How they survived in Baltimore, circa 1818
The lives of seamstresses, dockhands, domestic servants, and street sweepers fill the pages of Associate Professor of History Seth Rockman's recent book, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). The book, which explores the low-end labor market of early 19th-century America, will be the subject of the eighth annual Conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society, presented by the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Rockman spoke with Today at Brown about his controversial claims regarding economic opportunity in early America and the personal stories that emerged from his research.
Tell us about the book and your findings.
This book is about the survival of the poor in early American cities, much like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, circa 1818. It is a very material look at how people went about finding jobs and keeping jobs, then translating their labor and income to food, fuel, and rent. One of the things the book argues, somewhat controversially, is that for urban people at the very bottom of the economic ladder, being black or white, being enslaved or free, made much less of a difference than we have suspected. I describe a system of economic exploitation that encompassed people across lines of race, sex, and legal status. But I also show how that exploitation allowed others in the city to experience unprecedented levels of opportunity and freedom. As I say in the book, this is the story 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.
What inspired the work?
As a scholar, I’ve been very interested in American inequality and the tension between our myth of boundless opportunity for everyone and the reality that opportunity isn't as widely distributed as we might hope. Coming of age as a scholar in the 1990s, in the midst of the welfare reform debates, I was struck by the prevalent discourse that poor people were lazy. It seemed to me that, in fact, poor people are working much harder to materially stay alive than virtually anyone else in society... Ehrenreich's book [Nickel and Dimed] documents this brilliantly, and it really struck me that it was as true 200 years ago as it is today.
How did you go about finding such a variety of personal stories?
I used Frederick Douglass’s city of Baltimore as my main research base because the proximity of workers who were enslaved to those that were free was so visible there. I spent a great deal of time poring through municipal records of the city, employment records, massive numbers of runaway slave and slave-sale advertisements, and the records of charity organizations, and I just pieced all of these fragments together. When you're writing about people who in many cases weren't literate and whose lives weren't considered worth recording, who lived on the margins of society, you really only get these fleeting glances – for example, a name on a payroll or an entry on a charity roll.
Were there any particular stories that stuck with you?
There was a young man named Equillo who was enslaved. He first appeared to me on a payroll in 1809 for the city of Baltimore, which was hiring laborers for a bridge at the rate of $1 per day. On the payroll list was a series of nondescript names, some Irish, some German, etc. Then there was one that read “Goldsmith’s Equillo” – and that apostrophe becomes very interesting. Equillo was obviously Mr. Goldsmith’s slave. So, while some people are coming to this job site of their own volition, Equillo is being sent there by his owner, who is essentially renting him to the city. What does that mean for Equillo to be standing across the sawhorse from someone who is free and white? What does it mean for a nominally free worker whose job makes him no better than a slave?
I was able to trace Equillo’s life through tax and census records. After Mr. Goldsmith and his wife died, Equillo was likely sold to New Orleans. But there were other people also owned by the Goldsmith family who stayed in Baltimore. It turns out that at least two of those slaves had a child in the 1830s, and they named that little boy Equillo. Connecting the teenager in Baltimore being rented for bridge labor in 1809 to a two-year-old boy in 1833 named Equillo ... It makes you think not only of the loss and trauma, but the memory and resilience in something like that.
What is the significance of this symposium to you?
Just knowing that the book is starting a conversation is great. The symposium entails three very distinguished historians talking about my book, which is unusual for a first book from a young scholar. I make fairly large claims through this small story that challenge historians to rethink the legacy of the American revolution, the relationship of slavery to capitalism, and the degree of opportunity and equality that American life presents. I didn’t hold a lot back. To have people comment and discuss the book fills me with great honor.