Amazing book- excellent history- well written!

After reading Seth Rockman’s Scraping By, I have a new appreciation for the saying: “Living paycheck to paycheck.” Scraping By is the story of unskilled labor in Baltimore during the first half of the 19th century. In the parlance of the day, these were the folks “who perform(ed) the meaner offices of labor.” Specifically, they washed people’s dirty laundry, the picked rags, they scraped horse manure off the street, they sewed clothing, they dredged the inner harbor, they cleaned houses, and they dug ditches – for about $1.00 per-day, if they were lucky.Some days they worked and other days they did not – their employer decided. They were white men and women, free African American men and women and hired-out slaves, and their employer could care less what color they were – whoever was the cheapest got the job. They “lived poor” with no safety net, no savings and just a few days from the almshouse. They were not artisans or apprentices who through hard work and the good graces of an appreciative master craftsman would become the rising middle class. They were the invisible people who did the essential dirty, and often dangerous, work that made Baltimore livable and economically viable. They worked hard, took care of their families, and did the best they could. And, you don’t have to look hard to see those people today -- they are all around us.Using almost all primary sources, Rockman dug deep to tell the very personal, “by-name” stories of these hard-working people. Nothing makes the invisible more visible then knowing their names, the names of their family, what street they lived on, and what work they did. Rockman sets the stage with a brief history of Baltimore and its odd distinction as the “northernmost southern city and southernmost northern city.” As such, it was a one-of-kind concoction with a rapidly growing population of native-born Americans, German and Irish immigrants, free African Americans, and slaves. It was a growing center of commerce – imports and exports – and was strategically located at the end of the Susquehanna River and headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay.Against this backdrop, Rockman tells the personal stories and struggles of working men and women – white, black, free and slave. Thankfully, the author steers clear of the current trend where historians claim to “give their subjects agency” or assign some deeper meaning to their struggle. What little agency these folks possessed was directed at not starving, not freezing, and not being “sold down the river” if you were a slave. Rockman hits the reader like a bucket of water with the cold hard reality of making a dollar a day, or less. In a series of chapter-long vignettes, Rockman tells the specific stories of men and women, slave and free who work as seamstresses, dredging the harbor, or living in poor-house. Rockman also confronts the reader with the everyday reality of the urban enslaved person. In Baltimore’s chattel economy, the owner could readily convert that enslaved person into $300-$600 in cash.The most powerful chapter for this reader – The Hard Work of Being Poor – describes in stark economic terms how close to the edge these folks lived. Imagine making $5.00 per week (on a good week) and having to feed a family of six for $3.50, pay $.50 per week for rent, buy $2.00 worth of fire wood per week during the winter, and budget $15.00 a year for clothing. That was the reality of living poor.This is much to like in Scraping By and Rockman does not leave the reader wanting more. This is an essential read about the hard-working people, who with not much hope or opportunity, made the nation go.

By uncovering history of the working poor, Rockman provides not only a window into the development of capitalism in the early American Republic, but also a moving portrait of a group of people whose lives and labor are too often overlooked. This is a carefully researched and clearly written book that should be required reading for anyone who has ever relied on the labor of others.

Seth Rockman’s Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore examines the economics of the working class in early republic Baltimore. The book speaks to economic history, social history, labor history, the history of the South, and gender history. Rockman wants to know what life was like for the average person in the early republic and how that differed from the groups historians typically examine in this period.Rockman argues, “Early republic capitalism thrived on its ability to exploit the labor of workers unable fully to claim the prerogatives of market freedom.” Rockman structures his work around examinations of different types of work, from drudgery, like on the mud machine, to women’s work, in the form of sewing and domestic service, to the options available to the poor. While much history of the early republic focuses on the new opportunities, Rockman demonstrates that, in Baltimore, the employers were the most opportunistic, relying on a combination of free and slave labor from men, women, and children. Rockman’s analysis of women’s work offers a counterpoint to the usual narrative of Republican Motherhood. He writes of female labor, “Reputation could trump both skill and demographic background as a qualification for hire.” Rockman continues, “The creation of knowledge around women was particularly problematic in a patriarchal culture that reduced female character to sexual chastity and condoned misogynistic violence against ‘disorderly’ women.” After a woman had secured a job and navigated the intricacies of the gendered system, she still might not receive a decent wage. Rockman writes, “Women acting collectively in the early republic had to carefully navigate the gender boundaries of American society…Arguing from the position of motherhood enabled some women to make claims on government.” Even then, however, their options were limited in a society that continued to view men as the primary wage earners and considered women’s work a temporary measure until they married.Rockman’s discussion of slavery in Baltimore draws heavily upon Walter Johnson’s capitalist examination of chattel slavery. Rockman argues against historians such as Gordon Wood, Joyce Appleby, and Daviel Walker Howe who argued that “political democratization and economic posperity went hand-in-hand” in the early republic. Rockman relies on tax records, letters, and job advertisements for his source base. He frequently writes that the individuals upon whom he focuses left very few records as most did not earn enough in their day-to-day living to appear on the tax records. Payroll records often omitted the names of employees as well.

A fantastically written and well research analysis of the living and working conditions of those people history most often forgets about, the working class. Rockman combines two schools of history, labour history and the history of slavery, to paint a vivid picture of the economic, social and political relationships between classes, races, genders and ages in Baltimore. A must read for anyone who wants to understand what life was like for the majority of people in Antebellum America.