Civil War America

Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America

Brian P. Luskey

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469654331
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

When a Civil War substitute broker told business associates that "Men is cheep here to Day, " he exposed an unsettling contradiction at the heart of the Union's war effort. Despite Northerners' devotion to the principles of free labor, the war produced rampant speculation and coercive labor arrangements that many Americans labeled fraudulent. Debates about this contradiction focused on employment agencies called "intelligence offices, " institutions of dubious character that nevertheless served the military and domestic necessities of the Union army and Northern households. Northerners condemned labor agents for pocketing fees above and beyond contracts for wages between employers and employees. Yet the transactions these middlemen brokered with vulnerable Irish immigrants, Union soldiers and veterans, former slaves, and Confederate deserters defined the limits of independence in the wage labor economy and clarified who could prosper in it. Men Is Cheap shows that in the process of winning the war, Northerners were forced to grapple with the frauds of free labor. Labor brokers, by helping to staff the Union military and Yankee households, did indispensable work that helped the Northern state and Northern employers emerge victorious. They also gave rise to an economic and political system that enriched the managerial class at the expense of laborers--a reality that resonates to this day.

1

BLACK REPUBLICAN

ON JUNE 16, 1854, as the Kansas-Nebraska Act galvanized its opponents into a Republican Party coalition devoted to free labor and free capital, Thomas Webster Jr. of Philadelphia checked into the Exchange Hotel in Richmond. Thirty-six years old, Webster had been in the tobacco wholesaling business for more than fifteen years. He started in the trade as clerk and then junior partner in the firm of Ruddach & Webster. The senior member of the firm, David Ruddach, was related to his mother. Credit reports from after the Civil War claimed that the business “failed in 1837,” but city directories and Philadelphia newspaper advertisements show that assertion to be false. The firm remained in business in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and Webster left it to go into business “on his own hook,” to use the parlance of the day, in 1846. Advertisements in the Philadelphia Inquirer locate his office near the Delaware River wharves, where schooners and steamboats deposited hogsheads and boxes of leaf and manufactured tobacco from Connecticut, Cuba, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and, most of all, Virginia. Like other businessmen, he emphasized his connections to well-known producers—“factories at Richmond, Petersburg, and Lynchburg” that supplied him “warranted brands.” He underlined his attention to local consumers, offering tobacco in “extra fine, fine medium, and inferior grades”—with prices to match—that would satisfy the tastes of a variety of chewers and smokers across Philadelphia’s social order. By the early 1850s, one credit reporting agent considered Webster a “fair” risk for loans, although he also believed that Webster’s financial stability was underwritten by his 1848 marriage to Eliza Ann Richardson, the daughter of a wealthy umbrella manufacturer. He may have been worth $10,000, a substantial sum in these years, but even so the credit reporter believed that Webster sometimes “gets short” on funds and was “not v[ery]. prompt in paying his bills.”¹

Kinship mattered for success in business. Webster’s family ties had facilitated his entrance into the commercial world, and marriage opened new conduits to credit and capital. But Webster’s reputation in the city’s business community, as reflected in credit reports based on current rumor and fact, remained precarious. By 1854, perhaps in an attempt to bolster his credit or hedge against the potential ruin that unflattering credit reports sometimes caused, he had accepted a position as agent for two shipping companies—Hand’s Line that operated schooners sailing from Philadelphia to Baltimore and Alexandria, and the Union Steamship Company, which carried passengers and products among Philadelphia, Norfolk, and Richmond. By doing so, he sought to exploit his commercial knowledge of the traffic in goods along the Delaware, Patapsco, Potomac, and James Rivers for steady gain. In advertisements for the Union Steamship line, Webster touted the accommodations on the company’s vessels and the speed, economy, and regularity of the transport. Philadelphia businessmen knew that one of the company’s ships would leave the wharf every five days, and Webster assured them that the company took the utmost precautions to ensure that goods and people would arrive safely. Webster did his own business by these ships. In October 1854, for instance, the Union Company’s steamboat City of Richmond carried “8 cases Tingley’s superior sweet” for him to sell to retailers. His agency netted him a comfortable salary of some $2,000 per year and space aboard the company’s vessels that he used to make further profits in the tobacco trade. His business interests dovetailed to make tidy profits in an uncertain economy.²

