Work

By: Graham Russell Gao Hodges

Source:

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

Work

In early America, the idea of a black leisure class was unthinkable. Given the few allowances African Americans had for free time and the heavy demands of slavery, it is arguable that they worked harder than any other group in early America. It is a quirk of historical research that African American work patterns have always been considered apart from labor history. That skewed perspective has changed as scholars compare black and labor on a spectrum of experiences and emphasize the amount of work done together or in proximity to one another. Black work can no longer been seen as a homogeneous experience, but any history of it has to take into account when it occurred and where. Work is a fundamental human activity, and scholarship on labor history needs to take into account other aspects of a person's life such as the family, religion, personal habits, and nationality. This essay, however, will emphasize work lives.

Early Years of Exploration and Colonization

Blacks were part of the earliest explorations and initial settlements established by various European nations. Blacks, whether African-born or Creoles from around the Atlantic basin, worked as sailors, pilots, wharfingers, and soldiers. In the slave ports of Africa, Creole blacks acted as laborers, foremen, and water taxi drivers and in the higher levels of management in slave ports. Men and women alike became shrewd traders. Eventually, women dominated the local markets that grew up near the slave forts. Canoe men carried goods around the harbors. Some worked as longshoremen and warehousemen; others were porters, guides, messengers, and interpreters. There were woodchoppers, water carriers, cooks, and sexual workers. In the tough, desperate world around the forts, some turned to crime and became bandits, kidnappers, and gangsters. Because the forts were by nature slave societies, Creoles worked for the system as slave catchers, supervisors, soldiers who kept order, and sheriffs and judges who adjudicated local crimes.

Occasionally, opportunistic Creoles would ship out from Elmina and other slave ports for destinations around the Atlantic rim, working as blue water sailors, supercargoes, translators and interpreters. Shipboard servants became adept at navigating the languages, laws, and customs of New World slavery and could better their condition and work. Many, including some 16,000 Creoles in Lisbon, Portugal, wound up laboring in European ports. Nearly all lived in the Iberian Peninsula, though they were scattered around Europe's cities. A few Creoles, chosen for their Christian identity, were even sent to learn the ways of the world and then return to Africa. A small number gained fame. Esteban Gomez was a significant pilot for the Spanish in the 1520s. Jan Rodrigues was the first non-indigenous resident of Manhattan Island.

In the earliest settlements of European colonies, black prisoners of war were commonly coerced into semislavery, forced to work on the construction of fortifications and walls, clear fields and town plots, and serve as soldiers when necessary. The initial settlers of New Amsterdam (later New York) included over twenty such captives from Spanish and Portuguese colonies. In New England, blacks worked as fishermen and sailors and occasionally as farm hands In the Chesapeake colonies, black men and women worked as independent farmers, growing tobacco, the source of wealth in these colonies, and, for subsistence, corn. The cultivation of these labor-intensive crops involved little division of labor, which meant that Creole farmers in early seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland worked alongside whites, and men with women and children.

Because of this lack of separate status or workloads, blacks operated under English labor rules and were able to limit their amount of time at work and avoid unfair discipline. If they did not own their land, black servants and newly arrived slaves could usually negotiate some acreage for their private use and spend part of the workday on it, as an incentive for better production. These relationships were contested and variable, but Creole free wage laborers, servants, and even slaves could expect land use, ownership of some livestock, and control over tobacco surplus. Some even worked in the crafts and entered into the market economy of the colony.

The flexibility that Creole blacks enjoyed in the first half-century of settlement lessened when the British colonies moved toward racial slavery. Independent black farmers persisted in New York, East Jersey, and the Chesapeake, but their numbers were falling. The major changes occurred in New York and Virginia. In the northern colony, efforts initiated by Governor Peter Stuyvesant to make New Amsterdam the principal slave trade depot in North America and the immigration surge of young families in the 1640s and 1650s set the stage for the institution of slavery after the English takeover in 1664. Although the Royal African Company, the English slave trade monopoly, largely ignored New York, privateers smuggled enslaved Africans into New York and the neighboring colony of East Jersey. Enslaved people became the core laborers for artisans and merchants in the city and for rural farmers. New York's small farm and urban slavery meant fewer slaves per household but a general use of slaves among stem families. By 1720 the number of enslaved people in and around New York, by now corralled by a harsh slave code, numbered over 5,500, more than 12 percent of the total population. New York may have been a society with slaves in which servitude was one of several possibilities for labor organization, but within the Dutch Huguenot populations, use of chattel slavery was universal. In other words, those segments of New York and East Jersey, despite the absence of a staple crop, were slave societies in which bondage was the principal method of labor.

