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 of poor workmanship to worker resistance, see Michael S. Nassaney and Marjorie R. Abel, “The Political and Social Contexts of Cutlery Production in the Connecticut Valley,” Dialectical Anthropology 18 (December 1993): 247-289. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 5 produced brogans considered themselves farmers not shoemakers. Their rivals for the plantation market were the inmates at the Rhode Island State Prison, who began manufacturing brogans in 1840 and filled an order of some 2,000 pair for the Hazards the following summer. Those overseeing the labor of making slave shoes spoke frequently of workmanship, with the Batchellers apologizing for “the work being poor” in their early brogans and touting “workmanship [now] better than the last year.” The Board of Visitors at the prison urged “more attention be paid to the quality of the workmanship,” even as they acknowledged the lack of shoemaking skills on the part of the convicts.6 To recognize the salience of workmanship in the production of slave brogans directs us to different questions about the experiences and meanings of work as they emerge in relation to the material artifact being produced. Attention to materials and technique may offer a new angle on the social relations of production by recovering the tacit forms of worker expertise and improvisational practices in the manufacture of standardized goods for anonymous consumers. Consider, for example, how the historian David Jaffee evaluates a Windsor chair made in an early-nineteenth-century Massachusetts workshop as something more than a desirable object of consumption for a middling family in

Boston (as implicit in the vast majority of material culture scholarship focusing on the infinite possibilities for modern self-fashioning in a “world of goods”). Rather, the chair’s four-rod back and rounded-edge seat is the material convergence of physically dispersed labor and multiple forms of knowledge, aspiration, and possibility.7 These claims are

6 T. & E. Batcheller to R.G. Hazard, 1 May 1838 and 21 May 1838, box 3, folder 3, RGH–RIHS; Board of Prison Inspectors Minutes, 13 April 1840 and 14 July 1841, box 37, Rhode Island State Archive, Providence, R.I. 7 David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 189-207. Jaffee’s chair-making towns are not far from North Brookfield in Worcester County, Massachusetts. Other exemplary work that melds the histories of production and Rockman, Harvard Paper, 6 consistent with the recent work of anthropologists, archaeologists, political theorists, and science studies scholars who recognize a place for the materials themselves—the moisture content of the lumber, the torque of the lathe, the blade of the chisel—in the innumerable “transactions” of human and nonhuman actors “gathered” in the chair. In particular, Tim Ingold has guided our attention to “the creativity of the productive processes that bring the artefacts themselves into being: on the one hand in the generative currents of the materials of which they are made; on the other in the sensory awareness of the practitioners.” This perspective has implications for the history of industrial production, where it has been too easy to lose sight of the laborer’s expertise and the dynamic relationship of material and maker.8

This is only partially a critique of labor and economic histories that pay little heed to what’s being produced: does the story change if widgets are substituted for brogans? It is also an observation of contemporary American culture’s obsession with “making.” The valorization of the bespoke, the artisanal, the house-made, the small-batch, and the D.I.Y. links a renewed appreciation of craft knowledge to a self-conscious, if class-privileged, repudiation of mass production and its attendant labor processes. The valiances of

“making” in the entrepreneurial realms of software design and engineering likewise discount forms of work that fall below the threshold of “transformative.” In contrast, one might consider the craft identity of contemporary factory workers today making degraded goods that nonetheless require the kind of embodied engagement with materials typical of

consumption includes Kate Smith, Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700-1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); Pamela H. Smith, “Making Things: Techniques and Books in Early Modern Europe,” in Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800, ed. Paula Findlen, (New York: Routledge, 2013), 183-203. 8 Ingold, Making, 7 Rockman, Harvard Paper, 7 artists. For example, the Chipstone Museum in Milwaukee recently interviewed workers at the nearby Kohler plant, ceramicists whose descriptive language for making toilets befits the potters’ studio as readily as the industrial factory. The labor history of the brogan might yield something analogous. But absent workers’ testimony, our attention returns to the humble brogan as a material site of innovation and alienation in the early stages of industrialization.9

One last introductory point: This paper is drawn from my current book on the hats, hoes, shirts, shovels, and shoes manufactured in New England for use on slave plantations in the South. Northern entrepreneurs recognized opportunity in plantation provisioning, yet there was nothing obvious as to how a Massachusetts firm might come to dominate the trade in slave shoes. Tapping a network of Southern correspondents and embarking on extensive plantation tours for themselves, Northern manufacturers gathered information on frontier markets and competing products, on the habits and dependability of slaveholding customers, and on the “wants” of the enslaved men and women who would ultimately make use of their goods. But the information that flowed northward was not automatically translated into the template for a shoe, shirt, or hoe blade; it had to be assimilated into local patterns of production. Russet brogans and other manufactured goods served as a point of convergence for competing forms of expertise and ambition, activating distinctive political possibilities for those who made them and those who wore them; and bringing the plantation and manufactory into a common frame at a foundational moment in the history of American capitalism.