While in Richmond, Webster could serve both of his interests: he could solicit clients for the Union Steamship Company or meet tobacco manufacturers beneath the Greek Revival columns of the Exchange Hotel. He could take a short walk to the tobacco factories in Shockoe Bottom to inspect the product being packaged for shipment to Philadelphia. If he had done so, he might have walked past the offices and auction houses of slave traders on Franklin, Wall, and Fifteenth Streets, easily identified by the red flags raised over them to announce impending sales. Maybe he heard the patter of an auctioneer attempting to solicit bids for a human being standing on his block. Webster’s conscience surely would have been pricked. He hated slavery and the slaveholding aristocracy. Yet to earn a living as a tobacco wholesaler and agent of the carrying trade he had to cater to slaveholders’ interests and depend upon the productive capacities of enslaved people and the value of the commodities they made. Webster coped with the instability and uncertainty of the antebellum business world in much the same ways that other commercial men did, hedging against risk. He differed from many of his contemporaries, though, because the ambivalence of his creditors that forced him to seek safety through an agency was largely the result of his public reputation as a “black republican.”³

During the economic crisis of the late 1850s and early 1860s that made Northerners’ individual and household independence seem more precarious, antislavery businessmen engaged in the Southern trade faced an ethical dilemma as they sought to reconcile their ideology and interest. Webster tried to finesse this dilemma and accumulate economic and moral capital from different groups. Opposed to slavery, Webster nevertheless persuaded some Virginians to deal with him because all could profit jointly in a booming national political economy based on it. Webster’s cautious hedge was risky and became untenable as Northerners and Southerners debated the promise and peril of free labor and hurtled toward their separation over slavery. By 1860, the financial uncertainty born of the Panic of 1857 and the secession crisis encouraged Webster to illuminate for Republican allies the moral principles that had caused him economic hardship and made him deserving of patronage. Even though he failed to obtain a political post, Webster positioned himself to move goods and people in support of the Union war as it commenced. It was through the work of middlemen like Webster—as much as through the efforts of abolitionists, Republican politicians, Union soldiers, and enslaved people—that slavery ended and free labor’s promise for workers was unmade during the Civil War era. Webster and his ilk represented the speculative—many said the fraudulent—impulses and activities in an economy founded on the fact that having capital meant having power. That capital would make these Northerners more independent in a competitive market, and their speculations would shape the contours of war and emancipation.⁴

The want advertisements of nineteenth-century newspapers, beyond their polite entreaties to the public for patronage, are an index of an abstraction we call the market. They represent the competition for credit and capital and for work, workers, and things, and illustrate advertisers’ dependence on producers, distributors, and consumers for access to the resources they deemed valuable. In one column of the July 18, 1854, issue of the Richmond Daily Dispatch—published one month after Webster visited the city—advertisers puffed the virtues of children’s shoes, cheap clothes, gold pens, and cement they had for sale. A slave trader named Benjamin Davis also offered a fifty-dollar reward for help in recapturing his slave, Charles. Having lost this man he called a thing, Davis offered to pay someone to hunt, catch, and return his property. Davis’s desperation for the labor and monetary value Charles represented and the desperation of the slave catcher who needed the reward money—a small fraction of what Charles was worth—would be eased when the latter seized a desperate man on the run.⁵

At his office on Wall Street “under City Hotel,” Davis sold men, women, and children to be transported by schooner and steamer to other auction houses in the Gulf States, where they would be sold again to work on cotton and sugar plantations. Apparently, when Webster had been in the city, Davis was trying to sell Charles at an auction sale, but the buyers would not meet Davis’s estimation of his property’s value. Charles Gilbert—for he had a last name—took matters into his own hands to avoid an auction fate, and as a result forced Davis to reckon with the possibility that he would lose the value he represented. Within a few days of his slave’s escape, Davis increased the reward from $50 to $100 and guessed that Gilbert was making his way to Old Point Comfort, where his mother lived. Davis informed the slave catchers who would need to identify Gilbert that the runaway was twenty-one years of age, approximately five feet four or five inches tall, and distinguished by the “ginger-bread color” of his skin.⁶

