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Innovation, Alienation, and the Russet Brogan: Plantation Provisioning and New England’S Industrial Revolution

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Innovation, Alienation, and the Russet Brogan: Plantation Provisioning and New England’S Industrial Revolution HARVARD HISTORY, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY WORKSHOP | MARCH 4, 2016 Innovation, Alienation, and the Russet Brogan: Plantation Provisioning and New England’s Industrial Revolution Seth Rockman Brown University The Alabama politician and planter Jesse Beene was a dissatisfied customer. The forty-seven pairs of slave shoes recently arrived from New England were no good. “If I give a first rate price, I must have a first rate article,” Beene chided his Rhode Island supplier in 1842. Only a few years earlier, Beene had begun to purchase brogans from Rowland G. Hazard, whose family firm used plantation-to-plantation sales calls to popularize ready-made slave clothing along the cotton frontier. Beene had followed Hazard’s instructions and provided measurements for each of the slaves on his Cahawba plantation: Guinea Tom’s foot, for example, measured 11¼ inches, George’s 11½, Little 7 5 Lucy’s 9 /8, and Nanny’s 9 /8. Beene also requested Hazard to label each pair by name so “that I may have no trouble in making the distribution.” But the quality of the shoes had diminished since Beene’s first order, and the most recent shipment was “not equal, nor near to it, to those of other years.” Specifically, “the leather was neither so thick, nor so solid, as the shoes of former years, nor were they so perfectly made.” Other customers groused similarly to Rowland’s brother Joseph Hazard during an 1842 sales trip from New Orleans to the Red River of Texas. Too often, a bad pair of brogans found its way into a shipment and jeopardized the willingness of planters to pay $14.50 per dozen. “I observe there is once in a while a pair of spongy leather,” Joseph reported back to his brothers. “This should not be, such had better be thrown away.”1 1 Jesse Beene to R.G. Hazard, 31 January 1842, Rowland G. Hazard and Caroline (Newbold) Hazard Papers, Ms. 483 sg 5, box 4, folder 1, Rhode Island Historical Society [hereafter RGH–RIHS]; Jesse Beene Rockman, Harvard Paper, 2 Poor workmanship turned the Hazards’ attention to the makers of slave shoes, in this case the residents of the central Massachusetts village of North Brookfield. There, Tyler and Ezra Batcheller and other entrepreneurs mobilized local families in the production of some 560,000 pairs of shoes annually. “Charge Batcheller to keep up the quality of brogans,” Joseph Hazard implored his brothers back in Rhode Island once planters started complaining. The manufacture of shoes for distant markets was already several decades old in Worcester County, and although villages like North Brookfield trailed eastern industrializing towns like Lynn in total output, this small community concentrated its efforts on producing russet brogans for the plantation market. “Not one dollar in fifty, passes through our hands that is not probably derived from this source,” observed Thomas Snell, the town’s longtime Congregational minister in 1854. And eighty years later, elderly women and men in Arkansas and Texas recalled the “bachelor brogans” they had received as enslaved children.2 Slave shoes, especially badly made ones, provide an opportunity to consider the design history of goods lacking aesthetic value, conveying minimal social prestige upon their makers, and intended for scorned consumers. Drawing on recent work in to R.G. Hazard, 14 July 1839, Jesse Beene Letters, mss.0128, University Libraries Division of Special Collections, University of Alabama; Joseph P. Hazard to I.P. Hazard, 21 March 1842, Hazard Company Correspondence, E-57, folder 2, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries [hereafter LLMVC–LSU]. 2 Blanche Hazard, The Organization of the Boot and Shoe Industry in Massachusetts before 1875 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921), 58; Joseph P. Hazard to I.P. Hazard, 21 March 1842, LLMVC–LSU; John P. Bigelow, Statistical Tables: Exhibiting the Conditions and Products of Certain Branches of Industry in Massachusetts, for the year ending April 1, 1837 (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1838), 60, 172; Thomas Snell, A Discourse, containing an Historical Sketch of the Town of North Brookfield (West Brookfield, Mass.: O.S. Cooke and Co., 1854), 18; Lucy Thomas (Marshall, Texas), WPA Slave Narrative Project, Texas Narratives, Vol. 16, part 4; Fannie Tatum (Junction City, Arkansas), Arkansas Narratives, Vol. 2, part 6, accessed via Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, Library of Congress American Memory website. For additional references, see Helen Bradley Foster, “New Raiments of Self”: African American Clothing in the Antebellum South (Oxford, UK: Berg, 1997), 240. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 3 archaeology and material culture studies, this paper recognizes that even degraded goods like russet brogans must be understood as complex assemblages: less stable “objects” with discrete attributes (e.g., a distasteful red color or a low price), and more a “network of connections among processes, uses, techniques, and performances.” In other words, having had our attention focused on brogans as possessing (or lacking) craftsmanship, we consider the different kinds of work that became material in slave shoes manufactured in New England. Such an approach might provide new insight into nineteenth-century industrialization and the longer history of standardized goods in the era before mass production. Are there ways to rethink New England workers’ experience of industrial transformation through the goods they made? Does that story look different if the goods they made were not—and could not be—valorized, but were instead routinely ridiculed for their poor materials, coarse textures, and careless manufacture?3 The standard version of the early industrial revolution, emerging from the “New Labor History” of the 1970s and 1980s, still has much to recommend it: craft skill receded as traditional modes of handicraft manufacture were subdivided into discrete components and parceled out to poorly-paid workers from outside an artisanal culture committed in equal parts to masculine prerogative, white supremacy, and republican 3 This essay takes inspiration from Chris Evans, “The Plantation Hoe: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Commodity, 1650-1850,” William and Mary Quarterly 69 (January 2012): 71-100, as well as Nina E. Lerman, “Categories of Difference, Categories of Power: Bringing Gender and Race to the Histories of Technology,” Technology & Culture 51 (October 2010): 893-918. See also Bjorner Olsen, Michael Shanks, Timothy Webmoor, and Christopher Witmore, Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 157-195 (quote on 191); Francesca Bray, “Science, Technique, Technology: Passages between Matter and Knowledge in Imperial Chinese Agriculture,” British Journal for the History of Science 41 (September 2008): 319-344; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2013); Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationship between Human and Things (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Augustine Sedgewick makes a powerful argument for work in histories of capitalism in “Against Flows,” History of the Present 4 (Fall 2014): 143-170. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 4 political ideology. Mechanization brought women and immigrants to the forefront of the manufacturing labor force in New England, accelerated output to a staggering degree, and naturalized the production of goods for distant and anonymous consumers. Shoemaking was one of the first industries to undergo these transformations, and scholars have beautifully recovered the social history of workers adapting to and resisting modern regimes of capitalist production.4 Jesse Beene’s defective brogans— “not equal in either leather or making”— might attest to slippages in quality accompanying intensified production by poorly-trained or novice workers. They might speak to the ruthless profit seeking of New England industrialists, pinching workers on one side and cheating customers on the other. At the same time, the poorly-stitched brogan may have articulated the discontent of those who made them, a subtle but emblematic form of industrial protest against low piece-rates, loss of workplace control, or any number of other frictions between labor and capital. Whatever the case, Beene’s insistence upon an “abatement in prices or [an] advancement in quality” would seem to capture the major tensions of New England’s early industrial revolution.5 Recent scholarship in material culture studies provides an opportunity to revisit some of these issues by looking carefully at the processes of making. The term “workmanship” may seem inapplicable to a product made by men and women with no ostensible investment in craft. The rural men and women in central Massachusetts who 4 Please take the following three titles as representative of the much larger New Labor History approach to New England industrialization: Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); Paul G. Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981); Mary H. Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 5 Beene to R.G. Hazard, 16 December 1841, Beene Letters. For the relationship
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