Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (review)

In Scraping By, Rockman challenges the prevailing story of the early republic as a sanguine period of unfettered opportunity and unprecedented prosperity by charting the history of the men and women, black and white, freed and enslaved, who cleaned the city’s streets, dredged mud, sewed clothes, chopped wood, and dug ditches in early Baltimore. Scraping By is informed by a theoretical claim to apply the mantra of “race, gender, and class” to examine the lives of Baltimore’s population as a collective experience rather than studying the experiences of women, white male workers, and enslaved people as isolated experiences. In this effort, Rockman efficaciously puts into practice a theoretical conceit that has been circulating in academic circles for more than a decade; his motivation for doing so results from his understanding that the capitalistic system of early Baltimore depended on these “multiple simultaneous, and overlapping forms of inequality” (10). More to the point, Rockman emphasizes the experiences of these workers because within the broader field of labor history, their experience as chimney-sweepers, day laborers, plantation healers, and canal men, etc., has often been overshadowed by studies that focus on skilled craftsmen and artisans.

Rockman, avoids the trap of portraying these often unnamed and unacknowledged workers as having a “collective consciousness,” despite their shared socioeconomic position. At the turn of the nineteenth century, what mattered most to these people was finding a stable source of employment. Due to the harsh economic realities of living in Baltimore, the ebbs and flows of the market economy often left people “waiting every February for the harbor to thaw so that low-end jobs might resume” (11). By emphasizing labor as people’s main concern in Baltimore, Rockman circumvents the contemporary focus on questions of “agency” and “resistance” in the field of labor history. Instead, he investigates the gritty struggle to find any employment, from dredging pounds of foul-smelling muck in Baltimore’s harbor to sewing clothes into the dark hours of the night. Rockman argues that employers were less interested in making distinctions among workers based on race, ethnicity, or gender than in getting reliable workers for cheap pay. That is not say that the workers did not see differences among themselves or that the employers, at times, did not discriminate or pit one group against one another; they often did. Rockman argues, however, that these distinctions were not as fundamental to the social organization of early Baltimore as we might expect.

The creation of this undifferentiated mass of laborers resulted in large part from Baltimore’s unique geographical predicament as “the northernmost Southern city, and the southern most Northern city.” One of the major economic features that separated Baltimore from the South and the North was its peculiar stance on the subject of slavery. Whereas northern cities by the turn of the nineteenth century enacted various manumission laws to end slavery, slavery in southern states, particularly those in the Mississippi Valley and the lower South, began to expand rapidly due to the invention of the cotton gin, the War of 1812, and the forced removal of Native Americans. Baltimore seemed to encapsulate both of these impulses. Due to the rise of industry, slavery became an expensive business investment in Baltimore, and, as a result, gave way to manumission laws. Yet, the institution of slavery continued to thrive in the city, as slaves continued to be bought and sold as “term slaves,” an integral part of the city’s economy.

In general, this economic dynamic contributed to Baltimore’s unique population of workers. In addition to the immigrants, who worked on the docks; the women, who performed the grueling work of laundering clothes; and the white male denizens, who scored a day’s labor as shovelers, carters, or choppers, enslaved and free people of color joined the ranks of those who were employed in the city. The city suffered economically in its conflicting relationship with slavery and in its thorny transition...