9 Ethan Lasser et al. The Tool at Hand: A Chipstone Object Lab Experiment (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Chipstone Foundation, 2013), 26-31. On “making” as a mode of obscuring labor, see Debbie Chachra, “Why I am Not a Maker,” The Atlantic (on-line), 23 January 2015. On “artisanal toast” as emblematic, see Hannah Goldfield, “The Trend is Toast,” New Yorker (on-line), 2 May 2014. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 8

Russet Brogans

Brogans are mentioned in runaway slave advertisements, in slave hiring contracts, and in the lawsuits that often followed, but surviving specimens of slave shoes are exceedingly rare. Plantation archaeologists have periodically excavated shoes, most often using them to make arguments about African-American burial practices. The historian Katie

Knowles has evaluated slave shoes held in several museum collections, but the provenance of such shoes remains elusive. Hidden in the corner of a basement museum of a local historical society in central Massachusetts are a half-dozen slave shoes from the

1830s and 1840s that have never before been subject to scholarly analysis. These brogans survive as part of the display case that E. and A.H. Batcheller (as the company was then called) sent to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Alongside a model of the vastly-expanded North Brookfield factory and an enormous novelty boot in a men’s size 40, the Batcheller case featured historical brogans labeled by the dates 1833,

1837, 1838, 1840, and 1846. These do not appear to be reproductions fabricated for display at the World’s Exhibition, but pristine survivors of the intervening decades. The

“Men’s Russet Brogan, 1838” (pictured above) is twelve inches long and akin to a mule

(a closed-toed shoe into which one would slide one’s foot) with a loosely-affixed, but reinforced, back (called the quarter and wrapped with a “long counter”). The quarter attaches to the front (called the vamp) with less than two inches of double stitching; as such, the brogan was not a snug-fitting boot, but a loose-fitting shoe with a modest amount of protection for the wearer’s ankles. Holes for lacing were not standard on the

Batcheller brogans of the 1830s and 1840s, and the firm charged an additional 1½ ¢ for punching eyelets and adding “strings.” Two layers of leather comprise the sole, with two Rockman, Harvard Paper, 9

1838 Men’s Russet Brogan, T. & E. Batcheller, North Brookfield, Mass. Courtesy North Brookfield Historical Society.

pieces of leather added for a heel. Diamond-shaped wooden pegs affix the sole to the upper, with an additional three metal nails on each side of the sole. The North Brookfield specimens, alongside textual sources, make it possible to characterize New England- made russet brogans as exhibiting both standardization and differentiation while subject to “adaptive redesign” through the persistent interaction of a broad set of geographically- removed stakeholders: the New York wholesaler, the New Orleans factor, the Alabama storekeeper, the Mississippi planter, the Louisiana slave, the Haverhill inventor, the

Rhode Island entrepreneur, the North Brookfield shoemaker, the Boston abolitionist, the

South Carolina politician, the Argentine cattle rancher, and the Treasury Department customs official, to offer a very incomplete list of the people comprising a network converging upon—or resulting in— the russet brogan. 10

10 When John was locked in the Adams Co. (Miss.) Jail on February 2, 1833 as a runaway, the jailor noted his “good red brogans”; see Natchez Courier, 19 July 1833; James M. Davidson, “Keeping the Devil at Bay: The Shoe on the Coffin Lid and Other Grave Charms in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century America,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 14 (2010): 614-649; Katie Knowles, “Fashioning Slavery: Slaves and Clothing in the U.S. South, 1830-1865,” (Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 2014), 126-141. Material artifacts are so few that scholars have tended to generalize about the Rockman, Harvard Paper, 10

By design, brogans were shoes stripped down to their essence: a leather upper attached to a sole. Most footwear in the Euro-American shoemaking tradition contained additional components that required stitching or gluing as the leather upper was attached to an insole on a last; once fastened together, that assembly would then have a sole affixed; and possibly a heel attached to the soled shoe. In contrast, to make a brogan, several pieces of leather were sewn together to form an upper, which was left unlined and then directly fastened to the sole. It required fewer steps to assemble a brogan than a standard shoe. Deskilling in the shoemaking trade typically owed to the gendered subdivision of labor, with the leather cut by men in a central workshop, farmed out to women to stitch into uppers, and then delivered to other men to “bottom” (to pull the upper over a last, to attach an insole, and to sole). Brogans, however, spoke to a different kind of deskilling, one in which the desired product required far fewer steps to assemble.

The most accelerated step relative to an earlier generation of shoemaking was the attaching of the upper to the sole using nails or wooden pegs; working with an awl and a mallet, a shoemaker could complete a shoe with pegs in a fraction of the time it would take to hand-stitch the upper to the sole. Pegged shoes emerged in Massachusetts in the

1810s and created opportunities for communities like Athol to produce wooden pegs by the bushel—$3,000 worth in 1836—that might be hammered into brogans in the nearby village of North Brookfield. The Hazards’ first contract for 5,000 Massachusetts-made shoes in 1836 stipulated “brogs to be nailed, the mens in 3 places, boys at the heels” in addition to being pegged all the way around. A South Carolina manufacturer advertised

characteristics of brogans without being sure of design differences between those produced in massive numbers in New England and those produced locally by plantation cobblers. On “adaptive redesign,” see Evans, “Plantation Hoe,” 89. For the Batchellers’ description of this shoe, see T. & E. Batcheller to R.G. Hazard, 21 May 1838, box 3, folder 3, RGH–RIHS. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 11 his selection of “Negro’s peg and nailed Brogans,” while the Natchez merchant E.B.

