Early American Studies, 1 (2003), 273-312
148. Amy Dru Stanley, "Home Life and the Morality of the Market," in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800-1880, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (Charlottesville, VA, 1996), 74
149. (quotation); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT, 1982), 1-55
150. John F. Kasson, Rudeness & Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York, 1990), 70-111
151. and C. Dallett Hemphill, Botving to Necessities: A History of Manners in America (New York, 1999), 129-59
152. and T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped Independence (New York, 2004), 172-82
153. Bartleby, of course, clerked for a lawyer, though the image of the copyist in mercantile and legal situations was very similar. See Herman Melville, "Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street," in Herman Melville: The Complete Shorter Fiction (London, 1997), 18-51
154. For the origins and usage of "counter jumper," see Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, eds., Dictionary of American Slang (New York, 1967), 125
155. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937; 3rd ed., New York, 1950), 183
156. Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van Den Bark, The American Thesaurus of Slang (New York, 1942), 519, 526
157. For more on the economic development and firm specialization that created new working conditions for clerks, see Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 19-28, 36-40
158. For the pressures of commercial growth that opened clerkships to young men, especially in retail businesses, see Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 9
159. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class (New York, 1984), 110
160. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 437
161. and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York, 1981), 10
162. and Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 6
163. [Asa Greene], The Perils of Pearl Street, Including a Taste of the Dangers of Wall Street, by a Late Merchant (New York, 1834), 17
164. Tailer Diary, Dec. 5, 1848
165. Southworth Diary, Jan. 11, 1851
166. George John Cayley Diary, Jan. 15, Jan. 13, Feb. 20, Jan. 10, Jan. 12, Jan. 16, Jan. 29, 1844, N-YHS
167. and The Merchants' Magazine, and Commercial Review, 1 (1839), 325
168. Also see Rowland Berthoff, Republic of the Dispossessed: The Exceptional Old-European Consensus in America (Columbia, MO, 1997), 131-54
169. Henry A. Patterson diary, Dec. 22, Dec. 27, 1836; Jan. 10, Feb. 7, 1837, N-YHS
170. Augst, Clerk's Tale, 31, 83
171. Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes, 112
172. New-York Daily Tribune, Dec. 15, 1853, 1
173. Mistakes such as the ones Tailer made suggested to outside observers that clerks needed constant "supervision as to details." See Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, CA, 2000), 96
174. Graham Journal, Feb. 19, Feb. 26, Feb. 29, 1848
175. and W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York, 1986), 132
176. Hoffman Diary, June 22, 1850
177. Patterson Diary, Jan. 9, Jan. 23, 1839
178. Hoffman Diary, July 22- Aug. 1, 1848
179. On the absence of store employees making more work for other clerks, see Southworth Diary, Apr. 22, 1851. While textile workers may have worked according to the clock and year-round, most urban working people continued to labor, like farmers, according to seasonal cycles
180. Consult Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 108-20, 156
181. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York, 1986), 110, 113
182. Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 (New York, 1983), 15-16, 45
183. and Bruce Laurie, "'We Are Not Afraid to Work': Master Mechanics and the Market Revolution in the Antebellum North," in The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class, ed. Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston (New York, 2001), 55
184. William E. Dodge, Old New York: A Lecture (New York, 1880), 6-8
185. After the Revolution, blacks began to take porterage posts away from whites. See Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), 178
186. Herald (New York), Aug. 13, 1838
187. For immigrant clerks moving into uptown communities of mixed ethnicity, see Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 62
188. Tailer Diary, Jan. 15, 1852
189. Tribune, Jan. 19, 1860, 6
190. National Police Gazette, June 20, 1846, 347
191. and James W. Alexander, The Merchant's Clerk, Cheered and Counselled (1856; New York, 1861), 23-24