Virginia, as noted, had a mixed labor force working in the tobacco fields. White indentured servants spent years paying off the cost of their passage before (in theory) earning land grants in the interior of the colony. By the third quarter of the seventeenth century, that system had proved unworkable as Native Americans resisted the intrusion of white farmers into their lands. Nathaniel Bacon, a lesser gentleman from England, arrived in the colony in 1674 and quickly became the leader of a nexus of servant complaints, including hatred toward Native Americans, resentment over high taxes, and broken promises from the colonial authority in Williamsburg. Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 involved a mixed race force of small farmers, which at first prevailed over colonial authority, burned the city of Williamsburg, and marched into the interior to fight Indians. When Bacon died of flea infestation, however, his rebellion collapsed, and the colony fell under martial law. According to Edmund Morgan's brilliant thesis, English authorities solved the problem of resentful indentured servitude by turning to the slave trade and importing tens of thousands of enslaved Africans to work in the tobacco colony. Thus, Morgan argued, slavery created populism for small and large farmers and a racist denial of freedom toward Africans. Scholars have debated Morgan's thesis, but there is no question that Virginia turned to a staple crop economy based upon slavery within a few decades.

The movement toward slavery was in full swing south of the New England colonies; even there, enslaved Africans were a critical part of the labor force of the mercantile economy of the region's ports. In addition, the slave trade substantiated the movement toward a capitalist economy in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. In the rural areas of New England, blacks were a smaller part of the workforce but were present in nearly every town. Along the border of Connecticut and Massachusetts, the town of Brooklyn, Connecticut, was home to a sizable plantation where over sixty slaves toiled.

The movement to slavery was also evident in the lower South. In South Carolina, after an initial attempt to use a combined workforce of whites and enslaved Africans to herd livestock, the colony soon moved to turpentine and rice production. Eager for profits, masters imported thousands of enslaved Africans, so that by 1730 blacks constituted over 60 percent of the colony's population. By 1750 more than one-third of the colony's black populace worked on rice plantations of fifty or more enslaved people. Standing in putrid water all day, black rice cultivators, many of them with experience in rice production in Africa, toiled in gangs as planters tried to cash in on burgeoning profits. Even after a recession caused by the War of Jenkins' Ear from 1739 to 1742, rice cultivation remained the colony's staple. The introduction of indigo cultivation for textile dyes only added to the work burden of the enslaved people. Living in a world in which they were enslaved, legally mistreated and treated with contempt, blacks found family formation and identity hard. Unsurprisingly, rebellion ensued in the ferocious Stono Rebellion of 1739.

Within the evolving plantation systems, enslaved Africans generally worked in gang systems. Working under white overseers, black drivers amassed considerable power, often going over the overseers' heads to address the master. Eventually, drivers helped create a task system in which a slave's routine was clearly defined. After a set portion of rice rows was finished, for example, slaves and drivers conspired to preserve a portion of the day for their own use. During hard times, tasking could become a brutal system and never did it lead to genuine freedom.

Enslaved workers were critical to the prosperity of the lower South's ports. Skillful slaves helped artisans prosper and sometimes even retire from their work, subletting jobs out to their chattel. By the mid-eighteenth century, blacks dominated many artisan trades in southern cities. In the South (unlike the North, where American versions of European guilds pushed through legislation forbidding blacks from artisan work), enslaved people were carpenters, shoemakers, and even mechanics, shipwrights, and rope makers. Many established lease systems with their masters by which they paid fees for nominal freedom, thus setting their own terms of work and life. Similarly, black women found work as cooks, seamstresses, and mantua makers and took control of the fast food markets in the city's streets. Black women also took charge in sex work and in entertainment, either for their own culture or for young white “gallants.” Eventually, black appropriation of the streets attracted their brothers and sisters from the countryside. Through manipulation of the task system and urban work, Southern blacks tried to amend their enslavement. But they would never be truly free.