Baker requested brogans “nailed round the sole”— an option the North Brookfield manufacturers offered for an additional 5¢ with the nails “driven into every peg in the outside row of the whole fore part of the shoe from the heel forward” and “clinched inside on an iron last.” “We have done this for some of the planters at the south and have understood they were well pleased with them,” reported the Batchellers.11

Brogans were often reddish in color and stiff in feel owing to the use of hides that had not undergone a complete process of tanning and currying. “Leather for slaves’ shoes warn’t allus tanned and shoes made out of untanned leather look lak dey had been done dyed red,” recalled Bill Heard, who had been born a slave in Georgia. Other former slaves interviewed in the 1930s described their shoes as the color of “red rust leather” and sometimes referred to them just as “russets.” A dissatisfied Louisiana planter attributed the red color to the leather having been tanned in a hemlock solution, but the brogan’s feel and tint may have owed more to the absence of additional treatments to convert tanned leather “in the rough” into a more refined material. Across human history, societies have found ways to clean and treat animal skins, both as a means of preserving them and making them supple enough for use in a variety of capacities. Tanning is a multistep process of soaking and scraping, but hides undergoing only some of those steps can nonetheless be used in shoemaking. Such leather—and by some accounts, untanned leather is an oxymoron— is not soft; for that reason, “coarse” was a common descriptor

11 Ross Thomson, The Path to Mechanized Shoe Production in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 23-37; Blewett, Men, Women, and Work, 20-33; Hazard, Boot and Shoe Industry, 4; Bigelow, Statistical Tables, 44; Agreement with J.M. Leland & Co., 25 January 1836, box 24, folder 77, RGH–RIHS; Farmer & Planter (Pendleton, S.C.), April 1856; Edwin B. Baker to R.G. Hazard, 6 June 1843, Hazard (R.G.) Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Miss.; T. & E. Batcheller to R.G. Hazard, 28 May 1840, box 3, folder 15, RGH–RIHS. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 12 for brogans. “Coarse Negro Brogans are in great demand,” wrote Freeman Freeland from

Randolph, Tennessee, in an 1838 letter back to his brother Fayette back in Sutton,

Massachusetts. That coarseness endured in the memories of those who wore russet brogans. “[H]ard as rocks,” Carrie Davis recollected late in life. On the production side, however, it is not clear how the stiffness of the rawhide affected the work of the female seamsters who stitched the uppers by hand.12

Brogans were distinguished by soles so thick and stiff that wearers were unsure if they were made of leather or wood. In interviews from the 1930s, former slaves mentioned wooden-soled shoes, which were likely to have been plantation-made.

Batcheller brogans were leather-soled, and if any New England manufacturer was producing wooden-soled brogans, such shoes were considered novel in 1860 when an

Augusta, Georgia, agricultural improvement journal touted this new “combination of the

French sabot and the negro brogan.” The writer took the liberty of mocking the enslaved wearers of such shoes: “We do not know how Sambo will like them, but ‘tink he will

‘ject to ‘em kase he too ‘tiff and got no spring in de bottom, like ledder.’” The planters and merchants who wrote to the Hazards in the 1830s and 1840s did not mention wooden soles; more typical was the Pickneyville, Louisiana, planter requesting “the best leather stout thick at the heels so they will not run down behind at the heel.” However, one

Southern critic of “half-made Northern shoes” alleged that thick-soled brogans gained illegitimate bulk from wood chips stuffed between two stitched pieces of sole leather.

The title of this 1849 polemic, “Another Yankee Trick—shoes made of leather and

12 Foster, New Raiments, 233, 239-240; Kathleen M. Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power’s Purchase in the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 48; S.W. Gordon to R.G. Hazard, 5 November 1840, box 3, folder 18, RGH–RIHS; Freeman Freeland to Fayette Freeland, 12 November 1838, Freeland (Foster and Freeman) Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Miss [hereafter MDAH]. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 13 wood,” suggests that these materials were not yet commonly combined in slave shoes, at least not in Georgia markets. But regardless of their material composition, brogans’ thick soles had consequences for the mobility of their wearers, impeding ease of mobility and perhaps imparting a gait that white Americans would come to caricature. While there is reason to suggest that thick-soled shoes could figure in African-American forms of musical expression and dance, one might also consider stiff shoes that tapped or clopped as lending themselves to surveillance and limiting the wearer’s speed and agility.13

Brogans were ordered with measurements so precise—to the quarter-inch— as to suggest that slaveholders believed that the shoes would fit their intended wearers.

