Occupations

By: Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Richard Newman

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Occupations

People of African descent worked a vast array of tasks, jobs, and occupations during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Both free and enslaved blacks made much of the severely limited opportunities available to them in early American culture. Enslaved people worked on both tobacco plantations and cotton fields in nineteenth-century Virginia and South Carolina, respectively, but also harvested wheat in Delaware; labored as ironworkers in Baltimore, Maryland; and mastered carpentry, blacksmithing, and masonry skills on plantations from Georgia to Texas. Free blacks in towns and cities in both northern and southern states worked a spectrum of occupations—from chimney sweep, butler, or waiter to sailmaker, barber, or minister.

The Reverend Richard Allen offers one illuminating biographical perspective on the diversity of black peoples' working lives. Although he was born a slave in 1760, Allen secured his freedom in the 1780s, then became the principal founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; by 1816 he had become the first African American bishop in the United States. Yet Allen worked nearly a dozen jobs on his way to the bishop's post: during the 1770s he was an agricultural laborer on his master's Delaware plantation; after his liberation in the 1780s he toiled as a sawyer, cartman, butcher, and traveling Methodist preacher. After he settled in Philadelphia in the 1790s, he became a dry-goods dealer, grocer, whitewasher, master chimney sweep, and entrepreneur of a fledgling nail-producing operation. Finally, during the early nineteenth century he drew income from rental property accumulated through years of investment.

The famed Revolutionary Gabriel was not merely a slave laborer but also a carpenter whose skills were highly prized in post-Revolutionary Henrico County, Virginia. Lewis Woodson, one of the most important free black activists of the antebellum period and an early advocate of Black Nationalist ideologies, worked as a barber in Pittsburgh. Frederick Douglass, perhaps the most famous African American of the nineteenth century, worked as a printer, editor, author, orator, and reformer after escaping bondage in Maryland in the 1830s—each of these occupations supplying him with enough income to support not only his family but also his myriad exertions against slavery. Southern slaveholders utilized bondpersons in virtually every endeavor possible; they ranged from general laborers to craftsmen of the highest order. While nearly two-thirds of northern free blacks still worked in unskilled positions by the nineteenth century, there were numbers of African American entrepreneurs, business owners, and master tradesmen. For free and enslaved blacks labor proved to be multifaceted: a source of oppression as well as identity and even power over masters in the South, a source of income as well as discrimination in the North, and a part of blacks' identity and culture everywhere.

Slave Labor and Occupational Life in the Colonial Era

Slavery did not define the lives of all people of African descent arriving on North American shores. Colonial history offers many important examples of free Africans who lived, worked, and died beyond bondage's grip. Anthony Johnson arrived in Virginia in the 1620s but probably not as a slave: he worked as an indentured servant and then became a free black farmer and landholder. Despite the existence of free blacks like Johnson, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in and had occupational lives that revolved around slavery. Bondage in American culture evolved demographically, geographically, socially, and economically; changes occurred within the institution over time and place. When international tobacco markets sagged during the Revolutionary era, masters in both Maryland and Virginia began the practice of hiring out their slaves. While this practice offered recompense to masters who might otherwise have been burdened with an excess of laborers, it also allowed enslaved people a chance to work in new settings and move beyond their masters' power. Additionally, this quasi freedom expanded slaves' ability to communicate with those on other plantations as well as in urban locales. Gabriel's rebellion, for instance, had roots in the hiring-out practices of Virginia masters.

If diversity was one characteristic of bondage, so, too, was its ubiquitousness; every British North American colony in the North and the South sanctioned bondage before the American Revolution. Indeed, slave labor was a key aspect of the colonial economy. In southern colonies bondage became associated with staple-crop, or plantation, agriculture—the exploitation of a single cash crop through the toil of unfree laborers. While indentured white servants supplied much of the labor needs of the earliest plantations—tobacco plantations in Maryland and Virginia—by the late 1600s masters resorted almost exclusively to racial slavery. In the Chesapeake Bay region by the eighteenth century gang labor systems regulated slaves' work patterns. Under the gang system bondpersons worked in unison on a variety of activities, such as planting, cultivating, and hauling, for the entire day. Tobacco, in particular, was a labor-intensive crop, and masters utilized the gang system to exploit as much labor as possible from slaves; Chesapeake slaves were expected to cultivate approximately one and a half to two acres of tobacco each, in addition to performing any number of additional tasks before the day had ended.