The absence of freedom was also evident in the northern colonies, where enslaved people's share of the workforce expanded after 1750, primarily in the cities. In Philadelphia, for example, the ownership of slaves and thus their work duties shifted from gentlemen to artisans, who made less use of servant skills and more of maritime and artisan labor. This shift was even more evident in New York City, where enslaved people threatened to eclipse the city's coopers. In the countryside, with the falling availability and desirability of white indentured servants, enslaved black men and women became the core of the labor force on farms. Fee wage white labor could not compete successfully either. In Bergen County, New Jersey, enslaved blacks outnumbered white laborers on tax rolls by 306 to 8. Unlike the system in the southern colonies, where the plantations required a full reorganization of master/slave relationships, the small farm/urban slavery of the north expanded upon existing relationships dating from the late seventeenth century. Enslaved African Americans were often suited to work in town or country and were jacks-of-all-trades. Although there was an unbalanced sex ratio between town, where women predominated, and country, where men outnumbered women, their tasks often converged, especially on the farms. The sex ratio, a busy internal slave trade, and disease cut down on family relations and hindered life expectancy. Still, evidence of diverse talents can be found in ads alerting the white public to runaway slaves. Mr. Low's Cato, who ran away from his master in 1763, was an “extreme handy fellow at any common work, especially with horses, and carriages of almost any sort.” Others were advertised as having worked as blacksmiths, coopers, carpenters, fishers, and sailors. The most common skill mentioned was that of fiddler, which denoted a slave who could play numerous tunes for mixed audiences in taverns, at festivals and frolics, and at free moments on the docks and roads.

The Washington family, “George Washington, his lady, and her grandchildren by the name of Custis,” shown with a black servant. Stipple engraving by Edward Savage and David Edwin, 1798, after Savage.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, N.Y.

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As older systems of work devolved into slavery along the Atlantic Coast, so too did slavery emerge from a semi-free system in the Mississippi Valley. By the mid-eighteenth century, slavery there became an urban-based institution. By the 1760s over 60 percent of the white inhabitants and many mixed race people in New Orleans owned slaves. Combining the features of urban slaves farther east, bond-people toiled on the docks, worked in the skilled trades, were domestic servants, and performed industrial labor in the tobacco, turpentine, indigo, lumber, and livestock businesses. Slaves worked at a variety of trades, which somewhat ameliorated their condition and allowed for some tasking. Herdsmen used horses and guns and were alone for long periods of time, making them semiautonomous. Others worked semi-independently as sailors and fishermen. Hiring out was common, as were practices unknown in the East, including ownership of property, some legal rights, and greater freedom of movement. Female concubines actually gained a degree of legal protection under the institution of placage. While not true liberty, their condition surpassed that of their counterparts along the Atlantic Coast.

Revolution and Disruption

The American Revolution was a period of continuity and discontinuity in the labor done by African American enslaved people. The war disrupted much of the economy, especially in those places where fighting was most intense: South Carolina, Virginia, New York, and New Jersey. At the same time, battles were intermittent and war was seasonal. On the American side, Patriots signed up for limited tours of duty and, in the northern colonies, sometimes sent their enslaved bondpeople to fight in their stead in exchange for future freedoms. Many of the remaining colonies were relatively untouched, and unaffected residents sided with neither army. In those cases, colonial patterns of slavery remained strong. There were precious few free blacks, and even fewer were those in control of their means of production.

The war created great opportunities for blacks willing to risk all. The English military offered freedom to those who crossed over to the British lines and joined the King's Army. There is much debate about the numbers of those who leaped at this opportunity, but estimates range from 40,000 to 100,000. Blacks had served armies before in colonial America, but now entire regiments were made up of self-emancipated slaves. In addition to front line soldiery, African Americans worked as wagon men, built fortifications, and served as spies, as scouts, and as domestics for English officers. Black men and women created new lives and identities for themselves as they served the English for the entire war. In some cases, especially in South Carolina and New York, they combined soldiery with entrepreneurship, supplying the British with much needed forage, wood, and livestock appropriated from suffering rural residents. In all, though it did not cause a social revolution for them, the American Revolution did give large numbers of blacks a certain freedom of movement and helped many to attain permanent freedom.

