Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [276]
Once artisan-entrepreneurs entered this world of volatile markets, brutal competition, and a growing influx of cheap British manufactures, their ability to make a profit depended on their ability to hold down labor costs. One of the easiest ways to do this was by circumventing their customary responsibility to train up apprentices in the “mysteries” of their crafts. Taking on many more youths than they could care for, masters paid them low wages and offered cash payments in lieu of room, board, and education. The arrival every year of thousands of immigrants further corroded relations between masters and journeymen by steadily enlarging the pool of “free” labor—men and women who could be hired and fired at will, who required no initial capital investment or long-term care and feeding, and whose desperate need to earn a livelihood allowed employers to pay them subsistence wages.
Women Working in a Millinery Shop, n.d. by Alexander Anderson. Although it discloses nothing about the organization of the shop, Anderson’s engraving is a reminder that female waged labor figured importantly in the municipal economy. (Print Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
THE END OF SLAVERY
When the English traveler William Strickland visited New York in 1794, he discovered himself in a place that looked like most provincial British cities, except for the thousands of blacks “who may be seen of all shades till the stain is entirely worne out.” “Most of the inferior labor of the town is performed by Blacks,” he added, and on the surface it might well have seemed that slavery had become even more entrenched in the city since 1790. Between 1790 and 1800, as New York’s economy took off and its population leapt toward the sixty-thousand mark, the absolute number of slaves jumped by nearly 25 percent to twenty-five hundred—one of the sharpest such increases on record. After 1790, moreover, the number of white households relying upon some form of black labor more than tripled, and many of them had purchased their human property quite recently. By 1800 three-fourths of New York’s slaveholders had not owned slaves ten years before.
Yet support for the institution of slavery in New York was thinner and more fragile than ever. New slaveowners were by and large the big winners in the economic sweepstakes of the nineties—merchants, lawyers, bankers, brokers, artisan-entrepreneurs, speculators—and their primary interest was domestic service, chiefly by women. Artisans had continued their decades-long retreat from the use of black male labor, preferring to draw as needed on the plentiful numbers of cheap wage-workers who didn’t have to be housed, clothed, or fed. Some masters in more traditional trades like baking and butchering still found slaveowning an attractive proposition, but by 1800 only about one artisan in every seventeen owned slaves, proportionally just half as many as a decade before. The Manumission Society had meanwhile continued to promote its African Free School as evidence that blacks were as capable as whites as becoming “safe and useful members” of society, while its Standing Committee frequently attempted to win freedom for slaves whose masters violated the law against purchasing or selling slaves out of state.
What was more, the proportion of slaves in the black population had declined sharply because the number of free blacks rose from eleven hundred to thirty-five hundred between 1790 and 1800—a threefold increase, the result of a high birthrate, migration from elsewhere in the United States, and the arrival of the “French Negroes” swept up in the West Indian exodus. Once it was a safe assumption that virtually any African American in New York was enslaved. By 1800 well over half the city’s black residents were free, and the impact of this shift on the city’s racial dynamics was profound.
Free blacks harbored