On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America 9780814753484

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On the Make

AME RIC A N H I STORY A N D C ULTUR E General Editors: Neil Foley, Kevin Gaines, Martha Hodes, and Scott Sandage Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America Angela D. Dillard One Nation Underground: A History of the Fallout Shelter Kenneth D. Rose The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American Carolyn Thomas de la Peña Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920 Gerald Horne Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture in the 1960s Edited by Avital H. Bloch and Lauri Umansky Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort Karen Christel Krahulik A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women’s Public Culture, 1930–1960 Shirley Jennifer Lim Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America Kevin Mumford Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp Leslie Paris Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery Mary Niall Mitchell America’s Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867–1960 Donna T. Haverty-Stacke On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America Brian P. Luskey

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

Brian P. Luskey

 NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2010 by New York University All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Luskey, Brian P. On the make : clerks and the quest for capital in nineteenth-century America / Brian P. Luskey. p. cm. — (American history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–8147–5228–9 (cl : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–8147–5228–4 (cl : alk. paper) 1. Clerks—United States—History—19th century. 2. United States—Commerce—History—19th century. I. Title. HD8039.M4U554 2009 305.5’56—dc22 2009026862 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Puzzled about Identity

vii 1

1

What Is My Prospects?

21

2

The Humble Laborer in the White Collar

54

3

Homo Counter-Jumperii

83

4

Striving for Citizenship

119

5

The Republic of Broadcloth

148

6

The Swedish Nightingale and the Peeping Tom

177

Conclusion: Once More, Free

207

Notes

237

Index

273

About the Author

278

v

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Acknowledgments

The striver within me would like to make an ambitious claim: I wrote this book all by myself. And it’s true; I did. Yet like the creed of self-making, such a statement obscures the fact that I relied upon the assistance of many people and institutions as I researched, wrote, and revised. I am pleased to have the opportunity to thank them here for their support, though I will try not to sound like an obsequious counter jumper as I do so. The three people who have done the most to shape the questions I try to answer in this book are Jonathan Prude, Scott Sandage, and Wendy Woloson. Jonathan, my graduate school mentor, encouraged and challenged me in equal measure as I wrote this book. “I really like this,” he would say in response to a chapter draft, but then admonish me, only halfjokingly, to “change everything.” His keen suggestions on several versions of this book have immeasurably improved the final product. Scott, coeditor of New York University Press’s American History and Culture Series, read the manuscript twice with extraordinary care and gave me priceless feedback that strengthened the book’s organization and argument. Wendy has been a close friend of this book and its author for a long time now, and our discussions about new directions in economic history inform every page that I write. I thank all three of them for their friendship and generosity. I am grateful to several institutions for the funding that made researching and writing this book possible, and wish to thank several people associated with those institutions for guiding me through research collections and otherwise providing invaluable aid: the Library Company of Philadelphia (Jim Green, Connie King, and Charlene Peacock), the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (Amy Baxter-Bellamy), the American Antiquarian Society (Joanne Chaison and Caroline Sloat), and the NewYork Historical Society. West Virginia University’s Eberly College of Arts and Sciences kindly provided a publication subvention.

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Acknowledgments

I am particularly fortunate to have spent two years in Philadelphia as a fellow at the McNeil Center and the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company. I thank directors Dan Richter and Cathy Matson, respectively, for fostering the scholarly community that helped expand this book’s historiographical horizons. At conference meetings, I have profited from the advice of several historians who have commented on my work. I thank Howard Chudacoff, Christopher Clark, Toby Ditz, Faye Dudden, Ann Fabian, Dallett Hemphill, Graham Hodges, David Jaffee, Jane Kamensky, and the late Susan Porter Benson for their efforts on my behalf. Walter Friedman, editor of Business History Review, and Roderick McDonald, editor of Journal of the Early Republic, generously granted me permission to publish substantially revised versions of two of my articles. I also appreciate the help of two history department chairs, Barry Rothaus of the University of Northern Colorado and Elizabeth Fones-Wolf of West Virginia University, who have done their utmost to give me the time and resources necessary to see this project to completion. I feel especially lucky to have published this book with New York University Press. I thank Eric Zinner and Ciara McLaughlin for shepherding me through the process, and Martha Hodes, Amy Greenberg, and an anonymous reviewer for making inspired suggestions that significantly enhanced the manuscript. Friends and colleagues sustained me as I worked on this project. Hayes and Kelly Trotter planned the games in and around Wash Park that helped me escape the daily grind. Ben Irvin gave me a title for the book and let me borrow many of his brilliant ideas for making the text better. I thank Tom Bredehoft, Derek Buckaloo, Paul Erickson, Josh Greenberg, Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, Leslie Harris, Rose Hathaway, Erin Jordan, Cathy Kelly, Michael Kramp, Amy Lang, Ann Little, Michelle McDonald, Roderick McDonald, Jennifer Meares, Stephen Mihm, David Miller, Paul O’Grady, Emily Satterwhite, Kris Shepard, Nick Syrett, Rob Widell, and Amy Wood as well for taking the time to improve my work and make writing this book a lot of fun. My grandmother Doris Peck Warner Daiger and uncles Pete Luskey and Jim Peck taught me early in life to value education and scholarship. My sister Kate Jacobson is a talented teacher and writer who has been an inspiration and a good friend to me. Other members of my family have made sacrifices so that I could write this book. They kindly gave me places to stay near archives (don’t even think about moving, people!), encouraged me with their interest in what I was doing, and not so silently wondered

Acknowledgments

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how it could ever take so long to publish a book. So to you—Paul Jacobson, Eleanor and Tom Roney, Tina and Jack Peters, Sharon Rossi and John Majkut, Gail and Kurt Warner, Valerie and Alex Lanham, Adrienne and Andrew Lopez, Laura and Tim Folk, Kelly and Damon Rossi—thank you for your loving support. This book is dedicated to Barbara and Patrick Luskey, my parents and best friends. They got me started on my journey toward being a historian many summers ago on a family trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Knowing that I can never repay them for the opportunities and love they have given me, I can only say thank you for being with me every step of the way.

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Introduction Puzzled about Identity

The thirtieth day of March, 1848, marked a turning point in the life of an eighteen-year-old upstate New Yorker named William Hoffman. On that day, he chose to leave his family’s farm in Claverack and become an urban man of business. This momentous decision was the product of several weeks’ reflection about the process of self-making. Pondering the “perfect course of Providence” in his diary earlier in the month, he doubted that he could determine his destiny. “[W]hatever our fate is,” he wrote, “we must ca[l]mly submit to it without a murmur.” Yet at the same time, he felt that his relationship with his imperious brother George had become unbearable—the pair argued regularly about the management of their farm. So he chose to follow the example of his other brother Daniel, a clerk in their uncle’s shop in the nearby town of Hudson, and find a commercial clerkship of his own.1 For even as he reminded himself to abide by God’s will, William Hoffman was a striver, eager for the excitement and opportunities for independence that urban commerce offered. He was competitive, desirous of a “situation” with a firm operating in a more exciting location than Hudson. Perhaps Poughkeepsie or New York City, he thought, would provide more expansive scope for his ambition to attain the prerogatives associated with being an independent man. Hoffman was unable to put his plan into action until a Hudson-bound stagecoach passed by the farm. “I stood in the Threshold of the Hall,” he wrote, gazing “with steady fixedness” toward the horizon “for the Stage to make its appearance.” Poised on that threshold, Hoffman was situated astride the boundaries separating childhood and adulthood, urban and rural economies, urbane and provincial identities. Waiting for the stagecoach fostered doubt within him. He remained “very thoughtful all day,” and “seconds seemed . . . like minutes” as he reconsidered this fateful choice and its potential consequences. He was a young

1

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Introduction: Puzzled about Identity

man contemplating a rite of passage, a personal crossroads that offered both thrilling and worrying outcomes. Would he succeed in his attempt to remake his rural identity into that of a cultured city clerk? Would he eventually become wealthy as a merchant in his own right? Such were the anxious musings of the striver.2 Hoffman and thousands of other young white men who came to American cities to find clerkships subscribed to an ideology of self-making that had coalesced in the egalitarian moment of the United States’s independence and matured as industrialization and urban growth signaled wider opportunities for economic and social mobility. As one scholar has argued, young clerks used diaries to reflect upon the development of moral faculties and declare a private, interior independence that was sometimes elusive at work. Clerks’ diaries offer focused accounts of the ways in which young men thought about themselves, their career trajectories, and their places in urban society. These documents are evidence of clerks’ determination to craft their identities. The stories they told about themselves were crucial elements in their efforts to determine who they were and who they would become.3 For many young white men living in or moving to American cities in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the opportunities for selfmaking seemed endless. This was particularly true for clerks in urban wholesale and retail establishments, who believed that their occupational posts would prepare them for independence at the head of their own firms. These young men were ubiquitous figures in American cityscapes. In every commercial house and store, one could expect to find someone, typically though not exclusively a young man, who performed the writing, accounting, and sales tasks crucial to the development and efficiency of capitalism. For country storekeepers visiting cities on seasonal trips to wholesalers in order to stock their shelves with goods, or for city customers making retail purchases, clerks truly were the faces of capitalist transformation, leading one historian to contend that they were “revolutionary” figures on the urban scene.4 These clerks were on the make, persistently seeking self-advancement, self-improvement, or self-gratification. They could cultivate character from within to get ahead in business or adopt new identities to seize the potential independence of urban life and leisure. They monitored their position in firms, vigilantly sizing up competitors who might prove to be obstacles to their advancement. They were like many other white American men who seemed to be constantly searching for the main chance. In On the Make, I analyze diaries, letters, newspapers, credit reports, census

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity 3

data, advice literature, and fiction to examine who clerks were, what they did, and with whom they interacted inside and outside of wholesale and retail businesses in New York City (with illustrative detours to other American cities) between the 1830s and 1870s. I explore their role in perpetuating and rethinking cultural narratives about economic opportunity, social order, and self-determination that helped Americans make sense of the dislocating changes caused by industrialization and urban growth. Clerks told stories about themselves in diaries as they sought to map their hopes and comprehend their disappointments. They likewise emerged as figures invoked with special frequency in fictional representations, cautionary tales, and advice publications to chart the reorientations taking hold in important sectors of American life. These young men stood for the economic promise and peril as well as the widening and narrowing social divisions that defined urban America. Examining the intersections between clerks’ stories and stories about clerks is crucially important for our understanding of nineteenth-century America because they illuminate the ways in which Americans made sense of capitalist transformation and urban experience by coming into conflict with each other about the meanings of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age in their society. These young men embarked on a quest for economic and cultural capital that would earn them power and prestige, and they identified clerkships and independent living in cities as the means to achieve these ends. They wagered that their occupation promised upward mobility to proprietorship and often tried to balance refined practices, appearance, and conduct with the swagger of the young man about town to garner social respect among various urban constituencies. This quest for wealth and respect was never a fait accompli because it always involved a set of symbolic contests with contemporaries. In these contests, many clerks found that economic and cultural capital slipped through their fingers, despite their efforts to cultivate at least the appearance of good character and refined sensibilities. The phrase “on the make” thus had multiple meanings for them. Clerks were ambitious strivers in difficult economic times, unwilling to bide their time when financial panic might be just around the corner. Authors counseled youth to trust in the benefits of a decayed labor arrangement, apprenticeship, and patiently save money from their often minuscule salaries in the hopes of starting businesses of their own. Young clerks did porters’ work—heavy lifting that did not square with the assumption that they worked with pen and paper at desk, counter, and till. They developed intimate relationships

4

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity

with female customers, acquaintances often fueled by mistrust because they were fostered with sales in mind. They were servants in palaces of consumption, catering to women and monitored by parental surrogates, but life in boardinghouses and the urban underworld gave them opportunities to exist outside family surveillance, mixing with women more intimately (although not always as intimately as they hoped). Some rejected prescriptive authors’ arguments about the connection between morals and markets, pilfering cash and goods from their employers and using the dirty proceeds in alcohol-induced sprees in oyster cellars, theaters, and brothels. Some declared allegiance to a model of refinement in democratic politics and urban life that was at odds with the nation’s celebration of equality and was perceived to be hollow because they lacked the economic capital to fund such cultural claims. Clerks made a mockery of the evangelical, reforming, domestic, and striving ideologies shaping American culture, and yet they were also at the very heart of that culture. In their presence at church and brothel, commercial house and public house, clerks revealed that the values, institutions, and practices held dear by many of their elders were up for contest, even among those who appeared to be perfectly placed to accumulate power and prestige. Clerks’ ambiguous identities and motives were deeply troubling to many authors, parents, and employers as well as to the clerks themselves. Yet when many writers blamed clerks for their failures and social indeterminacy, they implicated industrial capitalism and cities— which these same authors relentlessly tried, and failed, to control—as obstacles to achieving upward mobility.5 Clerks moved to the center of the economy, society, and consciousness of their contemporaries with the maturing of industrial capitalism and the growth of the anonymous city. Examining commercial clerks in New York City makes particular sense because transportation improvements, industrialization, and deepening credit relationships between merchants and customers made Manhattan the focal point of the nation’s economy. The Black Ball line’s packet-ship service that carried people and goods between Liverpool and its East River docks commenced in 1818, while the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, connected the city with the fertile agricultural hinterland of western New York and the Great Lakes. New York’s role in Caribbean and southern commerce positioned its merchants to broker the cotton trade between slave masters and manufacturers in England and New England. By the early 1850s, railroad traffic in the Hudson River Valley began to divert the Northeast’s textile production toward New York.

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity 5

While merchants had typically imported and sold goods from their ships and countinghouses in the eighteenth century, they increasingly specialized in the nineteenth century in order to make trading more manageable. Economic growth also propelled others to enter the commercial world “on their own hook” as independent proprietors, and the proliferation and specialization of mercantile firms created a geography of trade in downtown Manhattan. Importers, often located along the South Street waterfront, continued to purchase goods from European, Caribbean, and Asian markets. Wholesaling “jobbers” set up shop in Pearl Street and nearby thoroughfares, buying large lots of goods from importers and breaking them into smaller blocks for sale to urban and rural retailers. Store proprietors in fashionable Broadway and less refined (but no less commercially oriented) streets like Chatham and the Bowery sold goods to individual consumers. Financiers and bankers on Wall Street fed the interconnected parts of this commercial dynamo with ample amounts of credit and currency. Industrialization and the transportation improvements that accompanied it precipitated an increase in the number of middlemen who connected northeastern city merchants with urban and rural customers across the country. Peddlers, storekeepers, and agents employed by merchants and manufacturers served as conduits for the movement of goods, capital, and credit. Industrial production spurred the substantial growth in the size and number of urban wholesale and retail establishments in the 1820s and 1830s, and New York merchants responded by hiring clerks to copy voluminous correspondence, calculate escalating sums in ledgers, sell goods to customers, run errands, collect debts, drum up business among rural merchants visiting the city, and physically move goods around stores. Landless young men from farming communities and foreign shores came to cities in search of work in the trades, on the docks, or in commercial houses and stores. Young men who desired clerkships were an important segment of the migrant population that swelled New York’s population to two hundred thousand in 1830, to more than half a million in 1850, and to nearly one million people in 1870.6 Clues about the demographic makeup of the clerking population in New York before the Civil War emerge from two samples I have taken from the Federal Census of 1850 and the New York State Census of 1855 to elicit who clerks were, where they came from, and how they lived in the antebellum city. Nearly fourteen thousand clerks lived in New York City in 1855. Unfortunately, neither the federal nor the state census makes it

6 Introduction: Puzzled about Identity

possible to disaggregate clerks working in commercial houses and stores from those employed in law offices, city government, factories, and courts, but taken together, clerks were the third largest occupational group in the metropolis behind servants and laborers. The most obvious characteristic of the clerking population was its youth. In both the 1850 and 1855 samples, about four-fifths were thirty or younger. Between 60 and 70 percent were under twenty-five, and most members of this latter group had not reached their majority. An overwhelming number were unmarried men. In the 1855 sample, roughly 60 percent of the clerking population classified themselves as boarders in privately run boardinghouses and residences, or hotels and businesses. Clerks were considered an unsupervised masculine cohort because, in large measure, they were young, overwhelmingly male, and living as boarders in the city.7 Table I.1 Age, 1850 (N=1,111) Age Range

Number

Percent

20 or younger 21-25 26-30 31-35 36-40 41-45 46-49 50 and older

400 367 196 62 37 14 6 29

36.0 33.0 17.6 5.6 3.3 1.3 0.5 2.6

Age, 1855 (N=1,083) Age Range

Number

Percent

21 or younger 22-25 26-30 31-35 36-40 41-45 46-49 50 and older

398 272 196 97 48 34 8 30

36.7 25.1 18.1 9.0 4.4 3.1 0.7 2.8

Sources: Manuscript Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, New York, New York County, New York City, Ward 3; Ward 7, Enumeration District (ED) 1; Ward 9, ED 3. National Archives Records Administration, Atlanta, Georgia. Manuscript Population Schedules of the New York State Census, 1855, New York City, Ward 1, ED 1; Ward 2, ED 1; Ward 3, ED 2; Ward 4, ED 2; Ward 5, ED 1; Ward 6, ED 5; Ward 7, ED 1; Ward 8, ED 2; Ward 9, ED 7; Ward 10, ED 2; Ward 13, ED 1; Ward 14, ED 3; Ward 15, ED 4; Ward 18, ED 1; Ward 20, ED 1. Municipal Archives of the City of New York.

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity 7 Table I.2 Marital Status, 1850 (N=1,111) Marital Status

Number

Percent

Single Married

964 147

86.8 13.2

Marital Status, 1855 (N=1,081) Marital Status

Number

Percent

Single Married Widowed

837 230 14

77.4 21.3 1.3

Sources: Manuscript Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, New York, New York County, New York City, Ward 3; Ward 7, Enumeration District (ED) 1; Ward 9, ED 3. National Archives Records Administration, Atlanta, Georgia. Manuscript Population Schedules of the New York State Census, 1855, New York City, Ward 1, ED 1; Ward 2, ED 1; Ward 3, ED 2; Ward 4, ED 2; Ward 5, ED 1; Ward 6, ED 5; Ward 7, ED 1; Ward 8, ED 2; Ward 9, ED 7; Ward 10, ED 2; Ward 13, ED 1; Ward 14, ED 3; Ward 15, ED 4; Ward 18, ED 1; Ward 20, ED 1. Municipal Archives of the City of New York.

Table I.3 Sex, 1855 (N=1,088) Sex

Number

Percent

1,054 34

96.9 3.1

Male Female

Source: Manuscript Population Schedules of the New York State Census, 1855, New York City, Ward 1, Enumeration District (ED) 1; Ward 2, ED 1; Ward 3, ED 2; Ward 4, ED 2; Ward 5, ED 1; Ward 6, ED 5; Ward 7, ED 1; Ward 8, ED 2; Ward 9, ED 7; Ward 10, ED 2; Ward 13, ED 1; Ward 14, ED 3; Ward 15, ED 4; Ward 18, ED 1; Ward 20, ED 1. Municipal Archives of the City of New York.

Table I.4 Relationship to Head of Household, 1855 (N=1,088) Relationship to Head of Household Self Child Sibling Other Relative Boarder in house/hotel Boarder and living with relative Boarder in business place Boarder in business place and living with a relative

Number

Percent

179 206 12 42 500 25 89 35

16.5 18.9 1.1 3.9 46.0 2.3 8.2 3.2

Source: Manuscript Population Schedules of the New York State Census, 1855, New York City, Ward 1, Enumeration District (ED) 1; Ward 2, ED 1; Ward 3, ED 2; Ward 4, ED 2; Ward 5, ED 1; Ward 6, ED 5; Ward 7, ED 1; Ward 8, ED 2; Ward 9, ED 7; Ward 10, ED 2; Ward 13, ED 1; Ward 14, ED 3; Ward 15, ED 4; Ward 18, ED 1; Ward 20, ED 1. Municipal Archives of the City of New York.

8 Introduction: Puzzled about Identity

In urban places, economic competition and social fluidity challenged cherished expectations about the career trajectories of white men, and potential anonymity cut against the older generation’s interest in monitoring youth. Nineteenth-century cities were places of paradox, simultaneously home to social stratification and to social mutability. The “sunshine” of the Broadway promenade and dry goods emporiums commingled uneasily with the “shadow” of underworld black markets, vice, crime, and slums like the Five Points. Clerks’ presence in every avenue and alley made the project of determining who they were and who they would become absolutely necessary and exceedingly difficult.8 For other evidence elicits questions about whether most clerks were unattached young men. Fully a fifth of the subjects in the 1855 sample were over thirty-one or married, though these figures were substantially lower in the 1850 sample. While the federal census did not record women’s occupations, the 1855 state account shows that a mere 3 percent of clerks were women. By the 1830s, women were beginning to take sales positions in large Philadelphia and Boston retail establishments, but in New York, it would appear that women were a decided minority of the midcentury clerking population. But other sources, such as the credit reports of Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency, suggest that women’s role in Manhattan businesses, behind the counter and at the desk, was a bit more significant than census takers and observers of the cityscape believed. Wives, sisters, and daughters of merchants who ran small businesses, particularly in the uptown wards along Sixth and Eighth avenues or in the Lower East Side, “assisted” their family members in stores. Perhaps these women did not consider themselves clerks, but conceived of clerking as a contribution toward securing their household’s competency, as women had done in the eighteenth century.9 The fact that many clerks lived in boardinghouses obscured the fact that others continued to live with a family member in New York. More than 45 percent of the 1855 sample established their own households and families in the city, lived with their parents, siblings, or other relatives, or resided with kin in boardinghouses, hotels, or businesses. These statistics reflect the fact that more than a quarter of the clerks in the 1855 sample had been born in Manhattan, while another quarter had grown up in upstate New York or the contiguous states of Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania. Despite the widespread cultural anxiety about young men living apart from their families in the city, many clerks maintained strong kinship ties, living with family members in New York or frequently visiting their homes.

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity 9

Other clerks had been born farther away from the banks of the Hudson, challenging the contemporary belief that the typical clerk was nativeborn. Forty-three percent of New York clerks in the 1855 sample had been born outside the United States. While prospective foreign-born clerks trickled into New York from Canada or the Caribbean, the vast majority had been born in Western Europe. Of the European contingent, 89 percent were from Ireland, Germany, England, Wales, or Scotland. Irish-born clerks made up 18 percent of the total sample, while Germans accounted for 12.5 percent. The foreign cast to the clerking population increases to almost two-thirds when we examine ethnicity, determined from the birthplaces of clerks’ parents in the 1850 federal census. Antebellum Americans, in their writings about clerks, often obscured the fact that immigrants figured prominently in the occupational group because they were more concerned about the supposedly deteriorating bonds connecting rural parents and their sons—“country boys” who hoped to become “merchant princes.” I have used census data, credit reports, newspaper advertisements, and the rolls of the Emigrant Savings Bank to piece together the experiences of immigrant clerks and investigate the meanings of ethnicity for clerks in terms of their work in order to illuminate the diversity of the occupational group.10 The ambitions of these clerks, whether they hailed from American or foreign shores, could take a variety of forms. During the winter of 1844, in an office on New York City’s South Street near the bustling commercial wharves of the East River, an eighteen-year-old Englishman named George John Cayley listlessly copied correspondence and balanced accounts for the merchant Jonathan Goodhue. The work exasperated him to no end. “I wish there were no such operation as writing,” he groused in his diary, hoping in vain for a process where “by applying the mental speculum to a sheet of paper the impression would come off directly.” Osmosis, unfortunately, was not an option. He had little patience for accounting, either, joining another clerk in experimenting with “a new sort of calculating machine . . . in the form of a revolving card with progressive numbers,” which he pronounced “very ingenious” for its labor-saving potential. It seemed to many observers that young men venturing to the city for clerkships were in search of easier lives rather than arduous career paths trod by patient, hard-working men. In Asa Greene’s fictional Perils of Pearl Street, the rural-born narrator explains his decision to move to New York and search for a clerkship with a stunning admission in a producer’s republic: “I had become early convinced that hard work was

10

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity Table I.5 Nativity, 1855 (N=1,077) Nativity New York City New York State (outside the city) United States Massachusetts Connecticut Vermont New Hampshire Maine Rhode Island Pennsylvania New Jersey Maryland Virginia Georgia Louisiana South Carolina Ohio Indiana England Scotland Wales Ireland Germany France Spain Hungary Austria Holland Poland Denmark Sweden Canada Cuba West Indies South America

Number

Percent

299 119 4 36 52 15 11 2 2 17 34 9 4 3 2 1 2 1 55 27 3 194 135 14 5 1 3 1 2 1 2 10 3 3 2

27.8 11.0 0.4 3.3 4.8 1.4 1.0 0.2 0.2 1.6 3.2 0.8 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.2 0.1 5.1 2.5 0.3 18.0 12.5 1.3 0.5 0.1 0.3 0.1 0.2 0.1 0.2 0.9 0.3 0.3 0.2

Source: Manuscript Population Schedules of the New York State Census, 1855, New York City, Ward 1, Enumeration District (ED) 1; Ward 2, ED 1; Ward 3, ED 2; Ward 4, ED 2; Ward 5, ED 1; Ward 6, ED 5; Ward 7, ED 1; Ward 8, ED 2; Ward 9, ED 7; Ward 10, ED 2; Ward 13, ED 1; Ward 14, ED 3; Ward 15, ED 4; Ward 18, ED 1; Ward 20, ED 1. Municipal Archives of the City of New York.

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity 11 Table I.6 Ethnicity (Nativity of Parents), 1850 (N=559) Ethnicity

Number

Percent

United States England Scotland Wales Ireland Germany France Canada Other

198 59 24 4 136 102 9 11 16

35.4 10.6 4.3 0.7 24.3 18.2 1.6 2.0 2.9

Source: Manuscript Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, New York, New York County, New York City, Ward 3; Ward 7, Enumeration District (ED) 1; Ward 9, ED 3. National Archives Records Administration, Atlanta, Georgia.

not easy.” These loungers perverted the striver’s ethic, trying to escape the mundane drudgery of agricultural and craft work in the countryside or countinghouse work in the city.11 In the commercial house, the business epistles Cayley copied contained Goodhue’s words, not his own; the numbers he tallied neatly in columns were markers of the firm’s success, not his. He and other clerks were mere ciphers for the merchants, who authored their own destinies. Yet after work in his diary, Cayley the lounger was much like Hoffman the striver, recording his mundane work duties, efforts to learn Arabic and Mandarin, and attempts to woo a beautiful young lady of the wealthy Van Rensselaer clan. In his diary, the young Englishman was an author of himself, though his goals were somewhat at odds with those of his fellow clerks. He was convinced that his future would include an ascent to literary genius rather than to the lofty heights of commercial proprietorship. Enamored with the poetry of Lord Byron, Cayley wrote Valentine’s Day couplets that he hoped young ladies would admire for their “Byronic twang” and penned a mock epic of fifty-five stanzas commemorating a visit to Boston entitled “Childe George John’s Pilgrimage.” What better way to forget that he and other clerks were part of an urban constituency that Herman Melville would later envision, rather unromantically, “tied to counters” and “clinched to desks.”12 “I am out of concert with myself to day,” Cayley languidly scratched into his diary in February 1844. “I take no interest in anything present or future, but feel like a useless apathetic lump, with an indolent heaviness

12

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity

about my stomach, in love with nothing, but without spirit to quarrel with anything, a nonentity.” Here was that Byronic twang. He knew that he lacked the ambitious spirit, battling competitiveness, and fastidious preparation for the future that strivers like Hoffman displayed. He lamented these deficiencies, admitting to being “very lazy and weary.” “I am a most infernal fool not to exert myself more,” he cringed, “but I feel incapacitated whenever I get with in those 4 bare walls” of Goodhue’s office. In characteristically dramatic fashion, Cayley worried about his future, too: “I think I shall turn out a ‘waif and stray’ . . . without a business, a sort of wretched bubble to be blown of the breath of praise and carried away to perdition on the winds of adversity.” Instead of accepting the challenge to improve himself, as the authors of prescriptive texts advised, Cayley desired the opportunity to be someone else and leave his faults behind him: “I am puzzled about identity, and how other people feel inside themselves.”13 The French commentator Alexis de Tocqueville, fresh from his grand tour of the United States, wondered in 1840 why Americans, equipped with unprecedented political and economic liberty, were “restless in the midst of abundance.” Why did it appear “as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow”? He needed to look no further than Hoffman’s concern about his future and Cayley’s claim that he was “puzzled by identity.” Both clerks encountered the significant impediments to self-making in American society, even though they were young white men who appeared best able to determine who they were. George Foster, intrepid reporter on the city beat for Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune, wrote that “[p]eople pass pretty much at their own valuation—unless it is too high, and then they are ‘bogus’ and won’t go at all.” Clerks’ project of self-making intersected with observations made by contemporaries struggling to make sense of a competitive economy and anonymous city. Observers contested young men’s claims about who they were. Charles Dickens paid scant attention to the dashing, bewhiskered urban clerks he filed past on his stroll through the streets of Manhattan in the early 1840s, but he would have popped Cayley’s bubble of pretension with his scathing dismissal: these young men were merely “Byrons of the desk and counter.” Romanticism, libertinism, and lounging were folly in an “age of capital” devoted to sober self-improvement and rational emphasis on dollars and cents. When Frederick Law Olmsted witnessed “young men, extraordinarily dressed” and “lounging or sauntering” near Natchez, Mississippi, in the 1850s, he could have made an invidious regional comparison between

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity 13

Yankee strivers and Cavalier loungers. Instead, he thought they resembled nothing other than “New York clerks on their Sunday excursions.” Keeping a diary might have been a means of cultivating character, but clerks found that literary practices were insufficient if they wanted to have their character traits validated in a fluid, democratic society. Although commercial clerks may have been the faces of capitalism, they were not the power brokers of capitalist transformation, and lacked the authority to make unchallenged assertions about who they were and who they would become.14 In newspapers, magazines, and fictional literature, for instance, authors ridiculed the “counter jumper.” The label evoked a retail clerk who was willing to hurdle store counters to serve customers and his employers in a speedy, efficient, and courteous manner. On the face of it, the nickname embodied the “go-ahead” spirit that marked the ambitious and ultimately successful American man of business. But “counter jumper” was not a term of endearment. Rather, it was a sarcastic reference Americans used to describe the young men who lounged about bolts of cloth and ribbon, seducing women into making frivolous purchases and refusing to do any arduous labor. Counter jumpers did not strive enough, respect their employers or customers enough, or mind their subservient place enough. At the end of the business day, these “heroes of the ell-wand”—the stick retail dry goods clerks used to measure cloth—leaped from their recumbent positions to strut about the streets as urban dandies, wearing fancy clothing and frivolous accoutrements that they could not afford. They participated in an urban “sporting culture” taking shape in taverns, brothels, and streets whose denizens praised rogues for their sexual conquests. Retail clerks in particular represented what many Americans had come to lament about the changes capitalism wrought. They were, paradoxically, arbiters of style who lacked producers’ know-how, revealing the ways in which industrialization devalued workers’ expertise and enshrined conspicuous consumption as a core aspect of self-making. These young men, unattached and unsupervised, also symbolized the deterioration of household ties and the explosive growth of cities filled with strangers.15 Just as Hoffman and Cayley might have been striving for different goals, the occupation “clerk” was capacious, bringing together individuals who had little in common with each other. Some New York clerks had been born into wealthy families in the city, and happily called upon connections with powerful merchants to obtain clerkships on high salaries in exalted firms. There was little chance George John Cayley would end up a “waif and stray”: he was the grandson of Sir George Cayley, a

14 Introduction: Puzzled about Identity

landed baronet. The English-born clerk did not become a merchant, but rather returned to Yorkshire, attended Cambridge University, and qualified to practice law. In adulthood, he became a writer as he had always wanted to do, publishing a Spanish travel narrative, serving as a battlefield reporter during the Crimean War, and advocating the extension of voting rights to skilled workers in Great Britain. Perhaps, finishing his life playing leisurely games of tennis in Algiers, Cayley was not as puzzled about identity as he had been years before. Likewise, though William Hoffman peered into a hazy economic future as he embarked for cities in which he had no wealthy connections, he eventually accumulated capital from the sale of his family’s 200-acre farm in Claverack.16 Other clerks lacked landed or commercial property. Immigrant Irishmen and Germans served as clerks in slums such as the Five Points and ethnic enclaves such as Kleinedeutschland. These clerks’ prospects for and expectations about advancement as well as their social identities were quite different. Indeed, many clerks, no matter where they were born, may have aspired to small-business ownership and small means rather than to partnership in a large firm taking great risks for even greater rewards. Clerking as an occupation had multiple meanings because these young men came from so many different backgrounds and were clerking for various reasons. The influence of social and economic changes on their experiences could be immense, negligible, or somewhere between those poles.17 And yet American commentators often wrote about commercial clerks as a commonly understood and unified occupational category, obliterating the distinctions among young men with different aims and prospects for achieving them. What did unite these young men was a desire to achieve the independence that proprietorship offered, and clerking appeared to be a sure way for a striver to reach that goal. But the meanings of a clerkship were changing. The institution of apprenticeship, never a completely reliable structure for recruiting and educating young men to be merchants, was an abomination to many Americans who believed in the radical ideas radiating from the American Revolution that privileged the liberty of the individual over relationships governed by patronage or deference. Clerks who submitted to an unequal social and economic relationship were doing so against the grain of the striver’s ethic. The ideals of apprenticeship constrained the advancement of young men according to a timetable not of their own choosing, but clerkships continued to sustain the illusion of merit-based upward mobility in the new nation. “All do not succeed” in

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity 15

their pursuit of independence and wealth, commercial observer Joseph Scoville warned, “but some do, and this is quite sufficient to keep the ambition to get a clerkship in New York alive.”18 This inequality was supposed to pass quickly, too—merchants’ clerks were not dependent journeymen or impoverished day laborers without prospects. Rather, their subordinate positions were directly related to their youth, which permitted the ideals, if not the forms, of apprenticeship to persist. Parents, merchants, and young men blithely assumed that clerks were destined for independence as owners of their own commercial houses or stores. As they became adults, they would simply choose individualistic self-making over the dependent social relations under which they previously had labored.19 But young men on the make could not simply choose success. There was a gaping disjuncture between hopeful cultural narratives tying character development to success and the uncertain possibility of achieving upward mobility in an age of economic panics. The devastating convulsions in national and transatlantic markets that occurred in 1819, 1837, 1857, and 1873 unleashed debilitating economic depressions and cast doubt over whether stalwart personal characteristics alone could save commercial men from failure. These panics ensued when banks restricted the distribution of credit in an economy lacking hard currency and in which almost everyone was indebted to someone else. Merchants stopped payment on debts, and widespread insolvency, bankruptcy, and unemployment followed with disastrous effects. The value of bank notes and other commercial instruments was uncertain, shaking the confidence commercial men had in each other and the economy as a whole. Clerks’ temporarily subordinate positions sometimes protected them from market fluctuations. Yet while some antebellum clerks understood the merits of dependence in the short term, they keenly felt and lamented that dependence and the difficulties they encountered in getting ahead. Elders were concerned that clerks would venture too soon into business and published cautionary tales encouraging young men to remain patient and persevering in their clerkships. Illuminating the difficulties independent proprietors encountered in the antebellum era, some failed merchants latched onto clerkships as means for their survival during depressions, further transforming the meaning of these subordinate posts. Were they stepping stones on the path to success, or platforms from which to recoup losses?20 The precepts of what one scholar has called an “ideology of mobility” were shaken in enervating economic times. Clerks seemed to be

16 Introduction: Puzzled about Identity

advantageously situated to obtain wealth and the trappings of refinement. They did not appear to be immediately imperiled by industrial capitalism’s structures and unrelenting pace or the inequalities it created and fostered. They did not suffer like many journeymen, day laborers, and the unemployed poor. Strivers believed they could make their own success; industrial capitalism apparently offered democratic opportunity and a merit-inflected economic system in which good men finished first. Yet the majority of economic actors typically migrated between the poles of economic success and failure, struggling upward or searching for security in a volatile economy. As Tocqueville explained, industrial capitalism not only created haves and have-nots—the conflicts about class between employers and workers established at the point of production—but also created other manifestations of class revolving around a social imperative that enjoined white men to distinguish themselves from other market actors. “When inequality of conditions is the common law of society,” he explained, “the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to hurt it. Hence the desire of equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete.” White American men, paying lip service to equality but worrying about the moral and social implications of free falling economically, desperately competed to distinguish themselves from their peers. Throughout this period, many young clerks impatiently complained about being dependent when the prevailing cultural ethos—democratic, individualistic, fast-paced—proclaimed that they did not have to be.21 Clerks’ quest for capital is significant because it reveals the ways in which the meanings of class in America have changed over time, intersecting with equally contested notions about identity, variously defined through gender, race, ethnicity, and age. Merchants, manufacturers, and professionals consolidated their economic power as industrialization sped apace and joined ministers and newspaper editors in appropriating the mantle of virtuous, Revolutionary-era citizens who had protected the common good against the effete elite throughout the British empire and against the lower sorts who challenged their authority at home. For these employers, scribblers, and orators, striving illuminated their personal virtues. They worked hard for success, which was a sign that God looked upon individual progress and saw that it was good—a benefit for the entire society. Yet when well-to-do Americans of the antebellum period proclaimed that ordinary folks could be “self-made men,” they obscured their own

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity 17

authority. These merchants, editors, and ministers, hardly an emergent middle class, should be styled “bourgeois” elites. They controlled access to the credit, capital, and connections that were necessary for Americans to be upwardly mobile, and eagerly sought to fix the meanings of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age in ways that would protect and bolster their power. Genteel authors insisted that American class distinctions were “natural,” stemming from differences in people’s intelligence, talents, and character rather than according to rigidly permanent—and hence “artificial”—European social constructions. In the United States, built upon a foundation of democracy and liberal political economy, a meritocracy reigned. This was the self-serving winners’ perspective, and it masked the social and economic inequalities of the era.22 Class was crucially important in antebellum America, but not always in the ways scholars have emphasized. While authors certainly made references to “elite,” “middle,” and “working” classes, the “formation” and “consciousness” of these categories should not be our only standard for assessing the salience of class in American society and culture. The formation of a “middle class,” for instance, was only infrequently and inconsistently on Americans’ minds. The wide-ranging debate about clerks and clerking shows that class in the antebellum period was the struggle for power and prestige among Americans who had unequal access to wealth and the trappings of refinement. Among clerks, the quest for capital depended upon whether they could accrue wealth or respect through their own writings and the writings of others, beyond the array of commercial and social transactions with employers, customers, parents, strangers, and peers. Their experiences reveal that class was a ubiquitous process that unfolded in the market, on the street, at home, and in the intense disputes over the meanings of keywords such as “producer,” “consumer,” “citizen,” “independence,” “freedom,” and “respectability.”23 At every turn, the capital that would validate priceless claims to authority and gentility was at stake, and clerks invested heavily in the debates about their occupational and social identities. Hoping to become independent commercial gentlemen, they praised character attributes— self-control, self-reliance, honesty, and diligence—that they trusted would inexorably grant them success and respectability, a term that connoted the cultural influence conferred upon people who accumulated wealth cautiously and displayed their prosperity tastefully. Yet these young men, who steadfastly believed in the striver’s ethic, had trouble mastering patience alongside these more instrumental virtues. They craved the power

18 Introduction: Puzzled about Identity

and prestige associated with “self-made men” who managed dependent women, children, and laborers inside and outside households.24 Capital could be accumulated in a variety of settings. Some clerks established reputations for manly feats in brothels, barrooms, and gymnasia to earn credibility among fellow “bloods” on the street. They also endured censure from the editors of sporting newspapers for their devotion to refinement. Bourgeois writers condemned them for the ways in which they both flouted and claimed respectability at the same time, shaving the cultural capital that the word “respectability” represented. Young men who wanted immediate power and prestige found that their self-valuations were judged by contemporaries to be “too high”—indeed, “bogus”—if they had not also accumulated economic capital to make their claims for respect legitimate. The meanings of gentility were vague in the fluid, democratic society of the city, even as bourgeois commentators declared that respectability and upward mobility were available to all who deserved it. In their diaries and other narratives in which clerks figure prominently, these cultural keywords assume inflated significance and were evacuated of meaning because material prosperity was at once so necessary to back them up and so difficult to attain. Clerks ultimately discovered that performing and claiming the identities of independent, respectable men while making sense of a volatile capitalist economy, a fluid urban society, and the voluminous literature produced to account for these transformations was a process fraught with uncertainty. As many contemporaries determined that clerks were insufficiently producers, citizens, and men, ambitious youth who had once aspired to clerkships engaged with the commercial world in new ways and reshaped the meanings they assigned to work and manhood. Increasing strains on the household economy, intensifying labor strife, and the subtle restructuring of business relationships between senior and junior commercial men in the Civil War era all helped to change the meanings of a clerkship. These developments also created new circumstances in which class came to be defined by structure—“elite,” “middle,” and “working”—rather than as a contest for capital. Spurred by debates about the meanings of work and freedom in the era of slave emancipation, aspiring clerks helped to redefine success by recalibrating the balance between risk and security. While some continued to seek independence, many clerks uncoupled the ideals of ownership and management, seeking secure positions as branch store operators, agents, or even clerk-merchants attached to capital-rich firms rather than risky proprietorship. These young men tempered their

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity 19

individualism and accepted dependence at work in return for the ability to achieve a measure of independence in consumer culture or family life. This ideological shift was a necessary precursor of the “managerial revolution in American business” that gave rise to large, corporate business structures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially in stores that catered to female customers, women began to take retail jobs, even though male clerks outnumbered their female counterparts until the twentieth century. Women could be paid lower wages than men because they were still thought to be contributing to their families’ earnings, thus affirming the traditional boundaries of the household economy. This gender shift in the occupation reprised a story of industrial capitalism involving the deskilling and diminishing prestige of occupations associated with poor pay and hard work, which in turn led to an influx of workers deemed less skillful and thus less deserving of adequate reimbursement or advancement.25 Many young men who had once sought clerkships now tried to obtain safe positions in powerful firms to separate themselves from a variety of other social groups: female retail clerks who would not advance to proprietorship; a radical working class whose members impressively (or threateningly) unified in national strikes to protest the degradation of their work; and the wealthy banking, manufacturing, and mercantile elite who attempted to police society with state-sponsored violence rather than by trusting processes of self-making and social reform. In doing so, they helped to create a postbellum, white-collar middle class in which being a manager and consumer offered, as one historian has argued, “respectable mediocrity.” A comfortable standard of living, a laudable goal in its own right, nevertheless paled in comparison to antebellum desires for gentlemanly proprietorship.26 Despite young men’s creative responses to the diminishing prospects of a clerkship, Americans could not help but notice that those decisions reflected the limits of self-making in their economy and society. Was the promise of economic freedom that had been heralded since the early republic as hollow as “respectability”? If hard-working and wellmeaning clerks—sons of upstanding farmers or urban merchants whom the Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Beecher called “ours”—found it difficult to achieve partnership or proprietorship at the head of their own mercantile firms, then there must be something very wrong with capitalism and the social relations it produced. Ministers, newspapermen, and merchants, rarely willing to question their own motives and practices or

20

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity

assess the impact of economic and social transformations that unsettled definitions of class terms such as “independence,” “gentleman,” and “producer,” blamed clerks for the fact that narratives linking character and success failed to resemble reality in most individuals’ lives. To expose and analyze the rich and complex history of clerks, clerking, and class in midnineteenth-century America is to come to terms with the ways in which capitalism’s opportunities and inequalities became the unquestioned organizing principles of American society and culture.27

1 What Is My Prospects?

Antebellum Americans believed that they lived in a revolutionary epoch in history. As never before, in this age of capital, white men had opportunities to advance economically and socially outside the constraints of hierarchical relationships. In the nineteenth century, strivers contended, the origins of success came from within rather than from outside assistance. “The man who does not at least propose to himself to be better this year than he was last must be very good or bad indeed,” the New York importer’s clerk Edward Tailer wrote in his diary on New Year’s Day, 1850. “[T]here is no such thing as a stationary point in human endeavors; he who is not worse to day than he was yesterday is better; and he who is not better is worse.” Self-reliance and self-improvement were central aspects of the creed of self-making. Arising from the democratic promise of the nation’s Revolution, that creed had become even more significant in the wake of capitalist transformation, which made cities great depots for agricultural produce, industrial goods, and men scrambling to earn wealth and respect in what one historian has called a “world of strangers.” Ambitious strivers made their own success; idle loungers made their own failure.1 From the pulpit and the press came earnest warnings that young men hopeful of getting ahead should do so in the right way. Unitarian minister Henry Bellows told Boston’s Young Men’s Benevolent Society in 1838 that an “honorable ambition for a good name” was often “rewarded with the world’s respect.” But the “honors of society” were not currency that could be exchanged to enter heaven. Ambition for earthly glory alone was misplaced. “Young men,” Bellows exhorted his audience, “the kingdom of the world, and the kingdom of God are before you. Choose ye between respectability and holiness.” Although Tailer believed in man’s ability to make his own success, he too saw merit in self-control. “Ambition . . . ruins yearly thousands of human souls,” he wrote. Men “are all filled with the desire to excel, surpass, and outshine their fellow beings, and so lost do

21

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they become in time to every other emotion that they imperceptibly loose [sic] sight of the future haven” in heaven, “which is only to be reached after years of self sacrifice and self denial.” Virtues at the heart of what Alexis de Tocqueville called “self-interest rightly understood”—humility, prudence, and generosity—would unite private and public interest in the new nation and serve young men’s quest for earthly success and heavenly salvation.2 Strivers tried to reconcile worldly and otherworldly aspirations by cultivating sterling character. Surely, they thought, character was the most valuable form of capital in an urban society populated by unknown persons and an economy defined by both thrilling boom times and enervating hard times. Edwin Freedley, the author of Leading Pursuits and Leading Men, a compendium of America’s most successful business men and firms in the 1850s, heartily concurred. “Capital is, of course, one of the foundations of credit,” he intoned, “but character, capacity, and industry are much more essential to success. Capital may be lost by some unexpected turn of fortune; but a merchant who, to use a quaint summing up of the whole in one phrase, ‘has it in him,’ will conquer even in the face of adverse circumstances.” Character was an inner reserve of capital that could overcome all obstacles to advancement. Freeman Hunt, editor of Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, a journal born in the wake of the Panic of 1837, affirmed that commercial character was built upon the foundations of “integrity, industry, and perseverance.” Equipped with these traits, young men would ultimately discover that their “virtues have shone out” to secure the trust of commercial actors. Ultimately, they would find that they had “established the fortunes of princes—clothed themselves in purple, and built for themselves palaces.” Hunt told youthful aspirants that the cultivation of character must be at the heart of their quest for capital. If they channeled their striving through the filter of these virtues, “there is no danger of your being unsuccessful in the world.”3 Although antebellum Americans coping with an industrializing economy and burgeoning cities considered theirs an era of change, they looked to the past for ideas and institutions that would help young men mold their character and get ahead. In the fall of 1856, Boston celebrated the sesquicentennial of Benjamin Franklin’s birth with the unveiling of a Richard Greenough statue of its native son. Decorating the Federal Street parade route were several banners upon which Bostonians inscribed what they considered to be the major events of the quintessential striver’s life. Joining the procession that accompanied the ceremony, members of voluntary

What Is My Prospects?

23

associations could trace his meteoric and well-known rise from printer to inventor to diplomat. The clerks who represented the Mercantile Library Association, a society dedicated to providing young commercial subordinates with the education that would lead to advancement in the commercial world, probably marveled at the banner reading “Dry Goods clerk, 1727.” They could proudly claim Franklin as one of their own. When Tailer “took a stroll through the grave yard” of Trinity Church before attending Sunday services there, he “took particular notice” of the monument to Alexander Hamilton, erected “in approbation of the high esteem in which he was held by them, as a man of never faltering integrity, of consummate wisdom and experience, and a true lover of the Institutions of his country.” Tailer may not have known that Alexander Hamilton had been a merchant’s clerk before he rose to prominence as a soldier, lawyer, and statesman, but the coincidence would have piqued his interest.4 Nineteenth-century Americans believed that a clerkship was a promising platform from which to attain respectable character as well as power and prestige in their society. Their forefathers had taken advantage of apprenticeships that provided them with education and protection within networks of friendly merchants in order to become independent commercial proprietors. Young nineteenth-century clerks took solace that founding fathers had once been in their place, learning how to become independent men in control of their own firms. Young men scoured Franklin’s Autobiography and other writings for guidance as they plotted their own social and economic ascent, noting passages that appeared to reveal how character development might lead to upward mobility. In 1849, a New York clerk named Robert Graham copied an aphorism from Franklin’s Poor Richard Improved into his diary: “There is nothing humbler than ambition, when it is about to climb.” Just commencing his commercial career, Graham cited Franklin in an effort to marry humility to self-interest and thus mitigate the potentially dangerous aspects of overreaching ambition.5 And a clerkship seemed just the humble berth from which dreams of advancement could be realized. Had that not been the case for Hamilton and Franklin? In a word, no. If antebellum Americans had read Hamilton’s letters, they would have seen a young man chafing at the constraints of his clerkship in a St. Croix countinghouse. “[M]y Ambition is prevalent,” he bluntly informed a confidant in 1769, and could not be assuaged. “I contemn the grov’ling and condition of a Clerk . . . to which my Fortune . . . condemns me and would willingly risk my life tho’ not

24 What Is My Prospects?

my Character to exalt my Station.” He accumulated responsibilities rather than prestige when his employer temporarily left the island for New York in 1771. A clerkship impeded rather than furthered his personal progress, and in 1773 he bolted to the North American continent to give free range to his ambition.6 How had young Franklin—a journeyman printer—become a clerk? In 1726, he sailed from London to Philadelphia at the invitation of Quaker merchant Thomas Denham, who wanted him to clerk in his Water Street shop. Denham expected Franklin to “keep his Books . . . [,] copy his Letters, and attend the Store,” assuring him that mercantile apprenticeship would lead to a position as an agent aboard one of his West Indian vessels and the opportunity to forge transatlantic connections with other merchants. Franklin applied himself to his education in “Accounts” and believed that “in a little Time” he became “expert at selling.” He “respected and lov’d” his master, who in turn evinced “a sincere Regard for” his new charge. Franklin would earn “Fifty Pounds a Year Pensylvania Money,” a sum far less than his “Gettings as a Compos[i]tor” of type. Yet Franklin eagerly “took Leave of Printing” because he believed that clerking offered “a better Prospect” for achieving social and economic advancement in the British Atlantic world. Unfortunately, Denham’s sudden death pushed Franklin back into the ranks of the printers.7 As Hamilton’s and Franklin’s cases show, nineteenth-century Americans were harkening back to a golden age of clerking that never existed. Although apprenticeship had connected senior and junior commercial men along lines of family and friendship, it was an uncertain mechanism for the transfer of power in commercial circles and an unreliable predictor of social mobility. The institution’s hollow promises and its emphasis on hierarchy betrayed the divergent interests that existed across a generational divide within commercial ranks both before and after the Revolution. In colonial and early national America, young men disliked dependence and questioned the value of apprenticeship when merchants and craftsmen looked increasingly for workers rather than trainees. Parents and commentators winced when young apprentices defied moral strictures and the authority of their elders. Neither apprenticeships nor apprentices were what they seemed, encouraging contemporaries to question the promise of the clerkship and the social identities of the young men who filled these posts. New Yorker Abraham Bailey voiced his frustration in 1813 when he asked a fellow clerk, “Are we not poor damned clerks, what is my prospects . . . [?]”8

What Is My Prospects?

25

Why, then, did ambitious young men choose to become urban commercial clerks in the nineteenth century? The answer has both ideological and structural components. Mercantile apprenticeship persisted as a resilient ideal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries even as the institution deteriorated and as the ideology of the American Revolution encouraged white American men to question patriarchal relationships and formulate a national idiom of aspiration predicated upon hard work, selfimprovement, and moral virtue. Nineteenth-century authors and readers cherry-picked apparently relevant virtues from early American merchants’ biographies for imitation and praised the hierarchical merchant-apprentice relationship as the ideal way to get ahead because it allegedly helped to shape young men’s character. The economic growth and competition unleashed in the early republic created new opportunities for distinction but also threatened access to economic and cultural capital. While many American boys responded to the commercialization of agriculture and industrialization by moving west in search of arable land or laboring in new factories, ever-escalating numbers ventured to northeastern cities, joining urban and foreign-born men in search of clerkships and chances to accumulate wealth as independent merchants. If apprenticeship and the assumptions about upward mobility attaching to it were unstable in both the colonial and early national periods, the ideals of the institution beckoned to wide-eyed young men of the antebellum period who were approaching the metropolis for the first time and dealing with unsettling economic and social transformations occurring in their midst. The specialization of mercantile firms and the rising number of retailing establishments, the boom-and-bust nature of the economy, and intense competition transformed urban commerce. Yet the relationships between senior and junior men in American business firms largely remained the same. Alone or with partners, proprietors owned their commercial houses or shops and managed the clerks who staffed them. In the absence of alternative business structures, young men tried to comprehend and react to change through traditional narratives of recruitment and advancement in the commercial world. With little except character at their disposal, young men realized that they had to take clerkships in order to accumulate the economic and cultural capital necessary to attain power and prestige at the head of commercial houses and stores. In their attempts to obtain those clerkships, antebellum youth tried to balance their allegiance to commercial traditions, the imperatives of ambition, and the language of character pervading prescriptive texts. In

26

What Is My Prospects?

the process, they helped to shape the meanings of class and masculinity in an age of panics.

A Usable Past? Clerks had long been important figures in commercial economies, and transatlantic importing merchants who dominated the colonial American economy particularly prized those who were known for their good penmanship and accurate numerical calculations. Typically, commercial proprietors brought a few young men, often coreligionists or family members, into their waterfront countinghouses to serve as apprentices. Both master and servant shared expectations about the nature and purpose of their relationship. Apprenticeship ties mirrored kinship bonds for parents and employers interested in maintaining oversight over the next generation and strengthening connections among merchants around the Atlantic basin. The young apprentice hoped that, by learning double-entry bookkeeping and representing his master’s interests as a supercargo or agent in foreign ports, he could one day become a merchant himself, elevated into partnership or proprietorship within a densely intertwined web of personal, family, capital, and credit relations.9 But apprenticeship was a suspect institution at the time when Franklin sailed back to Philadelphia to clerk in Denham’s shop. Merchants had often used the term “friendship” to describe the bonds they forged with other commercial men, including their clerks. In The Complete English Tradesman, first published in 1726, Daniel Defoe lamented the sentimental connotations of equality that the term conjured and the ramifications those linguistic associations had for social order. Relationships that had once constituted a careful means of raising honest mercantile men and protecting the business secrets of commercial principals were coming unglued as clerks acted “more like companions than servants.” Clerks’ claims to equal standing as members of their masters’ households threatened the orderly transfer of power between generations of men. Apprentices’ education suffered as they both failed to honor their elders and grasped for inappropriately rapid social advancement. In Defoe’s opinion, these ambitious young men came of age “much worse finished for business and trade than they did formerly.” While some English authors and instructors sought to fill the void in clerks’ education with penmanship and bookkeeping manuals or schools, critics typically reminded merchants and clerks of their mutual responsibilities to protect commercial fortunes,

What Is My Prospects?

27

business networks based upon character and trust, and orderly means of advancement to proprietorship. Many merchants met these expectations, sheltering and feeding their apprentices, writing letters of introduction on their behalf, and teaching them long after the period of apprenticeship was complete.10 One of the reasons why young men did not happily accept their subordination was that the definitions of occupational categories within the countinghouse were unclear. Eighteenth-century commercial dictionaries defined the words “apprentice” and “clerk” differently, even as commercial actors used the words interchangeably. When parents paid cash “premiums” to merchants in order to secure plum countinghouse apprenticeships for their children, they tried to clarify the distinction. John Bland, a Quaker merchant in London, agreed to pay John Reynell, a Quaker merchant in Philadelphia, a premium of one hundred pounds in two installments to cover a six-year apprenticeship for his son Elias from 1737 to 1743. The elder Bland might have sent his son to America because premiums demanded by London merchants ranged between two hundred and five hundred pounds. Just as craftsmen were dividing learners from workers, so too were merchants separating trainees from clerks who merely copied correspondence or tallied accounts. While they were not paid, merchants’ apprentices were going somewhere, literally to foreign ports as agents and figuratively up the social ladder when they finished their terms. Clerks would make between thirty and fifty pounds per year, about the same annual earnings as a skilled artisan, and remain a subordinate at desk or counter. With most merchants and professionals at the center and periphery of the British Empire earning between 80 and 150 pounds a year, obtaining a coveted berth for one’s son was cost-prohibitive. Younger sons of wealthy merchants and the English landed gentry were elbowing children whose families did not have as much disposable income out of prized apprenticeships and into mere clerkships.11 Clerks’ and apprentices’ prospects for advancement to independent proprietorship were uncertain. Some were able to achieve success as transatlantic wholesalers or urban retailers, while others used their education as springboards to enter the professions or politics. Many sought to put their penmanship skills to profitable use by drawing up legal and commercial documents. Former clerks also traveled along the Atlantic coast as itinerant penmanship and bookkeeping instructors, setting up shop long enough to take in freelance accounting work for harried local merchants but only infrequently establishing themselves permanently in

28 What Is My Prospects?

any community. Garrat Noel, an Englishman who arrived in New York in 1750 via Spain, was able to parlay his freelance instruction in “Reading, Writing, and Arithmetick” that “fits Youth for a Counting-House” and his knowledge of the Spanish language into a wide-ranging business devoted to selling books, medicine, and city property as well as employing workers in a book bindery.12 The perception that mercantile apprenticeship did not always lead directly to commercial independence for clerks was accompanied by the fear that clerks might not have mastered the character traits and skills necessary to ensure that independence. Authors of treatises on apprenticeship attempted to shore up the belief that education in bookkeeping and penmanship taught young men how to comport themselves virtuously, condemning clerks who circulated confidential commercial information. Some clerks had hearts of gold. William Coleman, Franklin’s friend and a merchant’s clerk, had “the best Heart, and the exactest Morals, of almost any Man” the young printer had encountered.13 Other clerks fell in with rakes and scoundrels, however, rejecting the work ethic, standards of cultural refinement, and social relationships with powerful men that a term in a mercantile countinghouse was designed to provide them. In his Autobiography, Franklin described how another clerk, John Collins, took to the bottle more resolutely than to industrious habits and scholarly pursuits, burdening Franklin with “extreamly inconvenient” costs to keep him afloat. When prospective employers got a whiff of Collins’s “Dramming” or balked at his unsteady “Behaviour,” not even sterling “Recommendations” could win him a clerkship. James Ralph, another clerking comrade, attempted to establish the cultural credentials of an elite man while also enjoying the life of an indolent rascal. Although his friends encouraged him to “think of nothing beyond the Business he was bred to” and the respectable, lucrative future that beckoned to him as a merchant, Ralph abandoned his wife and child to join Franklin on his expedition to England. If he had attended to his responsibilities as a Philadelphia countinghouse clerk, he might have achieved a measure of social and economic standing as a merchant. He sought fame and fortune in London instead. Unable to find work there, he ventured into the countryside to teach schoolchildren, believing that his countinghouse education suited him for the position. Thinking that accepting such a post might have suggested downward mobility, however, he assumed Franklin’s name. To Ralph, a journeyman printer who became a schoolteacher had ascended the social ladder.14

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While Hamilton and Ralph thought clerkships were beneath them, others in colonial America used these positions to challenge social hierarchies. In the colonial period, clerkships offered hope to a wide variety of people who could not, due to restrictions based upon their class, gender, and racial identities, participate in the educational nexus of mercantile apprenticeship. Young women and male servants and slaves learned how to copy letters, tend shop counters, and act as supercargoes aboard merchant vessels in order to scrape by as well as get ahead. When Philadelphia’s sheriff warned in Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette that a convict on the lam from the city’s jail might “pretend . . . to understand Clerkship,” he illuminated the ambiguities surrounding mercantile apprenticeship and commercial education as means for social and economic advancement and the uncertain social identities of the men and women who pursued this work.15 As the eighteenth-century consumer revolution sped apace, many women began to learn penmanship, bookkeeping, and sales skills from family members who were artisans or shopkeepers. A few newspaper editors wondered whether these tasks were in fact better suited to women than men. “Is it not as agreeable and becoming for Women to be employ’d in selling” pins, notions, and cloth, the editor of the Boston Gazette asked in 1740, “as it is absurd or ridiculous to see a Parcel of young Fellows, dish’d out in their Tie Wigs and Ruffles[,] . . . busied in Professions so much below the Honour and Dignity of their Sex?” Women could master the rudiments of commercial education as easily as men, and female merchants instructed female shop assistants in selling and accounting, helping them to open their own shops after their apprenticeships were complete. While Philadelphia shopkeeper Mary Coates sent her son to be educated in the countinghouse of her brother-in-law John Reynell, New York merchant Mary Alexander and Newport shopkeeper Sarah Rumreil taught their sons how to be commercial proprietors, pushing against the assumptions that mercantile apprenticeship bound older and younger men together. The pride that Franklin and other young men took in gaining expertise at the store counter appeared unmanly given the pronounced female presence on both sides of the apprenticeship nexus.16 Slaves, convicts, and indentured servants could also use special writing, managing, and sales abilities to help mitigate dependence or pursue freedom. Servants who “pretend[ed] to understand Clerkship” shared a great deal with other eighteenth-century confidence men who continually remade themselves while on the run from masters, owners, or

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creditors. Most obviously, coerced laborers with these skills might employ an elegant “clerkhand” to “forge a pass,” as several masters attested in the runaway advertisements they placed in the Pennsylvania Gazette. One master claimed his English servant would be able to support his claims to have “been a clerk or schoolmaster, as he writes well, and talks good English.” Yet even an incomplete education might have helped an Irish servant who fled to a northeastern city. He would “try to get to be clerk,” his master averred, hoping that the fact that he “writes a good hand, and understands figures” would obscure his poor spelling. While these examples of ingenuity and aptitude presumably went unappreciated by masters when they had control of their servants, there did exist the rare example of Robert King, a Quaker merchant trading between the Caribbean island of Montserrat and Philadelphia, who “fit” his slave Olaudah Equiano “for a clerk” because he was impressed by the African’s “good character” and his knowledge of the “rules of arithmetic.” Hardly an apprentice to King, Equiano explained in his autobiographical narrative that he was a jack-of-all-trades in King’s countinghouse and aboard his ships—he was a clerk, laborer, and sailor. But he proclaimed all the same that “I was of more advantage to him than any of his clerks” because of his expertise and the fact that his enslavement “saved” King “above a hundred pounds a year” in the salary he would have given a free white clerk. Through clerking and more arduous labor, Equiano was able to buy his freedom.17 Apprenticeship may have been an institution designed to teach youth the moral and commercial virtues that would help them achieve a competency and respectable bearing. For some, this mobility was possible through social and economic networks based upon friendship. Yet in light of competition for apprenticeships from the landed gentry and for clerkships from the down-and-out, many young men found that avenues to proprietorship had become choked with obstacles. Eighteenth-century clerks’ experiences and debates about mercantile apprenticeship illuminate the shifting meanings of class as they applied to clerkships. As it became clear to young people that they could not use apprenticeships or clerkships as completely reliable means to succeed their elders in positions of social and economic respectability or prominence, they refused to be deferential. Many merchants eluded the responsibilities of mentoring young “friends” in favor of hiring applicants from the want advertisements of local newspapers. At the same time, a consumer revolution, periodic labor shortages, more abundant educational opportunities, and the nature

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of household economies increased the demand for and supply of clerks from a variety of positions across the social spectrum. A diverse group of people used the crumbling edifice and vital ideals of apprenticeship, as well as the increasing demand for copyists, bookkeepers, and sales personnel, to survive economically and to appropriate elements of gentility associated with their social superiors. These circumstances created a fair bit of uncertainty about who could be a clerk, the opportunities for mobility that clerkships offered, and the respect attending the occupation. Nineteenth-century Americans told stories about clerking in the eighteenth century to present model career paths to aspiring young men in their own era, focusing on successful men and obscuring the ambiguities of clerking in early America. Unwilling to recognize that apprenticeship lay in tatters, Freeman Hunt used his Merchants’ Magazine to introduce mercantile biographies of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century merchants who had learned about commerce by serving as apprentice clerks. He was not timid about explaining why he chose to remember certain mercantile lives at the expense of others. “It becomes . . . the occasional duty of the biographer,” he noted, “to choose his subjects from a class to which all, whose parts are moderate, whose ambition steady, and whose industry unwavering, can elevate themselves.” Focusing on the merchant “who, by a sudden leap, or a mad speculation, has pounced by accident on success” would be a grave miscalculation. Hunt believed that fortunes were not made in a day, and therefore concentrating on “the merchant who has risen by slow and patient ascent to an eminence to which all, with ordinary capacity and the same determination, can arrive, [was] a far more suitable theme” for the pages of his journal.18 These brief sketches, like other nineteenth-century biographies, emphasized the character traits that explained success. Joseph May was noteworthy for “his love of order, his methodical habits, [and] his high estimate of the importance of punctuality.” Philadelphia merchant Jacob Ridgway was “a plain, truth-loving man” as well as “judiciously benevolent” to those in need. While “Dame Fortune” had allegedly “smiled” upon Ridgway’s mercantile efforts, Hunt and other contributing authors particularly stressed their subjects’ “perseverance.” For Hunt realized that the mercantile world was not for the mercurial, filled as it was with clerks and merchants who were unable to “discipline” themselves to its exacting requirements. Only commercial men who possessed this particular character trait were able to “take heart” from reverses in an age of panics and accumulate their fortunes once more. Economic storms could make it difficult to find

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clerkships, but self-reliance and perseverance could assist young men in their search for safe harbors and prepare them to sail to success in the future.19 Yet in Hunt’s explorations of success, it was difficult to connect the dots between humble beginnings and a gloriously successful adult life. He sometimes identified clerkships, collegiate education, an apprenticeship in the trades, or a stint as seaman, supercargo, or captain as the way to become a successful merchant, but he often left the structural portions of his biographical canvas unfinished. Surely, a few narratives noted the ways in which clerks might get ahead. Abijah Fisk “attracted the attention of some of the neighboring establishments, from his activity and good management in the establishment in which he was employed” in Boston at the turn of the nineteenth century. Yet in most of the biographies of merchants who served as apprentices to commercial men, readers seldom learned anything substantial about this formative period in their lives. Joseph Hewes, born near Princeton, New Jersey, in 1730, “went to Philadelphia to acquire a knowledge of commercial business.” The very next sentence read, “He entered, as soon as his term of apprenticeship in a counting house was closed, into the bustle and activity of trade.” Ridgway simply left his rural New Jersey home and became successful, if we are to believe the story in Hunt’s journal: “The object of this sketch left home at an early age, not content with the tranquil enjoyment and ease of competency in rural life, came to Philadelphia, and entered that of a busy, bold, and enterprising merchant.” Thomas P. Cope started his mercantile career in post-Revolution Philadelphia “by undertaking the primary labors of the counting room, and ascended from the junior grade, which only notices events, by a simple record, to that position which plans the movement and directs the conduct of thousands.” Clerks recorded the past while merchants made history. Knowing that his ambitious young readers wanted to plan and direct events rather than merely notice them, Hunt depicted clerks such as Cope easily moving from one stage to the other even as he failed to clarify why men rose to positions of prominence.20 The ambiguities of eighteenth-century mercantile apprenticeship did not offer a usable past for nineteenth-century Americans, so commentators like Hunt resurrected success stories, clothed in the nation’s storied heritage, that taught young men to rely on their own character in an economy festooned with opportunities for unparalleled success and littered with business failures. As a result, antebellum clerks would have to encounter and reconsider eighteenth-century struggles about social

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identity and clerking in light of the developing industrial economy and the increasing numbers of men from home and abroad who were entering urban clerkships in commercial houses and stores. Franklin and his contemporaries knew what ambitious male clerks would also discover in the nineteenth century: the “better Prospect” offered young men by the shiny exterior of mercantile apprenticeship might be hollow at its core.21

To Seek My Fortune in the Great City Young men helped to shape the languages of ambition and character as they began their commercial careers. Some resisted the advice of the prescriptive literature, refusing to buy into apprenticeship’s supposed promise or Hunt’s paeans to hard work and good habits. George John Cayley, upon reading Franklin’s Autobiography, marveled at the “endurance of labour” its author exhibited. “I wish I was like him,” Cayley wrote wistfully in his diary, “but I am not. I don’t think I am calculated for any serious labour of more than 5 or 6 hours a day, and this s[houl]d be of an interesting and not a clogging nature.” The narrator in Asa Greene’s Perils of Pearl Street forthrightly enumerated his imprecise goals upon arriving in New York City: “I wished . . . to get into a wholesale employment. I preferred one in the dry goods line. But I was equally well prepared for hardware or groceries; and was ready to turn my hand to any thing that was honest, in the way of selling goods, figuring accounts, or fingering cash.” Some prospective clerks valued character less than the capital they might soon grasp.22 Many strivers tried, conversely, to model their own stories along the contours of Franklin’s. When seventeen-year-old Francis Bennett of Gloucester, Massachusetts, took a clerkship with a Boston dry goods firm in the summer of 1854, he “found it pretty hard to keep from crying on leaving the home of my childhood.” Parting with family members and close neighborhood friends—especially his mother, whose grief was so overwhelming that she could not bring herself to say good-bye to her son—provoked an emotional response. This was a critical turning point in Bennett’s life—his future in the commercial world pivoted on his inner strength at this moment. “I . . . resolved,” he proudly wrote, “to be as manly as possible about it.” Recalling this transition at the end of the year, when he and other young men typically tallied up accomplishments in diaries, he noted that “I left my beloved home and mother and little sister to seek my fortune in the great city.” He rarely wrote about his clerkship,

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but he clearly believed that he could win riches and respectability through it and in the process prove himself an independent man.23 Clerks generally believed that financial prosperity would come to young men who mastered the language of character. But when they failed to ascend the occupational ladder at the quick-step, newly minted clerks often conveyed their disappointment with commercial life in their writings. Young aspirants to clerkships joined the conversation about the relationship among ambition, character, and success, recognizing but not escaping apprenticeship’s limits. In newspaper advertisements or conversations with merchants, they sought to display their character to help them secure a clerkship and perhaps in doing so wield some control over the trajectory of their commercial careers. Echoing Franklin, strivers after the Panic of 1837 were wary of speculative ventures that promised wealth without work. Active industriousness, not passive idleness, would help young men make themselves. Hunt publicized Franklin’s texts as “the true philosophy of business life, in giving tone and direction to the mercantile mind of America,” but many clerks trusted that Franklin held the practical key to getting ahead on their own timetable, rather than their employers’ or Freeman Hunt’s. If they applied the founder’s precepts with renewed vigor—indeed, ambition—they could shape their own careers as they competed with merchants and fellow clerks. By participating in this debate and portraying themselves as men of good character, young men with great expectations took important steps in the process of selfmaking.24 Far more often than in the colonial and early national periods, young men of the antebellum era announced in urban newspapers that they were looking for a clerkship, illuminating the proliferation of the urban press and the influx into cities of rural and foreign-born aspirants who were eager to make themselves but who were also strangers to the commercial world in which they wanted to make their mark. Their goal was to demonstrate that they had developed the skills and character traits that would earn merchants’ trust. One recent immigrant submitted the following advertisement in an August 1850 issue of the New-York Daily Tribune: WANTED.—A situation as clerk or assistant bookkeeper or salesman in a wholesale or retail tea trade. Has served a regular apprenticeship to the tea business; by a smart[,] intelligent young man (protestant) recently from Europe. First rate references given. Salary no great object for first six months. Address ‘James,’ care of Mr. Spink, 407 Broome-st.