As the northern states set slavery on the path to gradual extinction after the American Revolution, blacks responded by leaving their rural homes for the city. There they built upon pre-Revolutionary patterns of work on the docks, on ships, in homes, and created a black community with leaders in the skilled trades. But their eventual future was limited. In 1793 Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton wrote his famous Report on Manufactures. It would not become relevant for decades, but Hamilton's plan depended upon skilled immigrant labor he hoped would find America attractive. Even as black men and women worked at skilled trades in the streets around him in Philadelphia and New York, Hamilton ignored their talents in preference for white labor. As a result, by 1820 black men worked in every conceivable trade in the urban North, but only by themselves. Industrial work, which was changing the society and economy of the United States, was reserved for whites.

Neither did the end of slavery in the North mean expanded opportunity for rural blacks. As the number of free blacks grew and slavery became extinct by 1827, except in New Jersey, blacks found that credit was unavailable to them, and that land itself was scarce and jealously guarded by white farmers. Blacks were welcome to stay on the land to work as cottagers who handed over much of their annual pay in exchange for room and board and rent of tools. Young blacks often became indentured servants, sent from the cities as punishment for petty crimes. Only after 1830 did a tiny black middle class emerge in the rural North. Black work had largely stalled. Even stable labor as domestics and sailors gradually faded as immigrant labor took those jobs. In every northern city and in the rural areas, blacks moved away to possible opportunities in the West or in Canada.

Slavery seemed headed for a social death in the South after the Revolution, with the important exception of the Carolinas. Egalitarian attitudes, the lingering effect of the American Revolution, and evangelical religion combined to persuade many slave owners to free their bondpeople. By 1810, however, slavery had again become the dominant force in the plantation South. Blacks sent from Virginia and Maryland in the internal slave trade joined over 100,000 Africans imported into Charleston, South Carolina, before the slave trade was banned in 1808. Forced into the territories seized from Cherokee and Creek Indians, enslaved blacks became the backbone of the new plantation system that by 1830 stretched to Louisiana and beyond. Owners of large and small plantations united to possess and work enslaved African Americans in a system of little republics in which blacks did virtually all the labor required to run a large farm and staff a household. Freeing the plantation mistress of her labor, black female domestics cleaned house, cooked, and washed clothes, amid a thousand other chores. Other women joined men in the backbreaking work of cotton production. Black artisans in the countryside and city performed skilled work in every field. Even more than in the colonial period, blacks were the labor force of the South.

The Antebellum Years

African American work patterns until the Civil War were either directly controlled by the expanding system of slavery in the South and southwestern states or fell under the lunar shadow of the remnants of servitude in the North and in the midwestern states. Worsening the situation was the emergence of racism among the white working classes. At the same time, free African Americans carved out niches for themselves, especially in southern cities. The Civil War deeply affected black employment. After the Civil War, newly freed African Americans in the South strove for better work conditions in a climate of extraordinary racial animosity and violence. In the northern cities and rural areas, African Americans sustained the small progress of the antebellum period. By 1897 massive population shifts from south to north and west were already apace.

Thanks to the pioneering statistical work of Leonard Curry, it is possible to discern demographic data relevant to antebellum urban cities. First, population growth in northern cities was either stagnant or in decline. New York City's black and enslaved population rose from around six thousand (of which 2,500 were enslaved) in 1800 to around sixteen thousand free people in 1840 (thirteen years after the end of slavery in the state), but declined sharply thereafter. Philadelphia's black population increased by only six thousand in fifty years to slightly over ten thousand people; the black population of Albany, New York, grew by less than two hundred people in a half century. By 1830 all blacks in the North were free, with a few exceptions in rural New Jersey.

By contrast, free and enslaved populations in southern cities grew dramatically. Blacks in New Orleans jumped from three thousand to over twenty-seven thousand people, of whom seventeen thousand were enslaved. The percentage of free blacks in New Orleans' overall population declined by 1850, but for several decades was triple that of New York City; even after repression by whites during the 1840s New Orleans' black population was four times that of New York's, where the percentage of the city's black populace was but 2 percent. Charleston's free and slave population doubled in the same period and ten years before the Civil War, the city's free black population of over three thousand people was almost as high as that in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The most sizable free black population was in Baltimore, where twenty-eight thousand free people of color were 15 percent of the city's total. Just under three thousand black Baltimoreans were enslaved.

