From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City

Introduction

When I began the research for this book, I had a fairly clear idea about where my project might fit within an established historiography. Three decades of social and labor history had provided a persuasive account of the transformation of colonial American artisans into waged workers during a contested transition to capitalism. Building on the work of European scholars , American historians traced the rise of a market society and the decline of customary practices, craft pride, and workshop traditions that were thought to have once forged a powerful social bond between masters, journeymen, and apprentices. This decline was accompanied by a worsening of artisanal working conditions and material fortunes that fostered novel forms of republican political protest and ultimately class struggle. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of this view in labor and social history in the last four decades.1 However, there were also gaps in the literature and—lacking the late medieval and early modern research that underpinned the work of their European peers—the most noticeable gap in colonial American history was the surprising dearth of studies of urban skilled workers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.2 With this in mind I set out to examine the artisanal trades in early New York City, suspending my inquiries at 1760 so as to avoid the gravitational pull of the American Revolution that already held so many excellent studies in its orbit. After several, mostly unsuccessful, forays into the archives I began to appreciate why we knew so little about artisanal work in the earlier colonial period: court minutes and published sources frequently mentioned tradesmen who brought disputes before the magistrates, registered as freemen, paid taxes, or served in the militia; these registers and lists provided the raw data for several sociological analyses of the distribution of wealth, ethnic composition, and occupational structure of New York’s skilled workforce.3 But these snapshots revealed a static picture at best, little concerning the ups and downs of daily trade, and still less of the social and political import of artisanal work in the early city. A chance discovery provided Introduction an opportunity to investigate in greater detail the activities of a larger and, I came to believe, more representative sample of city tradesmen. Following a reference to a set of uncatalogued papers, I discovered a substantial collection of miscellaneous legal documents comprising several thousand complaints filed to initiate civil suits in the city’s Mayor’s Court. The complaints provided a wealth of detail concerning prices, wages, and the exchanges that constituted the everyday concerns of tradesmen and their customers. As luck would have it, the records were particularly rich for the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—the period about which so little was known and so much inferred.4 The Mayor’s Court Papers revealed that city artisans served a local market and that labor shortages made gainful employment generally easy to find. However, the complaints and related documents—bonds, promissory notes, bail agreements, and witness depositions—also disclosed that as early as the third quarter of the seventeenth century the fortunes of ordinary working men and women were intimately bound up with the Atlantic trade and the commercial development of the city’s rural hinterland. Tradesmen divided their energies between skilled work and all manner of commercial enterprise, relying on credit to pursue whatever opportunity offered the best return. They participated in the export of furs, tobacco, and plantation supplies and purchased imported cloth and household goods for resale in the city and its environs. They financed speculative ventures, and bought, sold, and rented property; they farmed—raising crops and livestock for local and export markets —and provided food, drink, and lodging for paying guests. In these and other endeavors, tradesmen were far from independent. They relied on wives, family members, slaves, and waged workers for labor and on partners and patrons for credit, capital, and access to customers for their finished goods and services. Indeed, the closer one looked, the more interdependent and impermanent artisans’ fortunes appeared. Skilled practitioners working in all areas experienced success and failure, and their commercial strategies seemed to be directed more toward the short-term opportunism of the economy of a bazaar than the orderly pace of craft work usually associated with preindustrial colonial towns.5 Indeed, by the early eighteenth century the commercial logic of the city’s trading economy encouraged artisans to undertake the reverse of what has previously been considered their...