On the Make

Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America

Brian P. Luskey

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814752548
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the bustling cities of the mid-nineteenth-century Northeast, young male clerks working in commercial offices and stores were on the make, persistently seeking wealth, respect, and self-gratification. Yet these strivers and "counter jumpers" discovered that claiming the identities of independent men—while making sense of a volatile capitalist economy and fluid urban society—was fraught with uncertainty.

In On the Make, Brian P. Luskey illuminates at once the power of the ideology of self-making and the important contests over the meanings of respectability, manhood, and citizenship that helped to determine who clerks were and who they would become. Drawing from a rich array of archival materials, including clerks’ diaries, newspapers, credit reports, census data, advice literature, and fiction, Luskey argues that a better understanding of clerks and clerking helps make sense of the culture of capitalism and the society it shaped in this pivotal era.

1
What Is My Prospects?

Antebellum Americans believed that they lived in a revolutionary epoch in history. As never before, in this age of capital, white men had opportunities to advance economically and socially outside the constraints of hierarchical relationships. In the nineteenth century, strivers contended, the origins of success came from within rather than from outside assistance. “The man who does not at least propose to himself to be better this year than he was last must be very good or bad indeed,” the New York importer’s clerk Edward Tailer wrote in his diary on New Year’s Day, 1850. “[T]here is no such thing as a stationary point in human endeavors; he who is not worse to day than he was yesterday is better; and he who is not better is worse.” Self-reliance and self-improvement were central aspects of the creed of self-making. Arising from the democratic promise of the nation’s Revolution, that creed had become even more significant in the wake of capitalist transformation, which made cities great depots for agricultural produce, industrial goods, and men scrambling to earn wealth and respect in what one historian has called a “world of strangers.” Ambitious strivers made their own success; idle loungers made their own failure.¹

From the pulpit and the press came earnest warnings that young men hopeful of getting ahead should do so in the right way. Unitarian minister Henry Bellows told Boston’s Young Men’s Benevolent Society in 1838 that an “honorable ambition for a good name” was often “rewarded with the world’s respect.” But the “honors of society” were not currency that could be exchanged to enter heaven. Ambition for earthly glory alone was misplaced. “Young men,” Bellows exhorted his audience, “the kingdom of the world, and the kingdom of God are before you. Choose ye between respectability and holiness.” Although Tailer believed in man’s ability to make his own success, he too saw merit in self-control. “Ambition . . . ruins yearly thousands of human souls,” he wrote. Men “are all filled with the desire to excel, surpass, and outshine their fellow beings, and so lost do they become in time to every other emotion that they imperceptibly loose [sic] sight of the future haven” in heaven, “which is only to be reached after years of self sacrifice and self denial.” Virtues at the heart of what Alexis de Tocqueville called “self-interest rightly understood”—humility, prudence, and generosity—would unite private and public interest in the new nation and serve young men’s quest for earthly success and heavenly salvation.²

Strivers tried to reconcile worldly and otherworldly aspirations by cultivating sterling character. Surely, they thought, character was the most valuable form of capital in an urban society populated by unknown persons and an economy defined by both thrilling boom times and enervating hard times. Edwin Freedley, the author of Leading Pursuits and Leading Men, a compendium of America’s most successful business men and firms in the 1850s, heartily concurred. “Capital is, of course, one of the foundations of credit,” he intoned, “but character, capacity, and industry are much more essential to success. Capital may be lost by some unexpected turn of fortune; but a merchant who, to use a quaint summing up of the whole in one phrase, ‘has it in him,’ will conquer even in the face of adverse circumstances.” Character was an inner reserve of capital that could overcome all obstacles to advancement. Freeman Hunt, editor of Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, a journal born in the wake of the Panic of 1837, affirmed that commercial character was built upon the foundations of “integrity, industry, and perseverance.” Equipped with these traits, young men would ultimately discover that their “virtues have shone out” to secure the trust of commercial actors. Ultimately, they would find that they had “established the fortunes of princes—clothed themselves in purple, and built for themselves palaces.” Hunt told youthful aspirants that the cultivation of character must be at the heart of their quest for capital. If they channeled their striving through the filter of these virtues, “there is no danger of your being unsuccessful in the world.”³