These demographic figures translated into job opportunities and home ownership. Under Curry's classifications, occupations fell into three categories. Group A included unskilled and semiskilled laborers and personal service workers. Group B included medium-skilled workers, including transportation and food service preparers and entrepreneurs. Group C consisted of artisan, entrepreneurial, and professional categories. In northern cities like New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Albany, group A workers accounted for over 70 percent of all free black employees. In contrast, fewer than 20 percent of free blacks in the south worked in Group A occupations. Over 60 percent of free blacks in New Orleans and Charleston worked as artisans in 1850, a pattern that held true around the urban south. In the northern cities, black artisans accounted for only about 5 percent of the total employed. Paradoxically, cities where slavery flourished also fostered better occupational climates for free blacks than in the north, where racism dictated job opportunities for blacks. Given the political and legal restrictions placed on southern free blacks and the constant, depressing presence of slavery, these statistics still indicate how poorly free blacks fared in the north compared with their southern counterparts, who toiled in a world of human bondage.

Having achieved freedom in the decades after the American Revolution, northern blacks found the road to economic stability long and painstaking. For decades, the predominant agricultural status of free blacks in rural areas was that of cottager. As such, agricultural workers labored on farms belonging to a white person, who was often their former master. Whether or not this was the case, cottagers entered into contracts by which they received housing on the farm, some food and fuel supplies, and tool rental—the value of which was deducted from their seasonal or annual contracts. This early form of sharecropping, along with tough credit terms (mortgages required down payments of more than 50 percent and balances generally had to be repaid within five years) made independent black farmers very rare in the northeast. Philanthropic efforts such as land donated in the Adirondack Mountains of New York by the abolitionist Garret Smith foundered because of the rocky soil, harsh winters, and limited communication and transport routes. Blacks unwilling to accept cottager status and knowing the faults of philanthropy either headed north to Canada to join the fledgling Wilberforce Colony or established black towns in the northeast and in the Ohio River Valley. Black towns enhanced black farm ownership and enabled, with varying success, competition with white farmers.

The 120,000 acres of land in the Adirondacks that Garret Smith donated were given to 3,000 blacks in hopes of establishing an independent, agrarian black society. Smith intended to create economic and political power for blacks as the 40 acres each received would bring them close to the $250 property bond required in order for black men to vote. At the same time, African Americans would become subsistence level farmers. Black leaders including James McCune Smith, Charles Ray, and Theodore Wright endorsed the scheme. Frederick Douglass saw the venture as a means by which blacks could show physical vigor and spiritual faith. Smith gave adjacent plots of land to Smith, Ray, and Wright, as well as to Douglass, William Nell, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, and the three Clarke brothers, Lewis, Milton, and Cyrus, but none of these men ever used the donated land. Altogether twenty to thirty black families settled on the land in 1848, but the poor quality of the land and logistical problems that included the lack of tools and animals doomed the cooperative experiment.

During the first decades of the nineteenth century, such occupations as livery drivers, domestics, caterers, chimney sweeps, and barbers were race-typed, but by the Civil War immigrants, particularly from Ireland, made significant inroads into these occupations. In 1810 black women held nearly all the domestic jobs in New York City, but by 1855, less than 10 percent of domestic jobs were filled by African Americans; by then, Irish women outnumbered black women by twenty-eight thousand to two thousand. Black domestics labored in poorly paid laundry work. Blacks in the North did their best to organize, despite general hostility from white labor unions. In Baltimore in 1835, black and white caulkers, the occupation in which Frederick Douglass became skilled, went on strike to protest unfair labor practices. The caulkers remained defiant and stopped work several times again before the Civil War. Douglass acknowledged in his autobiography that work on the docks helped inspire and fund his escape to freedom in 1838. In 1837 black men organized a petition drive to force the city government to issue licenses to African Americans to work as cart men. Despite glowing recommendations for several prospective black carters the city refused. Ironically, years later, Mayor Fernando Wood, a southern sympathizer in many ways, granted the first licenses to black carters in New York City. In the early 1840s free black seamen in Boston petitioned the U.S. Congress for protection against unlawful seizure as slaves while in southern ports. White and black waiters met together to form unions in New York City in 1853, but found little unity.

In the South, nearly 80 percent of African Americans (nearly all enslaved) were agricultural workers. Over 1.815 million or 72.6 percent worked in cotton production; another 350,000 worked in tobacco production; 150,000 in sugar; and 125,000 in rice. Ninety thousand blacks worked in the hemp industry. After staple agricultural production, the next largest area of labor lay in domestic and service work with extensive specialization as barbers, cooks, hairdressers, butlers, coachmen, waiters, stewards, and grooms. Blacks in the South performed ample work in maritime occupations as fishermen, oyster diggers, and as cooks and navigators. Women worked as maids, cooks, washerwomen, seamstresses, dressmakers, and midwives. Enslaved black workers could be found in cotton fields and mills, as well as in iron, salt, and coal mines. As the South strove to catch up with the North in railroad construction, blacks did the majority of the work. By contrast, few of the railroad laborers in northern canal and railroad projects were black.