By the 1700s South Carolina and Georgia masters were harvesting another cash crop: rice. Large plantations along the Atlantic coast operated under the task system, where individual slaves were given a certain task to perform—such as clearing a field, establishing an irrigation system, or cultivating and husking the rice. Work conditions on rice plantations were often worse than those on tobacco plantations. The average slave working on a Virginia tobacco plantation spent 113 days tending the crop, while the average South Carolina slave dedicated 188 days to rice cultivation; furthermore, the swampy conditions of rice cultivation bred diseases such as malaria. On the other hand, the tasking system, combined with a higher prevalence of absentee masters on South Carolina and Georgia plantations during the summer months, allowed for more autonomous activity among enslaved communities. Once a task was completed, slaves were given time to themselves.

Although gang and task labor systems defined large-scale plantation agriculture in the Chesapeake and in the Lower South through the Revolutionary era, other arrangements existed as well, particularly on smaller plantations. In such settings enslaved persons worked closer to masters and labored at every possible job—from building barns and clearing land to mending fences and tending to crops like corn and wheat—to keep the farms afloat. Slaves also worked inside plantation homes as butlers, cooks, maids, and even midwives. While black women often worked as laborers in both the gang and task systems on small to midsize plantations, they frequently worked in domestic service on larger plantations.

Some large plantations existed in northern colonies—in Rhode Island as well as in parts of New York and Pennsylvania—but most northern slaves worked in smaller settings at a range of general activities rather than on a single cash crop. A roster of occupations for black persons in colonial New York and New Jersey shows the diversity of work: artisans, blacksmiths, boatmen, coopers, tanners, weavers, woodcutters, cobblers, chimney sweeps, carpenters, domestics, cabinetmakers, masons, coachmen, and stevedores were all registered. In New York City, where one in five white people owned slaves by the late 1700s, enslaved blacks worked for artisans and tradesmen, as shipyard laborers, and as independent dealers of dry goods. In Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, middling artisans and mechanics either rented slaves for a brief period of time or bought one or two outright. Enslaved men and women alike could be found in domestic service, as porters, coachmen, maids, cooks, and butlers.

In northern rural locales, from New York to Pennsylvania, enslaved people built infrastructure—such as roads, sheds, and cabins—tended livestock, toppled trees, and hauled goods to market. In Upstate New York, where black men and women lived on larger manorial estates of between ten and twenty bondpersons as well as on smaller farms with as few as one or two bondpersons, slaves maintained roads; transported firewood, stones, and coal; butchered livestock; and helped produce tools such as brooms. In New York and New England enslaved people worked in a variety of milling operations, particularly the production of grains, lumber, and iron.

Changes in Black Occupational Life after the American Revolution

As slavery came under intense religious, political, and philosophical attack during the Revolutionary era, black occupational life shifted in dramatic ways. The passage of gradual abolition laws by every northern state between 1780 and 1804, combined with an easing of southern emancipation restrictions, created growing free black populations. The first federal census in 1790 counted nearly 70,000 free persons of color, many of whom resided in the North; by 1830 the number of free blacks had reached nearly 250,000. As free black communities blossomed in Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Providence, Baltimore, and Richmond, African Americans worked a variety of jobs to pay rent, obtain food, and build and sustain autonomous institutions, such as insurance organizations, burial societies, and educational and spiritual groups. Prince Hall, the renowned Massachusetts activist and former slave who founded the inaugural African Masonic Lodge in the 1780s, served in and supplied leather goods to the Continental army. Hall also worked as a peddler, soap maker, and leather dresser, eventually using his wages to purchase a home and workshop. When he published two pamphlets in the 1790s, he distributed them from his shop. He also utilized the African Lodge as a community forum to discuss and debate issues relating to work, racial justice, and political rights.

Free black leaders emerging in Atlantic seaboard communities likewise viewed work as a means to secure leadership positions and provide for the community at large. James Forten, a freeborn Philadelphian, became one of the most important black entrepreneurs and leaders before the 1830s. Working his way up the sailmaking trade, he eventually purchased one of the leading sailmaking operations in Philadelphia and hired an interracial labor force. During the 1790s and early 1800s other black leaders established independent businesses and apprenticed black workers emerging from slavery. In 1795 Richard Allen helped Pennsylvania abolitionists place roughly thirty liberated Jamaicans in various trades, from tailor to waiter to chimney sweep. Allen himself became the master of a chimney-sweeping business, employing black apprentices, as well as a partner in Absalom Jones's nail-making business.