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Unlike Greene’s fictional narrator, this applicant knew his business and hoped to pursue it in America. He wanted prospective employers to know that he was not a Catholic—potentially a strike against an applicant in an overwhelmingly Protestant nation. He had experience, and yet did not expect his new employers to pay him a salary until he had proven his worth. Friends or former employers would provide unimpeachable testimony about his good character.25 “James” was working at a disadvantage, however, in his quest for a clerkship. Unlike native-born aspirants for these positions, he evidently was not able to call upon the assistance of friends. Instead, he enlisted Thomas Spink, the proprietor of an “intelligence office,” or employment agency, who advertised regularly in the Tribune in the early 1850s. For a “moderate” fee, Spink acted as a broker between employers and workers in an anonymous urban society. In a typical advertisement of his own, Spink informed the public that “[s]ituations are speedily obtained . . . for clerks, salesmen, book keepers, porters for stores and hotels, firemen for steamers, gardeners, school teachers, waiters, drug clerks, men to work on farms, boys to learn good trades and unemployed persons generally.” Other intelligence office proprietors, such as Thorndike Saunders, lumped clerks together with “servants, cooks, nurses, waitresses, seamstresses, chambermaids, [and] laundresses” as well as “Catholic and protestant servants for city and country.” Despite his best efforts, “James” might not have been able to differentiate himself from other laborers in his search for work in the anonymous city. In their own advertisements, moreover, servant women, cooks, and nurses typically described themselves as “respectable” or as possessing “Good Character.” Grouped with the “help,” clerks were on a par with other workers in the city, using a language of class that did not adequately communicate social distinctions among strangers.26 Most applicants were much less specific than “James,” employing stock rhetorical strategies to make their case, illustrating the power of cultural assumptions about successful people to shape the ways youth asked for work but also illuminating the difficulties they faced when trying to make their advertisements unique and interesting to employers who also subscribed to those assumptions. Applicants often promised that “employment,” rather than a high salary, was their “chief desire.” Some ceded their negotiating power and permitted merchants to dictate pecuniary terms, while others offered to give up a month’s wages or “work three or four months for a mere trifle” for the chance of securing a permanent position after the trial period. Most admitted that they hoped to make a “living

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salary” but assured employers that they would “earn” it by being completely devoted to their “interests.” They rarely stated the dollar value they desired and instead evoked the ideals of apprenticeship by stressing the educational possibilities of clerking. Conversely, employers sometimes noted the “liberal” salaries they would give clerks, even naming a figure in their advertisements. More typical were the employers who asked applicants to enumerate the “salary [they] expected” to make, perhaps in an effort to start a bidding war among them.27 While they often refrained from addressing the touchy subject of salary in newspaper columns, clerks assiduously detailed the character traits that would make them reliable and propitious choices. Adjectives such as “active,” “energetic,” “steady,” “industrious,” and “[i]ntelligent” regularly appear in what amount to clerks’ abridged autobiographies, mirroring Hunt’s and Franklin’s life stories. Both clerks and employers hoped to unite with men of “good moral character” or “habits,” “respectable,” “enterprising[,] and responsible” business associates known for their “integrity and sobriety.” Since most commercial readers spoke this language of character, advertisers could shorthand qualities with “&c.” Clerks almost uniformly proclaimed their willingness to be “generally useful” in the office or store. Eschewing candid declarations that certain types of work were beneath them, most young people offered to do whatever labor was necessary in order to secure places. Indeed, this willingness illuminated their diligence, humility, and virtue.28 Hopefuls needed to offer employers more concrete information to obtain situations, of course. They focused on their experience in business as well as their writing, bookkeeping, or sales skills. In a few cases, prospective clerks tendered their savings as capital to be loaned to the firm that gave the bearer a position. The strategies job seekers used to represent their skills and experience ranged from the general, in which applicants emphasized the breadth of tasks they were suited to perform, to descriptions of experience in a specific branch of commerce that often noted clerks’ ability to “influence” regional trade through their connections with merchants outside the city. Advertisers might specify the post they wanted, such as “assistant bookkeeper,” “salesman,” “out-door clerk” (a drummer or traveler for a firm), “in-door clerk” (a salesman inside the store), or “entry clerk” (bookkeeper and copyist), but then evoke their desire to be “generally useful.” Hoping for a specific position while offering to do many labor tasks placed these applicants within the confines of narratives such as Hunt’s that promised young people advancement only after they had proven their mettle and character. If they successfully mastered

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the language of character, they might become a firm’s “chosen one,” as Edward Tailer called the young man who earned a clerkship with dry goods importers Little, Alden and Co. after responding to an advertisement the firm had placed in the Courier and Enquirer.29 Tailer, the son of a well-to-do William Street broker, regularly perused merchants’ advertisements for clerks and placed a few advertisements himself during his career as a clerk. As a schoolboy, he “answered an advertisement” in the Journal of Commerce but found that it had been placed by a Wall Street lawyer. “[A]s my object was to learn the mercantile business,” he wrote in his diary, “I respectfully declined.” The young man did not have to take the first position offered him, due to his father’s wealth and business connections. After signing on and clerking for Little, Alden and Co. for a few years, he paid for his own advertisement in the Journal of Commerce, proclaiming himself “conversant with the French language” and trumpeting his experience with “one of the largest Importing Houses of this city.” He moved to the firm of Reimer and Mecke at the end of 1852, but within months he “inserted” another advertisement “[f]or the fun of the thing,” now able to highlight to importing merchants the relationships he had cultivated with jobbers in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York. By the middle of 1853, he had joined the firm of Fanshawe, Milikin and Townsend, but in April of the next year his employer told him that he would not be retained because he exhibited a “want of firmness and indecision” in selling goods. He thought the criticism was “ridiculous” and placed yet another advertisement in which he touted his experience with “Western Jobbers.” In May, he signed with W. and S. Phipps and Co. as salesman, and was quickly dispatched to meet with the firm’s customers in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Chicago. When this firm failed, he readily got another position with Sturgis, Shaw and Co. In six and one-half years as a clerk, Tailer had served five firms, illustrating the weakness of traditional commercial structures of recruitment and advancement. On his twenty-fifth birthday in 1855, he wrote, “I hope the future may be fraught with happiness and success, and that I may eventually be numbered amongst the hard-working merchants of this Metropolis.” Tailer would have his wish granted by the end of the year. Although he sometimes rubbed employers the wrong way and made mistakes on the job, he built upon family and commercial connections on the one hand and his increasing knowledge of the dry goods market on the other to sell himself as an exemplary salesman and make personal progress toward his goal of independent proprietorship over his own firm.30

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Foreign-born clerks like “James” often lacked these connections. While the evidence is scant, it appears that immigrants were more likely to work for grocers, pawnbrokers, or storekeepers who hailed from the same national or linguistic backgrounds rather than the more powerful, better-connected wholesaling firms that employed Tailer. Some of these immigrants used their clerkships as positions from which to ascend to commercial independence in a small way as peddlers or storekeepers. Evidence exists that some immigrant shopmen had clerked in their country of origin, perhaps in large cities like Dublin, London, Liverpool, or Hamburg. A portion of these immigrants may also have moved considerably within their native countries in search of work before deciding to cross the Atlantic. It is clear that many foreign-born clerks, like other migrants, hoped for a better life stateside. James Vickredge, an emigrant from Worcestershire, England, reminisced about his mid-nineteenth-century crossing in a steerage compartment to “the Land of Promise America.” As he acknowledged, his family was not without means, with brothers in business on their own and a sister at school. Vickredge had been a “successful” clerk with a comfortable salary for four years, but had “no hope of being anything else.” The clerkship, he sighed, “did not satisfy my ambitions.” While an improvement in his salary delayed his decision for a year, the “fever” to emigrate to a place with more opportunities compelled him to obtain passage for New York in 1850. Success, defined by wealth or refinement, was not assured for these immigrants, as they were often pegged to low salaries and did not enjoy the familial ties or friendships that might have garnered them plum posts in commercial houses with the most extensive trade. Yet a few cultivated bonds with wealthy relatives, family friends, or influential foreign-born businessmen to achieve comfortable clerkships and mercantile independence in American cities.31 While immigrant clerks had a much more difficult time than nativeborn counterparts in maintaining contact with their families, the records of New York’s Emigrant Savings Bank reveal impressive attempts to reestablish kin connections in the city. John O’Beirne, a native of County Leitrim, had evidently buried his parents and left a brother behind to go to Dublin, Ireland. He arrived in New York via Liverpool in June 1851, settling on Nineteenth Street, taking a clerkship, and undoubtedly hoping for a reunion with two sisters who lived in Massachusetts. He probably despaired, however, about leaving his wife and three children in Dublin. Perhaps his deposit at the bank was part of his effort to accumulate the funds necessary to send for his family. Martin Ryan, a clerk from County

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Tipperary, left a widowed mother and four siblings in Ireland, joining another four brothers—one of whom worked as a laborer on Ward’s Island in the East River—and a sister in the United States. Another brother had emigrated to Australia. Walter Durack, a New York clerk from County Galway who had first landed in Quebec, Canada, apparently saved money from his salary so that his brothers could make the voyage to join him, and in one case, obtain a clerkship in Newark, New Jersey. These clerks were probably not desperate rural laborers pushed to the United States by the potato famine, but their livelihoods were imperiled by their nation’s economic collapse. Fortunately, they had the funds necessary to pay for their transatlantic passage and search for American clerkships that offered better and more consistent work than they could find in Ireland.32 Young men in the American countryside, pushed by deteriorating opportunities for land ownership or pulled by the promise of clerking, flooded into cities like New York in search of a berth in a commercial house. Many of these young men kept diaries to channel their ambitions in proper directions and chart their character development as they searched for paths to advancement. William Hoffman was one of these young men. In March 1847, when he started keeping his diary—a “strict account of the transactions and occurrences of each day—Good, Bad, or otherwise”—he was nearly eighteen years old and considered the diary his personal progress report. “[I]f rigidly adhered to,” he reasoned, diary keeping “will be highly beneficial in the end.” When he left his family’s farm in the Hudson River Valley at the end of March 1848, he spent an evening with his brother Daniel in the town of Hudson and then booked passage for Poughkeepsie. He hoped to find work there, but if he failed to obtain a position, he planned to venture to New York and Albany as well. Unlike the applicants for clerkships trying to master the language of character in their want advertisements, he sought to learn the parameters of finding work by meeting merchants personally, exhibiting his character traits rather than merely writing about them. Hoffman cast this mission to Poughkeepsie as an educational reconnoitering of the commercial landscape. By learning the give and take of mercantile negotiations, he believed he would be better able to take advantage of opportunities to win a position in the commercial world.33 At several junctures, Hoffman showed that he was not so much applying the lessons taught by commercial authors like Hunt as gaining instruction in the realities of particular business communities in the cities he visited. While he left Claverack alone, without the connections that Tailer could exploit, his travels to distant cities demonstrated that he was

40 What Is My Prospects?

never far removed from his past or his neighbors. His efforts to obtain a situation in Poughkeepsie also illustrated his already impressive knowledge about bargaining with employers, formed through his experience in selling produce from the family farm, buying consumer items, and negotiating with neighbors. Yet Hoffman had not considered the difficulties he would encounter from his lack of clerking experience. The questions to which he kept returning were, how could he obtain a clerkship without experience, and how could he obtain experience without a clerkship? With the cards stacked against his success, he nevertheless revealed remarkable perseverance in weighing all of his employment options, rather than quickly settling for a clerkship encumbered by disadvantageous terms. Upon arrival in the small city of Poughkeepsie, Hoffman was a bit daunted—according to the 1850 census its population was more than twice that of the town of Hudson. Hastened by the knowledge that a Manhattanbound boat was due later in the evening, he set off to locate openings. After a few disappointments, he “met with a little encouragement” at one shop but was only “offered nearly my Board,” which he considered “rather poor business.” Always calculating, he negotiated with other storekeepers. “After having a long talk with the Proprietor” of one business, he entertained a proposal for an annual salary of “$50.00 and I should Board myself.” The prospective employer informed him that the deal was the best he could propose, fifty dollars being “the standard price for any Young Man the first year.” The merchant hoped to avoid the cost of boarding his clerks, a common example of apprenticeship’s hollow core that offered young men a great deal of freedom to pursue unmonitored leisure after work. But Hoffman was not satisfied with the terms and rejected the position, even presuming to inquire if the shopkeeper knew of any other vacancies in the area. At another shop, he sidled up to a clerk who said that his employer had just hired another young man with previous store “experience” for three hundred dollars per year. Turning that seemingly outrageous sum around in his head, Hoffman lamented “how unlucky” he was for not obtaining such a post.34 He began to despair of finding a position in Poughkeepsie, and stooped to call at a “Grocery Store just to ascertain whether there was a chance in that line.” “[N]ot,” he assured himself in his diary, “that I wished to follow it but to ascertain what they were in the habit of paying the first year &c.” Unlike Greene’s fictional clerk, Hoffman had created a hierarchy of stores in his head—just as importers outshone retailers, dry goods stores were preferable to groceries because of the types of goods they sold and

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the clientele they served. Yet Hoffman thought it crucial to know how salaries varied among shops. The fact that he made these inquiries to obtain knowledge reveals a young man who was confident in his negotiating skills and able to hold his own in the commercial realm, saying “no” to prospective employers if their offers did not suit him. He had already turned down a viable chance to obtain experience when he rejected an employment offer because the salary was not lucrative enough.35 Prescriptive commentators roundly criticized clerks’ desire for large salaries because it reflected poorly on their character. Young men should be satisfied with their positions for the time being, all the while endeavoring to attain the knowledge that would help them achieve their commercial goals. Presbyterian minister James W. Alexander, in The Merchant’s Clerk Cheered and Counselled, argued that most young men entered clerkships without purposeful direction. “By what possibility can a young man begin business aright, who has no notion what he seeks?” Inquire of any clerk, “‘What have you set before you?’ and he is dumb. He does not know why he has entered the place.” In lieu of “pleasing . . . [their] Creator, Benefactor and Saviour,” many clerks acted on a goal “which is in many a heart, ‘To make money.’” Alexander remonstrated against such desires, proclaiming that “making money is not the ultimate object in life,” but rather was “but a subordinate means. Fix before you some pure and lofty aim, or you will assuredly become one of the grovellers.” Young men who stooped to worship Mammon could not conquer among commercial men who praised virtue. Instead, clerks should focus on a goal that reconciled worldly and heavenly aspirations. “Resolve, under God,” Alexander exhorted, “to seek all the perfection of which your powers are capable; and go to that desk, or that counter, with a deep purpose never to flinch from a duty, or commit a deliberate fault.” Like other warnings to clerks, this advice offered a plan for clerical success that stressed patience and caution instead of ambitious longings for money. Most clerks, for their part, wanted the “noble . . . character” and sound reputation that accompanied placement as a clerk to honest and successful merchants. Thomas Marston Beare, in a letter to his fiancée, rationalized taking a new clerkship by declaring that “the gentlemen with whom I am going bear a high reputation” despite the low salary they paid him. Substandard pay could be offset by a corresponding boost to one’s reputation as a clerk of an upstanding firm.36 Alexander paradoxically tried to convince young men that mobility was possible and constrain their dreams of speedy advancement. Unable to reconcile these aims, he described an economy that looked much like

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the bureaucratic capitalism of the twentieth-century corporation. The minister told his readers that the appropriate way to advance in commercial hierarchies was first to “Know Your Place,” subordinating immediate personal gain for the delayed gratification of success. While they were clerks, Alexander advised young men to “[w]ear the yoke gracefully.” Even though they would be “tempted to slip . . . out of the yoke” in attempts to gain “independence,” clerks should maintain their position, developing the mercantile skills and character associated with apprenticeship. Caution was the rule, because precipitous efforts to start new firms were bound to be disastrous. As Alexander acknowledged, some clerks never made it in the age of panics: “It is not every man who is formed to be a leader, and some are clearly pointed out for subordinate posts as long as they live.” Alexander suggested that, instead of going into business alone, clerks should show a healthy regard for the judgment of their elders, “to attempt nothing of the sort without the full approval of older heads; and, above all, to play the man in regard to the unavoidable annoyances of a subaltern place.” When clerks worried about their future prospects, they should “[t]ear up those whining epistles which [they] have written home” and write in large letters on their “private memorandum, PERSEVERANCE.” For young people who hoped to achieve property ownership and success, Alexander’s suggestion that clerkships might be permanent was unwelcome. His advice that they temper their ambition and prepare for present and future security would deny them the prerogatives and stature attending white manhood in the antebellum period. Many clerks would balk at accepting a permanently “subaltern place” even if Alexander was correct that few young men were cut out to be commercial “leaders.”37 Hoffman’s desire for a higher salary, however, suggests that some clerks did not blindly follow the advice of the prescriptive literature. Tailer, in his second year of employment with Little, Alden and Co., wrote a “most copiously detailed” proposal for an increase in his salary. Paul Alden would not succumb to Tailer’s demand—an annual salary of $150—and instead offered $50 for the present year and $100 for the next. Bringing to bear “all the arguments which my imagination could sum up,” Tailer convinced Alden to consider the matter further, although the employer had the last word: “in Boston,” where the firm’s headquarters were located, “young men usually received fifty dollars for the first year, with a yearly increase of fifty.” Furthermore, he felt assured that “he might procure young men who would be most willing to remain with him from the time they entered the store until they were twenty one, for nothing.” Whether Alden

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was correct or not, he believed that clerkships were apprenticeships in which skills were more important than remuneration. There were plenty of young men, Alden suggested, who would gladly work for nothing at all until they became men in the eyes of the law. Tailer was dumbfounded, seeing in Alden’s refusal “a mean trait of character” in his employer. Think of it, the affronted young man wrote in his diary: “a man, who has made thousands of dollars should refuse the paltry sum to a faithful and hard working clerk.” The language of character meant nothing, evidently, when ambitious merchants allowed greed to control them instead of giving clerks a heftier pay packet that would make them, in Tailer’s words, “feel happy and independent.” A misunderstanding about wages could break the bond between merchant and clerk. Henry Wirt Shriver of Union Mills, Maryland, took a clerkship in 1856 with a Philadelphia boot and shoe firm that would pay him $250 annually. His employer paid him five dollars a week, however, and Shriver made the mistake of thinking he would be paid that amount throughout the year, in effect raising his salary to $260. The merchant had made no such agreement, however, and when he began to dock his clerk’s weekly pay toward the end of the year, Shriver quit immediately and wrote home to tell his father about the insult.38 Tailer’s employers lost patience with him in part because he whined too incessantly about his salary. His linkage of independence with salary in the short term rather than with property ownership in the long term was also a departure from the nation’s republican heritage. As Tailer moved among five different elite importing firms in New York in the early 1850s, one of his uncles exhibited concern for the footloose boy. He advised strongly that “young men had much better remain in one situation until they become perfect masters of the business which they may have adopted.” Only after a lengthy period of apprenticeship, when “the capital be forthcoming,” might clerks “feel perfectly safe in embarking their all in business.” Otherwise, “by shifting every year they might possibly become ‘Jack of all trades’ but good at none, and liable to fail when they do commence business, owing to their want of experience and proper training.”39 Avuncular guides at home and in the press found the rapid movement of young men like Tailer among firms and their desire for greater independence to be disconcerting. Tailer’s wealthy father could afford the shortfall in his son’s earnings while he learned how to be a merchant. Tailer’s claim that he needed a higher salary so that he could earn “something towards supporting myself, and relieving my Father, of whatever expense which attended my support” is perhaps laughable given his father’s social and

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economic standing as a Manhattan broker. Yet this passage in Tailer’s diary can also be read as a desire to escape his father’s control. Unlike ruraland foreign-born clerks, Tailer still lived under his father’s roof at a time when most young men venturing to cities in search of clerkships lived on the salaries they received. They were beholden to their fathers no longer even as they now lacked the security of what may have been their families’ comfortable standard of living at home. In light of apprenticeship’s limits and Alexander’s stern warning about the potential permanency of clerkships, clerks accumulated commercial skills and knowledge as best they could and negotiated for better salaries to establish both independence and security. Some employers understood clerks’ concern. Price, Newlin and Co. of Philadelphia paid their youthful initiate Algernon Roberts fifty dollars in his first year, with 25-dollar raises for the next two years. Yet when Roberts turned twenty-one during his fourth year of employment, the firm increased his salary to four hundred dollars, suggesting that the principals believed that coming of age should mean a bit more financial independence for their clerks as well as freedom from parental constraint.40 Some clerks obtained situations that brought them much higher wages than those earned by tradesmen, and even for those mired in comparative poverty, clerks “enjoy[ed] at least the prospect of a good income” later in their careers, as one historian has argued. Yet contemporary sources could not agree on what an “average” clerk earned: midcentury estimates ranged between $250 and $600 per year. After recruiting the assistance of another partner, Tailer got his salary raised to $150 at the end of 1849. By June 1850, he was grousing that he “should be better remunerated for his services.” When Alden offered him $200 at the end of the year, Tailer bid for $300, which he received. Clerk and merchant continued to negotiate throughout Tailer’s time with the firm. At the beginning of 1852, James Little told his clerk, as Tailer wrote in his diary, “that I must not value my services too high, as I was yet young,” only twenty-one. Evoking the language of apprenticeship, Little told Tailer “that he would see to my welfare.” Sure enough, his salary for the coming year would be $450. In the fall of that year, when Tailer demanded $750 annually, Alden told him that he should “procure . . . another situation.” And he did so, several times over. Two days after he asked Alden for $750, he requested $1,000 per year from Reimer and Mecke, and they assented. In the mid-1850s, Phipps and Co. and Sturgis and Shaw both paid him $1,200 per year. While Tailer’s employers criticized aspects of his sales pitch and other skills, he had enough knowledge and enough powerful friends among elite mercantile firms to obtain the best-paying positions as salesman.41

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Salaries varied according to the age, experience, skill, and connections of the individual clerk and the pecuniary means and whim of his employer. For clerks who lacked commercial connections or who worked in retail shops and stores, salaries were not as high as those enjoyed by wholesalers’ clerks like Tailer. One dry goods retailer on Eighth Avenue, according to the Mercantile Agency, a credit-reporting firm, “changes cl[er]ks. v[ery]. often who leave because they can[’]t get th[ei]r. pay promp[tl]y.” Zachariah Rhode, a Jewish clothing store owner, employed “1 or 2 clerks at sm[al]l. salaries,” according to a credit agent. Just as clerks like Tailer challenged their employers’ assumptions about apprenticeship in their quest for higher pay, so too might store owners pay their clerks a pittance or not at all in an effort to cut their costs. The New York Transcript claimed in 1836 that intense competition for places and merchants’ devotion to their own “interest” drove clerks’ salaries down. While the paper acknowledged that perhaps fifty clerks in the city made more than one thousand dollars, most made “much less”—more like two hundred dollars. “Two hundred dollars per annum for a clerk!,” the Transcript envisioned “a journeyman employed in . . . the mechanic arts” gasping in response. “Let me see—that is—not quite four dollars per week—while I get nine; and at piece work I can make from twelve to fifteen.” The Transcript’s editor, Asa Greene, felt that these wage disparities were unjust. Clerks should be paid salaries that reflected their future prospects in the commercial world. Certainly, they should receive a rate higher than that offered to tradesmen as the re-organization of workshop labor threatened journeymen’s chances for advancement.42 Nevertheless, many clerks’ wages remained low. In 1851, a merchant’s clerk wrote a letter to Horace Greeley’s Tribune under the pseudonym “WRETCHED,” appending his yearly expense account: Board $156 Ferriage 8 Washing 18 Postage 3 Church matters 4 Clothing, hats, boots and shoes, &c. 55 Miscellaneous 20 [Total:] $264 Less 1 year’s sal’ry 200 Balance due $64

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“I may observe,” he concluded his letter, “this does not include wife or children, theaters, liquors, amusements, and things which prevent ‘Jack from being a dull boy,’ which I have the good fortune neither to possess nor care for. Bear in mind I am not a stripling either,” he wrote, revealing that some merchants did not correlate salary increases with coming of age, even for clerks who abided by the language of character. Newspaper editors often made reference to clerks’ debts, arguing that low salaries and clerks’ “extravagant . . . habits” were to blame for their embezzlement of funds and goods. These were young men, the National Police Gazette announced, “who are obliged to dress like gentlemen” and had “acquire[d] the tastes and longings of gentlemen.” They might have to steal to make credible their claims to gentility.43 Many clerks interpreted the search for a clerkship, like negotiations for salary increases, as empowering. In Hoffman’s case, however, the independence he felt on his job search unfolded among a network of friends from his community. After he turned down the clerkship in Poughkeepsie, he met an “old school mate” from home. His friend suggested they adjourn to a saloon, where they ate ice cream. Later, after attending—and sleeping through—a public lecture, the boys entered another saloon and ate a piece of pie. Antebellum-era advice-manual writers warned parents that their boys might stray from moral paths in cities, straight into the embrace of fast women, gambling halls that Alexander called “HELLS,” and saloons. Indeed, Hoffman succumbed to the enticements of the saloon, but in the end, he was seduced not by whiskey or women but by sweets and the company of an old friend. Reconnecting with his rural community and sampling tasty treats helped fortify him in his attempt to clarify his cloudy future and alleviate his disappointment about not locating work in Poughkeepsie. He did not find himself in a “subaltern place” as he walked the streets of a small city at night: he could freely ask for work and visit saloons with old acquaintances without supervision.44 The boat Hoffman boarded in Poughkeepsie that night arrived in New York City the next morning. Citizens offered advice to this green stranger, sending him to the largest dry goods store in town, A. T. Stewart’s “Marble Palace” at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. It is not clear whether these passersby knew that Stewart actually needed clerks, or that they merely assumed that a merchant who employed more than one hundred clerks might need the services of one more young man. But before he dared go to such an imposing place, Hoffman again sought encouragement from a Claverack friend who went with him “to Stewarts great Store

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where I applied for employment.” Again, the sticking point was Hoffman’s lack of seasoning as a clerk. If he only could have produced recommendations, he felt certain he would have obtained the post. Interestingly, he noted that the frustration of failure did not stop him from “looking around a little,” lingering in the store to admire the goods and the monumental aspect of the dry goods emporium. The sight-seeing continued as the old neighbors walked south on Broadway, stopping to gaze at the stunning “Astor House” hotel, where they “wondered at its massive Walls.” Hoffman forgot his failures and marveled at New York—its buildings, its goods, and its population of approximately half a million people. While commercial writers advised diligent application in finding work, Hoffman meandered through the hallowed halls of Manhattan stores and hotels with little purpose other than to gratify an interest in his surroundings.45 Later in the day, though, he intensified his search, walking farther south “purposely to install myself in business if possible. I went into the most business streets such as [P]earl[,] Nassau[,] and William . . . , but found no chance.” The question, he continually lamented, “would invariably be—Have you had any experience in the Business[?]” Discouraged but not defeated, he braced himself against the pouring rain and his disappointment, explaining that “perseverance whispered sharply in my Ears and I would push along, many would try to discourage me, and many whole hearted fellows would seem interested for my welfare, and inform me where I could best meet with encouragement.” He heard the persuasive voice of the prescriptive literature, and he listened to it. As the sun peeked from behind the clouds, the sidewalks began to dry and Hoffman rededicated himself to his task in the city. But two experiences that afternoon would sour the rest of his visit to New York. At one store on Broadway, he approached the proprietor, who “was then talking with a Gentleman of his acquaintance.” After waiting “a long time” for the man to finish his conversation, Hoffman “began to grow impatient as I wished to be a doing.” Flustered, he worried that “[t]he afternoon was passing rapidly and I felt much provoked at such inattention” as the merchant continued to chat idly with his friend. “[W]ithout longer to remain there in suspense I again braced myself before him,” he wrote, and “asked him if he wished any assistance—then he asked me if I had any experience in the business—I told him No. He said he thought that he should not want me.” Crestfallen, Hoffman “condemned him for Keeping me so long, to myself.” Unsettled by the merchant’s rebuff, Hoffman made one last effort to find a place. In a Greenwich Street shop, he met a “Loafer”

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who “was pretending to be the proprietor of the Firm and also wished to play the fool with me.” He admitted that the man “did carry it to some extent—it was done so smoothly that a person could hardly suspect anything.” He tried to claim that “I did all the while see something about him that did not look right,” but acknowledged that “at the same time my mind [being] somewhat involved, did not see the Mistake I was laboring under.” A clerk finally relieved Hoffman of his embarrassment by “kindly inform[ing] me that he did not belong here at all, and was trying to fool me.” New York was a bewildering place, inhabited, so it seemed, by merchants and tricksters whom country boys could not trust. Confronted by merchants who mocked his lack of experience and rudely kept him waiting, and confidence men who made him look like a fool, he again sought members of his community. He crossed the East River to Brooklyn, where he met an acquaintance who had once worked in his uncle’s shop in Hudson. This friendly face encouraged him to return to New York and apply for the position he had himself vacated days before. Upon landing in Manhattan, Hoffman ran into another friend from Massachusetts who broke the news that eighteen or twenty prospective clerks had already applied for the position. “I wandered till Noon,” he wrote, and then made a last attempt to find work in Jersey City, New Jersey. Here he met another friend, the son of his church’s pastor in Claverack. After inquiring unsuccessfully at “every Store in the city,” he returned to New York, vanquished. His friends had tried to help him find work, but now Hoffman decided to return upriver to Albany, alone. If friends could not secure him a clerkship, perhaps the sentiments of the prescriptive literature could: “I meant to persevere,” he wrote in his diary.46 On the morning of April 3, 1848, exhausted and disheveled by his travels, he “washed and fixed [him]self as slick as possible” and renewed his pursuit for work in the state capital. He received immediate “encouragement” from a carpet store proprietor who offered him seventy-five dollars for the year, without board. At this point he hesitated. Should he take this position without exploring the other opportunities the city might offer him? He decided to take his chances and proceed to other stores, though he “thought perhaps I should call again” if he failed to find another situation. At the next store, he tried to find the limits of the clerical salary scale in Albany, naming his own price, one hundred and fifty dollars, but sweetening the deal by offering to board himself. The shopkeeper demurred, unable to meet his demands. Hoffman left the store remorsefully,

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since it was “a very Neat store and I should like to have succeeded in getting a situation there.” As he had done at the carpet retailer’s shop, he resolved to return with a better offer if he was unsuccessful elsewhere. But in Albany, such contingency plans were unnecessary. Hoffman entered a dry goods store on State Street called “Old Gable Hall” and made his case to one of the proprietors, Stephen Boyd. “After having a long talk,” Boyd offered Hoffman a choice. “[H]e agreed to employ me and give me $150.00 for one Year and I board myself—or he Boards me[,] washes for me[,] . . . and at the expiration of the Year gives me $50.00.” Mulling over his prospects, he refused the option he had only just offered to another storekeeper and decided upon the second, an arrangement he had refused in Poughkeepsie but now accepted after educating himself about the vagaries of the market. “And now I felt relieved,” he wrote in his diary. “I did not care about seeing the City—I proceeded to a Saloon near the Wharf and there awaited the hour to come that I might proceed home.” Hoffman had confirmed his independence from his family by becoming Boyd’s dependent employee. He had sought independence by searching for a clerkship in cities on the Hudson within a community of upriver expatriates. It is not surprising that his first thought was not to make a new home in Albany but rather to return to his old one in Claverack. Young men like Hoffman claimed independence and deferred it during this transitional period in their lives.47 But once they had obtained clerkships, many young men desired to prove their manhood in competition with other men in the market. Often, this meant measuring themselves against other clerks. Hoffman regularly compared his sales against the expertise and output of his fellow employees: “I f[l]atter Myself, although I have been here only Three Months[,] that I can sell goods—especially Calicos[,] Muslins[,] and common goods as well as [John] Hinman or [Stephen] Mesic[k],” Hoffman wrote in July 1848, only lamenting that “as they are more experienced and have served longer,” he had “to yield and let them take most of the sales which gives them the advantage over me.” While extolling his progress in “the art of selling,” Hoffman acknowledged that seniority remained a crucial framework for understanding how clerks dealt with each other. Sometimes, inexperienced clerks might admire the gentlemanly bearing and kindness of more established clerks in the firm. But Hoffman’s diary entries reveal his disdain for clerks who failed to perform their allotted tasks and thus forced him to do extra work. Hoffman accused John Hinman of desiring “to be a perfect Gentleman and not even busy himself

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with the . . . chores of folding up Goods and regulating things about the Store. He in fact has left this work . . . for me to perform,” he fumed. His counterpart’s work ethic was abominable, as he “cared as little about keeping things . . . in order as he possibly could and escape the detection” of their employers. “How quickly,” Hoffman grumbled, “will he jump up from his easy seat when they happen in.” Hoffman tried to distinguish between those clerks who aspired to be “perfect Gentlem[e]n” and efficient, hard-working employees like himself. Social mobility would come, according to authors like Hunt and Alexander, only after diligent application to labor. Nicholas Chesebrough, a New Haven, Connecticut, dry goods clerk, appears to have kept track of his hard work by tallying the value of his daily sales in the margins of his diary. Edward Tailer regularly compared his sales figures with those of the other salesmen in his firm and noted when he met his old school friend Robert Graham on the streets, jealously marveling that Graham had obtained a place with the prestigious firm of Howland and Aspinwall. Advice-manual writers would have frowned upon the practice of making these comparisons, as doing so placed individual pride over the firm’s success. Yet these examples of competition were among clerks’ efforts to chart their own paths in the urban commercial world and respond to authors who instructed them to bide their time. They pushed against the precepts and warnings of the guidebooks in an attempt to reconcile their ambition with the language of character. In this way, they could claim themselves independent individuals even as they occupied subordinate roles in the economy.48

Becoming a Business Man After Hoffman arrived in Albany to start his clerkship, his new employers kept him busy running errands, dunning debtors, and distributing advertisements throughout town. When he was unsuccessful in one of his first attempts to sell goods, Boyd’s partner Henry Mesick was looking over his shoulder and reprimanded him “vehemently.” Hoffman vacillated. Had he done the right thing by leaving the farm? Three days after he arrived, he confided in his diary that “I cannot say as I like the place—the Business as well as I anticipated.” But he stopped himself from sliding into despair: “I shall not too soon be discouraged” by the hard work. “I am shure,” he wrote hopefully, “that Clerks the first Year . . . have to work harder than at any other time.” A week later, he wrote more positively that “I like my business and situation rather better than at first.” One evening in early

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May, Hoffman was busily cleaning the store and straightening the merchandise before closing when Mesick asked him if he liked his new job. The young clerk paused nervously: to admit he had been both satisfied and dissatisfied during this trial period might have hindered his commercial career before it had fairly begun. He told his employer that he was pleased with the position, and Mesick offered to end his trial and employ him for one year.49 Then Mesick raised the stakes, giving his young clerk a glimpse of a future gilt-edged with success. He acknowledged that he had not made the trial period easy on the young newcomer, explaining, in Hoffman’s words, “that I must expect a talking to once in a while—that I must not be depressed in spirits because I was sometimes corrected and talked to pretty loudly—that he did not expect that I could on commencing a new Business work with that dexterity eaqual to one whose experience has been the study of several Years.” Mesick apologized for his sharp criticisms of Hoffman’s sales techniques and conduct, admitting that his temper often led him to take out incidental frustrations on the clerks. Then he enticed his employee with the ultimate encouragement: “He then . . . pointed out to me Young Men who when in his Employ were as strictly kept as I am— and that he installed them in Business for themselves when they had arrived at” adulthood. Herein lay the core of the commercial promise for clerks: if he would only “persevere,” Mesick said, Hoffman might advance to a position of wealth and respectability as a merchant. Hoffman already believed this to be the case—he had written in his diary that he would not give up. According to Mesick’s lights, the new clerk’s behavior had been beyond reproach and his “deportment thus far evinced a good bringing up,” making him a good candidate for “becomeing a Business Man.” It was a humble beginning, and he still had his mind set on bigger and better things in the Empire City downriver, but Hoffman’s career had begun with fair prospects.50 Some two years later, he felt that he was primed for success. He had become a clerk for a new firm, Manhattan dry goods wholesalers Gilbert, Prentiss and Tuttle. In July 1850, he embarked upon a journey to western New York State on behalf of his employers, hoping to make connections with small-town storekeepers who would call on him when they visited New York to replenish their stock. It was on his trip up the Hudson, past familiar rural haunts, that he completed his personal transformation into an urban man of business. He juxtaposed natural beauty—the “verdant Green,” the “rescussitating waters,” and the “delightful Groves” of the

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countryside—with his city of residence: “New York[,] with all its mammon, its business, its would be luxuries, its plethoric ‘markets.’” No city could “compare” to the bliss of the countryside, “the Garden and Paradise of Eden.” And yet on this trip to Syracuse, Rochester, and smaller towns, Hoffman knew he would impress country storekeepers: he had “all the grace of a New York Clerk” and “drumming cards” acknowledging his connection to urban merchants. He shed his rural identity by praising the “gorgeous scenery” of the Hudson Valley in sentimental tones—he wrote as if he had never been to the countryside before. “My intention,” he wrote about his trip west, “has been honest and good and desirous of advancement.” He had high hopes that Mesick’s premonition about his success—founded upon his character, ambition, and education as a merchant’s clerk—was about to become reality. But Hoffman had made himself into an urbane man of business with only limited help from Mesick.51 The thousands of clerks living in northeastern cities at midcentury hoped to realize their ambitions. Those aspirations, shaped by the egalitarian political rhetoric of the American Revolution, as well as the economic opportunities offered by antebellum capitalism and the rise of cities as immense depots for goods, capital, credit, and customers, encouraged these young men to take clerkships in order to accumulate fortunes and prestige. While assumptions that character was the best form of capital provided a common context and language through which commercial actors could comprehend the underpinnings of success, Americans disagreed about the appropriate balance of ambition, character, and capital required to make the successful merchant. Economic panics that convulsed the economy periodically in the antebellum period provoked a variety of authors to encourage young men to be cautious. Good men as well as good men of business sometimes failed: contemporaries often repeated the adage that “nineteen twentieths of our merchants” did not make it. The contradictory messages percolating in American culture praised aggressiveness and submissiveness, self-control and establishing one’s authority over others, acting morally in the marketplace and taking the main chance at all costs. Clerks ruminated on these contradictions in their diaries as they tried to prove themselves worthy of and ready for mercantile proprietorship and competition with other men. Simultaneously, advice-book writers, journalists, ministers, and novelists revived the ideals of the moribund institution of apprenticeship, adapting misguided historical memories about colonial countinghouses and founding fathers to contemporary circumstances. The ambiguities of these narratives about

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success and what it meant to be striving young men challenged clerks to square this period of dependence with their dreams of achieving upward mobility, proprietorship, and distinction as urbane citizens. They did so by tentatively defining independence in different ways—as freedom from the household economy or the ability to negotiate salary terms and eat at a saloon with friends. As they settled down into their jobs, however, many young men found that Alexander’s warning about “subaltern places” was not far from the mark. Expected to do much more than monitor the books, counter, and cash box, these young men would participate in a broader cultural reassessment about the meanings of clerks’ work in light of capitalist transformation in the nineteenth century.52

2 The Humble Laborer in the White Collar

In the early evening of May 4, 1832, the six-story building of the metal and cotton dealer Phelps and Peck collapsed at the corner of Fulton and Cliff streets in New York City, crushing several men to death. The New-York Evening Post reported the irony that “the laborers employed about the establishment,” believing that the burden of heavy bales and plates had damaged the structure’s walls, “had come to a conclusion to work no longer in it than that very evening.” Three of the firm’s clerks had perished. Thomas Goddard, a “celebrated Accountant” well known for his bookkeeping talents, was found dead near the spectacles he used to calculate figures in the firm’s ledgers. Josiah Stokes, the firm’s “confidential” or head clerk, was discovered lifeless but still clutching “a silver pencil . . . with which he had been writing.” Among those mourning his death was Caroline Phelps, daughter of his employer. The couple was to have been married. Newspaper reports noted the deaths of three “colored men” and mentioned that three other black men were trapped inside. Two of the African American survivors, when freed from the wreckage, informed rescuers that they had been “in one of the upper lofts” when the building collapsed.1 Even as the newspaper coverage of the disaster confirmed that white and black men worked together in commercial environments, it reinforced cultural assumptions about the distinctions between white and black labor. White clerks were primed to succeed their employers as independent men of business by working with their heads and marrying the proprietor’s daughter. African American porters and cartmen did the heavy lifting and moving tasks that were absolutely necessary to commercial prosperity, but manual labor did not offer future promotion in business. Clerks died with the traditional implements of their trade—pencils, books, and reading glasses—close at hand, and Stokes’s occupational

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title, “confidential clerk,” suggested that a hierarchy of trust and skill existed in mercantile countinghouses (fast being shortened to “houses”). If clerks hoped to be successful, they should continue to learn the mercantile “trade” by moving slowly and surely from one post to the next in the pecking order of their firms.2 Yet the Post inadvertently excavated some of clerks’ hidden experiences in the antebellum commercial world. George Bannister, a clerk who fled the building before it fell, had been “attending to some business in a small room situated on the second floor” when the walls started to buckle around him. Stricken with fear, Bannister thought about jumping through a window before making a timely escape by way of the cellar. He was a lucky “gentleman” (the word is the Post’s)—Stokes did not even have time to put down his pencil. The nature of Bannister’s “business” upstairs is unclear: the typical commercial house in the antebellum period separated the storage of goods on the upper floors from the display, distribution, and accounting of merchandise on the first floor. If clerks worked at desks and counters on the ground floor, why was Bannister not employed there? Was he assisting the “colored men” employed on the upper floors of the establishment among cotton bales and metal sheets?3 Bannister’s presence in the collapsing building’s upper stories indicates a broader trend: clerks’ work was changing along with the American commercial economy in the antebellum period. Phelps and Peck resembled a mercantile shipping firm of an earlier era, yet it also focused substantially on domestic trade. Recovery efforts in the rubble revealed that one of the dead was a rural artisan-manufacturer who had been purchasing tin plate for his metalworking shop. Transportation improvements and industrial capitalism drove the growth of specialized wholesaling and retailing firms. These catalysts augmented the urban clerking population with rural- and foreign-born boys, created a more competitive business landscape, and contributed to a corresponding transformation in the work that clerks did.4 Occupational designations could be misleading. The vast majority of “clerks,” working in small shops with only their employer or a few other clerks and laborers for company, were interchangeably errand boys, salesmen, bookkeepers, cashiers, and porters. While they might have construed their search for a clerkship or their negotiations with employers as independence, most novices—especially when they began clerking—had to perform the most mundane types of “drudgery” in “subaltern” positions as they learned their way around a shop or office. As Edward Tailer wrote

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of his first few years of clerking for a Manhattan dry goods importer, he “performed whatever was to be done.” Once clerks in large firms had completed this trial period, they might—like Goddard and Stokes—succeed to more specialized and honored posts in the house. Clerks’ work experiences were shaped by the type of firm in which they worked and their seniority in that firm, and those circumstances in turn shaped their outlook on advancement. But for most of these young men, it was unclear how a course of menial, tedious work would help them make a rapid ascent to power and prestige. Alexander’s advice that they “wear the yoke gracefully” was not welcome. The narratives that linked a language of virtuous character to commercial education and imminent proprietorship were at odds with the capacious meanings of clerking, the variety of people who were clerks in antebellum cities, and the zig-zagging trajectories of clerks’ careers.5 Clerks’ multiple obligations in the commercial house and store made it difficult for them to claim the prerogatives and esteem due to wealthy and respected bourgeois men. They did nonmanual “headwork” and manual “handwork,” and in some cases they were, like laborers, imperiled by the boom-and-bust economy. Three days after the Phelps and Peck tragedy, the Post informed its readers that the respected Goddard’s death had “left a family in very narrow circumstances” and pleaded for funds “to alleviate the afflictions of his bereaved widow and children” in their time of sorrow. United in death, the newspapers ignored the fact that clerks and porters were often joined in life at work by shared tasks and even relative poverty. Contemporary examinations of the types of work that employees did in the antebellum commercial house did not necessarily make it easier to distinguish among them, thus blurring the meanings of class, ethnicity, and race in urban America. The perception that clerks were merchants in the making commingled uneasily with the reality that they were workers.6 The failure of occupational categories to delineate racial, ethnic, and class differences created profound instability in the meanings of clerking and clerks’ identities. When a reporter for the New York Herald referred to a litigant in an 1835 court case as “a bricklayer’s clerk, and hod carryer in general,” he simultaneously ridiculed trades apprentices’ and journeymen’s pretensions to a more exalted occupational label and illuminated the potentially shabby connotations of clerking, a job that entailed service both to employer and to customer. The uncertainty of these cultural meanings became even more unsettling for white, native-born clerks as

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foreign-born men and even a few African Americans made inroads into their occupation. Young copyists and counter attendants could not credibly argue that they were respectable men because they were clerks. Despite the assurances of commercial writers such as Hunt and Alexander, many commentators associated clerking with dependent and even servile assistantship. William Hoffman’s reference to his 1850 Manhattan employment search as a quest to become “the humble laborer of clerk” demands an investigation of clerks’ experiences with office “drudgery” and underscores a broader cultural discussion about the definitions of “work” and “worker” that used clerking and clerks to assess what class and race meant in antebellum cities. Hoffman’s awkward phrase reveals the conflicted nature of his ambition in an age of panics, but it also shows how the white collar that clerks wore was an ambiguous symbol of respect in this period. White clerks and other men of business debated the meanings of race and class in their society to determine the value of white skin. But unlike journeymen who earned the “wages” of whiteness, clerks and proprietors tried to hoard whiteness as cultural capital, at once announcing their citizenship in the republic and their genteel superiority over working people, black and white. To do so, clerks and their allies closely monitored quotidian interactions between Americans and immigrants as well as whites and blacks in a variety of urban venues—from the abolitionist meeting hall to the minstrel show, from the commercial workplace to the domestic hearth.7

Drudgery Young men who were hired by importing and wholesaling firms with a global clientele did the writing and bookkeeping work that had been commercial clerks’ bailiwick for centuries. Robert Graham, a clerk for New York importers Howland and Aspinwall, copied correspondence to send aboard a number of ships and duplicated those epistles in the firm’s letterbooks. When a number of clerks left the firm in the spring and summer of 1848, the partners asked Graham to pick up the slack. He found it “quite annoying . . . to have to leave my own duties to copy” the European and West Indian letters. Yet he was thrilled when, after only a year on the job, he rose to the cashier’s chair, “drawing all the checks for the Salaries” of the firm’s employees. Holding a position of great responsibility protected him one June afternoon from having to help “William the Porter” and other laborers whitewash the office. Yet Howland and Aspinwall kept

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changing Graham’s responsibilities, and the young man knew he was “really [a] miscellaneous clerk” who was still learning the ropes. He worried what would happen when, by autumn, “all the berths will . . . be filled” by more experienced young men “and I . . . [will have] nothing to do.” His was a false start up the firm’s hierarchy, borne of temporary necessity within his firm. Commercial writers repeatedly warned clerks that they would have to begin their commercial climbs at the bottom of the occupational ladder and work their way up, and many young clerks undoubtedly thought it reasonable to expect a period of dependence when they would learn the business and prepare for their advancement.8 But most were not prepared for the boredom that accompanied bookkeeping and copying in mercantile houses and stores. While some clerks seem to have been awestruck by the monetary values listed in their firms’ books and correspondence, after weeks and months on the job they described this work in a perfunctory manner. George John Cayley cut through the tedium of balancing Jonathan Goodhue’s account books by indulging in wry sarcasm: “checking accounts current. Interest but not interesting.” On some days, he dispensed with such humor and simply noted that he was “very tired of ” bookkeeping. Likewise, Graham dreaded writing a twenty-page “Invoice” that was “the longest that ever went out of the office.” In an eight-day period in the summer of 1850, Henry Southworth called clerking “dull” four times. It is remarkable that young men who spent much of their days scribbling would choose to scribble even more when they returned home in the evening. Diary writing might have helped clerks make themselves and achieve independence from family and social controls, but penmanship and accounting skills were most often harnessed for the good of the firm, restraining clerks’ sense of independence.9 Their dull work regime and the cultural ambivalence toward the ideas and structures of apprenticeship suggest that merchants could not agree upon what they should teach their clerks. Should apprentices learn how to be good merchants or good clerks? This question illuminated the tenuous compatibility of clerks’ temporary servility and their often grand expectations for wealth and prestige. Some writers contended, of course, that good clerks would become good merchants. Yet the relationship between mercantile education and advancement to proprietorship or partnership was unclear. Benjamin Franklin Foster, a bookkeeping and penmanship instructor who published several volumes in the 1830s and 1840s, had once been a bookkeeper himself. He believed that patience was a virtue for clerks because they had not yet mastered the nonmanual work of the

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commercial house. A beginning clerk “is for the first two or three years a mere drudge,” Foster explained, “because his school-boy hand is unfit for the journal or ledger, or even for a common bill of parcels.” Since these drudges were not receiving penmanship instruction in the commercial house—another proof of apprenticeship’s emptiness—Foster advocated his own “system” as an educational foundation. For fifteen dollars, clerks could also learn penmanship and bookkeeping through courses of instruction at his “Commercial Academy” located on Broadway in New York. This education, Foster promised in his “prospectus,” would “conduce most effectually to advancement in any mercantile situation.” Yet Foster, whose exquisite penmanship and bookkeeping expertise surely made him a candidate for upward mobility, forsook the opportunity to advance through tried and true channels from clerk to proprietor. Perhaps he thought that being an author and guru was a more certain means for upward mobility or comfortable stability than being either a clerk or merchant in this age of panics.10 As an occupational group, clerks shared with other workers the experience of unemployment, especially during tepid economic times, when rural and foreign immigration to cities made competition for places even more intense than usual. A Philadelphia labor journal, The Mechanic’s Free Press, reiterated in 1830 its devotion to the interests of journeymen and “labouring females” but also reported that roughly half of New York clerks were out of work for significant portions of the year and “reduced to the greatest poverty and distress.” Mathew Carey, in his impassioned Appeal to the Wealthy of the Land, primarily sought to improve working and living conditions for women in the needle trades, yet he placed clerks within the pale of unemployment and want. “There is at all times a superabundance of clerks,” he wrote, sometimes competing with dozens (a few newspaper editors counted hundreds) of other applicants for each position. Pulling at the heartstrings of bourgeois readers who were as interested in domestic happiness and welfare as in individual self-improvement, Carey obscured the fact that the vast majority of clerks were unmarried. He wrote, “I have known persons of this class, burdened with families, obliged to descend to menial and degrading employments for support.” At once, observers described clerks as enduring the common experience of workers in a fluctuating labor market and the uncertain prospects of an occupational group whose members were being primed for proprietorship. Young clerks, writers such as Carey believed, should not have to suffer the insults of downward mobility that laborers endured.11

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Clerks who were fortunate to have jobs could not use their special vantage point to admire the exciting hustle and bustle of commercial life. They were actors in that scene, working hard at repetitive drudgery inside and outside stores. Merchants who abdicated their responsibilities as clerks’ educators and protectors took away the very things that made dependence temporarily palatable. Negotiations about salaries or charting new paths to independence as Foster had done created new means for young men to measure their progress against their peers and a cultural standard that praised independent proprietorship and condemned waged dependence.12 Family members and specialized educational institutions staffed by former clerks continued to offer traditional mercantile education that merchants did not. In a changing antebellum economy, however, most clerks found that this education did not prepare them for some of the tasks they performed. Henry Patterson, clerking in a New York drug store in 1836, studied bookkeeping with his grandfather and brothers most evenings but filled small vials with medicine during the day. Bookkeeping, as one historian has convincingly argued, served as an ideology that made industrial capitalism legitimate for many antebellum Americans. In neat, balanced columns of credit and debt, capitalists created an orderly system that connected the transactions of diverse commercial, financial, and industrial proprietors. In agreeing to abide by the rules of double-entry, these men of business located “incontestable truth” not in Christian conduct but in the “bottom line” of profit and loss. Many clerks bought into what bookkeeping instructors called the “theory” of double-entry and used its precepts when they did bookkeeping work. Yet while they participated in a capitalist revolution in American society, clerks were not that revolution’s theorists. Job advertisements often demanded that prospective clerks possess a “quick, handsome business hand,” and clerks like Cayley and Graham completed repetitive arithmetical and writing assignments that required rote application more than theory. Moreover, as the disconnect in Patterson’s educational endeavors and work experiences suggest, antebellum city merchants asked clerks to perform a wide variety of tasks that seemed divorced from the “trade” of commerce—writing, accounting, and selling. Clerks could be excused for wondering how some of their labor situated them in the path to wealth and social standing.13 These ambitious clerks, like other white men chafing at dependent social relations, often remained well-meaning advocates of their employers’ interests. Merchants tried to balance their pecuniary interests with clerks’

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dreams of making an important contribution to the world of commerce. Early in his clerking career, Edward Tailer ran errands to the Customs House or the post office and attempted to collect money from customers. Although he possessed little discretionary authority, he often exaggerated the importance of these chores to his firm’s success and hoped that small triumphs—arranging goods just so, carrying mail to a departing steamer, or depositing bank checks—demonstrated that in the future he would fulfill his ambition and occupy “the same situation as those his illustrious predecessors now hold!”14 As the son of an elite broker, Tailer perhaps had the luxury to interpret mundane tasks in service to his firm as a temporary but necessary stage in becoming a merchant. And yet after about thirteen months of doing these tasks, he grumbled that it was “not creditable to myself that this kind of awkward and clumsy work . . . should still devolve upon me.” He believed himself “poorly situated” with his firm, though he hesitated “to offer any objections” because he feared that doing so “might prejudice” his employers against him. Tailer’s anxiety about making public his opposition to menial work coincided with a few serious errors he made that put his firm in difficult positions. In one instance, he directed a shipment of goods to be placed on a steamer to New Orleans rather than Charleston. One of his employers referred to the gaffe as “a most stupid mistake” and another informed him that he had cost the firm $113 “by means of . . . carelessness.” Whining about the types of work he was doing probably would not have garnered Tailer much sympathy when he had acted so irresponsibly. Merchants needed to monitor their inexperienced clerks’ activities.15 Clerks’ work, while monotonous, had its own rhythms that were shaped by many factors. Robert Graham knew that, because he was an importer’s clerk, the movement of transatlantic vessels regulated his labor. Many diary entries record his anticipation as he waited for ships to appear on the horizon, often wagering with other clerks about which boat would arrive first. On days when no vessels arrived in New York’s harbor, Graham did not have correspondence to copy or errands to run. When merchant ships docked, he and other clerks swung into action to load them with goods and letters before they set sail once more. Clerical labor could be tedious but was also punctuated by periods of intense mental and physical activity.16 While shipping news was especially significant for importing operations, seasonal changes also dictated how much retail and wholesale clerks

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had to do. In the dead of winter and the middle of summer, clerks could expect to be comparatively unoccupied and find their workdays dull, giving them time to write letters to friends. Winter cold spells choked waterways with ice and made snowy roads impassible, while hot weather incubated disease and created uncomfortable conditions that encouraged customers to avoid the city for months at a time. During slow periods, employers kept their clerks busy by “taking stock,” assessing the firm’s inventory and preparing for the spring and autumn revivals of business. In worst-case scenarios, such as when economic panic cast a pall over New York in April 1837, retail clerks did no work at all. Catharine Maria Sedgwick reported that in most of the city’s “deserted” dry goods stores, sales personnel paced behind counters, “up and down like so many ghosts” with no customers to serve. In response to slow economic times, employers wary of firing clerks might send them home for weeks, primarily in the summer and often one at a time until business revived. For instance, after New Jersey native Henry Patterson left the apothecary to clerk for Manhattan hardware wholesaler and retailer W. N. Seymour and Co., his new employer sent him home in the summer of 1837. After a month, the clerk returned to the city, but Seymour sent him home again and requested that he not come back until mid-October. Such temporary layoffs often meant more work for the clerks left behind but provided a safety valve for firms that sought to retain—instead of firing and rehiring—young men in the fall. When business rebounded, clerks sprang into action. Edward Thomas, a Boston hardware store clerk, claimed that his work duties had “accustomed [him] to talk rather rapidly,” proving that the commercial world often would not brook sluggishness of any kind. But the seasonal nature of their work linked clerks with other workers whose labor load slackened or grew at different times of the year.17 Despite their drudge work—sweeping floors and straightening displays, running errands and posting bills, taking stock and moving stock— contemporary understanding and prevailing historical wisdom about antebellum society suggest that clerks were different from store porters. Graham’s description of watching his firm’s porter clean the office reinforces this distinction. Clerks did headwork and hoped to become merchants who attained the prestige that position connoted. Porters, whose positions as manual laborers made it difficult to be upwardly mobile, did the dirty work of the store. Contemporaries believed that clerks were generally young and native-born and hailed from families of means. Porters supposedly came from economically struggling Irish or African American

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households. The 1855 New York State census reveals that 64 percent of the city’s porters were foreign-born. Nearly half were Irish, and 11 percent were German. Representing a larger trend by which immigrants took jobs from black men, only 6 percent of porters were African American. In early-nineteenth-century New York, porters had been independent contractors licensed by the city to transport packages of goods on their backs, yet a few merchants called upon their clerks to carry parcels to distant addresses to avoid paying the shilling fee for hiring a porter. By the 1840s, the increased volume, specialization, and scope of trade that had expanded clerks’ work duties compelled porters to align themselves with stores, bringing the two groups into closer proximity.18 Clerks themselves formed an ethnically diverse occupational group. While immigrants working for kin or members of their ethnic cohort in groceries, clothing stores, and other small shops often remained fugitive in a print culture dedicated to tracing the prospects of native-born clerks and their urban lives, some were featured in popular magazines and newspapers. An 1857 Harper’s Weekly article on shopping in Broadway dry goods stores, for instance, referred to a vulgar “Hibernian” clerk who “swore . . . frightfully” in his “native Irish” while at work, suggesting that some immigrants did clerk in stores on the city’s most refined thoroughfare. William Hoffman borrowed this type of ethnic slur in making his own judgments about foreign-born clerks. His fellow employees in the Albany store were “sluggish minded Dutchm[e]n”; the bookkeeper with whom he worked in a Manhattan firm was “an unprincipled old ‘Wag’” in part because he was a “foreigner.”19 But critiques of foreign-born clerks could be turned with equal effect against native-born young men. Early in 1852, as Edward Tailer was accepting greater responsibility for selling goods to wholesalers and retailers, he “had a regular blow out” with his firm’s junior partner, James Dunbar, about his sales technique. Dunbar thought that Tailer’s style “savored too much of the Chatham st[reet]. manner of receiving a customer,” in which “every man in the establishment” endeavored “to salute and shake a buyer by the hand.” Dunbar eschewed this aggressive approach for a more subdued, formal model of salesmanship in which clerks addressed customers “politely,” as if they had “accidently stumble[d] upon them.” Tailer responded defensively to Dunbar’s criticism because he understood the underlying message that his sales methods smacked of the style adopted by German Jews who sold clothing in shops on Chatham Street. Along what newspaper editors called the “furlong of Hebrewdom” or “Shylock’s

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Row,” merchants “endeavored to force” potential customers into their stores. George Wilkes’s National Police Gazette remonstrated against Jews’ “impulsive” methods of procuring customers, as it had “amounted to a decided nuisance.” Tailer needed to learn how to sell goods in a more refined way to escape the implication that, like the Jews of Chatham Street, he was pushy or unprincipled. Performing drudgery alongside immigrant porters and in danger of losing their positions in the boom-and-bust economy, clerks anxiously measured the geographic, social, and economic spaces separating Chatham Street from Broadway or the downtown financial district. They found the proximity to be too close for comfort.20

The Whiteness of Collars By the end of the nineteenth century, the white collar was associated with managers in corporations, but what did it signify for those who wore it to work in the decades prior to the Civil War? Henry Southworth, a clerk for a Manhattan millinery wholesaler at midcentury, thought it was a vital part of the wardrobe that underscored his refinement. He bought a black silk hat, new boots, and several detachable shirt collars, probably to complement a dark woolen coat, the monochromatic emblem of respectability in the city. The retailers who dealt with Southworth might have identified him as a potential success story among the rising generation of ambitious American youth. In June 1851, “somewhat busy filling orders and selling some goods,” he returned to his residence in the morning “to get a . . . collar” to replace the one drenched in sweat after a few hours of work. The hot weather would not diminish his work ethic, apparently so crucial to becoming a self-made man. Neither would it prevent Southworth from trying to establish his cultural credentials.21 Yet the white collar might have had another purpose for him. His multiple work duties blurred the distinctions between headwork and handwork that historians have used to clarify class distinctions in antebellum cities. To be sure, he sold goods, shelved and dusted the firm’s stock, kept account books, wrote and distributed advertising circulars, and ran errands. But the year before, he had written in his diary that “I have had to act the part of Porter for the last three days as our Porter is sick, or is playing ‘sojer,’” suggesting that he was feigning an illness to go on an alcohol-induced bender. Southworth’s contemporary William Hoffman stated his opposition to porters and their work in muted but clear terms after he had moved to New York City: “Robert the Colored Porter took

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Image Not Available

Figure 2.1. William Summers, “The New Shoes,” Life in Philadelphia Series, London Set (London: G. S. Tregear, c. 1833). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

leave to be absent about Three weeks and the duties of openening [sic] and closing the Store devolved upon me to perform—in short duties of Portership wholly thrown upon my shoulders.” Clerks placed a great deal of emphasis on their white collars because otherwise they found it difficult to differentiate themselves from those who rolled up their sleeves.22 African Americans were a small but important fraction of the portering population, but tabulators for the 1850 federal census counted only seven “colored” clerks in New York City, all of whom were designated “mulattoes.” The New York State census of 1855 listed only eighteen African American clerks in the city, representing just over one-tenth of 1 percent of the total number of clerks in Manhattan. Darker complexion was an impediment to obtaining clerical positions, though a few blacks were challenging this barrier nationwide. In the South, where many state

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laws prohibited teaching slaves how to read and write, a few slave masters from New Orleans to Savannah nevertheless entrusted their chattel property with keeping the books, copying correspondence, performing sales tasks, and generally “transact[ing] business.” In 1842, one beaming southern merchant praised his enslaved clerks for “honesty and fidelity” as they attended to his commercial “affairs.” A few free blacks obtained clerkships in northern cities during this period as well, and a Canadian newspaper, the Provincial Freeman, applauded the “Improvement of Colored People” in 1855 when it reported that Boston merchants were beginning to hire black clerks and bookkeepers. Recent scholarship on black businesses in the antebellum era suggests that free people of color may have had a few opportunities to learn the ropes of the commercial world from black entrepreneurs, much as Irish and German clerks apprenticed to storeowners in tightly knit ethnic communities.23 Clerkships connoted respectability among African Americans at the same moment that clerks such as Hoffman and Southworth were questioning the respectability of the tasks they had to do and the people with whom they had to work. A few white authors and artists, in their racist caricatures of black production and consumption, treated these divergent outlooks on clerking as well as the class and racial ambiguities prevalent in many commercial environments in urban America. In doing so, they ridiculed African American efforts at upward mobility and clarified the reasons why it was degrading to be a shop assistant. “The New Shoes,” an image in the popular Life in Philadelphia series of lithographs, was executed and published in London during the 1830s, though it evoked the themes canvassed in Edward W. Clay’s original images published stateside. As in other prints in the series, the lithographer aimed to denigrate African American attempts to take advantage of freedom through consumption. Setting the scene in a shoemaking workshop, the artist considers two absurdities, in his way of thinking: first, the notion that a black shoemaker could be a manufacturer—a successful business proprietor—and second, that African Americans possessed the wealth and cultural capital to participate in the promenade and consumer culture. The racist jokes about the high-quality “jet blacking” shoe polish and the female customer’s desire for something more “Handsome” than black shoes underscore whites’ uneasiness about the presence of black craftsmen and customers in a refined sphere of buying and selling consumer goods. These were laboring men and women who should not attain the prestige of proprietorship or purchasing power in fashionable retail outlets. Yet at the same

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time, the ways in which African Americans tried to display their refinement allowed the artist to critique more elevated commercial spaces. The nattily clad shoemaker’s assistant, wearing the striped shirt often worn by blackface minstrels, is the visual equivalent of the Herald’s reference to the bricklayer’s clerk. For in an elegant retail shoe store on Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street or New York’s Broadway, a white clerk would be serving a white female customer in precisely the same way, obsequiously acknowledging the customer’s refinement and suggesting fashionable styles. In this lithograph, then, the project of criticizing the ambiguous meanings of race in commercial districts of northern cities is intertwined with an acknowledgment of the uncertain respectability of clerking. African Americans could do sales work and so could shoemakers—laboring men.24 Black clerks’ numbers remained negligible in this era—contemporary attention to and historical commentary about these men show that they were only exceptions to the general rule. White merchants’ refusal to give these positions to African Americans concerned a growing group of black newspaper editors, craftsmen, and professionals, exposing as it did the ideological, social, and economic obstacles that kept young black men from the advancement allegedly offered through clerkships. African Americans who had obtained education in free schools sponsored by abolitionists and ascended to positions of prominence within their communities were often forced to take jobs as porters or draymen because whites would not countenance their participation in skilled trades or their ascension to posts supposedly offering headwork. Black abolitionists pressured white merchants to eradicate these obstacles in an exchange at the 1852 meeting of the American and Foreign AntiSlavery Society in New York. At this gathering, African American jeweler Edward Clark and doctor James McCune Smith challenged white abolitionist merchants to underscore their opposition to slavery by providing opportunities for occupational mobility to qualified black men. Centered in their collective sights was the president of the society, Arthur Tappan. Tappan and his brother Lewis demanded that their clerks display the utmost decorum in their private and public lives and appealed to evangelical ideologies of moral reform when they enlisted many of their clerks in the antislavery cause. Some Tappan employees had taken up arms to defend the firm’s Pearl Street house against antiabolitionist rioters in 1834. But the Tappans’ socially enlightened stance was dimmed by the reality that, despite the widespread belief that the firm had hired “‘nigger’ clerks to wait on people,” they had only briefly employed one black clerk in their

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establishment. Clark and McCune Smith criticized the Tappans for hiring African Americans “as the lowest drudges”—porters on low wages who could not “advance . . . according to [their] merits.”25 Arthur Tappan replied by tracing what he believed race and class meant in the mercantile house. He had once “offered a situation in my office to a colored man, . . . but he was not qualified.” He recoiled from the criticism that he had hired this man solely because of the color of his skin. Rather, he did so “because he [was] a gentleman,” culturally and educationally equal to his white clerks. Yet because he only hired (and quickly fired) this black clerk and was reluctant to repeat the experiment, it is clear that Tappan believed few African Americans possessed the genteel cultural credentials to fill clerkships. Nevertheless, he insisted that he could pull apart class and race—his concern was the former, he avowed, not the latter. He defensively declared that he “would not ask an Irishman sawing wood in the street, and covered in sweat, to come in and sit with my family. Neither would I a colored man, though I have been accused of it.” Tappan wanted only “gentleman” clerks and parlor visitors. Yet because his black employees were all porters, Tappan’s desire to be surrounded with gentlemen at work and at home embodied a vision of whiteness colored by bourgeois sensibilities. If educated individuals adopted the cause of evangelical reform, believed in the edifying refinement of a loving home, and strived mightily for commercial advancement, they might earn the economic and cultural capital that would lead to a clerkship in Tappan’s office. The hard-working but odorous Irish sawyer and most black men were, to Tappan, incapable of these sensibilities, and thus could not take places in the powerful and refined merchant’s economic and social circle.26 But there were blacks who had mastered gentility, as Tappan admitted. And some were educationally fit for clerkships, as the black press had long proclaimed. They were turned away by merchants who tried to obscure their own racism by passively blaming their white clerks for being impediments to a racially integrated desk-and-counter workforce. Tappan righteously told his fellow abolitionists that he had beaten back his clerks’ opposition when he briefly employed a black clerk. In Frank Webb’s 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends, set in Philadelphia, Charlie Ellis applies in writing for a clerkship, receives an encouraging letter from the firm requesting an interview, and then has his hopes dashed upon meeting his prospective employers. Despite his neat handwriting and evident education, it becomes quite clear that Charlie has no chance of obtaining