Although antebellum Americans coping with an industrializing economy and burgeoning cities considered theirs an era of change, they looked to the past for ideas and institutions that would help young men mold their character and get ahead. In the fall of 1856, Boston celebrated the sesquicentennial of Benjamin Franklin’s birth with the unveiling of a Richard Greenough statue of its native son. Decorating the Federal Street parade route were several banners upon which Bostonians inscribed what they considered to be the major events of the quintessential striver’s life. Joining the procession that accompanied the ceremony, members of voluntary associations could trace his meteoric and well-known rise from printer to inventor to diplomat. The clerks who represented the Mercantile Library Association, a society dedicated to providing young commercial subordinates with the education that would lead to advancement in the commercial world, probably marveled at the banner reading “Dry Goods clerk, 1727.” They could proudly claim Franklin as one of their own. When Tailer “took a stroll through the grave yard” of Trinity Church before attending Sunday services there, he “took particular notice” of the monument to Alexander Hamilton, erected “in approbation of the high esteem in which he was held by them, as a man of never faltering integrity, of consummate wisdom and experience, and a true lover of the Institutions of his country.” Tailer may not have known that Alexander Hamilton had been a merchant’s clerk before he rose to prominence as a soldier, lawyer, and statesman, but the coincidence would have piqued his interest.⁴

Nineteenth-century Americans believed that a clerkship was a promising platform from which to attain respectable character as well as power and prestige in their society. Their forefathers had taken advantage of apprenticeships that provided them with education and protection within networks of friendly merchants in order to become independent commercial proprietors. Young nineteenth-century clerks took solace that founding fathers had once been in their place, learning how to become independent men in control of their own firms. Young men scoured Franklin’s Autobiography and other writings for guidance as they plotted their own social and economic ascent, noting passages that appeared to reveal how character development might lead to upward mobility. In 1849, a New York clerk named Robert Graham copied an aphorism from Franklin’s Poor Richard Improved into his diary: “There is nothing humbler than ambition, when it is about to climb.” Just commencing his commercial career, Graham cited Franklin in an effort to marry humility to self-interest and thus mitigate the potentially dangerous aspects of overreaching ambition.⁵

And a clerkship seemed just the humble berth from which dreams of advancement could be realized. Had that not been the case for Hamilton and Franklin? In a word, no. If antebellum Americans had read Hamilton’s letters, they would have seen a young man chafing at the constraints of his clerkship in a St. Croix countinghouse. “[M]y Ambition is prevalent,” he bluntly informed a confidant in 1769, and could not be assuaged. “I contemn the grov’ling and condition of a Clerk . . . to which my Fortune . . . condemns me and would willingly risk my life tho’ not my Character to exalt my Station.” He accumulated responsibilities rather than prestige when his employer temporarily left the island for New York in 1771. A clerkship impeded rather than furthered his personal progress, and in 1773 he bolted to the North American continent to give free range to his ambition.⁶

How had young Franklin—a journeyman printer—become a clerk? In 1726, he sailed from London to Philadelphia at the invitation of Quaker merchant Thomas Denham, who wanted him to clerk in his Water Street shop. Denham expected Franklin to “keep his Books . . . [,] copy his Letters, and attend the Store,” assuring him that mercantile apprenticeship would lead to a position as an agent aboard one of his West Indian vessels and the opportunity to forge transatlantic connections with other merchants. Franklin applied himself to his education in “Accounts” and believed that “in a little Time” he became “expert at selling.” He “respected and lov’d” his master, who in turn evinced “a sincere Regard for” his new charge. Franklin would earn “Fifty Pounds a Year Pensylvania Money,” a sum far less than his “Gettings as a Compos[i]tor” of type. Yet Franklin eagerly “took Leave of Printing” because he believed that clerking offered “a better Prospect” for achieving social and economic advancement in the British Atlantic world. Unfortunately, Denham’s sudden death pushed Franklin back into the ranks of the printers.⁷