However, when the Hazards solicited individual foot measurements—like those Jesse

Beene would provide—it was not because they expected to provide Letty, Phillis, Ritter, and Harry with custom-made shoes, but rather because they knew that feet measuring between 10¼ and 10½ inches corresponded with a size 8 on a manufacturers’ scale that ran from a size 1 (8¼ inches) to a size 13 (12 inches). The adoption of standardized sizing among New England manufacturers was uneven. Already before 1830, shoemakers in Lynn were using standardized lasts and US customs collectors were told to employ a

“shoemakers’ size stick” to apportion taxes on imported footwear. However, not all brogan manufacturers translated foot measurements into the same gradations of sizes.

The Grafton, Massachusetts, firm providing the Hazards’ first brogans for the New

13 Foster, New Raiments, 233; Southern Cultivator, March 1849 (wood chips), August 1860. If Massachusetts manufactories were producing wooden-soled brogans before the 1850s, Augusta would not have been the last to know; one of its most successful merchants was John W. Houghton (1787-1851), who was born in Massachusetts, pursued shoemaking in Lynn as a young man, and gained commercial advantage upon resettling in Georgia by having his New England suppliers send goods early in the season; see Bryant, Shoe and Leather Trade, 8-18; Matthew N. Brandon to R.G. Hazard, 18 July 1841, Peace Dale Manufacturing Company Papers, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Mass. [hereafter PDMC]. On dance, see Knowles, “Fashioning Slavery,” 139-140; on footwear and gait, see Tim Ingold, “Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet,” Journal of Material Culture 9 (2004): 315-340. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 14

Orleans market in 1836 produced six sizes. The Batchellers produced seven sizes

(running six through twelve), with higher costs for larger shoes and lower costs for smaller ones as requested. The cases of assorted sizes that the Hazards shipped to plantations that had not provided individual measurements contained four pairs of the each of the three largest sizes (10, 11, and 12), nine pairs of size 9, sixteen pairs of size 8, twelve pairs of size 7, and four pairs of size 6. Only on a statistically average plantation might enslaved people have a reasonable chance of receiving shoes that fit.14

Elcho Plantation, 1857, Rice C. Ballard Papers, Ms. 4850, Box 30, folder 456, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

14 Beene to R.G. Hazard, 14 July 1839, Jesse Beene Letters; Thomson, Path to Mechanized Shoe Production, 36; Carolyn C. Cooper, Shaping Invention: Thomas Blanchard’s Machinery and Patent Management in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 169–180; “Circular to Collectors…” 25 June 1830, U.S. Customs House Records, ms. 28, series I, subseries A, box 5, folder 139, Rhode Island Historical Society; Agreement with J.M. Leland & Co., 25 January 1836, box 24, folder 77, RGH–RIHS; Thomas Cleveland to R.G. Hazard, 28 July 1841, box 3, folder 23, RGH–RIHS. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 15

Lists of foot measurements abound in the correspondence of the Hazards, and can also be found in plantation records; yet there is little information on the process by which such measurements were taken. For enslaved people whose bodies were constantly subject to the appraising gaze of their owners and overseers, the taking of such measurements may have been an additional indignity. Some slaveholders “would not take the trouble” to measure their slaves’ feet, but others boasted of their precision: “I have been particular to get the lengths,” reported the Louisiana planter Matthew Brandon as he provided the Hazards with “an exact a list of measures.” Another Louisiana slaveholder was careful to note that he had acquired “the exact measure of the naked foot.” Richard

Macks, who was born into slavery in Maryland and interviewed as a nonagenarian in the

1930s, recalled that “our measure were taken of each slave with a stick, they were brought to Baltimore by the old mistress at the beginning of each season, if she or the one who did the measuring for the shoe too short or too small you had to wear it or go barefoot.” On one of the Allston plantations in South Carolina, enslaved men and women were purportedly issued an inch-wide strip of wood on which they were to step to establish the length of their foot. The wood strip would then be cut, the person’s name written on it by the overseer, and the strips then collected and sent to Charleston where

“each measure was fitted into a pair of shoes.”15

Ultimately there is something strange about a regime of mass production that conveyed the pretense of bespoke goods for the nation’s most exploited workers. Such practices, however, were not new to the nation’s most elite slaveholders. In 1785, South

15 J. Bachman Lee to R.G. Hazard, 22 December 1840, box 3, folder18, RGH–RIHS; Brandon to R.G. Hazard, 18 July 1841, PDMC; T.W. Scott to R.G. Hazard, 30 May 1841, box 3, folder 22, RGH–RIHS; Foster, New Raiments, 227; Elizabeth W. Allston Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood (1922) as quoted in Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 115. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 16

Carolina’s Henry Laurens had sent his agent to London with a box containing the paper cutouts of some 250 slaves’ feet in order for shoes to be made in the metropolis; the cutout was to be placed in one shoe of each custom-made pair in order to aid the distribution. Fifty years later, some planters were distilling their slaves’ measurements into simplified data (e.g. 8 men @ 10.5 inches), but many still provided lengthy lists of names and hoped that the brogans could be individually labeled. The Natchez merchant

