Customer Reviews

Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia)

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This beautiful book dusts off the forgotten everyday struggles of the down and out in early Baltimore. Seth Rockman has unearthed a whole world of street scrapers, seamstresses, mariners, ditchdiggers, dockworkers, domestic servants, woodcutters, rag pickers, mudmachinists, hucksters, and pilferers; black and white; enslaved and (apparently not all that) free; all bound together in that they "lived poor."

In his digging, Rockman has found and polished two gems that deserve notice: first, he's not writing about skilled laborers, but the working poor. Historians tend to study skilled workingmen's struggles at shop-floor level, but Rockman has dug beneath ground level here, literally in the case of the diggers, dredgers, and mudmachinists who performed the "dangerous and disgusting" work of unmuddying Baltimore Harbor. The working poor are not easy to find in the archives--they almost might be called undocumented workers--but Rockman has made a lot out of a little here. Second, Rockman is sensitive to the unrecognized work of women. Working-class women perform the "hidden labor of capitalist economies," Rockman explains. While there is no wage for such work, Rockman duly addresses the labor early Baltimore women performed when they birthed, raised, fed, sheltered, provisioned, laundered for, and bathed the city's men. Baltimore women apparently also ran a few rollicking speakeasies out of their apartment kitchens.

This is profoundly honest history. Rather than imposing any teleological class consciousness on his subjects, Rockman draws his motley bunch together into a working class by what he calls their "common commodification and the ensuing circumstances of material insecurity." He provocatively suggests, then, that "class struggle was trying to meet the rent and scavenging for firewood to stay warm during winter."

This book will prove fascinating to anyone interested in the history of ordinary people. Rockman has done quite a bit of detective work to unearth lives that were barely recorded, mining almshouse rolls and jail records. Inevitably, it's hard to get a real sense of what these people were like as individuals from such fragmentary sources, but Rockman does as good a job as possible of reconstructing the details of their lives. He does occasionally lapse into less than transparent academic jargon, but for the most part the book is engaging and well written.

I recently read Seth Rockman's Scraping By, with surprise and delight. Scraping By is simply the best study of wage labor that I have read. Particularly helpful for me was Rockman's discussion, of race, labor and working class culture. Reading this fine account of Baltimore's, enslaved mariners, mud machine operators, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free and enslaved black domestic servants, and native-born street sweepers brought to mind E.P. Thompson's, The Making of the English Working Class and Sean Wilentz`s Chants Democratic New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class 1788-1850.
What I found most remarkable in Scraping By, was Rockman's ability to recover the lives and aspirations of a hitherto largely ignored group, day labors or per diem workers, here they truely come alive. While Thompson and Wilentz can rely on political pamphlets of the early 19th century, autobiographical accounts, and related literary sources to gain their insights, Rockman faced and overcame a more daunting challenge. Day laborers, enslaved and free, rarely have a voice in labor history; Rockman has made certain they will no longer remain in the margins of labor history. His brilliant use of the newspapers of the era and his impressive array of data from the early business, census and tax records support his study superbly and make his work unique.

Fortunately for the reading public, Rockman's Scraping By shares with Wilentz and Thompson, that unique ability to write well and honestly about working men and women without resorting to academic jargon or as E.P.Thompson once put it "the enormous condensation of posterity."

This is by far one of the best books on labor history ever!

In 1819 or so my ancestor was abandoned by his father in
Baltimore. This book has a lot of information on what Baltimore
was like in those days and what might have caused his father to
disappear. The book has sources for records of people who were
on the edge financial ruin who could be in this situation.

James Sinclair was 10 years old when he went to Lower Chanceford
in York county Pennsylvania hiding under a rug.

He hid in the wagon of Captain McCall who had come to sell at a
Baltimore market and was not discovered until they got back to
Pennsylvania. McCall ran a ferry and raised James as a foster child.

The city labor, poorhouse, and prison records may help me get
through this brick wall of genealogy.

Charles Lessig