“The Butter and Milk Man,” watercolor drawing by Nicolino Calyo, c. 1840. Calyo—who came from Naples—was one of several nineteenth-century émigré painters in New York whose local-color and genre scenes helped to generate interest among Americans in paintings of everyday subjects.

© Museum of the City of New York; gift of Mrs. Francis P. Garvan.

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Free black women found work as laundresses, maids, and cooks in large cities in both the North and South; they also worked as schoolteachers and educators in Philadelphia, New Haven, New York, and Boston. Maria Stewart of Boston, one of the most celebrated black female orators and pamphleteers of the early Republic, first worked as a schoolteacher. By the 1820s and 1830s black women had begun establishing their own literary and benevolent societies, adding the title of reformer to their list of occupations.

Despite examples of social mobility, for the majority of northern free blacks occupational options remained narrow through the early 1800s. Many worked in jobs thought to be undesirable by white citizens—as privy cleaners, haulers, and chimney sweeps. They worked in service industries, as oystermen, coachmen, and butlers, as dockworkers and general laborers, and as peddlers and dealers of all manner of new and used goods. One of the most profitable professions for blacks to enter was the shipping industry. By the early nineteenth century nearly 100,000 blacks worked in the seafaring trade annually. Some, such as the New England shipman Paul Cuffe, owned their own vessels; others worked on whaling ships, on the docks as laborers, and even in the navy.

Free black occupational patterns demonstrated the hard work required for community building. By striving to work in every trade and endeavor possible and to rise through occupational ranks, free blacks established viable institutions capable of standing up to lingering racism in the North and outright hostility in the South. David Walker offers an illuminating perspective in this regard: Born free in North Carolina in 1786, Walker traveled north and settled in Boston by the 1820s. He served as a correspondent for Freedom's Journal. He established a used-clothing business at Fisherman's Wharf, also employing the locale as a distribution site for his incendiary pamphlet Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Walker became one of the most celebrated black activists of the nineteenth century; he died in 1830 under mysterious circumstances.

The impressive rise of free black communities and activism in the early Republic owed much to African Americans' industriousness, as hard-won wages underwrote educational, religious, and reformist institutions. Still, slavery's massive growth, demographically and geographically, during the same period of time painted a more unsettling picture. Slave population and territory doubled between 1790 and 1830. The development and refinement of new technologies such as the cotton gin bolstered slavery's status within the American economy. Moreover, the purchase of southwestern territories brought valuable new land into the nation's fold; thus, by the early 1800s, enslaved laborers worked on new cotton plantations in Mississippi and Alabama as well as on sugar plantations in Louisiana.

Black work life continued to change as slavery expanded. On medium-size to large plantations masters utilized “slave drivers”—enslaved persons responsible for pushing fellow enslaved field-workers. One of the most intriguing aspects of southern slavery after 1800 was the development of an internal slave economy, in which enslaved people developed societal occupations mimicking those found in free black communities. Plantation preachers held church in the woods, healers served up potent remedies, and goods and services were traded in an internal marketplace. On southern Louisiana sugar plantations, which accounted for nearly seventy thousand slaves in the 1820s, slaves forced masters to allow them to devote time to their own economic activities. Such activities revolved largely around agricultural and laboring pursuits—cultivating crops on plots of land granted to slaves or delivering timber felled by enslaved people after they had worked the sugar fields. Slaves sold these and other products in and around the plantation. Southern slaves' internal economy created not merely earnings but a sense of autonomy, highlighting the resourcefulness of African Americans. Like their brothers and sisters in the North, enslaved people in the South not only hoped for freedom but also worked against all odds to attain it.

African Americans in the Workforce after 1830

After 1830 African Americans lost ground in occupations in northern cities. Jobs previously reserved for them—as chimney sweeps, liverymen, mariners, and, importantly, domestic workers—now went to Irish immigrants, though a small number of male servants were able to maintain positions as butlers and doormen at elite hotels in New York and Boston. About 180 of 200 domestic workers in Boston in 1860 were male, but the several thousand Irish domestics dwarfed that figure. In New York, black participation in domestic work fell to one in thirty, out of 3,000 domestics listed in the state census of 1855. Generally, blacks could not gain entrance to industrial occupations; only about 2 percent of northern factory workers were black in the antebellum years.