Davis was right about Gilbert’s direction. He had chanced to meet a captain of a Boston-bound schooner who agreed to take him to Massachusetts from the Virginia coast. So he fled east. Old Point Comfort had once been his home. It was also the place where, in 1619, the first African slaves had been forced ashore in North America. Gilbert hoped that, with the help of his mother and friends, it would be the place where his enslavement would come to an end. When he arrived home, however, slave hunters tipped off by Davis’s advertisement were stalking the neighborhood and making it difficult for Gilbert’s kin to come to his aid. They would pay a price if caught harboring a fugitive. Gilbert’s knowledge of the area helped him. He knew that the Hygeia Hotel, a seaside resort for the nation’s elite adjacent to the prominent military installation Fort Monroe, was built on pillars that allowed a man three or four feet of crawl space. He survived in a hiding place near the hotel’s cistern for four weeks, eating discarded food from a “slop tub” in the dead of night. When a young white boy trying to catch chickens under the hotel threatened to blow his cover, Gilbert snarled like a dog to scare him off. The ruse worked, but only temporarily, because he overheard the boy’s incensed father resolve to kill the cur who had frightened his son. On the run once again, Gilbert appreciated how precarious his position was in a landscape overseen by slaveholders and their agents. He climbed up an acorn tree one day, then hid under wooden floorboards in a washhouse in which his friends worked. Flushed out by slave catchers, he retreated to a thicket, then to a marsh, then back to his hiding place under the Hygeia. Evading the reach of the hunters made him miss his appointment with the Boston-bound ship. Gilbert’s mother, a free woman, was able at the last minute to cobble together thirty dollars for his passage on another ship. He hid aboard that vessel for another four weeks while it docked at Norfolk. Gilbert’s long journey out of slavery ended on November 11, 1854, when he set foot on the Delaware River wharves in Philadelphia. Benjamin Davis, unaware of Gilbert’s arrival in the City of Brotherly Love, was still desperately advertising his reward in Richmond for the capture and return of his human property.⁷

We know the details of Gilbert’s lengthy and harrowing flight from slavery because William Still, a prominent Philadelphia abolitionist, published his notes concerning Gilbert’s experience after the Civil War. Gilbert was one of the hundreds of men and women whom Still and other Philadelphians helped to escape from slavery in the 1850s. Gilbert escaped, Still wrote, on a “steamship bound for Philadelphia.” Still’s compendium of traffic on the Underground Railroad includes several references to runaway slaves becoming “acquainted” with stewards, hiding near boilers, or even booking state rooms on the Philadelphia or the City of Richmond, vessels in the Union Steamship Company’s fleet. Uncomfortable though their passage may have been on these ships, escaping slaves found temporary confinement in their holds worth enduring because opportunities for independent life and labor awaited them in Canada. Still never mentions Webster as a “helper” or “sympathizer” with the activists and activities of the Underground Railroad. Still notes that friendly captains and stewards aboard these vessels—and not distant agents—arranged for enslaved people’s passage. Yet Still also called smuggling slaves to Canada a “business” that had to be “transact[ed]” surreptitiously. Unlike in the domestic slave trade that shipped enslaved people from the upper South to the lower South, “[s]tockholders did not expect any dividends” from this underground traffic in people. “The right hand was not to know what the left hand was doing.”⁸