As Hamilton’s and Franklin’s cases show, nineteenth-century Americans were harkening back to a golden age of clerking that never existed. Although apprenticeship had connected senior and junior commercial men along lines of family and friendship, it was an uncertain mechanism for the transfer of power in commercial circles and an unreliable predictor of social mobility. The institution’s hollow promises and its emphasis on hierarchy betrayed the divergent interests that existed across a generational divide within commercial ranks both before and after the Revolution. In colonial and early national America, young men disliked dependence and questioned the value of apprenticeship when merchants and craftsmen looked increasingly for workers rather than trainees. Parents and commentators winced when young apprentices defied moral strictures and the authority of their elders. Neither apprenticeships nor apprentices were what they seemed, encouraging contemporaries to question the promise of the clerkship and the social identities of the young men who filled these posts. New Yorker Abraham Bailey voiced his frustration in 1813 when he asked a fellow clerk, “Are we not poor damned clerks, what is my prospects . . . [?]”⁸

Why, then, did ambitious young men choose to become urban commercial clerks in the nineteenth century? The answer has both ideological and structural components. Mercantile apprenticeship persisted as a resilient ideal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries even as the institution deteriorated and as the ideology of the American Revolution encouraged white American men to question patriarchal relationships and formulate a national idiom of aspiration predicated upon hard work, self-improvement, and moral virtue. Nineteenth-century authors and readers cherry-picked apparently relevant virtues from early American merchants’ biographies for imitation and praised the hierarchical merchant-apprentice relationship as the ideal way to get ahead because it allegedly helped to shape young men’s character.

The economic growth and competition unleashed in the early republic created new opportunities for distinction but also threatened access to economic and cultural capital. While many American boys responded to the commercialization of agriculture and industrialization by moving west in search of arable land or laboring in new factories, ever-escalating numbers ventured to northeastern cities, joining urban and foreign-born men in search of clerkships and chances to accumulate wealth as independent merchants. If apprenticeship and the assumptions about upward mobility attaching to it were unstable in both the colonial and early national periods, the ideals of the institution beckoned to wide-eyed young men of the antebellum period who were approaching the metropolis for the first time and dealing with unsettling economic and social transformations occurring in their midst. The specialization of mercantile firms and the rising number of retailing establishments, the boom-and-bust nature of the economy, and intense competition transformed urban commerce. Yet the relationships between senior and junior men in American business firms largely remained the same. Alone or with partners, proprietors owned their commercial houses or shops and managed the clerks who staffed them. In the absence of alternative business structures, young men tried to comprehend and react to change through traditional narratives of recruitment and advancement in the commercial world. With little except character at their disposal, young men realized that they had to take clerkships in order to accumulate the economic and cultural capital necessary to attain power and prestige at the head of commercial houses and stores. In their attempts to obtain those clerkships, antebellum youth tried to balance their allegiance to commercial traditions, the imperatives of ambition, and the language of character pervading prescriptive texts. In the process, they helped to shape the meanings of class and masculinity in an age of panics.

A Usable Past?

Clerks had long been important figures in commercial economies, and transatlantic importing merchants who dominated the colonial American economy particularly prized those who were known for their good penmanship and accurate numerical calculations. Typically, commercial proprietors brought a few young men, often coreligionists or family members, into their waterfront countinghouses to serve as apprentices. Both master and servant shared expectations about the nature and purpose of their relationship. Apprenticeship ties mirrored kinship bonds for parents and employers interested in maintaining oversight over the next generation and strengthening connections among merchants around the Atlantic basin. The young apprentice hoped that, by learning double-entry bookkeeping and representing his master’s interests as a supercargo or agent in foreign ports, he could one day become a merchant himself, elevated into partnership or proprietorship within a densely intertwined web of personal, family, capital, and credit relations.⁹