Edwin Baker was very excited to secure the Hazards an order for 275 brogans from the wealthy William Bisland, who had previously provisioned his plantations through

Philadelphia. “[I]f possible let the name of each slave in the list be marked in the shoe and them put up in separate boxes for each plantation,” advised Baker. “This is the plan pursued in Phila[delphia],” Baker elaborated, “and gives great pleasure to the planter.”16

Like other plantation provisions such as hoes and hats, russet brogans could be differentiated in quality. A late-1830s price list from New Orleans shows that the Hazards offered “Russet Brogans, good quality” at $12.50 a dozen and “superior” brogans, distinguished by being “nailed all round,” for $14 a dozen. The Alabama planter Joseph

H. Taylor wanted “Brogans of the best, nailed and clinched all round,” and was willing to pay $14.50 a dozen; he was also willing to pay an additional surcharge for the shoes to have laces. Harper Bryson sought to stock his Augusta store with “300 pair negro Russett

Brogans” with “Long counters and of very good quality”—one of the few orders to focus on a specific component of the shoe, in this case the counter, the piece of leather wrapping in the heel and the back of the foot. Haller Nutt in Mississippi should have been

16 Henry Laurens to Bridgen & Waller, 25 March 1785 in David R. Chesnutt and C. James Taylor, eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens, Vol. 16: September 1, 1782 – December 17, 1792, (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 545; E.B. Baker to R.G. Hazard, 22 June 1842, Hazard Company Correspondence, LLMVC-LSU. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 17 happy to receive two cases of brogans “Stock heavy + uniform + finished in the best manner” because, as his factor informed him, “Good brogans are going to be scarce this year.” Merchants in Columbia, South Carolina, marketed “Heavy Brogans… specially adapted to the use of Negroes on Railroads and Plantations.” Brogans were typically priced by quality and size, with boys sizes offered at a 10 percent discount. Planters often ordered different footwear for domestics, sometimes stipulating “kip” (calfskin) brogans for men working in interior spaces. Southern storekeepers also advertised brogans made of tanned leather, black in color; presumably some percentage of the region’s white population also needed cheap and utilitarian shoes.17

The wording of advertisements raises questions about brogans as a racialized good. Consider two adjacent advertisements in a Natchez newspaper in 1837: one listed

“2,500 pair Negro Brogans”; the second offered “2,500 pairs men’s and boys’ russet

Brogans.” Were these the same shoes? The second merchant also offered “black and kip” brogans, “fine Boots and Shoes,” and “Plantation Shoes, filled to measure.” It is possible that russet brogans, negro brogans, and plantations shoes were all the same product, but local planters and factors may have heard distinctions lost to posterity. In other cities, advertisers sometimes used modifiers like “plantation brogans,” sometimes listed

“brogans” with no additional descriptor, and sometimes offered “stout Negro Shoes” without referring to brogans at all.18

17 “Articles Furnished from Peacedale Manufactory, R.I.” undated, box 7, folder 1, IPH-RIHS; Joseph H. Taylor to R.G. Hazard, 28 July 1841, PDMC; H.C. Bryson to Joseph Witney & Co., 8 September 1838, Harper C. Bryson & Co. Papers, ms. 93-07, Special Collections, Reese Library, Augusta State University; Baker and Little to Haller Nutt, 22 September 1847, Papers of Rush and Haller Nutt, box 4, folder 4, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Cal.; Farmer & Planter, October 1859. 18 Natchez Daily Courier, 23 December 1837; Southern Times and State Gazette (Columbia, S.C.), 24 February 1837; Daily South Carolinian (Columbia, S.C.) 17 November 1854; Greenville Mountaineer (Greenville, S.C.), 19 September 1835. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 18

Apart from quality, the absence of differentiation on the axis of gender marked brogans as peculiar commodities. The most blatantly absent descriptor in advertisements and orders is women’s or girls’. Considering that enslaved women and girls received brogans alongside men in plantation distributions, and that their measurements were tabulated with men’s for purposes of sizing, it becomes clear that russet brogans were among the only unisex products marketed in the profoundly gendered consumer culture of the nineteenth century. This lack of differentiation was perhaps just the beginning: some percentage of brogans may have been manufactured to fit either foot interchangeably—straights in shoemakers’ parlance. Constructed in near rectilinear form and accommodating length as the only meaningful feature of the foot, brogans may have lacked any number of basic design features that adapted a shoe to the wearer’s foot.19

To the extent that brogans were an evolving product, it is worth placing them in the context of New England’s entrepreneurial culture of innovation. Between 1789 and

1847, the United States government issued more than 300 patents for inventions in boot and shoemaking, including machinery for cutting uppers and pegging soles that may have been developed specifically to solve problems in the making of low-end shoes; the turning lathe for producing standardized shoe lasts—a triumph of early industrial technology—allowed countless families in places like North Brookfield to manufacture shoes at home rather than under the roof of a factory. At the New York Industrial