Still’s metaphors of the financial market were neither coincidental nor poorly chosen. They were at the heart of a struggle for meaning that declared certain economic acts legitimate and illegitimate. The struggle to declare slavery’s capital illegitimate was central to Still’s life. His father had purchased his freedom from his owner, and his older brother was kidnapped into slavery for much of his life, losing the ability to control the fruits of his labor. William Still was born in Medford, New Jersey, moved to Philadelphia at the age of twenty-three, and took a job as a janitor and clerk for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. In the early 1850s, he became the chairman and corresponding secretary of the Vigilance Committee, which managed the Society’s efforts to usher Southern slaves from Philadelphia to Canada. Still and his associates worked to undermine the business of slavery by adopting the means that business used to distribute people and value through the American economy. The Underground Railroad siphoned money from the pockets of slaveholders—the financial capital embodied in enslaved laborers—and sent its passengers into independence on Canadian soil. In his book, Still quoted newspaper advertisements like Benjamin Davis’s and the testimony of former slaves to articulate the value that slaveholders lost. Still was keen to note the prices that these former slaves would have garnered at auction and the annual fees that they had paid to masters in Richmond, Petersburg, and Norfolk to hire out their time. These prices and fees made plain the injustice of slavery’s theft and the justice of the Underground Railroad’s stealings. In fact, the enslaved people whose stories Still told often chose the moment they heard about their impending sale—the moment at which their value would be reckoned—to run away. Through this northbound traffic, valuable commodities became invaluable people working together for collective independence in a confrontation with slavery’s capital. There were winners and losers in these transactions, much like in every sector of American business. Slaveholders lost thousands of dollars, represented by the present and future labor and the hiring fees and wages of their slaves. Former slaves obtained a foothold on independence in Canada that they could not enjoy in the United States because the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act created a national market in slave catching to bolster the claims of slaveholders and the authority of the men who hunted human property for them. Once safely across the Canadian border, formerly enslaved men and women wrote jubilant letters to Still that emphasized the transformation of their position in market terms. Under the protection of Queen Victoria, they could keep wages they earned from their labor.⁹

As the Union Company’s agent, Thomas Webster observed the company’s ships dock at wharves on the Delaware River and was aware of all types of licit and illicit cargo aboard them. He was, at the very least, a silent partner in the business of emancipating Virginia slaves. His tobacco wholesaling business depended on the labor of enslaved people who harvested the crop in rural fields and manufactured it in urban factories. His work as agent of a steamship company whose ships slaves used to leave Virginia and its slave economy worked against his bottom line. The labor of slaves made Thomas Webster more capital, and as a result, more independent, even as his antislavery ideology made his fortunes more uncertain. Still unwittingly illuminated Webster’s conundrum when he referenced the escape of Jack Pettifoot, who had been hired out by his master to the tobacco factory of McHenry & McCulloch in Petersburg. Pettifoot “reached Philadelphia by the Richmond line of steamers, stowed away among the pots and cooking utensils,” Still explained. The tobacco manufacturers, Pettifoot told Still, were “rather more oppressive than he agreed for.” Webster’s 1848 advertisement for the “warranted brands” he had for sale included the tobacco McCulloch sold to him. Webster bet that tobacco manufacturers would continue to do business with an antislavery Northerner because the ships that took away a few of their slaves also carried their products to Northern markets.¹⁰

Webster’s gamble on the nation’s political economy and the profit and prestige it offered him was a precarious one. So he broadened his labors from the strictly commercial to the benevolent. In August 1855, Clarissa Davis, one of the enslaved women who fled Portsmouth, Virginia, on the City of Richmond, wrote to William Still. She had heard that “the yellow fever is very bad down south.” Indeed, in her hometown, the fever raged that summer. Early reports in Richmond tried to downplay the outbreak, but soon the suffering was undeniable and costly for Portsmouth’s and Norfolk’s municipal authorities. The Richmond Daily Dispatch implored the charitably inclined to provide succor to the sick even as it debated whether to quarantine ship traffic up the James River to protect the health of people in the state’s capital.¹¹

Benevolent associations sprang into action in Richmond and around the country to help pay for the expenses associated with care for the dying. In Philadelphia, Webster tried to alleviate the suffering, urging a public meeting at the city’s Merchants’ Exchange to do something for the “dying and destitute” among their “Southern friends.” He offered resolutions that would systematize the collection and distribution of funds to the relevant agencies in Virginia and became the chairman of the committee tasked with implementing his plan. At a time when sectional conflict was rising to a crescendo, he emphasized ties of personal and commercial friendship between the regions. Aiding the sick in their time of trial would cement bonds of friendship. At the end of November, Webster dutifully accounted for Philadelphia’s role in mitigating the fever’s impact, telling a public meeting in the city that nearly $46,000 of Philadelphians’ contributions had been spent for vital medicines and the transportation of doctors and nurses to the affected areas. O...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Black Republican
• 2. Bargains Worse than Fraudulent
• 3. Capital in Self
• 4. Worthy of His Hire
• 5. The Draft, Popularized
• 6. A Great Social Problem
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover