On the make: Clerks and the quest for capital in nineteenth-century America

On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America

Volumn , Issue , 2010, Pages 1-278

  Luskey, Brian ^a  

^a WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84900628531     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (460)

1. William Hoffman Diary, March 3, 1848, N-YHS.
2. Thomas Augst, The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
3. Michael Zakim, "The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary; or, A Labor History of the Nonproducing Classes," Journal of the Early Republic 26 (2006): 563-603.
4. For the rise of New York as a central depot for goods and people, the structural and spatial organization of urban business, and the importance of middlemen in this period, see Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 429-39;.
5. Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840-1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 1-22;.
6. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 78-83;.
7. Allan Stanley Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes: The Social Control of Young Men in New York (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1975), 30-31;.
8. Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815-1860 (New York: Scribner's, 1939);.
9. Timothy B. Spears, 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1995), 23-49;.
10. David Jaffee, "Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760-1860," Journal of American History 78 (1991): 511-35.
11. New York population figures can be found at , accessed November 18, 2008.
12. The "sunshine and shadow" genre of urban literature is too enormous to cite here. For the complexities and contradictions of social identity in urban space, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982);.
13. John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 70-146;.
14. Stuart M. Blumin, "George G. Foster and the Emerging Metropolis," in Blumin, ed., New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches by George G. Foster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1-61.
15. My sample's percentage of Irish clerks is slightly higher than the total 1855 census percentage, while German clerks are slightly underrepresented. See Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 215;.
16. Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes.
17. George John Cayley Diary, February 3, March 2, 1844, N-YHS;.
18. [Asa Greene], The Perils of Pearl Street, including a Taste of the Dangers of Wall Street, by a Late Merchant (New York: Betts and Anstice, and Peter Hill, 1834), 10.
19. For more on loafers, see Zakim, "Business Clerk," 563-67.
20. Cayley Diary, March 11, March 29, 1844;.
21. Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or, The White Whale (1851; New York: Signet, 1961), 22.
22. For more on the influence of Byron on young male readers, see Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 103.
23. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Part the Second, The Social Influence of Democracy (1840; New York: Vintage, 1990), 136-37;.
24. George G. Foster, New York Naked (New York: Robert M. De Witt, n.d.), 73;.
25. Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842; New York: Modern Library, 1996), 107;.
26. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (New York: Scribner's, 1975);.
27. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860), 37. I thank Jennifer Meares for this last citation.
28. The "heroes" quotation can be found in Vanity Fair (New York), January 28, 1860, 172. Also see Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2005), 22-43;.
29. Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008);.
30. Zakim, "Business Clerk," 575;.
31. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 33-55.
32. John A. Bagley, "Cayley, Sir George, sixth baronet (1773-1857)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, online edition, ;.
33. Thomas Bean, "Cayley, George John (1826-1878)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, online edition, [both accessed May 12, 2006]. Cayley's publications include Las Alforjas; [or, The Bridle Roads of Spain] (London: R. Bentley, 1853);.
34. The Working Classes: Their Interests in Administrative, Financial, and Electoral Reform (London: D. F. Oakey, 1858).
35. For the sale of the Hoffman family farm, see Hoffman Diary, January 27, 1850.
36. For the importance of small-business ownership in antebellum America, see Mansel G. Blackford, A History of Small Business in America, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 3.
37. For the early republic ideology that attacked hierarchy and emphasized citizens' opportunities for social and economic mobility, see Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000);.
38. J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008);.
39. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), 229-369;.
40. W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);.
41. John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 9-36.
42. See Sandage, Born Losers;.
43. Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001);.
44. Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes;.
45. Rodney Hessinger, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 125-47.
46. Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 58-79;.
47. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Part the Second, 138.
48. For brilliant examinations of the ways in which these bourgeois Americans "reinvented American society in [their] own image," see Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 8;.
49. Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
50. For analysis of the terms of class used by antebellum Americans and the debate about "natural" and "artificial" class distinctions, see Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 53-158.
51. See Seth Rockman, "Class and the History of Working People in the Early Republic," Journal of the Early Republic 25 (2005): 527-35;.
52. Sappol, Traffic of Dead Bodies, 10;.
53. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992), esp. 402-47;.
54. Amy Schrager Lang, The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003);.
55. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 79;.
56. Burton J. Bledstein, "Introduction: Storytellers to the Middle Class," in Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston, eds., The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class (New York: Routledge, 2001), 7;.
57. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 244-56.
58. For the need to combine economic and cultural approaches in scholarly assessments of class, see the articles by Gary J. Kornblith, Seth Rockman, Jennifer Goloboy, Andrew Schocket, and Christopher Clark in "Symposium on Class in the Early Republic," Journal of the Early Republic 25 (2005):523-64;.
59. James Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1-56.
60. Toby L. Ditz, "The New Men's History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History," Gender and History 16 (2004): 1-35;.
61. Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000);.
62. Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender and the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002);.
63. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993);.
64. Joshua R. Greenberg, Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840 (New York: Columbia University Press, , 2006).
65. As Bruce Laurie and Stuart Blumin have respectively shown, however, antebellum languages of class that referenced "producers" and "monopolists" persisted after the Civil War in the writings of labor unionists, and the term "middle class" had various meanings well into the twentieth century. See Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (repr. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 152;.
66. Blumin, "The Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century America: A Critique and Some Proposals," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 310-12, esp. n.45.
67. Also see Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand:The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977);.
68. Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 203-19;.
69. Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1998);.
70. Clark Davis, Company Men: White-Collar Life and Corporate Cultures in Los Angeles, 1892-1941 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000);.
71. Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986);.
72. Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004);.
73. Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-1920 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), 125-48;.
74. Jerome P. Bjelopera, City of Clerks: Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia, 1870-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
75. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 258-97;.
76. Jocelyn Wills, "Respectable Mediocrity:The Everyday Life of an Ordinary American Striver, 1876-1890," Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 323-49;.
77. Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989);.
78. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001);.
79. idem, "Propertied of a Different Kind: Bourgeoisie and Lower Middle Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States," in Bledstein and Johnston, eds., The Middling Sorts, 285-95.
80. Edward N. Tailer Diary, January 1, 1850, N-YHS;.
81. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 33-55.
82. Henry W. Bellows, Respectability; or, Holiness. A Sermon Delivered before the Young Men's Benevolent Society, in Boston, Sunday Evening, Dec. 9, 1838 (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, 1839), 12;.
83. Tailer Diary, December 10, 1848;.
84. J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008);.
85. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Part the Second, The Social Influence of Democracy (1840; New York: Vintage, 1990), 121-24.
86. Edwin T. Freedley, Leading Pursuits and Leading Men: A Treatise on the Principal Trades and Manufactures of the United States (Philadelphia: Edward Young, 1856), 200; HMM 1 (1839):325; 4 (1841): 345;.
87. Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 44-69.
88. "The Statue of Franklin," Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (Boston), 11 (1856):268;.
89. Tailer Diary, March 25, 1849.
90. Robert McCoskry Graham Journal, July 15, 1849, N-YHS;.
91. Richard Saunders, Poor Richard Improved: Being an Almanack and Ephemeris ... for the Year of our Lord 1753 (Philadelphia: B. Franklin and D. Hall, 1753), in Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 4 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 406.
92. Louis P. Masur, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 1993), 64-66.
93. J. A. Leo Lemay, emphasizing Franklin's later criticism of merchants in Pennsylvania Gazette editorials, doubts whether Franklin ever truly felt so optimistic about clerking. See Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin. Volume 1, Journalist, 1706-1730 (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 318-19.
94. For the importance of clerks' writing and bookkeeping skills in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and the importance of ties of religion, kinship, and friendship that connected them with merchants, see Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 42, 47-49, 135-46;.
95. Frederick B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House: The Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia, 1682-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 92-93;.
96. Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 56-62;.
97. Peter Mathias, "Risk, Credit, and Kinship in Early Modern Enterprise," in John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan, eds., The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17-21.
98. [Daniel Defoe], The Complete English Tradesman (1726; New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 1: 8-10, 99-117;.
99. Michael Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1968), 211-12;.
100. Toby L. Ditz, "Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled:Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," Journal of American History 81 (1994): 51-80.
101. Examples of manuals for clerks include William Weston, The Complete Merchant's Clerk (London: Charles Rivington, 1754);.
102. Malachy Postlethwayt, The Merchant's Public Counting-House, 2nd ed. (London: John and Paul Knapton, 1751).
103. Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, Translated from the French of the Celebrated Monsieur Savary (London: John and Paul Knapton, 1751), 83, 502;.
104. Richard Rolt, A New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (London: T. Osborne and J. Shipton, 1756);.
105. John Bland to John Reynell, August 18, 1737, quoted in Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House, 93. For estimates of the annual earning power of clerks and merchants, see Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 70, 90;.
106. Hunt, Middling Sort, 5;.
107. Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society, and Family Life in London, 1660-1730 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 94-98.
108. Master craftsmen's and merchants' attempts to find workers instead of apprentices are discussed in Christopher Brooks, "Apprenticeship, Social Mobility, and the Middling Sort, 1550-1800," in Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks, eds., The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society, and Politics in England, 1550-1800 (New York: St. Martin's, 1999);.
109. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 180;.
110. C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 90;.
111. W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 29-31.
112. Masur, ed., Autobiography, 51-52, 55, 60.
113. Pennsylvania Gazette, November 16, 1732.
114. Pennsylvania Gazette, October 19, 1752; February 1, 1775; May 21, 1767; November 3, 1773;.
115. Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), March 25, 1778;.
116. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789; New York: Modern Library, 2004), 89-90, 93.