Exhibition of 1853, a Danvers, Massachusetts, firm displayed its brogans alongside other specimens of the prospering American shoemaking industry. “These ‘brogans’ are chiefly

19 Charlie Davenport, who had been enslaved as a child in Adams County, Mississippi, indicated that his brogans were interchangeable. Davenport’s owner was Gabriel B. Shields, one of the Natchez “nabobs” who claimed more than 400 people as property in 1860; these large planters typically purchased New England-made shoes. For Davenport see Mississippi Narratives, vol. 9, accessed via Born in Slavery. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 19 manufactured for the Southern markets, for the use of slaves, and are similar to the shoes worn by the miners of South Staffordshire,” observed the envoy sent by the British government.20

Ideas for innovation could also flow from sites of consumption back to sites of production. The Hazards’ plantation-to-plantation sales tours of the late-1830s and early-

1840s yielded a great deal of information on possible product improvements. Joseph

Hazard heard firsthand from several planters about the poor workmanship of some of the

Batchellers’ brogans, and it is certainly plausible that he spoke with enslaved men and women on his travels, just as his brother Isaac had consulted a group of South Carolina slaves in 1823 on the characteristics of “negro cloth.” Stopping at the Milliken’s Bend plantation of O.B. Cobb in 1842, Joseph scribbled an improvement for brogans (having just sold 112 pairs to Cobb) and mailed it back to his brothers in Rhode Island: “I think a rivet at the Quarter of Brogans would be a good security where is the greatest difficulty like rivets in a belt or Hose.” Within a few years, the Hazards had brought such shoes into the Louisiana market, although it is unclear whether such products were already

Joseph P. Hazard to I.P. Hazard, 8 February 1842, box 3, folder 6, IPH-RIHS

20 Joseph P. Hazard to I.P. Hazard, 8 February 1842, box 3, folder 6, IPH-RIHS; Edmund Burke, List of Patents for Inventions and Designs, Issued by the United States from 1790 to 1847... (Washington: J. and G.S. Gideon, 1847), 295; “New York Industrial Exhibition. Special report of Mr. George Wallis. Presented to the House of Commons by Command of Her Majesty, in Pursuance of Their Address of 6 February 1854,” reprinted in The American System of Manufactures: The Report of the Committee on the Machinery of the United States 1855 and the Special Reports of George Wallis and Joseph Whitworth 1854, ed. Nathan Rosenberg, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969), 255 Rockman, Harvard Paper, 20 being made in Massachusetts or whether the Hazards brought the innovation to their

North Brookfield suppliers. “The shoes with rivets promise a great run + if every planter is not mistaken I think it might be worth patenting,” reported an enthusiastic Louisiana merchant in 1845. The Hazards pursued no such patent, a decision consistent with what scholars of nineteenth-century innovation have described as minimal financial incentive

(since royalties were unlikely to be paid and infringement unlikely to be enforced) to claim intellectual property in something so small. In fact, the greater incentive may have been to disseminate the improvement in order to promote competition among multiple shoe manufacturers. References to metallic rivets have not yet been found in advertisements or orders, but appear repeatedly in the recollections of former slaves who were interviewed in the 1930s. Mary Reynolds, enslaved in Louisiana, had scars “from where the brass cut into my ankles.”21

The design history of the russet brogan is consistent with that of other northern- made plantation provisions in the nineteenth century, or even English-manufactured goods in the eighteenth century. Agricultural implements and textiles were also standardized in their manufacture (e.g. the sizing of hoe blades into No. 1, No. 2…) and increasingly differentiated (e.g. rice hoes, cotton hoes, sugar hoes). Just as dozens of different fabrics could be sold under the category of “negro cloth,” so too could

“brogans” refer to shoes of differing color, materials, and construction. How then did

New England merchants and manufacturers come to understand the market for plantation goods? A New Orleans merchant might solicit a New England supplier for the “lowest

21 Janvier Green & Co. to R.G. Hazard, 9 January1845, PDMC; Thomson, Path to Mechanized Shoe Production, 39; Cooper, Shaping Invention, 169-180; more generally, see Catherine L. Fisk, Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Foster, New Raiments, 233. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 21 cash prices for the different kinds of shovels you make suitable for the South,” but one wonders how someone like the Easton, Massachusetts, manufacturer Oliver Ames would decipher such a request—especially its accompanying desire for “about 20 to 25 doz shovels & spades as[sorted] sizes and qualities.” What sizes and qualities would render all 300 of those shovels and spades “suitable for the South?” How would Tyler and Ezra

Batcheller know how to make shoes for slaves? The interregional flow of information— often activated by the physical presence of northern-born men writing letters home from southern locales— sustained what might best be described as a learning process. New

England entrepreneurs can be seen quite easily gathering information and adapting products to meet the desires of remote customers. More elusive in the design history of the brogan, however, is the North Brookfield family that spent its days stitching and soling slave shoes.22

Networks of Exchange

“Is there in your neighborhood or among your acquaintances any Shoe Factory from which I could be cheaply supplied?” asked the Beaufort, South Carolina planter and storekeeper William Barnwell in 1840. Isaac Peace Hazard had probably never been asked an easier question, assuming that “neighborhood” could be defined as a one hundred mile long, crescent-shaped commercial corridor stretching from north of