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a position because he is black. A member of the firm breaks the bad news to Charlie’s older sister in this way: “We should like to take him; but his colour, miss—his complexion is a fatal objection” because hiring Charlie “would create a rumpus amongst the clerks, who would all feel dreadfully insulted by our placing a nigger child on an equality with them.”27 The nature of clerking as a job and of clerks as an occupational group unsettled the meanings of race and class in antebellum cities but did not fray the bonds connecting these ideologies as bourgeois men used them to maintain power. Tappan’s efforts to demarcate clearer boundaries of class and race excluded purportedly unwashed and uneducated Irishmen and African Americans from the category of “gentleman,” thereby implying that they were inappropriate candidates for clerkships in his house. The white clerks in Tappan’s firm and in Webb’s tale knew better—there were qualified African American competitors for their positions who must not be allowed to work alongside them. Employers had the luxury to craft a bourgeois vision of whiteness that resided in proprietorship, education, and domesticity. White clerks gladly appealed to this vision, but the nature of their work duties and the makeup of their occupational group also encouraged a more visceral response reminiscent of white artisans who tried to bar blacks from entering their trades. Creating and maintaining a racial divide was crucially important in a northern economy based upon wage labor. In the South, slaves could be clerks without posing a threat to white men’s economic privilege and cultural standing. When a white clerk in Charleston, South Carolina, called his work “the servile trade of quill driving” in a letter to a close friend, he acknowledged the ambiguities of his occupation, encompassing at once the threat of dependence but also the opportunity for white men to control the implements and pace of their labor. But some South Carolinians worried about merchants offering clerkships to free people of color, fearing that they would “degrade the occupation.” It was no “surprise,” one declared in his support for 1835 legislation that would ban the practice, “that our young [white] men . . . will not enter the arena with them.” Native-born white clerks in post-Emancipation New York City, faced with the prospect of competing for clerkships with foreigners and a few African Americans, would have wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment. The presence of Irish, German, and black clerks, even though they were minorities within the occupational group and often worked in ethnic enclaves or black-owned businesses, cumulatively brought into question the respectability of the occupational group and the native-born white clerks who also populated it.28

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The fact that clerks’ work portfolio included porters’ manual labor intensified anxieties about the promise of clerking and created what one historian, referring to southern whites in the antebellum period who did not own slaves, has called “an undercurrent of discontented whiteness.” As a result, markers of social position such as the white collar came to assume greater significance for clerks like Southworth. On several occasions, he had to do porters’ work, and when he changed into his clean white collar, he tried to hide telltale sweat stains and declare that he was a respectable man. White collars might still permit clerks to enter merchants’ parlors after the business day had concluded. Just as journeymen tried to modify the meanings of republican independence to include manual labor as they discouraged skilled black men from pursuing their trades, white clerks bought into Arthur Tappan’s vision of whiteness that evoked bourgeois sensibilities. Henry Patterson remarked in April 1838 that “[w]e got a black man as porter in our store . . . named Peter Monroe,” who “was discharged” a few months later “on account of his being to[o] dumb and slow.” Patterson condescended to think that porters were not interested in the creed of self-improvement. They were too untrustworthy, unintelligent, and unreliable when on the job to make their positions secure.29 Complicating clerks’ uneasiness with their porters’ work was the fact that strenuous manual labor remained a vital component of nineteenthcentury odes to masculinity and republican citizenship. But these concerns evaporated when clerks considered porters’ racial and ethnic identities and the degrading aspects of their jobs. Upon obtaining a new situation in a Manhattan dry goods firm, William Hoffman performed menial tasks, “running to Wall St[reet] and the Post Office on petty errands which,” he haughtily editorialized, “I morally detest.” An experienced clerk and a budding gentleman should not have been expected to do insignificant tasks. He was so exercised by the perceived degradation of drudgery as to consider it a moral problem. Nevertheless, he had descended to the bottom of the pecking order in his new firm. After a few months of hard work, though, he learned that his employers were sending him to drum up business for the outfit among storekeepers in western New York State. Hoffman’s firm had recognized his diligence and skill, and a trajectory from errand boy to salesman appeared to be assured. Yet he had little opportunity to enjoy his triumph, for when he returned to New York, he was forced to spell “Robert the Colored Porter” during the latter’s absence from work. Hoffman tried to put a positive spin on his setback by balancing his ambition with the language of character: “I never

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labored harder than I did these three weeks” and “performed more than anybody else would have done when placed in my situation.” It was arduous work, but he did it well and with few complaints—he should reap the rewards of perseverance. But the tone of his writing clearly betrays his dissatisfaction. Clerks had to do both clean and dirty work, and that was discomforting.30 Although clerks occasionally expressed admiration for the porters with whom they worked, they often carefully qualified any respectful tones with expressions of enmity for porters’ tasks. Edward Tailer referred to his store’s Irish porter as “renowned” and the store’s Irish cartman as “efficient” but also called the Irish men who worked for his firm “lazy” and described one episode in which he took it upon himself to “spur them to more rapid motions” by verbal “commands.” Yet he accepted that he had to do porters’ work, evidently considering it part of being a junior clerk. He enjoyed the sociability of these men, crowding with them around the stove to eat apples and swap stories, but he was ambivalent about manual work. In his free time, he attended a gymnasium and fancied himself an athlete when he took a place at the windlass, the mechanical system by which employees lifted heavy boxes to upper floors. “By way of amusement,” Tailer wrote, “I lent three athletic Irishman my assistance [in] . . . running one of the twelve cases, which were hoisted in less than seventy five seconds.” It is tempting to interpret this as evidence that Tailer took pride in arduous labor or that he thought of it merely as a diversion from the “real” business of clerking. But his response when the “renowned” porter was sick and out of work is telling. In this case, Tailer “was compelled ‘nolens volens’ [whether willing or unwilling] to superintend the shuting up of the store.” He was clearly unwilling, for when his employers hired another porter, Tailer rejoiced that the new employee “will do much towards relieving me of the porterage of many a parcel” so he could devote more time to writing and selling.31 Tailer was able, as clerk for a dry goods importer, to shun manual labor as he grew in stature as a salesman for the firm, yet most clerks found it difficult to divorce porters’ work from sales tasks, even as they could not separate themselves from the porters. Moving between the windlass and the sales counter or writing desk, Tailer jumped across eroding boundaries of ethnicity, race, and class as they related to labor. His multiple duties also brought the meaning of masculinity into question. Moving cases was exceedingly dangerous—a few clerks and porters were severely injured after being hit by heavy crates or falling through

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the hatchway. It was also difficult labor shared by strong young men, workers whom Tailer alternately managed and joined at the task. At the same time, Tailer knew that he needed to obtain knowledge about goods and businessmen—best gained by copying correspondence and corralling customers at the desk or counter—that would speed his transformation into an independent commercial man. Clerks could try to establish their manliness in both ways, but their choices had consequences in regard to their position in society. When Robert Graham recorded that “[t]he gay and fashionable young men who have been lately personifying Knights, Pashas, [and] Pages . . . at the Fancy Balls of Saratoga and Newport may now be seen up to their elbows in Bales, Crates and H[ogs]h[ea]ds” on the commercial streets of New York City, he drew attention to the incompatibility of these activities. Clerks moved between refined spheres in which wealth and good manners made them gentlemen and spaces soiled by sweat, dirt, and hard work in which young men could display strength and endurance. Young, well-to-do men could be expected to participate in costume balls in the most fashionable resort towns, but acquaintances in that circle could not envision them taking a turn at the windlass.32 Earlier engravings of commercial scenes, such as the one depicting a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Philadelphia countinghouse attributed to Alexander Lawson, had attempted to distinguish countinghouse work from wharf labor. In the top half of this image, workingmen row small boats to unload goods from larger vessels and open barrels under the surveillance of older men—one carries a cane or walking stick—who direct their labor. Surrounded by a cornucopia of labeled boxes and bushels, these men participate in the hustle and bustle of commercial life in the age of sail. Juxtaposed against this portrait of physical activity is an image of the countinghouse interior, in which clerks attend to the business of their employer by writing and delivering messages. There are no goods littering the floor, the account books are neatly shelved along the back wall, and the young men calmly keep books, copy correspondence, and discuss mercantile affairs. The action and inaction portrayed in both halves of the engraving were integral components of commercial success, but Lawson hesitated to permit inhabitants of either sphere of work to cross the threshold that separated the supposedly sterile interior of the countinghouse from the outside world. By the 1840s, pictorial representations of store exteriors in large advertisements called trade cards expressed mixed messages about what clerical

Image Not Available

Figure 2.2. Alexander Lawson, “A Merchants Counting House” (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, c. 1795–1805). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

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work entailed. The trade card promoting J. and J. Reakirts’ Philadelphia drug and paint warehouse, sixteen inches by thirteen inches in size, visually maintains the distinctions between clerks’ and porters’ duties. In this image, a porter or cartman, identified by his rolled shirt sleeves and bulging forearms, unloads barrels from a cart. A clerk stands beside him, wearing a dark suit and recording the delivery in one of the firm’s account books. Historians have supported their conclusions about class by emphasizing these types of distinctions: workingmen shed their coats and rolled up their sleeves to perform handwork, while men wearing black coats and writing on ledgers did headwork. But in other artistic renderings, porters’ and clerks’ identities were blurred, making it difficult to understand who did which tasks. In an 1846 lithograph depicting Elijah Bowen’s Philadelphia hat factory and shop, a young man in a black coat moves a box of goods across the threshold of the store while a shirt-sleeved man opens crates on the sidewalk. The young man is dressed more like the Reakirts’ clerk than the shirt-sleeved porter, and yet he is carrying, not writing or selling.33 This occupational blurriness followed clerks inside the store. In another plate from the Life in Philadelphia series—this one published in the Quaker City—an African American woman asks the foppish white clerk, “Have you any flesh coloured silk stockings, young man?” The clerk replies, “Oui Madame! here is von pair of de first qualité!” As in “The New

Image Not Available

Figure 2.3. Detail of Mathias S. Weaver, “J. and J. Reakirt, Wholesale Druggists and Importers of Drugs, Chemicals, Paints, and Dye-Stuffs” (Philadelphia: Sinclair, c. 1844). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

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Image Not Available

Figure 2.4. Detail of W. H. Rease, “Moyer and Hazard, successors of Alexander Fullerton, . . . [and] Elijah Bowen” (Philadelphia: Wagner and McGuigan, c. 1846). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

Shoes,” the lithograph’s primary function is to mock the pretensions of free blacks’ consumption, but another focal point is the equally ridiculous appearance and posture of the white clerk, cast as subservient to the African American woman. As cringingly servile as the kneeling black shoemaker in “The New Shoes,” the white male clerk in this image speaks broken or affected English, perhaps with French or German intonations. His speech might show that he was an immigrant, like nearly half of New York’s clerical population, or that he was trying desperately to appear culturally refined. Because they were often immigrants, compelled to work with black and Irish men in stores, and sometimes depicted serving black

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Image Not Available

Figure 2.5. Edward W. Clay, “Have you any flesh coloured silk stockings . . . ?,” Life in Philadelphia Series, Philadelphia Set (Philadelphia, n.p., c. 1830). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

customers, clerks could not be certain that their occupation would help them attain respect. Newspaper employment advertisements further muddled social boundaries by failing to delineate clerks’ and porters’ occupational duties. Most of those applying for clerkships knew that, when searching for work in a tight market where any “situation” was better than unemployment, they needed to make themselves more desirable by trumpeting multiple skills rather than hold out for the most refined post. An 1850 advertisement in the New York Herald read,

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WANTED—A SITUATION AS PORTER IN A STORE, by a sober, steady, active and intelligent young man; writes a good hand, and keeps accounts, if desired; wages not so much an object as steady employment; can produce the best of city reference for honesty, capability, and trustworthiness.

Some store porters were able to parlay an education in penmanship and accounting, coupled with trustworthy character traits, into promotion to clerkships. William Jagoe, for instance, an Irish porter who lived in New York’s lower downtown First Ward in 1850, became a clerk five years later, moving to the Seventh Ward on the Lower East Side. On the other hand, some clerks in rural America were compelled to become porters or cartmen when they came to the city. Advertisements revealed that many men could do both jobs. Men who had experience “car[ing]” for and “driving” horses or physically moving goods in addition to perfect penmanship needed to tout all of their skills in order to obtain work. Some applicants further softened the distinctions between the two by requesting “light” porters’ tasks. Stating their willingness to be porters, young men desirous of a clerkship evoked the language of character pervading their society, offering to be “generally useful” to their employers without apparent concern for wage levels or their rate of advancement in the workplace. One evidently native-born man, “recently from New Orleans,” professed proficiency in the “Italian, Spanish and English” languages, but meekly agreed to become a porter if a clerkship did not materialize. Young men hoped that the experience gained in any commercial post would lay the groundwork for occupational and social advancement.34 Immigrants were important figures in the blurring of occupational boundaries that tarnished the prestige of clerical employments. One advertised in 1845 that he had served an apprenticeship to a European grocer and had mastered “trigonometrical and geometrical calculations,” yet he only requested to “undertake the care of a horse and make himself generally useful in a store.” A “young well educated German” claimed in 1851 that he “speaks English fluently and writes a good hand” but would gladly accept “employment as Clerk, Copyist, or Porter in a mercantile house.” These well-educated immigrants, through their willingness to do manual labor, were helping to degrade an occupation that was already tainted by porters’ work. And at least a few immigrants moved between these occupational groups. Louis Camus, a French-born clerk living in New York’s

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Third Ward in 1855, was listed as a porter in the city’s upper wards by federal census tabulators in 1870 and 1880.35 Joel Baily’s employment records from his Philadelphia wholesale and retail hosiery business also reveal that beginning clerks’ and porters’ wages might be similar. Garrett Lukens of Bristol, Pennsylvania, began work as an “errend boy” in Baily’s store in 1852, making one dollar per week. By the beginning of 1859, Baily had increased Lukens’s salary to six hundred dollars per year, but he stipulated that the young man “draw” his salary at the rate of “$33.33 per month leaving the balance untill the close of the year.” Furthermore, Baily forced Lukens to “leave each month out of the above . . . $15—to pay his board, which is to be paid monthly.” At the original monthly rate, Lukens would make just $400, yet with board money taken out, he only carried away $220—just over eighteen dollars per month. According to the terms of his salary, he would be paid two hundred dollars more at the end of the year, but during the course of the year, Lukens would be paid a salary commensurate with those of the store’s four Irish porters, who made between sixteen and thirty-one dollars per month. If Lukens “makes proper exertions,” Baily wrote in January 1860, he would receive another pay raise to $750 per year, though Baily would permit him “to draw” only $33.33 per month. The payoff at the end of the year would be higher, but in terms of his monthly stipend, Lukens was on a par with the store’s porters.36 It is not clear how Lukens’s work duties changed as his salary increased, but the rough comparisons between his salary and the wages paid to the porter are revealing. Baily and Co. demonstrated profound paternal feelings toward all its employees, including the porters. When Thomas Dowling, a porter originally from Dublin, sought to return to Ireland after three years in Baily’s employ, the proprietor explained that, since “he had done us good service, . . . [w]e present him with money to pay his passage to Liverpool to wit $30.” While not the $200 that Lukens earned at the end of the year to complete his salary, it was a significant gift to a manual laborer. The proximity of some clerks’ salaries to foreign-born porters’ wages paralleled other uneasy links between store employees at work that questioned the value of a clerkship. A white collar might have been the only means by which clerks could claim respectability—accruing a cultural capital of whiteness—in comparisons they tried to make with black or Irish porters. Yet in a tight labor market, many needed to be willing to roll up their sleeves in order to make ends meet. Since that cultural capital often slipped through clerks’ fingers at work, they sought to seize it

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as they attempted to stabilize the meanings of race in the city’s public and private spaces.37

Black Faces and White Collars On an early April day in 1849, Robert Graham stood on the sidewalk in front of Howland and Aspinwall’s South Street office and surveyed the bustling commercial scene. A hogshead of molasses dropped out of a passing cart, and as the gooey substance “poured over the street,” he chuckled as “some darkeys and little girls and boys” crowded “around the spot for an hour afterwards shoveling it up dirt and all.” Graham, living with his parents in a fashionable neighborhood just east of Washington Square, had not encountered the intense pressures of poverty. Witnessing poor people scramble to salvage valuable resources amused him. He probably thought the images in Clay’s Life of Philadelphia series were hilarious. In his diary, he copied a racist joke making the rounds: “John is my Coffee hot?” “Not yet Massa, me spit in him and he no sizzle.” One way for white men to assert their racial supremacy in antebellum America was to make a joke of racial equality, laughing at what they perceived to be the intellectual, moral, or physiological deficiencies of black men and women. But Graham’s boisterous guffaws masked a great deal of anxiety about race relations in his society and in his parents’ household. In this era after Emancipation in New York, black children continued to be bound out as apprentices or servants to white families. The Grahams’ young black servant, George Washington Tucker, had arrived in their household from Flushing, New York, in the fall of 1847. Servitude, Graham believed, was a legal and social status befitting African Americans. But the family’s servant apparently did not agree. In the summer of 1848, Tucker, whom Graham called “[o]ur little colored boy,” ran back to Flushing for the first time. Outraged by this breach of the law, the aggrieved master’s son blamed a shadowy conspiracy of “confounded Niggers[,] thousands of whom are continually prowling about to find out some bound colored boy and they immediately entice him from his master.” The Grahams got no help from the city police—Chief George W. Matsell told Graham’s father Nathan to let “the little devil go as he will be continually running away.” But the Grahams would not relinquish their mastery so easily. On three more occasions, Nathan apprehended Tucker with and without the help of the police. For his part, Tucker politely proclaimed his desire to live in

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Flushing. When asked why he ran away, the servant said simply, “cause he wanted to.” Such claims to independent thinking and living flummoxed Tucker’s white employers, who learned how fleeting mastery could be in the fluid society of a post-Emancipation city. When Tucker escaped for a fifth time in June 1849, the Grahams let him go for good.38 The vast majority of white clerks in the city had not secured positions with powerful importing firms, and so the fact that the meanings of race and class were up for grabs in antebellum America was no laughing matter. These categories, after all, shaped understandings about freedom, citizenship, and cultural standing. The commercial workplace provided only limited opportunities for white, native-born clerks to accumulate the cultural capital of whiteness by proclaiming their superiority over store porters and establishing their refinement. They found opportunities to do so in city culture. They were, for instance, avid members of audiences at popular theatrical performances in the antebellum period, enjoying most genres of entertainment that might make up any one night’s show: burlesque comedy, opera, Shakespearian drama, and blackface minstrelsy. In the 1840s, minstrel shows starred troupes of white men who sang songs, performed dance numbers and melodramatic sketches, and made humorous speeches and lectures, all while masked in burnt cork. The shows purported to depict northern free blacks and southern slaves as they were, though these portrayals invariably degraded African American subjects. Historians have argued that these performances gave white artisans the opportunity to make more authoritative claims to being independent citizens of the republic and to deflect the degrading effects of industrialization.39 Clerks could be found in the pit, boxes, and gallery of theaters during these performances, sometimes sitting with other clerks and family members or standing next to manual laborers and prostitutes. On one occasion, Edward Tailer invited his store’s Irish cartman to accompany him to the theater. Theatrical performances of white supremacy fed audience members’ shared need to distinguish themselves from African American slaves and free blacks. But unlike other white workers, clerks tried to reconcile the rudeness of blackface amidst a democratically inflected audience with their desire for bourgeois refinement. Minstrel performers and song writers such as Edwin Christy and Stephen Foster—who were, incidentally, once clerks themselves—tried to make blackface less threatening to merchants’ and ministers’ notions of appropriate entertainment. Their efforts were part of a larger pattern through which tensions about

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the meanings of class began to bifurcate the theater in the midnineteenth century. Clerks often cited the performances of Christy’s Minstrels as their favorites, and Tailer accompanied a young lady he was courting to one of the troupe’s shows. An 1854 stage adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a racial melodrama rather than a minstrel show—demonstrates the ways in which theater proprietors tried to appeal to customers seeking respectability. Tailer described the transformation of the National Theater, which proprietor Alexander Purdy had dubbed the “Temple of the Moral Drama” in order to capture a more refined audience enraptured by either the political or the moral sentiments of Stowe’s work. He noted that “the pit,” typically the domain of “loaffers in shirts sleeves [eating] . . . peanuts, has been superceded by cushioned arm chairs, for the enjoyment of which an additional 37 ½ cents to the old price has been added.” Tailer was as ambivalent about the play as he had been about the book, but while he was not sympathetic to the abolitionist agenda, he could watch it unfold on stage in relative comfort.40 Part of the empowerment of these stage productions for white audiences came from watching white performers in blackface on stage, but clerks found that they could best earn the capital of whiteness by staying home in the embrace of family and reputable friends, separated from the rudeness of many antebellum theater subjects and audiences. Graham, for instance, bought minstrel song sheet music and played these tunes on his family’s piano, in effect domesticating minstrelsy. He reported in his diary that he “played some on the Piano in the evening” for his family, who “joined in Oh! Susannah! don’t you cry for me and Happy are we darkeys so gay.” Clerks could skip the step of donning blackface and enjoy all the prerogatives of whiteness in the comfort of their own homes. Appropriating minstrel tunes for respectable purposes in refined settings placed clerks in a position of power over white and black laboring men that they could not attain at work. Minstrelsy enacted in certain venues helped to whiten clerks’ collars.41 Cultural narratives extolling hard work, self-control, perseverance, and patience promised success. In an age of panics, such optimistic correlations appeared misguided. Uncertainties about clerks’ occupational purview contributed to their commercial anxieties, for it had become unclear who might take clerkships and what clerical work entailed. The occupational category “clerk” was capacious in meaning. The competitive labor market forced some clerks to apply for porters’ positions; the pressures of the commercial world forced clerks to do work also performed by porters.

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Despite the protestations of commercial commentators and clerks themselves, these humble laborers in white collars were part of a vast category of urban workers. Their response to porters’ work was mixed with contempt and anxiety, for they knew that their own obligations included assisting porters in their arduous labor—the boundary separating headwork from handwork was porous. Clerks were not pleased when employers put their labor to diverse uses, since a fluid job description blurred distinctions of class and race that were as important for clerks hoping to achieve commercial proprietorship and cultural respectability as they were for skilled craftsmen or common laborers hoping to affirm their republican independence. These laborers were increasingly able to work apart from African American workers by limiting access to their trades. Clerks found it difficult to make such moves, rhetorical or real, since they worked alongside African American and Irish immigrant porters in stores. As befitting a group striving for self-improvement and self-advancement, they labored assiduously at the theater and the home to accumulate the cultural capital of whiteness that was elusive in the commercial house. White, native-born clerks hoped that their efforts to obscure their manual labor would allow them to make claims that they were better situated than foreign-born or black men to achieve positions of power and prestige. And in popular perception, clerks did no manly work. In reality, they did, but they dared not brag about it: to highlight their porters’ work was to reveal how dirty their white collars were. Yet this void in Americans’ understanding of clerical labor’s scope did not automatically put its practitioners on the path to proprietorship and high regard. For counter jumpers who dickered with ladies over the price of cloth and cut ribbons and patterns all day were problematic figures in a culture that still praised the producer as a real citizen and a real man.

3 Homo Counter-Jumperii

In February 1851, Henry Southworth attended a lecture on the subject of “Labor” given by the Reverend William Adams at New York’s Mechanics’ Institute on the Bowery. Adams was pastor of the city’s Broome Street Presbyterian Church, a congregation boasting several “merchant princes.” Southworth struggled to put his memories of the minister’s words on the pages of his diary. Adams argued that “all were workers who producted [sic] any thing,” whether that “be thought, or tilling the land. . . . [S]ome’s work was mental [and] others physical.” The young clerk concluded that “the lecture was very interesting, and bore a very high moral tone.” No message could have been more compelling to a young aspirant to proprietorship: merchants, bankers, and manufacturers, though they did no handwork, could reap the rewards of membership in a producer’s republic. Southworth appreciated Adams’s references to “great men who were ‘self made,’” especially Roger Sherman, a shoemaker who became “one of the draughfters of the Constitution.” If Southworth could channel the work ethic by which Sherman and other Americans had risen from humble beginnings, perhaps he too could join this expansive, socially valued rank of producers.1 But clerks might also have been disheartened by Adams’s assertions. Many proprietors had the ability, underscored by their economic and social power, to declare themselves heirs to the nation’s heritage of production without diminishing their prestige. Clerks, persistently frustrated by their proximity to store porters and their work, had not accumulated sufficient reserves of economic and cultural capital to make comfortable, validating comparisons between themselves and workers. Southworth, no stranger to porters’ work, would have keenly felt this disjuncture between Adams’s pronouncements and quotidian labor in the commercial house. When he was at work, though, Southworth had little time to consider this gap between rhetoric and reality. He clerked for a millinery wholesaler on William Street, selling ribbons, silks, and other articles to women

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who owned retail shops inside and outside the city, as close as Pearl Street and as far away as Illinois, Ohio, South Carolina, and Georgia. He displayed “patience” when he served the “troublesome” Miss Gooden of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who dawdled for two days and made a purchase that only totaled sixty dollars. Patience was a virtue, but it was difficult to master. Agitated, he angrily wrote in his diary that “if I should have to attend upon many such people I should quit the trade in disgust.” A week later, an “old maid” from Stamford, Connecticut, entered the store just before six o’clock in the evening and kept Southworth busy for more than an hour after the store had officially closed. The “fun was,” Southworth grumbled, that she “bought only 12 dollars worth” of goods. Southworth’s frustration conveys both misogynistic assumptions about women in public and an acknowledgment that these were savvy women of business who drove hard bargains.2 When he did have spare minutes to himself during “dull” days on the job, Southworth banished striving from his mind and lounged about the counter reading Grace Aguilar’s Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters and Ik. Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart. He was trying to cultivate refined sensibilities when he “mused,” borrowing these novels’ tone and prose style, on the topic of “love”: “There is a prettiness, that your soul cleaves to, as your eye to a pleasant flower, or your ear to a soft melody.” Whispering lines like this might have earned him praise and purchases at the store counter, yet for many of his contemporaries, Southworth’s tangled experiences with subordinate manual and nonmanual work tasks, female customers, intense toil, and easy relaxation illuminated no prospect of linear advancement to success, respectability, or the vigor associated with manly producers.3 Some authors fretted about clerks’ ambitions and prospects, writing prescriptive texts to help young men achieve the freedom of mercantile proprietorship. Other observers of the urban economy trained jaundiced eyes on these young men and the nature of their work. None was as scathing in their criticism of young men who sold goods to women as the staff of the New York comic weekly Vanity Fair, a publication that James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald called “[t]he Punch of America.” The Irish immigrant essayist Fitz-James O’Brien, in a satirical “Natural History,” proclaimed that he had discovered a new species on the commercial scene. It was a possible missing link connecting apes and men, “as intelligent . . . as the ourang-outang” and “ornamental” as a “poodle.” It was “a curious animal,” a member of genus “Homo” and species “Counter-

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Image Not Available

Figure 3.1. “The Sybarites of the Shop.” Vanity Fair, January 28, 1860.

jumperii.” Its habitat was global, though it was “only found in perfection in large cities,” exhibiting remarkable beauty with its “long, glossy, often curled” hair and “languishing expression” on its face. While endowed with “white, soft, and fine” skin and impeccable grooming habits, it had no heart or brain, and lived in filthy boardinghouse “dens.” The anthropological tone of the essay suggests that the unsettling mixture of race and labor in the commercial house was beside the point: these counter jumpers were, according to O’Brien, a “race” all to themselves.4 O’Brien’s piece was part of Vanity Fair’s prolonged attack on counter jumpers and what they represented in the spring of 1860. On January 28, O’Brien skewered retail clerks in an article entitled “The Sybarites of the Shop.” Accompanying the article was an arresting image depicting the bustling inner sanctum of a dry goods emporium, in which male clerks measure and cut fabric according to the instructions of female customers. Would these young, whiskered dandies take advantage of the women present, pressuring them into consuming superfluous luxuries? Would they seduce these women sexually, spurred by their participation in the

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vice-ridden urban underworld? The artist’s placement of a pair of scissors dangling suggestively from the midsection of the clerk at left is not, in light of these fears, accidental. These concerns, Vanity Fair would have us believe, were ridiculous. The artist twisted the gender and sexual dynamics of shopping, turning anxieties about female consumption on their heads. For the male clerks, goateed, bearded, mustachioed, and mutton-chopped, sport the height of female fashion: bows, frilly collars, and hoop skirts. The attached verse from Macbeth, “SHAK[E]SPEARE FOR THE COUNTER-JUMPERS,” highlighted the conundrum: “You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so.” Counter jumpers, O’Brien explained, made a mockery of white, American manhood. Identifying stylish clothing and footwear “as a desirable consummation,” these young men were the frivolous consumers who threatened American virtue. At work, they reclined in “bowers of pleasure . . . decorated with moire-antique, . . . crinoline, and lace,” refusing to perform strenuous labor of any kind—manual or nonmanual—in farm fields, workshops, or commercial houses in order to obtain manly “independence.” Ignoring the “go-ahead” spirit of entrepreneurial contemporaries, clerks’ “highest ambition” was “to be able to measure merino with a grace, and sell sarsenet with suavity.” They were intruding upon the “limited . . . sphere” of employment for young laboring women and indirectly driving them into prostitution. “[T]hese muscle-less, slim-shouldered, flat-chested bipeds,” O’Brien contended, “are at the bottom of one of the greatest social evils of the present time.”5 Unlike the word “clerk,” which encompassed an amorphous set of occupational duties, “counter jumper” was a social label that evoked Americans’ anxieties about young strivers who eagerly leaped for higher rungs on the social and economic ladder and hurdled counters to sell goods. Writers always used it to bludgeon clerks in print: counter jumpers made them cringe. They illuminated, in their capacity as arbiters of style and facilitators of women’s commercial transactions, that business proprietors, professionals, and their families were more clearly denizens of a consumer’s paradise than of a producer’s republic. European and American manufacturers sent large quantities of goods to cities, and urban jobbers quickly distributed an astonishing variety of items for women to buy in retail shops and emporiums. Proprietors claimed that capitalism was a logical and fair system of exchange: capitalists made rational transactions

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with each other, trading goods and paper markers of wealth and tallying up profits and losses on a daily basis. Noted in ledger books by clerks, these exchanges represented economic progress that, capitalists contended, benefited the community’s and nation’s welfare, permitting proprietors to claim the elements of manhood that adhered to producing something more tangible than capital.6 Yet this counter jumper, this new man, proved that the producer’s republic was not as capacious as Reverend Adams believed. In fact, the increasing numbers of clerks in the city showed that the welfare of capitalism depended upon the ability of these young men to turn over merchandise. It was their job to take commodities on a store shelf, shorn of any historical relationship to the people who made them, and help consumers—desirous of the good life and the cultural prestige attending it—to give them new meanings. In doing so, retail clerks refuted the myth of the rational transaction, stimulating female customers’ emotions in order to seal the deal. Depictions of the virtuous farmer plowing his fields for slow and steady gains, or the brawny forearm and calloused hand of the craftsman depicted in the labor press under the script “by hammer and hand, all arts do stand,” no longer adequately symbolized the economy of antebellum America. Another image had come into focus: it portrayed the soft, white hands of male clerks and female customers intermingling in folds of cloth at the point of sale. When the female shopper “suffers her fingers to run to a slight exchange” with the male clerk’s “under a sheet of sarsnet or gingham,” the newspaper editor George Wilkes argued, “desires . . . become settled into passions.” A great social evil, indeed.7 Americans had long criticized women who consumed without discretion. They allegedly posed an affront to the republic’s virtue, defined by self-control and self-sacrifice. But the antebellum version of that critique, cropping up in newspapers, diaries, images, and fictional texts, reveals how transactions between male retail clerks and female shoppers were deeply troubling reminders of capitalist transformation. What was work? What made labor manly and honorable? Who was a producer in an economy in which men generated wealth through idle speculation as much as through steady perspiration? These questions lingered in the minds of clerks and those thinking about clerks during the antebellum period, in part because a range of white men in cities—newspaper editors, ministers, and merchants among them—worked with their heads more than their hands. The wives and daughters of proprietors and professionals consumed,

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sometimes extravagantly, the vast quantities of industrially manufactured goods that clerks sold. These women, abetted by retail clerks, posed a threat to the patriarchal household economy by acting independently of their husbands and fathers in commercial environments.8 The evocation of the counter jumper was useful for Americans who wanted to proclaim the abiding significance of production in an economy that was shifting to emphasize consumer choices and desires. Headwork was not as physically demanding as manual labor; sales personnel, rather than craftsmen, explained to customers why goods had economic and cultural value—even though they had not made them. Women were sometimes purchasing goods without the permission of the men in their lives. These were unsettling social and cultural changes—among the hyperbolic “social evils” O’Brien had in mind—borne of economic transformation, and counter jumpers were convenient scapegoats for commentators who wanted to circumscribe the effects of change. Counter jumpers earned unprecedented cultural attention for their tendency to seduce women into commercial (and even sexual) transactions and languish at effortless work among yards of ribbon and cloth. They were considered disreputable dandies who blurred the divide between rapacious male sexuality and foppish unmanliness. O’Brien wrote of the new “species” in Vanity Fair that it “is neither male nor female, though its manners are more feminine than masculine.” Antebellum authors, in attempts to make the consumer economy more orderly and clarify the relationship between gender and labor, demanded repeatedly that male clerks relinquish their positions to women.9 For these reasons clerks, who steadfastly refused to connect their work experiences to those of porters, were unable to accrue authority and respect as young men on the make, merchant proprietors in waiting. Clerks who maintained that their work did not soil the white collars they wore risked acknowledging that they were not producers, not citizens, not men. They were the antithesis of the producer, and thus symbols of what the nation had lost as a result of the elaboration of consumer culture, which bourgeois Americans thought both liberated and shackled them. A clerkship, especially at retail, did not necessarily bolster young men’s quest for the capital that would help them achieve mobility. So as they had done to clarify the boundaries of race and class, striving clerks shaped the meanings of gender and class as they pertained to work by venturing into city streets and urban leisure environments, or by giving up their mercantile dreams and taking up farming in the West.

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Troubling Transactions Retailing’s growth in the pre–Civil War decades underscored the importance of sales to the system of industrial capitalism. Transactions between clerks and customers were thus often strained and even based in outright antagonism. Each sales venue had its own important gender dynamics. Despite Southworth’s experiences dealing with women retailers, an important component of commercial education for clerks working in most wholesale or importing firms was the daily interaction with other men— merchants, clerks, and customers. Preliminary entries into that sphere might include, as they did for Edward Tailer of Little, Alden and Co., a crash course in the types and qualities of the goods themselves, with clerks noting the arrival of shipments in their employers’ books as a senior clerk or partner examined them. Clerks might show “pattern cards” or samples of goods to interested jobbers or retailers at hotels, auction houses, or stores, and learn the appropriate prices for goods by watching buyers and sellers bark values at auctions. It was widely assumed that merchants, clerks, and customers were meeting in an arena of equals. Men should deal fairly with each other, but they should also mind the cautionary motto “caveat emptor.” Importers, wholesalers, and retailers had different interests, and sought to divine the movements of the market and be flexible enough to steal a march on their competitors, with wholesalers and retailers trying to buy cheap and importers attempting to sell dear. From Tailer’s vantage point, importing merchants had to make quick decisions about whether to sell goods at auction or sell “privately.” On the one hand, they risked being “slaughtered” by cheap prices; on the other, they might burden their stocks with unfashionable goods because individual purchasers might not be willing to accept their prices. In such an environment, merchants might teach their inexperienced clerks some tricks of the trade to tip the bargain in the firm’s favor. Merchants tried to correlate their clerks’ interests with the firm’s interests. The fact that clerks often used the word “we” in their diaries to describe the triumphs and failures of their firms indicates that many merchants were successful in earning their clerks’ support.10 Clerks learned early how to display goods in such a way to “meet the eye of the customer,” Tailer wrote, because jobbers would be more likely “to purchase if each case of Merchandise . . . is kept with a precise niceness.” Eventually, though, clerks in wholesale and importing firms would graduate to selling those goods to customers. After what he called a

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“long apprenticeship at the desk,” Tailer was presented with opportunities to venture “outside of the counting room” and sell the firm’s goods to merchants in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Such a promotion mandated that Tailer develop an intimate understanding of the goods he would sell. It was also crucial that he cultivate a sales style that was pleasing to customers—the issue at the crux of his disagreement with James Dunbar about modifying the clerk’s “Chatham Street manner” with customers. Officious clerks might succeed in making sales in immigrants’ retail shops, but such behavior was not permissible among commercial gentlemen.11 In the course of the business day, the bustling atmosphere of the mercantile house made it difficult for merchants to monitor all transactions, providing salesmen with some latitude in creating a sales style and having some authority over the ways they bargained with customers. Of course, when Tailer negotiated disadvantageous terms with jobbers, or neglected to take into account customers’ character or credit, he risked punishment by the firm. After one such episode, Dunbar forbade him from negotiating with “out of town” merchants. When Dunbar was otherwise occupied, however, Tailer clandestinely made sales to a Boston merchant. The pages of Tailer’s diary reveal a struggle between its author and this junior partner, formerly a clerk with the firm. After Dunbar returned from a drumming trip to Philadelphia “without making a single sale,” Tailer privately noted that “I am half inclined to think that I might possibly have done better myself.” On several occasions, exhibiting the striver within, Tailer stated that all he wanted was an opportunity to show what he could do in other cities on the firm’s behalf. For clerks, the ability to make transactions represented potential freedom; for their firms, unsupervised deals elicited uneasiness because clerks could make mistakes that cost money.12 Tailer was soon to enjoy that feeling of independence, because he succeeded in playing the members of the firm against one another, earning the praise of James Little in the firm’s Boston headquarters and the disdain of Paul Alden and Dunbar in New York. Little dispatched Tailer to Philadelphia in March 1852, where he showed sample cards of goods to jobbers, who in turn made bids upon them. In the colonial and early national periods, supercargoes were placed in similar positions and instructed to use their commercial education and knowledge of markets to accept or decline such offers. But with the advent of the telegraph, traveling salesmen lost some control over these transactions. While Tailer had

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been given price “limits” before he embarked on his journey, the firm expected him to communicate suspect bids to the firm in New York, permitting the two parties to remain in close contact with each other.13 By making these trips to other cities, however, importers’ clerks were paving the way for entry into business on their own footing—independence in the future. They cultivated the trusting relationships with jobbers and retailers that would be necessary when they began to trade as partners or proprietors rather than as servants of a firm. Clerks who traveled for their firms might forge potentially profitable connections that could be reaffirmed when wholesale and retail merchants visited New York on buying trips. One Philadelphia businessman called on Tailer personally at Little, Alden and Co., “shaking hands” with the 22-year-old clerk and informing Alden and Dunbar that the lad “was as hard working, and as persevering . . . a young man as came to Phila[delphia] to sell goods.” Tailer was “extremely grateful” for a fillip that seemed, in its emphasis on the clerk’s character, to emanate directly from the didactic commercial literature of the period. “[I]t serves to show,” Tailer wrote, “the manner in which a young salesman can ingratiate himself into the favor of the Jobbers, by endeavoring to please and to humor them, at the same time furthering the interests of his employers by selling the goods confided to his particular care.” In this signal success, Tailer followed the advice that would soon make it into the pages of the Merchants’ Magazine: “Make yourself indispensable to your employers.” But Freeman Hunt would not have applauded Tailer’s behavior after this promising exchange. The clerk strode around the office with an air of importance and demanded that Dunbar treat him with more respect. Tailer might have felt his growing prominence in mercantile circles because he was developing connections with the city’s commercial and political power brokers. His father undoubtedly arranged for Tailer to attend the gala opening of the Metropolitan Hotel in 1852, where he listened to speeches delivered by national political figures such as Stephen A. Douglas while sitting next to a partner of the successful dry goods firm Bowen and McNamee. When Tailer was dismissed by Little, Alden and Co. later that year, he used his considerable connections to establish himself as a salesman in another importing firm.14 While Tailer drummed up business by traveling, many salesmen for importing and wholesaling firms remained in the city to entertain country merchants, desperately competing with one another to secure business by accompanying the rural men to brothels, saloons, and other locations

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associated with the city’s sporting culture. Drummers who stretched the boundaries of commercial morality and refined manliness came in for their share of criticism. Yet most commentators believed that country merchants interacted with clerks on equal terms in daytime business and nighttime play—they were all men.15 Most importing and wholesaling clerks were unable to foster the relationships that Tailer had forged. Wholesale and retail clerks selling to female buyers and customers found it even more difficult to establish connections that might help them achieve occupational mobility. The transactions that occurred between male retail clerks and female shoppers dredged up deep anxieties among city journalists and commercial observers. Merchants tried to manage the relationship between clerks and shoppers, creating spaces in which well-to-do women might feel at ease. Many upscale retailers whose shops lined thoroughfares like New York’s Broadway endeavored to replace a disorderly presentation of goods in crammed storefronts with better appointed, spacious, and comfortable surroundings. These spaces, while public, were satellites of refinement that evoked the splendor of bourgeois homes in which women had a measure of control. In many of these stores, the goods on display were for women’s use—cloth or clothing, jewelry, ribbons and laces, hats and gloves, pins and needles. Hardware merchants, conversely, did not have to worry about making salesrooms respectable in the same way, since they generally did not have to accommodate female customers. These retail spaces were equipped with large mirrors or overhead lamps to show goods in their best light, and the high ceilings and decorative architectural elements gave these emporiums a palatial feel. If trade card advertisements are to be believed, the promenade of the city’s most wealthy and respectable people moved indoors as it was bustled off Broadway by urban crowds. In these refined shops—insulated from the crowded, dirty streets—extremely well-dressed New Yorkers could make a clear statement about their cultural authority as knowledgeable, impeccably dressed clerks explained the merits of the goods for sale.16 These trade cards, such as the one advertising George Bulpin’s mantilla emporium on Broadway, sold genteel ambience in addition to the goods themselves. Well-dressed couples and families promenading through the store take pride of place at the forefront of this image. The artist depicted respectable people at leisure in a refined space, exchanging bourgeois proprieties with each other instead of money. Like many merchant proprietors who commissioned trade cards that advertised

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Figure 3.2. “Bulpin’s Paris Mantilla Emporium, 361 Broadway, N. Y.,” c. 1851–1861, negative number 81058d. Collection of the New-York Historical Society.

their businesses, Bulpin hoped to convey two central messages. First, he offered the city’s “upper ten” a comfortable place in which they could have their respectability validated without being jostled by the “lower million.” Second, he suggested that women who bought one of his firm’s cloaks could look as fashionable as the ladies portrayed wearing mantillas in the trade card. The commercial exchange of the cloth necessary to make a sophisticated cloak is shifted to the margins or background of the image. Two clerks confer with customers in the middle of the store—one holds a bolt of cloth at arm’s length for examination—yet they are minor characters compared to the potential customers emphasized in the advertisement. Images on trade cards tend to separate the cultivation of consumer desire from the cold calculation supposedly involved in transactions across the counter. Merchants believed that if they wanted to sell goods, they had to make their clientele feel as though they had prestige or that purchases of their goods would provide that distinction. Critics contended that consumer capitalism fed off merchants’ skillful manipulation of emotions rather than logic to loosen customers’ grip on their purse strings. And in

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Figure 3.3. “A Hint to Dry Goods Men.” Harper’s Weekly, April 25, 1857.

fact, the transactions were inflected with emotion and highly theatrical, explaining why merchants would want to relegate them to the margins or background of their advertising. In dry goods stores, environments that New York author Asa Greene called “the great shopping theatre,” cloth and other goods “were rather exhibited than sold.” Having created the stage for this spectacle, merchants instructed clerks to balance their attention between making women feel comfortable and making a profit. Interactions between male clerks and female shoppers—the ones that trade cards often obscured—were at the forefront of the critique of consumer capitalism, inflaming tensions in the store and the broader culture.

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Greene described clerks who had to serve customers while they also refined clever sales techniques to “ensnare” or “catch” them. Some observers believed that clerks’ employment was predicated upon their making fraudulent claims in order to sell goods.17 Many New York merchants were convinced that women shopped to see the clerks as much as the goods. Clerks’ youthful appearance served merchants’ interests. On the one hand, young men would not threaten adult female customers. On the other, their good looks and charm would fill the aisles and perhaps the till at their stores. “In a large and fashionable shopping establishment,” Greene wrote, “there must be a large number of clerks, to wait promptly on the ladies; otherwise there will be pouting, fidgetting, and withdrawing of patronage.” An 1857 Harper’s Weekly cartoon depicted a mustachioed clerk showing a bolt of cloth to fawning female consumers and offered “A Hint to Dry Goods Men. The handsome Clerk always attracts the Ladies.” In this image, the artist provides a detailed view of the transaction between clerk and customer, as opposed to the more distant rendering of the same negotiation in Bulpin’s trade card. The image portrayed consumer capitalism’s defining moment, and Harper’s criticized both merchants’ use of sexuality to tip the commercial balance of power with their customers and the women who fell into a trance when confronted with luxury items and good-looking men. But the artist saved most of his satirical venom for the sales personnel. There is little visual difference between this “handsome” clerk and the inane, foppish white clerk with the accent in Clay’s Life in Philadelphia series (see figure 2.5). Both images poke fun at clerks for their immaculate personal appearance—the Harper’s counter jumper curls his mustache and hair, and both clerks’ hair curls in the same manner on their foreheads. The vanity of the clerks in the Harper’s image also manifests itself as jealousy. The two men in the background who turn up their noses at their “handsome” colleague’s success feel personally aggrieved, despondently watching the proceedings at another counter rather than actively trying to pursue other sales. This spirit of ill will could also flow from the handsome clerk toward his more homely counterparts. On the eve of the Civil War, Vanity Fair invented an ill-educated counter jumper named Bunce Browning, a dashing dandy who claimed that women “would not look at any goods that I didn’t show” since “the other clerks was not handsum.” Burdened by the extra work of dealing with female consumers, he demanded that his employers “get some more good looking men and divide the work or else I should hev to resine.”18

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Hiring attractive male clerks was only one element in a strategy to entice female customers into stores, but it was among the most controversial of ploys, since many men were concerned about the confluence of sex and commerce at the point of sale and considered themselves powerless to protect women from the drama transpiring in dry goods stores. The Philadelphia journal Godey’s Lady’s Book, devoted to keeping women of means across the nation up-to-date on the ever-changing fashions, characterized shopping as women’s “Sport,” a pastime often supported by their husbands’ wallets. Not pleased with women acting so independently in public, well-to-do men underscored their concern by ridiculing shopping as a frivolous waste of time and money.19 Women shoppers did not necessarily desire protection. Like the clerks, they hoped that transactions would provide them with agency as independent economic actors. Godey’s advised its female readers to buy any goods they fancied, even though the journal’s fashion plates also helped shape consumer desire. When women saw an article they wanted, they were entitled to “haggle, demur, examine, and, lastly, buy,” thus using all of the weapons in their shopping arsenal: negotiating with the men of the shop to get the best price; taking advantage of contemporary notions about appropriate feminine behavior to obtain the goodwill of clerks and merchants; and then employing their knowledge of goods’ quality and price to make the best possible purchase.20 Shoppers vied with merchants and clerks to tip transactions in their favor. Late one afternoon in January 1849, the Albany dry goods retailer Stephen Boyd became exasperated with “a contemptible woman” who was interested in examining “several patterns of curtain Prints” but was equally reluctant to buy them. Boyd hoped that his clerk, William Hoffman, would have better luck in making the sale. Recalling the incident in his diary, the clerk patiently presented “what she desired” but refused, when she pressed him, to lower the firm’s prices. She decided to purchase “two remnants” but paid Hoffman one shilling less than the agreed-upon price and “immediately put for the door.” He “told her to stop,” but she had already escaped. When he told Boyd about the incident, the merchant was “somewhat miffed.” Presumably, Hoffman would not have been excused had he tried to detain the woman by physical force, as his employer had done with “a dishonest Wench or Mulatto” suspected of stealing goods the year before. That was not the way to treat apparently genteel white women. Boyd condemned his conduct anyway: the store’s reputation for propriety was less important than the bottom

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line. He unleashed his frustrations on his clerk, derisively referring to the lad’s “milk and Water” constitution.21 As this example shows, by attending to their needs with the utmost respect and dispatch male clerks and merchants carefully tried to avoid upsetting female customers. For bourgeois women, shopping was both a recreational activity and a statement of their cultural authority. In fashionable dry goods stores, these refined, assured, and mature women often towered socially above most of the young retail clerks who existed merely to serve their whims. They were not subject to being entranced by cloth and clerk, as Harper’s would have it. Fictional and nonfictional narratives presented clerks unpacking and displaying cases of cloth for female shoppers who never meant to buy. In such instances, the “polite” clerk mastered a placid facial expression as he straightened, folded, and stowed the goods until the next shopper called. Women shoppers used the uncertainty of clerks’ social and economic position to their pecuniary advantage. Merchants expected clerks to abide by conflicting gender imperatives. Clerks needed to tone down their relentless drive for profits and advancement and adopt a genteel mode of persuasion that made female consumers comfortable. If they were too pushy, they might threaten the transaction. But they also had to secure the firm’s goods and its profits to keep their jobs. These instructions often contradicted each other and put retail clerks in an untenable position. They had to appear deferential to women’s judgments, and thus show respect to distinctions of age and class. Yet in doing so, they also had to tiptoe along the line separating manliness from effeminacy: their employers condemned “milk and Water” constitutions in favor of stiff backbones at the point of sale.22 Young male clerks did not cower behind counters, however. Like merchants and shoppers, clerks had an active role to play in these transactions and in shaping the meanings of consumer culture. They, like critics of these exchanges, often conflated the commercial with the sexual. The trade-off for retail clerks at work, bored by bookkeeping and tired of “heavy” labor around the store, was to be able to admire beautiful customers. If wealthy women of their mothers’ generation were out of their league, perhaps daughters of those women were not. In New Haven, Connecticut, store clerk Nicholas Chesebrough attentively watched the young shoppers, whom he called “lovely angels,” flit about his counter. In the summer of 1837, he happily noted looking outside the store to see “[s]ome beautiful ‘Young Honnies’ enjoying the evening breeze.” These young women were, for Chesebrough, among the commodities on display

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in a world of goods. It was only in mock self-censure for his impertinent remark that he playfully wrote, “O Hush!” According to Greene, transactions between female shoppers and male clerks were often preceded by interactions that amounted to a courting ritual. “The ladies,” he explained, “while examining the merchandize, had a chance of exhibiting themselves to the lounging beaux,” referring to the clerks who served them. Coyly eliding the distinctions between women of marrying age and prostitutes as well as between commercial and sexual exchange, Greene argued that, “under pretence of shopping,” women “might possibly make a market for themselves.” And the “lounging” clerks not only happily watched the “exhibition” but carefully monitored their own appearances. Once, in close proximity to “ladies and ‘little pretty craft’” in the store, Chesebrough lamented having a “sty” in his eye that forced him to “look ‘cock eyed’ on the countenances of the sweet spirits.”23 On days in which trade ground to a halt, however, the engagement was broken off. Chesebrough’s admiration turned to scorn: “Few women out,” he recorded, and “those are huffy and cross and ugly,” thus contributing to a “Horrid day’s work.” If they were “just looking” at the goods and not buying, female customers suddenly lost their charm. Buying was beautiful to the beholding eye of the clerk, who responded antagonistically to those who did not make purchases. “[T]rade good,” Chesebrough wrote, “but plague take the plaguy customers[,] they are so darned stingy and difficult that they must keep looking.” Clerks sometimes exhibited their frustration with shoppers by badgering them until they agreed to make transactions. The Rake, one among many New York newspapers that chronicled the sporting culture populated by male patrons of barrooms and brothels, ferreted out the clerk “who told a lady, in the most courteous manner, to go to H-ll, because she refused to take [as change] a five dollar bill worth some sixty cents on a dollar.” While the paper threatened this clerk with public exposure if he did not beg forgiveness from his offended customer, others surely got away with strong-arm tactics in this battle across the counter, fighting against customers who were equally keen on obtaining a good deal. Merchants who refused to acknowledge connections between morals and markets praised their clerks for driving hard bargains.24 Clerks not only facilitated women’s choices but also influenced their determinations about goods. Since shoppers often did not go to a store with a purchase in mind, they might have needed help from clerks because they genuinely could not decide what they wanted. Experienced dry goods clerks knew the products they sold intimately and could explain

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the distinctions among varieties of cloth. As such, they were arbiters of style who could steer customers toward the fashionable (and probably more expensive) item. In a Godey’s story, two “languid-looking young ladies, evidently afflicted with a certain quantity of money and of time to be disposed of,” asked a dry goods clerk: “Do you happen to have anything new for dresses?” explaining vaguely that “[w]e want something very odd and very new.” The clerk, visually measuring his customers, tried to narrow their focus by asking them about the quality and price of the cloth they hoped to buy. The shoppers had not considered these questions, only wanting something beautiful and unique “that had never been seen by anybody else.” When the clerk showed them several different types of cloth, the girls had him cut samples so that their mother could choose the most fashionable pattern.25 Some female shoppers were able to defend themselves against clerks’ alternately flattering and intimidating counter-side manner. Frances Kemble, an English actress preparing to make her New York stage debut in 1832, found the behavior of clerks in one shop to be appallingly familiar: “the shopman called me by my name, entered into conversation with us, and one of them, after showing me a variety of things which I did not want, said, that they were most anxious to show me every attention, and render my stay in this country agreeable.” Kemble managed to show “the grace to smile and say ‘thank you,’” but she “longed to add, ‘be so good as to measure your ribands, and hold your tongue.’ I have no idea of holding parley with clerks behind a counter, still less of their doing so with me.” Reflecting bourgeois understandings of respectable conduct on both sides of the Atlantic, Kemble wanted these men to adopt a less chatty, more deferential pose: “I should have been much better pleased if they had called me ‘Ma’am,’ which they did not.”26 Obsequious clerks could quickly become loafers who leaned back in chairs or yawned with boredom, conveying the message that they did not “care if [the] customer buys.” Yet they could become much worse, according to an author of a squib in The New York Sporting Whip, who explicitly linked clerks’ commercial transactions with sexual exchange. The label “counter jumper” took on an entirely new meaning when a Canal Street retail clerk—“who belongs to the interesting fraternity of ‘Counter Skippers,’” the paper declared—conspired to meet a prostitute “of mixed colors” for “horizontal refreshments” on his store’s counter. The woman stole a thirty-yard “piece of prime silk,” and when the clerk’s employers discovered the theft, they dismissed him. Yet the damage had already been

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done: clerks would not only jump counters to serve the customer but also jump on counters to be serviced sexually.27 This article ridiculed the belief that commercial transactions were rational and revealed the ways in which retail clerks disrupted the meanings of class, gender, and race in antebellum cities. The clerk spoke in “polite terms” to the “handsome Creole girl,” who herself was eager to “make a very clever spec[ulation]” in her bargain at the counter. These were languages of class and commerce used out of place, mixing the refinement of transactions in the dry goods emporium with interracial sex and theft. Merchants’ fortunes, and even their wives and daughters, were not safe in stores staffed by young men whom the Sporting Whip paradoxically called both “gallant and amorous” and also “slaves” to their employers. The various ways in which commerce and sex intertwined made many Americans uneasy and created ambiguous identities for those who participated in transactions across the counter. The clerk was both refined servant and despicable predator; the respectable female shopper exerted her cultural authority but was also vulnerable. These contradictions disturbed the logic of capitalism, supposedly based upon rational exchange between equals in a “free” market.

Milk-Sops and Hulking Fellows A few merchants, led by A. T. Stewart, the proprietor of New York’s largest dry goods house, attempted to cleanse what they considered to be the moral issues at the heart of retail transactions by advocating a one-price system that wrested the power of haggling away from clerks and customers. While some shoppers opposed this innovation because they feared they would still be cheated, most felt it made for a less stressful shopping experience. Stewart demanded that his clerks be, in the words of his biographer, “gentlemen of presence” who politely encouraged women to make repeat purchases at his “Marble Palace.” Fixed prices meant that women would no longer need to foster relationships with clerks to purchase goods. As a result, clerks lost a measure of authority in the salesroom. It is little wonder that Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune thought, when the Marble Palace opened in 1846, that Stewart’s clerks appeared “diminutive” in the “magnificent Greek temple of worship.” In awe of the grandeur of an emporium that fostered bourgeois New Yorkers’ desire to possess goods, the Tribune “imagin[ed] that the whole establishment was ours . . . and that the Stewarts were our stewards, and their nice,

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dapper little clerks our clerks.” Lost in reverie, the Tribune described the way Stewart’s one-price system, because it prohibited negotiation, assisted shoppers in gaining control of the consumption experience and the clerks who facilitated it.28 Several commentators questioned male clerks’ presence in retail shops altogether. William J. Snelling, the principal contributor to another sporting publication, The Polyanthos, took umbrage in 1839 at the spectacle unfolding across store counters. He repeated a common refrain that argued for “the propriety of employing ladies to act as clerks in all the retail Dry goods and fancy stores in the city of [G]otham.” The relationship between male clerk and female shopper was an important factor in necessitating this change. Snelling contended that these interactions were not desirable for female shoppers. “How much more appropriate . . . would it be” for women to be clerks, he reasoned, “when a majority of the patrons of such establishments are ladies, whose wants often compel them to enquire of the male clerks . . . for articles which their delicacy would forbid.”29 Snelling’s argument encompassed not just the affront to female consumers’ privacy and the potential for seduction but the indignity of men doing unmanly work. “It is not a suitable business for a man, to stand behind a counter clipping a yard of two penny ribbon or retailing a skein of silk, recommending an article of french finery or selling a row of pins.” Instead, he claimed that a young man’s existence “should be a life of activity and exertion, of usefulness and industry.” Interestingly, the manly work that Snelling envisioned male clerks doing was manual labor rather than directing the work of others like merchants and manufacturers. “The plough and the plane, the adz and the sledge are more appropriate,” he wrote, “than the scissors for the use of man.” Despite clerks’ manual labor, Snelling focused on the sales tasks that made counter jumpers unmanly. Another commentator referred to the potential replacement of male clerks as a “Glorious Revolution” that would open avenues for impoverished women, like those working in the needle trades, into a more reputable station in society. Trying to bolster patriarchal assumptions of the household economy that obscured women’s productive labor, this author argued for the separation of a masculine sphere of “public” production and a feminine sphere of “private” consumption. Male clerks might recoup their manhood, lost through their prominent role in female consumption, by doing productive manual labor. Yet handwork would probably prohibit them from achieving the partnership or proprietorship that defined the independent man of business.30

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Vanity Fair expressed concern that male clerks might “make molly coddle[s]” of themselves, affirming its claims that clerks represented a third sex between men and women. Counter jumpers were thought to lack manly qualities because they helped women consume goods and appeared to do no handwork, but they were also considered heterosexually rapacious dandies. As a result, they lingered on the margins of Victorian America’s sexual categories. The sporting press responded to their ambiguous sexual identities by coupling them with “sodomites” whose “unnatural” sexuality also troubled contemporaries. Sleeping with female prostitutes in brothels and courting eligible ladies could not protect retail clerks from an association with eighteenth-century “mollies,” many of whom had cultivated a heterosexual masculinity in public while privately congregating in “molly-houses” to dress as women and find male sexual partners. The dry goods emporium, criticized for being the home of troubling transactions between men and women, was also a breeding ground, Vanity Fair announced, for a third sex.31 Stories in the sporting press suggested that sexual unions between men arose in commercial houses as the result of the social pressures and economic transformations of the antebellum era. In 1842, The Whip identified a French sodomite named Johnny L’Epine, using terms quite similar to Vanity Fair’s description of clerks: he was “[n]ot quite a woman, [and] by no means a man.” The paper considered sodomy to be a foreign crime, brought to American shores by hordes of Western Europeans, including clerks and merchants like L’Epine, himself a veteran Cedar Street “wholesale importer” who sought to make “proffers of employment”—referring to yet another set of negotiations in the commercial workplace—to young men “of prepossessing appearance.” The sexual “employment” L’Epine had in mind might also have opened clerkships in his firm to young men. The newspaper acknowledged the demands of competitive commercial and sexual economies in antebellum cities when it confirmed, “There are a swarm of youths always about a city like New York who may answer the purpose of such a man.”32 New York retailers’ conviction that women would not patronize stores lacking handsome male clerks to serve them came into conflict with demands in print culture that “molly coddles” be replaced with female clerks. As early as the 1830s in substantial Philadelphia and Boston emporiums catering to women, merchants followed contemporary European trends by hiring female clerks. In a sketch he wrote about retail stores in Philadelphia, George Foster hoped to convince Empire City firms that they were behind the times. Whereas male clerks were pushy and intimidating, Foster argued, saleswomen were “ready to show you everything and to enlighten

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you as to the peculiar merits of each article, yet never over urging you, nor insulting you with sour looks and grumblings if you don’t choose to buy.” With women behind the counter, a Godey’s author proclaimed, there was “none of that cringing servility I so hate in a shopman, or the rudeness that is equally disagreeable.” Clerks, according to this writer, could not balance the demands of refined service required by shoppers. A New York woman in another Godey’s story believed that the “custom” of giving women retail clerkships was a “barbarous” novelty, but a Philadelphia native countered that the practice was actually a useful means of “improv[ing] the deportment” of female laborers, as well as “teach[ing] them the valuable art of self command.” Laboring women who might have some experience with deferring to their social betters could create a pleasing aura of respectful service that did not reek of obsequious servility by men striving to exude refinement. Introducing female clerks into retail stores, moreover, would clarify “natural” class and gender distinctions in society. These authors reconfigured stores as “private” realms in which bourgeois women would give orders to female servant-clerks. Yet for some male journalists, even these attempts to redraw boundaries between private and public, masculine and feminine, weakened patriarchal authority. Foster, who supported the advent of female clerks, sought to limit the agency of women shoppers. He counseled urban citizens in one of his investigations of New York life not only to “hang up the namby-pamby [male] clerks by the heels” but also to “send their customers home to cooking their dinners, or darning their husbands’ hose.” Just as male clerks should recover their manhood through farming or craft labor, shoppers should mind their domestic responsibilities and leave commercial negotiations to men.33 This criticism of New York retailers for not hiring female clerks obscures the fact that many of them were already employing women to staff their counters. Just as they ignored the porters’ work that male clerks had to do, writers who catalogued women’s employments at midcentury believed that the “class” of female clerks was “not large” in Manhattan. The credit reports of Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency and recent scholarship suggest otherwise. Women often “assisted” in small stores owned by their husbands, fathers, or brothers, perhaps hiding their role as “clerk” when the census tabulator called. Women helped to run stores because of family necessity or an inclination to participate in business. Elite observers who mentioned saleswomen in fashionable dry goods stores in other cities failed to recognize that women clerked in New York shops that they did not patronize. A credit-reporting agent recorded in 1851 that at William

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McKenna’s hosiery and fancy goods establishment on Greene Street, “ladies attend to the sales,” as if their presence was surprising. Another made a special note in 1857 that Marcus M. Lichtenstein, a proprietor selling ribbons, silks, and laces on Broadway, “[k]eeps a lar[ge]. number of female cl[er]ks.” New Yorkers do not appear to have expected women to serve in this capacity, and census takers counted only a few New York women who tended stores or kept account books.34 Women’s presence as sales personnel promised the gender reform of the occupational group that many commentators desired. In consecutive issues in 1842, The Whip portrayed the female attendants of a cigar shop and a glover’s store. Like other commentators, the newspaper’s editors conceived of clerkships as a boon to women and as an opportunity for the men who would exchange these posts for other employment. “When we see a great hulking fellow measuring a yard of ribbon, or recommending flannel of the most approved texture for petticoats,” The Whip reasoned, “we fe[e]l inwardly indignant that the milk-sop was not made a washerwoman; so that if he or his friends determined to give him the business and occupation which a female ought to fill, it should be of the most laborious order.” If clerks were in fact hulking, they had no business in selling goods to women; if they were milk-sops, they had become so through their association with women and goods in stores.35 Yet if these articles in The Whip were designed to promote an increase in saleswomen, they also clarified the dangers to women that Americans concerned about market transactions feared the most—the pitfalls associated with becoming the sexual prey of morally suspect sporting men who openly rejected the dictates of refinement and propriety. Anxieties about the ways in which commercial and sexual exchanges overlapped were just as prevalent when men were customers and women were clerks. Poems that began each essay show that many men considered the cigar girl or glover’s shopwoman to be the commodity for sale: Hail! adjunct of the smoky temple, Attractive priestess of the light; We men of town in Broadway assemble, To gaze upon your charms at night. . . . Ah, lady fair, that face so rife, With war-contending red and white Tells me that once within your life, You’ve traded in Broadway at night.

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Figure 3.4. “Sketches of Characters—No. 31. The Cigar Shop Attendant,” The Whip, July 23, 1842. American Antiquarian Society.