117. Masters' concern that their coerced laborers would "pretend" to be someone they were not was a central trope of runaway advertisements. See Jonathan Prude, "To Look upon the 'Lower Sort': Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America, 1750-1800," Journal of American History 78 (1991): 124-59;.
118. David Waldstreicher, "Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic," William and Mary Quarterly 56 (1999): 243-72;.
119. Steven C. Bullock, "A Mumper among the Gentle: Tom Bell, Colonial Confidence Man," William and Mary Quarterly 55 (1998): 231-58.
120. HMM 5 (1841): 231.
121. HMM 14 (1846): 168; 12 (1845): 357; 9 (1843): 167; 20 (1849): 358.
122. Francis Bennett, Jr., Journal, August 28, December 31, 1854, AAS.
123. Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845-80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 57-58;.
124. Rowland Tappan Berthoff, British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790-1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 119-20;.
125. Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 67;.
126. Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825-1863 (New York: King's Crown Press, 1949), 96;.
127. Francis Wyse, America, Its Realities and Resources (London: T. C. Newby, 1846), 3:25-26.
128. Vickredge is quoted in Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants:The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1972), 395-96. For examples of foreign-born clerks earning berths with importing firms in New York, see the conclusion.
129. William Hoffman Diary, March 1, 1847; March 30-31, 1848, N-YHS.
130. Also see Thomas Augst, The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1-61.
131. On Hoffman's use of his Poughkeepsie experience as education, see Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes, 107-8.
132. James W. Alexander, The Merchant's Clerk Cheered and Counselled (1856; New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1861), 15-16; Thomas Marston Beare to Mary Susan Saltonstall, August 5, 1829, N-YHS.
133. Hoffman Diary, March 31, 1848;.
134. Alexander, Merchant's Clerk, 38.
135. Hoffman Diary, April 3, 1848.
136. Hoffman Diary, April 21, April 13, April 20, May 3, 1848.
137. HMM 1 (1839): 447.
138. EP, May 5, May 7, and May 8, 1832;.
139. William E. Dodge, Old New York: A Lecture (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1880), 44;.
140. Richard Lowitt, A Merchant Prince of the Nineteenth Century: William E. Dodge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 14-18;.
141. Edward G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 434, 438.
142. For a description of the hierarchy among clerks in some firms, see Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815-1860 (New York: Scribner's, 1939), 261-62.
143. EP, May 7, 1832;.
144. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 68-78.
145. For the pressures of commercial growth that opened clerkships to rural and urban young men, especially in retail businesses, see Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 9;.
146. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 437;.
147. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 10.
148. The specialization of firms in this era is described in Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand:The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 15, 19-28, 36-40;.
149. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 78-83.
150. For more on the "expansion of retailing" in the antebellum era and the "impact" it had "on the perceptions of the city dweller," consult idem, "Black Coats to White Collars: Economic Change, Nonmanual Work, and the Social Structure of Industrializing America," in Stuart W. Bruchey, ed., Small Business in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 105.
151. EP, May 7, 1832. For other references to the blurred divide between manual and nonmanual work and the uncertain meanings of occupational categories for and career trajectories of American men during this period, see Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 68-78, 112;.
152. Paul Erickson, "New Books, New Men: City-Mysteries Fiction, Authorship, and the Literary Market," Early American Studies 1 (2003): 273-312;.
153. Timothy B. Spears, 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 31;.
154. Jonathan A. Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 24;.
155. Gary J. Kornblith, "Becoming Joseph T. Buckingham: The Struggle for Artisanal Independence in Early-Nineteenth-Century Boston," in Howard B. Rock, Paul A. Gilje, and Robert Asher, eds., American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750-1850 (Baltimore, MD:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 123-34.
156. François Furstenberg, "Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse," Journal of American History 89 (2003): 1295-1330;.
157. Rowland Berthoff, Republic of the Dispossessed: The Exceptional Old-European Consensus in America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 131-54.
158. For examples of African Americans who clerked in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth- century America, see Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Negro Population, 1790-1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), 511;.
159. Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 215;.
160. 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 (New York: Putnam's, 1915), 209-10;.
161. Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 25;.
162. James Sidbury, "Slave Artisans in Richmond, Virginia, 1780-1810," in Rock, Gilje, and Asher, eds., American Artisans, 50;.
163. Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1988), 252;.
164. 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;.
165. Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 20;.
166. Juliet E. K. Walker, The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (New York: Twayne, 1998), 89;.
167. Provincial Freeman (Chatham, Canada West), August 29, 1855, , accessed December 8, 2008.
168. For more information on the London series that copied and, by 1834, addressed themes other than those in Clay's original lithographs, see file on Clay in Prints and Photographs Department, LCP; Shane White and Graham White, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 114-19;.
169. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992), 438-39;.
170. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 79-80.
171. Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends (1857; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 292.
172. Also see The Colored American (New York), November 9, 1839; Frederick Douglass' Paper, October 9, 1851, both at , accessed December 8, 2008.
