Special Marts: Intelligence Offices, Labor Commodification, and Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century America

“It seems to be absolutely necessary in large cities,” James Gordon Bennett explained in an 1859 issue of the New York Herald, “that labor, like every other merchantable commodity, should have its special marts.” In more than one column of prime, front-page real estate, Bennett informed readers about these marts, colloquially dubbed intelligence offices. Even though most Americans still found work or workers through friends and family members, these employment agencies were ubiquitous institutions in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Bennett estimated that there were between forty and sixty such shops in Manhattan, while other commentators counted hundreds. In these offices—sometimes located below ground, in basements, to evade police surveillance and city licensing requirements—employment agents sold information about the labor market to prospective employees and employers so the former could find work and the latter could find workers. Intelligence office keepers collected a fee ranging from fifty cents to a dollar from each party who sought information. In the waiting rooms of these establishments, agents, workers, and employers met face-to-face, asking questions and inspecting appearances to deduce character traits and skills in the hopes of making amenable bargains with each other.¹

As police officers’ accounts, city directories, mayoral reports, newspaper advertisements and editorials, credit agency ledgers, and the correspondence of charitable associations and government agencies show, the apparently mundane transactions occurring in these marts illuminated and shaped the culture of capitalism in critically important ways during the Civil War era. Intelligence offices provoked debates in antebellum cities about the legitimacy of capitalist exchange. Labor agents brokered transactions that resembled those made by other entrepreneurs, but because they meddled with the supposedly symbiotic partnership between employers and employees and often defrauded both groups, they sparked conflict about the ways businessmen made their profits. The Civil War proved to

Figure 1.

In the foreground, women wait in an intelligence office, hoping to meet with prospective employers about domestic work. In the background, such a meeting is taking place in front of a desk at which employment agents or their clerks keep records in account ledgers. Intelligence-Office in New York, Harper’s Weekly, May 4, 1867, 276. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

be a pivotal moment in which Americans tried, unsuccessfully, to reconcile their need for intelligence offices with their abiding anxieties about the transactions occurring within them. Despite concerted antebellum efforts to write employment agents and agencies out of the narrative of appropriate economic exchange, benevolent organizations and government agencies opened intelligence offices during and after the Civil War to manage what bureaucrats and reformers considered to be the crises produced by white southern refugees and emancipated slaves. The Union Volunteer Refreshment Saloon, a benevolent organization dedicated to providing food and shelter for northern soldiers passing through Philadelphia on the way to southern battlefields, launched a plan late in 1864 to transport white southern refugees and soldiers who had deserted from Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to farms and factories in the North. And in the aftermath of the war, historians have shown, northern proponents of free labor ideology working for the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen’s Bureau) informed skeptical freedpeople that labor contracts constituted the freedom for which Union armies had fought. Yet, it was white employers’ interest in procuring laborers that encouraged the bureau to open an intelligence office in the District of Columbia and establish cooperative relationships with other labor marts to send freedpeople to eager employers living as close as rural Maryland and Virginia and as far afield as Mississippi and Nebraska. Even while its agents spoke to the potentially edifying nature of waged work for freedpeople, the bureau improved on the antebellum intelligence office by agreeing, for a few years, to pay for the transportation of these laborers to their new employers. By adopting this antebellum model, the bureau briefly enhanced employers’ choices by creating a national labor market.²

If we are to make sense of what intelligence Offices did and...