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66 3 Artisans Caught in the Middle whiTe workers in PeTersBurg The Petersburg Benevolent Mechanic Association (PBMA) represented, for the most part, those masters succeeding in an expanding market economy. Although a significant segment of Petersburg artisans found membership in the elite artisan organization beneficial to their career goals, many more skilled workers either could not afford to, or chose not to, join the PBMA. In February 1848, Petersburg carpenter Monroe L. Birchett came before the Hustings Court on order of the town’s Overseers of the Poor. Birchett faced complaints for sending his children begging around the town. At a subsequent hearing on 16 March, Birchett argued before the court that his children should not be bound out as indentured apprentices. He was only partly successful, for the court ordered his son, Albert Birchett, bound out to learn a trade until he reached age twenty-one. Although he continued to try to eke out a living in Petersburg, Birchett and his family always lived in poverty and membership in the PBMA was beyond his reach. By 1856 he was described as a “poor laboring man,” who lived with his wife and seventeen-year-old daughter “in a miserable shanty in that wretched place called Donough’s alley”; in 1860 he still struggled, and owned no property other than a small personal estate valued at $25.1 Birchett’s example may be extreme, but his struggle to survive in a changing economy is illustrative of many southern artisans who found themselves facing an expanding industrial world in antebellum Virginia. In the antebellum era, economic and cultural changes created a gap that split the Petersburg artisan community and led to a significant class divide. White Petersburg artisans caught in the 1. Petersburg, Va., Hustings Court Minute Book 1848–1851, Library of Virginia, Richmond (hereafter cited as Vi), 17–18, 27–28; “The Slave Edmund and the Monroe Birchett Family,” Daily Southside Democrat, 25 September 1856; and Bureau of the Census, Population Schedules , Petersburg, Va. (Washington, D.C.,1860, microfilm). The Hustings Court met monthly to administer local government; it held the power of appointment for local offices, heard small court cases, and handled will probates and all criminal and civil cases involving slaves and free blacks. 67 “middle” of the expanding economy lived and worked in the town, but did not gain membership in the PBMA. As studies of artisan workers in antebellum America move their focus away from the declension model that was inherent in the artisan-republican paradigm , historians are uncovering new and more complex relationships between workers and capitalism.2 More recent studies of artisans, and particularly those that focus on the South, are discovering a host of structural dimensions that refute the notion that all crafts experienced a decline, and that in general, the early nineteenth century was not a particularly good time to be a skilled craft worker. Although poor and unsuccessful artisans such as Birchett could be found in all areas of the country, in many places, skilled trades declined less dramatically than was once believed. In fact, some trades expanded and prospered in the antebellum era. In Petersburg, the division of labor, not mechanization , brought the biggest shift in workplace organization. Although this new division of labor saw the percentage of skilled workers decrease, it also brought an increase in production that amplified demand for skilled artisans in many trades. Occupations related to construction trades or supportive of industry actually flourished.3 Although some southern industries, notably iron manufacture and textiles, were significantly dependent upon machinery from an early date, most industrial growth came from a reorganization of labor in tobacco manufacturing and construction trades.4 The precipitate growth of the city and the concomitant white workers in petersburg 2. The most prominent early studies upheld the primacy of republicanism to artisan politics and culture and argued that industrialization brought the decline of traditional artisan work cultures. See Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York: New York University Press, 1979). For the South, see Charles G. Steffen, The Mechanics of Baltimore: Workers in the Age of Revolution, 1763–1812 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984). 3. Richard Stott, “Artisans and Capitalist Development,” in Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic ed. Paul A. Gilje...

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