Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [443]
True, New York laborers had their political independence, no trifling matter. But the Revolution had been fought for economic independence as well, and by that criterion, the growth of wage-work, the declining respect for manual labor, the rise of renttenantry, the transformation of proud craftsmen into “hirelings”—all these together constituted a disturbing trajectory, whose end point might yet be dependency, even bondage, for whites as well as blacks.
For most New York artisans and laborers, however, the metaphorical equation of Northern wage-work and Southern slavery was not simply overdrawn but psychologically intolerable. Such men opted for a different linguistic strategy, one that sharply differentiated their condition from that of slaves by referring to capitalist employers as “bosses” rather than “masters” (reserving the older term for the small workshops where an owner was master of his craft, not his men).
There was another, uglier vocabulary that could be used to underscore the gulf between free and unfree labor: the language of racism, which insisted on the difference between “white men” and “niggers.” The problem was, the emancipation of New York City slaves made it more difficult to sustain such a sharp symbolic separation between whites and blacks. Emancipation had erased any grounds for assuming that the black person one passed on the street was of inferior legal status. True, white supremacy had been written back into the state constitution, denying nearly all black men the right to vote, at just the time all white males were being awarded the franchise. Unfortunately the argument used to justify that denial was not per se racist but rather the assertion that African Americans were dependent, powerless, and therefore easy pawns of the rich and powerful. But this was uncomfortably close to Chancellor Kent’s grounds for seeking to deny the suffrage to economically dependent white wage-workers. Once the provision was in place, however, it was but a short step to arguing that it rested on blacks’ inherent incapacity for self-government, just as some southerners were busily justifying slavery itself as the result of an innate black “slavishness” rather than of any forcible imposition of unfreedom.
White workers who rejected the evangelical gentry’s insistence that the poor were responsible for their own poverty accepted the premise when applied to blacks. If slavishness and slavery were attributes of blackness, and citizenship a function of whiteness, then whites were at least guaranteed that declining economic status would never lead to political disfranchisement. Such a position further undercut the appeal of “wage slave” imagery: one could not easily boast of being a citizen while claiming to be a slave.
Whites relied on more than language to distance themselves from unfreedom: they insisted that worksites be segregated on race lines. Few white artisans faced a direct challenge from African Americans: skilled black craftsmen were increasingly rare, a situation guaranteed by white refusal to accept black apprentices. Laborers, unskilled workmen, and servants were in more direct competition, though in most categories whites clearly held the upper hand. Still, it was increasingly felt that the mere presence of blacks degraded a job category (the expression “to work like a nigger” entered American English at this time). Only their complete expulsion from a trade could truly preserve its dignity, one reason New York’s blacks were being steadily driven from all but the most “servile” occupations.
Segregation