173. Walter Johnson, "The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s," Journal of American History 87 (2000): 38;.
174. Patterson Diary, April 20, August 7, and October 17, 1838.
175. Graham Journal, September 10, 1849;.
176. Patterson Diary, November 21, 1838;.
177. Tailer Diary, January 29, 1850.
178. See Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 438, for a similar example in the trade card of New York's Bowne and Co., Stationers, around 1830. For more on trade cards, see Joanna Cohen, "Images and Imagination: Consumers in Commercial Lithography," The Book (March 2008):3-4;.
179. Nicholas B. Wainwright, Philadelphia in the Age of Romantic Lithography (Philadelphia:Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1958).
180. Patterson Diary, May 21, 1837; January 1, 1842;.
181. Graham Journal, November 24, 1848;.
182. NYH, January 1, 1848;.
183. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988);.
184. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1990), 167, 173-74;.
185. Ken Emerson, Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998);.
186. Lott, Love and Theft, 169-210;.
187. John Frick, "Uncle Tom's Cabin on the Antebellum Stage," at , accessed December 8, 2008.
188. Graham Journal, July 14, July 18, 1848.
189. Henry Southworth Diary, February 17, 1851, N-YHS;.
190. Rode's New York City Directory, for 1850-1851 (New York: Charles R. Rode, 1850); and the obituary for Adams in NYT, September 1, 1880, 8.
191. Vanity Fair, January 28, 1860, 72.
192. For attempts by capitalists to cast their exchanges as logical and legitimate in the midst of a variety of similar, though illegal, transactions, see Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse (New York: Viking, 2008);.
193. Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
194. For the origins and usage of "counter jumper," see Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, eds., Dictionary of American Slang (New York: Crowell, 1967), 125;.
195. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1938; New York: Macmillan, 1951), 183;.
196. Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van Den Bark, The American Thesaurus of Slang (New York: Crowell, 1942), 519, 526.
197. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 96-97;.
198. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), figure 4 after 216;.
199. Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 100-101;.
200. George Wilkes, The Lives of Helen Jewett and Richard P. Robinson (New York: n.p., 1849), 60.
201. The eighteenth-century origins of a "homespun ideology" that encouraged virtuous consumption and condemned women for their luxury purchases are discussed in Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 11-36;.
202. T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 172-82.
203. Vanity Fair, February 4, 1860, 84.
204. Tailer Diary, January 22-25, 1849; January 3, 1851; January 15, 1852.
205. Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Vintage, 1998), 76-77;.
206. Timothy B. Spears, 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 30-31.
207. For the nineteenth-century discourse about domestic life that made the home women's place of "business," see Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: 'Woman's Sphere' in New England, 1780-1835, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 73.
208. For changing notions of commercial space and the creation of refined retail spaces in nineteenth-century cities, see Dell Upton, "Another City: The Urban Cultural Landscape in the Early Republic," in Everyday Life in the Early Republic, ed. Catherine E. Hutchins (Winterthur, DE: Winterthur Museum, 1994), 97-98;.
209. Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 64-65, 97;.
210. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 92-107;.
211. Harry E. Resseguie, "A. T. Stewart's Marble Palace: The Cradle of the Department Store," New-York Historical Society Quarterly 48 (1964): 131-62.
212. Also see David Scobey, "The Anatomy of the Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York," Social History 17 (1992): 203-27.
213. [Asa Greene], The Perils of Pearl Street, including a Taste of the Dangers of Wall Street, by a Late Merchant (New York: Betts and Anstice, and Peter Hill, 1834), 26;.
214. A Peep into Catharine Street; or, The Mysteries of Shopping, by a Late Retailer (New York: J. Slater, 1846), 7;.
215. Nicholas H. Chesebrough Diary, September 15, October 25, 1836, WL;.
216. Joanna Cohen, "Images and Imagination: Consumers in Commercial Lithography," The Book (March 2008): 3-4.
217. The struggle for power among merchants, clerks, and customers in antebellum stores is reminiscent of the culture of department stores in the early twentieth century. See Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1986).
218. [Greene], Perils of Pearl Street, 27;.
219. "A Counter Hit," Vanity Fair, March 10, 1860, 172.
220. 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: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 90.
221. Godey's Lady's Book (Philadelphia), 48 (January 1854): 83-84;.
222. Harper's Weekly (New York), October 31, 1857, 689;.
223. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 200;.
224. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 185-86.
225. Godey's, 48 (January 1854): 84.
226. Hoffman Diary, January 8, 1849; May 8, 1848, N-YHS.
227. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of Frances Anne Butler (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1835), 1:92-93, , accessed December 9, 2008.
228. Isabella Lucy Bird, The English-Woman in America (London: J. Murray, 1856), 340 (I thank Jonathan Prude for telling me about this source);.
229. The New York Sporting Whip, February 4, 1843;.
230. Godey's, 14 (April 1837): 165.
231. DT, September 22, 1846;.
232. Lears, Fables of Abundance, 81;.
233. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 666-68;.