Worcester, Massachusetts southeastward to Providence and extending southwestward through Rhode Island to Stonington, Connecticut. Upon their entry into the provisioning trade in the late-1810s, the Hazards had integrated small communities along the

22 Evans, “Plantation Hoe”; Lucius Beebe to Oliver Ames, 19 November 1844, F204, Arnold B. Tofias Industrial Archives, Stonehill College. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 22

Blackstone River into larger networks of exchange. For example, they purchased warps

(precisely-wound yarn ready to attach to a loom) from rural families living along the

Massachusetts-Rhode Island border and delivered them to households along the Rhode

Island-Connecticut border for weaving. The resulting “negro cloth” might be shipped from Providence, sold wholesale in New York, sold retail in Natchez, and worn by

Mississippi slaves who spent their days growing cotton that would return to Pawtucket or a dozen other Rhode Island mill towns for spinning into yarn that would then be parceled out to rural Massachusetts families for making warps. The efforts of the Hazards, however, were coincident with those of entrepreneurs like Tyler and Ezra Batcheller to accelerate the pace of “sale shoe” manufacturing in North Brookfield and nearby communities. They were more than prepared to provide the Hazards with the shoes they needed to provision a South Carolina storekeeper like Barnwell. This was big business.

“There are about $10,000 worth of shoes sold in this place per Annum and I could sell half of them if I could procure them put cheap and on reasonable terms,” boasted

Barnwell.23

The Hazards had dedicated the 1820s mastering coarse woolen textiles, developing a range of fabrics for plantation markets, and even patenting “double kersey,” a cotton warp, woolen weft, twill weave. Their next innovation was ready-made clothing.

Rowland’s 1835 visit to New Orleans convinced him that planters on the southwestern frontier—then importing slaves by the thousands— would gladly purchase shirts and pants in the name of saving enslaved labor that could otherwise be devoted to growing

23 William Barnwell to I.P. Hazard, 4 January 1840, Isaac P. Hazard Papers, Ms. 483 sg12, box 2, folder 30, Rhode Island Historical Society [hereafter IPH-RIHS]. For economic development of the Blackstone Valley, see A Landscape of Industry: An Industrial History of the Blackstone Valley. A Project of the Worcester Historical Museum and the John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2009). Rockman, Harvard Paper, 23 more cotton. Returning to New Orleans in 1836, Hazard disseminated a circular announcing the availability of ready-made clothing from “Peace Dale Factory, Rhode

Island.” “By an arrangement with a neighboring manufacturer of the article,” he noted, “I am prepared to furnish brogans of first quality, and in such quantity and sizes as may be directed.” Within a few weeks, Hazard seemed impressed with the number of orders he had garnered for brogans. “So far [I] find that the planters consider it a benefit to order them with the cloths,” he reported to his brother Isaac at home.24

The Hazards had no lack of neighboring manufacturers who could provide brogans for the New Orleans market. Indeed, many Bay State merchant shoemakers had been present in plantation markets for several generations. Danvers, near Salem on the northeastern shore of Massachusetts, was one of the first locales to specialize in brogans.

Owning a tannery and a general store, Zerubbabel Porter brought neighbors into an outwork system that allowed him to ship brogans south as early as 1789. Several Boston firms in the 1790s had opened branches in southern ports like Savannah and shipped shoes packed in recycled flour barrels and Havana sugar boxes. In 1804, Lynn shoe manufacturers claimed a $500,000 annual trade with the Southern states and sought to charter a bank that could discount remittances drawn on banks in Richmond, Charleston, and Augusta. Massachusetts shoemaking communities tended to specialize in a single product line, and why one village might jump to the forefront of women’s calfskin pumps and another men’s riding boots likely owed to the ability of a leading citizen to marshal

24 On the Hazards’ initial foray into the Southern market, see Seth Rockman, “Negro Cloth: Mastering the Market for Slave Clothing in Antebellum America,” in New Histories of American Capitalism, eds. Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, (under contract to Columbia University Press). For the opportunities in ready- made, see R.G. Hazard to I.P. Hazard, 15 February 1835, box 2, folder 1, IPH–RIHS; Peacedale circular, January 1836, box 2, folder 21, RGH–RIHS; R.G. Hazard to I.P. Hazard, 22 January 1836, box 2, folder 7, IPH–RIHS. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 24 materials (owning a tannery helped), acquire and train labor (owning a store to exchange merchandize for outwork helped, but so too did access to skilled journeymen), and connect to merchants in Boston, New York, and other wholesaling centers (family connections were optimal, but having a former neighbor or classmate in a city like New

Orleans worked well). It is unclear whether communities with the lowest concentrations of economic, social, and human capital ended up specializing in the lowest quality shoes.

