Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [354]
But the industrial revolution in New York wasn’t primarily about big machinery and factories. The great bulk of manufacturing after 1815 took place in small frame or brick houses near the waterfront, without steam power or other elaborate equipment, and typically involved the production of light consumer goods—shoes, furniture, and clothing—for wholesalers or auction houses. After 1815 Brooklyn was a beehive of small shops that churned out playing cards, pocketbooks, combs, tinware, patent leather, iron chests, marble mantles, mustard, writing ink, pencil cases, white lead, paint, glass, and more. It was exactly in places such as these, moreover, that the decay of artisanal skills and traditions advanced most quickly as masters-turned-employers—among them Duncan Phyfe, now a wealthy furniture manufacturer—struggled to get ahead at the expense of their employees. Ambitious shoemakers, for example, coped with competition from New England factory towns by packing their workrooms with low-paid apprentices, distributing cheap leather to journeyman outworkers, and hiring women and girls as binders.
The process was particularly quick and brutal in the men’s clothing trade. Before 1820 the bulk of the male population wore clothes made at home by their wives, mothers, and daughters or made to order by custom tailors. Only poor seamen, laborers, apprentices, and hapless bachelors wore the cheap ready-made clothing known as “slops.” Between 1825 and 1835, however, New York wholesalers, auctioneers, and jobbers presided over the creation of a huge new national market in men’s ready-mades. Local retailers and country storekeepers received generous credit to stock up on “negro cottons” for slaves and dungarees for farmers and miners, as well as slops for the urban working classes. Manufacturers, who were likewise given easy terms for the purchase of raw materials, stepped up production by expanding the number of women employed. As they worked in their own households, “outwork” saved on overhead (no small consideration at a time when real estate was becoming more and more expensive), and it avoided the managerial and disciplinary problems presented by a large, concentrated workforce. Female outwork was particularly attractive because it saved on wages—the wages of women were less than half those of men—while reinforcing the conventional wisdom that a woman’s place was in the home. By the 1830s some New York shops had five hundred women on the payroll, and men’s garment making had become one of the city’s (and the nation’s) most important industries.
WALL STREET
Western farmers and southern planters, notoriously cash-poor, usually bought goods from country storekeepers on credit—who in turn acquired their stock from wholesale jobbers in New York, also on credit. Although this chain of indebtedness was good for business, it also left New York creditors waiting for payment, usually until harvest time. Commercial banks solved the problem by turning accounts payable into cash. A Pearl Street jobber, for example, might send a thousand dollars’ worth of goods to an Ohio storekeeper. He would include a bill requesting payment in ninety days, which the Ohioan would sign and return to New York. The jobber could now wait three months and (hopefully) collect his full thousand. Or he could take the storekeeper’s promissory note to a bank and get, say, $950 immediately—his thousand less the percentage (or “discount”) charged by the bank—thereby gaining immediate access to most of his capital. When necessary, the jobber could also borrow from the bank to replenish his stock, or even purchase goods with a bank draft or “check” drawn against his account (a service that was becoming quite common in the early decades of the nineteenth century).
In 1815 there were only five banks in the city—among them Hamilton’s Bank of New York and Burr’s Bank of