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Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore. By Seth Rockman. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Pp. xviii, 368. Illustrations. Cloth, $50.00; Paper, $25.00.)
Reviewed by Stephen Mihm
In 1819, John Melish wrote a book aimed at anyone contemplating moving to the United States. "In no country in the world," Melish proclaimed, "is labour so well paid, or labourers so much respected in the United States" (29). Perhaps, but as Seth Rockman persuasively shows in this scrupulously researched and impassioned book, laboring life in the early republic was rarely rewarding. If anything it was brutal and unpleasant, with all of life's energies dedicated to "scraping by."
Rockman is not alone in covering this historiographical terrain: In recent years, labor historians have moved beyond an older preoccupation with skilled male artisans, expanding the definition of "worker" to encompass everyone from laundresses to prostitutes to canal diggers. But Rockman is not interested in the travails of a single occupation, much less the particular burdens born by women, African Americans, or any single ethnic or religious group. Rather, his aim is to consider "the full range of workers whose labor was for sale in the early republic city," with a particular emphasis on those "unskilled" workers whose labor underwrote the expansion of economic opportunity for others (11).
Baltimore is the backdrop of Rockman's study, and he makes a compelling case for its relevance as the archetypical capitalist boom town of the early republic. But Baltimore affords another intriguing vantage point on labor in the new nation: It was home to numerous free blacks, slaves (many of them "leased" to other employers) and so-called "term slaves" whose enslavement could end after a set number of years. All of these African Americans worked alongside native and foreign-born whites at the difficult, dirty jobs that are the focus of this study. While white workers often petitioned to ban blacks from certain kinds of work, Rockman persuasively shows that employers, however racist and reactionary they might have been, invariably "resisted...