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For the editor of this sporting publication and his readers, the commingling of commercial and sexual transactions was highly desirable, part of the fun male customers might have if they shopped in stores with pretty female clerks. The shopgirls found in these articles were indistinguishable, in terms of sporting culture’s overarching misogyny, from prostitutes. Their bodies were commodities to be purchased along with a few cigars or a pair of gloves. Blurring the boundaries of commercial and sexual desire might have been troubling to bourgeois men and women, but young men about town took advantage of these ambiguities to establish their power over urban women, many of whom were poor. And commercial men joined them in exploiting the relationship between sex and commerce. “[T]he fair glovist gets admirers galore,” The Whip assured its eager readers, “and by the agency of her sweet smiling face, and neatly turned figure,” she turned profits for her employer—much as the handsome male clerk supposedly did. Some employers took far more than profits from their saleswomen. Charles Mason, the Eighth Avenue store owner who reputedly paid low salaries to his clerks, “got into diffic[ul]ty with one of his shop girls,” a credit agent reported, and apparently persuaded her to contact the notorious Madame Restell to have an abortion. When Mason’s actions were discovered by police, he was sent with Restell to Blackwell’s Island prison for six months.36 Most employers and customers did not have to pay such a hefty price to have saleswomen turn tricks for them after the workday was over. At the end of the cigar-store essay, The Whip claimed that “[t]he pretty subject of our sketch is Miss ——, of a well known cigar store in Broadway,” whose beauty “has caused so much sensation about town.” Sporting-press editors took a similar tack when describing the moral and social “fall” of prostitutes, only to reiterate the women’s comeliness and their street addresses so that readers would be able to find them. While wealthy female customers might escape the seductive elements of consumption by shopping in stores staffed by saleswomen, the poor women in those jobs might not be so well protected from unwanted advances made by male customers. For bourgeois Americans, the consumption experience could be purified only by gender segregation: men should sell goods to men, while women should sell to women. Sporting-press editors straddled the high and low roads, noting that saleswomen were “for the most part virtuous girls,” but then arguing that some were not and that they traded sexual favors as well as goods. As a result, though the occupation itself might have been “condusive to the health” of laboring women, the sporting press

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reveals that for many urban men, the question was not one of appropriate employment for men and women but rather how they might lay claim to shopgirls’ bodies. According to the “bloods” who participated in sporting culture, establishing economic power and cultural prestige—represented in debates about the meanings of class and gender terms such as “respectability” and “producer”—was less important than clarifying men’s unfettered sexual power over poor women.37

Black Eyes and White Collars Retail clerks—especially those who worked in stores that catered to female shoppers—were largely unable to make credible claims that their work made them men. Their saleswork and interactions with women cast them as dependent and effeminate, so unlike the independent proprietors whom they hoped to replace in the commercial world. Moreover, clerks’ efforts to obscure their porters’ work robbed them of any opportunity to exhibit the fortitude that connoted manliness. Just as clerks such as Robert Graham invested a great deal of importance in white supremacy as a way to overcome the degradation of their porters’ work and clarify the meanings of race and class in their lives, many clerks also ventured outside of the store to claim that they were men in both refined and aggressive ways. Edward Tailer, for instance, wrote often in his diary about the salubrious effects of gymnastics. Like the clerks who helped form the first baseball clubs in New York during the 1840s and 1850s, Tailer believed that the fraternal competition encouraged by athletic endeavors offered opportunities to exhibit masculine independence and selfcontrol not available to him at work. In May 1850, he explained that “we went through with many difficult exercises, both upon the horse and bars. [A]nd when we had finished, [we were] left with the gratification of knowing that we had made some progress.” Striving in the gym seemed a more effective means of achieving personal growth than striving in the commercial house. Thinking about gymnastics seems to have consumed Tailer’s waking hours; he talked so incessantly with friends and coworkers about the benefits of the sport that he became known as a “one idea man.” He even wrote articles in city newspapers to advertise the gymnasium he attended. In December 1848, Tailer informed readers of the Courier and Enquirer that Dr. Rich’s gymnasium at the corner of Crosby and Bleecker streets “is peculiarily recommended to those of sedentary habits.” “Narrow and contracted chests are soon turned into broad and expansive ones,

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and the puny limbs of him who is not accustomed to exercise are soon changed into well developed and firmly formed ones,” he promised, accepting and providing a solution to the prevailing critique of clerks’ physiques. Predicting his audience’s hesitance to join in these activities, Tailer proclaimed that the gym was governed by “[t]he greatest decorum” and that “vulgar or profane language” would not be tolerated. In his diary, Tailer reiterated contemporary anxieties about white-collar masculinity, wondering if merchants and clerks would be prepared if they ever had to do punishing physical tasks. “[W]hen the rainy day of hard labor . . . shall have arrived, then will men be awakened to a sense of the importance of patronizing . . . Gymnasiums, in which the human frame is fortified in the physical sense of the word for the trials of life.” Confronting anxieties about failure and bracketing clerks’ manual labor alongside porters, Tailer suggested that gymnasiums would strengthen weak, white-collar men whether they experienced upward or downward mobility.38 The gymnasium encouraged male sociability. Tailer traded nicknames with two Englishmen whom he fondly called “John Bull Senior and Junior” and who in turn referred to him as “Zachery Taylor,” a witty homonym and cutting jab at the hero of a war that had complicated U. S.– British diplomatic relations and the new Whig president of the United States, whom Tailer, a staunch Democrat, opposed. The atmosphere was often light-hearted, with the gymnasts “laughing” at others who were doing “exercises . . . of a difficult and trying nature.” The banter at times included gossip about “the marriages of two of our most efficient members” and turned toward “friendly surmises as to who would be the next fortunate individual, who would be firmly bound at hymen’s shrine.”39 Yet Tailer demonstrated, in his writings about his conflict with the gymnastic instructor, Dr. John Rich, that relationships between gymnasts were sometimes strained. Rich and Tailer “had quite a falling out at the Gymnasium” after the latter published another article about gymnastics in the Tribune that advertised the establishment of “Mr. P. Mourquin,” one of Rich’s former employees who had opened his own gymnasium on Broadway. Rich upbraided him in front of the other subscribers, telling the clerk “that he had had trouble enough with me laterly, and that further, if I was not pleased, I had better desist from exercising.” Tailer did not record his immediate response to this verbal assault, but his diary entry reveals a temper still simmering after a public humiliation in front of other men. In Tailer’s opinion, Rich had overlooked “the numerous favors . . . which I had done him” and exhibited “to every body some of the baser qualities of

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Figure 3.5. “Exercise of Ye Youthfulle Jumperre on ‘Ye Prancinge Steede,’” Vanity Fair, March 31, 1860.

his depraved nature.” By the beginning of the new week, Tailer had bolted to Mourquin’s gymnasium. Robert Graham turned his heel on Rich’s gymnasium when he read the rules of the establishment—“it is all must and should and this and that will not be allowed.” Clerks would not suffer any criticism or subject themselves to the constraints on their freedom that they often endured in the commercial house. In certain venues outside of work, they could prove themselves men without worrying about ramifications for their character development and chances for advancement.40 Even though the cost of gymnastics might have limited participation to a select segment of New York society, the sport was not generally respected among the elite. Tailer generally liked the members of the gymnasium, even as he called them “rough[s],” members of the city’s sporting culture. They were “good natured” and “well meaning” men—one named Montgomery was “just the boy to stand by you in a fight, there being no such word as run or back out in his vocabulary.” These were men of the sort Tailer might brush past every day on city streets, but unlike the clerk,

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they were not members of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church or the American Temperance Union. Mourquin appears to have been an alcoholic. Tailer and his other students repeatedly warned him about missing classes, but to no avail. The gymnasts would find their instructor “seated half asleep in his arm chair” when they arrived for morning exercises. He would sometimes “talk . . . wildly and incoherently.” Tailer feared that Mourquin’s behavior “showed that his mind was unsound and preyed upon by troubles brought on by gambling, drinking, and . . . associating with strumpets.” When Mourquin committed suicide by ingesting a mixture of arsenic and laudanum, his gymnasts might have chalked it up to the Frenchman’s disreputable lifestyle.41 Commentators like Fitz-James O’Brien refused to accept the argument that gymnasiums would bolster white-collar masculinity and instead intimated that such institutions facilitated clerks’ access to disreputable fun in the form of “sprees” in gambling dens and saloons. In an article entitled “The Counter-Jumpers’ Gymnasium,” O’Brien and Vanity Fair’s artist depicted puny clerks dragging each other around on hobby-horses, castigating their pretensions to gentility by resorting to antiquated English and jokingly referring to their mounts as “prancinge steede[s].” The article also introduced readers to clerks who found their “constitutions . . . so invigorated” by athletics that they were “enabled to undergo their usual nocturnal dissipations with far more impunity than usual.” Tailer had used gymnastics to combat the degenerative effects of desk-and-counter work and provide a place to prove himself a man outside of the workplace. The clerks whom Vanity Fair lampooned, conversely, strolled from the gym to the saloon where, as a result of their exercise, they “can drink worse rum and smoke cheaper cigars than formerly.”42 In addition, some parts of the gymnasium’s athletic agenda were not considered dignified by the urban bon ton. Boxing was wildly popular among laboring men, rendered respectable only in elite sparring clubs of the early nineteenth century. Yet Robert Graham wrote eagerly about the famed 1849 prizefight between Tom Hyer and “Yankee” Sullivan on Poole’s Island in the Chesapeake Bay, even while trying to disassociate himself from the raucous and violent proceedings by writing, “I wish they were both at the bottom of the Bay for my own part.” Four days later, however, Graham happily reported that Sullivan had been pummeled, repeating the rumor that “his face looks like a butchers block.” Tailer counted himself among boxing’s practitioners. He might not have identified with the sport’s plebeian heroes, but he did conceive of boxing as a means to

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achieve a desired level of fitness and personal “progress.” It was also inherently dangerous. In one sparring session with “George Dean[,] ‘a celebrated and well known sporting character’”—Tailer showed that he was familiar with sporting culture by his use of quotation marks—he received a bloody nose. In another match, he “spared with an Englishman . . . who knocked me through a pane of glass, much to the amusement” of the watching gymnasts. The boxer was supposed to take this punishment like a man, as it was in good fun. In other fights, he gave and received black eyes. When he arrived at work with a shiner, though, the partners of Little, Alden and Co. “commented . . . pretty severely” upon his appearance, with one solemnly guessing “that Edward must have been in a fight.” The firm’s bookkeeper, fatigued by Tailer’s constant pressure to join him at the gymnasium, “was highly gratified, well knowing that this is but one of the numerous injuries which may be received in learning to box. ‘[F]or those who live by the sword, must perish by it.’” Tailer believed that his participation in gymnastics made him more manly than his commercial compatriots, but in the end a black eye called into question the sport’s, Tailer’s, and the firm’s respectability.43 Black eyes, like porters’ work, sullied clerks’ white collars. And clerks, especially those in retail stores, could not escape their contemporaries’ conclusion that what they did at work was not manly labor. Having spilled so much ink in alternately encouraging and tempering clerks’ ambitions, commercial observers like Freeman Hunt joined sporting-press editors in trying to determine what type of work clerks should do to be men. Many rural-born youth had forsaken manual agricultural labor for the excitement of the urban commercial world. Critics of their work behind the counter suggested that they return to the farm or migrate west. “Would that young men might judge of the dignity of labor by its usefulness and manliness,” the Merchants’ Magazine proclaimed in 1852 when comparing clerks’ work to that of agricultural laborers, “rather than by the superficial glosses it wears.” While merchants and manufacturers largely avoided manual work, Hunt believed that clerks who sold goods to women might benefit from such an education in manliness.44 Hunt happily reprinted criticism of retail clerks that he found in newspapers published as far away as New Orleans. His assertion that “he-biddies” should drop “tape and bobbin” in favor of work at the plow stood uneasily next to his belief that clerks might become merchants if they only cultivated character and restrained their ambition. Clerks might have been puzzled by the contradictory prescriptions, but a few did become farmers in

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adulthood rather than merchants. Fifteen clerks in a small group of almost two hundred from my census samples who could be traced in subsequent census schedules—7.5 percent—became farmers. It is difficult to determine why these clerks decided to till the land rather than man the till. A few had been embedded in the rural economy before they came to New York City to clerk. Charles Copper had been a farmer in Shenango, Pennsylvania, came to Manhattan to clerk in the 1850s, and by 1870 was a farmer in Summit, Iowa, having accumulated five hundred dollars in personal estate. The men who shuttled from their farms to New York City and back again may always have considered their moves to the city temporary ones. The sentimental pull of home or the landed wealth they had already amassed there called them back to the countryside. Federal census tabulators recorded in 1850 that John Staats was a married father who owned a farm worth almost eleven thousand dollars in Hillsborough, New Jersey. Five years later, Staats was still married but was now a clerk boarding without his wife in a house in Manhattan’s Fourteenth Ward, having been in the city for only five months before the census was taken. He had returned to Hillsborough by 1860, richer in real and personal estate, and he and his wife had been blessed with another child. After the Civil War, Staats ascended to a seat in the state legislature. A clerkship had not made John Staats, but it had played a brief—though ultimately murky—role in his economic career.45 Farming, of course, was not a certain path to independence either, and many clerks knew it, having fled a declining rural economy for the promise of urban commercial wealth. Two clerks who worked alongside Henry Patterson in a Chatham Square hardware house were less sure, and decided to leave their clerkships in 1846 “to become farmers in Illinois.” One returned to Manhattan a few years later, chastened, to clerk in Patterson’s own hardware store. But the draw of property, as proponents of “free labor ideology” were coming to define the independence of white, northern men in terms of whether they had access to land in the West, was undeniable. It is possible that some clerks heard the shrill criticism of counter jumping and sought to establish their masculinity through manual labor on the land. But Patterson’s friends, Copper, and Staats all took risks that rural farming was a clearer path to respectability than urban clerking.46 Clerks and their contemporaries tried and failed to make sense of the apparent contradictions between Hunt’s affirmation that apprentice-clerks could balance character and ambition in order to achieve stable proprietorship and the criticism that clerks were not men and could never be so while they did retail work. And yet the amorphous occupational

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label “clerk” dovetailed with the invidious social label “counter jumper” to scupper young men’s quest for capital. Clerks, both ambitious and humble, prospective merchants and degraded subordinates, confused the meanings of class and gender as they related to work and occupational mobility. In the broader culture, they were considered rapacious young men about town and lace-peddling milksops. Clerks’ prospects for advancement could not be viewed optimistically in light of their degrading porters’ work. Counter jumping—a phrase suggesting ambition as well as effeminacy—did not signify manliness in the same ways that work on the farm, in the workshop, or on the docks did. Rather, standing behind a counter seemed similar to rural women’s outwork or Lowell mill girls’ loom tending. Workers spun cloth in the home, wove it in the factory, and displayed it across a counter. These were the constituent elements of a productive and distributive process, and the workers who participated in each step seemed to perform similarly light labor. Yet at the spinning wheel or loom, women were producers who performed tedious and sometimes physically arduous tasks, especially after mill owners instituted “speed-up” and “stretch-out” practices in the 1840s. As Americans unsuccessfully tried to circumscribe women’s work for the household economy within the domestic ideal, they also dealt with the effects of industrialization on skilled workers. Since artisan independence through ownership of a workshop was no longer a certainty, tradesmen increasingly emphasized their productive work to place themselves squarely within the nation’s republican tradition of virtuous citizenship. When workers protested the increasing inequalities at the point of production, they argued that the worth of goods was equal to the labor expended to make them. Despite the Reverend Adams’s assurances, it was difficult for ministers, merchants, and newspaper editors to convince their contemporaries that mental exertion, writing, or business management was actually work, part of a heralded tradition of production. Antebellum laborers, like their Revolution-era ancestors, considered merchants and manufacturers to be “traffickers,” the middlemen who robbed them of their just profits in the marketplace. For their part, entrepreneurs considered overseeing employees and commercial affairs to be work. In order to make this claim convincing, brainworkers had to subvert the labor theory of value by contending that the character of a hard-working man was as reliable an emblem of republican citizenship as hard work with the hands. Character traits such as selfdiscipline and application to business were, for these men, as important

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as labor itself. But these efforts on the part of bourgeois commentators to privilege working hard as much as hard manual work also reinforced their aversion to the physical labor performed by farmers, tradesmen, and laborers. The counter jumper served as a convenient foil who could absorb the criticism levied against men who scribbled on paper, shuffled financial instruments into bank accounts, or directed the work of others.47 Hard-working business proprietors and professionals were manly, then. But powerful as they were, they could not stem the economic and social changes that the counter jumper represented. The nation, once a producer’s republic, had become a consumer’s paradise, staffed by retail clerks who earned observers’ scorn for trampling upon respectable notions of sincerity and gentlemanly conduct in persuading women to buy goods. This is, of course, what their employers demanded of them, but the transactions they made troubled many men because they reflected the potential for women’s commercial independence and even sexual liberty. But those freedoms were seldom the clerks’. In stores modeled after the refined home, they had in essence become domesticated servants. Hunt summarized a clerk’s role in the commercial house or store in 1855, probably attempting to commend the young man who was “to business what the wife is to the order and success of home—the genius that gives form and fashion to the materials for prosperity which are furnished by another.” Clerks served as helpmeets who made shoppers comfortable and added to their employers’ commercial fortunes. Lacking the means to transcend what one historian has called the “enormous flexibility, permeability, and overlap between women’s and men’s work,” male clerks were increasingly criticized for performing work better suited to women not only because that labor represented the economy’s shift toward consumption but also because it represented men’s dependence.48 Male clerks’ access to languages of respectability and manliness narrowed considerably in the antebellum years even as they illustrated the ways in which contests about such class and gender terms were unsettling their meaning or rendering them vacuous. Counter jumpers were among the figures who served as the punchline in midcentury comic valentines passed around for laughs with friends or at the expense of enemies. According to one valentine, the retail clerk had merely two purposes in life: “to measure calico, And leer in Woman’s eye.” In the accompanying image, the young, big-headed, sleepy-eyed clerk looms threateningly over his female customer. In another valentine, a dry goods clerk named Sir Foppleton Frisk, an officious, overbearingly pretentious clerk who resembles

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Figure 3.6. “Dry Good Clerk (Just Brains Enough),” Comic Valentine 3.30, n.d. (c. 1850–1870). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

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Figure 3.7. “Dry Good Clerk (Sir Foppleton Frisk),” Comic Valentine 3.31, n.d. (c. 1850–1870). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

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Figure 3.8. “Counter Jumper,” Comic Valentine 3.2, n.d. (c. 1850–1870). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

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nothing if not O’Brien’s missing link between man and ape, tries to browbeat a demure shopper by whispering sweet nothings about the merchandise. These images are scathingly humorous, but they probably touched a sensitive nerve among Americans who worried about clerks whose inflated egos and intimidating tactics might make the consumption experience uncomfortable, if not dangerous. Yet another valentine flippantly questioned the clerk’s humanity in verse: “Behind the counter, like an ape, You grin and measure off your tape.” It is interesting to note that, in this visual depiction of the “Counter Jumper,” the artist installs the clerk at a desk, keeping the books, hiding his varied work duties and proximity to porters and customers. The artist’s ridicule is clear enough: the clerk’s long hair, spindly legs, and tiny feet render him effeminate—he is even seated astride the stool as if riding “side-saddle.” Male clerks could not brag about doing physical, manly labor alongside porters—that would metaphorically soil their white collars. Yet observers responded, not with applause for clerks’ stance against porters’ work, but with hearty condemnation for their unmanly resistance to difficult manual tasks and working hard, evidently preferring to lounge about while facilitating women’s consumption. “Cheer up,” James W. Alexander told clerks in his advice manual, “at the thought that” long hours and workplace demands “will make a man of you.” At all costs, he warned, avoid “the ignominy of giving up prospects in life out of a little girlish disgust” for “menial” tasks. Under these circumstances, clerks’ traditional writing and bookkeeping tasks as well as their ambition to vault from a “subaltern place” were suspect markers of manliness and respectability.49 For poets, artists, sporting press editors, and prescriptive-literature writers, clerks were at once workers, but not heirs to the manly connotations of strenuous labor; white-collared, thinking employees but not employers freed from working with their hands. These commentators revealed cracks in the façade of clerking, an occupation that was supposed to lead to riches or a comfortable respectability. Antebellum Americans did not condemn all clerks—to do so would have threatened their cherished assumptions that these boys would become independent men in the republic. But a clerkship was a poor indicator of upward mobility and citizenship. These criticisms of clerking forced young men on the make to strive for recognition in the rough-and-tumble world of urban politics and society. Cultivating a respectable mode of citizenship in a movement to close stores earlier in the evening, they tried to attain the power and prestige that their occupational status largely denied them.

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On August 12, 1841, Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune entreated the “enlightened mind” and the “generous heart” to support the cause of the city’s dry goods clerks, who would meet later that evening “to consider the subject of . . . proposing some regulation of their hours of labor.” Dry goods stores might open between the hours of six and seven in the morning and close at nine or ten on weekday evenings and sometimes midnight on Saturdays. Such a lengthy workday would exhaust any laborer, but dry goods clerks were handicapped by the popular perception that they lounged among ribbons and cloth instead of performing arduous work. They were not producers, Greeley’s editorial rivals at the Herald and the Sun contended, but rather consumers lurking in the city’s most nefarious environs: “grog-shops, gambling-houses and brothels.” Keeping them behind store counters would safeguard their morals. Greeley defended clerks against this “insult” to their honor. These were young men— future merchants, he assumed—who were fully capable of self-control and deserving of masculine independence: “they are not asking a sugar-plum on condition of being good boys; they are seeking the recognition of a right.” They were citizens—men! Greeley hoped that clerks and merchants would recognize the symbiotic relationship between capital and labor and agree that young men should have an hour or two of leisure time for selfimprovement.1 Greeley’s clerks were independent men in the making, yet they knew that assistance from women shoppers was crucial to the success of their movement. The “Standing Committee” of dry goods clerks obsequiously requested ladies’ help and forthrightly inflected consumer purchases with political and moral valence. First, the committee argued “that purchases made after dark are too often the cause of dissatisfaction and regret” because of poor lighting. The answer was to forego buying “any article of consequence by gas or candle light.” The committee played upon women’s emotions, claiming that female customers were “intimately acquainted

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with” clerks’ “miserable existence,” marked by a most cruel “species of incarceration” for long periods of the day. Clerks assured ladies that they were petitioning their superiors for leisure time in order to attend “Reading Rooms, Lecture Rooms[,] . . . Libraries[, and] . . . Churches”; all were bent on “improving their minds.” While convinced that women shoppers were the foremost defenders of this “philanthropic concern,” the committee sought to strengthen that conviction by expressing “confiden[ce]” that “no respectable lady will be seen to enter” stores that remained open after eight.2 In an “early closing” movement in the 1840s and 1850s, clerks became political actors who at once declared their presence in the ranks of the republic’s producer-citizens, acknowledged their role in the consumer’s paradise, and tried to distinguish their aims and prospects from those of laboring men. Grappling with the relationships among work, gender, and citizenship in the political realm, clerks and their contemporaries participated in the broader cultural discussion about the meanings of class in antebellum America. Unable to make credible claims to either productive or refined manhood at work, clerks carefully crafted a respectable mode of politics that they hoped would earn them cultural capital among bourgeois shoppers and newspaper editors and renew the promise of clerking as an occupation that would lead to them becoming independent men with economic capital.3 Clerks did not congregate beneath the banner of a particular set of political beliefs in the antebellum era. Few merchants expected or coerced their employees to vote for particular candidates. Moreover, as state legislatures abolished property qualifications and granted the franchise to all adult white men over the age of twenty-one, some clerks were still too young to cast ballots in local, state, and national elections. Just as they aspired to clerkships and eventual economic prosperity and social respect, however, clerks hoped to achieve the authority associated with citizenship in urban political culture.4 That culture was changing rapidly in the antebellum era. Wealthy urbanites who had once ruled as republican patriarchs, believing that they understood the common good more clearly than the common man, left city politics in the hands of ward politicians and interest groups who initiated democratic, grass-roots debates that often played out in public places and prints. Clerks who had attained their majority were citizens because they were white men, but the rise of democratic political culture in anonymous cities forced clerks to rethink their political beliefs,

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presence in the public sphere, and concerns about class and gender, all in an effort to have their citizenship validated by their contemporaries. They alternately embraced and shunned the era’s democratic politics, predicated as it was upon conflict and struggle between party organizations. They admired and participated in the boisterous and egalitarian political culture of the era, yet they often tried to cast themselves as dispassionate observers—rather than members—of urban crowds attending political events, identifying with great leaders rather than with ordinary followers. On the pages of their diaries, clerks attempted to cultivate an honorable masculinity as well as detect refinement and manliness (or their absence) in others. They traced the outlines of the class and gender identities they desired for themselves in the great men they saw and met, borrowing the ideas and rhetoric of prescriptive literature and the journalistic style of the penny press to do so. Yet as they were pressed by conflicts about class in the metropolis, they sought to insulate their respectable mode of politics in learned discourse about the crucial issues of the day in lyceums and libraries, out of the reach of the ruder participants and corrupt practices of urban politics.5 In order to convince their employers and shoppers that stores should close early, however, clerks approached the harsh footlights of the public stage only to have their contemporaries debate whether they deserved the prerogatives of citizenship. In the 1840s and early 1850s, as the American economy dove into and climbed out of the depression caused by the Panic of 1837, a clerks’ mutual benefit and protective association declared its members’ support for a coalescing body of ideas about the supposed “harmony of interests” between employers and employees. Blithely ignoring the inequalities created by industrial capitalism, political economists, merchants, and manufacturers advanced the argument that classes were ephemeral and individual character omnipotent in America. Workers were free because they could sign contracts with employers of their choice and really were only temporarily workers: they could choose to become independent property owners themselves through frugality, sweat equity, and determination. Most clerks agreed. Hoping to become merchants in adulthood, they eschewed the turnouts, strikes, and violence of urban workingmen as well as the harangues of demagogues that unnaturally fostered class conflict and social disorder. They preferred instead the gentlemanly style of negotiation and compromise adopted by leading politicians—a language of class in itself—that reflected respectable citizenship and the harmony of interests.6

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Ultimately, though, this mode of politics was not a successful means for clerks to achieve their political goals in the rough-and-tumble, democratic political culture of the period. In reasoned addresses made to polite audiences and respectful editorials inserted into newspaper columns, they forged a refined political style that disavowed class antagonism with merchants. Many clerks unrealistically hoped that the harmony of interests existing with their employers and the enlightened rule of disinterested great men might limit the types of conflict that defined democratic political culture. These were fatal assumptions that belied the fact that clerks were workers without much economic capital, lacking the opportunities to accumulate power and prestige as independent men. Their ambition for perpetual ascendance blinded them to the common ground they shared with laborers who were more willing to see the ways class operated in American society. Clerks’ quest for capital through a respectable mode of politics failed them.

Great Men and Armchair Politicians On an early November day in 1842, Henry Patterson “got severely squeezed” by a few thousand fellow citizens who congregated at City Hall to “pay [their] . . . respects” to U.S. secretary of state Daniel Webster. News had just arrived in New York harbor that Britain’s Parliament had ratified the treaty Webster had signed in August with Lord Ashburton. The clerk, uncomfortably wedged in the receiving line, considered the long wait to be worth it when the city’s mayor introduced him personally to the great man. “Mr. Webster took me by the hand,” Patterson proudly recorded in his diary, “gave me a searching look, said with remarkable distinctness ‘how do you do, Mr. Patterson?,’ and I passed on.”7 In this brief exchange, Patterson seized an opportunity to take the measure of greatness. Webster’s graying hair betrayed his seniority, but he was “square built” in Patterson’s estimation, “a powerfully muscular man, with an iron frame and unimpaired constitution.” Posing as an amateur phrenologist, Patterson determined that Webster’s “very large” head encompassed “intellectual organs” of the highest order. The politician’s “forbidding” facial expression denoted its wearer’s penchant for “deep and habitual thought, close observation, and a calmness and self possession which necessarily arise from a conscious capacity to judge all things correctly, without being imposed on by false appearances.” By the looks of him, political or diplomatic antagonists found it difficult to dupe the man

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whom contemporaries called “Godlike Daniel.” Emphasizing Webster’s “manly independence, his democratic bearing, his spotless integrity, and his many valuable services to his country,” Patterson proclaimed, “I admire and respect him.”8 Henry Patterson believed Daniel Webster—honest and intelligent, polished statesman yet also a man of the people—was an exemplary leader, able to balance the sometimes contradictory aspects of reputable citizenship in a democratic republic. Yet Patterson’s description of this momentary meeting is interesting because it occurred as the youthful clerk’s political ideas and affiliations were in flux. Patterson had attended an 1837 supper honoring victorious Whig Party candidates, though on that occasion he exhibited more interest in the “eatables” than in the oratory. He had voted for the Whigs as recently as April 1842. In the weeks surrounding the November 1842 election, however, he had been reading Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population and Jean-Baptiste Say’s Treatise on Political Economy, texts that helped him formulate a critique of government intervention in the economy and strengthen his belief in the harmony of interests between producers and employers. Patterson agreed with Malthus’s critique of the British Poor Laws: they potentially rewarded the undeserving. He was also receptive to Say’s assertion that commercial and professional men were just as much producers as tradesmen. Despite his admiration for Webster the man, Patterson would not support “a National Bank, with a chartered paper currency and other Whig measures to which he is partial,” because these policies would “do infinite harm to the country.” Instead, he favored “free trade and sound currency” and believed “that capital and labour will always naturally turn into those channels which are most profitable, and that any artificial regulation of capital and labour will inevitably lessen its productiveness and injure the State.” In a democratic republic, respect for greatness did not preclude fierce debate among citizens about issues of national significance. While he took the measure of the great man, Patterson was, at the age of twenty-three, also judging how he measured up as a citizen. His political deliberations in his diary reveal a personal transformation from a political neophyte who would eat any partisan supper into a maturing citizen. When he “voted the entire Democratic or Loco Foco ticket” in the election held a week after his encounter with Webster, he made an anti-Whig statement “on the subject of Political Economy.”9 Yet he also held his nose while doing so. The Democratic politicians whom he helped to elect belonged to the party he considered “nearest

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right in their political principles,” but they were also a set of demagogues whose “individual character” he despised. Attending a Democratic Party function at Tammany Hall more than four years earlier, Patterson had been “suffocated and deafened,” indeed “nearly squeezed to death,” by the crush and noise produced by the rowdier elements of the party’s base. Being “squeezed” at Tammany was evidently far more unnerving for Patterson than being “squeezed” in the receiving line at City Hall. Radical Democrats such as Alexander Ming whipped the crowd of “real loafers and Bowery Boys” into a frenzy with political rhetoric that probably stressed class conflict between hard-working mechanics and a slew of nonproducers—speculators, bankers, and merchants—whom they typically called the “Money Power.” The speakers “as well as the company . . . perfectly disgusted” Patterson. His 1842 vote for the Democrats was a reluctant embrace. He had tipped demagogues to lead his city and nation because some of their ideas persuaded him, even though he did not consider them Webster’s social or intellectual equals. Furthermore, he retained some of his Whiggish persuasions about the absence of class antagonism. Perhaps his ideological differences with and cultural qualms about the radicals were the reasons he ultimately ended his flirtation with the Democratic Party and returned to the Whig camp once again.10 While clerks such as Patterson weighed philosophical arguments and their own experiences to determine where they stood on political questions, other young men were simply enthusiastic about the political sphere. Fifteen-year-old Nicholas Chesebrough, a clerk in New Haven, illustrated in 1836 how some boys were unsure about their political affiliations even as they demonstrated an abiding interest in the pageantry of politics. When early vote tallies in the presidential election suggested that the Whigs would win the state of Connecticut, he excitedly made the parenthetical notation “(Hurrah for Harrison and liberty).” When the “Official returns” arrived days later to confirm that the Democrat Martin Van Buren had received a slim majority of the state’s votes, he wrote “Hurrah for Jackson.” It is unclear whether he supported William Henry Harrison or the successor of Andrew Jackson, and this is perhaps beside the point. Young men like Chesebrough, who was not yet of voting age, still tried to master the political language that gave meaning to these events and shaped the identities of participants. In making parenthetical asides in his diary, Chesebrough was affirming that he knew the language of democratic political culture, even if he was still years from claiming voting rights or a cultivated understanding of the important political issues that

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would permit him to determine which slogans, parties, or politicians he supported.11 Chesebrough’s diary may be unique in the way it registers a clerk’s protean political sympathies, yet other clerks’ diaries reveal that their interest in political topics ebbed and flowed with the excitement of electoral seasons. At the same time, these young men typically described intense commitment to the fortunes of particular candidates and a capacious interest in the spectacle of politicians vying for power. Their episodic statements about political topics and contests show that clerks were eager participants in the political culture. To prove how politically astute they were, clerks supported those whom they considered great men, experienced politicians, and inspiring speakers. They condemned pretenders who lacked crucial attributes they associated with statesmanship.12 Watching the 1848 presidential campaign unfold from his vantage point in Albany, William Hoffman was certain that Democratic candidate Lewis Cass would “unquestionably be elected” since “[h]e is truly a great man and is every way calculated to perform the incumbent duties appertaining to the high office of President.” His “unqualified opponent” was Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor, whom Hoffman thought “incompe[te]nt for the filling of that high office,” perhaps because he had never held an elected political post before. Hoffman’s opposition to the general’s candidacy did not stop him from attending a “Taylor meeting . . . to hear what they had to say.” Yet the Whigs’ “miserable speaking” on that occasion only confirmed his opinion of the candidate at the head of their ticket.13 Hoffman was also a spectator to and critic of the factionalism that splintered the Democrats in New York State and helped pave the way for the election of the “incompetent” Taylor. Members of the “Barnburner” wing had broken with party regulars in 1848 on the question of whether the institution of slavery would be permitted to expand into the territory won from Mexico in the recent war. Arguing that western lands should remain “free soil” for the settlement of white farmers and workingmen from the northern states, its members nominated former president Martin Van Buren for the nation’s highest office. The fact that Van Buren hailed from Kinderhook, New York, just a few miles away from Hoffman’s Claverack home, did not sway the clerk from his support for Cass. Hoffman attended the meetings called by the Free Soil men, but he criticized their political style. He called them “spouting Barnburners” whose speeches were defined by too much “enthusiasm of feeling.” Their political ideas and speaking style lacked decorum and logic. The men who spoke at the meeting,

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including Van Buren’s son John, were “leading Demagogues,” “mean” or petty aspirants to political power who operated not on behalf of the commonweal but rather in the interest of a “mere faction.”14 By mentioning the dangers of “faction,” Hoffman evoked Revolutionary-era political ideas that continued to resonate in American politics. Yet even though civic virtue and anxieties about “interest” had deep roots in the nation’s political fabric, by 1848 such sensibilities ignored the fact that the struggle among interest groups for political power had become the driving force of urban democracy. Even so, as members of crowds who witnessed parades honoring political and military leaders, clerks repeatedly identified with the elite men whom, because they appeared to be situated above partisanship, they considered qualified to assume political leadership. Edward Tailer praised Cass’s “open and benevolent countenance” and Mexican-American War commander Winfield Scott’s “noble and manly countenance” in separate parades he watched on the streets of Manhattan, attempting to read their character traits by examining their appearance. By attempting to identify the refinement of men like these, clerks claimed the mantle of a bourgeois observer, hoping they might be protected from the coarser elements in society clamoring for equality or self-interested men who entered the civic sphere to claim that their political ideas most clearly promoted the common good.15 Often, of course, clerks’ descriptions of politicians were tied to their principles—Tailer’s and Hoffman’s support for the Democrats shaped their portrayals of these leaders. Yet Scott had openly feuded with President James K. Polk during the war and would become the Whig Party’s presidential candidate in 1852. Many clerks transcended partisan allegiance to admire any aspirant to or holder of political office if he looked, spoke, or behaved like they thought a gentleman should. Like other urban observers, they could be blinded by appearances. Clerks’ responses to the deaths of heroic statesmen reveal the emphasis they placed upon the appearance of gentility. We might expect Hoffman to cite the Democrat Polk’s “great character” upon hearing about the former president’s death in 1849. Yet he also acknowledged the “distinguished character” of the Whig senator Henry Clay in the same diary entry after hearing an erroneous rumor that the Kentuckian had passed away. When the Democratic sympathizer Tailer met Webster in 1850, he praised the Massachusetts senator with the same words he had used to venerate Scott: Webster’s “noble and manly countena[n]ce” and his reputation as the nation’s “greatest orator” earned the clerk’s respect. When a Whig candidate won the New York mayoral

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election in 1849, Tailer did not seem upset about the outcome, in part because the victor was a neighbor and a respectable public figure. Robert Graham’s father was a Democratic Party poll inspector, so we might have expected the clerk to be satisfied with the election of the party’s candidate for mayor in 1848. He clearly was pleased, but not necessarily because he was a Democrat. Rather, Graham was especially happy about the result because the winner was “a Merchant and a Gentleman.”16 Clerks’ desire for gentlemanly political leaders betrayed their contradictory sentiments about the public, political sphere as well as their ambivalence about urban life. On occasions in which citizens came together peaceably to honor great men, celebrate important events, or respectfully demand political reform, clerks readily joined the democratic crowd. When Henry Patterson witnessed a rather “cool” welcome for the unpopular president John Tyler during an 1843 visit to New York, the clerk “rejoiced to find . . . every face wearing, if not the looks of affection, at least those of respect; and love of order predominating.” Tailer “formed a fractional part of the thousands who swarmed into Metropolitan Hall” in 1853 to protest “the deeds of swindling, robbery, favor[i]tism, and trifling with the rights of the public” perpetrated by the city’s Common Council. “This heterogenous mass” of ministers, tradesmen, merchants, and day laborers “represent[ed] the bone and sinew of this mighty metropolis,” he wrote, proud to be part of the decorous and democratic proceedings.17 Yet clerks sometimes would filter pride in their nation’s egalitarian traditions by reading about events in newspapers rather than by attending public gatherings. On April 3, 1848, thousands of New Yorkers gathered in City Hall Park to celebrate the recent declaration of a republic in France. Both Tailer and Graham discussed the celebration in minute detail, from speeches to fireworks. Tailer noted the pervasive tricolore “rosettes” adorning men’s lapels and waxed rhapsodic over the “benign, happy, equal protection” offered to the crowd members by the United States and by God, who had permitted “the rising of another star in the great galaxy of human freedom.” Graham headed his diary entry for this day with the phrase “Vive la Republique Française” and fulsomely praised the international march of liberty as a desirable extension of America’s own political tradition. Despite their support for the proceedings, the young men gave no indication that they attended the celebration. There is evidence, however, that their descriptions of the “large mass meeting” relied upon newspaper reports to fill in the gaps in their own memories of the event. Graham cribbed his description of the scene—“The American and French

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Flags were . . . handsomely blended together and waved from each wing of City Hall, while in the centre the Coat of Arms of the United States waved in apparent triumph”—directly from the front-page coverage that James Gordon Bennett’s Herald gave to the event. In their diary entries, both Tailer and Graham adopted the reportorial style and substance of the urban penny press. While clerks might have been proud participants in civic events, they also had the option to read about them in the quietude of their living quarters and invent their presence in the body politic. By blurring the distinctions between their own thoughts and those of journalists, these young commercial men happily permitted newspapermen to speak for them about the politics of city life.18 For clerks frequently shrank from the rowdier aspects of the public sphere, criticizing speakers, audiences, and other figures who tried to foment challenges to social order. Henry Patterson attended a speech by the labor radical Frances Wright D’Arusmont at Masonic Hall in 1838 that started with “great cheering and stamping” on the part of the audience but descended into a full-fledged riot in which the crowd ran “backward and forward, over the seats . . . to the great injury of their skins and heads.” Wittily assessing the class and gender implications of this event, Patterson remarked that this was “[p]robably my last attendance on Mrs. Darusmont,” casting himself as the only gentleman present who might have been able to protect a vulnerable woman. At the same time, he abdicated this responsibility because the speaker had played a central role in causing the anarchic ferment in the hall. Patterson believed that ladies did not belong in the realm of politics and that Fanny Wright was no lady.19 Some young men wondered if they belonged in the rough-and-tumble world of urban politics either. In public and in their diaries, clerks announced their affinity for “noble” and “manly” leaders, but recoiled from the disreputable men who had begun to assert power in urban politics. These bosses sometimes riled up crowds and employed violence to have their way at the polls. On a July 1850 trip by steamship to Coney Island, Tailer was aggrieved to find himself sitting next to the Sixth Ward kingpin Isaiah Rynders, whose Empire Club, “a desperate gang of black legs” in Tailer’s words, had rioted and bullied its way into control of Five Points streets and municipal patronage posts. Later that autumn, Tailer strolled to the First Ward polls to witness the mayoral election. Yet upon “meeting with a set of m[e]n, totally void of all principals and hired for the purpose of electioneering,” he “turned [his] . . . back upon them in utter disgust.” Attempting to avoid the shoulder-hitters, threatening ward bosses,

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and intimidating speakers at the hustings was cowardly, damaging young clerks’ efforts to establish themselves as men and citizens. Clerks’ desire for gentlemanly leadership also illuminates their timid engagement with egalitarian politics. Some clerks apparently dealt with the class and gender ambiguities of urban politics by reading about the public sphere from their armchairs, limiting personal interaction with the potentially unruly electorate. “Reading the news,” as one historian has written, was “almost a fundamental requirement of citizenship,” but clerks found that perusing newspapers allowed them both to engage and to disengage from the public. They hoped to cultivate a particularly refined and insulated sort of citizenship—monitoring the people but not becoming part of the people. In effect, they marginalized themselves in the rough world of democratic politics, championing a particularly quaint stance toward involvement in public affairs that weakened their efforts to weigh in effectively on political issues.20

The Lyceum and the Library Debating societies and subscription libraries provided clerks with opportunities to have their citizenship endorsed that tended to elude them in the urban public sphere. Some formed their own lyceums and debating clubs, as Nicholas Chesebrough did with his workplace peers in New Haven. Other clerks, such as Henry Patterson, joined debating and literary clubs with young men from a variety of occupational groups. Some of these debating societies developed in the context of a particular electoral campaign. William Hoffman, for instance, noted in his diary that he and his fellow clerks in Stephen Boyd’s dry goods store were writing a constitution for a debating society on the night he condemned the Barnburners for their demagoguery. Clerks’ criticism of political leaders’ speaking abilities underscores what one scholar has called an antebellum “obsession with spoken eloquence” as a means of education and developing self-control. This intense focus on oratory was predicated upon clerks’ own attempts to convince colleagues to accept their arguments in debates about the significant social and political questions of their day, and in the process establish themselves as citizens.21 Clerks debated about many different issues, both topical and philosophical, at their meetings. Chesebrough and his fellow debaters began their first meeting by considering “w[he]ther Lyceums are beneficial to persons in our circumstances or not.” Hoffman’s Albany society pondered

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if “it [is] more profitable for a Merchant to sell at a small profit and do a large Business; or at a large profit and do a small Business.” In leisurehour discussions, these young men concerned themselves with potential strategies for social and economic advancement. Clerks also argued with each other about the smoldering political questions of the day. Hoffman and his cohort decided in 1848 that “the signs of the times,” presumably including the development of sectional ideologies concerning the spread of slavery into the trans-Mississippi West, did indeed “indicate a dissolution of the Union.” Patterson participated in a debate about the legitimacy of capital punishment.22 Debating offered clerks the opportunity to measure themselves against the great politicians they so admired as well as against each other. Members of the Jefferson Literary Association applauded Patterson’s first foray into public speaking, when after “an animated dispute” between debaters, he convinced the membership that the death penalty was in fact “justifiable.” His comrades were so impressed that they named him a “regular debater” for the following session and months later elected him president of the association. Participation in a debating society gave clerks chances to act as citizens—just as other men did in the public sphere—and assume leadership roles over their peers.23 Debating was also a means by which young men could compete with each other outside of the workplace. If they were not able to attain the legendary fame of national orators, perhaps they could best their local antagonists. Clerks’ competitiveness provoked strong feelings. Patterson became incensed when judges determined that his side had lost a debate, accusing them of being “influenced by personal friendship” with the men he was debating. He coped with this personal affront by adding in his diary that “the members present generally disagreed with them, and I think our side was the best supported.” Hoffman recorded in his diary that fellow clerk Peter Owens refused to participate in the society because its members rejected a question he posed for a future debate in favor of a topic proposed by Hoffman. Owens’s departure “was a movement that we were all in favor of,” Hoffman wrote, since he was “the most obstinate person I ever saw.”24 Yet individual slights in the debating club might take a back seat to collective embarrassment. At their first meeting, Hoffman and his fellow orators sat in embarrassed silence, with no one willing to speak first because they “all felt incompetent to say much” on the subject at hand. When the debaters nominated Hoffman to begin the proceedings, he “rose and after

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making a few apologies sat down again without saying more.” He was puzzled by their stage fright, since “we have not a great audience to face.” In the silence, clerks not ready for adult citizenship may have felt a deeper respect for the politicians who repeatedly put their oratorical reputations and manliness on the line in public speeches. The apparently short duration of many of these debating clubs probably had much to do with the poor quality of the debate as young men struggled to give voice to their embryonic political beliefs and establish their credentials as citizens.25 New York City clerks also joined subscription libraries to proclaim themselves members of the body politic. New York’s Mercantile Library Association (MLA), founded in 1820, was like many clerks’ debating societies in that its members hoped that reading and attending lectures under MLA auspices would augment their education and moral character simultaneously. In 1849, Edward Tailer contended hyperbolically that this “cherished institution” was “destined to perform a great deal of infinite good for some of the more unenlightened members of the mercantile community” whom he called “the bone and sinew of the land,” the same words he would use a few years later to describe a far more socially diverse urban crowd who met to fight for municipal reform. Clearly, Tailer was adopting a unique vision of “the people” that mirrored the bourgeois vision of what a meritocracy entailed: well-educated, economically successful, and socially mobile men would represent the entire society.26 But such a worldview belied the pervasive concern that respectable men might periodically act like ruffians. “[E]lectioneering”—apparently so troubling to clerks like Tailer at polling places—and the struggle between competing factions for control of the organization characterized the political life of the MLA. Maneuvering for official positions in the association initiated “ill-feeling” among members, Tailer affirmed in his diary. These confrontations disappointed Philip Hone, one of the powerful merchants who had founded the MLA. Patterson noted in his diary that, in an 1842 address to the association’s meeting to elect its officers, Hone “expressed his disapprobation of the spirit of faction and strong party feeling evinced on the occasions of our Election.” Hone worried that infighting among factions would limit the MLA’s ability to achieve its goals. Yet in the wake of this speech, MLA members ignored Hone’s advice. Patterson lamented that “sharp debating . . . caused a great deal of uproar and confusion. . . . [T]he whole proceedings,” he concluded, “were characterized by a want of order, turbulence, excited feeling, and a general want of dignity.” The members of the MLA acted much like the audience members in Masonic

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Hall had done during the riotous Fanny Wright speech that Patterson had attended years earlier, or like rowdy men at the polls. Newspaper reports claimed that contentious MLA meetings often devolved into “threat[s]” of “personal violence,” though the association disavowed these charges. Such boisterous assemblies pushed Horace Greeley to request that the “respectable” MLA not become a “political brawling-place” like those that existed on urban streets. Patterson condemned all anarchic public meetings, but his inability to escape the political circumstances that created them suggests the difficulty clerks encountered when trying to maintain an aura of propriety around their claims to citizenship. These concerns would spill over into their attempts to convince employers to close their stores earlier in the evening.27

The Early Closing Movement In August 1841, a “large and respectable meeting” of retail dry goods clerks convened in Washington Hall at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street, intent on passing resolutions that addressed the hours issue. They framed the parameters of debate by arguing that the long day was detrimental not only to their own well-being but also to their employers and the “Public” who shopped at dry goods stores. The clerks requested a modest reduction to their work hours, petitioning merchants to close shops at eight o’clock in the evening on weekdays. The assembly imposed a deadline of September 1 for the new closing hour to take effect. To implement these requests, clerks replicated the coordinating efforts often employed by striking workers, electing a “Committee of Three . . . to draft a Requisition addressed to the Merchants” and a “Committee of Thirty . . . to present the Requisition.” Unlike with workers, however, this would not be a traditional labor turnout but rather a “solicitation” of merchants’ goodwill. Nevertheless, the meeting authorized the Committee of Thirty to “take [the] . . . names and places of business” of the merchants who would not sign the petition so that the information could be used to pressure recalcitrant objectors. The clerks were also mindful of garnering public support for their action, deciding that their “proceedings” should be published in the major city dailies. Over the course of the following month, retail clerks selling boots and shoes, jewelry, hardware, groceries, and clothing joined the dry goods salesmen in asking for free evenings.28 The clerks defended their recourse to petition by claiming that long hours “deprived . . . [them] of privileges that others enjoy” and that they

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“receive an absolute injury from want of proper relaxation.” In several issues of his newspaper, Greeley, who trusted that a harmony of interests existed between capital and labor, helpfully elaborated upon clerks’ rather cryptic rationale for “Reform.” Just as Tailer and Graham used newspaper columns to manage their own limited engagement with the public sphere, the clerks who led the early closing movement were reluctant to speak from their own experience, on their own behalf. Respectfully and timidly making humble requests to employers, clerks let Greeley speak for them to the public at large. The Tribune editor wrote that he was well aware of clerks’ reputation for “ignorance, emptiness and foppery” but proclaimed that this “theme of popular ridicule” could be eradicated through efforts to limit the time they spent working in stores. Clerks deserved “an opportunity for mental and moral improvement” that would help them escape “the temptations to vice and immorality” threatening them in the metropolis. “No young man should voluntarily surrender his whole time to any demand of business,” Greeley informed his readers. In order to “prepare for a life of useful, intelligent, [and] honorable industry” in mercantile affairs, a clerk needed to “enlarge his sphere of knowledge by various reading, to discipline his mind by study, to cultivate the generous impulses of his nature[,] . . . to think and act as a Man in a world where knowledge, virtue and high endurance are essential to success.” Greeley glorified industry, but in statements such as this one, he showed how traditional ligatures connecting productive labor and citizenship could be strengthened by bourgeois ideals of character development. Labor was merely part of the self-made man. Personal characteristics of diligent application and cultivation of intellect might help clerks live up to that powerful cultural image of the successful man. Greeley, it is true, understood the downside of this extra free time, admitting that “if the theatre, the ball alley, the gay saloon or any of the haunts of gilded vice become places of frequent resort,” then the bonds linking clerks to merchants and clerks to “Society”—powerful people who possessed economic wealth and cultural prestige—would be rent asunder. Opportunities for proper spiritual and intellectual growth, therefore, should manifest themselves as visits to lyceums, mercantile libraries, and churches rather than to locations tainted by moral turpitude.29 Clerks were undoubtedly thrilled to receive public support from such a well-known editor who endorsed their endeavors to obtain economic and cultural capital and become men, proprietors, and respectable citizens. Yet the editor of the Tribune also used the early closing movement

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to bolster his own ideas about social reform. While clerks might, through education and hard work, become proprietors, they were another group of workers oppressed by employers. That exploitation threatened the harmony of interests between capital and labor that Greeley believed should define the nation’s economy. He promoted workplace “cooperation” rather than “conflict,” as a recent biographer has explained; he advocated tariffs to protect American businesses and workers from British economic dominance. Despairing of the rising antagonism between employers and employees in the 1840s and early 1850s, however, Greeley flirted with a variety of utopian socialist experiments designed to ameliorate the excesses and inequalities caused by capitalist competition. By allowing Greeley to speak for them, clerks would not be alone in shaping their movement’s meaning, and in so doing they compromised their status as citizens. Greeley wanted them to make the transition to citizenship under his guidance. He was putting his own reputation on the line for these young clerks, and his reference to their reputation as denizens of a lurid sporting culture underscored the latent quid pro quo he must have had in mind: he was sticking his neck out for them, and they should respond by using their leisure hours wisely.30 Educational organizations vied for clerks’ patronage in the midst of the 1841 petition drive, attempting to answer Greeley’s hope that moral institutions would structure young men’s leisure time. John H. Griscom beckoned “[t]o Dry Goods Clerks” to attend the “New-York Lyceum” on Broadway, to take advantage of the “delightful recreation[,] . . . instruction[,] and entertainment” that could be enjoyed by listening to oratory. The MLA wondered why “[a] large proportion of Clerks hav[e] . . . neglected to avail themselves of the privileges of membership,” given the organization’s “unequaled resources”—a 24,000-work library, “commodious” reading areas, and courses in “Penmanship, Book-Keeping,” and other disciplines presumably of interest to them. The library’s advertisement drew clerks’ attention to its affordable “initiation fee” of one dollar and quarterly dues payments of fifty cents. Would clerks go to the library or the tavern after early closing? Lyceum and library directors did not know, but like Greeley, they hoped to shape the purpose of clerks’ quest for additional leisure hours.31 In mid-September, Henry Patterson noted in his diary that his employer, a hardware wholesaler and retailer, had acquiesced to the clerks’ proposal to close shops at eight o’clock on weekday nights, “which makes it very pleasant for us.” In November, his boss began to close the store at seven in the

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evening, providing the clerks with two and one-half additional hours of leisure per night during the week (the store would remain open on Saturday nights until nine-thirty). Patterson used the time for various purposes in subsequent months. He went to the Academy of Fine Arts with another clerk to view a scale model “of the falls of Niagara with Real Water,” a “silly, ridiculous, and childish” imitation that deserved only five minutes of his time. He met “beautiful, accomplished, witty, . . . gay, and most of all, wealthy” women at fashionable parties on Broadway, and mixed with workingmen in the “Pit of the Olympic Theatre” to applaud two “very laughable” comedies. He visited the Mercantile Library to “look at Audubons birds” and prepared and argued his case for capital punishment in his literary society’s debate. Greeley, Griscom, and the MLA could not control what clerks did after dark. In their early closing movement, these young men knew how to push the buttons of urban power brokers, earnestly declaring that moral education was their top priority. They really wanted the opportunity to govern themselves, determining what they would do after work, free of meddling from employers, ministers, newspaper editors, or parents.32 That freedom was not forthcoming because clerks permitted others to speak for them and because so many New Yorkers opposed the early closing movement and cast negative light on what they thought were its true aims. In doing so, they ridiculed clerks about their lack of manly independence and wrote them out of the body politic. At the forefront of these attacks was James Gordon Bennett, Greeley’s nemesis and editor of the Herald. Bennett referred to the movement for fewer hours as a suspect “combination” of labor arrayed against employers that upset the harmony of interests and supposedly infringed upon the rights of clerks who wished no amendment to their work hours. A letter to Bennett signed “JUSTICE” contended that store owners who did not sign the petition bore no ill will against the clerks’ demands. These merchants did not bear “any wish to keep open, but rather” shrunk from associating with “any thing that might have the appearance of a combination.” It was the principle of the thing—capital and labor, Patterson and Greeley would have agreed, were not antagonistic to each other’s interests. Despite clerks’ reticence to criticize employers, Bennett thought he smelled a rat—an unjust action taken by workers against their bosses that raised the specter of immutable class conflict in America. In order to become free citizens, all workingmen should abide by the contracts they made individually with their employers, and through perseverance, frugality, and hard work make their own progress and craft their own identity as “self-made” men.33

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Bennett thought that “[i]t is much better for each man, as an individual, to make his own way through the world—cut out his own breeches from his own cloth,” suggesting that clerks were not manly citizens in a nation of producers. According to the powerful and pervasive gender critique of clerks’ labor, counter jumpers thrived in the company of women instead of producing goods alongside men. In their petition drive, clerks’ appeals to women shoppers and their reliance on Greeley illustrated their unmanly dependence. Bennett did not tell clerks to be their own seamstresses—doing so would have muddled the desirable divide between masculine “public” production and feminine “private” consumption—but his emphasis on the ways he thought they borrowed unions’ tactics to ameliorate workplace conditions dovetailed with the popular perception that they did no strenuous labor. Like other critics of clerks’ unmanly work, Bennett returned to the producer’s ethic, claiming that these men should make their own trousers rather than sell cloth to make clothing. But in drawing on ideas about the freedom to contract that would coalesce over the course of the 1840s and 1850s to form the heart of “free labor ideology,” he was simultaneously constricting the definition of freedom for all workers.34 Dry goods clerks were largely helpless to respond to both halves of this scathing critique, but clothing clerks could respond to one part of it. Advertisements for clothing store clerks to meet and discuss submitting their own petition included a call for cutters, skilled craftsmen who fabricated ready-made garments in these stores, to join them in solidarity. Yet this move, while refuting the gender and class critique intertwined in Bennett’s riposte, might also have made the clerks uncomfortable. While it might have helped them claim citizenship in a producer’s republic dedicated to “free labor,” association with workingmen was not what they desired, for it would call into question their own aspirations to mercantile proprietorship and the power and prestige attending it. Bennett and Greeley disagreed about a lot of things, but they both believed that clerks were workers, a reality that most clerks ignored or rejected in their quest for economic and cultural capital. When clerks and their supporters tried to challenge Bennett, they revealed other fissures in their coalition and contradictions in their ideology. “JUSTICE” began to dig a hole for clerks when he, like the general committee, appealed to “the fair sex . . . in . . . the cause of human freedom.” By “emancipating” the clerks, female customers would only improve their shopping experiences because rested, enlightened, and refreshed young

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men would be able to pay their customers “increased attention” in the store during daylight hours. In a telling slip, “JUSTICE” informed women that providing clerks a few more hours of freedom would “make them . . . willingly devoted servants.” Ironically, freedom in the commercial world would be not only for clerks but also for customers—a freedom built upon clerical servitude.35 Special pleas to dry goods clerks’ “Public” issued by the early closing movement’s central committee were addressed to the female shoppers who bought many of their goods, and these letters illuminate the cultural anxieties many men felt about women’s publicity. In a spoof of the early closing committee’s entreaties to the “public” in the Tribune, the Sunday Flash used double entendre to poke fun at the clerks on this very point. In a supposedly solemn letter to the paper, “MUNGO MUCKWORM, Chairman” and “SMITH STENCH, Secretary” wrote on the clerks’ behalf, proclaiming that “no lady of good judgment will consent to have her vault emptied in the night, when it can be done in the day.” Sporting papers lampooned the aura of respectability at the heart of clerks’ obsequious notices in the penny press with a rude correlation between commerce and sex. While young men such as Patterson questioned Fanny Wright’s femininity and respectability when she spoke on labor issues in public, no one could dispute the economic and cultural power of the ladies whom clerks addressed. They possessed authority as customers in dry goods palaces, public spaces that were also considered extensions of the domestic sphere. Yet at the same time, clerks who dared to say that respectable women were “intimately acquainted with” their plight were engaging in a type of familiarity that made women’s publicity problematic. Indeed, if they refused to accede to the clerks’ demands and continue to shop when “no respectable lady” would do so, they risked the clerks categorizing them with prostitutes who walked the streets at night.36 Bennett was also suspicious of clerks’ rationale for early closing, writing that shutting doors early would mean that “clerks will have time to read novels” at the MLA, “flirt with sewing girls,—or do something worse.” Bennett might have been drawing attention in this cryptic accusation to his own coverage of and clerks’ potential role in the sensational murder of Mary Rogers, the “beautiful segar girl,” earlier in the summer. The Sunday Flash agreed, suggesting that early closing would give clerks “time to enjoy the business of the barroom and the third [tier] of the theatre . . . without regard to law or decency, or fear of the constable.” In the September 2, 1841, issue of the Tribune, Greeley admitted that clerks

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might have “something worse” in mind when he printed a letter signed “THE DRY GOODS CLERKS” and addressed to Martin Lewis, a Canal Street dry goods merchant. The authors of the letter were a great deal more demanding and incendiary than the “Committee of the Dry Goods Clerks” had been. Lewis had refused to shorten his clerks’ work day, and the authors attempted to intimidate him into changing his mind, writing that Lewis was “damnedly mistaken” if he believed he could continue to keep his store open until midnight, as the clerks supposed he was. These radicals claimed that Lewis had little say, in fact, about “what you will do and what you won’t.” Then came the cascade of threats: “I would merely say . . . that you had better look out for your glass if you want to save them from being smashed; moreover you had better look out for your head, if you want to save that, as this course of yours will not be allowed; you are obliged to shut up, and if you . . . persist in keeping open after 8 o’clock many days you will be dealt with in a manner you little expect.” Lewis’s measured reply was appended to the menacing letter, in which he remained adamant about closing his store at nine-thirty in the evening, as he had done before the clerks had issued their petition. He was not intimidated by the petition or the more violent alternative. “The authors of the above, no doubt,” he reasoned, “belong to that class of Dry Goods Clerks who steal from their employers during the day and now wish more time to spend the stolen money.” Thomas H. Oakley, the chairman of the early closing committee, tried to limit damage to the cause, disavowing the radical measures hinted at by the anti-Lewis rogues, pawning the letter off as the work of “some malicious person” who was attempting “to thwart our measures.” Oakley, like labor union leaders, sought to reestablish his committee’s control over the hours movement by stating that “any communication received by any individual, except it be signed by the Chairman and Secretary of the Committee, does not and cannot speak the sentiment of the Dry Goods Clerks.” Lewis’s refusal to close at eight, however, demonstrated the ineffectual nature of the clerks’ use of the petition rather than the strike, which might have crippled commercial New York. Anxious about the similarities between workers’ unions and their own associations, clerks appeared wary of performing a most workmanlike act—turning out of work to struggle for better conditions—and thus impaired the potential impact of their movement.37 Although many New Yorkers argued that capital and labor could both profit through their relationship with each other, some employers like Lewis did not trust clerks. At the end of 1846, rumors circulated that a

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vast conspiracy of dry goods merchants was paying undercover police officers to watch their clerks after business hours. The focus of subsequent investigations about the matter settled on A. T. Stewart, proprietor of the “Marble Palace” and the only commercial principal to acknowledge that he had authorized policemen to “survey” his salesmen for some thirty to forty-five minutes inside his store. He evidently also supplied police with a “list” of his employees’ names and addresses in the city, asking the officers “to look after him, . . . and that he would pay them for their trouble, and pay them well.”38 The city’s dry goods clerks recognized the implications of this surveillance. Despite Stewart’s explanation that “it was [not] intended to apply to all the clerks in the establishment,” clerks were filled with “indignation” that one of their employers had cast them as potential thieves or devotees of the more disreputable aspects of urban life “during their hours of relaxation from business.” Their reputation for visiting brothels and taverns in their spare time did little to help the clerks’ early closing movement. But dry goods clerks met several times as a body in the weeks around Christmas to formulate a forceful response to Stewart, ultimately condemning the “espionage” as a “degrad[ing]” affront to “our calling” and “our integrity.” It was incumbent upon all clerks, their resolutions proclaimed, “to repel such slander” by “unit[ing] in one body . . . to resist the malicious attacks that have recently been made to injure our standing as men and degrade us in the public estimation.” To prove they were manly citizens and oppose the actions of powerful merchants such as Stewart, dry goods clerks needed to band together once again, linking clerks in large, departmentally organized stores to those in small neighborhood shops. They needed to create a city-wide organization dedicated to “moral improvement and . . . protection against oppression and fraud.”39 By the end of the 1840s, clerks had added another star to the crowded galaxy of antebellum voluntary organizations, forming the Dry Goods Clerks’ Mutual Benefit and Protective Association. In December 1849, retail dry goods clerks once again began to petition their employers to close stores at eight o’clock in the evening during the summer (except Saturdays) and at seven o’clock during the winter months. The association’s constitution and bylaws stated that the organization was devoted to “selfimprovement” and the construction of a “LIBRARY AND READING ROOM” that would allow members to “qualify ourselves to discharge . . . the duties of our profession and the social offices of life.” An initiation fee of one dollar and yearly dues of $4.50 would provide a fund to pay for

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costs associated with members’ illnesses or deaths. Infirm clerks would be given three dollars a week if they were unable to perform their work duties, while a clerk’s widow would be given thirty dollars to help pay for her husband’s funeral. “Visiting Committees” were entrusted with the responsibility of caring for their sick brothers and providing for the families of the deceased. The members were expected to be men who had passed their eighteenth birthday, “of unquestionable moral character, good industrious habits, free from all mental or bodily infirmities, and believing in the existence of a Supreme Being.” They could be fined for foul language and expelled for “habitual drunkenness” or “feigning” illness to receive association funds. The new group’s rules and regulations emphasized the struggles of married men who, though vastly outnumbered by younger single colleagues, were better spokesmen about the threats capitalism posed to families’ aspirations to a refined home. Also, they perhaps knew far more than those who were wet behind the ears about the obstacles to social and economic mobility that clerks encountered in the antebellum commercial world.40 With such an impressive institutional foundation, the association’s success appeared more likely than that of previous early closing efforts. Its petition drive solicited the support of many merchants, who were undoubtedly as pleased as the ever-supportive Greeley that clerks’ grievances were still couched as requests rather than demands. Like previous movements for early closing, clerks disavowed any conflict of interest between employers and clerks, and aimed in their circulars to emphasize the shared benefits of day shopping for merchants, clerks, and female consumers alike. “[G]reedy” merchants and nocturnal consumption partnered to keep clerks from the “self-improvement” that would make them knowledgeable and useful citizens. Even “[m]echanics, artisans and laborers” were able to leave work at a reasonable hour to take advantage of “fresh air and exercise” as well as moral recreation—why did retail clerks not enjoy the same opportunities? Despite the fact that most clerks were unmarried, the association hoped to earn the support of bourgeois families by focusing on the plight of the clerking husband and father, whose “children . . . may have a glimpse only of their parent as he hastily partakes of his meals, for at night, when he is released from business, his little ones are long ago asleep.” Since they were compelled to work long hours, retail dry goods clerks were disconnected from reform-minded libraries and lyceums as well as the domestic hearth. It was not altogether “surprising” under these circumstances that they “should degenerate rather than

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advance in the social and moral scale.” Clerks believed that they were deteriorating physically as well as socially, stressing the debilitating effects of retail clerking on their bodies, arguing that long hours in “unventilated” and dimly lit stores actually took years off their lives.41 This renewed early closing movement quickly garnered widespread support, and at a meeting in the Broadway Tabernacle on February 27, 1850, political, religious, and mercantile leaders rallied to the cause. The movement presumably benefited from the copious newspaper coverage of the event, but again clerks abdicated responsibility for shaping their movement’s meaning. Instead, they allowed eager spokesmen to weave early closing into the fabric of the cultural imperative to strive and blame clerks themselves for the unraveling of opportunities for advancement. The city’s Whig mayor, Caleb Woodhull, chaired the meeting and Free Soil Democrat John Van Buren spoke in support. Leaders of both parties could temporarily reconcile their differences and join forces for such a noble cause. Several dry goods merchants also championed their employees’ efforts. Woodhull opened the meeting by describing the magnitude of the problem. He estimated that there were approximately two thousand retail dry goods clerks in the city, “whose education is necessarily incomplete.” Moreover, since these clerks were, in the mayor’s estimation, mostly under the age of twenty-one—he was correct to be skeptical of the guiding assumptions of the association—they deserved the support and guidance in the public, political realm that could only be provided by adult citizens. Since they worked between fourteen and sixteen hours a day, “[h]ow are they to fit themselves for future usefulness?” This was a typical refrain among early closing supporters, for it drew upon the mantra of prescriptive-literature writers who continued to promise that young clerks would become merchants. The older narratives of inevitable, incremental occupational mobility retained their resonance, but the early closing movement and the creation of the association revealed that these clerks were workers rather than apprentices destined to move into positions of proprietorship—they referred to clerking as a “calling” in and of itself. Trying to cover this rift between rhetoric and reality, Woodhull reasoned that “[i]f . . . we expect to have a class of intelligent merchants, we must allow those who are now clerks an opportunity to qualify and elevate themselves for such a position. Show me who and what are the clerks in this City, and I will show you what its merchants will be. . . .” Woodhull was not the only speaker to wax nostalgic on the occasion, as ministers advised the renewal of apprenticeship ties between merchants and clerks

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that were founded on “kindness” rather “than mere [economic] interest.” Other preachers longed for the moral marketplace of the prescriptive literature, criticizing merchants’ practice of using clerks to “grind . . . out dollars” late at night with little thought to their charges’ “moral improvement.” Van Buren envisioned revolutionary hero Patrick Henry, who had been a dry goods clerk before rising to oratorical greatness, accumulating knowledge, like Benjamin Franklin, in stray moments “stolen from the labors of that humble calling.” Dry goods clerks who were kept “under the present slaving system” of long hours, as another speaker called it, could not replicate their forebears’ rise.42 The Reverend Edwin F. Hatfield, in a sermon he gave in his pulpit at the Seventh Presbyterian Church in support of the early closing movement, echoed this claim that treatment of clerks bordered on slavery. He argued that excessive exertion on the job was as dangerous as idleness to man’s well-being. Even late-eighteenth-century West Indian slaveholders had understood this, Hatfield contended, when they passed legislation limiting the hours of labor for field hands. But nineteenth-century retail merchants, eager to increase profits and professing to protect clerks from the temptations of urban nightlife, kept them at work by gaslight. Was it appropriate, Hatfield asked, to “treat . . . them worse than convicts or slaves?” By closing stores earlier in the evening, merchants and customers could answer with a resounding “No.” “Make him not a slave,” Hatfield pleaded on the clerk’s behalf. “Give him time to breathe the healthful air, to taste the sweets of domestic life, to improve his mind, to polish his manners, to enjoy the means of grace.” Demonstrating clerks’ experiential affinity with workers fighting to escape from purported “wage slavery,” Hatfield issued a call to liberate white men from a state of bondage associated with people of African descent. He also hoped to enfold clerks in the embrace of home, library, and church, refined spaces removed from the racy culture of the urban street.43 Despite these references to slavery and the clear evidence that a harmony of interests did not actually exist, clerks and their mouthpieces would only request, rather than demand, freedom. No one was suggesting that they struggle to the death for their cause, as the great Henry might have done. Rather, at the apogee of the early closing movement, some speakers at the Tabernacle could not help placing blame for the inequities of capitalist competition upon the clerks themselves. Dr. Edward H. Dixon, editor of a medical journal called The Scalpel, interrupted his speech upon the physical effects of clerking to take stock of the reasons

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why young men had put themselves into these harmful environments. Like other commentators, he identified the country boy as his clerk ideal. The rural lad often became enchanted by the evident wealth of an old friend who had gone to the city and returned home a “merchant prince,” little realizing that his chum’s apparent success, clothing, and jewels were mortgaged upon thousands of dollars worth of credit. “By dint of indolence,” Dixon said, the young man “leaves his plow and comes to the city to realize those visions of glory that have so long floated through his diseased brain.” Lacking the “knowledge” of the urban world he had entered and unable to afford accommodations better than a “fifth-rate boardinghouse,” the young man could only earn “the elevating privileges of an under-clerkship” that sentenced him to long, difficult hours of work in which “the confinement, the dust, the heat, and the exactions often made upon his patience and self-respect” overwhelmed him. Of course, Dixon stated, he did not mean to say that his audience came to cities under these pretenses, but his insistence that even members of the association might succumb to the “temptations” and mental disease produced by overweening ambition demonstrates that the good doctor considered all clerks of a piece.44 A letter to the Tribune in support of early closing supplied more evidence on this score: “unless the . . . dry goods clerks . . . are destined to forever remain on the surface of society—unless of their body none shall supply the place of our present race of merchants— . . . the movement must go ahead.” Appeals to a striver’s ethic of self-making conflicted with Dixon’s assumption that ambition led clerks directly into urban obstacles to their advancement. Neither proponents of ambition nor its cautious detractors could obscure the fact that, in light of economic circumstances that encouraged occupational association, retail dry goods clerks were workers. As Van Buren had said at the Tabernacle, clerking was a “humble calling.” Lingering beneath the praise for dry goods clerks and their association was the concern that perhaps clerks had been condemned to exist on the margins of respectable society.45 The links between clerks and workers were increasingly unmistakable in terms of the association’s geographical proximity to the headquarters of workingmen’s associations. The ideology of the labor movement also suggested cultural and ideological affinities connecting clerks with laboring people. The meeting at the Tabernacle, Charles Grandison Finney’s church in the 1830s and thus an important location in the development of evangelical fervor and refinement, was a coup for members of an organization

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hoping to establish their own respectability. Yet the association met for many months in 1850 at the corner of Hester Street and the Bowery on the Lower East Side, home to native- and foreign-born workers. Hester Street was also the site of Mechanics Hall, the meeting place for the city’s bakers, among other tradesmen. The clerks’ move to more esteemed quarters in the College of Physicians on Crosby Street was merely temporary. They returned to the Bowery–Hester Street corner in November 1850 and shared a building with a daguerreotypist. Clearer connections between the dry goods clerks and laboring people were traced on the pages of the Tribune, in which Greeley listed the association alongside trades unions in his recurrent column in support of “LABOR MOVEMENTS.” In the political campaign to recoup their manhood by winning shorter hours and the leisure time to prepare for proprietorship, clerks sounded much like the bakers, who demanded that “[f]ellow men be no longer stigmatized as housemaids and slaves.” The Industrial Congress of trades unions then meeting in the city considered the clerks’ efforts to be deserving of the attention of all workers, passing resolutions that encouraged laborers, rather than clerks’ preferred constituency of fashionable ladies, not to shop in stores that permitted nighttime purchases. While settling for a somewhat longer workday, clerks thought that all business transactions could be completed reasonably in ten hours, just as the Industrial Congress suggested, and the clerks’ association sent delegates to a mass meeting of workers in support of the journeymen tailors’ month-long strike.46 Although they were associated publicly with other workers, dry goods clerks could never bring themselves to adopt “coercive measures” against their employers. The Industrial Congress hoped to instill “fear and respect” in the hearts of “the enemies of Labor.” Clerks refused to adopt this militant posture because doing so would have been an acknowledgment that they were workers. Instead, they clung to the hope that their positions would ultimately lead to mercantile independence. Their stated objective, study and self-improvement after business hours, was different from workers’ desire for higher wages. Yet clerks’ feeble requests for their employers’ help fell upon deaf ears in some corners of the commercial community. Continued advertisements for the early closing movement throughout 1850 and 1851 reveal that at least a few merchants remained open for business after dark. To break the resistance, “A DRY GOODS CLERK” wrote to the Tribune offering a compromise. Working from the premise that most dry goods stores were divided into departments, he contended that one-half of the clerks in each department should be

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released early from their nighttime duties on three days of the six-day work week. The other half would obtain time for moral and intellectual recreation on the other three nights.47 A speedy reply to this letter by a member of the association recognized that this solution was impractical because it had been based on a faulty premise: “I would ask how this so-called compromise is to be carried into effect in the thousand stores where they employ only one, or perhaps two salesmen.” While clerks from larger stores like A. T. Stewart’s and Lord and Taylor served in offices of the association, a chasm clearly separated clerks in large stores from those in smaller shops. Retail clerks’ prospects for advancement, moreover, diverged from those of their counterparts in importing and wholesaling firms. The MLA had given its support to the dry goods clerks’ movement at the Tabernacle public meeting, but fell silent in subsequent months as the association sought to establish itself. Greeley identified one issue that drove a wedge between the two groups: the dry goods clerks’ insistence on forming their own library and reading room. Was this a case of snobbery on the part of the dry goods men, or did they not feel welcome in the library of the venerable MLA? An examination of the nominations for office in the Mercantile Library suggests the latter conclusion. The “official ticket” proposed for 1851 included clerks for four importing firms, two commission houses, a bank, a comptroller, an insurance company, a stationer, and a dry goods establishment. Whether this last firm sold at wholesale or retail is not clear, but the majority of these men held more august situations than the clerks in the mutual benefit and protective society.48 As a result of these ambiguous links and fraying ties, it became difficult for retail dry goods clerks to sustain the momentum of the Tabernacle meeting. While the association’s recording secretary boasted that it was “in a prospering condition” at the beginning of 1851, the fact that it had only 313 members out of a population that Mayor Woodhull had numbered around two thousand retail dry goods clerks demonstrated that it had failed to unite even this segment of the clerking population. The opening of the library and fraternal support from hatters’ clerks, clothing clerks and cutters, and dry goods clerks across the East River in Brooklyn temporarily bolstered the organization, but an attempt to recapture public interest in early closing with another Tabernacle meeting seems to have failed, given the silence in the press. Efforts to revitalize the organization by opening membership to all retail clerks also seem to have occurred too late to save the association, which vanished from the Tribune’s columns by the end of 1852.49

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Clerks and Democratic Citizenship In antebellum New York, clerks encountered substantial difficulties in trying to have their citizenship validated through creating and fostering a respectable mode of engagement with political issues, leaders, and culture. Uncomfortable in the rough-and-tumble world of partisan rabble-rousers, clerks posed as refined observers and reluctant participants in public life who longed for an orderly political sphere managed by gentlemen. The realities of urban politics, filtered through class and ethnic tensions as well as assumptions about youth and gender, presented obstacles to the realization of this dream. Clerks were ultimately not willing to adopt the style of ward bosses and demagogues, tinged as it was with the emotional baggage of class conflict and inequality. Ultimately, though, the distance between the political tactics and styles of fork-tongued demagogues and respected gentlemen such as Daniel Webster was much closer than clerks appreciated. When political enemies accused Webster of embezzling government funds during his treaty negotiations with Ashburton, “Godlike Daniel” transformed into “Black Dan,” a demagogic alter ego. Defending himself against the charges on the floor of the Senate, Webster cast aspersions on the mental health of his principal accuser, Representative Charles Jared Ingersoll of Pennsylvania, claiming the congressman had “a screw loose.” While a House Committee found Webster innocent, the episode shows that respected leaders needed to descend from the pedestal of gentlemanly politics from time to time to defend their reputations. John Van Buren, dogged by a reputation for excessive consumption of goods and the high life, nevertheless was a power broker in New York State’s Democratic Party in the late 1840s and early 1850s. A central ambiguity of democratic politics in this period was that one citizen’s dishonorable demagogue was another’s principled leader.50 This was an ambiguity that many clerks did not care to countenance. In their early closing movement, they chose to rely upon this respectable mode of citizenship, and they chose poorly. They believed that they could sidestep the unsavory aspects of democratic political culture and partake of the bounty enjoyed by virtuous citizens as indisputable members of the body politic. So concerned were they about appearing to be demagogues or a nefarious labor “combination” that they often left the talking to their political spokesmen, who tried to make clerks fit into an ennobling story about enduring American economic promise and social harmony. Their critics, conversely, lampooned their ambitions to rise above

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the democratic crowd. Burdened by the prevailing critique that their work was not manly, clerks found that respectful appeals to the good graces of gentlemanly politicians and shopping ladies were not enough to ensure their upward mobility to independent proprietorship or to underscore their citizenship. Reconciling democracy, ambition, and respectability was a fool’s errand, even though bourgeois commentators who already possessed power and prestige believed it could be done. Moreover, the rich and respectable affirmed that, because of the anonymity and individualism of urban life and the opportunities for consumption offered by industrial capitalism, all men could be respectable citizens. Urban clerks—and the contemporaries who wrote about them—concurred, and used the city as a proving ground for the idea that Americans’ ambitions for perpetual ascendance could coexist harmoniously with the pride they felt in their nation’s egalitarianism.

