From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  Workers’ troubles in some occupations went beyond hard labor and low pay. Many sailors lost their lives at sea, many more suffered from what they called “Falling Sickness”—dizziness caused by recurrent beatings at the hands of their captains. Domestic workers sometimes faced physical abuse as well. In 1734, a group of them announced in the New York Weekly Journal 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.”

  For all of these reasons, most free people did everything in their power to build lives that did not revolve around wage work. More often than not, they succeeded. Just as wages were higher than in Europe, alternatives to wage earning were more plentiful.

  Family farming was by far the most common alternative;it occupied well over half of free people, both black and white. Land to the west of the well-established settlements was cheap enough for a great many people to buy. Others obtained acreage as part of their “freedom dues” or squatted on land the colonies had reserved for Indians. A good number of people rented farms, especially in Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York’s Hudson Valley, and interior Pennsylvania and Maryland. Though farming was a family affair, it was also a commercial venture in most cases. Nearly every household marketed products such as corn, butter, and woolen goods; many also produced cash crops for export—tobacco in southern colonies, wheat in New England and the mid-Atlantic region. In the Northeast, whose winters brought farm work to a halt for several months each year, numerous households filled the time with craft work, chiefly leather tanning and shoemaking. Farm families were often hard-pressed, even destitute, the land owners as well as the tenants. “Inconsiderable people,” the colonial elite called them. Even so, they lived and worked without a boss breathing down their necks; therein lay the great attraction of farming.

  Craft work in cities and towns offered another route to independence, an astonishingly fast route by European measures. In Europe, an artisan spent many years preparing for self-employment as a master of his craft. First, he completed a seven-year apprenticeship, serving under a master craftsman in return for room and board; then he worked a long stint as a journeyman, perfecting his skills as he slowly saved money to finance a shop of his own. In America, it was easy to find shortcuts, for the craft guilds that oversaw the system in Europe almost never took root in the colonies. Absent guild oversight, few apprentices put in a full seven years. Some served less time by mutual agreement with their masters; others reneged on their contracts and ran away, eluding the law by moving to a different colony. Skilled labor was in such short supply that almost anyone with a few years of apprenticeship under his belt could get work as a journeyman, and journeymen usually earned enough to finance swift transitions to self-employment.

  Benjamin Franklin exemplifies this mobility. Born in 1706 in Boston, he was a candlemaker’s son who at age twelve undertook an apprenticeship in printing—a much more prestigious craft, not far below silversmithing at the very top. His master was his older brother James, whom Ben contracted to serve for seven years. By all accounts the boy learned quickly, but James’s foul temper made it a difficult apprenticeship. So in 1723, two years before his obligation expired, Ben ran away to Philadelphia, where he passed himself off as a journeyman and soon opened a printshop of his own. By 1748, he was sufficiently rich to retire from the shop and give himself full time to the almanac writing, political activity, and scientific experiments that made him one of the most famous Americans of the eighteenth century.

  The unregulated craft system could also undermine the very advantages it bestowed. By the mid-1700s, some trades were so crowded with master craftsmen that bankruptcies were common in slack times. Some masters lowered costs by retaining fewer journeymen and more apprentices—more than they could train in all aspects of the craft. Others turned to slave labor or imported out-of-town journeyman to glut the local job market and thus reduce wages. For the time being, though, such problems were confined to certain trades in certain locales. Most practitioners of most crafts still had good reason to believe Ben Franklin’s adage, “He that hath a Trade, hath an Estate.”

  This “he” was frequently a she. While midwives practiced a prestigious, wholly female trade, many more women engaged in male-dominated crafts from silversmithing on down. Excluded from formal apprenticeships, they acquired craft skills by working in shops owned by their fathers, husbands, or other male kin. Virtually every master craftsmen counted on women’s assistance; it took more than his own labor and that of male employees to make the shop pay. A handful of women opened crafts shops of their own. In Baltimore, for example, Mary Minskie and two male assistants made metal corset stays and men’s and women’s clothing. But the vast majority of master craftswomen were widows carrying on their husbands’ businesses—women like Ann Smith Franklin, who ran James Franklin’s printshop for twenty-three years following his death.

