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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The gold standard of American labor history references, updated to include the latest political, social, and economic developments of the 2020s
Labor in America: A History, Tenth Edition, is a comprehensive and authoritative discussion of the U.S. labor movement from the colonial era to the 2020s. Authors Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin have expanded and updated their landmark text, incorporating significant recent events and their implications for American labor. The book addresses the continuing and evolving challenges faced by American workers, critical developments in U.S. labor history, the impact of economic and political changes, and more.
Dubofsky and McCartin offer nuanced analyses of workers’ collective actions, the formation of unions, and the role of labor in shaping American society. They provide a rich historical context and a detailed narrative of labor history for students, scholars, and laypersons alike. The authors also explain the likely impact of major contemporary trends on workers, including the rise of the gig economy, and discuss the most critical influences on modern U.S. labor.
An invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history and future of labor in the United States, Labor in America: A History will undoubtedly remain the gold standard in the field for years to come.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of Figures
Preface to the Tenth Edition
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1 Laboring a Nation into Being
Varieties of Bound Labor
Patterns of Control, Resistance, and Accommodation
The Agency of an Embryonic Working Class
Workers, Revolution, and Nation Building
2 Labor in the New Republic, 1790 to 1830
The Intensification of Agricultural Slavery
Scraping By: Race, Gender, Ethnicity, and the Limits of Resistance
From Journeymen’s Organizations to Unions
3 The Protean Power of Organization, 1828 to 1840
Workingmen’s Parties and the Emergence of a Politics of Labor
Labor Organizing in the 1830s
A National Labor Movement
Employer Counterattack
The National Trades’ Union
The Decline of Unionism
4 Irrepressible Conflicts, 1840 to 1860
The Factory System and New Technologies
Immigration, Urbanization, and Divisions of Ethnicity and Race
Reformism and the Antebellum Working Class
Reawakening 10‐hour Movement
Rebuilding Unions
The Coming of War
5 The Incomplete Triumph of Free Labor, 1861 to 1877
Wartime Conditions and Expanded Worker Organizing
Black Labor and Emancipation
The Limits of Reconstruction
National Labor Union
The Eight‐Hour Movement, Cooperatives, and the Greenback‐Labor Movement
Depression, Upheaval, and Fragmentation
6 The Great Upheaval, 1877 to 1887
Changing Economic and Social Context
The Origins and Rise of the Knights of Labor
The Knights of Labor at Flood Tide
The Decline of the Knights
Denouement: Haymarket, Richmond, and the Thibodaux Massacre
7 The Rise of the American Federation of Labor, 1886 to 1896
The Appeal of Trade Unionism: From Washerwomen to Skilled Craftsmen
Origins of the New Unionism
Samuel Gompers and the Founding of the American Federation of Labor
Autonomy, Skill, Race, and Gender: AFL Principles and Policies
The Homestead Strike, Depression, and the Limits of AFL Unionism
Eugene V. Debs and the Pullman Strike
Trade Unionism in Turbulent Times
8 Labor at the Dawn of the Progressive Era, 1896 to 1908
The Failure of Populism and the Birth of the Socialist Party
Progressive Era Experiments with Labor–Capital Cooperation
Labor’s Limited Breakthrough: The Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902
Labor, Law, and Increasing Employer Resistance
AFL Political Action and a Nascent Labor–Democratic Alliance
9 Winds of Change, 1908 to 1916
Stirrings of Reform
Emergence of the New Unionism
The Radical Unionism of the Industrial Workers of the World
The Spirit of the IWW
The IWW’s Challenge to the AFL
Labor Upheaval, Federal Action, and a Budding Political Alliance
10 War, Reform, and Reaction, 1914 to 1922
Repression of the IWW and the Socialist Party
Toward Industrial Democracy
African Americans, Women, and Mexican Immigrants
Peace in Europe, Class Conflict at Home
The Last Throes of Postwar Labor Militancy
The Open Shop American Plan and Labor’s Deferred Dreams
11 The 1920s
Welfare Capitalism
The Failure of Insurgent Politics, 1922 to 1924
The AFL after Gompers
Crisis and Glimmers of Change: Miners, Clothing Workers, and Pullman Porters
Depression and the Demoralization of Organized Labor
12 The New Deal and the Rebirth of Labor Militancy
Section 7(a) and the Revival of Organizing
The Wagner Act and the Second New Deal
The Emergence of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO)
Labor and Roosevelt’s Reelection
13 The CIO and the New Deal Order
The Little Steel Strike, the Roosevelt Recession, and the Resurgence of the AFL
The Consolidation of the CIO and a More Inclusive Union Membership
A Final New Deal Victory: The Fair Labor Standards Act
Labor and the Emerging New Deal Political Order
Encroaching War and the 1940 Election
14 World War II
Workers, Unions, and Wartime Labor Policy
The NWLB and Labor Politics
Race, Gender, and the Changing Union Movement
Demobilization and the Postwar Strike Wave
A New Industrial Relations System
15 Workers and Unions in the Postwar Era
Anticommunism, the Politics of 1948, and the Purge of the Labor Left
The Politics of Collective Action in the Emergent New Deal Order
The Heyday of Collective Bargaining
A United Labor Movement
The Travails of a Sleepy Monopoly
16 Labor’s Long Sixties, 1960 to 1973
Confronting Automation, Alienation, and Structural Inequalities
Labor, Civil Rights, and the Great Society
Public Employees, Farmworkers, and a Diversifying Union Movement
War and Division
The Challenges of Solidarity
17 The Great Reversal, 1974 to 1990s
Economic Crisis and Its Aftermath
Restructuring the Labor Force
The Rise of Conservative Politics and Neoliberal Policy
The Reagan Revolution
The Post‐Reagan Political Economy and Labor Policy
The Crisis of Unionism
18 Renewal and Setback, 1990s to 2009
The Impetus for Change
A Change of Direction for Labor
From Setbacks to Schism
Fissuring, Financialization, and the Great Recession
The Obama Moment