5 The Republic of Broadcloth

It was not sufficient for the Declaration of Independence to declare that “all men are created equal.” Antebellum authors felt compelled to assert that white men walking along city streets appeared to be equal. The clerks’ advocate Horace Greeley proclaimed in 1853 that “[t]he wearing of a superfine suit was once a principal mark of distinction in the countries of Europe between a laboring man and ‘a gentleman.’” Indeed, fine woolen broadcloth imported from Europe had long set the standard for refinement in the American republic. By midcentury, American manufacturers and laborers took the lead in “mechanical invention,” which led to improvements in production and a steep decline in the price of these high-quality suits. Now “[e]very sober mechanic,” Greeley contended, had the opportunity to own “one or two suits of broadcloth.” The fabric had become democratic as well as respectable, for an American worker “can make as good a display, when he chooses, as what are called the upper classes.” Every man had the choice to look like a gentleman; everyone had the opportunity to shape his identity through refined appearance. Merchant tailors such as Alfred Wheeler gave credence to Greeley’s assertions in trade cards geared toward increasing their profits. In the top panel, Wheeler had an artist depict a fancy dress ball taking place at the posh Astor House hotel located across Broadway from City Hall Park. Juxtaposed with this image of gentility is a portrayal in the lower panel of citizens mulling about the streets outside the hotel. Most New Yorkers were not eligible to attend the ball, but Wheeler suggested that by sporting his wares they could appear deserving of invitations.1 In Wheeler’s advertisement, Greeley’s trust that refinement had been democratized met Alexis de Tocqueville’s belief that democratic social conditions created Americans’ desire to excel their peers. Since economic success was often difficult to achieve and maintain, Greeley and Wheeler proposed refinement as an acceptable substitute. But broadcloth was not all that it seemed. Its association with the elegance of European gentlemen

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Figure 5.1. “Autumn and Winter Fashions for 1849 and 1850 by A. Wheeler, No. 4 Courtland St., New York” (New York: Sarony and Major, 1849). Museum of the City of New York. The J. Clarence Davies Collection, 29.100.2496.

obscured the fact that the supply and demand for superfine wool had actually declined precipitously by the time Greeley championed its democratic promise. Consumers’ quests to obtain new and newly popular goods meant that, by the 1850s, blended substitutes such as cassimere and satinet had seized from broadcloth a far more substantial share of the woolens market. As entrepreneurs revolutionized the men’s ready-made clothing industry by connecting far-flung production, distribution, and sales networks, they demystified the skills of artisans who specialized in bespoken goods. At the same time, consumers found it difficult to determine whether clerks’ and proprietors’ claims about the vast array of products made available through industrial innovation were accurate. What did Wheeler or his clerks really know about the quality of the garments they sold? Could American consumers discern the differences between broadcloth and its proxies? These questions underscored Greeley’s assertion

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that class distinctions could be ironed out only “so far as mere clothes go”: he knew that elite observers would want to decipher a subject’s social identity in other ways, through an analysis of posture, manners, or character. Ultimately, he had to acknowledge that the cut and feel of a man’s coat could either mask or clarify the inequalities of capitalism, depending on whether observers in the know could distinguish between grades of cloth and whether they wanted to describe what they saw accurately. In their idyllic portrayals,Wheeler and Greeley both refused, for instance, to see workers interested in economic survival rather than sartorial splendor. They did so because, like other bourgeois commentators, they desperately wanted to link elegant refinement with egalitarian choices and the promise of mobility offered by capitalism. References to broadcloth, still emblematic of finery, symbolized the triumph of democracy and the ideology of the “self-made” man, even when the real story was woven into America’s conundrum of class.2 The imperative to make sense of urban anonymity meant that questions about identity filled the pages of contemporary writings about cities. Nathaniel Parker Willis, a genteel New York editor who hoped that the intermingling of rich and poor on city streets would lift the morals and manners of the lower orders, reflected upon what he called the “Republic of Broadway” and the “Republic of Fashion” in which all men dressed to impress. A young man’s presentation of self was aimed at an audience of people who did not know “whether his father is a mechanic or a rich man.” As a result, Willis explained, “There is no telling, by any difference in dress, whether the youth, going by, has . . . a sister who is an heiress or a sister who is a sempstress. There is no telling the merchant from his book-keeper.” Greeley’s man wearing the woolen coat might have been a clerk rather than a mechanic.3 And yet some observers were more confident than Willis in their attempts to identify a particular group of young men on the streets. Walt Whitman, in his 1856 “dissection” of the morning promenade down Broadway, vividly described “the jaunty crew of . . . down-town clerks” ambling to their workplaces. They were “a slender and round-shouldered generation, of minute leg, chalky face, and hollow chest,” he sneered, emphasizing the slim builds and milky skin that connoted an aversion to hard outdoor labor and lack of masculine vigor. He thought them “trig and prim in great glow of shiny boots, clean shirts—sometimes, just now, of extraordinary patterns, as if overrun with bugs!” They were improperly laying claim to a higher social station through dress, wearing “tight

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pantaloons, . . . startling cravats, and hair all soaked and ‘slickery’ with sickening oils.” They were “[c]reatures of smart appearance, when dressed up,” Whitman admitted, but he summarily exposed and dismissed their pretensions to refinement, wondering “what wretched, spindling, ‘forked radishes’ would they be, and how ridiculously would their natty demeanor appear if suddenly they could all be stript naked!” Once robbed of their finery, clerks who made outlandish fashion choices could be condemned for the hollow men they were, lacking the virtuous character that supposedly illuminated the respectability of wool-wearing men and the democratic ethos of urban culture.4 In their disparate ways of seeing the chaotic ebb and flow of the urban crowd, pundits tried to explain the city to an American population eager to understand the social and economic changes occurring there. Some suggested the inherent anonymity of individuals among the masses; others were certain that individuals’ occupational identities (and perhaps their character) could be determined by a careful examination of their outward appearance. These were the ambiguities at the heart of city life in the antebellum era. Manhattan, the center of the men’s ready-made clothing industry, was a republic in which white men could obtain citizenship by wearing certain garments, but also in which the quality of cloth and its wearers could not be determined with certainty. Fine broadcloth—or what observers mistook for it—stood for the bourgeois refinement that supposedly was available to the masses if they sought advancement. It was a means by which a man could differentiate himself from those above and below him on the social ladder, but it might also allow the wearer to blend into the crowd. Celebrations of broadcloth bolstered the idea that American strivers could appeal to or claim certain respectable behaviors, postures, and associations, yet simultaneously disavow the existence of class in their society. The slippery meanings entangled in the fabric of broadcloth, however, symbolize the difficulties clerks encountered in accumulating cultural capital in antebellum cities. Whether they dressed in broadcloth coats, cheaper knock-offs, or dandified alternatives, clerks evoked the tensions in cities between striving and equality, between democratic sociability and conspicuous consumption. In a republic of broadcloth that simultaneously reified and blurred social, economic, and occupational distinctions, writers alternately obscured and assigned clerks’ identities, grouping them with the masses or picking them out of the crowd as special objects for ridicule. Just as newspaper editors and other commentators tried to make sense of urban contradictions

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by focusing on clerks, these young men tried to cope with the uncertainties of life and leisure in the city in order to define themselves as respectable men within that milieu. These efforts went beyond determining what not to wear—broadcloth is a telling metaphor for clerks’ lives at home and on the streets. These young men were actors and subjects in bourgeois observers’ attempts to monitor and manage the urban social order in their narratives. Clerks symbolized the “sunshine and shadow” of the city, and could be found at leisure on Broadway or the Bowery, slumming in the Five Points or mixing with the people in City Hall Park. They were denizens of what urban writers called the “Upper Ten,” the “great middle classes,” and the “Lower Million” but also were figures poised between these groups as they came into contact or conflict in public spaces. They were noble assistants in the struggle to create order, and prominent examples of urban disorder. Clerks were situated at the center of the city’s most disturbing dichotomies. Their contemporaries used them to understand that cities were places marked by astonishing opportunity, astounding inequality, and unsettling disorder. Just as they had done in the roughand-tumble realm of democratic politics, clerks assumed an ambivalent stance toward citizenship in a republic of broadcloth that offered them both egalitarian promises of anonymity and access to cultural capital. As a result of their ambiguous social identity and their role in creating urban disorder, they found it difficult to attain authority and esteem in city society.5

Home, Sweet Home Dr. Edward Dixon’s reference during the early closing movement to the clerk who moved into a “fifth-rate boarding-house” exhibited a concern shared by parents and ministers that many young men who traveled to the nation’s growing cities in search of clerkships would be separated from the domestic influence of their loving families and the paternal oversight of their employers. While they enjoyed independent living in boardinghouses, young rural immigrants and their urban counterparts hoped to exhibit self-control and develop a discerning eye for the urban dangers that threatened their prospects for economic and social advancement.6 My sample from the 1855 New York State census shows that nearly 60 percent of clerks boarded in private residences, boardinghouses, hotels, or businesses (see table I.4). They were not an anomaly in the urban population—historians have estimated that between one-third and one-half of

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urban Americans lived in boardinghouses. Surely, many clerks considered these living arrangements to be interim homes, just as they believed their clerkships were temporary stepping stones to mercantile riches. Bourgeois observers who tried to differentiate between boardinghouse and home argued that the latter was more clearly representative of domesticity, the ideology that presented the hearth as a haven from the vexing competition of the capitalist market. Yet they were concocting fictional distinctions: family ties continued to shape boarding clerks’ lives, and in a few cases these young men lived with brothers, sisters, or parents in boardinghouses. Clerks’ urban experiences were filtered through day-to-day relationships with beloved sisters and mothers, surly or benevolent boardinghouse keepers, and fellow boarders.7 Boardinghouse keepers, caught uneasily in the debate about the culturally desirable separation of the respectable home from the market, often attempted but ultimately found it difficult to distinguish their establishments as refined environments. Contemporary assessments of boardinghouse life, such as Thomas Butler Gunn’s comic Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses, suggest that many boardinghouses muddled the meanings of class and ethnicity in the city. Native-born Americans lived with European immigrants, and many clerks resided in disreputable boardinghouses. In the “dirty” boardinghouse operated by an Irish woman in a “mean street on the east side of town,” Gunn’s narrator lived next door to “two rough, good-humored laboring-men” as well as the purported “aristocrats of the place,” who included a besotted “dispensary doctor,” a wholesale downtown fish exporter, and “a dry-goods clerk from the store below” the boardinghouse. During his residence at a seedy boardinghouse located “midway between East Broadway and the [East] River,” he found a “Tipperarian,” a widow and her daughters, a sailor-turned-policeman and his family, “a hatter, attorney’s clerk, and a jappaner or dealer in ornamental furniture.” They were joined by a “red-haired dry-goods clerk, who found favor in the eyes of the landlady’s daughter, and propitiated the mother and [her] married sister by presents of ribbons.” Of course, it might have been possible for clerks to develop strong associations with fellow commercial and professional men who were born in the same country and ignore others living in their boardinghouses. Yet as in other areas of their lives, clerks—even those styled “aristocrats”—illustrated the fluid meanings of class and ethnicity in the republic of broadcloth.8 Even boardinghouses catering solely to clerks came in for criticism. James Boardman, an appropriately surnamed English visitor to New York,

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wrote in 1833 that “[t]he boardinghouses of those numerous classes, the smaller shopkeepers and merchants’ clerks, are in general miserably furnished, and the provisions and cookery too often in strict keeping with the poverty of those concerns.” Such “poverty” often meant that the rooms were “of the meanest description, without furniture in the depth of winter: a chest of drawers is, indeed, a rara avis; each boarder making a general depository of his trunk or portmanteau, as poor Jack does of his chest in the forecastle of a ship.” Not only were some clerks impoverished, then, but according to Boardman they lived much like sailors. The tight quarters he portrayed are not unlike those William Hoffman squeezed into when he shared a room with fellow clerks in Albany. The cramped space often fostered quarrels with roommates who objected when Hoffman opened the windows to get “fresh air” or refused to extinguish the lamp by which he recorded daily “proceedings” in his diary.9 Hoffman’s experiences with boardinghouse life after he moved to New York City demonstrate the difficulties that clerks encountered when attempting to reconcile their straitened financial circumstances with their desire to attain independence in their living arrangements. Upon obtaining a position in Manhattan in March 1849, he decided to live in a boardinghouse on Greenwich Street, paying three dollars per week. After two months, he moved to a “better” boardinghouse on Warren Street, perhaps making that assessment by noting that his hometown minister’s sons “[b]oard there.” Perhaps because he was a newcomer to the republic of broadcloth, Hoffman believed that he could judge the quality of various boarding establishments in the city by taking account of the dignity of the inhabitants. He easily pointed his mother and sister to a “Boarding House in Fulton st[reet]” when they visited the city because that was “where Mr. and Mrs. Soop,” apparently respected Claverack neighbors, resided.10 As cholera raged in the city and business flagged, Hoffman retreated to his family’s farm upstate. When he came back to Manhattan, he “concluded not to return to my former Boarding House.” He did not explain his reasoning, but simply mentioned that “he looked about for a House that would suit me better,” much as many clerks did when they searched for new jobs. Hoffman quickly found a roommate in a clerk named Lewis Skinkle, who boarded with a Mrs. Hinton on Fulton Street. Hoffman considered this an upgrade because Skinkle was “a very agreeable Room mate and a Gentleman.” Yet when Skinkle became anxious about his health and moved to the country, Hoffman took a smaller room in the same house. Mrs. Hinton gave him the option either to pay the weekly sum of $3.50

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and live by himself or to pay $3.00 “and bring some young man in the Room with me.” Having just negotiated an annual salary of $250 with his employer—a bit less than $5 per week—Hoffman found this decision difficult. But he chose the former alternative, valuing privacy and the opportunity to protect himself from potentially ill-mannered roommates.11 During the summer of 1849, Hoffman built friendships with the people living in his boardinghouse. He visited the Croton Aqueduct with the Hinton family, had “familiar chat[s]” with fellow boarders in his room, and passed away leisure hours on the roof of the establishment “with several of the Gentlemen . . . [,] performing many funny feats.” His quest for capital seemed to be bolstered by interacting with “Gentlemen,” a term that egalitarian urban life threatened to efface into meaninglessness but that strivers infused with great import in the process of self-making. But Hoffman was obsessed with “rules of economy,” and the cost of his room threatened his access to cultural capital gained through interaction with people who called themselves “gentlemen.” When a particularly intense day at work made it impossible for him to return to the boardinghouse for lunch, he paid a shilling for “[d]inner at Parkers Saloon,” which he lamented was “an increase of expenses but cannot be avoided.” In his diary, he noted the price he paid weekly for lodging and sustenance, explaining that “I cannot obtain” a room for “any less with honor to myself,” as he attempted to remain “pleasantly . . . aloof from vicious characters” who might “tempt” him into unseemly behavior. Hoffman would have agreed with the prescriptive writer James Alexander, who advised young clerks to “beware what boarding-houses they select.” The vigilant young man, Alexander argued, might avoid the confidence men—city dwellers who manipulated genteel appearance to take pecuniary advantage of unsuspecting dupes—who “lie in wait for the new arrival.” If Hoffman paid less than $3.50 per week, he thought he might develop acquaintances with disreputable boarders and thus jeopardize his connections with boarders who sought the label “gentleman” in the higher-quality house. As it was, he enjoyed his independent lifestyle: “I have at present a Room by myself and can arrange such as I wish.” But that independence and proximity to genteel boarders would be imperiled by any increase to his expenses.12 Mrs. Hinton soon dimmed Hoffman’s appreciation for his living arrangements by requesting that he move into his old room so that she could “let the little Room to a new comer for 50 c[ents] more per week than I pay.” He “reluctantly consented that I would change” but haughtily proclaimed that the move was “much against my will and not so pleasant

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for me.” He began a search for a new house that would grant him more autonomy and moved in the fall, rooming with another clerk and paying three dollars per week. Hoffman described the board as “Excellent,” but that was problematic, for “[i]t was living too high for our habits.” In the late-autumn and early-winter months, his failing health forced him to settle with his employer and return home to Claverack.13 When he came back to New York the following spring, his brother Daniel accompanied him. Both found new positions as clerks and boarded together. Assured of the respectability of his roommate, William also noted that the owners of their boardinghouse on Pike Street were “nice folks and our Room is kept neat and clean.” But by July 1850, they had moved again. At 75 Anthony Street—William’s sixth new residence since he had arrived in New York the previous spring—they paid “75 cents a piece” and “live[d] with another man.” The reason for their move must have been renewed attempts at economy, illustrating some clerks’ difficulties with paying rent. By moving to the cheaper boardinghouse, the brothers Hoffman were saving money but potentially compromising their ability to interact with people who valued the label “gentleman.”14 Sometimes familial networks shaped clerks’ geographic mobility from residence to residence in the city. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, Henry Patterson moved among boardinghouses and the homes of relatives who resided in the city. His brothers were also clerking for New York firms, and his New Jersey hometown was close enough for his parents, sisters, and brothers-in-law to make periodic visits to the metropolis. Patterson’s residential mobility reflected the obligations his extended family felt to care for him, but it also represented the financial strains the young man placed upon their households, the strength of the apprenticeship ideal that encouraged young clerks to protect their masters’ property, and Patterson’s own desire for a degree of independence. Between 1836 and May 1837, when he began keeping a diary in the city, Patterson moved into the residence of his uncle and aunt. At the latter date, he recorded that he “commenced boarding” with another uncle, though he slept “in the store.” Patterson had left the employ of druggist John Robinson in February 1837, disappointed with his menial work and the unbecoming debauchery of the clerks who worked there. His father relied on business and family connections to obtain a position for his son at the hardware store owned by W. N. Seymour in Chatham Square, and traveled to New York to arrange for his son to switch clerkships. Henry’s new working, boarding, and sleeping arrangements might have been part

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of an overarching parental plan to shield him from the drunken clerks and unknown boarders who populated the republic of broadcloth. Later in the year, Patterson wrote in his diary that “I sleep at Grand Fathers for the present,” and another clerk “sleeps at the store in my place.” In the following spring, Seymour once again requested that Patterson sleep at the store, “very much against my will however.” Much like Hoffman, Patterson declared that he had the option of opposing the control of family, boardinghouse keepers, and employers in a variety of “home” environments, and yet both young men accepted the dictates of their elders in these cases. Seymour and Patterson finally negotiated a settlement by which the clerk would sleep in the store on weekday nights, although particularly ferocious bed bugs chased him back into his uncle’s home.15 This move apparently strained that relative’s budget, for in September 1838, “Uncle William gave me notice to leave, as he could not conveniently keep me any longer.” Patterson found a boardinghouse to his liking in Pearl Street, and resolved to take his meals there while sleeping in the store. Again, pesky bed bugs changed his plans, forcing him to rent a room in the boardinghouse for three dollars a week. As he became acclimated to boardinghouse life, playing chess and otherwise making the acquaintance of his fellow boarders, he received a letter from his parents in New Jersey. The message: “move to Aunt Mary[’]s,” evidently another relative in the city. Patterson’s reply was negative: “as I think the reasons insufficient” for making the move, he claimed that “it is very doubtful whether I go.” Given a glimpse of residential life independent of his family, he challenged his father’s efforts to maintain indirect surveillance over his activities. Henry won this battle of wills, at least until the following spring, when his boardinghouse keeper announced that she was about to close her accounts. He moved to the Washington Square residence of yet another uncle and aunt. In the period between 1842 and 1843, he rented a room in Henry Street until he got married in 1844.16 Other clerks had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to obtain independence by living in boardinghouses because they lived with their parents in the city. Robert Graham was one such clerk. His father, a customs house official, owned a home in tony Stuyvesant Place, the stretch of Second Avenue just east of Astor Place. As in Patterson’s experience, Graham’s diary reveals an extended network of familial relationships upon which he could rely. While he says little about his home life, his writings demonstrate that his parents were eager to protect their son and teach him how to live as a respectable man in the republic of broadcloth. In

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August 1848, Graham requested permission from his father to attend Niblo’s Garden to see a performance of Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, a prominent example, the New-York Daily Tribune affirmed, of the Bard’s “humorous Comecy.” Nathan Graham told his son that he could attend if he so desired, though he counseled that “no young man ever did well who went to such places for amusement.” He turned the screw further by telling his son that “he wanted [him] to do damned well.” Of course, the father concluded, “if [you] want . . . to go—‘go.’” Nathan would have a son who would be highly regarded, not one who would shame his family by attending common entertainments. Instead, the father entreated the son to “practise one hour each day” on the piano he had purchased the previous May and mingle with wealthy vacationers when the Grahams visited Saratoga Springs, New York. Like Patterson and Hoffman, who questioned authority figures in their lives, young Graham understood his father’s critique through the lens of dependence. Yet he made a rather dubious claim in his diary that not attending the play was his own idea: “I did not go as I did not care particularly.” He was learning to subdue his frustration and recast his father’s rebuke as self-control. This was a way for boyish clerks to become respectable men.17 Nathan surely knew that there was little chance his dutiful son would disappoint him. Yet he was not as keen on shielding Robert from the democratic aspects of urban culture as this episode suggests. He permitted his son to deliver a message to him at Niblo’s while the elder Graham was attending a performance of Macbeth. Despite Nathan Graham’s stinging criticism, William Niblo endeavored to create a respectable milieu for audience members who did not want to be jostled by workingmen and prostitutes at other urban theaters. Nathan Graham was making a clear point to his son about filial dependence. Refraining from theater attendance helped boys attain respectability, but attendance at the theater was perfectly acceptable for men who possessed power. Robert often spent the early evening tea hour playing billiards and vingt et un with cousins at home, under Nathan’s supervision. The son “had a good deal of fun” on these occasions, playing with “Ivory colored counters” and “getting rich, and then being reduced to abject poverty” by his father, who “had every Counter when we gave up.” Parents permitted their sons to gamble within their own homes rather than have them venture into a smoke-filled oyster cellar and lose their shirts to decoying sharpers. This parental strategy had special merit when it was accompanied by stern lessons like the one that Robert learned: “the folly of Gambling.”18

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When parents made or purchased consumer goods for their sons, they sought to ensure that respectability passed to the next generation in the form of cherished gifts. “Mother finished me a new Dressing Gown— Cashmere de Laine—lined with Green silk pockets inside and cut in the latest style . . . [and] trimmed with a handsome border of Cashmere,” Graham wrote in October 1848. “[I]t is an indispensable article in a Gentleman’s wardrobe,” he explained. Robert’s mother also bought him a ring for his birthday, and Nathan had it engraved “with the ‘Graham’ Coat of Arms” and an inscription on the inside that read “‘My Mother’ Robert McC. Graham, Sept. 28th 1848.” Wearing these precious tokens of motherly love would remind Graham that his family’s evident wealth and the elegant setting for enjoying it in Stuyvesant Place meant that to be a gentleman, he merely had to clothe himself in his family’s crest and good name. Hoffman and Patterson, moving between boardinghouses and relatives’ homes, had to work harder than Graham to earn the cultural capital of gentility.19 The cashmere dressing gown, lined with silk, bestowed respectability on its wearer in the privacy of the home. Graham and the dry goods merchant who sold the cloth believed that appending the French word for wool, “laine,” added to the garment’s elegance, even if its display would be private. Ironically, it was Graham’s dependence as a member of his father’s household on Stuyvesant Place that made his cultural pretensions credible. In the republic of broadcloth, in which clothes did not clearly make the man, clerks often moved between boardinghouses and family residences in efforts to make homes and cultivate associations with domesticity. Although many clerks succeeded in doing so independently of parents and employers in boardinghouses, urban-born clerks and some country migrants to the city retained ties to family as the best means of connecting to domesticity’s considerable social benefits, even if that meant continued dependence on adult relatives. While Graham’s parents groomed him for social eminence, Hoffman’s and Patterson’s experiences reveal that many clerks meandered nomadically around the city. These young men could only tenuously claim membership in any particular domestic venue. As such, they were both autonomous and dependent in others’ households, living with other commercial men, their families, or immigrants and laborers. Their position in the broader culture was ambiguous, since Americans were concerned about their ability to evade parents’ or employers’ surveillance and yet would not respect men who remained dependent.

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Dressing to Impress When they ventured into the fluid social spaces of the city and encountered the possibilities of anonymity and surveillance that public life offered, clerks found the outcome of their quest for prestige even more uncertain than at home. Prescriptive-literature writers counseled Americans who wanted to be considered respectable that outward appearance should transparently reflect inner character. And yet, as many commentators also explained, the quality of a broadcloth coat might not accurately reflect the quality of the man who wore it. Despite bourgeois observers’ attempts to correlate appearance and character, many Americans used clothing purchases to appeal for respect, assuming a close relationship among apparel, individual character, self-making, and the promise of capitalism. And while customers distrusted clerks’ knowledge about goods as production processes were pulled apart from sales pitches, clerks’ role behind the counter gave them special familiarity with the prices and quality of goods. They used this deep understanding to buy clothing for themselves in attempts to earn the cultural capital attending fine-quality or fine-looking garments. They had to square this desire with their sometimes meager salaries. Robert Graham, a clerk from a wealthy family, wandered into the renowned John Genin’s Broadway hat shop to be specially fitted by the proprietor for a “white drab beaver” hat “for summer” to complete an ensemble for his uncle’s wedding that included “black doeskin pants and marseilles white vest.” But most clerks, like their customers, looked for ready-made bargains. Patterson “went into Broad Way” one evening in November 1836 and “priced some gloves” as winter set in. In 1850, Hoffman, his brother, and a friend shopped at “the large Boot Store in Chatham Street and purchased each of us a new Pair by compromise.” Proprietors who had not yet accepted the “one-price” system allowed clerks like Hoffman to haggle with sales personnel and not feel pressured into making a purchase at a disadvantageous price.20 And store clerks had special knowledge about the goods that they bought. When Richard Robinson was arrested in 1836 on suspicion that he had murdered the prostitute Helen Jewett, police asked his roommate, James Tew, if Robinson owned the cloak found at the murder scene. Tew was a William Street clothing store clerk and thus could be expected to give a reasoned opinion on the subject. Yet he would not incriminate his friend, unconvincingly claiming that he could not identify the cloak as

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Robinson’s: it was “[a]s near like it as one Cloth Cloak is like another.” Yet clothing clerks were paid to understand the subtle varieties of the cloth they dealt to customers. Robinson, himself a clerk for the cloth merchant Joseph Hoxie, figuratively split threads in an effort to differentiate between the cloak found at the scene and his own “camblet” cloak that was “made of wool and silk.” As Whitman’s description of the morning promenade on Broadway demonstrates, clerks as a group had the reputation for being dandies who failed to control their consuming habits and thus garnered comparisons to women shoppers. An intimate knowledge of goods, however, fed clerks’ frenzied consumption of the best clothing, jewelry, and accoutrements. The clerks who cheered Robinson’s acquittal claimed the “innocent boy” as one of their own. Robinson’s supporters emphasized appearance over substance: their style of dress, according to the historian of the murder case, consisted of a “plum-colored dress coat with black velvet collar, black neck scarf, and floppy cap like the one Robinson wore throughout his trial.” Robinson’s clothing included elements of the respectable—particularly the dark color of the ensemble— but astute observers would have considered him a dandy for the tight fit of his clothes, high-heeled shoes, styled hair, long-tailed coat, and ostentatious headwear. These subtle markers might have caused observers to question his membership in the democratic and respectable republic of broadcloth.21 In Henry Patterson’s diary, the quantity of his consumer purchases overwhelms any mention of quality. The volume is astounding, even if, with only simple notations to describe his clothing purchases, we cannot determine the colors or cuts of the items he bought. In a twelve-day period in the fall of 1836, Patterson bought trousers, shoes, and a hat. He clearly was interested in his appearance—he returned to the hatter the day after his purchase to have “the wrinkles pressed out.” The following spring, he “left a pair of . . . gloves” at a store “to be clean’d,” a necessity after a winter in the filthy nineteenth-century city. Patterson’s consumption continued apace, adding another “pair of pants and suspenders,” a stock, and an eighteen-dollar coat to his wardrobe. These latter purchases were impulse buys, made “on the strength” of news that his brother Turner had earned a promotion and salary increase. Evidently his brother loaned or gave him the money to buy these things. But Patterson also bought “a moleskin box coat” to wear at the store at which he worked, and by the end of 1837, he purchased a “new overcoat” for twenty-three dollars. In early 1838, Patterson bought yet another coat for twenty dollars and took

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Figure 5.2. Richard P. Robinson, the “Innocent Boy” who briefly set a fashion trend for the young dandies who supported him during his 1836 murder trial. H. R. Robinson, “Richard P. Robinson, Taken from life as he appeared in the Court of Oyer and Terminer” (1836). American Antiquarian Society.

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it home, only to find that it did not fit. Yet “as it fitted Turner exactly,” he returned the favor to his brother by giving it to him.22 Patterson’s frequent consumption might be explained by the awkwardness of his stage in life. A seventeen-year-old boy, he was probably outgrowing his clothing. While it is not clear how he bought the garments, his purchases reflect merchants’ demands that clerks appear as if they had achieved social and economic mobility before they had actually accomplished that goal. Young men who wore old or less fashionable clothing could not evade aspersions on their character and questions about whether they were ready to advance. At the same time, they could not trespass across refined canons of “sincerity” in dress and avoid the dandified, hollow display of respectability that Whitman so roundly criticized. Juggling these demands sometimes led clerks to dabble in crime. Amaziah Rogers, a clerk for the dry goods wholesaler Arnold and Constable, stole “silk and fancy goods” worth some two thousand dollars for his and his wife’s use in April 1851. After police arrested him and recovered the property from the couple’s Broome Street boardinghouse room, Rogers tried to deflect blame from himself, explaining vaguely that “the conduct of his wife . . . drove him to desperation.” Perhaps Rogers, like other young men and women who were beholden to cultural expectations that good appearance revealed good character, filched the cloth in order to keep up the charade that he and his wife were upwardly mobile citizens of the republic of broadcloth.23

The Theater of the Street Conflict about languages of class in cities, embodied in the multiple meanings of broadcloth, was closely related in most Americans’ minds to fears about class conflict on the streets. In the early nineteenth century, New York’s Broadway had been the stage for the respectable promenade, what one scholar has called a “core rite of sociability” designed to clarify class in an era in which Americans debated the meanings of distinction. Yet by the middle of the nineteenth century, members of the city’s elite were increasingly unable, despite their fine clothing, to make a clear statement of their cultural superiority. Crowds of commoners and strivers choked promenade routes and “stared” participants “out of countenance.” The fluid movement of New Yorkers on city sidewalks and streets was an apparently democratic development, akin to the supposed diffusion of broadcloth through their wardrobes. Clerks’ diaries show that they

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were participants in the dramatic denouement of the promenade and the emerging democratic parade of the antebellum street. They observed the urban crowd even while they were part of that crowd—their purpose was not merely to enjoy the company of friends but also to watch the “spectacle” unfolding on the street. Hoffman “stroll[ed] up Broadway” from the Battery with his brother Daniel in 1849, with no other purpose than to “observ[e] . . . that [which] was presented . . . [to] our view.” Others watched the poor in order to master a sentimental, though detached, perspective toward those deserving charity. Henry Southworth figuratively shed a tear for “a great number of poor Irish” who, after a rainstorm, were driven by floodwaters out of the “cellars” where they resided. He hoped that these immigrants, “bare foot” and “without hat[s],” would be cared for by the police. Clerks watched the crowd in order to manage their relationship to others in the urban panorama, to become part of the people or declare their independence from it.24 For clerks, the downside to being on the streets was finding themselves rubbing shoulders with the laboring poor. Most strivers were not as sympathetic as Southworth, and instead used their diaries to distinguish themselves from plebeian figures and clarify their identities as social climbers. May 1 was traditionally “moving day” in the city, in which New Yorkers changed residences or signed new leases on rented property. Walking around town the next day, Edward Tailer trained his focus on the “street and gutter gold seekers” who “engaged” in a desperate search for “jewels, and articles of no apparent value” that may have been lost or discarded by people moving to new homes. While “root[ing]” in the “dust and gutter water” for “trinket[s]” was a crucial economic tactic for the urban poor, Tailer disparaged those who stooped so low. “It is sad and disgusting to see a man . . . put himself upon a level with the hog,” the clerk wrote, disdaining these efforts in part because “obtain[ing] his living . . . by gathering those things, which are usually deemed useless by the generality of mankind, and by turning their paltry value to a good account” was to evade the rules of appropriate market conduct. While clerks were disappointed with the salaries they earned in offices and stores, they exulted in feelings of superiority over the down-and-out, refusing to countenance a wide variety of economic activities the poor employed to survive in a capitalist economy that did not serve their interests.25 Clerks might, through dress and manners, set themselves apart from the impoverished masses forced to find their daily bread in the gutters. Yet they sometimes found that creating distance between themselves

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and laboring people was more difficult. In 1838, as Patterson waited for a friend at the corner of East Broadway and Market Street, he “witnessed a grand fight between about a dozen firemen.” This account was typical of clerks’ distancing project—Patterson was present and compelled to watch an exciting urban spectacle, but he did not enter the fray. Some four years later, as he was garnering invitations to gatherings with genteel young ladies that offered “dancing,” “first rate singing, and piano forte music,” he objected to one party at the “Tivoli” in Flushing, just outside the city. “[T]he people composing the assembly” there, he declared, “were mostly of too low a caste for me to find much enjoyment among them[,] . . . the largest portion of them being what is termed Soap Locks,” the hairstyle commonly adopted by Bowery B’hoys, young tradesmen and volunteer firemen whose boisterous habits and flashy deportment helped to create a culture that stood in opposition to that of bourgeois merchants and professionals. Unlike the experience of watching firemen fight in the street, in which he was in complete control as a dispassionate observer, Patterson considered the dance at the Tivoli chaotic because he was uncomfortable in the Soap Locks’ milieu. Tailer’s declaration, upon seeing Benjamin Baker’s Glance at New York with friends at the Olympic Theater, that the play was an “excellent” portrayal of “‘Mose,’ a true specimen of one of the B’hoys,” underscored the fact that Tailer was not one of the b’hoys himself. These clerks might admire aspects of Bowery culture, but they did so from afar.26 Yet the identities of these firemen and Soap Locks who alternately tickled and offended clerks’ sensibilities are unclear. While firemen schooled in the rough street culture of antebellum cities were long thought to have hailed from artisanal backgrounds, scholars have shown that fire companies recruited from all parts of urban society. Men who fought fires and brawled with members of other companies were drawn to what one historian has deemed “an extremely appealing vision of masculinity.” Clerks were as susceptible to these appeals to manliness as other urban citizens and, New York City fire company membership records show, joined companies alongside tradesmen, laborers, and merchants. Newspaper editor Cornelius Mathews identified the Bowery B’hoy as an “uproarious young gentleman” who, while typically a “respectable young butcher,” might also be “a stout clerk in a jobbing-house” or “a junior partner in a wholesale grocery.” Clerks who were firemen claimed allegiance to the definition of manliness proposed by critics claiming that women should replace men behind retail store counters. Hulking fellows who hustled to the site of

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fires and bravely attempted to put them out, or who struggled with members of other companies to earn plaudits for putting them out, might be clerks who hoped to transcend their purported unmanly work. Patterson followed fire companies to watch them fight blazes at the Bowery Theater, helped fight fires on a few occasions, and later became a member of a company in 1849. He ultimately could not reconcile the tensions between his admiration for firemen’s manliness with his revulsion at the vulgarity exhibited by the “Soap Locks” who destroyed the aura of gentlemanly deportment that should have prevailed at a party frequented by respectable men and women.27 One historian, refuting the contention that the Bowery was solely a workers’ thoroughfare, claims that it actually “presented an area of confusion, a socially promiscuous zone that fell somewhere between the sunshine of respectability and the sites of outright degradation such as the Five Points.” And yet clerks could be found in the Points as well, either slumming or working in small, often immigrant-owned, shops. In Ned Buntline’s novel, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York, the nefarious clerk Frank Hennock shows that he is at home in the midst of the vice and crime of the slum. We will never know if clerks were among those from whom Patterson wanted to maintain a safe distance, but it is clear that clerks could take advantage of the anonymity of the street to navigate through the vice districts of the antebellum city. The occupational group cut a wide swath through the urban population, reflecting the democratic ethos of the republic of broadcloth. This fluidity was enjoyable for some clerks but disturbing for others like Patterson, who were unable to square their desires to be among fellow strivers who knew when and how to control themselves and concerns that self-control obstructed displays of masculine strength and vigor. Clerks were Bowery B’hoys and “fifteenth ward nabobs,” revealing that these categories, created to make sense of the chaotic city, were as imprecise as the meanings of wearing broadcloth.28 Theaters were also spaces that, because of the fluid seating arrangements and types of entertainment available, blurred the meanings of class in the city. In many stage productions, representations of clerks were part of the fun. Songsheets and dramatic scripts from this era include clerks as stock characters, cast as villains, as failures, or as figures whose ambitions for gentility were laughable. Mr. Snobson, Mr. Tiffany’s confidential clerk in Anna Cora Mowatt’s 1845 play Fashion, tries to use evidence that his employer habitually forged bank notes to extort a promise that he could marry Tiffany’s eligible daughter Seraphina. At the Park Theater, a “melo-

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drama” entitled The New York Merchant and His Clerks played for four nights in April 1843 but was pulled from production after the sporting newspaper The Spirit of the Times referred to it as “trash.” It was replaced by performances by one of Edwin Christy’s rivals, the Virginia Minstrels. The Dry Goods Clerks of New York had a week’s run at the National Theater in early 1851, playing opposite other occupational dramas like The Printer of New York, The Ship Carpenter of New York, and The Seamstress of New York. The scripts to these plays do not appear to have survived, and the productions suffered in comparison with more popular offerings like The French Spy. One theater historian guessed that audience members were “too near . . . to being ship’s carpenters, and printers and dry goods clerks, to enjoy seeing [their] counterfeit presentments on the stage.” Yet playwrights continued to portray clerks on the urban stage, evidently hoping to create or tap into an existing market for such fare. At the New Bowery Theater in 1863, the program included a scene from Shakespeare, “a comic dance on stilts” and other “acrobatic act[s],” “song[s],” and several “farce[s]”—one was called The Dry Goods Clerks. A songsheet entitled “Dry Goods Clerk,” published in the Civil War era, might have been performed during this production. It melodramatically narrated the life of a counter jumper named Vermicelli—a name suggesting dandified, if not foreign, origin—who arrived in the big city to take a clerking post. He fell in love with a “boss of a sewing machine”—probably a laboring woman doing piecework—but was ultimately supplanted in her heart by a daguerreotypist who snapped her picture for free. Vermicelli responded to the disappointment by committing suicide. Sung alongside other comic numbers and sandwiched among a congeries of theatrical acts, the tune would have thrown clerks in the audience back into the threshold between the rude and the respectable because it lampooned their striving for cultural capital.29 Flawed attempts to order the city through the delineation of class distinctions continued nonetheless, shaping understandings of quintessentially urban events such as the 1849 riot at the Astor Place Opera House. Located where the Bowery and Broadway—supposed geographic markers of class in the city—almost come together just blocks east of Washington Square, the Opera House provided an arena around which conflict about class could be played out. Robert Graham and Edward Tailer inserted themselves as characters in the dramatic scenes that unfolded outside the theater on May 10, 1849. As diary keepers they could construct their own account of events, framing their claims to gentility on their own terms.

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The relationship between these young men and the violence in the streets is a bit unclear, since they were both a part of the action and separated from the proceedings. In their diaries, they used their presence as (or the pretense of being) eyewitnesses to reaffirm their respectability. In the process of writing about the riot, they distanced themselves from the riot’s participants. At the same time, the presence of clerks as observers and participants in the riot also reinforced the uncertainty of validating that respectability on the streets. Graham and Tailer knew, like the rest of New York, that “trouble” was brewing as the English actor William Macready prepared to play Macbeth at the Opera House that evening. This theater, designed for a wealthy audience and respectable fare, had been built to clarify the boundaries of class disturbed by urban theater spaces and performances. A number of disputes between Macready and American tragedian Edwin Forrest registered broader national and class conflicts brewing in a city population transformed by immigration and the inequalities created by industrialization. Native-born American workers hoped to curtail Macready’s performance with rotten fruit and catcalls, while wealthier New Yorkers demanded that the Englishman’s show must go on. Speechmakers outside the Opera House denounced the “den of the aristocracy” that forced audience members to wear “kid gloves and a white vest,” an insulting English imitation that threatened the democratic culture of the American city.30 Both clerks apparently made their way into Astor Place in the early evening hours, Graham arriving from work and Tailer coming from his afternoon cup of tea. They were confronted with “an immense crowd” surrounding the theater, and Graham decided to repair to his Aunt Louisa’s home nearby in order to protect himself from the danger that appeared imminent. The sight lines from her “2d story front window” allowed him to continue to watch the proceedings from a safe vantage point, behind glass that was not in danger of being broken by the “mob” that had gathered outside the Opera House. Tailer hints in his diary that he remained out-of-doors, a witness to crowd members throwing “volley after volley of large paving stones . . . against the windows,” which were “smashed to atoms.” These words, however, were James Gordon Bennett’s, published in his account of the “Dreadful Riot and Bloodshed” in the May 11 issue of the Herald. In his description of the riot, the motive of the crowd, the arrest of mob leaders, and the action that occurred inside the theater, Tailer cribbed from Bennett’s summary of events. As Graham had done when describing the political meeting in support of the French Republic

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the year before, Tailer gladly determined that he could best preserve his respectability and his skin by recording life on the city’s volatile streets with the assistance of the penny press. Tailer’s use of the newspaper account to form his own description of events does not invalidate his claims to having been in the streets, but they do render them suspect.31 From his aunt’s house, Graham “heard a discharge of Musketry” and recorded “soon another and another.” He asked his diary plaintively, “Can they be firing blank cartridge?” And then declaratively he wrote, “I did not think so, and wanted to go out and learn the particulars.” His relatives did not believe that this was a safe proposition and refused to let him out of the house. Soon after, his mother and uncle arrived to escort him to his home in Stuyvesant Place. Yet at the corner of Ninth Street, Graham met another uncle and persuaded his mother to permit his return with this guardian to the scene of the action “to see If there were any killed.” Indeed, several men had perished in the mayhem. Graham visited the “Drug stores and . . . Vauxhall, where the dead, the dying, and the wounded lay in dreadful agony.” One man who had been gut-shot pleaded for “Laudanum to take away his pain,” while Graham evidently touched a corpse lying in state on a Vauxhall billiard table, explaining that the man was dead “though not yet cold.” Tailer continued to copy from Bennett’s account. Just as clerks shaped the language of ambition and character in tandem with advice literature, public prints shaped clerks’ private feelings about important urban events. The Herald helped Tailer to declare a personal stake in the tragedy of this bloody event and keep a genteel distance from the riot itself: Herald: THE SCENE AT THE FIFTEENTH WARD STATION HOUSE. This scene was tragical in the extreme. On a bench at the end of the room lay the dead body of a tall, genteel looking man, whose name we ascertained to be George W. Gedney, brother to a broker in Wall street. He had been shot through the brain, in the manner we have already described. Tailer: I went to the Fifteenth ward Station House. And there the scene, was truly tragical. On a bench at the end of the room lay the dead body of a tall, genteel looking man whose name I believe is George W. Gedney, brother to a broker in Wall st[reet]. he had been shot through the brain. (italics mine)

This was plagiarism with a purpose: Tailer would be able to claim on the pages of his diary that he had participated in what he called “the

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Image Not Available

Figure 5.3. Nathaniel Currier, “Great Riot at the Astor Place Opera House, New York” (New York: N. Currier, 1849). In this lithograph, the republic of broadcloth evoked chaotic mob rule rather than the triumph of American democracy. Rioters cannot be distinguished from innocent bystanders by the clothes they wear: men of respectable appearance run from the scene, carry off the wounded, and throw bricks. Negative number 38084, Collection of The New-York Historical Society.

adventures of this evening which will ever be remembered in New York, as one of the saddest [and] most terrible occurences, that the city has ever witnessed.” This was his chance to declare to posterity that he had been a witness, too. Gedney’s death had personal resonance for Tailer. This “genteel” man had been one of a group whom Graham called the “several innocent people” who were in the wrong place at the wrong time during the rioting—the corpse, with “brains protruding from a wound in the skull” (Bennett’s words), might just as well have been one of the clerks who recorded the event. Tailer clearly had been shaken by the revelation of who Gedney was. He acknowledged the other dead men at the police station, including the unfortunate man who had his “skull blown off,” obscuring his identity, and another deceased man, “apparently a mechanic, shot in the neck.” But laborers, in his mind, were supposed to number among the casualties, and he blamed “parties of organized ruffians” for inflaming the

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“mob” in front of the theater. The fact that fellow strivers had died made the Astor Place Riot a “tragical transaction.” Bullets and brickbats, in a republic of broadcloth defined in part by anonymity, did not inquire about the social identity of the men they struck. Tailer relied on the penny press simultaneously to associate with a significant event and to mark his refined detachment from the rowdy crowd of anonymous men.32 The variety of roles clerks assumed in the affair, however, made clerks’ respectability as an occupational group uncertain. While Tailer and Graham were able to escape harm at Astor Place, two clerks from Halifax and Boston were killed in the streets. The ubiquity of broadcloth and readymade alternatives made it difficult to discern who was innocent and who was guilty. While tradesmen were the principal rioters, they were joined by Henry A. Hansford, an eighteen-year-old clerk living on Division Street in the Lower East Side and Henry Hiffer, a grocery clerk residing on the Bowery. Alexander Hossack, a teenaged shipping clerk who lived on Canal Street, was evidently wounded by members of the Seventh Regiment. Clerks played all roles in this drama: they observed, they rioted, and they died. Graham could register the distance between himself and the violence of the event by noting in his diary the outcome of the court proceedings against the rioters: the punishment included a year in prison and a $250 fine. Perhaps in an effort to help clarify the respectability of the young men who were supposed to inherit commercial New York, the MLA bought the Astor Place Opera House in 1854 as a new home for the organization’s library. Here clerks could, as members Edward Tailer and Henry Patterson had done at the MLA’s downtown location, leave the dangerous ambiguities on the streets and assume the mantle of respectability while reading histories, scientific texts, and sentimental fiction.33

Unraveling Promises The republic of broadcloth consisted of numerous stages on which citizens performed roles that alternately distinguished them from their contemporaries or allowed them to blend into the crowd. Clerks adopted a variety of roles as they tried to attain cultural prestige. On consecutive nights in May 1848, Tailer attended a concert put on by students of the New York Institution for the Blind and a meeting of the American Temperance Union, perhaps enhancing his claims to membership in a cultural milieu devoted to charity and social reform. He went to the Tombs, but he had not been convicted of a crime. Rather, he was eager to see notorious

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men “confined there on a charge of murder” and other crimes in order to measure them against his own self-image, grounded in propriety. Tailer paid particular attention in his diary to “two young and apparently respectible men” who stumbled past him one evening in June 1850, “slaves” to the “demoralizing influence of ardent spirits.” Since they seemed respectable, Tailer judged that once they had been apprehended by the police and “upon returning to conscientiousness,” they would feel “mortification” for having “disgraced themselves.” Alcohol diverted respectable people from their right minds. Tailer was certain that once they recovered consciousness they would also recover conscientiousness and repent for their transgressions.34 Tailer’s judgment of others belied his concerns about his own respectability in urban life, and how to monitor and protect it in light of the variety of leisure activities available to young men in cities. “How many hours will we be credited with upon the book of God’s remembrance,” he wondered in his diary at the end of the year, when such introspection was encouraged. The young striver, in recalling the past twelve months, now worried that those hours spent “in the festive hall or at the theatre, or in reading books of fiction, or in the society of the wicked,” so fun at the time, might better “have been . . . spent in the study of divine writ or in the society of the righteous.” Tailer resolved that, in the new year, he would make himself a more respectable person on earth and a more fit candidate for salvation: “may it be our lot to live happily and holy . . . , and may we increase in the love of God, and in the estimation of our fellow beings.”35 The “city items” and police court columns of New York newspapers show that some clerks did not harbor Tailer’s secular or sacred goals. Like those who participated in the events at Astor Place, they created urban disorder. In June 1846, a callithumpian band of some two dozen clerks, mounted on horses, “their faces besmeared with dirt, and dressed like rag-a muffins,” paraded down Chatham Street to interrupt a Sons of Temperance meeting in City Hall Park. The clerk at the head of the procession used “a fish vender’s trumpet” to disrupt the sober proceedings on the park lawn. The Evening Post encouraged their employers “to look well after them, for such persons seldom make good clerks.” In January 1848, a member of the Second Ward police brought two “young men of genteel appearance,” Maiden Lane store clerks, before the court for drunken, “disorderly” behavior. The defendants professed to be “penitent” in front of the bench, even though one had “bitten” off part of the

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arresting officer’s finger the night before. The judge let them off with a “reprimand” while promising a sterner response for a repeat visit to his courtroom. When store clerk George Johnson was brought up on similar charges in 1849, the justice who presided in the case asked the defendant, “how long do you expect to remain in your situation if you get drunk and roll about the streets?” The newspaper account did not record the young man’s answer, but in the judge’s opinion—as in Edward Tailer’s—Johnson’s continued reliance on spirits would make him a “vagabond,” a drifter without the character traits necessary to attain cultural prestige.36 Clerks could endanger the social order as well as defend it. Newspaper reporters on the city desk described criminals of “genteel appearance” to elicit surprise, but it was a tired theme for most urban readers, who understood that affordable and respectable outerwear could provide temporary cover for the despicable conduct of strangers. Still shocking, though, was the possibility that clerks—the young men readers thought they knew—would reject respectability in favor of urban fun, danger, and violence. The assumptions made by newspaper editors and police court magistrates about clerking and clerks revealed something disturbing about the republic of broadcloth and the languages of class that were woefully inadequate to describe it. The members of this occupational group were not easily identified by the clothes they wore and the ways they acted. They were not necessarily honorable youth who deserved to achieve upward mobility. Clerks were much like other members of the republic of broadcloth in claiming access to the power and prestige offered by democratic refinement, but they in particular had their appeals closely examined by other citizens. They enjoyed the independence that urban anonymity permitted, even while they desired accolades that would prove that their striving had catapulted them into positions of economic or cultural authority. Under the tutelage of family members, they might stand out for their refinement. On the other hand, they might offend refined sensibilities by consuming too extravagantly, rioting, or standing in the theater pit alongside laborers, painfully reminded of the ways they did not surpass the common man. Their efforts to cloak themselves in respectability through careful monitoring of their fellow boarders, their personal appearance, and their interaction with workingmen on the streets were endangered by new residential patterns and leisure environments created by urban growth. The promise of broadcloth unraveled for clerks.

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In February 1851, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher gave a lecture about character at the Broadway Tabernacle, where dry goods clerks had rallied support a year before for leisure time that would permit their pursuit of virtue. In the audience was Henry Southworth, who wrote in his diary that Beecher tried to separate character—which shone “from within the man”—from reputation, a potentially shimmering but inaccurate guide to character. Southworth seemed to realize that Beecher’s argument was an important component of the creed of self-making. Men might earn a gilt “reputation for honesty” but still harbor a “dishonest” character, an impoverished soul. As Beecher’s biographer has argued, the preacher believed that “cultivation of character” might bring “contentment” outside the race for “prosperity” or “genteel ‘respectability.’” The minister of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church was apparently offering clerks a means to achieve cultural capital through introspection instead of striving. But rather than write admiringly of the sentiment, Southworth complained that he was “disappointed with the lecture as well as with the lecturer.” He called Beecher’s speaking style “coarse”—a unique assessment among mostly admiring contemporaries—but he also spent several lines trying in vain to capture Beecher’s flowery meditation on the presence of God in human affairs: “the same power that causes the thoughts of the poet to soar aloft influences him in all his transactions, be his like the bird who soars aloft.” Chiding himself for not taking down the pastor’s words verbatim, Southworth wrote hopefully that “I believe that I have got the idea if not the exact words.”37 It is hard to know which ideas Southworth “got” from Beecher’s lecture. In trying to resolve the imperatives of striving and “contentment,” Beecher unwittingly showed how difficult it was to determine the meanings of class in the city. Few members of his audience would dispute the importance of character—it was widely lauded as the surest form of capital. As such, the cultivation of character could serve as a broad, inclusive principle to frame respectability as a democratic virtue. But Beecher and other promoters of a language of character pulled the wool over clerks’ eyes. Refined and democratic citizenship in the republic of broadcloth was elusive, cloaked in a rapidly changing array of new fashions that, according to Beecher, were the stuff of reputation rather than character. It remained crucial for strivers to dress to impress, to relocate to better boardinghouses, to distinguish themselves in diaries and deportment from the rabble-rousers in the crowd. This was cultural competition fostered by the imperatives of capitalism. Beecher himself was not immune to the dictates

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of competition, shaping his “Gospel of Love” to appeal to a broader constituency of spiritual consumers who did not hesitate to accept ideas as commodities. But methods of obtaining cultural capital through outward appearance rather than inward development were made both necessary and unreliable because broadcloth and the democratic ethos of the street permitted ordinary urban dwellers to adopt the semblance of refined character as easily as putting on a new coat.38 Unable to square ambition and equality, some clerks also decided that they would rather not try to pin down bourgeois arguments about what it meant to be respectable. Clerks were not only endangered by the city and its disreputable elements; they could be the dangerous figures who preyed upon naïve contemporaries. In an oft-reprinted series of lectures, Beecher expressed his belief that the gilded city “dazzle[d] our poor country boy” into a lifestyle of corruption and sin. Supposedly alone and helpless, young clerks could choose respectability or membership in the “flash class” at the heart of the city’s sporting culture. In parlors, streets, and brothels, though, many clerks tried to have it both ways, using their relationships with women to reconcile the ambiguous connection between manliness and respectability in cities.39

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Figure 6.1. Mathew Brady, Daguerreotype of Jenny Lind (1850). The Library of Congress.

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6 The Swedish Nightingale and the Peeping Tom

On September 1, 1850, William Hoffman joined a crowd of thousands at Castle Garden on the southern foot of Manhattan Island to greet the renowned “Swedish Nightingale,” Jenny Lind, as she arrived from Europe. The impresario P. T. Barnum had aroused popular interest in the soprano’s impending American tour by focusing on what Hoffman called her “unsurpassed vocal . . . endowment.” The clerk was equally interested in her “unsullied character and . . . virtuous Life,” which she had forged despite encountering “many seducing temptations.” Barnum had repeatedly emphasized Lind’s reputation for being both chaste and charitable, fashioning her character into a commodity that would reimburse him handsomely. Encouraged by Barnum’s description of her as the ideal woman, men crowded about Lind’s carriage, grabbing hold of the wheels and jumping on the carriage’s top, all in a shared effort to “peep in the Window.” Hoffman, unable to see her, ran all the way up Broadway to A. T. Stewart’s store in order to glimpse Lind from a distance as she waved to admirers from her hotel balcony across the street.1 A week later, Hoffman attended Sunday morning church services at the Broadway Tabernacle. He was accompanied by his brother Daniel— also a city clerk—and their mother, who was visiting from upstate New York and staying with family friends. After a midday meal, the boys returned to their Anthony Street boardinghouse with two other young men and quickly discovered a source of entertainment not to be disclosed to Mrs. Hoffman. Peeping “through a hole the size of a Bean in the Door of an adjoining Room,” they saw “the perfect Female form of the Two Miss Whitings Young Girls or Lady’s about 17 and 19 years old.” The young women “were entirely for about 20 minutes with every part of their Bodies exposed to my view,” Hoffman wrote gleefully. “This was indeed to me a fine view and what I desired Etc.,” he proclaimed. That night, he and

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Daniel “accompanied Ma” and a few family friends to the Tabernacle for evening services.2 Hoffman did not record whether the Reverend Joseph Parrish Thompson, presiding at the Tabernacle that day, peppered his sermons with selections from his published 1848 lectures entitled Young Men Admonished. Hoffman’s conduct illuminated the perceived problems associated with unmarried young men let loose in the anonymous metropolis and the conundrum of authenticity at the heart of strivers’ efforts to become powerful men. “He is in the midst of a multitude and yet alone,” The Advocate for Moral Reform determined in its 1836 investigation of the clerk cut adrift in the republic of broadcloth. Perceived to be unmoored from the institutions of family, church, and community that helped young men maintain their virtue and respectability, these city clerks instead patronized what the Advocate called the “genteel brothel,” a place that aped refinement but was staffed by a “conclave of fiends.” Like the young woman who was seduced into sexual sin, the Advocate claimed that the clerk who crossed the threshold of such an establishment “fell and was ruined.”3 Was Hoffman a nice young man in danger of moral failure, who piously attended church with his mother to ponder two of Thompson’s sermons and evade these urban threats to his respectability? Or was he the source of his own descent from virtue, unable to control himself? Antebellum editors, ministers, and health reformers, hoping to ensure the ultimate ascension of aspiring young men on the make to economic and social eminence, instructed youthful readers to curtail their ambitions for speedy advancement in the commercial world and temper their passions when confronted with the cornucopia of urban leisure options. Authors in this genre hoped that self-help tracts would encourage young men to make themselves in the proper way by monitoring the moral character of their thoughts and actions. Yet authors of prescriptive texts did not agree on whether these young men were solely to blame for behaving badly. In the opinion of minister John Todd of Northampton, Massachusetts, young men taking advantage of urban leisure options were in danger of eternal damnation because shadowy confidence men sought to pollute “those whom they deem a little above them . . . in point of respectability.” These “idlers” hoped to push clerks from the path of morality and gentility. Perhaps Hoffman fell prey to peer pressure when he peeped at women, but he was also uncomfortable with the fact that his lack of self-control violated the precepts of the advice literature. On the day his mother returned to Claverack, he stopped at a bakery to “buy two Loaves of ‘Graham Bread’

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upon which I breakfast every morn,” hoping that the health reformer Sylvester Graham’s “pure food” regimen would limit his sexual urges.4 If Hoffman’s desire made him a danger to himself, was he also dangerous to unprotected women, a denizen of sporting culture and its misogynistic assumptions about male power? The 1831 report of the evangelical New York Magdalen Society made spectacular—and probably exaggerated—claims about the numbers of prostitutes and kept women residing in Manhattan, but it correctly fingered clerks as being a crucial part of the city’s sexual economy. These young men contributed to the moral and social ruin of young women in “sinks of iniquity.” The Reverend Todd knew that young men delighted in the opportunities that urban leisure offered them. “How strong is the temptation in the young man,” he wrote, “to feel that it is manly to throw away the tender emotions of his heart towards his parents—to feel that he cannot remember the . . . instructions of home, without forfeiting that claim to independence and manhood which he now wishes to establish!” Many young men openly flouted the prescriptive literature that offered them assistance in identifying urban perils and managing their desires. They seized masculine freedom by attempting to claim power over women, cheered on by sporting publications whose authors not only chronicled exciting events in the boxing ring and the horseracing track but also praised or playfully criticized libertines who seduced women into having sex with them. These papers revealed the sexual escapades of their readers in gossip columns entitled “Wants to Know” that were sometimes accompanied by a woodcut of a man peeping through a keyhole at an amorous young couple.5 William Hoffman was equal parts reformer, striver, and peeping tom, reflecting the difficulties clerks had in balancing claims that they were respectable, refined, or genteel against their desire to have power over women and thus be valued as men by their comrades. Hoffman placed Jenny Lind on a pedestal because she embodied the ideals that bourgeois Americans claimed for themselves: meeting with a variety of ill-defined “temptations,” Lind had emerged with her honorable, generous, and virtuous character intact. For Hoffman, these traits were markers of the cultural capital he wanted to claim as his own. He hoped that, by waiting for and attending on Lind, he would cement those associations. Adult men who had achieved positions of social and economic power paid the utmost respect to refined ladies. The social origins of the “Miss Whitings” are unknown: Hoffman’s description of them as “Young Girls or Lady’s” obscures who they were. He clearly believed he could watch them with

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reckless abandon through the hole in the door of his cheap boardinghouse room on Anthony Street. These were not bourgeois, adult women like Lind whose character traits earned respect. Hoffman could enjoy the “view” with his male cohort and substitute an arrogant “Etc.” for the snickering comments he and his friends probably made, cementing social bonds among other men at the girls’ expense. Yet he did use the word “Lady” to describe them, a term that reflected America’s obsession with class even as it blurred the meaning of class. Hoffman felt guilty about being a peeping tom, and assiduously followed elements of Graham’s system for purifying the human body. Whether he read tracts like Todd’s or gathered inspiration for living a moral life from the examples of refined women such as Lind or his mother, it is clear that he believed it was up to him to control his desire and announce to the world that he was a lady’s respectable companion—a gentleman. The fact that he ate Graham bread in the weeks before and after observing the naked women suggests that he was attempting to follow the prescribed moral path, but was ultimately having a difficult time in doing so. But by eating Graham bread and extolling the virtues of Jenny Lind, Hoffman could distance himself from his observation of the Whitings.6 Young clerks’ interactions with women gave them opportunities to assert that they were respectable and powerful men. They could establish their authority over themselves and others in the expression and repression of heterosexual desire, and brag about sexual conquests or courting the most eligible ladies to earn the admiration of other men—competitors or comrades. But not all clerks were adept at winning ladies’ hearts or gaining access to their bodies. They might be alternately self-assured and timid, aggressive and reserved. Hoffman’s efforts to balance his desires for control over women with self-control illustrate why clerks found it difficult to reconcile the precepts of the religiously inflected prescriptive literature and the rakish sporting press in their relationships with male peers, refined ladies, and laboring women. Clerks’ experiences with women and the cultural conversation about clerks and women reveal that “respectable manliness” was, like “respectable politics,” a mirage that young men could strive for but not attain because the meanings of these vague markers of class were crucially important but also hotly contested. Clerks like Hoffman encountered possibilities and challenges in attempts to establish their claims to respect and manly prerogatives in the antebellum city. They could decide if they wanted to participate in a sporting culture of young men that thrived upon its members’ sense of

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sexual entitlement to women’s bodies, or find refuge in the prim propriety of a bourgeois parlor and the strict advice of the religious tract. Yet they had a choice: after business closed, they could contemplate a racy newspaper among friends, drink heavily at a saloon, carouse with disreputable women at a brothel, or not. Some tried to balance a frenetic schedule of respectable and illicit activities. Whatever choices they made, clerks could enter the commercial house the next morning with hair combed, white collar adjusted, and woolen coat pressed, apparently as respectable as when they had left the previous evening. But “fast” clerks, like all capitalists, were speculating. They gambled that they could reject respectability at the same time that they claimed it. Yet discovery by employers or snitching comrades, or a squib in a sporting publication revealing an indiscretion, might curtail clerks’ dreams of upward mobility. Unseemly conduct might anger genteel ladies who policed the boundaries of appropriate interactions between men and women. Clerks could take advantage of all the city had to offer young single men, but they stood to pay a high price for fast living. As writers affirmed, clerks could be both “dangerous” and “endangered” urban figures. Their quest for cultural capital through their relationships with women was alternately empowering and fraught with uncertainty.7

Private Pictures and Prostitutes Even if he did feel pangs of guilt, Hoffman thought that the opportunity to observe the naked young women through the hole in his boardinghouse door was a welcome perquisite of cheap living, merely one aspect in the project of becoming a man who exerted control over women. Inside the cover of his diary, he affixed two images. One is a miniature trade card showing the Albany dry goods store in which he worked before coming to Manhattan, framed by laurels and leaves on blue paper. Above this image Hoffman wrote “Albany 1848” to memorialize the year he had spent there. This was the place in which his mercantile career had begun, the prologue to the commercial autobiography that he was keeping in the diary. Below this portrait is another miniature rimmed in gold, portraying a woman who wears a dark green dress, yellow gloves, and a white hat, carries a riding crop, and leans on a rail fence. She has brown hair that curls in ringlets, framing a brooch that hangs from her neck. She looks boldly at the viewer, her red lips pursed into a smile, her rosy cheeks coloring an otherwise pale white face. She might have been a real woman, and this

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image of her a souvenir. Conversely, she might have been an imaginary, mass-produced fantasy woman. Hoffman’s placement of the two images on the inside cover of his diary illustrates that he considered them significant statements about himself. He was a man of business with a reputable pedigree; he was also a man consumed by his sexual desire for idealized women. There is much evidence to suggest that young men in their late teens and early twenties were more comfortable watching and writing about women than interacting with them. Indeed, clerks often idealized the opposite sex in their diary entries or in public discussions about women. In April 1849, Edward Tailer attended a meeting of the Knickerbocker Literary Association, at which a fellow clerk recited an “essay upon ‘woman.’” The speech enumerated women’s supposed virtues, discussing the ways in which “every true woman” found “a husband worthy of her.” “[H]er indefatigable constancy for man” meshed with “that hidden spirit, which . . . compels [man] to look upon woman, as a helpmate given him, by the Omnipotent to assuage and ease the toils which beset him.” Tailer had fashioned a paean to the creed of domesticity, whose proponents believed that women’s private virtues complemented the actions of public men. In recording his notes on the speech, however, he made a curious slip, referring to the “never dying love, which animates the breasts of every true woman.” Realizing his mistake, Tailer emphatically crossed out “the breasts of.” In remembering remarks about the ideal woman, he had inadvertently and embarrassingly embodied her.8 Tailer’s furtive attempts to obliterate offensive material from his diary exhibit his inner turmoil in regard to sexual desire. On fashionable Fourth Street, a world away from Hoffman’s low-rent Anthony Street boardinghouse, Tailer confronted the conflicting imperatives of being both a respectable and a powerful man in his parents’ dining room. Sitting down for breakfast in September 1850, he began to read an article reprinted from the lofty London publication Westminster Review, a dense, 58-page meditation on four recent scholarly works about prostitution in European cities. The essay’s author declared that a “cure” for prostitution could only be discovered through a “courageous and unshrinking” investigation of its causes, attacking those who weakly mumbled that their “refinement” forbade them from addressing such an indecorous topic. In his review of contemporary literature on the subject, the author revealed the ways “courageous” manliness commingled uneasily with bourgeois “refinement,” arguing that respectable men should be both intimately knowledgeable

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Figure 6.2. Detail of the interior front cover of William Hoffman’s Diary (1847–1850). Negative number 81060d, Collection of The New-York Historical Society.