234. Stephen N. Elias, Alexander T. Stewart: The Forgotten Merchant Prince (Westport, CT:Praeger, 1992), 48;.
235. Harry E. Resseguie, "Alexander Turney Stewart and the Development of the Department Store, 1823-1876," Business History Review 39 (1965): 309-10;.
236. Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 102-4;.
237. Lewis Tappan, The Life of Arthur Tappan (1871; Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 70-73.
238. Polyanthos, May 4, 1839;.
239. Sunday Flash (New York), September 19, 1841.
240. 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: Craighead and Allen, 1837), 8-10;.
241. NPG, October 17, 1846, 45;.
242. William Burns, Life in New York, in Doors and out of Doors (New York: Bunce and Brother, 1851);.
243. Home Journal (New York), February 1, 1851;.
244. HMM 33 (1855): 766.
245. Also see Amy Dru Stanley, "Home Life and the Morality of the Market," in Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800-1880 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 74-96.
246. Vanity Fair, January 28, 1860, 72;.
247. Anne G. Myles, "Queering the Study of Early American Sexuality," William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 200;.
248. Randolph Trumbach, "Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London," Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1991): 190;.
249. Clare A. Lyons, "Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture: Homoeroticism in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 124-26;.
250. Cohen, Murder of Helen Jewett;.
251. Rotundo, American Manhood, 271-72.
252. Whip, February 26, 1842;.
253. Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 45-59;.
254. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002), 172;.
255. Myles, "Queering the Study of Early American Sexuality";.
256. George Chauncey, Gay New York: The Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (London: Flamingo, 1995), 13.
257. George Rogers Taylor, "'Philadelphia in Slices' by George G. Foster," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 93 (1969): 32;.
258. Godey's, 45 (October 1852): 371; 17 (October 1838):180;.
259. [Foster], New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (New York: W. F. Burgess, 1849), 8-9.
260. For images of female clerks in Boston and Philadelphia stores, see "Interior View of L. S. Driggs Lace and Bonnet Store," Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (Boston), 3 (1852): 244;.
261. Edward W. Clay, Life in Philadelphia, plate 14 (Philadelphia: S. Hart, 1830), Prints and Photographs Department, LCP; "Interior View of L. J. Levy & Co.'s Dry Goods Store" (Philadelphia: L. N. Rosenthal, 1857), HSP.
262. For the sensational murder of a cigar-shop attendant a year before the publication of the Whip image and essay, consult Amy Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. 45-60.
263. Also see Toby L. Ditz, "The New Men's History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History," Gender and History 16 (2004):1-35;.
264. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York:Knopf, 1986), 96-99;.
265. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 208;.
266. Cohen, Gilfoyle, Horowitz, The Flash Press;.
267. Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 146.
268. "The Counter-Jumpers' Gymnasium," Vanity Fair, March 31, 1860, 216.
269. Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 69-97;.
270. Graham Journal, February 5, February 9, 1849;.
271. Tailer Diary, February 21, March 20, July 22, 1852; September 11-12, 1850.
272. For the ways in which the California Gold Rush offered young men the opportunity to confront standards of respectability through violence and disreputable behavior and yet maintain access to those standards, see Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 197-219.
273. HMM 26 (1852): 648; reprinted in The Genesee Farmer (Rochester, NY), 17 (August 1856):249.
274. Also consult Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 94;.
275. William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 222-37;.
276. Thomas Augst, The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 220;.
277. Jonathan A. Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 10, 181, 301;.
278. Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 96, 113-16, 123.
279. Patterson Diary, March 16, 1846; September 10, 1848.
280. Catherine E. Kelly, In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 19-63;.
281. Boydston, Home and Work, 120-41;.
282. Stansell, City of Women, 116-19;.
283. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 63-70, 109;.
284. Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor, 11, 27-29, 62-69, 260-61;.
285. Gary J. Kornblith, "Becoming Joseph T. Buckingham: The Struggle for Artisanal Independence in Early-Nineteenth-Century Boston," in Howard B. Rock, Paul A. Gilje, and Robert Asher, eds., American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750-1850 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 129-30;.
286. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 157-68, 182-90;.
287. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 121-33;.
288. Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 85.
289. HMM 33 (1855): 394 (quoted with a different interpretation in Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 78);.
290. Kelly, In the New England Fashion, 35.
291. Also see Roberts, American Alchemy, 182-83;.
292. 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, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 50;.
293. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 82.
294. James W. Alexander, The Merchant's Clerk Cheered and Counselled (1856; New York:Anson D. F. Randolph, 1861), 17-18.
295. For more on comic valentines, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 77-85.
296. I thank Marni Davis for the "side-saddle" interpretation of the valentine. For growing concerns that writing was no longer appropriate for the "self-made man" in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Augst, Clerk's Tale, 79, 207-54.
