Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [121]
Repeatedly, the Common Council tried to bolster the authority of masters with ordinances that prohibited apprentices from loitering, gambling, bartering or selling goods, fighting, swearing, drinking in taverns after eight or nine o’clock at night, and other offenses against the peace of the city (especially on the traditional popular holidays: in 1719 the Court of General Sessions complained of the “Disorders and Other Mischiefs that Commonly happen within this City on Shrove Tuesday by Great Numbers of Youths Apprentices and Slaves that Assemble together in throwing at Cocks”). Apprentices who broke the law could be fined, whipped by the public whipper, or sentenced to longer terms of service, at the discretion of the magistrates.
Masters who failed to abide by their contractual obligations, especially those guilty of cruelty, were increasingly likely to be fined or to have their apprentices released. James Jamison’s indenture to Henry Brughman was voided in 1718 when the magistrates learned that Brughman had so disfigured Jamison’s face that he stood “in Danger of loosing his Eyes.” In 1728 eleven-year-old Margaret Anderson won a discharge from her apprenticeship to Benjamin Blake, a cordwainer, who was found guilty of “very often Immoderately Correcting her & not allowing her reasonable time to rest several times in the Night.”
Indentured servants presented the corporation with a somewhat different kind of dilemma. Although servants too were subject to the in locoparentis authority of masters, they were probably older than apprentices, on the whole, and doubtless included a higher percentage of women. Some already knew a trade, having gone into service for the sole purpose of obtaining passage to the colonies. They also appear to have been rather less tractable than apprentices. Masters griped constantly about disobedient servants, larcenous servants, and idle servants. Ann Sewall savagely beat Ann Parsons and kept her “in Chains and Irons for several Weeks upon bread and water only,” explaining “she didn’t know itt was the breach of any Law her said Servant having highly offended her.” Small wonder that hardly a day seemed to go by when the sheriff and constables didn’t have to contend with servants who, like apprentices and slaves, struck back or ran off. (In 1734 maidservants formed an organization and declared that “we think it reasonable we should not be beat by our Mistrisses Husband[s], they being too strong, and perhaps may do tender women Mischief.”)
Maintaining order was complicated by the town’s so-called bawdy or disorderly houses—unlicensed groggeries and gin mills catering to boisterous crowds of apprentices, servants, free women, and even slaves. The better part of them also sheltered a brisk underground traffic in stolen goods as well as aiding and abetting prostitution; many were located in the homes of widows or unmarried women unable to support themselves by other means. In 1710 Elizabeth Green spent a week in jail because she regularly permitted “sundry Negro slaves to assemble and meet together to feast and Revell in the Night time” at her house. Such an establishment, besides endangering public safety, was an ominous inversion of the social order—a world turned upside down, an underworld beyond the authority of masters, where the conventional boundaries between races and sexes were flagrantly ignored.
THE CITY AND THE POOR
Further complicating the management of servants and apprentices was the sharply unequal distribution of wealth in the city. According to the 1730 census, New York’s population stood at 8,622: 7,045 whites and 1,577 blacks. That same year, a comprehensive property assessment revealed that the richest 10 percent of the city’s taxable population, some 140 merchants and landowners, held almost half its taxable wealth. By contrast, 49 percent of white taxables held property worth ten pounds or less—a pathetically meager