Middle-class African Americans worked as small shopkeepers and merchants, selling clothing, groceries, and dry goods. Others worked in personal services as caterers, barbers, hairdressers, or tailors. There was always at least one skilled craftsman (blacksmiths, carpenters, shoemakers, etc.) for each trade in every city. Very occasionally, shopkeepers rose to wealth and prominence. Peter Howard of Boston ran a number of barbershops and hairdressing salons; John Jones of Chicago was a popular and well-paid tailor; George Downing of Providence was a caterer who also ran a lucrative bath and water cure resort in Newport, Rhode Island. William Alexander Liedesdorff of San Francisco was one of the nation's wealthiest merchants and land speculators and left an estate valued at $1,500,000 when he died. Some, not many, blacks were lawyers, teachers, and ministers; even fewer African Americans worked as doctors and dentists. Often they combined professional work with activism, as did David Ruggles, a hydro-therapist, and James McCune Smith, a doctor. A small number of blacks gained experience in the antislavery movement and went on to become lawyers. Macon B. Allen and John Rock were abolitionist lawyers in Boston. Frederick Douglass famously combined activism with publishing, as did Benjamin Franklin Roberts of Boston. Well-known black teachers included William Allen, who received a graduate education at the Oneida Institute and later became the first African American college professor at Central College in McGrawville, New York. Black women such as Mary Ann Shadd combined activism with teaching. Many other black women were entrepreneurs. Nancy Ruffin was an independent fish and fruit retailer in Boston; Sarah A. Tilman was a fancy hair braider for women in New York City. Also in New York, one hundred black women organized a short-lived Female Trading System in the 1850s.

In the south, black men and women were able to secure skilled positions because whites did not want them and also because of the high percentage of blacks in southern society. In cities, African Americans worked as carters, food sellers, dock workers. Even among slaves, who overwhelmingly labored in the tobacco, rice, and cotton plantations of the south, some blacks were able to gained limited status in their occupations. Drivers and foremen were slightly above their fellow slaves, just as house servants usually occupied a higher position than field workers. There were also a few examples of entrepreneurial slaves. Benjamin Montgomery operated a store on the Mississippi plantation of Joseph Davis, brother of Jefferson Davis. Montgomery's store sold to whites and blacks and led to his marketing Davis's cotton. In effect, he became his master's business partner and was able to protect his family from the ravages of slavery. After the Civil War, Montgomery purchased the plantation for $300,000. Another enslaved man who achieved the same success was Reverend Pierre Landry, who later became a Reconstruction politician and Methodist churchman. Enslaved women showed entrepreneurial skills in selling food and fruit, manufacturing clothing, and cooking. About 2 percent of Charleston, South Carolina, women were listed as independent entrepreneurs in the 1848 census.

After the Civil War, although most African Americans were reduced to agricultural laborers, there were innumerable black businesspeople. Freedom allowed more opportunity in mercantile, real estate, and shipping enterprises. Blacks continued to have a strong presence in personal services, as tailors and clothing retailers, and as undertakers and cemetery workers and managers. They owned transport companies, especially in the south, and lumberyards and mines in the north and west. They owned hotels and catering services and became entertainers. Work in real estate and construction became available to African Americans in urban areas. By the end of the century, even as discrimination and racial violence restricted greater access to wealth and property, blacks were able to find work in a number of occupations closed to them during the slavery era.

See also Abolitionism; African Methodist Episcopal Church; Allen, Richard; American Revolution; Artisans; Black Nationalism; Black Press; Black Seafarers; Cuffe, Paul; Demographics; Entrepreneurs; Forten, James; Fraternal Organizations and Mutual Aid Societies; Free African Americans to 1828; Freedom's Journal; Gabriel Conspiracy; Gradual Emancipation; Hall, Prince; Indentured Servitude; Jones, Absalom; Midwifery; Oratory and Verbal Arts; Slavery: Lower South; Slavery: Mid-Atlantic; Walker, David; Women; and Work.

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