19 Resiliency and Disruption, 2009 to 2020
The Impact of the Great Recession
A Renewed Assault on Unions and Collective Bargaining
Obama’s Mixed Legacy for Workers
Labor’s Green Shoots
Workers, Unions, and the 2016 Presidential Election
The Trump Years
Labor and the 2020 Election
20 Making the Road by Walking: Labor in the 2020s
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of Figures
Preface to the Tenth Edition
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Begin Reading
Further Reading
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Labor in America
A History
Tenth Edition
Melvyn Dubofsky
Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History & SociologyBinghamton University
Joseph A. McCartin
Professor of HistoryGeorgetown University
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: Dubofsky, Melvyn, 1934– author. | McCartin, Joseph Anthony, author. | John Wiley & Sons, publisher.Title: Labor in America : a history / Melvyn Dubofsky, Joseph A. McCartin.Description: Tenth edition. | Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2025] | Includes index.Identifiers: LCCN 2024016449 (print) | LCCN 2024016450 (ebook) | ISBN 9781394208241 (paperback) | ISBN 9781394208258 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781394208265 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Labor–United States–History. | Working class–United States–History. | Labor unions–United States–History.Classification: LCC HD8066 .D78 2024 (print) | LCC HD8066 (ebook) | DDC 331.0973–dc23/eng/20240514LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024016449LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024016450
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © Lawrence Strike, Massachusetts, 1912, public domain/Wikimedia Commons
List of Figures
Figure 1.1
Certificate of indenture, 1767
Figure 1.2
Slave coffle
Figure 1.3
Notice of a mechanics’ meeting, 1774
Figure 2.1
Picking cotton on a Georgia planation
Figure 2.2
Ship carpenter at work, 1807
Figure 2.3
Mechanics’ Association membership certificate, 1800
Figure 3.1
Bricklayers’ bill of prices, 1814
Figure 3.2
Ely Moore, leader of the General Trades’ Union and the National Trades’ Union
Figure 4.1
The
Lowell Offering
, 1845
Figure 4.2
Women shoe workers from Lynn, Massachusetts, striking for better wages, 1860
Figure 5.1
Colored National Labor Union’s founding convention, Washington, D.C., December 1869
Figure 5.2
William Sylvis, president of the National Labor Union
Figure 6.1
Pittsburgh train depot in flames, July 21, 1877
Figure 6.2
Terence V. Powderly, leader of the Knights of Labor from 1879 to 1893
Figure 6.3
Terence Powderly introduces Frank J. Farrell at Richmond convention of the Knights of Labor
Figure 7.1
Samuel Gompers as he appeared in 1886
Figure 7.2
The Battle of Homestead, 1892
Figure 8.1
Eugene V. Debs, Socialist Party leader
Figure 8.2
United Mine Workers membership certificate, 1890s
Figure 9.1
A sample of Industrial Workers of the World propaganda stickers
Figure 9.2
Members of the Massachusetts state militia confront strikers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1912
Figure 10.1
President Woodrow Wilson, Samuel Gompers, and first Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson, 1916
Figure 10.2
A shop committee ballot distributed by the National War Labor Board, 1918
Figure 10.3
Mary Harris “Mother” Jones and William Z. Foster
Figure 11.1
The Goodyear Company’s employee representation plan
Figure 11.2
A Pullman Sleeping Car Porter, 1943
Figure 12.1
Robert Fechner, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace with formerly unemployed CCC workers
Figure 12.2
A Works Progress Administration worker checking his paycheck
Figure 12.3
The Committee for Industrial Organization’s founders, Sidney Hillman, John L. Lewis, and Philip Murray, 1937
Figure 13.1
Sit‐down strikers hanging effigies from the windows of an occupied factory, 1937
Figure 13.2
Richard Frankenstein and Walter Reuther after being beaten by Ford service workers, May 26, 1937
Figure 14.1
Women working at the Douglas Aircraft bomber plant, Long Beach, California
Figure 14.2
A. Philip Randolph, longtime leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
Figure 14.3
CIO‐PAC Election Poster, 1944
Figure 15.1
George Meany and Walter Reuther clasping hands at the merger of the AFL and CIO
Figure 15.2
Teamster leaders James R. Hoffa and Frank Fitzsimmons, 1966
Figure 16.1
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. joins a picket line, 1964
Figure 16.2
Cesar Chavez, leader of the United Farm Workers
Figure 16.3
Coalition of Labor Union Women leaflet
Figure 17.1
A solidarity rally for Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization strikers, Houston, Texas, 1981
Figure 17.2
AFL‐CIO president Lane Kirkland, 1982
Figure 18.1
John Sweeney, Stephen Lerner, and Andy Stern, the architects of Service Employees International Union’s Justice for Janitors campaign
Figure 18.2
Unions join immigrant rights protests, May 1, 2006
Figure 18.3
President Barack Obama addresses the AFL‐CIO, September 15, 2009
Figure 19.1
AFL‐CIO President Richard Trumka, Secretary‐Treasurer Liz Shuler, and Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre
Figure 19.2
A “Fight for 15” demonstration in Kansas City, Missouri, 2015
Figure 19.3
Minneapolis’s Service Employees International Union Local 26 stages a climate strike, 2020
Figure 20.1
AFL‐CIO President Liz Shuler and Secretary‐Treasurer Fred Redmond
Figure 20.2
Protest against working conditions at Amazon
Figure 20.3
President Joe Biden at United Auto Workers’ strike picket line, 2023
Preface to the Tenth Edition
This text has changed enormously since Foster Rhea Dulles published its first edition in 1949. Dulles revised the text for two subsequent editions before Melvyn Dubofsky thoroughly revamped it for a fourth edition in 1984. On his own, Dubofsky subsequently published four more revisions of the text, the last for its eighth edition in 2010. Dubofsky’s former student, Joseph McCartin, then joined Dubofsky in preparing the ninth edition, which was published in 2017. As the longest‐running and most frequently revised overview of US labor history, this text evolved substantially from one edition to the next. The tenth edition represents the text’s most thorough revision since Dubofsky became its lead author.