297. For an introduction to the connections in American political culture between production and citizenship, see Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 55, 65, 85;.
298. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, repr. with new introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);.
299. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic:New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1787-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
300. For the ways in which antebellum political parties appealed to young voters in particular, see Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6;.
301. William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 436.
302. Richard Franklin Bensel explores attempts to discern the age of youthful voters in The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 93-106.
303. Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin have illustrated the disparity between merchants' and clerks' partisan affiliations in Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 2000), 31-32.
304. Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);.
305. Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic, 8, 72, 84;.
306. Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001), 141-71.
307. Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9;.
308. Burke, Conundrum of Class, 108, 121-22;.
309. Foner, Free Soil, xxi;.
310. Leon Fink, "The New Labor History and the Powers of Historical Pessimism:Consensus, Hegemony, and the Case of the Knights of Labor," Journal of American History 75 (1988): 115-36.
311. Henry A. Patterson Diary, November 5, 1842, N-YHS;.
312. Robert V. Remini, Daniel Webster:The Man and His Time (New York: Norton, 1997), 568.
313. Nicholas H. Chesebrough Diary, November 8, November 12, November 14, 1836, WL.
314. William Hoffman Diary, June 10, 1848; October 6, 1848, N-YHS.
315. Edward N. Tailer Diary, June 8, May 24, 1848, N-YHS; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1982), 33-55.
316. Hoffman Diary, September 9, 1848.
317. Constitution and By-Laws of the Dry Goods Clerks' Mutual Benefit and Protective Association (New York: Oliver and Brother, 1850), 3, 4, 6, 15-19.
318. E. F. Hatfield, The Night No Time for Labor: A Sermon on the Early Closing of Stores (New York: D. A. Woodworth, 1850), quotations on 138, 140.
319. Also see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), 68.
320. Remini, Daniel Webster, 610-17;.
321. John Niven, Martin Van Buren: The Romantic Age of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 291, 544-45, 594-95;.
322. Ted Widmer, Martin Van Buren (New York: Times Books, 2005), 126, 152, 161;.
323. Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 121.
324. Horace Greeley, Art and Industry as Represented in the Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, New York, 1853-4 (New York: Redfield, 1853), 231.
325. Also see Arthur Harrison Cole, The American Wool Manufacture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 1:23, 28, 151, 300;.
326. Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 8;.
327. John A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953), 224;.
328. Doggett's New-York City Directory for 1848 and 1849 (New York: John Doggett, Jr., 1848).
329. Patricia Cline Cohen, "Unregulated Youth: Masculinity and Murder in the 1830s City," Radical History Review 52 (1992): 33-52;.
330. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women:A Study of Middle-Class Culture, 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982);.
331. Erickson, "Welcome to Sodom," 330-36;.
332. John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 70-146;.
333. Stuart M. Blumin, "George G. Foster and the Emerging Metropolis," in New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches by George G. Foster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1-61;.
334. Jonathan Prude, The Appearance of Class: The Visual Presence of American Working People from the Revolution to World War I (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming), ch. 3;.
335. David Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 2002), 9.
336. For the economic benefits and cultural meanings of "home" in this period, see Gamber, "Tarnished Labor," 177-204;.
337. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 173;.
338. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 121.
339. For the ubiquity of urban boarding, see Wendy Gamber, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 3.
340. The continued ties between young male boarders in the city and their families are traced in Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 22, 32-34, 81.
341. Thomas Butler Gunn, The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses (New York: Mason Brothers, 1857), 49, 51, 53, 61, 92, 96-97.
342. For the scholarly debate about how boardinghouses were and were not made respectable through class and ethnic segregation, see Gamber, Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America, 30-31;.
343. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 121, 129, 134-35;.
344. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 178;.
345. Kenneth A. Scherzer, The Unbounded Community:Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830-1875 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 104-5.
346. [James Boardman], America, and the Americans, by a Citizen of the World (London:Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1833), 27;.
347. William Hoffman Diary, April 10, May 18, and July 19, 1848, N-YHS.
348. For the culinary shortcomings of boardinghouses and clerks' inability to rent rooms in houses with better-appointed tables, see Gamber, Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America, 79-80.
349. Graham Journal, October 28, November 10, 1848.
350. Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 63;.
351. "Firemen's Register, Board of Engineers and Engine Companys" (1855-1864), N-YHS;.
352. Cornelius Mathews, A Pen-and-Ink Panorama of New York City (New York: John S. Taylor, 1853), 137;.
353. George G. Foster, New York Naked (New York: Robert M. Dewitt, n.d.), 125-26 (Foster envisions the fireman leaving a ball to fight a fire, and then returning "to resume the thread of his night's amusement");.
354. Benjamin F. Baker, A Glance at New York (New York: Samuel French and Son, 1848);.
355. Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 56-57;.
356. Peter George Buckley, "To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820-1860" (Ph. D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984), 298, 321, 323, 334, 439-41;.
357. Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001), 180-84;.
358. Ned Buntline [E. Z. C. Judson], The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life (New York: Berford, 1848), 74-75.
359. Southworth Diary, February 18, 1851;.
360. Debby Applegate, "Henry Ward Beecher and the 'Great Middle Class': Mass-Marketed Intimacy and Middle-Class Identity," in Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston, eds., The Middling Sorts: Exploration in the History of the American Middle Class (New York: Routledge, 2001), 117-18.
361. Southworth probably heard Beecher preach from notes of a thanksgiving sermon he had given the previous fall, in which he criticized men who believed they could "be honorable in private, and yet dishonest in public affairs." See Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 42.
362. Applegate, "Henry Ward Beecher and the 'Great Middle Class,'" 120-24.
363. Henry Ward Beecher, Lectures to Young Men, on Various Important Subjects, New Edition with Additional Lectures (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 225-26.
364. Hoffman Diary, September 8, 1850.
365. Joseph Parrish Thompson, Young Men Admonished, in a Series of Lectures (New York:Leavitt, Trow, 1848);.
366. The Advocate for Moral Reform (New York), March 1, 1836, 33; March 15, 1836, 43. Also see Patricia Cline Cohen, "Unregulated Youth: Masculinity and Murder in the 1830s City," Radical History Review 52 (1992): 33-52;.
367. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
368. John Todd, The Moral Influence, Dangers and Duties, Connected with Great Cities (Northampton, MA: J. H. Butler; Philadelphia: Smith and Peck; New York: Gould, Newman, and Saxton; Boston: Crocker and Brewster, and A. D. Phelps, 1841), 201, 204;.
369. Hoffman Diary, September 14, July 3, September 18, 1850.
370. Also see Rodney Hessinger, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780-1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 125-76.
371. First Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the New York Magdalen Society (New York: n.p., 1831), 5, 13-14;.
372. Genius of Temperance, Philanthropist, and People's Advocate (New York), August 3, 1831;.
373. Todd, Moral Influence, 207.
374. For the keyhole woodcut, see New York Sporting Whip, February 11, 1843.
375. Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 33, 113.
376. Toby Ditz argues that historians of masculinity should attend to the power dynamics of gender by focusing on the "patriarchal dividend" men hoped to accrue through their "access to women." See Toby L. Ditz, "The New Men's History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History," Gender and History 16 (2004):10-11.
377. For young men moving back and forth between parlor and sporting cultures and "dangerous" and "endangered" identities, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Bourgeois Discourse and the Age of Jackson: An Introduction," and "Davy Crockett as Trickster: Pornography, Liminality, and Symbolic Inversion in Victorian America," in Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 81, 92;.
378. C. Dallett Hemphill, "Isaac and 'Isabella': Courtship and Conflict in an Antebellum Circle of Youth," Early American Studies 2 (2004): 413-16, 422;.
379. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002), 125-43;.
380. Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
381. Also see Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 64-78.
382. Hemphill, "Isaac and 'Isabella'," 403; Edward N. Tailer Diary, April 17, 1849, N-YHS.
383. Tailer Diary, November 12, 1852.
384. For more on these sporting newspapers, see Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2008).
385. Smith, Green Family, 59-65, 103, 105, 113.
386. The Flash (New York), October 2, 1842;.
387. The Whip and Satirist of New-York and Brooklyn, April 2, April 9, 1842;.
388. The Whip, August 27, 1842.
389. The Rake (New York), September 10, 1842;.
390. New York Sporting Whip, March 4, 1843;.
391. Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 99-188.
392. The Weekly Rake, October 1, 1842.
393. New York Sporting Whip, February 11, 1843.
394. Weekly Rake, October 22, 1842.
395. Whip, October 15, 1842.
396. Also see Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
397. Weekly Rake, July 9, 1842;.
398. Flash, November 20, 1841.
399. Flash, December 10, 1842;.
400. The Weekly Whip (New York), February 12, 1855;.
401. Hemphill, "Isaac and 'Isabella'," 399 n.3.
402. The Life and Adventures of Cicily Martin (New York: Sinclair and Bagley, 1846), 59-61.
403. Also see Venus' Miscellany (New York), January 31, 1857;.
404. Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850," Signs 4 (1978): 219-36.
405. "The Trial of Richard P. Robinson for the Murder of Helen Jewett, New York City, 1836," in John D. Lawson, ed., American State Trials, Volume 12 (St. Louis: F. H. Thomas Law Book, 1919), 458;.
406. George Wilkes, The Lives of Helen Jewett, and Richard P. Robinson (New York: n.p., 1849), 59-60;.
407. Robinson Down Stream; Containing Conversations with the 'Great Unhung,' Since His Acquittal; and an Account, by Robinson Himself of His Travels from Connecticut to New-Orleans, on His Way to Texas (New York: n.p., 1836), 3-5;.