  UNRULY LABOR

  The first labor rebellion in colonial North America preceded the establishment of permanent colonies. In the summer of 1526, 500 Spaniards and 100 enslaved Africans made camp near the mouth of the Pee Dee River in present-day South Carolina. That November the slaves rose up, killed most of their captors, and escaped to nearby Indian settlements. The Spanish survivors retreated to Hispaniola; the Africans stayed on. Over the next 250 years, North America saw many more acts of resistance by colonial laborers, both bound and free.

  Slaves and indentured servants frequently challenged authority in the much the same ways Adam defied John Saffin. “Stubborn, refractory and discontented,” in the words of one Connecticut official, they paced their work as they saw fit, objected aloud to insults, and refused to march dutifully to whipping posts. Many took aim at their masters’ property, breaking tools, injuring farm animals, setting fire to houses and barns. Some took aim at the masters themselves, along with anyone who got in the way. In 1678, the Englishman Thomas Hellier, indentured on a Virginia plantation called Hard Labour, axed to death his master, mistress, and a woman servant who tried to assist them. In 1747, the Comanche Pedro de la Cruz led his tribesmen in an armed raid on the New Mexico town where he had been enslaved. In 1771, two African slaves in New Orleans were arrested for flogging their master and burning his hayloft. Stories of such incidents appeared in colonial newspapers on a fairly regular basis.

  For both slaves and indentured servants, however, the most common form of resistance was flight. Newspapers carried column upon column of advertisements describing runaways and promising rewards for their capture and return. In British colonies, which were more thickly settled than those of France and Spain, most of the fugitives wound up caught. As one indentured Pennsylvanian wrote, “‘Tis certain that nothing is more difficult than for a Slave or a Servant in America to make his Escape without being retaken.” The penalties for those apprehended included whipping, branding, and the amputation of an ear. But attempts at escape continued nonetheless, inspired by the fact that some people managed to get away for good. Those who beat the odds typically found refuge among Native Americans or by fleeing to French or Spanish territory.

  In Spanish Florida, escaped slaves from the Carolinas founded a town of several hundred in 1739. Located just north of Saint Augustine, surrounded by stone walls, and guarded by a town militia about 100 strong, this settlement—known as Fort Mose*—became a barrier against British invasion as well as a beacon for runaways. In 1740, when an army of South Carolinians marched into Florida, their defeat at Fort Mose persuaded them to retreat. Welcoming new arrivals from the Carolinas and, later, Georgia as well, the town survived until Spain ceded Florida to Britain in 1763 and Fort Mose’s residents moved to Cuba.

  Resistance to servitude also took the form of armed rebellion. Colonial records describe the suppression of hundreds of plots by would-be rebels, including indentured servants in Maryland in the 1650s, an alliance of Indian and African slaves in Massachusetts in 1690, slaves in French New Orleans in 1730 and 1732, about 150
slaves and 25 white allies in New York City in 1741, and the Pueblos in Spanish New Mexico in 1784, 1793, and 1810. If authorities exaggerated some plots and dreamed up some others, their suspicions are understandable. Experience proved time and again that bondage begat revolts.

  The largest by far occurred in New Mexico in August 1680, when 17,000 Pueblos rose up against Spanish demands for tribute under the encomienda system and Indian conversions to Christianity. A model of strategic planning, this offensive mobilized Pueblos from over two dozen far-flung villages that spoke at least six different languages and widely varied dialects, many of them mutually unintelligible. The revolt also seems to have won strong support from the tens of thousands of baptized Pueblos laboring for Franciscan missions. By October, the rebels had driven every Spaniard out of New Mexico, and only a few hundred Pueblos from the missions had joined the exodus. Spain did not retake the colony until 1693 and never reestablished the encomienda. Following a smaller Pueblo uprising in 1696, the colonists also softened their demands for religious conversion and for labor from mission Indians and repartimiento draftees.

