Servants and Slaves in Louisville: Race, Ethnicity, and Household Labor in an Antebellum Border City

SPRING 2011 3 Servants and Slaves in Louisville Race, Ethnicity, and Household Labor in an Antebellum Border City Stephanie Cole I n June 1836, Mrs. J. R. Taylor placed an advertisement in the Louisville Daily Journal looking for domestic help. “Wanted to hire, two good house servants of steady habits who are qualified to fill the station of cook and washerwoman,” the ad announced, “A woman and girl would be preferred.” The wording revealed neither the legal status of the domestics the widow Taylor hoped to engage nor whether she would in fact make the final hiring decision , directing interested parties to “refer to J. R. Taylor,” her son, at his grocery on Main Street or directly to her at her home on the “corner of Seventh and Walnut.” Mrs. Taylor may have planned to hire slaves from their owners , and simply substituted the term “servant” for “slave,” avoiding the latter term out of discomfort. During an earlier era, Louisville readers would have assumed that Mrs. Taylor meant slaves “of steady habits.” But by 1836 such an interpretation, while still likely, was not the only possibility. E. W. Rupert’s want-ad later the same month reflects an open interest in non-slave domestic workers; he advertised for a “black or white girl of 10 to 13 years of age . . . to take care of a small child.” Mrs. Taylor may have had in mind hiring a free woman of color—15 percent of the city’s black population was free by 1840—and one, R. Carter, lived just down the street from Mrs. Taylor’s son, listing her occupation as washerwoman. Possibly, Taylor hoped the advertisement would catch the eye of one of the Irish or German women beginning to arrive in the city; in September 1836, Louisville entrepreneurs F. A. Nauts and Thomas Sims expanded their new “Intelligence Office” to include translation and other services to “emigrants, free of charge.”1 Advert of Mrs. Taylor, Louisville Daily Journal, June 6, 1836. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY Advert of E.W. Rupert, Louisville Daily Journal, June 8, 1836. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY SERVANTS AND SLAVES IN LOUISVILLE 4 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Mrs.Taylor’s call for applicants to come to her own home—indicating that she could make the hiring decision—suggests another perhaps related social change. Prior to 1840 few women, even in cities, played a public role in the effort to staff their homes. Instead, they relied on husbands—or in the case of widows, other male agents—as their contractual representatives. Because most of these early ads concerned buying, selling, and year-long hiring contracts for slaves, their reliance probably reflected men’s roles in making large-scale capital decisions as much as a proper woman’s invisibility in the public realm of the newspaper. After 1840, women’s names appeared more often in the “help-wanted” advertisements of border city newspapers, reflecting both the declining importance of slavery and an emerging sense of the home as entirely women’s domain, regardless of the presence of slaves. Whether or not Mrs. Taylor herself sought slaves, the advertisement reveals her willingness to assess a domestic’s suitability and worth. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that housekeepers remained embedded in economic activity, even as the rhetoric of separate spheres rendered household labor less visible.2 Similarly, in Louisville maintaining a home increasingly required public transactions, both for wage negotiations and market purchases. The confusion Mrs. Taylor’s help wanted advertisement engenders emerges from the complexity of the transitions underway in Louisville and other antebellum border cities, as well as historians’ limited understanding of the changing nature of household labor and the growing diversity of the servant workforce. A close reading of newspaper want ads, public records left by census enumerators and court reporters, and private correspondence and account books of border city housekeepers suggests that urbanization and the intensification of the market economy altered the work done within southern urban households—although not at the uniform pace earlier studies of the decline of household production implied. More significantly, urban economic growth transformed the domestic servant labor pool even in this slave economy and “southern” housekeepers proved remarkably willing to adapt to...