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about the problem and remotely detached from its notorious practices and participants. They should not have sex with prostitutes, because doing so repudiated the values of self-control and domesticity that provided social stability. Yet they were also compelled to witness prostitutes’ suffering and sympathize with them, called to see the pathos in their “tragic and touching romances” and offer them, if possible, charity and goodwill.9 This book review was both prurient and fastidious. Its author uncovered the “evils” and “mysteries” of the metropolis even as he told readers how to engage with them. He included long passages of an 1836 work on prostitution in the original French to assist his educated audience in proving their erudition as well as their sympathy for courtesans. But some readers might not have been willing to read about prostitution in ways sanctioned by the tight-laced Westminster Review. Some young men read about sex and prostitutes for fun in a variety of publications catering to sporting men that revealed and reveled in the sexual conquests and liaisons of their readers. The Westminster Review author, when he excoriated slang—“slut, strumpet, wretch”—for being outside the realm of respectable speech, offered immature young men opportunities to laugh among friends and snicker at the misfortunes of impoverished women. Tailer wrote in his diary that a fellow gymnast had given him the article, appending “an urgent request that I should carefully peruse and note the contents.” Tailer made no comment about these instructions, but the friend might have been joking: what better way to tease a chum than by evoking the solemn tone—lampooned in sporting publications—of contemporary advice-book writers intent on cataloguing the many dangers that cities posed to young people? Male readers could thus remain detached, but not in the seriously appropriate and “courageous” way the author had intended. Moreover, the joke was a friendly jab at Tailer: it was funny precisely because he was not disposed to partake of the racier elements of sporting culture. Later that day, when he left the commercial house in which he clerked, he hustled to the Battery, the location of a lessthan-reputable evening promenade. If he had wanted to find a prostitute on a typical afternoon, he might have done so there. According to an 1842 letter to the editor of The Whip, “respectable looking you[n]g men” degraded themselves in illicit rendezvous on the Battery with “the lowest order of lewd women.” One dry goods clerk became a subject of ridicule not only for walking on the Battery with a prostitute well known for her habitual inebriation but also for trespassing across the boundaries of democratic refinement. He had dared to appear in broad daylight with “the fur

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on his hat brushed the wrong way.” But Tailer actually went to the Battery to witness the ideal woman, Jenny Lind, and enhance his own reputation by joining “a crowd of several thousand” hoping to catch a glimpse of her as she was about to sing for the first time on American soil.10 Invariably for young male clerks, tramping along city streets meant multiple chances to observe beautiful women. On one occasion, walking with the bookkeeper of his firm, Tailer wrote that “Broadway was never better filled with the fair and lovely daughters of Gotham, then [sic] it was upon this evening, and many were the smiles and frowns, which were indiscriminately showered upon Haynes and I as we toiled with the current upwards.” Why did women mix flirting smiles with frowns at Tailer and his companion? Other entries in his diary reveal that he enjoyed observing women on Broadway in order to “criticis[e]” them among his young male cohort. Perhaps the frowns were not indiscriminate at all: the women may have overheard this criticism and been none too happy about it.11 Clerks also focused on women they identified as prostitutes, coached by articles like the one in Westminster Review or urban mysteries penned by Ned Buntline and George Lippard. Clerks were wary of the seductive power of prostitutes. They cared little for the social and economic circumstances that forced women to sell sex to urban men, and cast themselves as the endangered parties on the streets even though many critics deemed clerks dangerous to women. In January 1850, after finishing work and eating a late dinner at an oyster cellar with his firm’s porter and day laborers, Tailer began to walk from the corner of Wall Street and Broadway to his parents’ home in Fourth Street, a distance of some two miles. Hustling up “that great thoroughfare alone” in the dark, Tailer “met two of those frail and seducing daughters of Eve” just blocks from his destination. These women were trying to “entice some amorous mortal, to the would seem be palaces inhabited by them—where outwardly they would feign make all believe, that nothing but happiness reigns within.” Tailer, in his telling, escaped their snare, bolstered by his sturdy moral fiber. He knew the confidence game that prostitutes played, portraying “deeds of sin and iniquity” as harmless, happy amusements. Tailer exposed their lies in his diary with language reminiscent of the period’s urban pulp fiction: “when the veil is thrown aside, then is the sickening picture portrayed in its true colors.”12 Pulling back a figurative curtain to illuminate urban immorality was a central theme of both “city-mysteries” fiction and reform nonfiction.

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Tailer examined this topic often in his diary. On one occasion, he found Broadway “litterally swarmed with the most depraved of women.” Since men like himself successfully exhibited self-restraint, “daughters of Eve” or women he only guessed were prostitutes successfully hooked “the lasivious and lewd man” who was morally bankrupt already. For Tailer, a problematic aspect of prostitution was its commodification of sex—the economic transaction made it illegitimate. Both parties to that transaction, the woman who sold sex and the man who forked over “filthy lucre” to fulfill his sexual appetites, would lose their “virtue” and “self respect,” two highly prized attributes associated with evangelical attempts to square commodity capitalism and Christian morality. Some things should not be bought and sold.13 Yet urban observers were not always able to determine women’s identities with certainty, so young men like Tailer also adopted the reportorial style of nonfiction writers and reformers such as George Foster to better understand the dangers that cities and their inhabitants posed to men. In March 1850, Tailer sought refuge from a rainstorm in a Broadway stagecoach. There he laid eyes on a “beautiful and loquacious creature” who “was reclining in one corner, and from her apparel,” he reasoned, she was “one of that numerous class of sewing girls who abound in such numbers in this metropolis.” Accepting the prevailing belief that surveillance alone could shed light on people’s inner motives and desires, Tailer took special pains to condemn what he deemed to be the young woman’s overt sexuality. “She was determined to interest an old fellow who was seated next to her, and it was my amusement,” he wrote, “to see how . . . he was wrapped up in her conversation, and was perfectly lost amongst the shoals of passion.” Tailer admitted to have “thought much about the artful wiles” of the sewing girl, “to entrap those thrown off their guard by fair looks and sweet and insinuating words.” His invective in these passages underscores the antebellum concern about confidence, swindling, and seduction. He would dispassionately observe, rather than be fooled by, a young woman whom he thought might be a prostitute. But watching another man succumb to the sewing girl’s “artful wiles” was capital “amusement.” Tailer’s notes on his observations were a way to overcome his own missteps in regard to sexual desire—chronicling the excessive passions of others, combined with crossing out objectionable phrases in his diary, proved that he could control himself. Yet in his diary, Tailer reveals that he deeply mistrusted women in general. A few months after watching the sewing girl, he concluded that some of “the fair and apparently happy Ladies of

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Gotham” parading on Broadway enhanced their “beauty” by using “art,” modifying their appearance “to renewed advantage.” He was linking these ladies with prostitutes who wore cosmetic masks to obscure who they really were. Ladies who frowned at Tailer may just have been rebuffing his untoward overtures, but if he connected respectable women on the streets with sewing girls or prostitutes in his commentary with friends, there is little wonder that he met with some dirty looks from female passersby.14

Bloods, Puppy Dogs, and Cheap Store Monkeys As women’s public disapproval of Tailer shows, clerks’ attempts to exhibit their respectability and power took shape as contemporaries variously displayed interest, indifference, sympathy, or disdain for them. Nowhere was this more true than in the sporting culture unfolding in the barrooms, brothels, and gambling halls of the antebellum metropolis. Clerks not only were centrally important participants in this culture but were often identified as subjects for special examination in publications catering to a young, male clientele bent on partaking in sporting life or examining it from afar. An astonishing variety of printed materials—books, newspapers, and erotica—helped to unite young men around a variety of shared interests in sports, drinking, and illicit sex. It is often impossible to distinguish reality from fiction in the fanciful stories, investigative exposés, and letters in these “flash” publications, but the texts of sporting culture were pitched at a different tone than the traditional prescriptive texts written by concerned ministers and moralists. Varnished with a faux-bourgeois concern for propriety, flash authors taught lessons by humiliation and titillated their overwhelmingly male audience with ribald stories. These print sources playfully attempted to govern young male behavior, invoking the possibility of serious scolding by an outraged community but actually valorizing the excesses of male sexuality. Editors playfully humiliated clerks whether they were striving for gentility or for sexual access to women. Simultaneously, they criticized clerks for lounging and for a lack of self-assurance in the bedroom. They also turned a few of them into cult heroes, providing sexually inexperienced young men with role models.15 Young men used these publications to solidify bonds with like-minded men, and they depended upon friends “in the know” to connect them with the ephemera of sporting culture. In 1847, John Ingalls, a Hartford clerk, wrote to his chum Trumbull Smith, a Hartford native who clerked for a Manhattan saddle manufacturer in Maiden Lane. Ingalls longed to

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return to the larger city to be with Smith, dreaming of the “fun we could have” in the metropolis. While another correspondent mimicked the prescriptive literature when he warned Smith “to be denying of the many pleasures found in N[ew]. Y[ork]. and especially those that take young men from the Country down to death,” the fun Ingalls had in mind revolved around those very “pleasures”: the male camaraderie of sporting culture and its emphasis on dreams of sexual access to and power over women. Just as Tailer’s friend might have snickered at the hysterical tone of the period’s reform literature about prostitution, so too did these young men hear and disregard the advice that they be on their best behavior. In lieu of a visit to New York, Ingalls sent money to Smith so that his friend could procure him a daguerreotype of a beautiful young woman in their social circle and “a pack of ‘French transparent cards.’” Ingalls told Smith knowingly, “you know what I have reference to”: the cards “show some rather fancy pictures” of naked women “when held to the light.” In another letter to Smith, Ingalls wrote that their friend “James says the cards cost not far from a dollar and that you will find no difficulty in trying to get them.” There was a network of young men who knew where to obtain the cards and circulated images and publications associated with sporting life. When Ingalls told Smith he was “lonely,” he desired Smith’s company in addition to a woman’s, to strengthen their friendship while examining images of women, respectable and otherwise, and talking in open terms about having their way with these women.16 Had Ingalls not been so preoccupied with sporting culture in New York, he might have found a willing community of young men in his native Hartford, according to a racy book entitled The Green Family; or, The Veil Removed. A handwritten note in the margins of the copy owned by the American Antiquarian Society proclaims, “This book was written by seven young men, who had a room in the Waverly—thier [sic] names are all mentioned in the book.” This clue suggests that, despite the name of a solitary author on the title page, this story was a corporate effort written by and on behalf of sporting men. The book’s stated aim was akin to the Reverend Todd’s: the “virtue-loving community” needed to know about the “designing men” who lure “the unsuspecting and innocent to ignominy and moral destruction, which is worse than death.”17 Yet The Green Family was no moralistic tract, for its author(s) took pleasure in describing the “lustful and unholy passions” that sporting men validated among peers. The story’s protagonist, country boy James Green, obtains a job as a store porter in Hartford and works so “industriously and

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dutifully” that he earns the respect of employers who promote him to a clerkship. Green’s wardrobe grows to include a “fine ruffled shirt and collar” and “a glistening pair of patent leathers.” He has “his hair . . . frizzled” and nurtures “a most thriving embryo goatee,” taking on the guise of “a dandy—an imitation ‘upper crust’ man—‘one of the bloods.’” He begins to read “wild adventure” novels that he checks out of the library of the local Young Men’s Institute. His discussions with other clerks about more scandalous reading material teach him the lesson “that every young man of the age of twenty was a fool, unless” he enjoys “the closest intimacy with a number of young ladies.” His reading tastes expand further to include Aristotle’s Masterpiece and one of Eugène Becklard’s treatises on physiology, works that, under the guise of anatomical education, introduced him to frank discussions of sex. Green’s reading list connects him with a network of clerks who patronize taverns, bowling alleys, and brothels to satiate the “passions” the book’s author(s) had condemned in their introduction. Indeed, art imitated life. While searching for a clerkship on his first visit to Manhattan, William Hoffman paused to buy books for his brother Daniel, at the time still clerking upstate. Venturing into a bookstore, he met with “extraordinary success” by purchasing the “work of Aristottle[;] . . . Midwifery; . . . And a neatly bound work [with] Gilt edges giving an advice to Married. Etc.” This was a business transaction: Hoffman obtained the volumes at a discount on the “premium” price that Daniel had “anticipat[ed],” which he knew would be “pleasing in the highest degree to” his brother. But the “Etc.” stood for how pleasing the sexually explicit discussions in these books might be to young men.18 William Hoffman tried to keep these discussions and his feelings about them under wraps. The fictional James Green revels in them and becomes “a favorite generally at all the sport-shops in town”—“a ‘b’hoy,’ a ‘game-cock,’ a ‘gallus feller.’” At this point in the text, the author(s) examine some of the leading lights of Hartford’s night life. There is the gaggle of languid dry goods clerks at the bowling alley, who “rolled ‘merely for the exercise.’” Parched from their hearty “exertions,” they guzzle bottles of champagne. Ridiculing the commercial writers who believed that clerks would inevitably become men of business by working hard and cultivating character, the author(s) snidely remark that “the company were as jovial as was consistent with the character of such respectable, moral, and steady young men.” “Charles J——,” “a spruce young gentleman . . . clerk in the dry good’s store of Barrow, Phelps and Co.,” is “well known as a regular lady-killer.” Although his reputation as a seducer precedes him

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around town, “no one could easier obtain the company of any woman” due to his reputation for sexual prowess: “[c]ertain it is that he wielded a powerful weapon, whose onslaught no ardent female could parry or thrust aside.” With a wink and a nod to local participants in sporting culture, The Green Family chronicles this clerk’s successful attempt to seduce a married woman into sleeping with him, legitimating rather than condemning his conduct. In the process, the book takes aim not only at the clerks who swill wine and seduce wives but also at the hollowness of concepts central to bourgeois ideas about self-making such as “respectability” and “character.”19 Flash newspapers published in the early 1840s also validated the leisure endeavors of urban “bloods.” Like the author(s) of The Green Family, editors often adopted the tone—even as they mocked the substance—of the prescriptive literature, perhaps to protect themselves from attacks by moral reformers. While ministers and commercial observers hoped to reform young men’s behavior by appealing to religious scruples, memories of loved ones at home, and duty to employers, sporting press editors threatened to humiliate young men for their scandalous conduct. One paper was even entitled The Whip, evoking its ability to cause discomfort for readers. In “Wants to Know” gossip columns, editors or informants exposed, in veiled terms, the illicit activities of sporting men in New York as well as in smaller cities and towns within the orbit of these Manhattan media sources. Some of the offenders moved from the center to the edges of the sporting press’s circulating area. The Flash condemned “J.P.,” a Manhattan dry goods clerk, for abandoning his “wife and child in New Jersey” and implicated him as the father of another child by a “woman at Kingston, Ulster County,” New York—the boy “looks much like him.” Letter writers asked if clerks would marry the women they seduced or merely continue to “pay . . . board” to retain them as kept women. Informants wrote gleefully about brothel stakeouts, recounting how they accosted clerks leaving the premises who sheepishly offered hush money to keep their full names a secret.20 These networks of surveillance resembled those created by Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency to monitor the creditworthiness of commercial houses. And just like merchants who called Tappan’s reporters “spies,” the men accused of indiscretions by the sporting press bristled at assaults upon their character. To protect themselves from litigation, flash press editors typically only printed the culprits’ initials, thus obscuring identities and embellishing the mysteries surrounding them. In a September 1842

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issue, the Rake eagerly asked “[w]hether Z——, the grocer’s clerk, will whip the man who puts him in the RAKE,” hoping to stir up controversy that its informants had created. Flash press editors celebrated their publications’ ability to dole out punishment and entertainment at the same time. They delighted in hounding young men who now had to look over their shoulders when they had acted improperly, for they might be left muttering, “D——N ME, IF I AINT IN THE WHIP.” Sporting men who were guilty of the same sins could enjoy reading these stories for their voyeuristic potential—the punishment of fellow sports was enjoyable. Moreover, young men who did not participate in sporting culture could learn about this notorious underworld from the safety of the parlor or counter.21 Flash press editors and letter writers were prominent critics of retail clerks’ work and their early closing movement. Channeling the republican critique of luxury and its attendant effeminacy, the authors of these columns condemned clerks for their central roles in the consumer economy and the unmanliness of retail labor. That critique inevitably expanded to include negative assessments of clerks outside of work, allowing flash press writers to question the meanings of respectability, gentility, and civility. A contributor to the “Wants to Know” section of the Rake, for instance, asked “[i]f that chowder-headed gentleman counter-jumper in Varick Street thinks he is anybody”—suggesting that the airs he put on were foolish rather than genteel. Certainly his efforts to appear refined were not successful, since the “girl” with whom he was intimately involved was poor and sold fruit on the streets. The sarcasm of this commentary bit two ways: counter jumpers were not gentlemen, but the word “gentleman” itself had become so meaningless as to make anyone who tried to claim it for himself an object of ridicule.22 These clerks deserved special derision because they were dandies— letters addressed to 1830s precursors of the Whip, Flash, and Rake called them “puppy dogs” and “Cheap Store Monkeys.” Clerks’ wardrobes and affectations, borne of their ambition for power and prestige, missed the mark of egalitarianism and refinement. In introducing the “Bloods of Broadway Pave,” the Rake described a “clerk to a Spanish importer” as being a “weak puny youth” who affected “a drawling tone” of voice and developed “insolent manners.” In an attempt to deflate the clerk’s ego, the essay revealed that “[h]is evenings are spent in low bawdy houses or rum mills; it is a mystery where he obtains money to support his beastialities; for further particulars we refer to his woman, Moll T.” Humiliation

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popped this clerk’s pretensions: he frequented rude places of entertainment, his hunger for fun outpaced his meager funds, and “his woman,” perhaps a prostitute, had an intimate knowledge of—if not a managing interest in—his social affairs that strayed far from what was respectable.23 As an occupational group, clerks were mere pretenders to the respect and authority that genteel manners and behaviors were supposed to grant them. As a result, they should have been more circumspect and humble. A letter to the New York Sporting Whip exposed the exploits of a New York store clerk who returned to his hometown of Hackensack, New Jersey, “every other Saturday” in order “to sneak about town with lies in his mouth about his most intimate friends. His parents,” the author declared, “are highly respected residents of this place, and on [them] he is a libel.” He probably showed off a bit, as Hoffman did when he returned to the countryside as a drummer, with embossed business cards and an attitude to match. The Whip’s correspondent sanctioned idle gossip about an idle gossiper. He cast aspersions on the young man’s dancing abilities, an important aspect of refined self-presentation. The dandy clerk’s moves were “the most laughable of all comicalities we ever beheld,” similar to “the equestrian evolutions of a hog on the ice.”24 Clerks heaped disrepute upon themselves not only for what they did and how they did it but also for where and with whom they spent their leisure time. One article in the Rake described the various “grades” of drinking establishments called porterhouses, in essence mimicking bourgeois efforts to classify urban society. At the bottom of the pile were the “three cent ratgut” houses that served “tired coal-heavers, fire boys, and emancipated cobblers.” Just “a peg higher” were “a superior sort of ‘threecent’ shops” whose clientele included “retail dry good’s clerks, mechanics who ‘steam it some,’ cartmen, and ‘young men with small means’ but great expectations. The all absorbing topics of conversation here are politics on a small scale, balls, parties, and the rights of working men.” After describing more “exclusive six-cent shops,” the author of this essay places one establishment, the Pewter Mug, at the apex of refinement in part because its patrons numbered “most of the gentlemen connected with the New York Press,” including Horace Greeley. This article was a self-serving attempt by newspapermen to place themselves among the power brokers of the city, but it does show that clerks’ aspirations for economic and cultural capital had currency only in their own valuation. Many contemporaries lumped them with other laborers, working to achieve insignificant political and social goals.25

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The sporting papers did not criticize clerks for participating in the racier aspects of urban life but rather condemned them for violating precepts of the sports’ code of honor. The Whip called out a group of Wall Street clerks, not for going on a “spree” that took them into several well-known city brothels but for using “queer,” or counterfeit, currency to obtain the wine and women on offer there. The editor imagined these clerks discussing the subject among themselves: “John, how much bad money have you got? . . . Dan, lend me that V you bought to-day, or the bill Jane gave you last night.” According to the values of the sporting press, young men “heretofore . . . considered respectable” lost the esteem of their sporting contemporaries not because they slept with prostitutes but because they accumulated economic or cultural capital in ways that the bloods deemed inappropriate.26 The Weekly Rake published a “Warning” to a “‘nice young man’ who rejoices in the cognomen of ‘Tall William’ and performs the arduous duties of clerk, in a wholesale store in Pearl” Street. The paper’s editor, in placing quotation marks around two phrases, played on the divide between prescriptive literature and sporting publications. The first quoted phrase evoked ministers’, parents’, and employers’ assumptions that clerks were respectable men in the making. The second quoted phrase, jarring when placed alongside the first, was probably a nickname the clerk used among his fellow bloods. The author informed this clerk that he “should be careful how he takes a certain little strawberry girl to a house” of assignation in Orange Street, likely in the notorious Five Points. “You are right in enjoying her,” the author wrote encouragingly, but the clerk needed to honor his promise “to send her to school.” Another epistle in the Flash condemned a “scoundrel counter-jumper, named John H——s,” who endeavored to accomplish “the ruin of a beautiful young girl, . . . the only daughter of very respectable parents residing in Burton Street.” After she became pregnant, her parents accepted the clerk’s solemn word that he would marry her. Promises given were not promises kept, however, and the clerk “decamped and fled, nobody knows where.” The correspondent speculated that the clerk had also absconded with some of his employer’s money, and he hoped that the “vagabond” would be “apprehended, and obliged to support his tape-and-bobbin offspring, under pain of imprisonment.”27 The sporting papers acknowledged that it was difficult to identify the bad clerks. In a Flash piece, a “good, nice young” grocery clerk earned the respect of his neighbors because he “always went to church on Sundays,

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and carried a prayer book.” A “model of transcendent virtue,” this young man nevertheless seduced a servant woman who worked for a family in Madison Street. As her pregnancy became apparent, the clerk “decamped after hearing that the city was about to be burdened with another addition to the long list of responsibles” he had conceived. Sporting press editors questioned whether clerks who promised and then refused to marry the young women who carried their children were “honorable and upright gentlem[e]n.” These editors claimed to be on the side of “justice” against the “scamp” who refused to do the right thing. They did not argue, as evangelicals, reformers, and well-to-do authors of prescriptive tracts did, that clerks should abide by bourgeois values and behaviors to become gentlemen. Instead, they mocked those values, behaviors, and labels as well as the young men who tried to attain or transcend them.28 Promises of exposure might have been designed to curb bad behavior, but that was not the only cultural work these newspapers performed. Surely, young clerks might have worried about the publicity of these announcements, but these squibs were also free advertisements that they were sporting men having fun in gambling halls, billiards parlors, or brothels. To their friends, they might have looked less like fools and more like studs, taking advantage of what one historian has called the “autonomy of youth” open to them in the city. In sporting culture, it was good to be a scoundrel.29 And yet many of these young men were not sexually experienced, a fact that kept them reading. Authors ridiculed shy and “verdant” young men and offered to teach them how they could have their way with women. While clerks provided fodder for the gossip columns, some perused these texts for information as well as entertainment. In one erotic book, The Life and Adventures of Cicily Martin, a young clerk finds the heroine naked and asleep in his boardinghouse bed. Timidly assessing how he should proceed, the clerk sits next to her and cops a feel. As Cicily awakens, she catches him in the act, for which he profusely apologizes. Stories in this genre asserted, however, that despite bourgeois conventions about women’s “passionless” reserve, some members of the fair sex were eager to play the aggressor in sexual relationships. Cicily, for example, encourages the clerk in his amorous “embraces” because her own “passions had but just got fairly excited.” As urban observers Hoffman and Tailer did in making comparisons between virtuous ladies and less-than-reputable women, readers of Cicily Martin could obscure their own desires for and mistreatment of poor women by foisting a lack of self-control onto

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the women they seduced. Other texts portrayed women as easy targets who eventually would be overpowered by men’s sexual prowess. Male authors contended that this was harmless fun rather than rape. These texts and the sexually explicit images that accompanied them would not have disappointed young men who inculcated the behaviors of a misogynistic culture while also living vicariously through or comparing their own experiences to the fictional sexual exploits of other men.30 The indictment records of New York’s district attorney illuminate the ways in which this fantasy played out in reality. John L. Cregier, a New York clerk, entered the Bleecker Street apartment of Catharine Agnew at eleven o’clock on the night of February 22, 1860, “caught hold of her and attempted to throw her on the bed.” When Agnew “resisted,” Cregier “caught hold of her and held her firmly.” Agnew “screamed for assistance” and Stephen Christopher, a Ninth Precinct police officer, came to her rescue, taking Cregier into custody. Agnew accused Cregier “with attempting an indecent assault upon her person,” asking that he “be arrested and dealt with as the law directs.” Christopher added that when he arrived on the scene, the clerk “had his fist raised as if he intended to strike” his victim. The policeman also recorded that “Cregier laughed” as he was escorted out of the building, “saying it was all right.” The struggle to subdue women, indulged by young male readers of books such as Cicily Martin, was part of a fantasy in which women’s passions would be aroused to the point that they would eventually enjoy being raped. And for rapists, everything would be all right in a court system unwilling to take all victims’ claims seriously. Despite Agnew’s explicit testimony, the district attorney only indicted Cregier for the crime of assault and battery rather than rape, suggesting that he and members of the grand jury did not consider Agnew to be a reputable lady.31 Discussions about rape often revolved around perceived affronts against husbands’ and brothers’ control over the women in their household rather than women’s suffering. “Criminal connection” cases also typically unfolded as competition between men. In 1853, the New York Times reported that a jealous husband in the District of Columbia shot and severely wounded his wife and a dry goods clerk with a revolver after he found the pair “en dishabille” in “his chamber.” Both city dailies and sporting papers framed adultery as a threat to a husband’s authority in his home.32 Richard Robinson, the New York clerk who allegedly murdered prostitute Helen Jewett in 1836, famously escaped punishment for the heinous crime. Under the shadow of suspicion, Robinson revealed how the striver’s

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Figure 6.3. Frontispiece, The Life and Adventures of Cicily Martin (Boston: Sinclair and Bagley, 1846). American Antiquarian Society. 196

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ethic might be interwoven with male prerogatives in the bedroom. He attempted to deflect criticism by exclaiming, “Do you think I would blast my brilliant prospects by so ridiculous an act? I am a young man of only nineteen years of age . . . , with most brilliant prospects.” By appealing to the public in this way, Robinson evoked the narrative of clerks’ impending success that held such value in American commercial culture. Many citizens who eagerly read the penny press publications for information about the story and the young clerks who supported their hero by dressing like him during the trial wanted to believe that he was “the innocent boy” because his career trajectory appeared to point upward. His low annual salary of sixty dollars and accusations that he embezzled from his employer suggested, however, that he was a drudge and a swindler. His activities in the brothel demonstrated that he was thrilled to be part of a sporting culture based upon sexual experience, not innocence. The bonds formed among men in that culture provided Robinson with fame and power, temporary though both were. He could boast about having sex with many prostitutes and seducing married women—“[h]alf the women in New York were in love with me,” he was reported to have said after his acquittal. He called a servant woman who passed letters for him “a damning deceitful lying bitch,” as he made light of his own murder trial. Robinson valued being one of the bloods, and yet still cloaked himself in the ideal of the striver in order to escape punishment for his crime. By reading the sporting papers and visiting brothels, young clerks could create bonds with other men based upon competition and camaraderie and establish power over women, authority that they lacked in other areas of their lives.33

With Her I Was Much Pleased Many young clerks hoped to wield power more permanently as patriarchs of their own households. They charted a course toward marriage and attempted to find their own Jenny Lind—a lady they considered morally, financially, and socially superior to the women they encountered in sporting culture. Indeed, courting rituals could be mastered in some respects within that culture: relationships with high-class prostitutes, for instance, were often predicated not just upon sex but upon notions of romantic love. Jewett demanded love letters and gifts from her clients in return for her services. The young men who proclaimed their love for her knew that they were not alone in stating their affections, but the pretense of romance

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and the courting manners glossing these relationships would help young men when they interacted with women they hoped to marry.34 Clerks’ efforts to find a bride often transpired in more reputable arenas than the “genteel” brothel. While Henry Patterson may have desired independence in his city living arrangements, he relied upon his female cousins to get him invitations to parties at the homes of respectable young ladies. Clerks such as Robert Graham received invitations to parties whose participants included women from important commercial families. These occasions provided young men with opportunities to meet, talk, dance, and sing with intelligent, vivacious, and cultured members of the opposite sex with apparently minimal interference from parents. Once he had obtained an invitation Patterson became part of a “usual circle,” making these parties regular events on his social calendar. Typically, he described them as “genteel affair[s],” though some parties were “too fashionable” or “too formal” for his liking. He much preferred the unsupervised and relaxed get-togethers among the friends he knew best to ones in which he encountered too many “strangers.” These gatherings sometimes included music provided by a fiddler or pianist or “kissing plays”—staged dramas that permitted intimacy between members of the opposite sex that “caused a great deal of merriment” among the assembled young men and women. Guests invited to these parties often did not return to their own homes until after midnight.35 Invitations to balls put a premium on learning how to dance gracefully—spinning like a hog on ice would win few admirers in fashionable circles. In October 1853, as he began to comment more often in his diary about ladies he considered potential wives, Tailer attempted to find a dancing school suitable to his self-valuation. Upon surveying the options, he wrote favorably of Saracco’s on Bond Street. Although twice the expense of the “A. Dadworth Academy,” this establishment had “young Ladies constantly on hand in the ball room ready to dance with those who are sufficiently advanced, whilst at” the competitor’s “you are compelled to dance with men as partners.” Yet dancing with women was not enough— they must be unquestionably virtuous in character. The “dancing girls” at a third school were much like the prostitutes and sewing girls he encountered on the street. They “bear bad characters,” he wrote, concerned that they “may tempt those who are thrown in their society to swerve from the paths of virtue,” which was easier to do at that establishment because “a bar room is off the ball room.” Needless to say, Saracco’s dignified milieu

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and clientele best served Tailer’s interest in accumulating cultural capital for the marriage market.36 As they did in various urban locations, young men spent a great deal of time considering eligible young ladies’ appearances. Recording in his diary his memories of a fancy dress ball in Saratoga Springs, Robert Graham listed the examples of beauty he had witnessed. Miss Worrell had the “prettiest and most exquisitely formed foot I ever saw” and moved “elegant[ly]” on the dance floor. Miss Morgan impressed him too, “a very pretty girl, [with] fine eyes, and most accomplished manners.” Miss Myer earned lukewarm praise for being “really pretty, and certainly a very sweet girl.” Miss Ward was “graceful, amiable and intelligent.” Running out of compliments, Graham called Miss Bedford “graceful as a fawn, with an easy unrestrained educated carriage—lovely girl. [S]ings also exquisitely every morning.”37 Graham could write rapturously about the female beauty that surrounded him in the resort town, but he knew he must be on his best behavior when he interacted with refined women there. Ladies were entitled, according to the prescriptive literature on manners, to “cut” or ignore ill-mannered men. They could, that is, attempt to escape the gaze of young men who commented upon their appearances. Polite, honorable men were expected to defend ladies’ reputations, thus making courting ritual, much like sporting culture, a means whereby men could compete with each other for respect. Graham was both a flâneur and a defender of female honor. While he heaped praise upon the dashing “beau[x]” visiting Saratoga who had earned their stripes on battlefields in Mexico, he bravely defended the character and person of his cousin Louise against men who were neither manly nor mannerly. As they promenaded together on the piazza of the United States Hotel, the Grahams encountered a Kentuckian named Tevis who was evidently interested in walking with Louise. Tevis’s interest soon grew bothersome, since he “would relate long love stories about young Ladies whom he had met under very auspicious circumstances” and expound upon the meaning of “the word Love.” Graham “became disgusted with the man, and as Lu said she did not like him,” he “determined to put a stop to it.” “[H]e is of very good family in Kentucky,” Graham acknowledged, “but that is no reason why he should be a Gentleman.” Like the authors of the sporting press, Robert believed that labels meant little when unaccompanied by etiquette or honor. Ensconced in a watering-hole patronized by the rich and reputable, far away from the republic of broadcloth in which all men could appear to be gentlemen in

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dress and deportment, men who had economic capital reprimanded their peers who lacked cultural capital. When Tevis later accosted the pair, Louise fled the piazza for the safety of her hotel room, giving Robert the opportunity to rebuke the southerner for his conduct. Tevis claimed not to know that “it was very impolite to address a Lady when she was walking with another Gentleman.” When Graham made it clear that he was offended by Tevis’s unwelcome approaches, the Kentuckian bristled: at home a “young Lady never walked with her Cousin when she could get any one better.” Dumbfounded by Tevis’s rude conduct and his ignorance of refined manners, Graham asked the southerner “if he wished to insult” him. “[A] young Lady was always the best judge of her own Company,” he retorted. Tevis demurred from escalating the war of words, explaining that he “never intended any thing wrong,” and apologized for running afoul of “some points of etiquette which we know nothing about in Kentucky.” In his diary, Robert Graham insouciantly listed all of the pretty women with whom he danced at the ball, unafraid of the consequences because his writings were private. In his upbraiding of Tevis, Graham demonstrated that he knew better than the Kentuckian when romantic feelings should be made public or kept close to the vest. He could also take solace in the fact that his masculinity had been bolstered by defending a female friend against the unwanted advances of a strange man. Louise was merely a prop—clerks’ sense of themselves as men could be achieved or sustained through cultural competition with other men.38 In courting young ladies, though, clerks might need to master subservience to, rather than combativeness toward, other men. When Tailer began to court Agnes Suffern, it became clear that the young lady’s father, prominent city merchant Thomas Suffern, desired to put the brakes on a speedy engagement. While Agnes had “promised to accompany me to the American Art Union,” Tailer wrote, “upon calling at her Father’s mansion, she told me that she preferred going with a party, as her Father objected to her going out alone with gentlemen.” Disappointed in his hopes of spending time alone with her, Tailer accepted Agnes’s invitation to stay at the house for a cup of tea. He “spent the evening with them. She is evidently the flower of the flock, and I enjoyed myself very much.” Tailer was probably interested in a marital match for financial reasons as much as for love—Thomas Suffern’s wealth would propel his own business prospects far more than Agnes’s evident beauty—and he recognized the merit of moving slowly in the marriage market to gain the trust of future in-laws.39

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Financial stability and social competition aside, clerks also had to negotiate treacherous emotional terrain when they courted women. They were often knocked off balance. Englishman George Cayley fell in love with Justine (Tiny) Van Rensselaer, a member of one of the city’s wealthiest families. Van Rensselaer had, from Cayley’s description of her, a feisty and stubborn personality. On one evening in January 1844, he visited her and she “behaved shockingly.” “[S]he is the most reckless daredevil . . . I ever saw,” he wrote in his diary. “I partly hate her and partly love her.” If “it were not for the love,” he reasoned, “I should intensely dislike her.” Cayley believed that possessing these conflicting emotions was “a curious phenomenon,” writing in another diary entry that he looked forward more than anything else to “quarrel[ing] with” the woman he loved.40 And yet he also longed for her recognition, if he could not ultimately win her affection. He was competing with her, trying to win her approval with gentlemanly grace. On a Sunday visit to his employer’s home, Tiny was present but secluded in an upstairs room. Cayley sat down and made small talk with a mutual friend, Susan DePeyster, who clearly knew of Cayley’s interest in Tiny. “Well Cayley,” she broke the silence, “I know you want to ask about your friend Tiny.” He tried to play it cool, feigning indifference: “Do you think so[?]” Yet he could not put DePeyster off forever—she “was not satisfied, either she pitied me, or wa[n]ted to tantalize me more.” She ran upstairs to “tell Tiny to come down” as Cayley vainly protested, knowing that the petulant “Tiny would not obey so summary a summons.” Sure enough, DePeyster returned to give Cayley the message: “Tiny sends you her best wishes, and said she is very much engaged reading . . . so that she hopes you will excuse her.” “[T]his was said,” he wrote, “in rather a mischievous way.” DePeyster thought it would be fun to trifle with her friend’s emotions in the guise of formal parlor etiquette. For his part, Cayley maintained a stoic repose—the epitome of self-control—that obscured his feelings and maintained a veil of decorum. Yet he fought his emotions, claiming that it was “quite against my nature not to storm and look exceedingly sulky.” Triumphantly he noted that “Miss DeP[eyster]. was evidently mortified I took” the rebuff “with such philosophical coolness, although,” he admitted, “if her penetration had been more than skin deep she might have seen my philosophy was hollow.”41 Acting the part of the disappointed yet worthy suitor did little to diminish Cayley’s ardent passion for Van Rensselaer. He could not control himself; he could not give up the chase. Later in the spring, he courageously read a valentine of his own composition to her in the presence

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of her sister and his employer’s family. When he was finished, Tiny’s sister gave Cayley a backward compliment by insisting that the verses were not his own—surely they were more graceful than his own writing. Tiny, for her part, exclaimed that the poem was “beautiful, excellent,” though Cayley remained unsure of her true feelings. “I don’t know whether she was not humbugging me, for her conduct always might be interpreted 50 ways.” It is perhaps not surprising that when Cayley returned to England in April 1844, he did so without making peace with the fact that Tiny mastered her emotions more effectively than he did his.42 Not all of clerks’ efforts to court young women ended in grim attempts to control emotions. Some clerks were successful in their overtures, though it is also clear that love did not necessarily appear at first sight. When Henry Patterson met his future wife at her home on East Broadway, he wrote in his diary that she had been both “intelligent and agreeable, but not as polished and easy as her mother,” though she earned Patterson’s esteem for being “very unaffected and artless, and withal a good singer and pianist.” Yet he gave much more space in this diary entry to changes in his political philosophy after reading Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. Evidently, Eleanor Wright did not make as significant a first impression as discussions about “capital and labour” and “subsistence” agriculture.43 His conclusions about her character were more firmly established during subsequent encounters, illuminating the high standards of intelligence and decorum that Patterson had for the lady he would marry. “Her mind which I before thought was only a little above mediocrity, [is] the result of a careful, and elaborate education,” he wrote admiringly. Her thoughts were “characterized by freshness and originality; by clearness, vigour, strength, and harmony; producing a sound and critical judgement; with matured and truthful ideas on almost every subject,” he beamed. “In short, in her reason sits enthroned; not alone, but blended with warmth of feeling, tenderness, and an acuteness of perception, which renders her manners cordial, unreserved, and easy; but not loose, improper, too familiar, or unbecoming her years or sex.” Patterson characterized her as an ideal lady—not unlike Jenny Lind—who successfully attained respectability by carefully balancing its elements in perfect equilibrium. Such evident education and refinement brightened her unremarkable physiognomy: “Her countenance too, when lit up with animation and intelligence, seems less uninteresting.” With this tepid compliment, Patterson had stated his intentions in regard to his wife-to-be: “With Eleanor . . . I was much pleased.”44

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Clerks who avoided brothels and assignation houses read books about physiology—like the sporting protagonist of The Green Family—as they reached courting age to prepare themselves for their first sexual experience. Edward Tailer perused Michael Ryan’s book, The Philosophy of Marriage in Its Social, Moral, and Physical Relations and “found the work to be one worthy of consideration, containing information of an incalculable value to the unmarried man.” For all of his opposition to the commodification of sex in the city and his willingness to chuckle with friends about the fate of prostitutes, Tailer’s notes on Ryan’s text are devoid of emotion—mature, rational, gentlemanly. Ryan’s discussion of “the genital organs of his own as well as of the opposite sex,” as well as their “operations and the laws which govern them,” offered important details that young men “should be made acquainted [of] prior to entering upon the consummation of marriage.” His evident maturity masked anxieties. Sex was not simply another transaction in men’s and women’s lives. Yet as a striving man of business, he wanted more information to increase the value of his first sexual experience. He “exchanged” Ryan’s book for Alexander Walker’s Beauty; Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Woman, mentioning that he had already examined many of Walker’s “medical productions.” Although these texts might excite clerks’ prurient interest in sexuality—as The Green Family intimated—they also, as one historian has written, “emphasized decorum and bodily control” and helped regulate sexual expression in public, outcomes that accorded well with the bourgeois interest in managing the self and society. Just like the author of the Westminster Review article about prostitution, writers in this genre sought to cultivate a dignified public discourse about private acts in contradistinction to sporting publications.45

Very Good Sport for One Evening Sporting culture had a strong grip on many young men, however, even as they tied the marital knot. Samuel Edgerley, a 21-year-old New York store clerk, tried to hang onto the prerogatives of sporting culture even as he was about to marry a refined woman, Amelia Corbet. Early in 1859, about one week before their special day, Edgerley attended a midweek prayer meeting or Bible “class” at his church and then joined two friends for a night on the town that ended at a rather risqué “party” at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-Sixth Street. Earlier in the day, all he could talk about was “the coming ‘fete’”—his marriage—but all was forgotten

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amidst the “skylarking and fooling” uptown with other women. He discarded his first escort for another named Celia, whom he called “my second love!” “[S]he . . . is soft as ‘mush,’” he confided to his diary, “played and mussed with her as I pleased—rather loose girl.” After the encounter, his friend “Ned and I walked down, wouldn’t wait for a car—got to bed at 1/4 to Five!! awful!!” A few days later, he “went with Ned up to” what was evidently a house of ill fame, “‘Miss M——r’s’ gay as ever.” This was to be his “last nights spree with any strange girls” because after his marriage, he was “always going to stay home with my dear wife—oh my!” He turned in at approximately midnight, but had still found “very good sport for one evening.” With “[o]nly days to live” as a single man—suggesting that marriage represented social death and rebirth for young bridegrooms—Edgerley followed the tack of sporting publications that encouraged manly freedom and dominance in the bedroom but also threatened to expose lewd conduct. He playfully slapped himself on the wrist (“awful!!”) while he also patted himself on the back for achieving the power necessary to move easily between the brothel and his own household.46 The authors of prescriptive tracts sought to invigorate the ideals of refinement, gentility, and civility by placing them at the core of institutions such as the church, commercial house, and home. Many urban clerks wanted to cloak themselves in these ideals because they would assist them in accruing economic and cultural capital. Sporting publications repeatedly focused upon dandy clerks to show that these ideals did not automatically confer respect. This bawdy literature highlighted clerks’ varied interactions with women to impugn their timid or overly aggressive sexuality, even while editors tried to instruct men lacking in sexual experience and revel in the joys of masculine sexual power. As they had done with limited success in other urban venues, clerks at leisure contested the meanings of respectability and manliness with their contemporaries. In doing so, they often mapped their quest for authority among men onto the bodies of women. Clerks distinguished between bourgeois ladies fit to be praised or married and women of uncertain character fit to be ogled or seduced—or who might seduce them. Certainly, many clerks did not wish to associate with the rowdy and egalitarian culture of sporting men. They identified with commercial proprietors even if a competitive labor market and business world made it difficult for them to become independent merchants themselves. But clerks often wanted to have their cake and eat it, too, declaring their allegiance to the virtues of domestic refinement while also rejecting them. William

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Hoffman admired ideals of womanhood like Jenny Lind, ate Graham bread to diminish sexual urges, and succumbed to those desires by peeping through the hole in the door at the cheap boardinghouse. Edward Tailer observed and criticized the morals of poor and bourgeois women on city streets by filtering what he observed through a cultural discussion about appropriate behavior for refined men who could control themselves and others. Fellow clerks and other young men initiated by sporting publications enjoyed masculine freedom, rejecting parents’ and prescriptive writers’ teachings in favor of a more aggressive masculinity. Such were the potentially liberating and empowering options available to ambitious young men in the republic of broadcloth, as long as they were able to remain anonymous. Many clerks, despite longing for patriarchal control, also believed that their character and conduct had to be morally spotless. A transgression revealed might imperil their chance to strive for commercial greatness. Yet over the course of the antebellum period, clerks were not able to make unassailable claims to authority and respect in urban commercial houses, politics, streets, or leisure venues. As the economy’s uncertainties only grew in the 1850s, many clerks made peace with capitalism’s inequalities and helped recast economic structures and what it meant to be successful, respectable, and manly. From the wreck of many clerks’ fondest hopes, the postbellum middle class began to take shape.

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Conclusion Once More, Free

Bradford Morse was a good boy. In October 1852, he set sail from Boston to California on the clipper ship Flying Fish. He was eighteen years old and aspired to save his earnings and come to his family’s financial aid. His father, a bookkeeper at the Registry of Deeds in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, did not earn a salary sufficient to pay the family’s pew rent. Morse’s goal was to “buy a small farm” and “build that house in North Chelsea” for his parents. He hoped a promising clerkship in San Francisco’s burgeoning commercial sector would help him accomplish this feat. Early in 1853, he wrote home to inform his family that he had parlayed the “influence” of a wealthy cousin, Captain Henry Cheever, into a position with a footwear wholesaler. If he “practise[d] the strictest economy” and “conduct[ed himself] right,” he thought he would “certainly meet with success.” Morse, hoping to provide his family with a competency, also envisioned a Franklinesque career path for himself. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that clerks could combine sobriety, loyalty, honesty, and hard work to become successful, independent men.1 Although kinship ties offered Morse the opportunity to advance in San Francisco, he found it difficult to make headway in the commercial world. His letters reveal the intensity of business competition and the deterioration of wages for clerks in the city, as well as his inability to save money over the course of the 1850s. A serious illness, caused in his opinion by doing arduous porters’ work, forced him to relinquish his lucrative clerkship. He bounced around among different firms, optimistically hoping for success but finding it elusive. The business failure of his well-connected cousin narrowed his chances of finding another post. Worrying that his time in the West was fast proving a failure in economic and moral terms, he ventured to the gold mines northeast of Stockton. He explained to his father that clerking had left him without a dollar to his name; digging for

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gold represented the only means of realizing his dreams for himself and his family back in Massachusetts. He tried to reassure his parents that “no person lives a more sober life” and that his “moral character” remained “unimpeached.” But what had gone wrong? Why had he not succeeded? A cousin living in California told Morse’s mother that mining for gold “is like a lottery” and tried to brighten the gloom clouding the young man’s future by expressing her hope that “it will be Bradford’s turn soon.” Morse continued to believe that moral conduct was of the utmost importance, but he knew it did not pave the way for the accumulation of capital either as a clerk or as a miner. He encouraged one of his brothers to temper his desire for riches and retain his subordinate, but comfortable, clerkship in an “apple shop” back east. In a poignant letter he wrote by the “dying embers” of a campfire, Morse fondly remembered his happy and hopeful childhood, so at odds with a market economy in which access to capital and credit often seemed to trump virtuous character. “I left home full of boyish . . . dreams, that were never to be fulfilled,” he told his parents. “I flattered myself I knew the world,” he wrote. “[T]hat idea has long since vanished.”2 Morse was one of thousands who believed that independence, respectability, and even wealth were available to youth who followed the mantra “Go West, Young Man!”—a phrase often incorrectly attributed to the clerks’ friend, Horace Greeley. For Greeley and other observers of commercial Manhattan, geographic mobility was absolutely crucial for young clerks if they were to be socially and economically mobile. Yet if they did not go west, Greeley told youthful aspirants from the countryside that they should remain at home. Even as he fought on behalf of urban clerks and their early closing movement, Greeley realized that even ambitious young men of character faced overwhelming challenges in getting ahead. The cost of rent and food in New York was exorbitant; the competition for clerkships, excessive. Urban commercial journals such as Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine published short tales in which city clerks pined for their country homes and became successful farmers; small-city newspapers such as Rochester, New York’s Genesee Farmer printed stories advising parents to convince their sons and brothers to remain on the farm. Even sporting publications jumped on the bandwagon: “Very few clerks,” New York’s Monthly Cosmopolite argued in 1849, “are able to save enough from their earnings to become employers, and in nine cases out of ten they do not do as well when in business for themselves, as when in the stores of others.” How should clerks manage risk in a society steeped in individualism

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and an economy threatened by panics? For most young men in the antebellum period, the goal was independence through proprietorship: individuals who owned property obtained power and prestige in the form of economic and cultural capital. These commentators hoped that the West would provide a wider scope for youthful ambitions and ensure the stability of the household economy, both under attack in the anonymous city. The Cosmopolite suggested that, after a lengthy period of instruction in the commercial house, clerks “should go to the western country where land is cheap” in order “to become men of wealth and standing” as farmers rather than as merchants.3 It was clear to many Americans that a clerkship was not an ironclad means to advancement. In 1860, Greeley charted urban retail clerks’ descent into wage labor, signaling that this was a transitional phase in the way merchants remunerated clerks. He claimed that “DRY GOODS CLERKS (retail) have salaries varying from $400 to $1,000 per year” even as he pinned their average weekly wage at $10.50, on a par with bricklayers, hatters, iron-molders, and printers. Clerking was not as seasonally uncertain as the work required of some tradesmen and laborers. But as he had done in the early closing movement, Greeley contended that clerks were workers, among a population of wage earners who could achieve independence in the western territories if they were protected from competition with enslaved laborers and their owners.4 Beginning in the 1850s, clerks reassessed the values at the core of the striver’s ethic and the value of a clerkship in order to determine what it meant to be independent, respectable, and free in an economy increasingly dominated by powerful firms that consolidated power over men of business operating on a smaller scale. Faced with slim opportunities in northeastern cities, some clerks sought social and economic mobility through astounding geographic movement. And yet going west—albeit to another booming metropolis—did not propel Morse to “wealth and standing.” Many clerks attempting to reconcile the tension between their ambitions and uncertain opportunities for proprietorship or partnership chose caution and security and called it success. As a commercial, financial, and manufacturing elite became more unified by marriage, cultural customs, and economic interests during the Civil War era, many young male clerks abandoned their relentless quest for capital and sought the comfort of belonging to a white-collar class of subordinate middlemen—agents, branchstore operators, and, most intriguing, clerk-merchants oscillating between

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dependence and independence. These commercial actors adopted more circumspect approaches to advancement rather than risk the pitfalls of business failure and bankruptcy. Clerks, especially those who worked in wholesaling and importing firms, might still become merchants by using several tested and innovative strategies to establish their independence. In most instances, however, that independence was tenuous, forcing clerks to accept positions that only approached older conceptions of the term. Senior merchants with capital forged bonds with junior men without funds that largely failed to offer more than incremental mobility. Young men on the make made decisions in the 1850s and 1860s that were necessary precursors of the “managerial revolution” in American business because they uncoupled the ideals of management and ownership. In accepting posts offering the former rather than the latter, they redefined what a clerkship represented and what it meant to be a free, respectable, white man. Unable to accumulate the economic and cultural capital that would enable them to become self-made men, these young men were the forerunners of the “company men” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who desired only incremental advancement within corporate hierarchies. Those corporations arose out of the growth in American industrial production during and after the Civil War, as a catastrophic financial panic and debilitating depression saw conflict between workers and employers rise to a level in the 1870s that Americans had not previously seen. Members of the secure but not-quite-independent white-collar class saw benefits in making peace with an economic order that provided only limited liberty and in defining themselves against the anticapitalist ideologies and conflict espoused by some in the labor movement. In this historical moment and under these circumstances, the modern triad of “elite,” “middle,” and “working” classes began to resonate more strongly with Americans.5 These cultural recalibrations occurred as proprietors of a new type of commercial house, the department store, began to encourage women to fill clerkships in retail establishments catering to female customers. While some New York merchants like A. T. Stewart were reluctant to adopt this innovation, by the 1870s competitors such as Rowland H. Macy employed a sales staff in which women were a majority. As wholesalers’ and importers’ clerks tempered their aspirations to own a business by accepting a variety of middleman positions, laboring women, encouraged by popular condemnation of male retail clerks and the demands of social reformers, began to take posts behind store counters because these jobs provided better wages and working conditions than alternative employments. Men

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Table C.1 Sex, 1880 (N=1,480) Sex

Number

Percent

Male Female

1,213 267

82.0 18.0

Source: Manuscript Population Schedules of the Tenth Census of the United States, 1880, New York City, New York, Ward 3; Ward 7, Enumeration Districts (ED) 74-87; Ward 9, ED 219-231. National Archives and Records Administration, Atlanta, Georgia.

continued to outnumber women in clerkships, but my 1880 census sample of almost fifteen hundred clerks shows that women represented 18 percent of the occupational group in New York. In the 1860s and 1870s, lofty, optimistic paeans to impending occupational mobility rang even more hollow than they had in the antebellum years for male retail clerks as working women—not likely candidates for eventual independence—took clerkships.6 As a result of this economic competition and the beginnings of a gender transformation within the occupational group “clerk,” the clerkship— and especially retail berths—lost value for young men. These economic changes occurred as a cultural debate raged about who should enjoy the rights of political and economic citizens in the era of slave emancipation. In an economy that valorized liberal contract rights over republican property ownership, clerks found that they were just as free as other workers— black and white, male and female—to sign contracts with employers who managed their labor. The freedom to contract paled in comparison with the power and prestige at the core of many antebellum clerks’ dreams for proprietorship. Neither did it offer young men opportunities to manage aspects of a firm’s business. As laboring men and women filled clerkships and as capitalism created structural inequalities between men with capital and those without, ambitious young men could no longer use a clerkship to make self-valuations that they were strivers with good character who deserved advancement.7

The Origins of the White-Collar Middle Class In November 1862, A. T. Stewart opened a new retail establishment that would, by the end of the 1860s, fill an entire Manhattan block bounded by Broadway and Fourth Avenue on the west and east and Ninth and Tenth streets on the north and south. It was six stories tall, made of fireproof

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cast iron, and too far uptown from the established retail district: “Stewart’s Folly,” the press called it. Yet the presence of “liveried coachmen” and carriages “lining the curb” around the new store soon showed that the wily Stewart had successfully unsettled the commercial geography of the city. The emporium would be the first retail outpost along a stretch of Broadway dubbed “The Ladies’ Mile.” Here, around Union Square, elite women could shop and promenade while escaping the threatening disorder of the downtown wards.8 Organized into departments led by “competent chiefs” and staffed by “skilled subordinates,” Stewart’s wholesale and retail businesses ran according to what one newspaper correspondent called a sort of “military precision” that bred success. At the head of this retailing army was an “autocratic” general named “ALEXANDER the Great,” always interested in “conquering” new frontiers in the business world. His chain of command ran through junior partners, European buyers, and department heads, many of whom had failed in business on their own. Stewart used these associates’ commercial networks to broaden his control over the distribution of dry goods from European and American mills to his wholesale department at the old “Marble Palace” store. He also reached into the manufacturing sector, buying textile factories in Europe and employing hundreds of women to staff his sewing department on the upper floors of his Astor Place emporium. Stewart exerted more centralized authority over the production, distribution, and sale of dry goods than any of his competitors in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. He quickly replaced current stock by selling quality goods cheaply to eager customers and then paying lower prices on the wholesale market by using cash instead of credit. His retail and wholesale businesses presaged the hierarchical structures at the heart of the “managerial revolution” in American business in the decades after the Civil War.9 The foot soldiers in his army were the hundreds of clerks whom Stewart had begun to call “hands” in job advertisements of the early 1850s. Unlike many wholesale and retail clerks in the antebellum period, Stewart’s clerks were responsible for sales at certain counters and reported to a department manager rather than to the proprietor. For some four or five hundred dollars a year, hard-working and knowledgeable young people might earn a living at Stewart’s, but they would be considered no better than the “hands” or operatives laboring in textile mills where foremen monitored the workforce.10

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Stewart’s clerks weighed their ambitions for independence against the possible benefits of incremental movement within the firm. Edgar Rogers, one of several hundred clerks in Stewart’s store during the Civil War, could not obtain a recommendation letter from Stewart for inclusion with his application to the United States Military Academy at West Point because he lacked intimate connections with the proprietor. Unlike merchants who operated on a smaller scale, Stewart could not manage all of his employees directly. When Rogers’s floor manager transferred him from the “Fine White Goods” department to “Embroideries,” Rogers considered the move a “promot[ion],” but he continually badgered the manager about increasing his salary. The clerk finally obtained an annual salary of five hundred dollars, but the manager refused to let Rogers transfer from the retail store to the potentially more lucrative wholesale side of the business. After Rogers tried to circumvent this obstacle to his advancement in the firm by speaking with superiors in the wholesale department, he was dismissed for insubordination. Disappointed, Rogers wrote that “I am not equal to my aspirations in business and almost wish I had never seen New York City.” This statement is equal parts a criticism of self and society, but perhaps he recognized that his ambitions were inappropriate because they were unattainable. Maybe he should have remained at home near Saratoga Springs, as Greeley thought young country boys should do, rather than come to the big city. Rogers was fortunate to land securely on his feet, first in the Broadway dry goods store of George Bliss and Co., earning three hundred dollars per year. “I am thankful to find immediate employment,” he wrote, “even at this small salary.” He was rewarded for what he proudly called his “industry” when a military officer offered him a position as copyist in his office for the princely salary of one thousand dollars. Rogers fared better than many of Stewart’s clerks during the war. In January 1860, some two and one-half years after a devastating financial panic had turned many clerks out of work, salesmen recently “discharged” by Stewart proposed the formation of a Clerks’ Aid Society to provide for downtrodden clerks. As with the earlier mutual benefit and protective association, the existence of such an organization reflected the limited options for social and economic advancement that members of the occupational group encountered.11 Stewart’s store was a colossus, matched in size and organization only by the department stores opened in the late 1860s and early 1870s by Rowland H. Macy and the firm of Lord and Taylor. Stewart remained unique

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among fellow merchant princes in his attempts to streamline and connect the manufacture, distribution, and sale of products. Commercial proprietors had not yet inaugurated the vertical and horizontal integration of their enterprises that would necessitate the development of hierarchical structures of managers to monitor a company’s goods from the point of production to the point of sale. Yet the appearance of department stores portended these structural transformations in American business and coincided with clerks’ realization that their occupation was not necessarily an optimal path to advancement in the commercial world. Clerks responded to these economic realities with traditional and novel strategies to claim independence or redefine what freedom meant to them.12 Tracing 199 subjects from my 1850 and 1855 census samples through later manuscript schedules illuminates stories of movement—geographically across the nation and upward and downward on the social ladder. Fifty-three percent of this subsample moved outside of New York City after serving as clerks there. While 23 percent of these mobile clerks merely went across the East River to Brooklyn, the rest ventured across all regions of the expanding nation. For those who moved outside of New York, different levels of success were available. Edward Dean, a native of Massachusetts who clerked in Manhattan in 1850, found another clerkship in Boston before setting up as a dry goods importer in Union, New Jersey, by 1870. Kellogg Francis went into business with his father in Yonkers, New York, while Gabriel Hoyt, in 1850 a married clerk living next to his father, a lumber merchant, became a lumber dealer himself in Buffalo and Brooklyn, New York, and New Madrid, Missouri. By 1870, Nathaniel Hubbard had retired after accumulating twelve hundred dollars in personal estate through his Wheeling, West Virginia, grocery store. But ten years later, Hubbard had come out of retirement to peddle eatables out of a wagon in and around Medina, New York. As these examples suggest, men who were clerking at midcentury often moved over substantial geographical distance during their lifetimes in search of occupational, social, and economic mobility. Clerks tapped into the promise of land ownership, as Greeley suggested, buying farms in Erie County, Pennsylvania, Chautauqua County, New York, and Kane County, Illinois, to obtain independence. Yet for other clerks, geographical mobility did not yield economic advancement. Some men who had been clerks wound up stonemasons and agricultural laborers, living in places geographically remote and ideologically separated from their assumptions about the promise of a New York clerkship.13

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Table C.2 The Career Paths of Clerks from the 1850 and 1855 Census Samples (N=199) Category 1 (clerks who became merchants, manufacturers, brokers, or “gentlemen”): 57 (28.6%) Category 2 (clerks who became clergymen, lawyers, doctors, and druggists): 7 (3.5%) Category 3 (clerks who became farmers): 15 (7.5%) Category 4 (clerks who remained clerks or became bookkeepers, agents, secretaries, cashiers, or superintendents): 62 (31.2%) Category 5 (clerks who became proprietors or professionals and then became clerks again): 11 (5.5%) Category 6 (clerks who became laborers or tradesmen, including tailors, silver platers, porters, police, watchmen, waiters, farm hands, miners, cigar makers, jewellers, watchmakers, and photographers): 33 (16.6%) Category 7 (clerks who became tradesmen and then became clerks again): 3 (1.5%) Category 8 (laborers, seamen, farmers, and porters who became clerks): 9 (4.5%) Category 9 (clerks who became proprietors and then became laborers): 2 (1.0%) Source: Manuscript Population Schedules of the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Censuses of the United States (1860, 1870, and 1880), accessed at .

Many of these young men enjoyed independence in the commercial world, whether they remained in New York or strayed from the city. Almost 40 percent in this subsample became proprietors of commercial businesses or manufacturing establishments, professionals, or farmers. Some young men may have used their fathers’ capital as a foundation for the success of their own enterprises. Jacob Corlies, a twenty-year-old Manhattan clerk in 1850, moved upstate by 1860 to Poughkeepsie, New York, and had accumulated an impressive ten thousand dollars worth of real estate. Later census schedules show that he increased his holdings as a real estate speculator. The 1860 census lists him as living in the household of his father George, a retired merchant who owned property valued at forty thousand dollars. Jacob’s meteoric rise so soon after relinquishing the clerkship suggests that he came to the city to gain valuable knowledge and experience with the understanding that his father would provide him with the capital necessary to begin his own career. Family ties could certainly help young men become independent. In 1850, Baxter Lane was an eighteen-year-old clerk whose brother was a furniture dealer. They both lived in the household of their father Josiah, a cabinetmaker. Thirty years later, Baxter was a furniture dealer himself, living in Brooklyn with his wife, children, and a domestic servant. His son was a store clerk, suggesting that Baxter was hoping to replicate the sort of relationship that probably helped him become an independent man of business. In other instances, the census does not reveal how men got

216 Conclusion: Once More, Free Table C.3 The Career Paths of Foreign-Born Clerks in the 1850 and 1855 Census Samples (N=59; 29.7% of the sample in table C.2) Category 1: 17 (29.8%) Members of category 1 who became grocers (at wholesale and retail), “flour” storekeeper, restaurant or saloon keepers: 9 (52.9%) Category 2: 1 (14.3%) Category 3: 1 (6.7%) Category 4: 20 (32.3%) Category 5: 1 (9.1%) Category 6: 14 (42.4%) Category 7: 1 (33.3%) Category 8: 4 (44.4%) Category 9: 0 (0%) Note: For the total numbers of clerks in each category and for the scope of the categories, see table C.2. Source: Manuscript Population Schedules of the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Censuses of the United States (1860, 1870, and 1880), accessed at .

ahead: perhaps a few could claim that they were examples of the selfmade men found in the prescriptive literature. A nineteen-year-old boy from Indiana, William Alling, had arrived to clerk in New York City by 1850. Twenty years later, he was proprietor of his own jewelry manufacturing firm in Newark, New Jersey, worth more than one hundred thousand dollars.14 Foreign-born immigrants to the city represented 30 percent of the clerks who became business owners. The fact that half of the foreignborn clerks who became commercial proprietors ran groceries, restaurants, or saloons suggests that immigrants’ definitions of success might have been met by owning small shops serving their neighborhoods. And yet these dreams of competency and community did not preclude some from achieving more ambitious goals. Nicholas Doscher, for instance, was a sixteen-year-old German immigrant clerk in 1850 whom the Seventh Ward census tabulator recorded as living in the household of grocer Claus Doscher, perhaps an uncle. Ten years later, Nicholas was still clerking for Claus, but in the years after the Civil War the clerk became a grocer who had saved three thousand dollars. John Crowin, an eighteen-year-old Irish immigrant who had taken a clerkship within a year of his arrival in New York’s Sixth Ward in 1855, built a family and a fortune by the postbellum period, accumulating ten thousand dollars as the owner of a St. Louis, Missouri, shoe factory.15

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Another 5 percent of the total subsample enjoyed some measure of independence as business owners who subsequently became clerks again. Ninety members of this subsample—45 percent—became independent, however briefly, at some point in their careers. Yet despite the evident success of almost half of the subsample, fully 55 percent of these men remained clerks or did manual work as tradesmen and laborers. A clerkship might have been a boon to the career of an aspiring artisan who would have to balance his own books and sell his own goods. Perhaps this was David Prescott’s strategy. The son of a West Boylston, Massachusetts, farmer, Prescott came to New York City in 1854, but by the beginning of the Civil War had moved back to Massachusetts to become a bootmaker with a few hundred dollars in savings. Samuel Dare was able to move among various clerkships and a position as a tinsmith in New York and New Jersey, and in the course of two decades had accumulated six thousand dollars in real estate. Herman Zimmer, a 23-year-old German immigrant bookkeeper in 1855, had become a cigar maker by 1880, probably an independent artisan who employed four sons—all cigar makers themselves—in a small household business. Clerks such as the Englishborn James Sugden might have remained clerks because they were able to save money, become household heads, and establish families inside and outside of New York City. For some, a clerkship represented something worth striving for and maintaining, in and of itself.16 Just less than one-third of the subsample remained clerks or transferred into clerklike posts as bookkeepers, cashiers, agents, or secretaries. While this percentage might be misleading because some clerks’ careers can only be traced five or ten years after their first census entry, several young men in this segment were still in clerical posts fifteen or twenty years into their careers. Charles Clapp, born in Vermont, had moved to New York’s Eighth Ward by 1855 after having clerked in Gardiner, Maine. Already married, Clapp moved back to Maine to join his wife and children in 1860, taking a job as a city clerk in Gardiner. A decade later, he was selling medicines in an apothecary. He was a householder, his wife was listed as having nine thousand dollars in real estate, and his son was a dry goods clerk. Some clerks, it is clear, decided that clerkships provided the economic wherewithal to own their own home or land. Others, like James Freed, remained more clearly dependent in their clerkships. From the age of seventeen until the age of thirty-two, he was a clerk and bookkeeper who lived in the household of his father, a painter in the Ninth Ward. One clerk had his freedom taken away from him more explicitly.

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Edward Hays, a Canadian-born bookkeeper who resided in Manhattan’s Seventh Ward in 1855, was still a bookkeeper in 1870. But by that date he had been locked up in the Jefferson City, Missouri, penitentiary, perhaps for the type of white-collar crime so often reported in the newspapers. Foreign-born clerks represented larger percentages of these categories than their representation in the subsample as a whole, suggesting that immigrants faced slightly greater obstacles to advancement than their native-born colleagues. William Saul, a forty-year-old Irish immigrant clerk in the Sixth Ward in 1855, had been a bricklayer in the city in 1850 and returned to masonry work after the war, alternately accumulating savings and spending them during periods of prolonged unemployment. John Haine, a German grocer’s clerk in the 1850s, also became a bricklayer by 1870. Were these men the latter-day “bricklayer’s clerks” whom James Gordon Bennett’s Herald had lampooned decades before? The occupation and the reputations of those within it were tarnished by these associations.17 These anecdotes, like the ones commercial authors and ministers told, do not adequately explain how and why young men got ahead or failed. Chance occurrences, friendships made, or ebbs and flows in the economy all might carry men like driftwood to safe harbor or directly into the rapids. Men typically could not, despite Americans’ confidence about their ability to make themselves, control the economy or their careers in that economy. That is precisely why clerks resorted to earnest catalogs of personal character traits—in these moments of uncertainty they were like many other middlemen and proprietors in the economy. American men had begun to comprehend that character might not be enough to garner them wealth and accolades, but nothing else helped them feel as though they were agents directing their own lives. Yet they could, like some of the clerks mentioned above, try to maintain their positions to achieve economic and cultural comfort—if not accumulate unassailable reserves of capital—that would provide them security. The credit reports of Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency reveal clerks making a variety of choices, influenced by their access to economic capital, in order to get ahead or maintain their positions in a competitive economy.18 Ambitious clerks who were unwilling to abide by the cautious precepts of the prescriptive literature or wait to become partners with established merchants took risks by going into business on their own or with fellow clerks. Henry Patterson, by the time he was twenty-nine years old in 1848, felt he had waited patiently for far too long: he had been eleven years a clerk for the hardware firm of W. N. Seymour and Co. When his employer

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decided to confer partnership upon a more junior employee, Patterson keenly felt the insult. He responded with alacrity, however, immediately going into the hardware business with his brothers by buying the stock of two former Seymour clerks who were eager to retire from their Bowery store. The Patterson brothers called upon other young men who had been in Seymour’s employ to clerk in their new establishment. Primarily through judicious use of the capital reserves of the eldest brother, Turner, the Pattersons built a thriving concern, worth some fifty thousand dollars by 1870.19 It is much clearer in the credit reports than in census records that clerks, like Henry Patterson, plotted their commercial ascent by looking for ways to harness substantial amounts of capital through ties to family members and employers. Edward Tailer relied upon social contacts and his well-cultivated sales ability to join two other merchants at the head of a dry goods importing partnership in 1856. He funded his entrance into business by marrying Agnes Suffern, whose wealthy father agreed to give Tailer twenty thousand dollars, a sum that more than doubled the capital value of his new firm. While agents explained that Tailer and his partners enjoyed “good cr[edit]” in the New York business community, they attested that the firm “can hardly pass thro[ugh] the crisis [of the late 1850s] without assistance,” naming Thomas Suffern as the reason for its stability. Tailer, considered the “monied man of the Conc[ern],” astutely used the Suffern family’s wealth to accumulate a vast fortune worth some four hundred thousand dollars, permitting him to retire from business at the age of forty. If clerks had saved capital of their own, they might buy businesses from employers eager to retire from the commercial stage. Seven clerks of Hamlin, Rushmore and Co., for instance, pooled some ten to twelve thousand dollars to buy the jobbing firm from its principals. While they might have had to assume their bosses’ debts, clerks who purchased an existing business provided themselves with an existing stock and customer base.20 If clerks forming their own businesses had access to the capital of a “special,” “silent,” or “general” partner, their chances of establishing financial stability were much better. William Watson, a drug store clerk, started in business with the help of his “friend” Dr. Vanzandt, who put eleven thousand dollars into Watson’s hands. Frederick and Augustus Heye emigrated to New York from Bremen and commenced as drug importers after clerkships with American firms, flush with at least thirty thousand dollars in funds provided by their father, who promised “more . . . if necessary.”