  Slaves and indentured servants in British colonies launched scores of smaller-scale revolts that made up in daring what they lacked in size. The early 1660s ushered in thirty years of unrest in Virginia. Both slaves and servants fled their masters in record numbers. Authorities discovered plots for armed rebellion by servants in York County in 1661, an alliance of slaves and servants in Gloucester County in 1663, and slaves in the Northern Neck region in 1687. Bands of fugitive slaves staged repeated raids on plantations in various counties in 1672 and again in 1691. In 1682, when planters’ overproduction of tobacco plunged the colony into depression, slaves, servants, and impoverished free people laid waste to the tobacco crop on plantations throughout Gloucester County.

  For Virginia’s elite, the most frightening of all the uprisings in this period was Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. It began that spring as a revolt by backcountry farmers, most of them former servants working land they had received as freedom dues. In April some 500 farmers united behind the tobacco planter Nathaniel Bacon to wage an unauthorized war on neighboring Indians. By summer Bacon’s troops were also plundering wealthy planters’ property, and in September they attacked the colony’s capital in Jamestown, where hundreds of slaves and servants joined the uprising. Within days the rebels had burned Jamestown to the ground and fanned out into the surrounding countryside to loot plantations. Chaos reigned for the rest of the year, with slaves and servants fighting on long after Bacon died of dysentery in late October and the farmers started to trudge home.

  Following Bacon’s Rebellion, the large planters of coastal Virginia and nearby Maryland rethought their labor policies. The indenture system seemed terribly risky now that former servants had inaugurated a mass revolt in which black and white fought side by side. Slavery might prove safer, as long as slaves could be isolated from poor whites. To secure their dominion, the planter elite would henceforth purchase as many slaves as possible, use indentured workers only in a pinch, and try to minimize contact between the two. Colonial officials meanwhile criminalized marriage across the color line and granted servants certain rights and protections denied to slaves—the right to own property, for example, and protection from dismemberment as a penalty for insubordination. As other British colonies institutionalized slavery, they, too, passed laws designed to eliminate common ground between servants and slaves. Labor revolts that united black and white were soon a thing of the past.

  Both slaves and servants continued to resist bondage, however, and especially bold mutinies broke out in New York, South Carolina, and Florida following its transfer to England’s hands. In April 1712, about twenty-five slaves in New York City—including two Indians and a visibly pregnant black woman—armed themselves with guns, clubs, and knives, set fire to a building on the northern edge of town, and attacked the men who came to put out the fire. Soldiers garrisoned in the city quickly rounded up the rebels, save for six who chose suicide over capture;and some fifty more slaves were arrested on the suspicion that they had helped to plan the revolt. In the end, twenty-one people were executed in gruesome ways designed to terrify potential rebels into submission.

  The South Carolina rebellion began in the town of Stono on September 9, 1739, when about twenty slaves led by an Angolan named Jemmy seized guns and powder from a warehouse and set out for Spanish Florida, waving flags, beating drums, and shouting “Liberty!” About sixty more slaves soon joined the column, which attacked every plantation in its path and killed about twenty-five whites along the way. A militia detachment tracked down the rebels in a matter of hours but failed to stop their march for another ten days. While most were finally killed or captured, as many as ten or fifteen got away.

  In Florida, a revolt erupted in summer 1768 among Italian and Greek immigrants indentured to ten years’ labor on an indigo plantation at New Smyrna on the colony’s Atlantic coast. The plantation’s British proprietors had recruited them with promises of comfortable lodgings, a half-share of the crop, and their own acreage as freedom dues. Arriving at New Smyrna in June and July 1768, the immigrants found an arid wilderness of uncleared land, severe shortages of food and shelter, and epidemics of gangrene and scurvy. On August 18, some 300 rebels led by Carlo Forni of Livorno, Italy, helped themselves to firearms from the plantation storehouse and locked up their English overseer. About 100 then crowded onto the only ship at the settlement’s dock and set sail for Cuba. The British navy soon intercepted them, but a few of the rebels, including Forni, escaped in a rowboat and remained at large for another four months. The only fatalities stemming from this revolt occurred when Forni and one of his lieutenants were captured and beheaded by British authorities. Back at New Smyrna, the deaths were many; close to 900 workers had succumbed to disease by 1773. Four years later, the survivors deserted en masse, and the African captives who replaced them ran away in droves. By 1783, when Spain snatched Florida back from Britain, the plantation lay in ruins.

