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  • Uncommon Labor in Early Baltimore
  • Peter John Way (bio)
Seth Rockman . Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xii + 368 pp. Figures, maps, tables, abbreviations, notes, essay on sources, and index. $25.00.

Seth Rockman's study of laboring life in Baltimore in the early republic transcends labor history's usual limiting parameters of skill, wage labor, gender, and race to develop an image of early capitalism that simultaneously levelled and entrenched social distinctions in the pursuit of a pliable labor force and the ultimate goal of profit. At the same time, Rockman punctures the celebratory narratives of economic opportunity and political equality in the New Republic that are sounded by liberal historians. He crafts a much more sombre tale "of the chronically impoverished, often unfree, and generally unequal Americans whose work made the United States arguably the most wealthy, free, and egalitarian society in the Western world" (p. 3). This central irony—of opportunity purchased with the toil and immiseration of others—pervades the study and is captured in the workings of the labor market. Rockman, as a result, successfully places class at the core of the American experience. He is less adept, however, at theorizing class anew, particularly in relation to the competing historical models of gender and race. Part of the problem lies in his narrow application of class in terms of the labor exchange, another part in his reluctance to engage critically these other models from a class perspective. The result is a book that once again highlights the complex world of working life but, not unexpectedly, without effecting a full resolution of the debate over what historical force or forces lay behind its making.

Rockman studies "unskilled labor," a diverse group encompassing distinct social and economic types—men, women and children, native-born and immigrant, free and unfree—who nonetheless shared a marginal economic existence marked by "minimal control over their own labor, periodic spells of joblessness, and severe privation" (p. 2). They had different experiences, arrived at unskilled labor by different paths, and confronted varying structures of oppression such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and nativism. But they came to occupy "the same capitalist political economy—one designed to transform their labor into new wealth and power for those who could purchase [End Page 47] it, whether by the hour, day, week, month, season, year, or lifetime" (p. 4). Employers and owners helped construct this political economy by innovating the ways by which they identified and contracted labor power in a seemingly indiscriminate fashion. The new political economy exacerbated the economic insecurity of laborers, which in turn enabled employers to explore new modes of exploitation. Despite the presumptive logic of the early republic, wage labor did not constitute a transitional stage to independent economic status. These individuals found themselves shut out from the American Revolution's promise of political democracy and economic opportunity emphasized by such historians as Gordon Wood (The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 1992) and Joyce Appleby (Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans, 2000). Such opportunity existed, Rockman affirms, in fact forming a necessary corollary to the lives of deprivation lived by his unskilled laborers. The under-remunerated and discretionary employment of one person provided the economic advancement of another as the ability to control others' labor proved the key to upward mobility.

Rockman first introduces the different segments of Baltimore's common labor force. White migrants came from the Mid-Atlantic region's rural areas where the transformation of the agricultural economy to commercial grain production freed much labor from the land. Likewise the shift from tobacco to grain lessened labor demand on Maryland's plantations. Masters transferred slaves to the city to work, to be hired out or sold; the freed or freeborn sought greater opportunities and freedom there; and slaves ran away to seek refuge in the urban environs. White immigrants from Europe, fleeing warfare and economic dislocation, also landed in Baltimore. Employers tapped all the streams of labor that flowed into the city, simultaneously looking to exploit nontraditional labor sources—children, women, free blacks, slaves—by taking advantage of social difference. This made for a mixed-race...

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