But apprenticeship was a suspect institution at the time when Franklin sailed back to Philadelphia to clerk in Denham’s shop. Merchants had often used the term “friendship” to describe the bonds they forged with other commercial men, including their clerks. In The Complete English Tradesman, first published in 1726, Daniel Defoe lamented the sentimental connotations of equality that the term conjured and the ramifications those linguistic associations had for social order. Relationships that had once constituted a careful means of raising honest mercantile men and protecting the business secrets of commercial principals were coming unglued as clerks acted “more like companions than servants.” Clerks’ claims to equal standing as members of their masters’ households threatened the orderly transfer of power between generations of men. Apprentices’ education suffered as they both failed to honor their elders and grasped for inappropriately rapid social advancement. In Defoe’s opinion, these ambitious young men came of age “much worse finished for business and trade than they did formerly.” While some English authors and instructors sought to fill the void in clerks’ education with penmanship and bookkeeping manuals or schools, critics typically reminded merchants and clerks of their mutual responsibilities to protect commercial fortunes, business networks based upon character and trust, and orderly means of advancement to proprietorship. Many merchants met these expectations, sheltering and feeding their apprentices, writing letters of introduction on their behalf, and teaching them long after the period of apprenticeship was complete.¹⁰

One of the reasons why young men did not happily accept their subordination was that the definitions of occupational categories within the countinghouse were unclear. Eighteenth-century commercial dictionaries defined the words “apprentice” and “clerk” differently, even as commercial actors used the words interchangeably. When parents paid cash “premiums” to merchants in order to secure plum countinghouse apprenticeships for their children, they tried to clarify the distinction. John Bland, a Quaker merchant in London, agreed to pay John Reynell, a Quaker merchant in Philadelphia, a premium of one hundred pounds in two installments to cover a six-year apprenticeship for his son Elias from 1737 to 1743. The elder Bland might have sent his son to America because premiums demanded by London merchants ranged between two hundred and five hundred pounds. Just as craftsmen were dividing learners from workers, so too were merchants separating trainees from clerks who merely copied correspondence or tallied accounts. While they were not paid, merchants’ apprentices were going somewhere, literally to foreign ports as agents and figuratively up the social ladder when they finished their terms. Clerks would make between thirty and fifty pounds per year, about the same annual earnings as a skilled artisan, and remain a subordinate at desk or counter. With most merchants and professionals at the center and periphery of the British Empire earning between 80 and 150 pounds a year, obtaining a coveted berth for one’s son was cost-prohibitive. Younger sons of wealthy merchants and the English landed gentry were elbowing children whose families did not have as much disposable income out of prized apprenticeships and into mere clerkships.¹¹

Clerks’ and apprentices’ prospects for advancement to independent proprietorship were uncertain. Some were able to achieve success as transatlantic wholesalers or urban retailers, while others used their education as springboards to enter the professions or politics. Many sought to put their penmanship skills to profitable use by drawing up legal and commercial documents. Former clerks also traveled along the Atlantic coast as itinerant penmanship and bookkeeping instructors, setting up shop long enough to take in freelance accounting work for harried local merchants but only infrequently establishing themselves permanently in any community. Garrat Noel, an Englishman who arrived in New York in 1750 via Spain, was able to parlay his freelance instruction in “Reading, Writing, and Arithmetick” that “fits Youth for a Counting-House” and his knowledge of the Spanish language into a wide-ranging business devoted to selling books, medicine, and city property as well as employing workers in a book bindery.¹²

The perception that mercantile apprenticeship did not always lead directly to commercial independence for clerks was accompanied by the fear that clerks might not have mastered the character traits and skills necessary to ensure that independence. Authors of treatises on apprenticeship attempted to shore up the belief that education in bookkeeping and penmanship taught young men how to comport themselves virtuously, condemning clerks who circulated confidential commercial information. Some clerks had hearts of gold. William Coleman, Franklin’s friend and a merchant’s clerk, had “the best Heart, and the exactest Morals, of almost any Man” the young printer had encountered.¹³

Other clerks fell in with rakes and scoundrels, however, rejecting the work ethic, standards of cultural refinement, and social relationships with powerful men that a term in a mercantile countinghouse was designed to provide them. In his Autobiography, Franklin described how another clerk, John Collins, took to the bottle more resolutely than to industrious habits and scholarly pursuits, burdening Franklin with “extreamly inconvenient” costs to keep him afloat. When prospective employers got a whiff of Collins’s “Dramming” or balked at his unsteady “Behaviour,” not even sterling “Recommendations” could win him a clerkship. James Ralph, another clerking comrade, attempted to establish the cultural credentials of an elite man while also enjoying the life of an indolent rascal. Although his friends encouraged him to “think of nothing beyond the Business he was bred to” and the respectab...