  Free workers resisted subordination in ways that sometimes paralleled those of slaves and indentured servants. Save for the sailors, wage earners in British North America almost never staged strikes. Historians have so far discovered just two definite exceptions to this rule—a 1636 strike in northern Massachusetts (now Maine) by fishermen whose employer had withheld their earnings and a 1768 strike for higher pay by journeymen tailors in New York City. But wage earners repeatedly joined with others from the lower and middle classes to protest harms from above. Most of these protests took place in cities, and Boston saw an especially large share. In 1713, when the city’s grain supplies dwindled and its food prices soared, some 200 hungry Bostonians ransacked the ships and warehouses of a merchant exporting corn to the West Indies. In 1747, a crowd of several thousand armed with clubs and swords stopped a British commander from press-ganging Boston seamen into compulsory service in the Royal Navy. A city official who vigorously backed this riot’s suppression soon lost his house to arson as hundreds gathered in the street hollering, “Let it burn!”

  On a more mundane level, free workers asserted their rights to dress and amuse themselves in ways the elite deemed inappropriate. As often as they could afford, they wore bits of finery such as a handkerchief, a garment of brightly colored chintz, or a collar of fine linen. Many working men and more than a few of the women congregated in taverns in their spare hours. Some showed up at entertainments intended for the gentry. All of this the upper classes abhorred. No less a body than the Massachusetts General Court denounced wage earners for desiring clothes “altogether unbecoming their place and rank” and for frequenting “taverns and alehouses where they idled away their time.” A British musician performing in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was horrified to find three farmhands in the audience; he had thought the ticket price “sufficient to exclude such characters.” An important issue underlay these small conflicts. The elite resented free workers’ liberty to do as they wished in at least some corners of t
heir lives; and that was the very thing the workers valued most.

  Nowhere was this more evident than in their responses to destitution, a constant danger for all wage earners save craft journeymen. From the mid-1600s onward, colonial officials complained about the numbers of “idle and unprofitable” people who could not find steady wage work yet refused to volunteer for the security of indentured service. They scavenged, begged, engaged in petty crime, squatted on other peoples’ land, searched endlessly for a few days’ work here and there—anything to avoid bondage. Officials who tried to intervene met strong, sometimes violent resistance. In 1715, a sheriff served an eviction notice on a squatters’ camp in Schoharie County, New York; Magdalena Zeh and her women neighbors attacked him with rakes and hoes, rode him out of the camp on a rail, and dumped him on the road back to Albany. In later decades, city governments opened poorhouses where the destitute could work in return for bed and board in strictly regimented dormitories. No one went there voluntarily; instead, authorities filled the dormitories with people who were too weak to flee. Philadelphia’s poorhouse reported in the 1770s that inmates arrived “emaciated with Poverty and Disease to such a Degree that some have died in a few days of their Admission.”

  Women sometimes resisted subordination in another way too: they fled their husbands. English law, which applied in the colonies, defined a wife as her husband’s chattel. Whatever he desired, she should desire. Whatever wages she earned, property she obtained, or children she bore belonged to him. He was entitled to her labor in the household and entitled as well to give her “reasonable chastisement,” meaning any physical punishment that did not inflict permanent injury or death. Most wives seem to have worked out tolerable domestic arrangements nonetheless, but quite a few did not. The same newspaper columns that described runaway slaves and servants also described runaway wives, warning that anyone who assisted these women would be prosecuted to “the utmost Rigour of the Law.” Such ads were placed by free men of all stations, from merchants and planters to silversmiths, tailors, bricklayers, and sailors.