Free blacks in the rural South fared little better than the enslaved. In the agricultural south, free blacks worked as farm hands and casual laborers. Few were skilled. Just before the Civil War, 75 percent of the free blacks in North Carolina worked as farmers, common laborers, ditch diggers, and woodchoppers. Others worked as turpentine hands, tanners, and weavers. Black women labored as laundresses, housekeepers, and seamstresses. There were about 250 carpenters, 150 blacksmiths, 100 coopers, and smaller numbers of masons, shoemakers, and mechanics throughout the South. Coastal workers included boatmen and fishermen, who were somewhat more independent, but operated in patterns established during slavery.

Despite such limitations, southern cities offered greater diversity, pay, and security for free blacks in the antebellum era. There were fewer immigrants in southern cities and white artisans avoided competition with free blacks. Freed people worked in factories, as teamsters, laborers, washerwomen, and domestics. In Richmond, Virginia, about one-third or 174 of 550 free blacks held skilled positions. In Charleston, South Carolina, skilled blacks accounted for almost 75 percent of the city's 534 free adult male workers. In this city, nearly one quarter of the city's carpenters, 40 percent of the tailors, and 75 percent of the millwrights were free black men, figures that contrast greatly with the dismal opportunities for free blacks in the Upper South and North. Ira Berlin has reasoned that free blacks in Charleston were singular individuals with protective white patrons, who encouraged their friends to give business to them, making them very hard to dislodge through competition. In sad comparison, few whites in northern cities offered significant help to free blacks.

The Civil War and Postwar Years

The Civil War broke the old system of slavery in the South. Many blacks quickly left their masters for freedom inside the Union lines. There, after some hand wringing by northern generals, former slaves became free wage laborers and recuperated the damaged cotton, tobacco, and vegetable crops. Others became servants. Many more served in the armies of both sides, especially as builders of fortifications, mechanics, and repairers of railroads. As the northern blockades cut off the Confederacy from international trade, blacks were impressed from plantations into urban work in iron foundries, machine shops, munitions plants, and textile factories. Black workers in the North fared poorly during the Civil War. White laborers, fearful of job competition from emancipated southern slaves, rioted against blacks in a number of northern cities. In the worst example in 1863, draft rioters in New York City aimed much of their violent behavior at African Americans, lynching and shooting many.

After the Union Army, following the example of the navy, accepted the enlistments of black troops, more than 180,000 African Americans (20 percent of the nation's population of black men under the age forty-five) served as soldiers for freedom. In some ways, those were the best opportunities available as rising racism and pressure from immigrant groups continued to press blacks out of domestic service, the merchant marine, and laboring jobs formerly held by blacks in northern cities. The infamous New York City Draft Riots of 1863 were about labor competition as much as about unfair military policies. At the same time, the force of the national military conquest of the slave system heartened northern black leaders and workers. Suddenly there was hope for black professionals. In February 1865 John S. Rock became the nation's first black admitted to the Supreme Court. More significant for ordinary black people was the work of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known popularly as the Freedmen's Bureau. Notable for its efforts to supply food in the devastation of the war, and for getting land for freed people, the Bureau also helped negotiate labor contracts between freedpeople and employers and to settle labor disputes.

Black perceptions about prewar work affected their attitudes about labor after the Civil War. As thousands of freedpeople rushed into southern cities, many found a huge demand for domestic and personal servants, jobs that whites disdained. As blacks took jobs as waiters, butlers, coachmen, maids, hackmen, washerwomen, cooks, seamstresses, nurses, and other domestic positions, they often regarded the work with distaste, as being reminiscent of slavery. Accordingly, they resented these jobs and let white employers know of their unhappiness. Poor work conditions and irregular pay exacerbated frictions.