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If clerks could call upon assistance from friends with substantial amounts of money, their credit ratings—and thus their reputations in the business community—would be more favorable.21 Character, credit, and capital remained inextricably linked in the minds of commercial men. Credit reports catalogued firms’ worthiness by summoning the cultural assumptions that stressed Franklinesque values, noting each merchant’s character and using that evaluation to predict future prospects. James Lipsett, an Irishman who had saved money during clerkships in Dublin and New York, opened a dry goods store on Spring Street in the latter city. When business slackened, the credit reporter guessed at the cause: Lipsett “takes his drinks as usual.” Charles Benson had not saved any capital as a clerk before he opened his Bleecker Street grocery store in 1835, but “was aided by a friend” and later “got some prop[erty]. by his wife.” With full knowledge of this assistance, the agent reported without any sense of irony in 1856 that Benson “[i]s a self made man, wor[th]” sixty thousand dollars. Yet clerks who relied upon family or commercial friends to set them up in business could not always reckon themselves impending success stories or completely independent. Benson himself failed in 1860 after speculating in real estate and trying to expand his enterprise uptown. Richard Brown had an impressive clerking pedigree, working for Lord and Taylor and A. T. Stewart in the 1840s, but it was the death of his aunt that put him into business on his own, propelled by the four- or fivethousand-dollar inheritance. The credit reporter originally deemed him “v[er]y Steady and strictly moral.” His subsequent failure proved that he was “not a v[er]y shrewd bus[iness] man.” The members of the firm Cassin and Daniels, selling fancy dry goods on Canal Street, had been clerks for J. Higgins and Co. The latter firm supplied the money to buy the new firm’s stock, and still held a lien on the merchandise. The fact that, in the credit agent’s opinion, Higgins never “had much cap[ital]” threatened Cassin and Daniels’s business, which soon collapsed under the weight of suspect credit.22 If they could not start new enterprises of their own, clerks hoped that merchants would include them in their partnerships. Business acumen, ability to bring trade to the firm through an “extens[ive]. acquaintance” with commercial contacts, or sales and bookkeeping skills made some clerks potentially valuable partners. The credit reports suggest that the firms most able to include employees without capital were the ones with the most capital themselves. The Manhattan firm of Arnold, Constable and Co. accepted Arnold’s son and “an eff[icien]t clerk” of theirs into the

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partnership, even though they did “not add anything as cap[ita]l.” As the credit correspondent stated, “[i]t [was] . . . not necessary” for them to do so because “[t]he firm as it stood before was v[er]y sound.” Clerks could be “valuable on acc[oun]t. of bus[iness]. capac[ity]” alone, credit reporters affirmed.23 But clerks might also become junior partners and continue to receive a salary, “mod[erate] int[erest],” or “p[e]r. centage on the Sales.” The young men who were able to marshal several thousand dollars to invest in their new partnerships were more likely to be welcomed as equal parties to the business. Clerks without capital who became salaried junior partners were not the equals of senior men with capital, but were rather the forerunners of a white-collar managerial class that developed in the latter decades of the nineteenth century within American corporations. Despite the affirmations of Freeman Hunt, most credit-reporting agents implicitly acknowledged that character was only a handmaiden to capital. Merchants with capital could supply money to new firms and bring those enterprises under their control by formally creating branch offices or by establishing more informal ties with junior mercantile men. Sometimes the smaller merchants in the orbit of wealthy capitalists were able to break free, but more often they were unable to declare their independence. One revealing credit entry claimed that E. S. Chadsey was operating a clothing store in the early 1850s, “backed” by his employer. In April 1854, the credit reporter wrote that Chadsey was “[n]ot in bus[iness]. and never was.” Mercantile independence could be illusory when patronage relationships, evincing a traditional interest in protecting junior commercial men and elders’ fortunes while eschewing apprenticeship’s educational purpose, dominated the commercial world. When Joseph Cowperthwaite was unable to make a “Branch Store” supported by the firm of Suydam and Haff “pay,” he returned to his clerkship with that firm and later used four hundred dollars in savings to go into business on his own. Within six months he had failed again and become a bookkeeper.24 Clerks displayed ingenuity in this changing business climate, keeping their positions as clerks while operating their own small stores on the side. As clerk-merchants, they often called upon the services of wives, daughters, or sisters to manage the stores in their absence, allowing them to combine retail profits and their salaries. They may have been able to buy stock for their own stores because their salaries as clerks typically exceeded one thousand dollars. Being clerks and merchants simultaneously gave them the option of strengthening their claims to a comfortable

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competency, aiming more ambitiously for larger profits when they went into business solely on their own, or engaging commercially somewhere between these options. In 1850, Nathaniel Moore was clerking for the firm of Ely, Clapp and Bowen in downtown Manhattan, earning fifteen hundred dollars per year, while also running a Sixth Avenue dry goods shop with his sister Elizabeth. While he clerked during the day, Elizabeth and his other sisters tended the store. Nathaniel formally united in a business partnership with Elizabeth at a time when his “salary [was] . . . sufficient to support him and [his] sister independant of the bus[iness],” a fact that allowed them to save their store profits. Nicholas Ludlum had failed “2 or 3 times” in business before he became clerk and bookkeeper for a predecessor of Ely, Clapp and Bowen. As his salary with the firm increased from one hundred dollars to one thousand dollars over the course of only three years, he opened his own dry goods store on Greenwich Street and installed his brother as “manager” of the concern. His employers “have confidence in him and . . . credit him freely,” allowing him to amass four thousand dollars in profits in a few years. A credit-reporting agent noted that Consider Parish was “formerly a Cl[er]k with . . . Clark and Coleman” of New York City in the 1850s, when he became a commission merchant. By 1860, though, he was “[n]ot doing bus[iness] on his own” but rather was “Cl[er]k with E. W. Coleman . . . on a salary” of sixteen hundred dollars while he also acted as agent “for the Sale of Spring Beds” made at his brothers’ factory. Credit reporters considered Parish a good credit risk— he was saving money from his salary and from his quasi-independent role as agent. He remained Coleman’s clerk through the war and became partner in the firm in 1865. A German immigrant named Bernard Lowethal had failed in the trimmings business in the late 1850s after serving as a clerk. During the war, he started a business in his wife’s name to protect his profits from creditors while he also served as bookkeeper to another merchant.25 The meanings attached to a clerkship proliferated in this uncertain economy: a clerkship represented a platform both for young men moving up and older men falling down in the commercial world. When merchants failed, their goods were often “assigned” to their “preferred” creditors, who sometimes provided the failed men with clerkships to work off their debts. Whether offered by family members, friends, or other merchants, clerkships allowed failed men to recoup their losses, pay what they owed, and make further connections in the business world. Many senior merchants helped poorer, less experienced men get back on their feet. But

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their assistance also registered the deep divide between the two groups of commercial actors. Many men residing in the latter group were unable to take off from the platform the clerkship provided them and became rooted in cycles of debt, failure, and an incessant lack of capital. In a career spanning three decades, the aptly named Benjamin Poor suffered several failures as an auctioneer, manufacturer, and commission merchant in Boston and New York. By the time the Panic of 1857 struck, he had “no means of consequence” and accepted a position as salesman in his son’s Boston firm. In this topsy-turvy economy, sons sometimes nurtured fathers back to wealth. While character was an important component of young men’s solicitation of financial backing from senior merchants, the stories told in the credit reports illustrate that it was access to capital or the endorsement of capitalists that determined the fate of most mercantile firms. Under such difficult circumstances, a foreign-born merchant named Withers might have been excused for trying to take pecuniary advantage when a wealthy woman left her purse unattended at his counter. When his clerk snitched on him, Withers proceeded not to prison but to a clerkship in his former employer’s store.26 Clerks’ varied riffs on ambition, caution, and safety in business show how young and old men creatively survived in a competitive economy. But these men could not always circumvent bankruptcy and ruin. By the beginning of the Civil War, Henry Southworth had set up his own millinery shop on Chambers Street, apparently with his brother. In the postwar period, he endured a series of economic mishaps, as a millinery establishment with which he was associated failed and another of his ventures, a Paterson, New Jersey, silk factory, succumbed to creditors. Southworth took it upon himself to pay the debts for these debacles. By the 1880s, he had set up “head quarters” in the offices of other firms after bad business decisions had pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy, unable to maintain ownership of his Forty-Sixth Street home or rent his own office space. When one creditor sued him, he left the commercial world for good. A failure in business, he found refuge in the Customs House as a political appointee who appraised the value of silk ribbons arriving in the port of New York.27 Character was often an insufficient form of capital; connections to powerful men in the business community were also unreliable markers of future success. Robert Graham, Tailer’s old schoolmate, had blossomed under the tutelage of the importing firm of Howland and Aspinwall, becoming a partner in a firm dedicated to prosecuting the West Indian

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trade. “[F]ortune[,] it seems since we were boys,” Tailer wrote wistfully in 1853, “has favored him.” Yet as Tailer’s fortunes climbed, Graham’s seem to have leveled off before they dipped. He had risen in the postwar years to become president of the Metropolitan Fire Insurance Co., which by the 1870s had failed, according to credit agents. The credit reports listed him in 1880 as the proprietor of a marine insurance firm whose credit should only be trusted for “mod[erate] am[oun]t[s].”28 William Hoffman wrote in 1850 that a “Young man engaged in the ‘Rag Trade’ . . . has many obstacles . . . in his way and many barriers almost impossible to surmount.” “What will enable those clerks whose enterprise and ambition demand for themselves an advance in this earthly Career— To become valuable and gain a competency for themselves?” he asked confidently, as if his hearty aspirations could “demand” and win the economic and cultural capital he most valued. “It is by unflagging exertion and an industry comendable on their part—A perseverance in the occupation embarked in—at all times endeavoring while employed during the hours of business to work and sedulously too, that nothing devolving upon a clerk [is] to be neglected and left undone.” He needed to commence the unceasing hard work immediately, because if he did not meet his goals “This Fall,” he would be “greatly disappointed.”29 Little did he know that he would spend over four more years in New York City as a clerk before entering the wholesale straw-goods business at the beginning of 1855 with his brother and another associate. Initially doing business on a cash and short-term credit basis, probably putting their shares of the Claverack farm’s sale to good use, the Hoffmans earned a favorable report from the Mercantile Agency. Three years after this propitious start, their associate retired from the firm, leaving them to run the business together, armed with an “excellent” reputation for paying debts and for being “close, sharp, money making men.”30 In September 1859, however, the brothers dissolved the firm “by mutual consent,” and Hoffman began a journey that would take him around the world. In 1863, he published an account of his circumnavigation of the globe as The Monitor, filled with “advice, instruction, and warning” that he “hoped” would “benefit the reader.” As prescriptive authors had done for his generation, Hoffman attempted to offer young men a moral compass by which to navigate the uncertainties of an unstable commercial world and potentially achieve advancement. In San Francisco, where he opened his own store, Hoffman wrote that a hopeful aspirant climbed the commercial ladder by revealing his character through good work and

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good works. Hoffman’s own moral life included membership in a Christian congregation, reflection on weekly sermons, and a leading role in the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), all of which shaped his outlook on economic mobility. Presumably he was no longer a peeping tom: if young men were to succeed on earth and become “worthy of the crown of life” in heaven, they must shun vice and play a role in the spiritual regeneration of the community.31 Why did Hoffman and other young men succeed while others failed? He briefly cites New York contacts and his close study of the San Francisco market as the foundations for his good fortune on the Pacific Coast, though he probably also felt that he had been blessed by God. At the YMCA and in the business district, he sympathized with the “young men” who traveled to California in search of “golden dreams” but who “found themselves considerably straitened in their circumstances.” Unfortunately, they ultimately had to replace “their golden visions” with “the most dire realities!” As a more established merchant, Hoffman became a judge of character, variously hastening and curbing the progress of the young men he encountered. In September 1860, he met one of his brother’s former employees, fallen on hard times as he tried to make it to China. His poor budgeting had left him destitute, forcing him to work odd jobs on the waterfront to make ends meet or to beg when necessity demanded. Hoffman, noticing the young man’s efforts, “succeeded in getting him a situation in a large house, in the capacity of an out-door clerk,” evidently not meaning a traveling salesman but an employee who, like a cartman or porter, was “engaged in driving a cart, [or] loading and unloading [goods] at the wharf.” Hoffman did not examine the hard work that surely accompanied this young man’s subsequent rise in the firm, even though he had deemed it necessary in his own diary years earlier. He merely noted that, at the time his book was published, the young man enjoyed “lodgings in the store of his employer” and “a fair salary of $900 a year.” Conversely, Hoffman refused the plea made by the son of a wealthy New Yorker because he possessed “little confidence in his integrity,” having been a disapproving witness to “some of his past exploits at Saratoga.” He could not admit it without blasting the ambitions of thousands of young men who hoped that they could author their independence, but Hoffman and other senior merchants like him were the “monitors” who played crucial roles in determining whether young men got ahead or not. Young men in mid-nineteenth-century America depended for their advancement on revealing their good character to patrons who would

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choose whether to use their own capital or connections to propel youthful associates into well-paid jobs.32 Virtuous character and the willingness to strive were not enough to keep even senior commercial men from failing in this competitive environment. By the end of 1861, Hoffman had returned to New York to reconstitute the partnership with his brother, bringing with him some thirty or forty thousand dollars from his San Francisco venture. Financially sound, the firm seemed likely to carry on as it had before, under the brothers’ “[s]harp, prudent and capable” oversight. The Monitor’s last page showed that Hoffman’s purpose was self-promoting as well as didactic: a trade card depicted the grandeur of the brothers’ commercial building on Broadway. But the economic lull that accompanied the beginning of the Civil War appears to have hurt the firm, and it dissolved again in mid1863. Rumors circulated about a collapse in the Hoffmans’ “Calif[ornia] bus[iness],” but the agent could not substantiate these claims. By the time the war was over, Hoffman had reentered the commercial scene alone as a commission merchant and manufacturer. While the new firm appeared to stand on sound financial footing, its proprietor’s reputation had withered considerably. He obstinately refused to provide credit agents with any information about his business, forcing them to rely on outsiders who uniformly hated to trade with him. The only man “who speaks well of him” was his brother. Hoffman was thought to be “rather a disagreeable person to deal with” because “he invariably decline[d] to show his hand and ma[d]e . . . impudent responses when called upon to do so.” The credit agency sent spies to pry into his business; a man who believed fervently that his conduct was morally upright was likely to take umbrage at such queries. His sense of moral superiority, the credit reporter believed, was the reason why “parties decline[d] selling [to] him.” The same qualities that made him and his brother “[s]harp, prudent and capable” might have encouraged other men of business to take their goods elsewhere and deal with men of less “disagreeable” character. A later entry referred to Hoffman as an “English Jew” who was “tricky and untrustworthy,” playing upon invidious ethnic stereotypes that must have galled this Yankee Protestant. Hoffman’s “unpopular[ity]” quickly changed into a general “distrust” of the man and his firm—his character cast him outside the community of creditworthy commercial men. In June 1871, after legal suits had been opened against him for the repayment of debts, the reporter announced that “W[illia]m. Hoffman and Co.” had gone bankrupt. While he found another partner to join him in

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a new enterprise, Hoffman probably knew how challenging it would be to recoup his reputation.33 By the Civil War era, more young men seem to have been willing to settle for a clerkship than to brave the abrasive elements that Hoffman and others faced as independent men in the urban commercial world. Many merchants, upon failing in business, declared bankruptcy, took clerkships, and reemerged as merchants months or years later; some failed again and slipped into the clerking population, finally choosing to remain clerks for a bit of security. A permanent white-collar job did not resonate with traditional understandings that clerkships would lead to mercantile independence or partnership, but it protected its holder from the exigencies of the market.34 Taken together, these clerks’ decisions illuminate the origins of the white-collar class that developed within American corporations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Men who settled for clerkships, clerk-merchants, and capital-poor “branch office” storekeepers had begun to resolve a long-standing debate, choosing incremental advancement over ascent to partnership or proprietorship, and dealing realistically with economic competition by moderating their sometimes considerable ambitions. Beginning in the 1880s, elite merchants and manufacturers pooled their wealth to create large corporate hierarchies that would require junior men to fill bureaucratic and managerial positions in their offices. When clerks decided in the 1850s and 1860s to swallow their ambition and accept positions as middlemen, they paved the way for the managerial revolution in American business. Young men would clamor for these positions in large corporations, finding them to be palatable alternatives to risky commercial ownership while recognizing that they offered only a pale imitation of antebellum definitions of independence.35

Once More, Free If some clerks had begun to choose dependence, how could they be truly free, truly men? This question was posed by and about all men who worked for wages in this era of emancipation as white women and former slaves entered into work contracts in the market economy. The Civil War offered clerks the chance to prove that they were men by answering the call of their country. The decision to become a soldier was a difficult one for young men in subordinate commercial positions, wary of losing employment. The prestigious Seventh New York regiment included clerks

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“who have families depending on them, who have lost their situations from leaving, and others who will lose theirs from the failure of firms they are with.” Clerks who did not join the military often demonstrated their willingness to do their civic duty. In July 1863, they helped merchant employers in trying to reestablish law and order on the streets after the Draft Riots in Manhattan. Many observers considered the clerks who did not join the army to be suspect citizens, however. They argued that the rifle and bayonet, at least for the time being, were more effective instruments for making a man than a pen or the ell-wand used to measure cloth. A correspondent to the New York Times who signed his letter “A SOLDIER” wondered why “so many young men in this and other cities prefer to occupy situations in dry goods and grocery stores . . . when they could enter the army and have a position more respectable than that of a merchant’s clerk?” Opportunities to display manly courage and achieve heroic fame were much more plentiful on the battlefield than in the commercial house. This letter-writer focused on the relative poverty of clerks when compared to merchants and the likelihood that they would remain clerks. “There are hundreds of young men in this city eking out miserable lives as clerks, without a shadow of a chance of their ever being better off.” He offered “all clerks without capital” better pay, respect, and potential “promotion” if they joined the army. “A SOLDIER” wove together elements of an ideology linking masculine character attributes with upward mobility that were increasingly inaccessible to clerks in the commercial world.36 Despite the continued criticism of white, male clerks and the changing meaning of the clerkship in this era, white laboring women envisioned the occupation as a stepping stone out of manual labor, particularly the needle trades. A slew of social reformers and suffragists promoted women’s entrance into clerical work, concurring with the editors of Vanity Fair that when women replaced men behind store counters, workingwomen’s poverty would be alleviated and men would no longer be emasculated by doing work “naturally” suited to women. Such a reformation would be empowering to both the men relinquishing retail clerkships and the women taking them. Virginia Penny wrote in her 1863 compendium The Employments of Women that it would benefit “the welfare of the nation” dedicated to human freedom.37 Suffragists and reformers made sense of women’s increasing presence behind store counters in light of debates preoccupying postwar America about freedom, citizenship, and the household. As they attempted to craft new political alliances in the late 1860s to ensure that women’s voting

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Figure C.1. “Shop-Girls.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (June 1880).

rights would be protected in the provisions of the Fifteenth Amendment being debated by Congress, these bourgeois suffragists became familiar with the struggles encountered by urban workingwomen. What they saw dismayed them. Even as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, editor of The Revolution, agreed with the calls for women to engage in retail work, she also envisioned negative consequences for female clerks who would be exploited by greedy employers. The Civil War had opened employment opportunities for women as men left their jobs to fight in the conflict, but women were paid roughly half the wages men earned in comparable positions. According to Penny, saleswomen received three to eight dollars per week while salesmen raked in six to twelve. Employed at a pittance, these struggling women had to “retrench in other expenses” after buying the fashionable clothing they needed to work in refined, but busy, stores. They often lived

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“in crowded attics or damp cellars, or on unwholesome food.” Stanton reported that a firm’s advertisement for a “lady copyist” had been answered promptly by one with “a fine business hand.” The merchants had a good laugh when the woman enumerated “her terms.” “Indeed, you must be from the country, Miss!” they chortled. “Ten dollars a week; why, my dear young lady, we could get a man for that!”38 The critique of male counter jumpers notwithstanding, many merchants weighed their desire to employ cheaper labor against their belief that men did superior work. Rather than giving women opportunities to earn a living in occupations that best “suited” them, merchants brought them into competition with men to decrease wages for all clerks. Clerks were workers: the occupation evoked few of the antebellum cultural assumptions that promised impending independence, authority, and esteem for those who were part of it. Stanton thought that the growing “antagonism between man and woman” in postbellum stores and shops was analogous to the economy of the antebellum South. “Just as slave labor crowded free labor out of the Southern States, so will the cheap labor of woman crowd man out of every employment she enters.” What had been a racial wedge separating free people from slaves was now, in Stanton’s estimation, a gender divide that degraded honorable labor and the workers who did it. The solution to this “antagonism” was for laboring men to support women workers in their efforts to establish and maintain a foothold at the hustings and in the workplace. “[D]isfranchised” women threatened the economic viability of all working people. By voting and striking for better shop conditions, workingwomen could alleviate economic inequalities that threatened all workers, men and women.39 Male and female retail clerks both contested the growing inequalities of capitalism during the 1860s and 1870s in renewed efforts to close stores earlier in the evening. During an 1864 rally attended by some fifteen thousand people at Union Square in New York, clerks evoked the experiences of southern slaves recently emancipated by presidential edict. If it was time to free African Americans, white clerks hoped that merchants and consumers would “redeem” them “from a literal white slavery” so that they could enjoy refined society and “mental culture” during their leisure time. They might have given the phrase “white slavery” two meanings. The changing gender makeup of the occupational group suggested that they worried about the potential moral threat to saleswomen forced to sell their bodies to supplement paltry wages. Yet clerks were also concerned about the blurring meanings of race and class as black men

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and women became free. They thus joined other white workers concerned about job competition from African Americans. As emancipation defined freedom as the ability to make contracts with employers of one’s choice, clerks longed for the leisure time to develop their minds and differentiate themselves more clearly from black workers. Moreover, clerks still hoped to separate themselves from white laborers. Newspaper articles noted favorably that clerks “have told us nothing about the everlasting battle between labor and capital” in their early closing movement. Clerks studiously avoided references to class conflict because many young men still hoped that they could obtain economic and cultural value from their occupation, preparing them educationally and culturally for advancement to proprietorship.40 Yet newspapers repeatedly listed the early closing gatherings under the heading “Labor Meetings,” just as they had done before the war. Male clerks had not learned the political lessons of their earlier campaigns, and the participation of saleswomen in the movement provoked fissures in its organization and aims. The New York Times reported in July 1870 that a “Miss” Netta interrupted a meeting of the Early Closing Association to catalogue her “grievances” against retail merchants who permitted “disgraceful” mistreatment of saleswomen like her. Such aspersions cast upon the character of employers had rarely been a part of the early closing movement’s official rhetoric, and reflected the perspective of laboring women better versed in the antagonisms of class festering in American workplaces. Netta’s apparently impromptu speech was powerful enough to foster support for the creation of a Saleswomen’s Early Closing Association. In subsequent meetings of the new group, Netta stated her desire to meet with the heads of department stores to petition for better working conditions. She encouraged her fellow saleswomen to “cultivate self-respect” and “a feeling of independence,” yet she also situated these women’s struggles within the context of the household economy. Most female clerks, the Times reported, had to take care of “an invalid mother” or cope with “the capricious whims of an exacting father” when they arrived home to the “badly-ventilated apartments” of an urban tenement building. Netta asked shoppers to consider the fate of the saleswomen who sold them their goods. They were “their own daughters and the daughters of their friends.” Antebellum early closing efforts by male clerks had made appeals to bourgeois women to suspend their nighttime shopping. Saleswomen such as Netta appreciated similar decisions by the postbellum elite, but her appeals to working people reflected the changing dynamics

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of class within the occupational group and the fact that female clerks recognized the potential for solidarity across the counter against the profitmaking motives of store owners. A few of the male clerks present at the saleswomen’s meeting understood the implications of Netta’s comments and called vaguely for greater “communicat[ion]” between the men’s and women’s organizations.41 Yet male clerks were in reality reluctant to assent to Netta’s transformation of the meanings of class at the heart of the early closing movement’s goals. The power structure of the movement, shaken by the creation of the saleswomen’s group, remained intact: the president of the saleswomen’s association was a member of the Clerks Early Closing Association—a man. At the very point at which men and women might have cooperated to achieve similar goals, much as Stanton had recommended, men invested much ideological importance in the label “clerk” and the means to proprietorship they still hoped it offered them. This rhetorical gambit was a last-ditch effort to create a class divide between male clerks and saleswomen, even though these occupational designations were imprecise. The saleswomen also provoked criticism on this score because they demanded to be called “salesladies.” This was merely another example of the “vulgarity and absurdity” of the age, suggested the Times, lamenting the American predilection for calling everyone “ladies” and “gentlemen” whether or not their economic assets or cultural bearing warranted it.42 The debate about occupational labels invoked powerful keywords in the nation’s languages of class, illuminating the way Americans came to grips with women’s work outside the home and their demands for citizenship by posing distinctions between “women” and “ladies,” just as antebellum clerks had done in their interactions with women. Caroline Healey Dall, a reformer who supported increased economic and political opportunities for women, declared that only when “women of rank begin to work for money” would laboring women be accorded the praise she thought they deserved. Workingwomen could not obtain the respect of their society until bourgeois women worked outside the home; but labor made it more difficult for women to obtain that esteem. Penny hoped that saleswomen would come into contact with “ladies” who would help them “refine their manners” and appearance. In their analysis of opportunities for women in the workplace, suffragists, newspaper editors, and male clerks registered the class differences between “women” behind the counter and “ladies” in front of it.43

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Such distinctions based upon class and gender served employers, politicians, and journalists who sought to proclaim the victory of “free labor” ideology and the continued significance of patriarchal household relations in the aftermath of the war. In “a perfect state of society,” the Times editorialized, women would remain in positions of “dependence” to men who “will earn all that is needed for the support of both sexes.” The postbellum influx of women into the workforce illustrated the strains on household economies, much as the antebellum movement of young rural men into cities had done. Yet American men considered the possibility that women could exist independently on wages earned outside of the home to be a more threatening transformation. Society was out of kilter, thrown off its axis by the pressures of postwar political and economic reconstruction. Provided the “chance to work,” women should get no more. White workingwomen should not struggle for “equal payment with men.” Wage equity would come in due course, if the situation merited, according to the time-honored procedures of the capitalist market and freedom to contract. Women must forego a struggle for “right[s],” the Times argued, uncoupling Stanton’s marriage of labor struggle with citizenship. Organizing for reimbursement on a par with men’s wages would take away from women “their main means of securing their chance to work at all.” The twisted logic of these sentiments parallel the arguments made by free labor proponents who counseled freedpeople to sign contracts with white planters in an arrangement that resembled slavery. Under these terms, economic opportunity could only be enjoyed at the behest of white men with land or capital, and the fault for lost opportunities would be workers’, not the economic system’s.44 Defining freedom as the freedom to contract was convenient for employers, idealizing the household economy under men’s rule and legitimating the narrow opportunities for advancement available to young men and women who kept account books and sold goods in retail stores. In October 1872, a young man from Milford, Connecticut, began his career as a clerk at Tiffany’s in Union Square. Unfortunately, his name is unknown. He proudly recorded in his diary that “[m]y first trial of living and working in N[ew]. Y[ork]. commenced to day[.] I am well pleased so far and hope for success.” He measured his accomplishments in terms of sales, small salary increases, and movement to various sales counters and bookkeeping posts in the store. Within a month of his arrival, he declared his “success has been first rate.”

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Yet he also feared that moving back and forth between departments without a sense of linear advancement signified stagnation or failure. While he received two five-dollar gold coins from his employer to mark the New Year, his salary was a scant three dollars per week, on par with the average saleswoman’s wage. In March 1873, he noted having “sold my old coat and pants for $2” in order to buy new undergarments. In April, after a serious illness, he paid four dollars to a doctor for medicine. “[S]o goes my laid up money,” he wrote in his diary. He was mortified to attend church in well-worn trousers and fretted that Tiffany was about to fire him. When his pocketbook was stolen in July, the loss of the six dollars inside was foremost on his mind. Encountering this economic uncertainty, merely keeping his job and trying to curb his alcohol abuse and join the YMCA were sufficient markers of economic and cultural achievement. But at the end of the diary, he remained hopeful: the new year of 1874 “opens with good prospects of me being able to pay all I owe soon and be once more free.”45 This clerk’s diary reveals how attaining success and freedom had become a more mundane and tenuous project for clerks between the 1830s and 1870s. Independence, a prerogative enjoyed by white men before the war, was something antebellum clerks had largely taken for granted as a status that would soon be theirs. For them, success meant proprietorship and the power and prestige it conferred, not keeping their jobs or aspiring to managerial positions. Reacting to economic uncertainties, the influx of women into the occupation, and emancipation, male clerks sought secure positions and comfortable salaries. Even these more modest goals would not be easy to attain: the Times reported in January 1874 that the wages of salesmen and clerks in the “dry goods trade” had been cut “from twenty-five to forty per cent” since the panic of 1873 had struck. In the coming decades, clerks joined labor unions such as the Knights of Labor, which tried to uphold the producer’s ethic that had defined hard work and the production of goods as the means to achieve and maintain workers’ republican independence. Unlike the observers who claimed that clerks and their labor were not productive, the Knights encouraged a broader conception of who did work. In response to these calls for brotherhood among all workers, hundreds of New York clerks and salesmen mobilized according to their occupation in sixteen Knights of Labor local assemblies in the 1880s and early 1890s, including five locals whose membership consisted solely of dry goods salesmen. In 1888, sales personnel began to band together in the Retail Clerks’ National

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Protective Association, which joined the more exclusive American Federation of Labor.46 Clerks who joined a union acknowledging the solidarity of producers, who defined freedom through wage contracts with employers or through attaining managerial positions, made a clean break with the past. Clerks and clerking were at the center of antebellum debates about the striver’s ethic, the commercial workplace, the anonymous city, and what class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age meant in American society. Young male clerks were primed to take the positions of proprietors and citizens before the Civil War. They seemed ready and able to use American economic and political freedom to their advantage and make themselves into powerful, refined men. Yet conflicts about class before the war—turning on individuals’ abilities to attain economic and cultural capital and thus wield authority and obtain prestige—established the myriad challenges clerks faced in becoming free, independent, and respectable citizens of the republic. Ironically, these conflicts created circumstances in which clerks could help reshape the meanings of cultural keywords and play a role in forming a more clearly defined class structure in postbellum America. Young men decided to scale back their ambitions because economic competition and the limited promise of the clerkship made the accumulation of economic and cultural capital—the currency of self-making—a difficult proposition. No longer young men on the make, they would become either union members or company men within hierarchical corporations, depending on their access to that capital. Those remaining in clerkships were clearly workers; those who achieved incremental advancement to management—but not proprietorship—belonged to a white-collar middle class. Clerks’ quest for authority and respect needed to be recast if the ideology of self-making was to remain a viable cultural narrative for Americans in the late nineteenth century. That ideology is not dead today, and neither is the notion of a perpetually ascending middle class—just ask the millions of twenty-first-century Americans who consider themselves members of the middle class and believe, even in hard times, that success and the respect that comes with it are just around the corner. The economic and social relations of capitalism foster dreams for success but also circumscribe opportunities to achieve them. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, labor, feminist, and civil rights activists have offered alternative social visions that challenge the ideological assumptions at the heart of capitalist society. But many Americans continue

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to trust in the creed of self-making and affix psychological, moral, and gendered meanings to their “failures” to determine who they are and who they will become. Paeans to hard work and self-denial allow many Americans to deny the fact that deep class inequalities exist in their midst. In this context, discussions in the first decade of the twenty-first century about the fluctuations of the stock market or declining standards of living often focus on the perceived dangers such trends pose to middle-class citizens’ ability to be upwardly mobile—a “middle-class squeeze”—rather than the ways Americans might alleviate the suffering of the poor. Nineteenth-century clerks’ stories of the self and the social help us understand how capitalism—including the cultural narratives that tout its opportunities and explain away its inequalities—has shaped Americans’ worldviews to this day.47

Notes

A b b r e v i at i o n s AAS DT Dun EP HMM HSP LCP MACNY MDHS NPG NYH N-YHS NYPL NYT WL

American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA) New-York Daily Tribune (New York, NY) R. G. Dun and Co. Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School (Boston, MA) New-York Evening Post (New York, NY) Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review (New York, NY) Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA) Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA) Municipal Archives of the City of New York (New York, NY) Maryland Historical Society (Baltimore, MD) National Police Gazette (New York, NY) New York Herald (New York, NY) New-York Historical Society (New York, NY) New York Public Library (New York, NY) New York Times (New York, NY) Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur Library (Winterthur, DE)

Notes to the Introduction 1. William Hoffman Diary, March 3, 1848, N-YHS. 2. Ibid., March 30, 1848. For an anthropologist’s discussion of the anxieties provoked by “liminality,” see Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 95–96. 3. Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 4. 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. 5. The etymology of the phrase “on the make” reveals this concern with men who caused disorder. The phrase came into common usage in the 1860s to describe men eager to advance economically and thus blur social boundaries, although Americans often labeled men “on the make” who engaged in financial, rather than social, fraud. See George Ticknor Curtis, The True Conditions of American Loyalty (New York: n.p., 1863), 17; and Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: J. B. Ford , 1869), 224. Also see Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Davy Crockett as Trickster: Pornography, Liminality, and Symbolic Inversion in Victorian America,” in SmithRosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 92.

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238 Notes to the Introduction 6. 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; Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 1–22; 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; 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; Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815–1860 (New York: Scribner’s, 1939); Timothy B. Spears, 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 23–49; David Jaffee, “Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760–1860,” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 511–35. New York population figures can be found at , accessed November 18, 2008. 7. The 1850 federal census is the first to note occupation as well as national and state origin. The 1855 New York State census provides this data as well as additional information about the number of years each person had lived in New York, breaking down New York State residents according to the county of their birthplace. An explanation of my methodology is in order. My sample of the 1850 census focuses on wards 3 (downtown), 7 (Lower East Side), and 9 (Greenwich Village). I sampled clerks, salesmen, bookkeepers, and copyists on every other manuscript page for all of ward 3, the first enumeration district of ward 7, and the third enumeration district of ward 9, for a total of 1,111 subjects. My sampling technique for the 1855 state census was the same, except that I chose one enumeration district for wards 1–10, 13–15, 18, and 20, for a total of 1,088 subjects. Each of these samples consists of roughly 8 percent of the total number of clerks (13,929) that Robert Ernst found in his study of the 1855 New York State census, in Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1949), 215. In a few cases, the data set varies from this number, due to unclear entries in the census. Many historians have chronicled the inaccuracies and uncertainties that plague census sources. Certain categories in my tables, such as the number of clerks boarding in business places, required a certain amount of educated guessing on my part. Missing data also complicate matters. I use the census data here as a means to understand clerks in the aggregate and complement the other types of evidence I analyze. At various points in the text, I trace these clerks’ careers in other census manuscripts with the search engine at . 8. 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); John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 70–146; and 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. 9. For more on these female shop assistants, see chapter 3. 10. 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; and Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes. 11. George John Cayley Diary, February 3, March 2, 1844, N-YHS; and [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. For more on loafers, see Zakim, “Business Clerk,” 563–67. 12. Cayley Diary, March 11, March 29, 1844; Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or, The White Whale (1851; New York: Signet, 1961), 22. For more on the influence of Byron on young male

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readers, see Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 103. 13. Cayley Diary, February 3, March 11, 1844. 14. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Part the Second, The Social Influence of Democracy (1840; New York: Vintage, 1990), 136–37; George G. Foster, New York Naked (New York: Robert M. De Witt, n.d.), 73; Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842; New York: Modern Library, 1996), 107; E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York: Scribner’s, 1975); Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860), 37. I thank Jennifer Meares for this last citation. 15. 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; 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); Zakim, “Business Clerk,” 575; and Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 33–55. 16. John A. Bagley, “Cayley, Sir George, sixth baronet (1773–1857),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, online edition, ; 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); and The Working Classes: Their Interests in Administrative, Financial, and Electoral Reform (London: D. F. Oakey, 1858). For the sale of the Hoffman family farm, see Hoffman Diary, January 27, 1850. 17. 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. 18. Ibid., 11; [Joseph A. Scoville], The Old Merchants of New York City. By Walter Barrett, Clerk (New York: Carleton, 1863), 57–58. 19. 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); J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), 229–369; W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 9–36. 20. See Sandage, Born Losers; Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes; and Rodney Hessinger, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 125–47. 21. Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 58–79; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Part the Second, 138. 22. 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; and Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). For analysis of the terms of class used by antebellum Americans and the debate about “natural” and “artificial”

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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. 23. In this book, I join other scholars in trying to revive class as a useful analytical tool in historical scholarship. My examination of class in the antebellum period offers a flexible interpretive model for understanding the economic and cultural “power relations” created by capitalism, as Seth Rockman has urged, and illuminates what Michael Sappol calls “the ambivalence, subtlety, [and] fluidity, not only of language but of social relations and practices, and also the various social and cultural structures in which they originated.” Clerks and their contemporaries routinely came into conflict with each other over the power associated with these languages, practices, and structures. See Seth Rockman, “Class and the History of Working People in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 25 (2005): 527–35; Sappol, Traffic of Dead Bodies, 10; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992), esp. 402–47; Amy Schrager Lang, The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in NineteenthCentury America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 79; 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; and Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 244–56. 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; and James Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–56. 24. 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; Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender and the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); and Joshua R. Greenberg, Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800–1840 (New York: Columbia University Press, , 2006). 25. 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; and Blumin, “The Hypothesis of MiddleClass Formation in Nineteenth-Century America: A Critique and Some Proposals,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 310–12, esp. n.45. Also see Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977); Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 203–19; 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); Clark Davis, Company Men: White-Collar Life and Corporate Cultures in Los Angeles, 1892–1941 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), 125–48; and Jerome P. Bjelopera, City of Clerks: Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

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26. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 258–97; Jocelyn Wills, “Respectable Mediocrity: The Everyday Life of an Ordinary American Striver, 1876–1890,” Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 323–49; Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); 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. 27. Henry Ward Beecher, Lectures to Young Men, on Various Important Subjects (1846; Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 218–19. On the Make joins recent works that, taken together, explore the cultural history of nineteenth-century capitalism from a variety of new perspectives. This scholarship has moved beyond the study of successful merchants and elite shoppers to show the ways in which ordinary white and black laborers, business men and women, sharpers, and consumers played important roles in shaping—as well as being shaped by—the nation’s capitalist culture. Some of these important works have already been cited in the notes. Also see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York: Viking, 2008); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Wendy A. Woloson, In Hock: Pawning from American Independence through the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women’s Economic Networks in Revolutionary Port Cities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Notes to Chapter 1 1. Edward N. Tailer Diary, January 1, 1850, 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. 2. 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; Tailer Diary, December 10, 1848; J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Part the Second, The Social Influence of Democracy (1840; New York: Vintage, 1990), 121–24. 3. 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; Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 44–69. 4. “The Statue of Franklin,” Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (Boston), 11 (1856): 268; Tailer Diary, March 25, 1849. 5. Robert McCoskry Graham Journal, July 15, 1849, N-YHS; 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. 6. Alexander Hamilton to Edward Stevens, dated St. Croix Novemr. 11th 1769, in Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke, eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Volume 1, 1768–1778 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 4, 8.

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7. Louis P. Masur, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 64–66. 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. 8. Abraham Bailey to James Colles, December 3, 1813, Box 1, Folder 4, James Colles Papers, NYPL. 9. 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; 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; Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 56–62; and 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. 10. [Daniel Defoe], The Complete English Tradesman (1726; New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 1: 8–10, 99–117; Michael Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 211–12; and 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. Examples of manuals for clerks include William Weston, The Complete Merchant’s Clerk (London: Charles Rivington, 1754); Malachy Postlethwayt, The Merchant’s Public Counting-House, 2nd ed. (London: John and Paul Knapton, 1751). For colonial merchants’ attempts to arrange for the training of young men entrusted to their care, see the correspondence in Henry and John Cruger Letterbook, 1766–1767, N-YHS; and John Reynell Letterbooks, 1729–1772, HSP. 11. 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; Richard Rolt, A New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (London: T. Osborne and J. Shipton, 1756); 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; Hunt, Middling Sort, 5; and 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. 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); Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 180; C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 90; and W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 29–31. 12. Masur, ed., Autobiography, 55; Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia), January 19, 1744; April 12, 1745; October 29, 1747; December 20, 1748; June 28, 1750; and New-York Gazette, December 21, 1747; May 1, 1749; January 8, 1749/50; April 16, 1750; and November 13, 1752. For more on Noel, see New-York Gazette, December 10, 1750; January 14, 1750/51; June 10, 1751; November 13, 1752; March 26, 1753; May 7, 1753; November 25, 1754; and , accessed September 11, 2006. For clerks deciding to take other career paths, see

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Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit, 44–45; and Thomas P. Slaughter, The Natures of John and William Bartram (New York: Vintage, 1996), 122, 124, 130–31, 155–56. 13. Masur, ed., Autobiography, 72; and Toby L. Ditz, “Secret Selves, Credible Personas: The Problematics of Trust and Public Display in the Writing of Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia Merchants,” in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 229. The clerks and tradesmen who belonged to Franklin’s Junto cultivated “both the social polish and the reputation for moral probity” that would help them achieve success, according to Anne S. Lombard, in Making Manhood: Growing up Male in Colonial New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 80–81. 14. Masur, ed., Autobiography, 51–52, 55, 60. 15. Pennsylvania Gazette, November 16, 1732. 16. Boston Gazette, March 17, 1740, quoted in T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 179. Also see [Defoe], Complete English Tradesman, 213–27; Patricia A. Cleary, “‘She-Merchants’ of Colonial America: Women and Commerce on the Eve of Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1989), 82–83, 100, 140, 142–43, 180, 193–94, 198–202, 216, 238–40; and Ellen L. Hartigan-O’Connor, “The Measure of the Market: Women’s Economic Lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and Newport, Rhode Island, 1750–1820” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2003), 113. 17. Pennsylvania Gazette, October 19, 1752; February 1, 1775; May 21, 1767; November 3, 1773; Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), March 25, 1778; and Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789; New York: Modern Library, 2004), 89–90, 93. 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; 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; and Steven C. Bullock, “A Mumper among the Gentle: Tom Bell, Colonial Confidence Man,” William and Mary Quarterly 55 (1998): 231–58. 18. HMM 5 (1841): 231. 19. Ibid., 5 (1841): 359; 9 (1843): 167–68; 19 (1848): 63–64; 32 (1855): 67; 5 (1841): 356; 25 (1851): 31. For nineteenth-century American biographies’ focus on character, see Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 20. HMM 14 (1846): 168; 12 (1845): 357; 9 (1843): 167; 20 (1849): 358. 21. Allan Stanley Horlick surmises that apprenticeship ties and clerical obedience held firm until the antebellum period, though he does not explore the relationships between merchants and clerks in earlier eras. See Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes: The Social Control of Young Men in New York (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1975), 67–79, 164–73. 22. George John Cayley Diary, March 14, 1844, N-YHS; [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), 17. 23. Francis Bennett, Jr., Journal, August 28, December 31, 1854, AAS. 24. HMM 35 (1856): 265. Nian-Sheng Huang has found that Franklin’s Way to Wealth was “printed more than eighty times” by 1850 and his Autobiography was “reprinted nearly one hundred and twenty times” by the end of the 1850s. See Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, 1790–1990 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994), 42–48. 25. DT, August 24, 1850, 4. 26. Ibid., September 9, 1850, 5; October 1, 1850, 5; NYH, February 12, 1851, 5. Intelligence offices were well known for fleecing naïve youth who had just arrived from the countryside or abroad. Policemen routinely investigated accusations made by disgruntled workers about

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employment brokers who promised a full refund if a job did not materialize but then pocketed the cash in violation of their agreement. See William H. Bell Diary, October 30, November 4, December 12, December 13, 1850; January 23, 1851, N-YHS. 27. DT, June 11, 1845; September 17, 1846; September 5, 1850, 5; March 20, 1851, 1; September 21, 1850, 2; September 23, 1850, 5; May 10, 1851, 1; July 23, 1851, 1. 28. Ibid., January 18, June 11, July 17, October 31, 1845; September 3, September 10, September 17, 1846; January 9, 1847; February 14, 1848; September 5, 1850, 5; September 6, 1850, 5; September 16, 1850, 5; October 1, 1850, 5; December 24, 1850, 1; December 11, 1851, 1; March 31, 1853, 6. 29. Ibid., January 3, January 18, June 4, July 17, 1845; January 6, September 3, December 9, 1846; January 11, 1847; February 7, February 12, 1848; September 2, 1850, 5; September 4, 1850, 5; September 21, 1850, 5; October 3, 1850, 5; December 24, 1850, 1; January 17, 1851, 1; January 31, 1851, 1; February 11, 1851, 1; March 20, 1851, 1; May 10, 1851, 1; June 11, 1851, 1; December 11, 1851, 1; March 29, 1853, 1; June 27, 1860, 2; and Tailer Diary, July 20, 1850. 30. Tailer Diary, October 31, 1848; January 13, 1851; February 11, 1853; April 1, May 17, May 23, June 7, June 8, June 11, June 14, November 24, 1854; July 20, 1855. Also see entries for May 18, December 4, 1848; and Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes, 107, 121–43, for another take on Tailer’s movement among these firms. Horlick suggests that Tailer’s “overt aggressiveness and self-promotion” shaped “a new style of commercial career,” an assertion that is difficult to reconcile with the fact that Tailer used family and friendship connections to get ahead, like young men in the eighteenth century. 31. Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845–80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 57–58; Rowland Tappan Berthoff, British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 119–20; Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820–1880 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 67; Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1949), 96; and Francis Wyse, America, Its Realities and Resources (London: T. C. Newby, 1846), 3:25–26. 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. 32. Emigrant Savings Bank Records, Bank Deposit Accounts, Test Book 1, Reel 4, entries for November 10, 1851, June 10–11, September 11, 1852, NYPL. For more on Irish emigration to Liverpool and the United States, see Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 293–95; and J. Matthew Gallman, Receiving Erin’s Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845–1855 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 28–33. 33. William Hoffman Diary, March 1, 1847; March 30–31, 1848, N-YHS. 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. On Hoffman’s use of his Poughkeepsie experience as education, see Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes, 107–8. 34. Hoffman Diary, March 31, 1848. In 1850, Poughkeepsie was home to 13,944 inhabitants, while Hudson’s population totaled 6,286. See J. D. B. DeBow, The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850 (Washington, DC: Robert Armstrong, 1853), 95–96. Arthur and Lewis Tappan were among the few New York merchants who tried to track their clerks’ lives outside of work in this period, instituting curfews and demanding temperance and church attendance of their employees. See Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 204. 35. Hoffman Diary, March 31, 1848. Horlick concludes that Hoffman, in the course of his career as a clerk in Albany and Manhattan, was more often “his employer’s mouthpiece” than an ambitious young man. Yet as Horlick acknowledges, his ambition to get ahead could only be

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realized through patience and adherence to the language of character. See Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes, 118, 120. 36. 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. 37. Alexander, Merchant’s Clerk, 18, 20–21; The Duties of Employers and Employed, Considered with Reference to Principals and Their Clerks or Apprentices (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1849); and Rorabaugh, Craft Apprentice, vii. For the challenges prescriptive authors encountered in trying to sell texts that at once sanctimoniously counseled young men to temper their ambitions and yet also profusely encouraged readers to excel, see Rodney Hessinger, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 125–47. For Max Weber’s description of the power structure of bureaucratic capitalism and the “staff of subaltern officials and scribes” who administered it, see Sandage, Born Losers, 163. 38. Tailer Diary, December 12, December 15, 1849; Henry Wirt Shriver to A. K. Shriver, October 12, 1856, Shriver Family Papers, MS 2085, MDHS. Also see Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 112; and Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes, 126–28, for different readings of Tailer’s negotiation with Alden. 39. Tailer Diary, October 10, 1852. Also see entries for February 2, 1850; January 2, December 30, 1851; October 19, 1852; April 21, 1853. 40. Ibid., December 12, 1849; Algernon Roberts Diary, February 21, 1847; Algernon Roberts Ledger, entry for 1849, in Roberts Family Records, Box 5, both in HSP; Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes, 126; 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. 41. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 113; Wyse, America, 3:26; HMM 20 (1849): 570; and Tailer Diary, December 24, 1849; June 8, December 6, 1850; January 14, February 13, October 2, October 4, October 9, 1852; May 27, November 24, 1854. For the generally high salaries paid by a Philadelphia hosiery wholesaler (with salesmen’s salaries exceeding one thousand dollars in the 1850s), see “Private Records of Joel J. Baily and Joel J. Baily and Co. Philadelphia” (1844–1864), HSP. 42. Charles Mason, New York, v. 209, p. 98; Zachariah M. Rhode, New York, v. 210, p. 145; in Dun; New York Transcript, February 24, 1836. 43. DT, June 10, 1851, 6; NYH, April 16, 1836; NPG, December 26, 1846, 124. Also see [Philadelphia] Public Ledger, July 11, July 14, 1836. 44. Hoffman Diary, March 31, 1848; Alexander, Merchant’s Clerk, 38. 45. Hoffman Diary, undated entry between entries for March 31 and April 3, 1848. Also see Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes, 106–21. 46. Hoffman Diary, April 3, 1848. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., July 12, July 15, November 11, 1848; August 26, 1850; Nicholas H. Chesebrough Diary, 1836–1838, WL; and Tailer Diary, October 28, November 30, 1850; September 28, 1853; February 25, 1854; September 28, 1855. 49. Hoffman Diary, April 21, April 13, April 20, May 3, 1848. 50. Ibid., May 3, 1848. 51. Ibid., June 29, July 2, July 3, June 22, July 6, 1850. Also see Martin Bruegel, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780–1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 216–17; and Michael Zakim, “The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary; or, A Labor History of the Nonproducing Classes,” Journal of the Early Republic 26 (2006): 590. 52. HMM 1 (1839): 447.

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Notes to Chapter 2 1. EP, May 5, May 7, and May 8, 1832; William E. Dodge, Old New York: A Lecture (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1880), 44; Richard Lowitt, A Merchant Prince of the Nineteenth Century: William E. Dodge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 14–18; and Edward G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 434, 438. 2. 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. 3. EP, May 7, 1832; and 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. 4. 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; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 437; and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 10. 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; and Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 78–83. 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. 5. Edward N. Tailer Diary, entry for January 22–25, 1849, N-YHS. 6. 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; Paul Erickson, “New Books, New Men: City-Mysteries Fiction, Authorship, and the Literary Market,” Early American Studies 1 (2003): 273–312; Timothy B. Spears, 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 31; Jonathan A. Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 24; and 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. 7. NYH, September 8, 1835; William Hoffman Diary, February 25, 1850, N-YHS. For the ways in which white artisans and journeymen helped to shape the meanings of race and class in antebellum America, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991). 8. Robert McCoskry Graham Journal, May 17, June 30, June 23, August 17, and September 13, 1848, N-YHS. Also see entries for February 4, February 18, February 28, April 21, and June 12, 1848. 9. George John Cayley Diary, January 15, January 13, February 20, 1844, N-YHS; Graham Journal, November 9, 1848; Tailer Diary, December 5, 1848; Henry Clay Southworth Diary, June 5–13, 1850, N-YHS. For young men cultivating an elegant writing “hand” to proclaim “manly deed[s]” and assert their “will,” see Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 8–10. 10. James W. Alexander, The Merchant’s Clerk, Cheered and Counselled (1856; New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1861), 5; B. F. Foster, Foster’s System of Penmanship; or, The Art of Rapid Writing Illustrated and Explained (Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1835), vi; idem, Prospectus of the Commercial Academy, 183 Broadway, N. Y. (New York: n.p., 1837), 5; and idem, A Concise Treatise

Notes to Chapter 2 247 on Commercial Bookkeeping, Elucidating the Principles and Practice of Double Entry, and the Modern Methods of Arranging Merchants’ Accounts (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1839), 85. Also see NYH, September 7, 1835. 11. The Mechanic’s Free Press (Philadelphia), September 11, 1830 (I thank Josh Greenberg for telling me about this source); M[athew]. Carey, Appeal to the Wealthy of the Land, Ladies as Well as Gentlemen, on the Character, Conduct, Situation, and Prospects of Those Whose Sole Dependence for Subsistence Is on the Labour of Their Hands, 2nd ed., improved (Philadelphia: L. Johnson, 1833), 8. Also see EP, April 12, 1848 (I thank Paul O’Grady for this citation); Free Enquirer (New York), September 16, 1829; Letter from Emily Chubbuck Judson to Sarah Catherine Chubbuck, January 18, 1843, in The Life and Letters of Mrs. Emily C. Judson (New York: Sheldon, 1860), 88, at North American Women’s Letters and Diaries Website, , accessed December 6, 2008; Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 225–26; Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 18. 12. François Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 89 (2003): 1295–1330; Rowland Berthoff, Republic of the Dispossessed: The Exceptional Old-European Consensus in America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 131–54. 13. Henry A. Patterson Diary, December 22, December 27, 1836; January 10, February 7, 1837, N-YHS; Michael Zakim, “Bookkeeping as Ideology: Capitalist Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America,” Common-Place 6 (April 2006), , quotations in paragraphs 2, 3, and 6, accessed May 27, 2007; DT, December 15, 1853, 1; Augst, Clerk’s Tale, 31, 83; Allan Stanley Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes: The Social Control of Young Men in New York (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1975), 112. 14. Tailer Diary, entry for January 22–25, 1849. Also see entries for January 13, February 24, March 24, 1849; February 1, February 18, April 6, November 28, December 27, 1850. 15. Ibid., January 17, April 16, February 28, April 30, 1850. Also consult entry for January 22, 1851. For the variety of clerks’ outdoor work, see Patterson Diary, September 8, September 27, 1836; October 24, 1838; January 30, 1839; William Hoffman Diary, April 22, April 28, May 3, May 6, July 12, 1848. 16. Graham Journal, February 19, February 26, February 29, 1848. 17. Letter from Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Katharine Maria Sedgwick Minot, April 24, 1837, in Life and Letters of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (New York: Harper and Row, 1871), 265, at North American Women’s Letters and Diaries website, accessed December 8, 2008. For taking inventory and preparing for the changing of business seasons during dull times, see Letter from Thomas Marston Beare to Mary Susan Saltonstall, August 25, 1828, N-YHS; Southworth Diary, June 24, June 29, July 12, July 25, 1850; January 9, February 3, 1851; Hoffman Diary, June 22, 1850; Patterson Diary, January 9, January 23, 1839. For clerks’ summer hiatuses from commercial houses, see Patterson Diary, July 17–October 24, 1837, and July 5–July 31, 1838; Hoffman Diary, July 22–August 1, 1848. On the absence of store employees making more work for other clerks, see Southworth Diary, April 22, 1851. For the speed of Thomas’s speech, see Edward I. Thomas Diary, November 18, 1856, AAS. 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. Consult Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 108–20, 127–40, 156; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 110, 113; and W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 132. 18. Dodge, Old New York, 7–8; Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 59 n.45, 92; Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1949), 216; and

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Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 437–38. After the Revolution, blacks began to take portering posts away from whites. See Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 178. By the 1850s, however, Irish immigrants had become the dominant portion of this occupational group. See idem, New York City Cartmen, 1667–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 2, 20, 164–65, 170. 19. Harper’s Weekly (New York), October 31, 1857, 689; Hoffman Diary, May 18, 1848; June 25, 1850. Also see Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 96–98; Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845–80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 57–58; and Kenneth A. Scherzer, The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830–1875 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 116. 20. Tailer Diary, January 15, 1852; DT, January 19, 1860, 6; NPG, June 20, 1846, 347; Alexander, Merchant’s Clerk, 23–24; and Horatio Alger Jr., Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks (1868; New York: Signet, 1990), 30–31. Also consult Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820–1880 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 80; Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 86; and Frank J. Byrne, Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 190. 21. Southworth Diary, June 17, 1851. Also see entries for October 14, 1850; January 29, 1851. Michael Zakim situates Southworth’s collar exchange in clerks’ search for cheap but respectable clothing rather than the varied nature of their work in Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 105–12. For more on how clothing stood for 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 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming), ch. 3. 22. Southworth Diary, June 4, June 13, 1850; Hoffman Diary, undated entry, July 1850 (on 228). 23. 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; Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 215; 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; Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 25; James Sidbury, “Slave Artisans in Richmond, Virginia, 1780–1810,” in Rock, Gilje, and Asher, eds., American Artisans, 50; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 252; 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; Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 20; Juliet E. K. Walker, The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (New York: Twayne, 1998), 89; and Provincial Freeman (Chatham, Canada West), August 29, 1855, , accessed December 8, 2008. 24. 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; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992), 438–39; and Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 79–80.

Notes to Chapter 2 249 25. Frederick Douglass’ Paper (Rochester, NY), May 27, 1852, , accessed December 8, 2008; Lewis Tappan, The Life of Arthur Tappan (1871; Westport, CT: Negro University Press, 1970), 284, 286. 26. Frederick Douglass’ Paper, May 27, 1852. White and black abolitionists often came into conflict with each other in the 1840s and 1850s as demands for emancipation and equality sparked racial violence and unsettled the meanings of social and cultural standing. See Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 170–262; Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 229; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1969), 43–44, 179–80. 27. Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends (1857; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 292. Also see The Colored American (New York), November 9, 1839; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, October 9, 1851, both at , accessed December 8, 2008. 28. J. D. Aiken to A. Baxter Springs, November 1, 1842, Box 1, Folder 21, Springs Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (I thank Jennifer Meares for providing me with a photocopy of this letter); Edward R. Laurens, A Letter to the Hon. Whitemarsh B. Seabrook; in Explanation and Defence of ‘An Act to Amend the Law in Relation to Slaves and Free Persons of Color’ (Charleston: n.p., 1835). I thank Emily Blanck for sharing her notes on this last source. Also see Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 43–92, 133–63; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 97–98, 110, 112. 29. Walter Johnson, “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s,” Journal of American History 87 (2000): 38; Patterson Diary, April 20, August 7, and October 17, 1838. 30. Hoffman Diary, June 25, 1850, and undated entry, July 1850 (on 228). For the advent of the clerk as a drumming and dunning agent for firms, see Spears, 100 Years on the Road, 27–28. 31. Tailer Diary, December 14, 1848; May 11, July 22, May 15, July 26, 1850; April 7, 1849; January 21, 1850. Also see entries for June 1, November 20, 1849; January 28, May 9, September 13, 1850; February 7, 1852. For an example of clerk-porter tensions escalating to the point of attempted murder, see NPG, October 7, 1847, 15. Relationships between textile mill overseers and mill workers could also oscillate between tension and friendship. See Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 82–84, 117, 134. Thomas Augst argues that clerks interpreted manual labor as mere “play” separated from their work at desk and counter in Clerk’s Tale, 62. 32. Graham Journal, September 10, 1849; Patterson Diary, November 21, 1838; Tailer Diary, January 29, 1850. 33 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; and Nicholas B. Wainwright, Philadelphia in the Age of Romantic Lithography (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1958). 34. NYH, July 2, 1850, 7. For Jagoe, see 1850 Federal Census, New York Ward 1 Eastern Division, New York, New York, Roll M432_534, page 15, image 31 (accessed at ); and Manuscript Population Schedules of the New York State Census, 1855, New York City, Ward 7, Enumeration District 1, MACNY. For want ads in which those seeking work requested clerkships as well as porters’ berths, see DT, January 18, 1845; December 9, 1846; October 22, 1850, 1; November 16, 1850, 1; January 31, 1851, 1; February 11, 1851, 1; August 28, 1851, 1; November 21, 1851, 1; March 29, 1853, 1; July 25, 1860, 1; August 10, 1860, 1. Also see Hodges, New York City Cartmen, 153.

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35. DT, January 18, 1845; November 21, 1851, 1. For Camus, consult Manuscript Population Schedules of the New York State Census, 1855, New York City, Ward 3, Enumeration District 2, MACNY [identified as Lewis]; 1870 Federal Census, New York Ward 22 District 11 (2nd Enum), New York, New York, Roll M593_1052, page 338, image 72; and 1880 Federal Census, New York (Manhattan), New York City-Greater, New York, Roll T9_888, page 203.3000, Enumeration District 452, image 0769 (accessed at ). Also see [Joseph A. Scoville], The Old Merchants of New York City. By Walter Barrett, Clerk (New York: Carleton, 1863), 194–95; and the entries for Peter Creegan, Emigrant Savings Bank Records, Bank Deposit Accounts, Test Book 1, Reel 4, January 5, 1852; August 8, 1853; June 2, October 4, 1854; and August 29, 1855, NYPL. 36. “Private Records of Joel J. Baily and Joel J. Baily & Co. Philadelphia” (1844–1864), “Employee Section,” 51–52, 67, 83, 86, HSP. 37. Ibid., “Employee Section,” 56. 38. Graham Diary, April 2, 1849; March 4, 1848. For Tucker’s attempts to escape, see entries for June 30, September 30, 1848; April 20, April 22, June 29, 1849. For another variation of the racist joke cited here, printed in the November 22, 1849, issue of the Missouri Courier, see Terrell Dempsey, Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 293. For the ways in which apprenticeship represented the “limits of Emancipation” for black New Yorkers, see Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 132–33. 39. As many historians have shown, there was a great deal of anxiety woven into these affirmations of white supremacy. White audiences, in an era of economic and social dislocation, longed for the experiences that blackface performers portrayed on stage—experiences that were emblematic, they believed, of a more easy-going, preindustrial past. See Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 115–31; Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 67; and Peter J. 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), 112, 145–46. 40. Tailer Diary, March 30, 1854, and entries for January 6, December 25, 1848; September 26, 1850; September 22, 1852; and November 29, 1853. Also see Southworth Diary, July 3, 1850; February 1, July 12, 1851; Patterson Diary, May 21, 1837; January 1, 1842; Graham Journal, November 24, 1848; NYH, January 1, 1848; Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Verso, 1990), 167, 173–74; Ken Emerson, Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998); Lott, Love and Theft, 169–210; and John Frick, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the Antebellum Stage,” at , accessed December 8, 2008. 41. Graham Journal, July 14, July 18, 1848. Notes to Chapter 3 1. Henry Southworth Diary, February 17, 1851, N-YHS; 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. 2. Southworth Diary, June 3, June 11, 1850. Also see entries for September 21, 1850; February 3, February 17, March 20, March 22, 1851. 3. Ibid., January 30, April 20, 1851; Grace Aguilar, Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1850); and Ik. Marvel [Donald G. Mitchell], Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1850). 4. “Natural History: The Counter-Jumper,” Vanity Fair (New York), February 4, 1860, 84. For more on Vanity Fair, see Wayne R. Kime, ed., Fitz-James O’Brien: Selected Literary

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Journalism, 1852–1860 (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2003), 26. While Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, the book did not achieve a wide readership in the United States until after the Civil War. See Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 13. Two possible sources for O’Brien’s foray into “natural history” are P. T. Barnum’s “What Is It?” exhibition displayed at the American Museum in New York in early 1860 and Gustave Flaubert’s 1837 “Une leçon d’histoire naturelle— genre: commis.” See James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 119–62; and Gustave Flaubert, Early Writings (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 45–49. 5. Vanity Fair, January 28, 1860, 72. 6. 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); and Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 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; Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1938; New York: Macmillan, 1951), 183; Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van Den Bark, The American Thesaurus of Slang (New York: Crowell, 1942), 519, 526. 7. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 96–97; 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; 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; and George Wilkes, The Lives of Helen Jewett and Richard P. Robinson (New York: n.p., 1849), 60. 8. The eighteenth-century origins of a “homespun ideology” that encouraged virtuous consumption and condemned women for their luxury purchases are discussed in Zakim, ReadyMade Democracy, 11–36; and T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 172–82. 9. Vanity Fair, February 4, 1860, 84. 10. Tailer Diary, February 24, 1849; April 18, December 27, 1850; April 24, May 10, 1852; Graham Journal, February 19, February 29, 1848, both in N-YHS. For more on the growth of retailing in the antebellum era, see Stuart M. Blumin, “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. 11. Tailer Diary, January 22–25, 1849; January 3, 1851; January 15, 1852. 12. Ibid., January 21, February 27, March 3, September 10, 1852. 13. Ibid., March 11–17, May 18–19, 1852. 14. Ibid., May 4, July 21, August 6, August 18, September 1, October 2, 1852; HMM 29 (1853): 264. For “sociability” among men in the commercial world, consult E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 196–97. 15. 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; Timothy B. Spears, 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 30–31. 16. 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. For changing notions of commercial space and the creation of refined retail spaces in nineteenth-century cities, see

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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; Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 64–65, 97; 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; and Harry E. Resseguie, “A. T. Stewart’s Marble Palace: The Cradle of the Department Store,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 48 (1964): 131–62. 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. 17. [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; A Peep into Catharine Street; or, The Mysteries of Shopping, by a Late Retailer (New York: J. Slater, 1846), 7; Nicholas H. Chesebrough Diary, September 15, October 25, 1836, WL; and Joanna Cohen, “Images and Imagination: Consumers in Commercial Lithography,” The Book (March 2008): 3–4. 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). 18. [Greene], Perils of Pearl Street, 27; “A Counter Hit,” Vanity Fair, March 10, 1860, 172. 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. 19. Godey’s Lady’s Book (Philadelphia), 48 (January 1854): 83–84; Harper’s Weekly (New York), October 31, 1857, 689; Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 200; Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 185–86. 20. Godey’s, 48 (January 1854): 84. 21. Hoffman Diary, January 8, 1849; May 8, 1848, N-YHS. 22. Godey’s, 14 (April 1837): 165; 54 (April 1857): 331; 56 (March 1858): 283. Also see DT, October 20, 1857, 6; Harper’s Weekly, October 31, 1857, 689; and [Greene], Perils of Pearl Street, 28–32. For more on the sales techniques that merchants and clerks used when dealing with female consumers, see Rotundo, American Manhood, 209–11. 23. Chesebrough Diary, March 17, June 19, February 25, May 31, 1837; [Greene], Perils of Pearl Street, 26–28. 24. Chesebrough Diary, October 26, 1837; October 10, 1836; The Rake (New York), September 10, 1842. 25. Godey’s, 48 (January 1854): 33–34; 52 (March 1856): 285–86. 26. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of Frances Anne Butler (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1835), 1:92–93, , accessed December 9, 2008. 27. Isabella Lucy Bird, The English-Woman in America (London: J. Murray, 1856), 340 (I thank Jonathan Prude for telling me about this source); The New York Sporting Whip, February 4, 1843; Godey’s, 14 (April 1837): 165. 28. DT, September 22, 1846; Lears, Fables of Abundance, 81; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 666–68; Stephen N. Elias, Alexander T. Stewart: The Forgotten Merchant Prince (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 48; Harry E. Resseguie, “Alexander Turney Stewart and the Development of the Department Store, 1823–1876,” Business History Review 39 (1965): 309–10; Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 102–4; and Lewis Tappan, The Life of Arthur Tappan (1871; Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 70–73.