During its years in print, its revisions have been shaped by both the course of the labor history it chronicles and the development of the subfield of US labor and working‐class history. When Dulles published his first edition, organized labor was ascendant after the industrial union upsurge of the 1930s and the consolidation of unions during World War II. Sociologist C. Wright Mills saw the union leaders of that time as the “new men of power,” while labor economist Sumner Slichter believed that the United States was entering a “laboristic age.” Yet labor history had not yet become a subfield among historians. Rather, it was the province of labor economists such as John R. Commons, Selig Perlman, and their students who had pioneered scholarly work on labor history in the early twentieth century. Tellingly, although he was a historian, Dulles was a specialist in US–East Asia relations, not labor history.
By the time Dubofsky took over the text, however, both the nature of labor history scholarship and the state of the US labor movement had changed markedly. Historical scholarship on labor and working‐class history blossomed in the 1980s thanks to the work of Dubofsky, others in his cohort, and their students, who forged the “new labor history.” Yet the labor movement, an emerging force when Dulles first wrote, had entered a period of institutional decline.
Dubofsky’s first revision of this text in 1984 coincided with President Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection. Ironically, the administration of the only former union president to ever win the nation’s highest office heralded the increasing marginalization of worker organization. As Dubofsky continued to revise this text and as McCartin joined him as coauthor, globalization, financialization, intensified anti‐unionism, and the rise of neoliberal economic policy were accelerating the breakdown of the labor relations model that had just taken shape when Dulles began his work.
During McCartin’s collaboration with Dubofsky it became clear that US labor was in crisis as old models broke down and new ones struggled to be born. The arrival of the Great Recession in 2008 punctuated the turn into this new epoch. That economic catastrophe triggered social upheaval and an increased sense of economic and political insecurity in its wake – an upheaval that helped elect Donald J. Trump to the presidency. The last edition of this text came hard on the heels of that election. This one allows us to probe the significance of that event, what led to it, what followed it, and where the story stands in the mid‐2020s.
Like previous editions, this one focuses on the history of workers’ collective responses to the conditions of working life that they have faced from the colonial era to the present. It does not aspire to be a history of the entire American working‐class experience. We believe no single volume could evoke the full variety of that experience or fully limn the polyglot complexities of working‐class culture and consciousness over the long expanse of time we cover. Nor does this volume provide a “history of capitalism” – although it is influenced by that scholarship. While we draw on the histories of working‐class culture and of capitalism to provide necessary context for understanding American workers and US labor history, we focus on the institutions workers built to defend their interests, improve their lives, and influence the course of their nation’s history.
This story is more relevant than ever. As this book goes to print, a world is taking shape in which workers’ ability to act collectively to advance their interests is eroding and the future of democracy itself is threatened. We believe those developments are intertwined. In that context we also believe the history detailed in the pages that follow demands remembrance and consideration – now more than ever. In that spirit we commend the tenth edition of this work to you.
June 8, 2024
Melvyn Dubofsky
Joseph A. McCartin
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank a number of people for their help in bringing this tenth edition to press. At Georgetown University, we benefitted greatly from the work of graduate assistant Joel Berger. An exceptionally talented scholar in his own right, Joel read and commented on early versions of the revised chapters, proofread the book’s page proofs, and prepared our index with great care.
At Wiley we benefitted from the help of many people. Sophie Bradwell initiated the revision process. Anya Fielding carried it forward and helped us survey past users of the book regarding suggested changes. (Special thanks to James Kraft of the University of Hawai’i for his response to our request for a review.) Wiley’s Rachel Greenberg served as our commissioning editor. Managing editor Juhitha Manivannan and her colleagues, including Ed Robinson, Radhika Madhiseelan, and Jamila Niroop, moved the process along smoothly. We are particularly grateful to our copy editor, Kristi Bennett, whose careful eye helped us improve the language and readability of this edition.
We would also like to thank our fellow scholars in the field of U.S. labor and working‐class history. A synthetic work such as this one would not be possible without the labors of hundreds of historians who have unearthed a rich history that we can only summarize in a volume like this.
And we’d like to offer a final word of gratitude to our families, especially Myrna and Diane, for their support as we worked on this revision.