African Americans also experienced friction with immigrants, who competed with blacks for industrial jobs. In the 1880s, over 90 percent of furnace workers in the steel mills were African American; within twenty years, that percentage had dropped to four percent. Blacks were able to gain employment as laborers in railroad construction, mining, dock work, or in textile work. Although they worked alongside whites, blacks rarely were able to become foremen or fill other managerial positions.

Enduring southern racism hampered the black transition from slavery to freedom. Hostility and violence by terrorists such as the Ku Klux Klan were endemic. Black workers were reluctant to toil for whites because they believed the federal government would soon make them landowners. Unfortunately, Andrew Johnson, who succeeded to the presidency after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, quickly returned land to the slave owners. Northerners who favored free wage labor agreed with the decision, one that ultimately doomed Reconstruction. Even though some blacks held out hopes that the government would offer the lands promised to African Americans, and others strove to work only for annual contracts, poorer blacks sadly accepted harsh realities and returned to work for whites. Infamous “black codes” enacted by white legislatures passed vagrancy laws that punished blacks who refused to work for whites. Already-poor wages became worse with the collapse of Confederate currency and agricultural disasters. White farmers hoped to force blacks back into a docility akin to slavery, a position endorsed by Democratic-dominated legislatures in the South. White employers began hiring freedpeople in gang labor and used whips to enforce discipline. Blacks reacted by refusing to work under such conditions and sought to limit hours, gain better wages, and improve work conditions.

Racial hostility and government indifference and failure to supply lands created the system of sharecropping. Under sharecropping, the planter paid workers a share of the crop and supplied tools and seed. In return, blacks gained some autonomy from whites and toiled in groups smaller than the work gangs typical of plantations and large farms. Abuses occurred when whites withheld wages, skimmed profits during hard times, and created a debt structure that reduced blacks to near-slavery. When cotton prices fell, the sharecropper suffered more than the owner.

One aim of sharecropping was flexible work conditions for black women. Social aims and economic reality clashed due to the desire of black men to keep black women, particularly married women, out of such employment. One key goal of freedom for black men was the general removal of black women from fieldwork in the South. Stemming from a sense of male honor, from strongly patriarchal male attitudes, and from uneven wage scales paid by the Freedmen's Bureau, men rather than women toiled in the fields. Similarly, black women tried, often without success, to stay out of domestic work. Unfortunately, once again economic and social realities forced women to work. Determined to leave the wreckage and instability of rural life, black women flooded into southern cities, especially Atlanta, and took up work as domestics in private homes or in local hotels. Excluded from manufacturing work like bookbinding or making candy, clothing, textiles, or paper boxes (areas in which white women found jobs), black women sought, but rarely could attain, skilled work as seamstresses or dressmakers. At the same time, black women enjoyed the freedom of working for wages, quitting undesirable jobs, and organizing political groups like the Rising Daughters of Liberty Society, which flourished in Atlanta in the 1870s despite Ku Klux Klan repression and violence. Southern blacks at least had the opportunity for work in these areas; in the north, Irish servants, especially women, crowded blacks out of domestic work. Black women continued to fight for job opportunities. In 1881, the Atlanta Washerwomen's Strike, held during an International Cotton Exhibition, won increased wages for women.

African Americans built upon prewar efforts to organize. White organizers, convinced that only a national labor movement could remedy the troubles of American workers, met in Baltimore in August 1868. Black workers were immediately interested. Isaac Myers of the Baltimore Colored Caulkers Trade Union Society spearheaded efforts to bring black and white unionists together. Although the white laborers listened with interest to his appeals, ultimately political divisions over white denunciations of President Ulysses S. Grant and the Republican Party drove the black organizers away. They in turn formed the Colored National Labor Union in 1869 in Washington, D.C., the first union of its kind in the nation's history. Delegates had been interested in the question of race for some time and in previous years members had voiced hope that racial antagonism between whites and blacks might be overcome. The union's constitution, adopted in August 1869, hailed Grant, implored white workers to join the battle against capital, and decried prejudice in the work force, which threatened to make citizenship for blacks worthless. Taking a position in opposition to the white laborers' union, the Colored National Union stated opposition to repudiating the national debt. A few months later Isaac Myers announced full support for the Fifteenth Amendment and for funding public schools and vocational education.

The caulkers of Baltimore were a highly militant group during this period. In 1865, the black caulkers walked out in a general strike after a group of white shipyard workers voted to fine any white caulker twenty dollars if he worked among blacks. Frederick Douglass, who had been a caulker, initially did not show much interest in his erstwhile mates and took an avuncular attitude that a better day was coming. A year later, however, after whites beat black caulkers, he was outraged and demanded that barbarism be excised from the city. However, his ultimate aim was gaining the vote for black men.