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29. The Polyanthos, and Fire Department Album (New York), May 4, 1839. While George Washington Dixon was the titular editor of the Polyanthos, Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy Gilfoyle, and Helen Horowitz have recently shown that Snelling “claimed that he did nearly all the writing” for the paper. Since Dixon was in jail and court fighting libel claims in the early months of 1839, it is likely that Snelling wrote this article. See Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 39. 30. Polyanthos, May 4, 1839; Sunday Flash (New York), September 19, 1841. 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; NPG, October 17, 1846, 45; William Burns, Life in New York, in Doors and out of Doors (New York: Bunce and Brother, 1851); Home Journal (New York), February 1, 1851; and HMM 33 (1855): 766. 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. 31. Vanity Fair, January 28, 1860, 72; Anne G. Myles, “Queering the Study of Early American Sexuality,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 200; 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; Clare A. Lyons, “Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture: Homoeroticism in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 124–26; Cohen, Murder of Helen Jewett; and Rotundo, American Manhood, 271–72. 32. Whip, February 26, 1842; Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 45–59; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002), 172; Myles, “Queering the Study of Early American Sexuality”; and George Chauncey, Gay New York: The Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (London: Flamingo, 1995), 13. 33. George Rogers Taylor, “‘Philadelphia in Slices’ by George G. Foster,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 93 (1969): 32; Godey’s, 45 (October 1852): 371; 17 (October 1838): 180; [Foster], New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (New York: W. F. Burgess, 1849), 8–9. 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; 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. 34. Burns, Life in New York, n.p.; William McKenna, Hosiery & Fancy Goods, 237 Greene, New York, vol. 210, p. 150; Marcus M. Lichtenstein, Ribbons, Silks & Laces, 387 Broadway, New York, vol. 210, p. 146; both in Dun. For women who assisted or ran businesses on behalf of their husbands or brothers, see Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 89–90; William H. Bell Diary, October 18, December 4, December 11, 1850; January 13, 1851, N-YHS; and the following Mercantile Agency credit reports: entries for Charles Ferguson, Dry Goods Jobber, 57 William St., New York, vol. 197, p. 91; Patrick Kelly, Retail Dry Goods, 613 Third Ave., New York, vol. 209, p. 96; John Clark, Dry Goods, 8th Ave., New York, vol. 209, p. 99; Marum Cooper, Silks, 112 Chambers, New York, vol. 210, p. 110; David Leopold, Dry Goods & Fancy Goods, 13½ Carmine, New York, vol. 210, p. 117; Henry Arnold, Dry Goods, corner of 8th Ave. & 32nd St., New York, vol. 210, p. 127; James J. Smith, Hosiery, 275 Grand, New York, vol. 210, p. 133; Peter Ziglio, Millinery, 67 Division, New York, vol. 210, p. 151; A. Berk, Dry Goods, 197 Canal, New York,

254 Notes to Chapter 3 vol. 210, p. 176; Hugh Laing, Retail Grocer, 97 Washington, New York, vol. 264, p. 8; Theophilus Taylor, Grocer, 536 6th Ave., New York, vol. 264, p. 35; all in Dun. 35. Whip, July 23, July 30, 1842. 36. Ibid.; Charles Mason, Dry Goods, 347 Eighth Avenue, New York, vol. 209, p. 98, Dun. 37. 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. 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; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 96–99; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 208; Cohen, Gilfoyle, Horowitz, The Flash Press; and Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 146. 38. Tailer Diary, May 13, January 24, 1850; December 2, 1848; undated entry (probably October 14, 1849). Also see entries for November 17, 1849; February 15, March 1, March 20, May 28, 1850. Robert Graham noted in his diary that Rich charged eighteen dollars for a year’s subscription. Melvin Adelman pegs the average annual gymnasium subscription rate in 1860 at twelve dollars, which limited participation, he reasons, to “white-collar workers.” See Graham Diary, September 18, 1848; and Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820–1870 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 259–60. For more on early baseball clubs and their role in creating a vision of manliness and respectability, see Benjamin G. Rader, Baseball: A History of America’s Game (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 12–15. 39. Tailer Diary, March 12, 1849; and April 3, 1850. 40. Ibid., May 19, May 26, May 28, 1849; Graham Diary, September 18, 1848. 41. Tailer Diary, March 3, 1852; June 4–5, 1850. For the ways in which “young men’s [temperance] reformers defined an ideal manhood against the opposing figure of the older intemperate man,” see Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 131. 42. “The Counter-Jumpers’ Gymnasium,” Vanity Fair, March 31, 1860, 216. 43. Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 69–97; Graham Journal, February 5, February 9, 1849; Tailer Diary, February 21, March 20, July 22, 1852; September 11–12, 1850. 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. 44. HMM 26 (1852): 648; reprinted in The Genesee Farmer (Rochester, NY), 17 (August 1856): 249. Also consult Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 94; William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 222–37; Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 220; Jonathan A. Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 10, 181, 301; and Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 96, 113–16, 123. 45. HMM 23 (1850): 249. For Copper, see 1855 New York State Census, New York City, 1st Ward, Enumeration District 1, MACNY; 1850 Federal Census, Shenango, Lawrence, Pennsylvania, Roll M432_790, page 167, image 329; 1870 Federal Census, Summit, Marion, Iowa, Roll M593_409, page 259, image 518; 1880 Federal Census, Union, Union, Iowa, Roll T9_366, page 274.3000, Enumeration District 224, image 0552 (accessed at ). For Staats, see 1855 New York State Census, New York City, 14th Ward, Enumeration District 3, MACNY; and 1850 Federal Census, Hillsborough, Somerset, New Jersey, Roll M432_463, page

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434, image 395; 1860 Federal Census, Hillsborough, Somerset, New Jersey, Roll M653_708, page 793, image 219; 1870 Federal Census, Hillsborough, Somerset, New Jersey, Roll M593_888, page 547, image 472 (accessed at ). 46. Patterson Diary, March 16, 1846; September 10, 1848. 47. Catherine E. Kelly, In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 19–63; Boydston, Home and Work, 120–41; Stansell, City of Women, 116–19; 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; Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor, 11, 27–29, 62–69, 260–61; Gary J. Kornblith, “Becoming Joseph T. Buckingham: The Struggle for Artisanal Independence in EarlyNineteenth-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; Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 157–68, 182–90; Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 121–33; and Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 85. 48. HMM 33 (1855): 394 (quoted with a different interpretation in Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 78); Kelly, In the New England Fashion, 35. Also see Roberts, American Alchemy, 182–83; 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; and Carroll SmithRosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 82. 49. James W. Alexander, The Merchant’s Clerk Cheered and Counselled (1856; New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1861), 17–18. 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. 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. Notes to Chapter 4 1. DT, August 12, September 9, 1841. 2. Ibid., September 6, 1841. For the politicization of consumer purchases, see T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 3. 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; 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); and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1787–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 4. 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; and William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 436. Richard Franklin Bensel explores attempts to discern the age of youthful voters in The American Ballot Box in the MidNineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 93–106. Glenn Altschuler

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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. 5. Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic, 8, 72, 84; 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. 6. Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9; Burke, Conundrum of Class, 108, 121–22; Foner, Free Soil, xxi; and 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. 7. Henry A. Patterson Diary, November 5, 1842, N-YHS; Robert V. Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (New York: Norton, 1997), 568. 8. Patterson Diary, November 5, 1842. For the contradictory ways in which contemporary supporters and detractors assessed Webster’s character, emphasizing both his “noble manhood” and his “heathenish . . . private life,” see Remini, Daniel Webster, 28, 308, 523. 9. Patterson Diary, November 22, 1837; April 16, 1842; December 3, 1842; November 5, 1842; November 12, 1842. In mixing opposition to tariffs and paper currency with support for the harmony of interests between capital and labor, Patterson created an amalgam of Whig and Democratic Party doctrine. See Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 21; Robert C. Williams, Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 95–97; Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 113–14; and Burke, Conundrum of Class, 53–75. The Locofocos were radical Democrats who broke with Tammany Hall in the mid-1830s over their opposition to state-chartered banks, paper money, and opposition to the “Money Power” and “Slave Power” that had united against the interests of working men. When the regular Democrats snuffed out the gas lamps in Tammany during one meeting to drive the radicals from the hall, the latter lit self-starting matches called “Loco Focos.” While this radical, or “equal rights,” wing of the party was largely welcomed back to the ranks by the late 1830s, the label “Locofoco” persisted as an identifier of the Democratic Party as a whole. For the ways in which the Democrats adopted or coopted radical ideals over the course of the 1830s, see Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 25, 30; and Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 206. 10. Patterson Diary, November 12, 1842; April 13, 1838. To complicate his return to the Whig fold, Patterson noted in his diary that he voted for James Harper, the Nativist mayoral candidate, as well as a slate of Whig candidates in 1844. See his diary entries for April 14, 1844; November 9, 1845. He explained his vote for the Whigs on the latter date by once again impugning “the character of the democratic candidates.” For Ming returning to the Democratic fold after he had helped lead the Locofoco revolt, see Walter Hugins, Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class: A Study of the New York Workingmen’s Movement, 1829–1837 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960), 91. For Whig criticism of Democratic demagoguery, see Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 20; Howe, Political Culture, 30, 34, 187; and Morrison, Slavery and the American West, 86, 149. As Sydney Nathans has argued, however, Webster had deep misgivings about his own party’s “demagogic drift” during its popular and successful “log cabin campaign” of 1840. Hoping in vain “to argue the issues,” Webster only halfheartedly accepted that “songs and slogans” had replaced high-minded ideas in the minds of ordinary American voters. See Sydney

Notes to Chapter 4 257 Nathans, Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 130–31; and Remini, Daniel Webster, 505. 11. Nicholas H. Chesebrough Diary, November 8, November 12, November 14, 1836, WL. 12. For the spikes in popular interest that accompanied electoral campaigns, see Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic, 143. 13. William Hoffman Diary, June 10, 1848; October 6, 1848, N-YHS. 14. Ibid., September 7, 1848. Also see entry for October 5, 1848. According to Jonathan Earle, the Barnburners were a radical faction in New York state’s Democratic Party who opposed the internal improvement projects and state-chartered banks proposed by the “[p]rodevelopment” faction of the party, the “Hunkers,” who supposedly “hankered” after the potentially lucrative political posts offered by these institutions. The Hunkers labeled their opponents “Barnburners” “after an apocryphal and overzealous Dutch farmer who burned his barn to rid it of rats.” Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 62–77; and Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 92. 15. 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. 16. Hoffman Diary, July 7, 1849; Tailer Diary, November 19, 1850; April 2, 1849; April 10, 1849; Robert McCoskry Graham Journal, April 11, 1848, N-YHS. 17. Patterson Diary, June 17, 1843; Tailer Diary, March 5, 1853. 18. Tailer Diary, April 3, 1848; Graham Journal, April 3, 1848; NYH, April 4, 1848. As David Henkin has noted, by the late 1850s Tailer, by then a prosperous merchant, routinely clipped newspaper articles and inserted them into his diary, further embedding himself in the urban public sphere while also distancing himself from what happened in the streets. Henkin also argues that Tailer used a “journalistic style” to blur the boundaries between the literary form of diaries and newspapers, since “the newspaper is clearly the model for the kind of public record Tailer is trying to create.” See Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 130–32. 19. Patterson Diary, October 10, 1838. For more on Fanny Wright’s political persona—contemporaries called her the “female Tom Paine” and a “lady man”—and women’s circumscribed access to the public, political sphere in antebellum America, see Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 176–78; and Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 134–36. 20. Tailer Diary, July 28, 1850; November 5, 1850; Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 126. For Rynders’s reputation for violence, consult Anbinder, Five Points, 141–44, 153. 21. Chesebrough Diary, April 29, 1836; Patterson Diary, November 20, 1841; Hoffman Diary, September 7, 1848. Thomas Augst identifies the ways in which young men used lecture attendance and library reading to inculcate appropriate character traits amidst the challenges posed by democracy and capitalism in Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 114–206 (quotation on 118). 22. Chesebrough Diary, April 26, 1836; Hoffman Diary, September 8, September 11, 1848; Patterson Diary, November 20, 1841. 23. Patterson Diary, November 20, 1841; April 9, 1842. For Patterson’s attention to the forms of oratory, as well as his critiques of other speakers, see Augst, Clerk’s Tale, 135. 24. Patterson Diary, January 8, 1842; Hoffman Diary, September 15, 1848. For the ways in which youthful Americans in the post-Revolution generation replaced quests for “immortal

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fame” with more mundane ambitions in an era of potentially enervating prosperity, see George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: Norton, 1979), 59–60, 73–74. 25. Hoffman Diary, September 9, 1848. 26. Tailer Diary, undated entry after February 4, 1849; February 1, 1849. Maryland KnowNothings used the phrase “bone and sinew” to describe their voters in 1856. As Jean Baker has argued, “vague . . . designations” helped unify a party consisting of “proprietors, skilled workers, and clerks” as well as what one observer called the “riff-raff.” See Jean H. Baker, Ambivalent Americans: The Know-Nothing Party in Maryland (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 141, 145. 27. Tailer Diary, January 20, 1852; Patterson Diary, January 15, 1842; DT, January 16, 1850. Augst makes the point that the “aggressive sociability” of MLA events prepared clerks for mercantile competition. See Augst, Clerk’s Tale, 162, 189–90. 28. DT, August 16, August 31, September 2–4, 1841. Also see Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 113–14. 29. DT, August 12, September 1–2, 1841; Augst, Clerk’s Tale, 178. For clerks’ purported “sycophancy,” see Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 122. Howe has shown that Greeley advocated “opportunities for intellectual self-improvement” as a way to “redeem” the working class. See Howe, Political Culture, 187. 30. Williams, Horace Greeley, 95–96 [quotations on 95]; Adam-Max Tuchinsky, “‘The Bourgeoisie Will Fall and Fall Forever’: The New-York Tribune, the 1848 French Revolution, and American Social Democratic Discourse,” Journal of American History 92 (2005): 470–97. 31. DT, September 2, September 11, September 20, 1841. 32. Patterson Diary, September 11, November 13, September 18, October 23, 1841; January 1, 1842; October 2, October 30, 1841. 33. NYH, August 20, August 23, September 11, 1841. 34. Ibid., August 20, 1841; Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. 35. NYH, August 23, 1841. 36. Sunday Flash (New York), September 12, 1841; Ryan, Women in Public, 76–87; DT, September 6, 1841. 37. NYH, September 3, 1841; DT, September 2, 1841; Longworth’s American Almanac, NewYork Register, and City Directory (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1841). In 1827, clerks broke the plate glass of their employers’ shops during an hours movement. See Paul A. Gilje, Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 223–24. Also see Amy Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 38. DT, December 24–25, 1846. 39. Ibid., December 17, 24–25, 1846. 40. 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. 41. DT, January 12, March 1, 1850. 42. Ibid., February 28, 1850. 43. 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. Also see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), 68. 44. DT, March 1, 1850. 45. Ibid., March 22, 1850. 46. Ibid., February 28, March 29, 1850; May 31, 1850, 3; November 7, 1850, 1; April 25, 1851, 5; August 12, 1850, 5; August 13, 1850, 1; August 16, 1850, 4; September 4, 1850, 1; September 12,

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1850, 3. Given his belief in the harmony of interests between workers and employers, Greeley disavowed the development of an American working class, rather endeavoring as he saw it to protect workers’ “right to organize themselves” against the “exploitation” of wage labor. See Williams, Horace Greeley, 98; Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 114; and Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 363–89. 47. DT, May 15, 1850, 2; June 13, 1850, 3. 48. Ibid., May 20, 1850, 3; December 30, 1850, 1; October 21, 1851, 5. 49. Ibid., January 24, 1851, 1; April 24, 1851, 1; December 1, 1851, 3; December 20, 1851, 5; January 8, 1852, 1. The last reference that I can find for a meeting of dry goods clerks on the Bowery is in ibid., August 17, 1852, 1. 50. Remini, Daniel Webster, 610–17; John Niven, Martin Van Buren: The Romantic Age of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 291, 544–45, 594–95; Ted Widmer, Martin Van Buren (New York: Times Books, 2005), 126, 152, 161; and Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 121. Notes to Chapter 5 1. Horace Greeley, Art and Industry as Represented in the Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, New York, 1853–4 (New York: Redfield, 1853), 231. Also see Arthur Harrison Cole, The American Wool Manufacture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 1:23, 28, 151, 300; Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 8; John A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953), 224; and Doggett’s New-York City Directory for 1848 and 1849 (New York: John Doggett, Jr., 1848). 2. Stuart Blumin cautions historians to be wary of affirmations that mid-nineteenth-century America was—in the words of New York’s Illustrated News—a “plain dark democracy of broadcloth.” He contends not only that careful observers could discern visible distinctions in the clothing worn by urban citizens but also that what he sees as the increasing segregation of workers and employers in residential and leisure space gave fine clothing different meanings in different venues. Consult Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 143–44; Cole, The American Wool Manufacture, 1:206, 300–301, 306; Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 37–68, 84–85, 101–2, 108, 118; Florence M. Montgomery, Textiles in America, 1650–1870 (New York: Norton, 1984), 192–93, 342; and Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 24–27. 3. Willis’s description of the “Republic of Broadway” can be found in Weekly Mirror (New York), November 23, 1844. For Willis’s invocation of a “Republic of Fashion” in New York, see Home Journal (New York), January 4, 1851. Also consult Paul Joseph Erickson, “Welcome to Sodom: The Cultural Work of City-Mysteries Fiction in Antebellum America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2005), 327. 4. Walt Whitman, from Life Illustrated, August 9, 1856, in Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari, eds., New York Dissected, by Walt Whitman. A Sheaf of Recently Discovered Newspaper Articles by the Author of Leaves of Grass (New York: R. R. Wilson, 1936), 120–21. Also see “Human Nature in Chunks. Chunk No. 9—Modern Clerks—How Made Up,” United States Democratic Review (New York) 35 (February 1855): 119–21; and Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 112–13. 5. Patricia Cline Cohen, “Unregulated Youth: Masculinity and Murder in the 1830s City,” Radical History Review 52 (1992): 33–52; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Erickson, “Welcome to Sodom,” 330–36; John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in

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Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 70–146; 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; 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; and David Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 9. 6. Patricia Cline Cohen has emphasized the importance of boardinghouses for introducing clerks to sporting men, and I will discuss clerks in the context of sporting culture in the next chapter. Wendy Gamber, conversely, has discovered that some lodging clerks tried desperately to master a refined appearance while obscuring their “loaferish . . . habit[s]” of smoking and drinking alcohol. Still others, she notes, piously attended “grammar class” together. Consult Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Vintage, 1998), 10–11; and Gamber, “Tarnished Labor: The Home, the Market, and the Boardinghouse in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 22 (2002): 196–97. 7. For the economic benefits and cultural meanings of “home” in this period, see Gamber, “Tarnished Labor,” 177–204; Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 173; and Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 121. For the ubiquity of urban boarding, see Wendy Gamber, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 3. 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. 8. Thomas Butler Gunn, The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses (New York: Mason Brothers, 1857), 49, 51, 53, 61, 92, 96–97. 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; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 121, 129, 134–35; Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 178; and 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. 9. [James Boardman], America, and the Americans, by a Citizen of the World (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1833), 27; and William Hoffman Diary, April 10, May 18, and July 19, 1848, N-YHS. 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. 10. Hoffman Diary, March 9, 1849 and undated entry after March 9, 1849. 11. Ibid., March 9, June 25, June 26, June 29, 1849. For a Boston clerk’s rapturous description of a roommate’s respectability, see Gamber, Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America, 41–42. 12. Hoffman Diary, July 4, July 7, July 9, 1849; and James W. Alexander, The Merchant’s Clerk Cheered and Counselled (1856; New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1861), 10–11. Kenneth Scherzer’s far more comprehensive study of boardinghouse room rates suggests that Hoffman was paying rent that might have purchased “first-class accommodations,” according to an 1840 observer. Yet in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Scherzer contends that working-class boarders paid on average between four and seven dollars per week, while “simple middle-class rooms” might cost twelve to fifteen dollars per week. See Scherzer, Unbounded Community, 101–3. Wendy Gamber contends that “typical boarders . . . at mid-century” might fork over three to four dollars per week. See Gamber, Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America, 43.

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13. Hoffman Diary, July 10, July 14, July 20, 1849, undated entry on 198 (probably January 1850), and January 27, 1850. On the desirable “semi-autonomy” of boardinghouse life, see Scherzer, Unbounded Community, 98. Charles Rosenberg has argued that affluent midcentury New Yorkers believed that cholera was “a disease of poverty and sin,” though it might also stem from “gluttony” and “appetites undenied.” Hoffman might have been referring to excessive eating when he claimed to have been “living too high.” See Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 120, 130. 14. Hoffman Diary, June 21, 1850, and undated entry on 228–29 (July 1850). 15. Henry A. Patterson Diary, May 26, November 1, 1837; March 7, April 6, May 11, August 7, 1838, N-YHS. A. T. Stewart established a boardinghouse “home” for his clerks near the “Marble Palace” in 1846. See “Description of Stewart’s Store,” The American Penny Magazine (New York), October 31, 1846, 615. Advice-literature writers also encouraged employers to re-create ties to home for rural clerks. Consult The Duties of Employers and Employed, Considered with Reference to Principals and Their Clerks or Apprentices (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1849), 19. 16. Patterson Diary, September 19, October 24, 1838; April 17, 1839; December 31, 1842; July 29, 1843; “Marriage Proof,” July 18, 1844; and February 27, 1847. 17. Robert McCoskry Graham Journal, August 9, May 29, 1848, N-YHS; DT, August 9, 1848. For an astute discussion of the class implications of Shakespeare in the American theater, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 13–81. Nathan Graham’s assessment of Niblo’s differed sharply from that offered by P. T. Barnum, who claimed that Niblo’s was “the only place of amusement where the shining lights of righteousness will be seen,” even though, Barnum admitted, Niblo often produced “the same entertainment that you have in a theatre.” One important difference between Niblo and other New York theater proprietors was his decision to exclude unattached women from his audiences. See Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 32. For more on Nathan Burr Graham, see Doggett’s New York City Directory, 1849–1850 (New York: John Doggett, 1849); and Graham Journal, November 6, 1848. 18. Graham Journal, October 9, October 20, 1848. As Ann Fabian has argued, the primary aim of popular discourses about gambling was to teach young clerks and others the difference between the speculation involved in commercial capitalism and the speculation inherent in the gaming table. See Fabian, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 19. Graham Journal, October 28, November 10, 1848. 20. Ibid., May 26, 1848; Patterson Diary, November 30, 1836; Hoffman Diary, August 31, 1850. Also see Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 110–11. 21. While Patricia Cline Cohen contends that “[i]t took a woman’s eye, a woman’s knowledge of sewing, to identify the one idiosyncratic feature that made it Robinson’s cloak and his alone,” merchants expected male store clerks to be knowledgeable about the goods they sold. See Cohen, Murder of Helen Jewett, 12, 15, 298, 304, 308–10; and “The People vs. Richard P. Robinson for murder, April 19, 1836,” New York County District Attorney Indictment Records, MN 5165, roll 165, MACNY. For the ways in which dandies flouted bourgeois prescriptions encouraging “genteel anonymity” in dress and personal appearance, see Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, 118–21. 22. Patterson Diary, September 9, September 13, September 20, September 21, October 7, October 18, October 22, 1836; February 3, March 4, December 6, 1837; March 23, March 30, 1838. 23. DT, April 5, April 7, 1851. The former story values the stolen goods at $350, while the latter raised the total to $2,000. See “The Chestnut Street Beau,” n.d. [c. 1850–1870, Philadelphia], Songsheet Collection, LCP, for critical verses levied at dandies who never paid their tailors’ bills. 24. Hoffman Diary, July 17, 1849; and also see September 15, 1850; Patterson Diary, March 20, 1839; Henry Southworth Diary, March 18, 1851, N-YHS. David Scobey, “Anatomy of the

262 Notes to Chapter 5 Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York,” Social History 17 (1992): esp. 203–4, 214. For the “stared” quotation, see Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 27. 25. Tailer Diary, May 2, 1849; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 193–216; and Seth Edward Rockman, “Working for Wages in Early Republic Baltimore: Unskilled Labor and the Blurring of Slavery and Freedom” (Ph. D. diss., University of California at Davis, 1999). Also see Graham Journal, June 28, 1848. 26. Patterson Diary, August 28, 1838; January 15, February 12, 1842; Tailer Diary, March 27, 1848. For Tailer’s admiring description of two firefighters who died while struggling to extinguish a blaze in Duane Street, see his diary entry for April 3, 1848. For Bowery culture, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 257–71; and Stansell, City of Women, 89–101. 27. Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the NineteenthCentury City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 63; “Firemen’s Register, Board of Engineers and Engine Companys” (1855–1864), N-YHS; Cornelius Mathews, A Pen-and-Ink Panorama of New York City (New York: John S. Taylor, 1853), 137; 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”); Benjamin F. Baker, A Glance at New York (New York: Samuel French and Son, 1848); Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 56–57; Henry A. Patterson, Misc. Mss. Folder, N-YHS; Patterson Diary, September 22, 1836; February 21, 1838; January 29, December 31, 1842. 28. 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; 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; and Ned Buntline [E. Z. C. Judson], The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life (New York: Berford, 1848), 74–75. 29. Buckley, “To the Opera House,” 31, 298; “Dry Goods Clerk” (New York: H. De Marsan, c. 1850–1870), Songsheet Collection, LCP; Anna Cora Mowatt, Fashion (1845) in Jeffrey H. Richards, ed., Early American Drama (New York: Penguin, 1997), 304–67; The Spirit of the Times (New York), April 15, 1843, 84; Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 21, 56; George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–49), 4: 617–18; 6:39–41; T. Allston Brown, A History of the New York Stage from the First Performance in 1732 to 1901 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1903), 1:60, 2:202; Joseph N. Ireland, Records of the New York Stage from 1750 to 1860 (New York: T. H. Morrell, 1866), 2:390, 580. 30. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 64; Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, 227–28. 31. Graham Diary, May 10, 1849; Tailer Diary, entry for May 9, 1849 [but includes record for May 10 and May 11]; and NYH, May 11, 1849. 32. Graham Diary, May 10, 1849; Tailer Diary, entry for May 11, 1849; NYH, May 11, 1849. For Gedney, see Doggett’s New York City Directory, 1848 and 1849 (New York: John Doggett, 1848), which lists him as a broker living at 18 Wall Street. 33. Graham Journal, September 29, 1849. For a contemporary description of the riot, see Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot at the New-York Astor Place Opera House (New York: H. M. Ranney, 1849). For lists of casualties and of rioters arrested, see Buckley, “To the Opera House,” 5, 306. For more on the uncertainty of class identities in nineteenth-century riots, consult my “Riot and Respectability: The Shifting Terrain of Class Language and Status in Baltimore during the Great Strike of 1877,” American Nineteenth-Century History 4 (Fall 2003): 61–96. For the

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MLA’s purchase of the Opera House, see Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 158–59; and Buckley, “To the Opera House,” 78. 34. Tailer Diary, May 10–11, March 4, 1848; June 3, 1850. For contemporaries’ shock at seeing “genteel-looking” but clearly intoxicated youth prosecuted in court, see Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 107–8. Also consult Southworth Diary, May 29, 1851, for a clerk’s description of his uncomfortable encounter with drunken “low fellows” on a stagecoach from Yorkville to the city. 35. Tailer Diary, December 31, 1848. 36. I thank Paul O’Grady for giving me the citations for the temperance meeting and finger biting incidents, in EP, June 10, 1846; and NYH, January 14, 1848. For Johnson’s case, see NYH, March 13, 1849. Also see Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 47. 37. Southworth Diary, February 18, 1851; 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. 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. 38. Applegate, “Henry Ward Beecher and the ‘Great Middle Class,’” 120–24. 39. Henry Ward Beecher, Lectures to Young Men, on Various Important Subjects, New Edition with Additional Lectures (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 225–26. Notes to Chapter 6 1. William Hoffman Diary, August 31, September 1, and September 21, 1850, N-YHS. For Barnum’s advertising campaign that preceded Lind’s arrival and a description of her American tour, see P. T. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, ed. Terence Whelan (1855; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 296–343. 2. Hoffman Diary, September 8, 1850. 3. Joseph Parrish Thompson, Young Men Admonished, in a Series of Lectures (New York: Leavitt, Trow, 1848); 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; and Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 4. 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; Hoffman Diary, September 14, July 3, September 18, 1850. 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. 5. First Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the New York Magdalen Society (New York: n.p., 1831), 5, 13–14; Genius of Temperance, Philanthropist, and People’s Advocate (New York), August 3, 1831; Todd, Moral Influence, 207. For the keyhole woodcut, see New York Sporting Whip, February 11, 1843. 6. Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 33, 113.

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7. 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. 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; C. Dallett Hemphill, “Isaac and ‘Isabella’: Courtship and Conflict in an Antebellum Circle of Youth,” Early American Studies 2 (2004): 413–16, 422; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002), 125–43; and Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Also see Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 64–78. 8. Hemphill, “Isaac and ‘Isabella’,” 403; Edward N. Tailer Diary, April 17, 1849, N-YHS. 9. “Prostitution,” The Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review 53 (1850): 448–506 (quotations on 448, 449, 465); and Tailer Diary, September 11, 1850. 10. “Prostitution,” 451; Tailer Diary, September 11, 1850; The Whip (New York), September 3, 1842. 11. Tailer Diary, June 6, April 28, May 2, May 30, November 4, 1850; Henry A. Patterson Diary, March 20, 1839, N-YHS; Hoffman Diary, July 17, 1849; September 15, 1850. 12. Tailer Diary, January 25, 1850. Also see Paul Joseph Erickson, “Welcome to Sodom: The Cultural Work of City-Mysteries Fiction in Antebellum America” (Ph. D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2005), 44, 79, 84, 132, 245–46; and David S. Reynolds, “Introduction,” in George Lippard, The Quaker City: or, The Monks of Monk Hall, ed. Reynolds (1845; Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), xix–xli. 13. Tailer Diary, November 12, 1852. 14. Ibid., March 6, May 18, 1850; Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women; Stuart M. Blumin, “George G. Foster and the Emerging Metropolis,” in Blumin, ed., New York by GasLight and Other Urban Sketches by George G. Foster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1–61; David Scobey, “Anatomy of the Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York,” Social History 17 (1992): 215; and Hemphill, “Isaac and ‘Isabella’,” 417–19. For a discussion of the economic circumstances that drove some working-class women to prostitution, see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 171–92. 15. 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). 16. John Ingalls to Jonathan Trumbull Smith, January 18, 1847; R. H. Bigelow to Smith, January 24, 1847; Ingalls to Smith, January 25, 1847, in Folder 2, “Letters, 1847,” Jonathan Trumbull Smith Correspondence, 1841–1851, AAS. Conversations with Helen Horowitz and Paul Erickson have helped me think through the “imaginative” aspects of sporting literature, whose readership may have included young men who were not “sports” but who wanted to remain, in Erickson’s phrase, “in the know.” Conversation with Helen Horowitz, August 6, 2003; Paul J. Erickson, “The Community of Solitary Readers: Consuming Obscene Literature in Antebellum America” (paper presented at the American Studies Association annual conference, Hartford, Connecticut, 2003). 17. J. Henry Smith, Esq., The Green Family; or, The Veil Removed. Comprising the Most Thrilling Incidents in the Lives of the Members of the Green Family; As Detailed by the Only Surviving

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Member: With an Account of the Toils and Vicissitudes through Which They Were Compelled to Pass: Wherein Hartford Is Raked over from Lord’s Hill to Ferry Street; and the Shortcomings and Iniquities of Persons in Both High and Low Life Are Detailed (Springfield, MA: Smith and Jones, 1849), iii, 55 (marginalia); and Erickson, “Welcome to Sodom,” 320–21. 18. Smith, Green Family, iii, 32, 41–43, 47–50; Erickson, “Welcome to Sodom,” 298 n.62. For more on Aristotle’s Masterpiece and the works of Becklard, see Horowitz, Rereading Sex, 19–32, 279–80. Also see Hoffman Diary, undated entry between March 31 and April 3, 1848. 19. Smith, Green Family, 59–65, 103, 105, 113. 20. The Flash (New York), October 2, 1842; The Whip and Satirist of New-York and Brooklyn, April 2, April 9, 1842; The Whip, August 27, 1842. For the geographical scope of The Whip’s network of “spies” and readers, extending from New York southward to Philadelphia and northward to Portland, Maine, see the issue for July 9, 1842. Also consult Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz, Flash Press, 1–3, 9–13. 21. The Rake (New York), September 10, 1842; New York Sporting Whip, March 4, 1843; Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 99–188. 22. The Weekly Rake, October 1, 1842. 23. Ibid., October 22, 1842. For the article calling a Division Street grocery store clerk a “puppy dog,” see Ely’s New York & Brooklyn Hawk and Buzzard, or Saturday Courier & Enquirer, March 15, 1834. For the Rahway, New Jersey, informant who called the young clerks harassing women who left the local Methodist Church “New York Cheap Store Monkeys,” see Ely’s Hawk & Buzzard, or New-York & Brooklyn Courier & Enquirer, September 8, 1832. 24. New York Sporting Whip, February 11, 1843. 25. Weekly Rake, October 22, 1842. 26. Whip, October 15, 1842. Also see Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 27. Weekly Rake, July 9, 1842; Flash, November 20, 1841. 28. Flash, December 10, 1842; The Weekly Whip (New York), February 12, 1855; and Weekly Rake, undated, but possibly issue of August 6, 1842. 29. Hemphill, “Isaac and ‘Isabella’,” 399 n.3. 30. The Life and Adventures of Cicily Martin (New York: Sinclair and Bagley, 1846), 59–61. Also see Venus’ Miscellany (New York), January 31, 1857; and Nancy F. Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850,” Signs 4 (1978): 219–36. Smith-Rosenberg has also concluded that male sexuality and violence in this period, as played out in the mythical tales of Davy Crockett, were considered in the logic of sporting culture to be “good clean fun.” See Smith-Rosenberg, “Davy Crockett as Trickster,” 107. 31. It is unclear from the indictment whether Cregier ever served jail time. See “The People vs. John L. Cregier,” in New York County District Attorney Indictment Records, February 23 and March 16, 1860, MN 5385, roll 85, MACNY; Marybeth Hamilton Arnold, “‘The Life of a Citizen in the Hands of a Woman’: Sexual Assault in New York City, 1790 to 1820,” in Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, eds., Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 35, 39–42, 49; and Sharon Block, “Rape without Women: Print Culture and the Politicization of Rape, 1765–1815,” Journal of American History 89 (2002): 849–68. 32. NYT, June 16, 1853, 5. Also see Hendrik Hartog, “Lawyering, Husbands’ Rights, and ‘the Unwritten Law’ in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 84 (1997): 67–96. 33. “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; George Wilkes, The Lives of Helen Jewett, and Richard P. Robinson (New York: n.p., 1849), 59–60; Robinson Down Stream; Containing Conversations with the ‘Great Unhung,’ Since

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His Acquittal; and an Account, by Robinson Himself of His Travels from Connecticut to NewOrleans, on His Way to Texas (New York: n.p., 1836), 3–5; Cohen, Murder of Helen Jewett, 378. 34. Cohen, Murder of Helen Jewett, 126–51. 35. Patterson Diary, October 23, December 11, 1841; January 8, January 15, January 22, February 5, February 12, March 19, 1842; Graham Journal, February 9, 1848. William Alcott hoped that interaction “with the more refined and virtuous of the other sex” would keep young men from indulging in immoral activities and help them “acquire the true polish of a gentleman.” See Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide, rev. and enlarged sixteenth ed. (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1846), 247. Also see Hemphill, “Isaac and ‘Isabella’”; and Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 42. 36. Tailer Diary, October 20, October 24, 1853. 37. Graham Journal, July 28, 1848. 38. Ibid., July 27–28, August 2, 1848; Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 115–16; Scobey, “Anatomy of the Promenade.” 39. Tailer Diary, December 13, 1853. 40. George John Cayley Diary, January 7, January 20, 1844, N-YHS. 41. Ibid., January 21, 1844. 42. Ibid., March 3, 1844. 43. Patterson Diary, November 5, 1842. 44. Ibid., July 15, September 30, 1843; and Charles Lennox Wright, “Genealogy of the Wright, Benedict, and Patterson Families. Correspondence, genealogical records, photographs, notes, etc.,” N-YHS. While Patterson’s descriptions of Eleanor focus on her intellectual attainments and virtuous character, Ellen Rothman and Karen Lystra have shown that correspondence between suitors in this period often made reference to sexual attraction and desire. See Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 122–31; and Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 56–87. For the suggestion that a marriage to a frugal, virtuous, and domestically inclined woman would help clerks save part of their earnings instead of wasting them in theaters, oyster cellars, and cigar shops, see Grant Thorburn, Sketches from the Note-Book of Lawrie Todd, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Fanshaw, 1847), 12–14. 45. Tailer Diary, August 23, 1852; Horowitz, Rereading Sex, 11, 55. Also see Michael Ryan, The Philosophy of Marriage, in Its Social, Moral, and Physical Relations (Philadelphia: Barrington and Haswell, 1848); Alexander Walker, Beauty; Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Woman (New York: W. H. Colyer, 1845); 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); and idem, Woman Physiologically Considered as to Mind, Morals, Marriage, Matrimonial Slavery, Infidelity and Divorce (London, A. H. Baily, 1839). 46. Samuel Edgerley Diary, February 24, February 26, March 1, 1859, NYPL. Also see Hemphill, “Isaac and ‘Isabella’,” 415–16, for an example of a young man who attempted to balance competing claims of class and morality as he courted young women in Camden, New Jersey, and visited brothels in New York City. Notes to the Conclusion 1. Letter from Bradford Morse to My Dear Parents, October 24, 1852, in Folder 1, Correspondence, n. d., 1852; Morse to My Dear Parents, February 13, 1853, Morse to My Dear Parents, May 15, 1853, Morse to My Dear Brother Ammi, June 9, 1853, Morse to My Dear Mother, June 14, 1853, in Folder 2, Correspondence, 1853, January–June; Morse to My Dear Father, November 30, 1854, in Folder 5, Correspondence, 1854, July–December; Morse to My Dear Father, December

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18, 1855, in Folder 6, 1855; Morse to My Dear Brother Edward, August 30, 1857, in Folder 8, Correspondence, 1857; all in Morse Family Papers, AAS. 2. Morse to My Dear Father, August 31, 1856, in Folder 7, Correspondence, 1856; undated letter from Carrie Cheever Butler to My Dear Aunt Mary, in Folder 9, 1858, 1860; Morse to My Dear Brother Edward, June 12, 1853, in Folder 2, Correspondence, 1853, January–June; Morse to My Dear Father and Mother, October 23, 1856, in Folder 7, Correspondence, 1856. For Morse’s declining conditions and fortunes, see Morse to My Dear Father, July 31, 1853, August 9, 1853, in Folder 3, Correspondence, 1853, July–December; Morse to My Dear Brother Ammi, August 31, 1854, Morse to My Dear Father, November 30, 1854, in Folder 5, Correspondence, 1854, July–December; Morse to My Dear Father, July 2, 1856, in Folder 7, Correspondence, 1856. For his upright moral conduct, see Morse to My Dear Father, October 14, 1853, in Folder 3, Correspondence, 1853, July–December. Morse counsels his brother to be patient in Morse to My Dear Brother Edward, April 28, 1854, in Folder 4, Correspondence, 1854, January–June; all in Morse Family Papers, AAS. For the fluctuating wages and prospects for San Francisco’s commercial community in the 1850s, see Peter R. Decker, Fortunes and Failures: White-Collar Mobility in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 32–86. 3. Robert C. Williams, Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 40–43; DT, July 20, 1850, 4; HMM 29 (1853): 646–47; Genesee Farmer (Rochester, New York), 18 (March 1857): 89–90; and 18 (October 1857): 309–10 (my thanks to Wendy Woloson for sharing the citations to Genesee Farmer); The Monthly Cosmopolite (New York), October 1, 1849. 4. DT, March 31, 1860, 5. 5. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977); Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Howard P. Chudacoff, “Success and Security: The Meaning of Social Mobility in America,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 101–12; Clark Davis, Company Men: White-Collar Life and Corporate Cultures in Los Angeles, 1892–1941 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Jocelyn Wills, “Respectable Mediocrity: The Everyday Life of an Ordinary American Striver, 1876–1890,” Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 323–49; Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 203–19. 6. 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); Sarah Smith Malino, “Faces across the Counter: A Social History of Female Department Store Employees, 1870–1920” (Ph. D. diss., Columbia University, 1982); Jerome P. Bjelopera, City of Clerks: Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 291; and 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). To gather my 1880 federal census sample for New York City, I used the same techniques described in the introduction, n. 7, for all of ward 3; Enumeration Districts 74–87 in ward 7; and Enumeration Districts 219–231 in ward 9. The printed census schedules for 1880 show that 5,654 of the 45,312 “clerks, salesmen, and accountants in stores” in New York City were women—12.5 percent. See Francis A. Walker and Charles W. Seaton, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1883), 892.

268 Notes to the Conclusion 7. 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). According to Ileen DeVault and Jerome Bjelopera, turn-of-the-twentieth-century working-class families whose sons became clerks often interpreted such a rise not as movement into middling economic strata but as an outcome consistent with their identities as workers. See DeVault, Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Bjelopera, City of Clerks. 8. “An Hour in A. T. Stewart’s Retail Store,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (New York), April 24, 1875, 107; Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (Hartford: J. B. Burr, 1869), 59. Also see David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 95. 9. “An Hour in A. T. Stewart’s,” Harper’s Weekly (New York), January 15, 1870, 39; Philip Quilibet, “Drift-Wood,” The Galaxy (New York) 22 (1876): 556; Edward Crapsey, “A Monument of Trade,” The Galaxy 9 (1870): 98. For Stewart hiring failed merchants to staff his corporate hierarchy of buyers and department managers, see Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 226–27; Stephen N. Elias, A. T. Stewart: The Forgotten Merchant Prince (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 53. 10. DT, January 27, 1851; Harry E. Resseguie, “Alexander Turney Stewart and the Development of the Department Store, 1823–1876,” Business History Review 39 (1965): 301–22; idem, “A. T. Stewart’s Marble Palace: The Cradle of the Department Store,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 48 (1964): 131–62. 11. C. E. Rogers Diary, January 13, February 23, March 2, March 8, March 9, March 16, March 24, March 25, April 27, April 28, April 30, May 13, July 26, 1864; NYPL; DT, January 9, 1860, p. 7; HMM 42 (May 1860): 647; NYT, February 25, 1861, 5; February 28, 1861, 7. By the late 1860s, the society had passed into the hands of German clerks who listened to lectures in their native tongue and held a “festival” at “Lion Park” far uptown at 110th Street and 8th Avenue, the northwest corner of Central Park. See NYT, November 8, 1867, 8; July 28, 1868, 5. 12. Chandler notes that Stewart’s “ventures into manufacturing proved unsuccessful.” See Chandler, Visible Hand, 220, 225. 13. These searches of New York City clerks from my 1850 and 1855 census samples were performed using the invaluable resources provided by . To trace the careers of clerks from my sample, I used names, ages, and birthplaces. If multiple clerks with the same name, age, and birthplace appeared in the search, I did not include them in the subsample. Unfortunately, this means that the subsample accounts for the experiences of only a small percentage of the men and women clerking in New York at midcentury. Certainly, more research needs to be done in these internet databases, but I think the data here suggest the wide variety of clerks’ career trajectories in this period. Kellogg Francis: Federal Census 1870, Yonkers, Westchester County, New York, Roll M593_1116, p. 610, image 565. Nathaniel Hubbard: Federal Census 1870, Wheeling Ward 5, Ohio County, West Virginia, Roll M593_1696, p. 294, image 591; and Federal Census 1880, Medina, Orleans County, New York, Roll T9_912, p. 232.2000, ED 151, image 653. Edward Dean: Federal Census 1860, Boston Ward 11, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Roll M653_524, p. 118, image 119; Federal Census 1870, Union, Bergen County, New Jersey, Roll M593_852, p. 536, image 692. Gabriel Hoyt: Federal Census 1860, Buffalo Ward 5, Erie County, New York, Roll M653_746, p. 672, image 187; Federal Census 1870, Brooklyn Ward 20, Kings County, New York, Roll M593_960, p. 94, image 187; Federal Census 1880, New Madrid, New Madrid County, Missouri, Roll T9_705, p. 326, ED 78, image 657. For clerks who became farmers, see John Halley, Federal Census 1860, Hampshire, Kane County, Illinois, Roll M653_191, p. 0, image 469; Richard Chambers, Federal Census 1860, Harborcreek, Erie County, Pennsylvania, Roll M653_1108, p. 637, image 25; Richard Chambers, Federal Census 1880, Mina, Chatauqua County, New York, Roll T9_816, p. 491.1000, ED 64, image 205. For clerks who became tradesmen or laborers, see Charles Beaumont, Federal Census 1860, Manteno, Kankakee County,

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Illinois, Roll M653_192, p. 320, image 324; Charles Beaumont, Federal Census 1870, New York Ward 18, District 21 (2nd enum), Roll M593_1041, p. 641, image 422; George W. Wood, Federal Census 1860, Tompkins, Delaware County, New York, Roll M653_743, p. 576, image 579; George W. Wood, Federal Census 1870, Manchester, Wayne County, Pennsylvania, Roll M593_1464, p. 148, image 280; George W. Wood, Federal Census 1880, Manchester, Wayne County, Pennsylvania, Roll T9_1202, p. 86.3000, ED 5, no image number. 14. Jacob Corlies: 1850 Federal Census, New York Ward 7, District 1, New York, New York, Roll M432_539, page 43, image 87; 1860 Federal Census, Poughkeepsie Ward 4, Dutchess, New York, Roll M653_741, page 344, image 346; 1870 Federal Census, Poughkeepsie Ward 6, Dutchess, New York, Roll M593_927, page 102, image 595; 1880 Federal Census, Poughkeepsie, Dutchess, New York, Roll T9_825, page 234.2000, Enumeration District 61, image 0474. Baxter Lane: 1850 Federal Census, New York Ward 7, District 1, New York, New York, Roll M432_539, page 117, image 235; 1880 Federal Census, Kings (Brooklyn), New York City-Greater, New York, Roll T9_846, page 463.3000, Enumeration District 94, image 0283. William Alling: 1850 Federal Census, New York Ward 7, District 1, New York, New York, Roll M432_539, page 129, image 259; 1870 Federal Census, Newark Ward 9, Essex, New Jersey, Roll M593_881, page 240, image 484; 1880 Federal Census, Newark, Essex, New Jersey, Roll T9_778, page 260.4000, Enumeration District 58, image 0182. 15. Nicholas Doscher: 1850 Federal Census, New York Ward 7, District 1, New York, New York, Roll M432_539, page 55, image 111; 1860 Federal Census, New York Ward 7, District 3, New York, New York, Roll M653_792, page 263, image 267; 1870 Federal Census, New York Ward 7, District 5, New York, New York, Roll M593_979, page 245, image 495; 1880 Federal Census, New York (Manhattan), New York City-Greater, New York, Roll T9_872, page 314.4000, Enumeration District 123, image 0330. John Crowin: 1870 Federal Census, St. Louis Ward 8, St. Louis, Missouri, Roll M593_818, page 248, image 496. 16. David Prescott: 1850 Federal Census, West Boylston, Worcester, Massachusetts, Roll M432_343, page 217, image 434; 1860 Federal Census, West Boylston, Worcester, Massachusetts, Roll M653_528, page 895, image 565; 1870 Federal Census, West Boylston, Worcester, Massachusetts, Roll M593_657, page 349, image 255. Samuel Dare: 1850 Federal Census, New York Ward 7, District 1, New York, New York, Roll M432_539, page 155, image 311; 1860 Federal Census, South Brunswick, Middlesex, New Jersey, Roll M653_699, page 513, image 516; 1870 Federal Census, Brooklyn Ward 21, Kings, New York, Roll M593_961, page 511, image 536. Herman Zimmer: 1880 Federal Census, New York (Manhattan), New York City-Greater, New York, Roll T9_899, page 236.4000, Enumeration District 662, image 0480. James Sugden: 1850 Federal Census, Brooklyn Ward 9, Kings, New York, Roll M432_520, page 62, image 61; 1860 Federal Census, New York Ward 17, District 5, New York, New York, Roll M653_808, page 286, image 287; 1870 Federal Census, Troy Ward 3, Rensselaer, New York, Roll M593_1084, page 107, image 217; 1880 Federal Census, Troy, Rensselaer, New York, Roll T9_920, page 436.4000, Enumeration District 144, image 0877. 17. Charles Clapp: 1850 Federal Census, Gardiner, Kennebec, Maine, Roll M432_257, page 324, image 136; 1860 Federal Census, Gardiner, Kennebec, Maine, Roll M653_441, page 0, image 62; 1870 Federal Census, Gardiner, Kennebec, Maine, Roll M593_546, page 283, image 569. James Freed: 1860 Federal Census, New York Ward 9, District 4, New York, New York, Roll M653_796, page 3, image 5; 1870 Federal Census, New York Ward 9, District 8, New York, New York, Roll M593_983, page 299, image 34. Edward Hays: 1870 Federal Census, Penitentiary, Cole, Missouri, Roll M593_771, page 267, image 535. William Saul: 1850 Federal Census, New York Ward 11, New York, New York, Roll M432_547, page 326, image 151; 1860 Federal Census, New York Ward 21, District 5, New York, New York, Roll M653_818, page 553, image 555; 1870 Federal Census, Newark Ward 6, Essex, New Jersey, Roll M593_880, page 588, image 558; 1880 Federal Census, New York (Manhattan), New York City-Greater, New York, Roll T9_899, page 72.2000, Enumeration

270 Notes to the Conclusion District 651, image 0147. John Haine: 1870 Federal Census, New York Ward 19, District 19 (2nd Enum), New York, New York, Roll M593_1044, page 188, image 378. 18. Chudacoff, “Success and Security,” 104, 106. Other scholars have analyzed the ambiguous meanings of clerks’ occupational, economic, and social mobility in their work. Stuart Blumin has written that between one-quarter and two-fifths of his sample of Philadelphia clerks enjoyed upward mobility in the four decades prior to the Civil War, yet he also acknowledges the uncertainty of mobility for those in what he calls the “large ‘middle class’” of urban dwellers. See Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 120–21; and idem, “Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century American City: Philadelphia, 1820–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1968), 81, 106. Clyde and Sally Griffen also illustrate the uncertainty of clerical mobility in their study of Poughkeepsie, New York, during the period between 1850 and 1880. In their statistical sample, the Griffens show that between 40 and 50 percent of clerks stayed in their clerkships, while a significant fraction experienced downward mobility into the trades, “semiskilled,” or unskilled positions (between 16 and 26 percent). Upward mobility into the “proprietor” category fluctuated between 28 and 40 percent. They qualify their quantitative analysis with a rather bleak verdict about opportunities for occupational advancement available to younger clerks. See Clyde Griffen and Sally Griffen, Natives and Newcomers: The Ordering of Opportunity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Poughkeepsie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 60, 62, 132–36. On disagreements about the meaning of occupational mobility for postbellum Americans, see Stephen Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 47, who argues that a change from “clerk” to “salesman” might not have meant very much, and Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 291–92, who contends that, in an economic climate marked by diminished opportunity for significant advancement, such small gains might be laden with great importance. 19. Henry Patterson Diary, September 10, 1848, N-YHS; Patterson Bros., New York, v. 316, pp. 78, 100N, 100 a/3, 100 a/17, 100 a/40, 100 a/58, 1 a/7, 100 a/85, Dun. 20. Winzer, Tailer, & Osbrey, New York, v. 199, p. 276; v. 203, pp. 700N, 700QQ, Dun; Edward Tailer Diary, December 20, 1855–January 11, 1856, N-YHS; Hamlin, Rushmore & Co., New York, v. 197, p. 1, Dun. For other clerks who entered firms through family ties with the principals, see John Slade & Co., New York, v. 197, p. 1V; S. B. Chittenden, Bro. & Co., New York, v. 197, pp. 5, 22; Martin & Lawson, New York, v. 197, p. 89. For other clerks who bought out their employers, see John Divine, New York, v. 198, p. 104; McConkey & Jones, New York, v. 209, p. 75; John Quinn, New York, v. 264, p. 64; all in Dun. 21. W. Watson & Co., New York, v. 224, p. 44; Heye Brothers, New York, v. 224, p. 72; in Dun. 22. James H. Lipsett, New York, v. 209, p. 54; Charles S. Benson, New York, v. 264, p. 11; Richard Brown, New York, v. 209, p. 97; Cassin & Daniels, New York, v. 209, p. 86; all in Dun. For other clerks who received loans, inheritance, or other assistance in starting businesses, see Post & Young, New York, v. 197, p. 53; Cameron, Edwards & Co., New York, v. 197, p. 84; A. Travers & Co., New York, v. 197, p. 85; James Goodeve & Co., New York, v. 197, p. 99; Henry Haviland, New York, v. 224, p. 92; Charles Meyer, Jr., New York, v. 264, p. 49; all in Dun. For the rise of credit reporting and the attendant focus on commercial character, see Bertram WyattBrown, “God and Dun & Bradstreet, 1841–1851,” Business History Review 40 (1966): 432–50; Edward Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 146–51; Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 99–158. 23. Carleton & Co., New York, v. 197, p. 33; Arnold, Constable & Co., New York, v. 364, p. 35; A. & G. & H. Brown, New York, v. 197, p. 2; all in Dun. For firms in which clerks contributed capital when they became partners, see Bellamy, Bradley & McMahon, New York, v. 209, p. 24; Hall, Ruckel & Co., New York, v. 224, p. 32; S. B. Chittenden, Bro., & Co., New York, v. 197, pp. 5, 22. For clerks who provided their new firms with access to their renowned business skills or

Notes to the Conclusion

271

access to customers rather than to capital, see Petit, Harris, England & Co., New York, v. 197, p. 28; Eli Mygatt Jr. & Co., New York, v. 197, p. 29; Martin & Lawson, New York, v. 197, p.89; Clements & Hayden, New York, v. 198, p. 103. For clerks who invested nothing and received a “moderate interest” or salary as a partner in the new firm, consult Lathrop & Ludington, New York, v. 197, p. 35; Thomas & W. A. McLaughlin, New York, v. 209, p. 85; J. W. Scudder & Co., New York, v. 209, p. 91 all in Dun. Also see Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Constructing Firms: Partnerships and Alternative Contractual Arrangements in Early Nineteenth-Century American Business,” Business and Economic History 24 (1995): 64–65, 68–69. 24. Furman, Davis & Co., New York, v. 197, p. 71; S. & M. E. Fowle & Co., New York, v. 209, p. 93; E. S. Chadsey, New York, v. 209, p. 7; Joseph Cowperthwaite, New York, v. 209, p. 18; all in Dun. 25. Elizabeth and Nathaniel Moore, New York, v. 209, pp. 42, 100KK; Nicholas S. Ludlum, New York, v. 209, p. 57; Consider Parish, New York, v. 197, p. 1x; Bernard Lowethal, New York, v. 197, p. 1. For other clerk-merchants, see James B. Smith & Co., New York, v. 197, p. 75; William T. Anderson, New York, v. 209, p. 68; Thomas Bailey, New York, v. 209, p. 83; Thomas Rumney, New York, v. 209, p. 91; Andrew Little, Jr., New York, v. 210, p. 151; Robert Boyd, New York, v. 264, p. 50; all in Dun. 26. Benjamin Poor & Co., New York, v. 197, p. 91; Knight & Withers, New York, v. 210, p. 111; in Dun. For other examples of failed merchants assigning goods to their associates and becoming clerks, using a clerkship as a platform to become a merchant again, or becoming mired in cycles of business failure, see Caleb B. Le Baron, New York, v. 197, p. 57; David Morriset, New York, v. 197, p. 57; Giles S. Ely, New York, v. 197, p. 81; Chase, Goodridge, & Walker, New York, v. 197, p. 84; Hellman & Stadeker, New York, v. 197, p. 90; Charles Ferguson, New York, v. 197, p. 91; Henry Arnold, New York, v. 210, p. 127; Childs & Dougherty, New York, v. 224, p. 71; A. G. Waterbury & Co., New York, v. 224, p. 74; William S. Hall, New York, v. 264, p. 16; Frederick S. Bogue, New York, v. 264, p. 22; L. D. Simons, New York, v. 316, p. 5; Hull & McMullen, New York, v. 316, p. 6; George B. Farrar, New York, v. 364, p. 87; all in Dun. Also see Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 17, 26, 50, 72, 95–96, 135, 168, 174–75, 179, 194. 27. For Southworth, see New York, v. 216, p. 800 a/86, Dun; and NYT, February 20, 1885, 8. 28. For Graham, see New York, v. 343, p. 400L, Dun; Tailer Diary, October 2, 1853. 29. William Hoffman Diary, August 31, 1850, N-YHS. 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. 30. New York, v. 319, p. 469; v. 322, p. 752, Dun. 31. 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. 32. Ibid., 77, 68–69, 42, 113–14. 33. New York, v. 322, pp. 758, 800N, 800V, 800 a/11, 800 a/34, Dun; and NYT, July 19, 1871, 7. 34. Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 203–19; Griffen and Griffen, Natives and Newcomers, 136. 35. See Chandler, Visible Hand; Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 125–48; Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 258–97; Beckert, Monied Metropolis; Davis, Company Men. 36. NYT, May 20, 1861, 2; August 10, 1862, 4; July 14, 1863, 4; July 15, 1863, 1; August 8, 1863, 2; January 24, 1864, 1. For an argument about clerks’ enlistment in smaller towns that emphasizes “economic frustration and social malaise,” see W. J. Rorabaugh, “Who Fought for the North in the Civil War? Concord, Massachusetts, Enlistments,” Journal of American History 73 (1986): 699–701. 37. Virginia Penny, The Employments of Women: A Cyclopœdia of Woman’s Work (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1863), vii, x, 104–8, 125–31. 38. Ibid., 126; Revolution (New York), February 19, 1868, 99–100.

272

Notes to the Conclusion

39. Revolution, January 15, 1868, 25; July 15, 1869, 23; and 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. 40. NYT, June 17, 1864, 8; July 8, 1866, 4; April 15, 1869, 4; March 3, 1870, 8. 41. Ibid., July 29, 1870, 8; April 7, 1872, 1; August 19, 1870, 8. 42. Ibid., October 19, 1879, 5. 43. Caroline H. Dall, ‘Woman’s Right to Labor’: or, Low Wages and Hard Work (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1860), 72, 104–5; Helen R. Deese, ed., Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-Century Woman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), xv–xvi, 287–88; Penny, Employments of Women, 126. 44. NYT, February 18, 1869, 4; Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, 80, 122–30. 45. Diary of an unidentified young Tiffany’s clerk, October 28, November 27, 1872; March 8, April 9, April 20, April 26, May 1, May 11, July 11, July 23, August 2, August 9, October 11, 1873; undated entry at end of diary, N-YHS. 46. 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; 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; Jürgen Kocka, White-Collar Workers in America, 1890–1940, trans. Maura Kealey (London: Sage, 1980), 54–55. 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. 47. “Poverty Spreads,” ; “CBS Poll: The Middle Class Squeeze,” , both accessed June 6, 2007.

Index

Adams, William, 83, 87, 113 Agnew, Catharine, 195 Aguilar, Grace, 84 Alden, Paul, 42, 44, 90–91 Alexander, James W., 41–42, 50, 57, 118, 155 Alexander, Mary, 29 Alling, William, 216 American Federation of Labor, 235 Astor Place Riot, 167–71 Bailey, Abraham, 24 Baily, Joel, 78 Baker, Benjamin, 165 Bannister, George, 55 Barnum, P. T., 177 Beare, Thomas Marston, 41 Beecher, Henry Ward, 19, 174–75 Bellows, Henry, 21 Bennett, Francis, 33 Bennett, James Gordon, 84, 128, 168–69, 218; on early closing movement, 135–37 Benson, Charles, 220 Bland, Elias, 27 Boyd, Stephen, 49, 96 Brown, Richard, 220 Bulpin, George, 92–93 Camus, Louis, 77 Cass, Lewis, 125–26 Cayley, George John: on ambition, 9, 33; on courting, 201–2; on identity, 11–12; on work, 9, 58, 60 Chadsey, E. S., 221 Character: and appearance, 151, 163; as capital, 22, 31–36, 52, 174, 177, 207–8, 220; and citizenship, 133; language of, 17, 19, 36, 43, 46, 70–71, 77, 91, 174–75, 224–25; in library and lyceum, 129–32; and reputation, 174–75, 220, 226–27; and social mobility, 218, 221

Chesebrough, Nicholas: ambition of, 50; and customers, 97–98; on lyceum, 129; and politics, 124–25 Christy, Edwin, 80, 167 Clapp, Charles, 217 Clark, Edward, 67–68 Class, antebellum language of respectability and: appearance, 160, 163; diary keeping, 167–71; gender, 155–56, 159, 172, 177–205, 232; parents, 157–59; political culture, 120–21, 126, 129, 146–47; race, 67–70, 80–82; sex, 182, 184, 203; sporting publications, 137, 184, 187, 189–94, 204; stores, 92–93, 99; urban life and leisure, 108–11, 165–66, 171–72, 178; work, 114 Class, definitions of, 16–18, 240n23 Class, postbellum structure, 19, 207–36 Clay, Edward, 66, 95 Clay, Henry, 126 Clerks: African Americans, 65–69; ambition of, 1–3, 12–15, 21–53, 57, 61, 70–71, 86, 90, 107, 141, 143, 151, 163, 166, 172–74, 179, 195, 197, 209, 213, 220–23, 227, 233–236; as arbiters of style, 86, 99; in boardinghouses, 4, 6–7, 143, 152–57, 159, 177; as bookkeepers, 57–59, 61; as clerkmerchants, 209, 221–22; as consumers, 119, 160–63; as copyists, 58; courting, 81, 197–203; drumming of, 91–92; early closing movements of, 119–20, 132–45, 230–33; eighteenth-century, 26–31; and female customers, 3–4, 84–88, 92–100; foreign-born, 9–11, 14, 30, 34–35, 38–39, 63, 66, 77–78, 166–67, 216–20, 222; and lyceums and libraries, 129–32; and one-price system, 100–101, 160; on politicians, 122–23, 125–27; and porters’ work, 3, 54, 62–65, 70–79, 83, 207; and producer’s republic, 119–20, 234–35;

273

274

Index

Clerks (continued): retail work of, 61–62, 71, 92–100, 144–45; salaries of, 3, 27, 40–46, 78, 155, 209, 213, 221–22, 225, 229–30, 234, 245n41; and servility, 75, 100, 103, 114, 137, 142; sexual experiences of, 99– 100, 187–97, 203–5; in South, 65–66, 69; and sporting culture, 4, 187–97; theft by, 4, 46, 163, 193, 218; union membership of, 234–35; and urban disorder, 171–73, 175; and white-collar middle class, 211– 27; wholesale work of, 61–64, 71, 89–92, 144–45; women as, 8, 19, 88, 101–7, 210– 11, 228–33; and women in cities, 177–205; as workers, 35, 56, 62, 82, 118, 122, 134, 136, 141, 143–44, 209, 211–12, 230 Clerks’ Aid Society, 213 Clerks’ Early Closing Association, 231–32 Clerkships: and apprenticeship, 3, 14–15, 24– 33, 42–45, 51–52, 54–55, 58–61; in Civil War era, 207–11, 214, 218, 221–22, 225, 227–36; eighteenth-century, in historical memory, 22–25, 31–33; as platforms for advancement, 23, 120, 217, 222, 232; as subaltern places, 4, 42, 53, 55–57, 118 Coates, Mary, 29 Coleman, William, 28 Collins, John, 28 Consumption, 4, 13, 18; African Americans’, 66–67; and producer’s republic, 114–18; and sexual exchange, 86–100, 104–7, 137; shoppers and early closing movement, 119–20, 136–37, 231–32; shoppers’ interactions with clerks, 96–107, 137 Cope, Thomas, 32 Copper, Charles, 112 Corbet, Amelia, 203 Corlies, Jacob, 215 Counter jumpers, 13; and bourgeois elites, 113–14; in comic valentines, 114–18; and manhood and respectability, 86, 88, 102, 112–18, 150–51, 167, 191–94; and producer’s republic, 9, 83–86, 107, 113, 136, 161; as seducers, 85–86, 88; and sexuality, 88, 95, 102 Cowperthwaite, Joseph, 221 Cregier, John, 195 Crowin, John, 216 Dall, Caroline Healey, 232 Dare, Samuel, 217

D’Arusmont, Frances Wright, 128, 132 Dean, Edward, 214 Dean, George, 111 Defoe, Daniel, 26 Denham, Thomas, 24 DePeyster, Susan, 201 Dickens, Charles, 12 Dixon, Edward, 142, 152 Domesticity, ideology of, 59, 68–69, 81, 140, 152–53, 159, 182, 184 Doscher, Nicholas, 216 Douglas, Stephen A., 91 Dowling, Thomas, 78 Dry Goods Clerks’ Mutual Benefit and Protective Association, 139–45 Dunbar, James, 63, 90–91 Durack, Walter, 38 Edgerley, Samuel, 203–4 Emigrant Savings Bank, 9, 38–39 Equiano, Olaudah, 30 Ethnicity, meanings of: in boardinghouses, 153; in clerks’ work, 56, 66, 71–72; in images, 74–75, 167; for native-born clerks, 9, 63, 68–69 Fisk, Abijah, 32 Five Points, 8, 14, 128, 166, 193 Foster, Benjamin Franklin, 58–60 Foster, George, 12, 102–3, 186 Foster, Stephen, 80–81 Francis, Kellogg, 214 Franklin, Benjamin, 22–24, 26, 28–29, 33–34, 36, 142 Freed, James, 217 Freedley, Edwin, 22 Freedom, meanings of: in era of slave emancipation, 17–18, 211, 227–36; free labor ideology, 112, 121, 135–36, 209, 233 Gender, meanings of: and citizenship, 119, 128–29; in Civil War era, 227–36; and clerks’ interactions with women, 177–205; and clerks’ work, 29, 70–72, 82–88, 100–107, 111–18, 165–66; and farming, 88, 111–12; and female clerks, 19, 104–7, 230–33; and household economy, 13, 18–19, 101–4, 113, 136, 195, 204, 231–33; and independence, 17–18, 37, 42–44, 46, 49–50, 72, 87, 159, 234; and respectability, 3–4, 18, 72, 180, 182; in retail

Index business, 92–100; and self-making, 1–2, 12–13, 15–18, 64, 133, 135, 143, 150, 155, 160, 174, 178–81, 184, 186–87, 201–202, 216, 218, 220, 235; in urban life, 3, 88, 107–11, 165, 179, 194; in wholesale business, 89–92 Goddard, Thomas, 54, 56 Goodhue, Jonathan, 9, 11, 58 Gordon, George (Lord Byron), 11 Graham, Louise, 199–200 Graham, Nathan, 79–80, 157–59 Graham, Robert: ambition of, 23; on Astor Place Riot, 167–71; business venture of, 223–24; clothing purchases of, 160; on gymnasium’s rules, 109; on honor, 198–200; on Hyer-Sullivan fight, 110; and parents, 157–59; on politicians and political culture, 127–28; racism of, 79–81; on work, 57–58, 60–61, 72 Graham, Sylvester, 178–80 Greeley, Horace, 12, 45, 100, 119, 148, 192, 208–9, 213–14; and early closing movement, 133–35, 144 Green, James, 188–89 Greene, Asa, 9, 33, 35, 45, 94–95, 98 Griscom, John, 134–35 Gunn, Thomas Butler, 153 Haine, John, 218 Hamilton, Alexander, 23 Hansford, Henry, 171 Harrison, William Henry, 124 Hatfield, Edwin, 142 Hays, Edward, 218 Henry, Patrick, 142 Hewes, Joseph, 32 Heye, Augustus, 219 Heye, Frederick, 219 Hiffer, Henry, 171 Hoffman, William: ambition of, 1, 11–12, 70– 71, 179, 224; as author, 224–26; in boardinghouses, 154–57, 159; business ventures of, 224–27; on clerkship search, 39–41, 46–51; clothing purchases of, 160; on debating, 129–31; on foreign-born clerks, 63; gender and work, 96–97; on politicians, 125–26; on porters and their work, 64–65, 70–71; salary of, 155; on urbanity, 51–52; on women and sex, 177–83, 189 Hone, Philip, 131

275

Hossack, Alexander, 171 Hoxie, Joseph, 161 Hoyt, Gabriel, 214 Hubbard, Nathaniel, 214 Hunt, Freeman, 22, 31–34, 36, 39, 50, 57, 91, 111, 114, 221 Independence, 17–19, 53, 234; in clerkship search, 46, 49–50; through proprietorship, 14–15, 19, 69, 83, 87, 91, 107, 209, 215; through salary negotiations, 42–44; in urban life and leisure, 3, 19, 107, 119, 135, 154–57, 164, 173, 179 Industrial Congress, 144 Ingalls, John, 187–88 Ingersoll, Charles Jared, 146 Jackson, Andrew, 124 Jagoe, William, 77 Jewett, Helen, 160, 195, 197 Johnson, George, 173 Judson, E. Z. C. (Ned Buntline), 166, 185 Kemble, Frances, 99 King, Robert, 30 Knights of Labor, 234 Lane, Baxter, 215 L’Epine, Johnny, 102 Lewis, Martin, 138 Lichtenstein, Marcus, 104 Lind, Jenny, 176–77, 179–80, 197, 202, 205 Lippard, George, 185 Lipsett, James, 220 Little, James, 44, 90 Lowethal, Bernard, 222 Ludlum, Nicholas, 222 Lukens, Garrett, 78 Macy, Rowland H., 210, 213 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 123, 202 Martin, Cicily, 194–96 Mason, Charles, 106 Mathews, Cornelius, 165 Matsell, George W., 79 May, Joseph, 31 McKenna, William, 103–4 Melville, Herman, 11 Mercantile Agency, 8, 45, 103, 190, 218–224, 226–27

276

Index

Mercantile Library Association (MLA), 131– 32, 134–35, 137, 145, 171 Merchants: and apprenticeship, 26–27, 30, 42–46; on Chatham Street, 63–64, 90; and female clerks, 230; and retail transactions, 92–98; and white-collar middle class, 220–21, 225–26 Mesick, Henry, 50–52 Ming, Alexander, 124 Mitchell, Donald (Ik. Marvel), 84 Mobility, occupational and social: 270n18; in Civil War era, 211; through clerkship, 2–3, 14, 152; in colonial Atlantic world, 24; through geographical movement, 208–9, 214; ideology of, 15–16; prescriptive literature on, 41–42, 50, 178; uncertainty of, 59, 140 Moore, Nathaniel, 222 Morse, Bradford, 207–8 Mourquin, P., 108–10 Mowatt, Anna Cora, 166 Netta, Miss, 231–33 Newspapers, clerks’ use of: in early closing movement, 133; in urban life, 127–29, 133–34, 168–70, 184, 190–91; for want advertisements, 34–37, 76–77 New York City, 3; business in, 4–5; census sample of clerks in, 5–11, 238n7, 267n6; and countryside, 52; female clerks in, 8, 103–4; as republic of broadcloth, 148–75 Noel, Garrat, 28 Oakley, Thomas, 138 O’Beirne, John, 38 O’Brien, Fitz-James, 84–86, 88, 110 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 12 Panic, financial: of 1819, 15; of 1837, 15, 22, 34, 62; of 1857, 15, 213, 223; of 1873, 15, 210, 234 Parish, Consider, 222 Patterson, Henry: on bookkeeping practice, 60; business venture of, 218–19; clothing purchases of, 160–61, 163; courting, 202; on debating, 129–31; leisure activities of, 134–35, 165–66, 198; on MLA, 131; on politicians and political culture, 122–24, 127–29; on porters, 70; residential mobility of, 156–57

Penny, Virginia, 228–29, 232 Phelps, Caroline, 54 Philadelphia, images of business in, 67–68, 72–76 Polk, James K., 126 Poor, Benjamin, 223 Prescott, David, 217 Prescriptive literature: on appearance and character, 160; on clerks’ ambitions, 21, 41–42, 118; on clerkships and self-making, 31–33, 141–42, 216; clerks’ reactions to, 12, 33, 47–48, 50, 91, 155, 178–79, 184, 188; and sporting publications, 193 Purdy, Alexander, 81 Race: and clerkships in Civil War era, 230–31; and clerks’ work, 30, 54–57, 62–72; and stores, 96, 100; whiteness as cultural capital, 57, 68–69, 78–82 Ralph, James, 28 Restell, Madame, 106 Retail Clerks’ National Protective Association, 234–35 Reynell, John, 27 Rhode, Zachariah, 45 Rich, John, 107–8 Ridgway, Jacob, 31 Roberts, Algernon, 44 Robinson, Richard, 160–62, 195, 197 Rogers, Amaziah, 163 Rogers, Edgar, 213 Rogers, Mary, 137 Rumreil, Sarah, 29 Ryan, Martin, 38 Ryan, Michael, 203 Rynders, Isaiah, 128 Saul, William, 218 Saunders, Thorndike, 35 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 123 Scott, Winfield, 126 Scoville, Joseph, 15 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 62 Seymour, W. N., 62, 156–57 Sherman, Roger, 83 Shriver, Henry Wirt, 43 Skinkle, Lewis, 154 Smith, James McCune, 67–68 Smith, Trumbull, 187–88 Snelling, William, 101

Index Southworth, Henry: on Beecher’s speech, 174–75; on boredom at work, 58; business venture of, 223; on labor, 83; on porters, 64; and urban life, 164; white collar of, 64, 70 Spink, Thomas, 34–35 Staats, John, 112 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 229–30, 232–33 Stewart, A. T., 46, 100, 139, 177, 210–13, 220 Stokes, Josiah, 54, 56 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 81 Suffern, Agnes, 200, 219 Suffern, Thomas, 200, 219 Sugden, James, 217 Tailer, Edward: ambition of, 21–23, 42–43, 50, 61, 90, 172; on Astor Place Riot, 167–71; attendance at theater, 80–81, 165; business venture of, 219; courting, 81, 200; on dancing schools, 198; on gymnasium, 107–11; on physiological literature, 203; on politicians and political culture, 126–29; on porters and their work, 71–72; on respectability, 171–72; on respectability of MLA, 131; salary negotiations of, 42–45; sales style of, 63–64; and urban life, 164, 171–72, 185–87; want advertisements of, 37; and wholesale trade, 89–91; on women, 182, 184–87, 198 Tappan, Arthur, 67–70 Tappan, Lewis, 8, 67, 103, 190, 218

277

Taylor, Zachary, 108, 125 Tew, James, 160–61 Thomas, Edward, 62 Thompson, Joseph Parrish, 178 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12, 16, 148 Todd, John, 178–80, 188 Tucker, George Washington, 79–80 Tyler, John, 127 Van Buren, John, 126, 141, 146 Van Buren, Martin, 124–25 Van Rensselaer, Justine (Tiny), 11, 201–2 Vickredge, James, 38 Walker, Alexander, 203 Watson, William, 219 Webb, Frank, 68–69 Webster, Daniel, 122–23, 126, 146 Wheeler, Alfred, 148–49 Whitman, Walt, 150–51, 163 Wilkes, George, 64, 87 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 150 Women: as clerks, 8, 19, 103–7, 210–11, 228– 33; as objects in men’s quest for power, 104–7, 177–205; as shoppers, 83–107 Woodhull, Caleb, 141 Wright, Eleanor, 202 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 225, 234 Zimmer, Herman, 217

About the Author

Brian P. Lusk ey is Assistant Professor of History at West Virginia University.

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