List of Abbreviations
AA
Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers
ACA
Affordable Care Act
ACTWU
Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union
ACWA
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
AFL
American Federation of Labor
AFL‐CIO
American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations
AFSCME
American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees
AFT
American Federation of Teachers
ALA
Alliance for Labor Action
ARU
American Railway Union
BCG
Bargaining for the Common Good
BCTGM
Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union
BSCP
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
BTW
Brotherhood of Timber Workers
CBTU
Coalition of Black Trade Unionists
CIO
Committee for Industrial Organization/Congress of Industrial Organizations
CLUW
Coalition of Labor Union Women
CMIU
Cigar Makers’ International Union
COPE
Committee on Political Education
CPUSA
Communist Party of America
CTO
Center for Transformational Organizing
CTU
Chicago Teachers Union
CtW
Change to Win
CWA
Communications Workers of America
DLC
Democratic Leadership Council
EA
Employers Association
EFCA
Employee Free Choice Act
EITC
Earned Income Tax Credit
EMOs
education management organizations
FEPC
Fair Employment Practice Committee
FTA
Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers
GATT
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GM
General Motors
HERE
Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees
IAM
International Association of Machinists
IBEW
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
ICFTU
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
ILGWU
International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union
ILWU
International Longshore and Warehouse Union
ITUC
International Trade Union Confederation
IUE
International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers
IWW
Industrial Workers of the World
JwJ
Jobs with Justice
LIUNA
Laborers International Union of North America
LMRDA
Labor‐Management Reform and Disclosure Act
NAFTA
North American Free Trade Agreement
NAM
National Association of Manufacturers
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NAWU
National Agricultural Workers Union
NCF
National Civic Federation
NCOISW
National Committee to Organize Iron and Steel Workers
NDLON
National Day Laborers Organizing Network
NDMB
National Defense Mediation Board
NDWA
National Domestic Workers Alliance
NLRA
National Labor Relations Act
NLRB
National Labor Relations Board
NLU
National Labor Union
NOW
National Organization for Women
NRA
National Recovery Administration
NTWA
National Taxi Workers Alliance
NUHW
National Union of Healthcare Workers
NWGA
National Guest Workers Alliance
NWLB
National War Labor Board
NWTUL
National Women’s Trade Union League
OECD
Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development
OPEC
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
OUR
Walmart Organization United for Respect at Walmart
PAC
Political Action Committee
PATCO
Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization
PBGC
Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation
PE
private equity
PRO Act
Protect the Right to Organize Act
RWDSU
Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union
SEIU
Service Employees International Union
SEIU‐UHW
United Healthcare Workers West
SPA
Socialist Party of America
SWOC
Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee
TDU
Teamsters for a Democratic Union
TPP
Trans‐Pacific Partnership
TSA
Transportation Security Administration
TTIP
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
TUUL
Trade Union Unity League
UAW
United Automobile Workers
UBC
United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners
UCAPAWA
United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America
UE
United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers
UFCW
United Food and Commercial Workers International Union
UFT
United Federation of Teachers
UFW
United Farm Workers of America
UGW
United Garment Workers of America
UMW
United Mine Workers
UNITE
Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees
UPS
United Parcel Service
USAS
United Students Against Sweatshops
USCIR
U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations
USW
United Steelworkers of America
WFM
Western Federation of Miners
WTO
World Trade Organization
WWRA
Working Women’s Relief Association
1Laboring a Nation into Being
The development of the colonies that became the United States depended upon a vast array of human labor: waged and unwaged; productive and reproductive; artisan and unskilled; agricultural and household. That labor was carried out by diverse peoples, who worked under vastly different conditions, ranging from freely immigrating or indentured Europeans to Africans forcibly transported and enslaved. Between 1619 and 1776, their exertions, whether coerced by a whip and chains or rewarded by a wage and the promise of land and a more abundant life, would transform North America’s eastern seaboard into the world’s most dynamic outpost of settler colonialism, one that would in time give rise to the world’s dominant economic power. As that economy took shape, it would be stamped from the beginning by the sharp distinctions between free and unfree labor upon which it was built.
In the first two and a half centuries of colonization, the east coast and its hinterlands were overwhelmingly rural. Upward of 90 percent of settlers lived in a countryside that had been occupied for millennia by American Indian peoples whose economies depended upon the abundance of the land and waters. The labor systems of these different indigenous cultures had been organized around farming, fishing, and hunting and informed by values much different from the concepts of land ownership and acquisitive individualism that European settlers brought with them. Europeans soon found that the main obstacle they faced in transplanting their conceptions of economy into North America was a shortage of labor.
The early settlers had barely landed in Virginia and Massachusetts when they realized the imperative need for workers. In its first voyage to Jamestown and three succeeding expeditions, the Virginia Company had sent to the New World a motley band of adventurers, soldiers, and gentlemen. In growing despair of establishing a stable colony out of such people lacking in skills and laboring experience, Captain John Smith finally entered an urgent protest. “When you send again,” he wrote home emphatically, “I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, masons, and diggers of trees’ roots, well provided, than a thousand such as we have.” Plymouth fared better. Among the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts Bay in 1630 there were enough artisans that the Bishop of London disparaged them as “cobblers, tailors, feltmakers, and such‐like trash.” Still, the founders of colonial New England, like those of Virginia, worried about the scarcity of free people willing to perform the work necessary to build successful colonies. Cotton Mather thus made it “an Article of special Supplication before the Lord, that he would send a good servant.”
Struggling with a shortage of necessary labor, the colonists considered alternatives. Even as colonists negotiated with Native peoples or made war upon them to take their land, they also attempted to enslave them to address their labor shortage. Spanish conquistadors did the same in New Mexico. In addition to importing Africans into Florida, the conquistadors captured and enslaved Apache and Navajo during war, referring to them as genizaros. (The general prohibition of indigenous slavery in New Spain did not apply to those taken prisoner in war.) As much as one‐third of the population of New Mexico were genizaros by the late eighteenth century. However, along the Atlantic seaboard of North America, Native tribes for the most part succeeded in resisting the colonists’ sporadic efforts to enslave them. Thus, colonial settlers were forced to look back across the Atlantic to two sources of bound labor that together would provide the essential foundation of a growing colonial economy: indentured servants from Europe and enslaved inhabitants of Africa.