The movement rapidly spread across the South. Other conventions were held in South Carolina, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Very quickly the massive outpouring of support demonstrated how badly the movement was needed. Unlike the white National Labor Union, the black version appealed to and recruited all workers: male and female, industrial and agricultural, skilled craftsmen and common laborers. Convention delegates established a permanent National Bureau of Labor with offices in Washington, D.C., to provide information and employment opportunities across the nation. The office lobbied for legislation insuring equality of opportunity, and to negotiate with “bankers and capitalists” for assistance to black-owned businesses. Its elected officers declared that the “question of the hour” was how to enable the black man to improve his condition. Lewis Douglass, a son of Frederick, was among the Colored Union's top officials. Frederick Douglass, exulting over the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in March 1870, spoke before the Colored Union in Richmond in 1870.

The convention continued to meet annually over the next few years. It spawned an extraordinary number of local activities, including strikes in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, Texas, and Virginia. The Alabama Labor Union, an offshoot of the National Union, was the first group specifically organized for farm workers. Although genuine unity among cotton workers proved difficult, the Alabama Labor Union was a benchmark for agricultural workers and provided them with lobbying power and a sounding board.

Frustrated and angered by Ku Klux Klan terrorism in the South, blacks began moving to the states of the Middle West. Soon after the Civil War, freedpeople sought equality as soldiers and cowboys. Others took advantage of the Homestead Act to acquire land. Out of this came the “black towns movement.” Established by speculators who aimed at profits by encouraging migrants' quest for social equality and financial security, towns such as Nicodemus in Kansas or Langston City and Bodly in Oklahoma were part of a movement that spawned thirty-two independent black towns. Speculators gained controls over farm acreage, advertised their sites in eastern and southern states, offered credit terms and used organizational methods similar to other towns to establish a government and identity. Town planners discouraged poor African Americans from settling in hopes of creating stability, intending instead to initiate policies of black uplift and to attract new residents. Using methods akin to white towns, these new black societies sought to attract transportation connections and educational institutions. They eschewed government agencies because they regarded trying to work with such organizations, in light of pervasive racism throughout the government, as a waste of effort. Sadly the black town movement failed. Difficulties with financing and limitations on acreage that curbed expansion discouraged younger blacks from remaining in the towns. Beset by poor crops and isolation, almost all black towns gradually disbanded.

Blacks did find some success in the West. In this region they occasionally did well, owning silver mines in Utah and operating tobacco and soap factories in San Francisco. A black middle class emerged as freedpeople operated hotels, blacksmith shops, barbershops, and saloons—and even served as local officials. In addition to problems plaguing new settlements, racial discrimination in job opportunity soon followed in the wake of black migration to the West. Native-born whites and immigrants pushed blacks out of work as carpenters, blacksmiths, and barbers in the West and in the North. Lack of union support hurt such black workers as Lewis Douglass, who could not get employment as a printer in Washington, D.C., even though he had much experience in his father's newspaper print shop.

By the end of Frederick Douglass's life, it must have seemed as if the dreams and successes of his career were bring rolled back. Black workers throughout the nation suffered from job discrimination, from political inequality, and from terrorism. Only in the humble task of sharecropping was there any stability and that was fragile indeed. For every example of black success like that of Ian Matzeliger—who worked in Lynn, Massachusetts, and was regarded as one of the best shoemakers in the nation—there were hundreds of other skilled workers exiled from their callings by racism. After 1880 over 75 percent of urban black workers held menial labor positions or jobs in personal service. Women worked generally in domestic labor while a few became dressmakers, hat makers, hairstylists, nurses, and teachers. Residential exclusion worsened their life conditions. As black historian Rayford Logan once described the period, it was the nadir.

See also American Revolution; Black Migration; Black Uplift; Caulker's Trade; Civil Rights; Class; Discrimination; Economic Life; Entrepreneurs; Exoduster Movement; Fifteenth Amendment; Freedmen; Gender; Hamilton, Alexander, and African Americans; New York City; Occupations; Patents and Inventions; Political Participation; Riots and Rebellions; Slavery: Mississippi Valley; Urbanization; and other specific cities and regions.

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