408. Cohen, Murder of Helen Jewett, 378.
409. Cohen, Murder of Helen Jewett, 126-51.
410. Tailer Diary, October 20, October 24, 1853.
411. Graham Journal, July 28, 1848.
412. Patterson Diary, November 5, 1842.
413. Tailer Diary, August 23, 1852;.
414. Horowitz, Rereading Sex, 11, 55.
415. Also see Michael Ryan, The Philosophy of Marriage, in Its Social, Moral, and Physical Relations (Philadelphia: Barrington and Haswell, 1848);.
416. Alexander Walker, Beauty; Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Woman (New York: W. H. Colyer, 1845);.
417. idem, Intermarriage; or, The Mode in Which, and the Causes Why, Beauty, Health, and Intellect, Result from Certain Unions, and Deformity, Disease, and Insanity, from Others (New York: J. and H. G. Langley, 1839);.
418. idem, Woman Physiologically Considered as to Mind, Morals, Marriage, Matrimonial Slavery, Infidelity and Divorce (London, A. H. Baily, 1839).
419. Robert C. Williams, Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 40-43;.
420. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977);.
421. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2001);.
422. Howard P. Chudacoff, "Success and Security: The Meaning of Social Mobility in America," Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 101-12;.
423. Clark Davis, Company Men: White-Collar Life and Corporate Cultures in Los Angeles, 1892-1941 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000);.
424. Jocelyn Wills, "Respectable Mediocrity: The Everyday Life of an Ordinary American Striver, 1876-1890," Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 323-49;.
425. Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 203-19.
426. Ralph M. Hower, History of Macy's of New York, 1858-1919: Chapters in the Evolution of the Department Store (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943);.
427. Sarah Smith Malino, "Faces across the Counter: A Social History of Female Department Store Employees, 1870-1920" (Ph. D. diss., Columbia University, 1982);.
428. Jerome P. Bjelopera, City of Clerks: Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia, 1870-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005);.
429. Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986);.
430. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 291;.
431. Carole Srole, "'A Position That God Has Not Particularly Assigned to Men': The Feminization of Clerical Work, Boston, 1860-1915" (Ph. D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1984).
432. "An Hour in A. T. Stewart's Retail Store," Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (New York), April 24, 1875, 107;.
433. Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (Hartford: J. B. Burr, 1869), 59.
434. Also see David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 95.
435. "An Hour in A. T. Stewart's," Harper's Weekly (New York), January 15, 1870, 39;.
436. Philip Quilibet, "Drift-Wood," The Galaxy (New York) 22 (1876): 556;.
437. Edward Crapsey, "A Monument of Trade," The Galaxy 9 (1870): 98.
438. For Stewart hiring failed merchants to staff his corporate hierarchy of buyers and department managers, see Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 226-27;.
439. Stephen N. Elias, A. T. Stewart: The Forgotten Merchant Prince (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 53.
440. William Hoffman Diary, August 31, 1850, N-YHS.
441. Also see Allan Stanley Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes: The Social Control of Young Men in New York (Lewisburg, PA:Bucknell University Press, 1975), 118.
442. William Hoffman, The Monitor; or, Jottings of a New York Merchant during Trip Round the Globe (New York: Carleton, 1863), vi-vii, 45, 73-82.
443. Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 203-19;.
444. Griffen and Griffen, Natives and Newcomers, 136.
445. See Chandler, Visible Hand; Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-1920 (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1990), 125-48;.
446. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 258-97;.
447. Beckert, Monied Metropolis;.
448. Davis, Company Men.
449. Virginia Penny, The Employments of Women: A Cyclopoedia of Woman's Work (Boston:Walker, Wise, 1863), vii, x, 104-8, 125-31.
450. Revolution, January 15, 1868, 25; July 15, 1869, 23;.
451. Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 126-61.
452. Caroline H. Dall, 'Woman's Right to Labor': or, Low Wages and Hard Work (Boston:Walker, Wise, 1860), 72, 104-5;.
453. Helen R. Deese, ed., Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-Century Woman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), xv-xvi, 287-88;.
454. Penny, Employments of Women, 126.
455. NYT, January 8, 1874, 8. For the rhetorical and organizing efforts to include "brain workers" within the producerist ethic, on the one hand, and the inverse movement to integrate working people into "respectable" society, see Leon Fink, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 13, 223;.
456. idem, "The New Labor History and the Powers of Historical Pessimism: Consensus, Hegemony, and the Case of the Knights of Labor," Journal of American History 75 (1988): 115-36;.
457. Jürgen Kocka, White-Collar Workers in America, 1890-1940, trans. Maura Kealey (London: Sage, 1980), 54-55.
458. For Knights membership in New York City, see Jonathan Garlock, comp., Guide to the Local Assemblies of the Knights of Labor (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 313-38.
459. "Poverty Spreads," ;.
460. "CBS Poll: The Middle Class Squeeze," , both accessed June 6, 2007.