Labor Overview

Like most aspects of American life in the post-Revolutionary decades, work in the new American nation underwent a prolonged state of transition. Even as older, established ways persisted, new ways of working and of thinking about work slowly took shape, spreading over decades rather than months or years. Because the connections among national markets in goods and labor were still weak, rapid change, when it did occur, was usually limited to isolated cases. One of the most significant changes was the decline of traditional craft production as factories redefined the methods and means of production of goods. Tensions over the role of free and unfree labor in the workforce began to divide the nation. Women entered the workforce, challenging society's understanding of male and female roles. These changes were profound and would come to define American work.

regional labor systems

Taking the early national period as a whole, the most striking change in the nature of work was the increasingly regional concentration of labor systems. Colonial America had been rich in land but poor in labor. Those who needed labor, whether temporary labor for fall harvests or permanent labor for year-round agriculture and craft manufacturing, were generally forced to take whatever labor they could find. For this reason, colonial labor tended to be a mixture of free and unfree labor systems, with free workers often working side by side with indentured servants and slaves. This all changed in the wake of the Revolution. Building on changes that were already under way during the French and Indian War (1754–1763), rapidly expanding population in the early nineteenth century and the Revolutionary rhetoric of freedom combined to place considerable pressure on unfree labor systems. In the end, the issue of unfree labor divided the new nation into two sections, each with its own distinctive labor system. In the North, states gradually or immediately abolished slavery and indentured servitude became both economically infeasible and ideologically unpopular. As a result, free labor became the norm. In the South, slavery remained the keystone of the southern labor system, especially after the spread of cotton agriculture in the 1790s. This trend toward distinctive sectional labor systems would continue through the first half of the nineteenth century and would become one of the central issues leading to the Civil War (1861–1865).

changing production systems

If labor in the South remained constant in the years following the Revolution, the opposite was true in the North, where both its labor system and the economic relations that supported it underwent profound change. Industrialization began to transform production in the new nation almost immediately after the Revolution. Improving on mill technology borrowed from industrializing Britain, early American manufacturers consolidated mechanized production of textiles in rural factories sited along the Northeast's major watercourses. At the same time, and with even greater impact, small groups of merchants and master craftsmen created urban manufactories in which they divided traditional craft production into discrete tasks and used the resulting gains from the division of labor to increase production of a wide variety of goods, ranging from cutlery to shoes. Taken together, these early forms of industrialization virtually transformed the nature of work in the early nation.

decline of craft production

The most significant change took place at the level of traditional craft production. As late as 1800 nearly all American manufacturing took place in artisan shops employing the skilled labor of master artisans, their journeymen, apprentices, and families. This craft system, with its roots stretching deep into the European past, had provided work and a way of life to tens of thousands of craftsmen since the beginning of English colonization in the seventeenth century. Resting on a tiered system of education and training, the craft system promised a life of economic well-being (competence, as people at the time put it) and social and political independence. For artisans, the skill they learned in their youth was a form of property; in a society in which rights devolved from the ownership of property, their skill entitled them to the same active voice in community political affairs that were claimed by modest landowners. If any one word described artisan identity, that word was "independence."

This independence was severely challenged by the new organizations of work and manufacturing that developed during the early national era. Competition from factories and manufactories—both of which could produce goods faster and more cheaply than artisans—drove prices down and forced artisans to work faster and longer in an increasingly futile attempt to maintain their standard of living. In time, most artisans simply could not keep pace with mechanized factories and more labor-efficient manufactories and were forced to seek work in these new workplaces themselves or follow some other line of employment. Whatever path they chose, however, their expectations of lifelong economic independence were usually dashed by the new productive systems.

work and new gender roles

One of the most profound social and cultural changes occasioned by the dissolution of the craft system and the rise of manufacturing was the redefinition of gender roles that the new work regimes forced on the new nation. Factories employed women as well as men, and this situation presented one of the most important challenges to established gender roles in American history. Since before colonial times, masculinity had been rooted in a concept of male independence and female dependence, and society had operated along patriarchal lines. What, then, did it mean to have independent working women and dependent wage-earning men in the new nation? Would the relations between the sexes be turned upside down? Would anarchy ensue? These fears dominated discussions of men's and women's roles in the post-Revolutionary era. In the end, traditional male and female norms were preserved by translating the meaning of masculinity and patriarchy from one anchored in artisan independence to a new norm in which a man fulfilled his masculine role by being employed, working diligently at his job, and supporting his family. Masculinity was redefined in ways that maintained male dominance in society. So long as women's work was largely isolated and peripheral (which it was throughout this period), women commanded meager resources. This alone prevented them from mounting a serious challenge to the received patriarchal system. In the new world of work, working women came to be seen as deviant, and the domestic ideal came to dominate early nineteenth-century conceptions of women.

See alsoClass: Development of the Working Class; Cotton; Cotton Gin; Manufacturing .

bibliography

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Schultz, Ronald. The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720–1830. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

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Ronald Schultz