Varieties of Bound Labor
The majority of that bound labor force during the early colonial years was furnished by indentured servants: laborers who signed contracts of indenture in Europe; and “redemptioners,” whose cost of passage to the colonies was paid by their indenture (sale) at auction in their port of arrival. They formed the bulk of a labor force in which waged work initially proved the exception. Indentured laborers worked the tobacco farms of the Chesapeake region, provided household labor on farms and in towns in every colony, and engaged in all sorts of labor for their masters.
Attracting indentured laborers was not easy. Agents of the colonial planters and of British merchants scoured the countryside and towns of England, and later even parts of continental Europe, to advertise the advantages of emigrating to America. These crimps and newlanders, as the agents were called, distributed handbills extolling the colonies, as a place where food, land, and opportunity abounded. Nor did they hesitate to engage in fraud. Their extravagant promises induced many to sign articles of indenture with little idea of the hardships that awaited them. Believing that England was overpopulated, local authorities cooperated with these recruitment efforts, hoping especially to rid their communities of so‐called paupers and vagabonds. On occasion, authorities would round up those deemed undesirable and force them to choose between indentured emigration and imprisonment.
Among those generally targeted for transportation were orphans and other minors who had no means of support. In 1619, the Common Council of London designated “one hundred Children out of the swarms that swarme in the place, to be sent to Virginia to be bound as apprentices for certain yeares.” For its part, the Privy Council authorized the Virginia Company to “imprison, punish and dispose of any of those children upon any disorder by them committed, as cause shall require; and so to Shipp them out for Virginia, with as much expedition as may stand for convenience.” The term kidnapping originated to describe the practice of nabbing children and then transporting them to the colonies. When it came to recruiting indentured labor for the colonies, the line between voluntary and involuntary transportation – especially when it involved young children and the poor – was never clear.
Figure 1.1 Certificate of indenture, 1767. This certificate bound one Mary Elizabeth Bauer to Samuel Pleasants for five years of labor in return for his payment of her passage to the American colonies. (With permission of Historical Society of Pennsylvania.)
Prisons too became important sources for indentured labor. Imprisoned people transported across the Atlantic as “His Majesty’s Seven‐Year Passengers” were often simply poor and thus deemed incorrigible. But when the market demanded, even those who committed more serious crimes could find themselves bound for the colonies. The prerevolutionary roster of arrivals in one Maryland county totaled 655 persons and included 111 women. Among their crimes were murder, rape, highway robbery, horse‐stealing, and grand larceny. Contemporary accounts described many of the women as “lewd.”
Many colonials objected to the importation of those who were imprisoned. An “abundance of them do great Mischiefs,” one complained. “Our Mother knows what is best for us,” one bitter contributor to the Pennsylvania Gazette groused in 1751. “What is a little Housebreaking, Shoplifting, or Highway‐robbing … compared with this Improvement and Well peopling of the Colonies?’” Benjamin Franklin bitterly declared that the policy of “emptying their jails into our settlements is an insult and contempt the cruellest, that ever one people offered another.” But such protests were of little avail. Roughly 50,000 people convicted of crimes were transported, largely to the middle colonies. In Maryland, a favored destination, they were the majority of indentured servants in the eighteenth century.
Although involuntary transportation played an important role in the assembly of a colonial labor force, most indentures were voluntary. Indentured servitude largely replicated English patterns of rural employment and adapted them to the labor market realities of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century, redistributing labor to a region where it was scarcer and hence more valuable. Ultimately, the indentured servants who responded to the pull of the colonial labor market constituted a broad cross‐section of the laboring classes.
But redistribution was scarcely smooth. Emigration to the colonies was risky. Often as many as 300 passengers sailed on small vessels – overcrowded, unsanitary, and with insufficient provisions for voyages that could take from 7 to 12 weeks. Typhus and other diseases took a terrible toll. The mortality rate was sometimes as high as 50 percent. “During the voyage,” reads one account of the experiences of redemptioners recruited from the German Palatinate, “there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of seasickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth rot, and the like, all of which come from old and sharply‐salted food and meat, also from the very bad and foul water, so that many die miserable. … The misery reaches a climax when a gale rages for two or three nights so that everyone believes that the ship will go to the bottom with all human beings on board. In such a visitation the people cry and pray most piteously.”
Nor did such hardships end when port was finally reached. Those for whom contracts had already been arranged were handed over to their unknown masters. If the redemptioners did not immediately find employment themselves, they were put up for sale by the ship captains or merchants to whom they owed their passage money. Colonial newspapers often carried notices of prospective sales, such as this one in the March 28, 1771, Virginia Gazette:
Just arrived at Leedstown, the Ship Justitia,
with about one Hundred Healthy Servants.
Men, Women and Boys, among which are many
Tradespeople – viz. Blacksmiths, Shoemakers,
Tailors, House Carpenters and Joiners, a
Cooper, several Silversmiths, Weavers,
A Jeweler, and many others. The Sale will
commence on Tuesday, the 2nd of April, at
Leeds Town on Rappahannock River. A
reasonable Credit will be allowed, giving
Bond with Approved Security to
Thomas Hodge
At such sales, families might be separated when spouses and offspring were auctioned off to the highest bidder. The terms of servitude varied with age and might run from one to seven years. If the sales were not concluded at the port of entry, “soul drivers” herded groups of redemptioners to the backcountry, “like cattle to a Smithfield market,” where their contracts were auctioned at public fairs, often a significant profit for those who imported them. In some colonies, 50 acres of land was granted to a planter for each immigrant imported, and the indentures’ contracts could always be resold. In the case of sturdy farm hands and skilled artisans, prices ran high. Planter William Byrd reported to his agent in Rotterdam, in 1739, that he was in a good position to handle heavy shipments. “I know not how long the Palatines are sold for who do not pay passage to Philadelphia,” he wrote, “but here they are sold for Four years and fetch from 6 to 9 pounds and perhaps good Tradesmen may go for Ten. If these prices would answer, I am pretty Confident I could Dispose of two Shiploads every year.”
It is estimated that more than half of all the colonists who came from Europe arrived under some form of indenture. Yet the emergence of indentured servitude as an answer to the shortage of colonial labor proved to be a dress rehearsal for the far more brutal system of coerced labor that would first supplement and then eclipse indenture: chattel slavery.
By themselves, indentured servants proved unable to meet colonial labor demands, especially once Southern colonies began finding markets for agricultural products abroad. To acquire the necessary hands to plant, tend, and harvest tobacco, rice, and indigo, planters increasingly looked to the African slave trade to fill their needs. In fact, indenture and enslavement had emerged together. The first enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, the same year the Virginia General Assembly was founded—thus ensuring that American slavery and America’s putatively democratic institutions would take root in the same soil and conditions, a development of lasting consequence. Planters soon found that enslaved Africans offered an advantage over indentured servants. Not only did the former seem to provide an endless supply of bound labor, but, unlike indentured Europeans, they could be bound in perpetuity and defined as property (chattel), and they could pass on their enslaved status to their children, not only providing a new generation of laborers but also multiplying their enslavers’ wealth.
Women played an indispensable role in the world of bound labor, whether enslaved or indentured, North or South, on the plantation’s fields or in the kitchen of the main house, clearing the innkeeper’s tables or swilling the farmer’s hogs. Households rather than individuals were the basic units of economic and social life in colonial society, and households were sustained by both women’s productive and reproductive labor. Most free men who worked for wages needed the unpaid labor of women to turn their own earnings into enough to sustain a household. If married free women happened to earn wages, their husbands were legally entitled to them under the legal principle of coverture. In 1782, one New Hampshire woman described the dawn of a typical day with this verse:
Up in the morning I must rise
Before I’ve time to rub my eyes.
With half‐pin’d gown, unbuckled shoe,
I haste to milk my lowing cow.
But, Oh! It makes my heart to ake,
I have no bread till I can bake,
And, then, alas! It makes me sputter,
For I must churn or have no butter.
For enslaved women, of course, the work was immeasurably harder and their vulnerability to abuse far greater. They labored side by side in the fields with their men and often proved to be the more dexterous cotton choppers and pickers. Meanwhile, their subjection to violence and rape as well as their resiliency in the face of unspeakable exploitation would define the nature of the plantation household. As historian Shauna J. Sweeney observes, if race “became the self‐evident mark of hereditary slavery” that laid the basis for an emerging American capitalism, then “Black women’s wombs were the incubators of capital accumulation.”
Several features distinguished slavery from indenture from the beginning. While some indentures were coerced, all the enslaved Africans who arrived in the colonies were captives who had been sold in chains to slave traders. As one observer recalled, at their ports of embarkation in the 1690s some captive Africans were “so wilful and loth to leave their own country that they often leap’d out of the canoos, boat and ship, into the sea, and kept under water till they were drowned.” While indentures endured long dangerous voyages from Europe, their experience paled against that of souls who endured the infamous Middle Passage that ships traversed from Africa to North America’s east coast. Chained side by side below deck for the entire voyage, which lasted on average 2–3 months, the enslaved suffered unimaginable agonies. Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, who served as surgeon on slave ships in the late 1700s before embracing the antislavery cause, described the ship’s hold during an (all too common) outbreak of dysentery: “The deck, that is the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux [illness], that it resembled a slaughter‐house. It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture a situation more dreadful or disgusting.” And although indentures had their contracts auctioned off on their arrival, the market for the enslaved was much more brutal and dehumanizing, as prospective purchasers closely examined and probed for weakness in the bodies of the humans they would consider their permanent property.
If enslaved Africans arrived in North America under quite different conditions than European indentures, the differences between the status of these two groups was not immediately clear in the mid‐seventeenth century. The two groups often worked together, especially on the tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake region of Virginia, socialized together, and produced biracial children. While the enslaved lacked contracts that specified the terms and duration of their service, their futures seemed at least partly open in this period. Some slaves took advantage of the demand for labor to negotiate arrangements with their enslavers that allowed them to hire themselves out and accumulate savings that might be used to purchase their freedom. In the 1660s, in some areas of Virginia nearly one‐third of people of African descent were free.
Nor was the heritability of enslavement immediately and firmly established. That aspect of the American system was clarified only in the aftermath of the case of Elizabeth Key, a mixed‐race woman born in 1630 to an enslaved African mother and a White Newport News legislator. Before he died, Key’s father had promised her freedom, but after his death she remained enslaved. In 1656, she successfully sued in a Virginia court and won. Her case disturbed Virginia’s emerging planter aristocracy, the more so because it took place in the context of the English Revolution of 1640–60, when groups like the Diggers and Levellers were threatening to upend the hierarchical social order in England and colonial authorities were beginning to worry about the potential of indentured servants and enslaved Africans making common cause. The Virginia legislature moved to foreclose any such alliance with a series of laws between 1660 and 1662. The legislature enacted severe penalties for any White indenture who ran away “in company with any negroes.” Then it addressed the dangerous precedent set in the Key case by jettisoning a foundational principle of English common law that children traditionally inherited their race and thus social standing from their father. The legislature declared instead that thenceforth “all children borne in this country” would instead follow their mother’s lineage. The children of all enslaved women would therefore be enslaved, even if their fathers had been their mothers’ White enslavers (and rapists).
Another turning point in the boundary‐drawing that would indelibly distinguish the enslaved from the indentured came in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. In that episode, landless White Virginians and aggrieved indentured servants under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon stormed into the colonial capital of Jamestown in an attempt to depose its government. Although the rebellion soon collapsed when Bacon succumbed to dysentery, the event shook Virginia’s landed aristocracy to its core. Thereafter, landowners increasingly replaced potentially rebellious White indentures with enslaved Africans against whom any form of violence was held legal. By the end of the seventeenth century, a series of newly enacted laws (consolidated in the Virginia slave codes of 1705) defined enslaved people as chattel property bound in perpetuity, whose offspring were likewise bound. Unlike indentured servants, the bodies of the enslaved would constitute a permanent and self‐reproducing source of wealth for their enslavers. The enslaved could not testify against White people in court, legally own property, marry, make contracts, or win manumission (freedom) by conversion to Christianity.
As Africans’ permanently unfree status became defined and enforced in law, the stark difference in condition between enslaved Black people and indentured White laborers crystallized with the latter realizing a higher status based on their skin color. White racism, which would be rooted in this emerging caste structure, soon assumed a dynamism and life of its own, one that would deeply affect the labor history of what became the United States. Like George Alsop, an indentured servant who wrote home in 1659 to make clear that the “servants of this province, which are stigmatiz’d for Slaves by the clappermouth jaws of the vulgar in England” were certainly not in that most debased condition. White workers drew status because enslaved Africans were the ones truly “stigmatiz’d.”
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the future growth and profitability of Southern staple agriculture – at first primarily tobacco but then rice, indigo, sugar, and most importantly cotton – depended on enslaved labor. In time, the staple crops produced under slavery would become the engine that drove the national economy, as cotton became a good in great demand in the international market and the generator of enormous earnings that enriched those who marketed the crop and financed the planters. The heavy labor of the enslaved as well as their ingenuity drove the Southern plantation economy. In the South Carolina Low Country, enslaved people taught plantation owners how to adopt rice‐growing practices they had used on West Africa’s Grain Coast, leading to the growth of some of the colonies’ largest plantations.
Yet enslaved labor was not confined to agriculture or to the colonies of the South. Enslaved people mastered a wide range of skilled trades, from carpentry, masonry, and blacksmithing, to cordwaining (shoemaking), all of which were necessary to both the plantation system and the colonial economy as a whole. While slavery became the predominant labor system in much of the South, it existed in all the colonies in the mid‐eighteenth century. In the 1740s, for example, nearly a third of workers in New York City were enslaved. Accordingly, the number of people held in slavery in the colonies grew from an estimated 7,000 in 1680 to 250,000 by 1750. And as slavery grew, indentured servitude diminished.
Figure 1.2 A slave coffle, a platoon of enslaved people chained together and marched to work or the auction block, was a frequent sight as slavery gradually replaced indenture as the prime source of bound labor. (Miscellaneous Items in High Demand/Library of Congress/Public domain.)
Patterns of Control, Resistance, and Accommodation
Indenture and slavery were policed by different degrees of force. What White indentured servants endured, although often harsh, was never as brutal as that endured by the enslaved. While indentured servants’ diets might be meager and their labor exhausting, colonial laws at least called upon their enslavers to provide them with adequate food, lodging, and clothing. Those indentured were rigidly confined to the immediate vicinity of the place where they were employed, tavern keepers were not allowed to sell them liquor, their terms of service might be extended for a long list of minor offenses, and they were subject to whippings and other corporal punishment by their masters for disobedience or perceived laziness. Indentured young women could be held in longer bondage if they became pregnant, and their masters sometimes conspired to this end. “Late experiments shew,” read one report, “that some dissolute masters have gotten their maides with child, and yet claim the benefit of their services.”
Indentured servants were recognized as fellow Christians by their masters and were in theory entitled to their day in court. However, because their masters had quasi‐proprietary rights, indentured servants found it extremely difficult to secure redress for injustices. Court records concerned with instances of willful ill treatment reveal how vulnerable servants were. A certain Mistress Ward whipped her maidservant on the back so severely, with the added brutality of putting salt in the wounds, that the girl died. On the finding of a jury that such action was “unreasonable and unchristianlike,” Mistress Ward was fined 300 pounds of tobacco. In another case, Mistress Mourning Bray defiantly told the court that in no circumstances would she allow her servants to “go to play or be Idle,” and the unlucky complainant was stripped and given thirty lashes. A third trial resulted more favorably for another maidservant. She was discharged from the further employ of a master who had climaxed frequent beatings by hitting her over the head with a three‐legged stool when he found her reading a book on Sunday morning. In none of these respects, however, were indentured servants as vulnerable to violence as were the enslaved.
The system of slavery ultimately rested firmly on the threat or actuality of unrestrained and unrelenting violence. Enslavers were free to impose the most stringent punishments, including whipping, maiming, and even murder. Enslavers raped with impunity, broke up slave families when it suited them, and attempted to prevent the enslaved from learning to read or write.
The imposition of slavery as a system of control began with a process called seasoning, which took shape on Barbados, Jamaica, and other Caribbean islands. Under this practice, the enslaved were categorized in three groups: Creoles (those born in the Americas), old Africans (those who had lived in the Americas for years), and new Africans. Seasoning was the process of turning new Africans into old Africans by imposing new names on them, teaching them enough English to comprehend and follow orders, and accustoming them to gang labor under the tutelage of old Africans and Creoles – all under the control of whip‐wielding overseers. This same pattern of control was adopted in the cotton‐producing colonies of what would become the United States.
The organization of work, the extent and methods of control, and the meting out of discipline differed according to region and the crop on which the enslaved worked. In the Carolina Lowcountry, which developed a rice culture, enslaved people had the greatest autonomy. The cultivation of rice was delicate, skilled work, organized around tasks that each person was assigned individually. If an enslaved person completed their assigned tasks early, they could take time to rest, be with family, or cultivate their own gardens. Reinforcing the degree of relative autonomy in this region was the extent to which African cultural practices survived. Over half of enslaved people brought into South Carolina in the mid‐eighteenth century came from Senegambia and Sierra Leone on the Grain Coast. Their concentration in the region helped them perpetuate and adapt aspects of African cultures, including some spiritual rituals and work habits. Lowcountry slaves developed a Creole language called Gullah that drew on both English and West African languages. By contrast, in regions that cultivated tobacco or, later, cotton, gang labor was the rule. In these settings, overseers used threatened lashings to drive gang laborers through cycles of planting, hoeing, chopping, picking, drying (in the case of tobacco), baling, and transporting.
Both the indentured and the enslaved found methods to resist oppressive conditions. The most common form of resistance in both cases was to simply run away. Advertisements often appeared in the colonial newspapers for runaway White servants. One such notice referred to an English servant who had “a pretty long visage of a lightish complexion, and thin‐flaxen hair; his eye tooth sticks out over his lower teeth in a remarkable manner,” and another to a shoemaker who “loves to be at frolics and taverns and is apt to get in liquor and when so is subject to fits.” Other advertisements offered special rewards for runaway bricklayers, tailors, carpenters, and even teachers. Advertisements seeking fugitive slaves were even more common. In one, an enslaver let it be known that he was looking for “my boy Alfred,” a “bright mulatto five foot eight or nine inches high” with “a scar over his right eye which extends down to his nose.” Fugitives often escaped in groups, whose members shared an African homeland and language. When they succeeded, they frequently stayed in the region near the plantations they had escaped, stealing what they needed to survive and living as outliers. In Florida and the Southeast, many of those who managed to escape their captors fled to interior lands where they founded so‐called maroon communities or took refuge with the Seminole tribe. In regions where free Black people were common, fugitives could pass as free people.
Since they would eventually gain freedom, indentured servants had less incentive to flee than the enslaved. For those who faithfully served out the term of their indenture, there were rewards. Grants of land were the exception rather than the rule, but there was universal provision for some form of freedom dues. In Massachusetts, for example, the law specifically stated that all servants who had served diligently and faithfully for seven years should not be sent away empty‐handed. What this meant varied, of course, not only from colony to colony but also in terms of individual articles of indenture. The freed person’s dues generally included at least clothing, tools of some sort, and perhaps such livestock as would enable the servant to start farming on their own account. Typical indentures called for “a pigg to be pay’d at every years end” and “double apparell at the end of the term.”
Once they had established their freedom, Hugh Jones wrote in 1724, the formerly indentured might “work Day‐Labour, or else rent a small Plantation for a trifle almost; or turn overseers, if they are expert, industrious and careful, or follow their trade … especially Smiths, Carpenters, Taylors, Sawyers, Coopers, Bricklayers, etc.” Some succeeded as independent farmers or artisans, others became the casual day laborers needed in seaport cities, and still others struck out for the frontier – although they frequently failed to achieve landowning status.
For those who were enslaved, there were no freedom dues. Although some had an opportunity to hire themselves out (in return for giving their enslavers a large percentage of their wages) and by doing so eventually saved enough to purchase their freedom, over time the enslaver class discouraged manumission and made it harder for enslaved people to achieve it. If fleeing was not an option, the enslaved were forced to adapt to a situation where freedom was an increasingly distant dream. They responded by resorting to other means to protect themselves, ranging along a broad spectrum from passive resistance to, on occasion, outright rebellion.
New arrivals from Africa who had not yet been seasoned were more likely than old Africans, or Creoles, to band together and simply refuse to work, provoking overseers to violent countermeasures. If group resistance of this kind became infeasible, then the enslaved adopted more passive methods, including feigning illness, breaking tools, destroying crops, and simply slowing the pace of their work in subtle ways that would help them preserve their bodies. In 1757, planter Landon Carter complained that enslaved people would try to extend their time off – traditionally, they were not compelled to work on Sundays – by claiming to be ill on Mondays. “More sicke people come in and so it has been every monday morning for near three weeks,” he wrote in his diary, “but this peculiar to negroes who refuse to complain on Sundays because they look at that as a holy day.” On occasion, however, resistance could be more direct, and even fatal. In 1758, Elizabeth Russel petitioned a South Carolina charity for help, explaining that the enslaved woman owned by her family poisoned her husband, two of her children, and herself. How widespread such poisonings were is unknown, but enslavers clearly worried about the potential. One colonial newspaper carried an advertisement for “An Antidote, Against the Poison, Usually Given by the Negroes.”
Yet it was the least common form of resistance – outright rebellion – that weighed most heavily on enslavers’ minds. Rebellions led by enslaved people were rarer in the colonies that became the future United States than they were in other parts of the Western Hemisphere, in part because White people outnumbered the enslaved everywhere except the Carolina Lowcountry. Still, rebellions occurred, and when they did, they caused panic in White communities that took years to subside. In 1712, 27 Africans laid siege to buildings in lower Manhattan in New York City, torched them, and killed nine White people and wounded six more. When they were ultimately captured, 21 of the rebels were executed, while six committed suicide rather than allow their captors the chance to take their revenge. In 1741, a series of more than a dozen mysterious fires in New York City led to a conspiracy theory that slaves and poor White laborers were beginning to organize together in preparation for a full‐scale revolt. Whether this was true is unclear, but 172 suspected conspirators were arrested, 34 of whom were executed. Of those, 30 were Black men, 13 of whom were burned at the stake while the rest were hanged.