However, that hypothesis might apply to early national North Brookfield, which according to an 1854 town history, had been “the most quiet, noiseless, and dead” place in central Massachusetts. “Previous to the shoe business, the people in this town, with a very few exceptions, were farmers, and were making next to no progress in anything profitable…. There were many poor families— poor houses—and poorly furnished.”25

Things turned around quickly in North Brookfield, once the twenty-six year old

Oliver Ward began manufacturing shoes there in 1809. Born in nearby Grafton and raised in Sutton, Ward purchased an old tannery and built a central shop that distributed leather and supplies to local families for assembly into shoes. Assisting Ward was his sixteen- year-old cousin Tyler Batcheller who had just completed an apprenticeship in Grafton.

Batcheller worked for Ward until 1819 when he struck out on his own; younger brother

Ezra also worked for Ward until joining forces with Tyler in 1825. As was typical in these communities, Ward trained many of his future competitors. The Batchellers were already exporting shoes to southern markets in the 1820s, but focused their energies on russet brogans in the early-1830s. There is no evidence that either man visited the South in order to learn more about the particularities of their customers or the settings in which

25 Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers, 18; Seth Bryant, Shoe and Leather Trade of the Last Hundred Years (Boston: Seth Bryant, 1891), 38, 39, 49; Blewett, Men, Women, and Work, 11-12; Snell, Discourse, 15. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 25 their goods would find use. That work could be left to others like the Hazards, who began buying Batcheller shoes in 1837 for their ready-made clothing customers in Louisiana and Mississippi. In contrast, the rival North Brookfield firm of Deming & Edwards opened their own satellite storefront in Mobile and guided production at home with firsthand information on local markets. Indeed, Joseph Hazard noted the difference in the wake of his 1842 sales trip: “I think Deming and Edmunds shoes rather better than T&E

B.”26

When the Hazards first decided to sell Massachusetts-made brogans alongside their own textiles in 1836, they looked to Grafton, a Blackstone River town already dedicated to shoemaking. For a community producing over 600,000 pairs of shoes annually, the Hazards’ contract for “not less than five thousand pairs” (with the option to purchase as many as ten thousand) was not substantial. But it was ideal for John M.

Leland and Jasper W. Putnam, manufacturers with a footprint in the New Orleans market: one partner (Putnam) supervised production in Grafton and the other (Leland) established a remote sales outpost. It was in New Orleans not New England, in fact, that Hazard and

Leland struck a deal for brogans: Leland & Putnam would deliver brogans to New

Orleans by November 1 so that planters could distribute them to slaves for the upcoming winter. Hazard had five additional months to pay Leland & Putnam $10.80 per dozen, time that he would need to collect from his slaveholding customers who had purchased the shoes at $13 per dozen.27 Anyone doing business in the South understood the

26 Hazard, Organization of the Boot and Shoe Industry, 55-61, 201-207 esp. 58: “By 1831 the new [Batcheller] firm introduced the manufacture of the russet brogan for the southern slaves, the first that were made in Massachusetts, and this became their leading product.” I cannot confirm this attribution of primacy. Joseph Hazard to I.P. Hazard, 1 April 1843, box 3, folder 7, IPH–RIHS. 27 Agreement with J.M. Leland & Co., 25 January 1836, box 24, folder 77, RGH–RIHS; R.G. Hazard to I.P. Hazard, 22 January 1836, IPH–RIHS. The actual contract stipulated a November 1 delivery, while Rockman, Harvard Paper, 26 timeline: the fall’s cotton harvest was sent on consignment to England, and only by spring would planters have funds to cover the previous year’s expenses. Risk was everywhere in this system: low cotton prices and a planter couldn’t pay for last year’s shoes; an insolvent planter and Hazard couldn’t pay Leland & Putnam; a defaulting merchant and Leland & Putnam couldn’t pay the families who stitched their shoes.

Sometimes the risks balanced out: Leland & Putnam had to pay for labor and supplies in

February 1836 for which they would not be repaid until March 1837; but because they often paid shoemaking families in store credits, there was some insulation for both parties. The risks were most unbalanced for the enslaved wearers of North Brookfield brogans: should a slaveholder prove unable to meet the shoe bill, insolvency proceedings could lead to the sheriff auctioning human property on the courthouse steps.28

The Hazards devoted the bulk of their energies to manufacturing and vending textiles, but the brogan business generated revenue without requiring additional investment or expenditure. “Good brogans would sell very readily at this season of the year and command a better profit than any other article,” advised an Alabama merchant in 1838 welcoming them into the market. Reputable shoes could aid the Hazard brand, as when a Louisiana sugar planter reported “hear[ing] that those of the Peace Dale fabric are imperishable.” Typically his plantation required “a second supply during the Rolling season,” but now it would not. This correspondent raised one of the challenging issues for

Rowland told his brother of an October 1 delivery. Considering how much slaveholders complained of goods arriving late, the difference of a month could be significant. 28 On slaves as the backstop of the national credit economy, see Edward Baptist, “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, Collateralized and Securitized Human Beings, and the Panic of 1837,” in Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America, eds. Michael Zakim and Gary Kornblith, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 69-92; Thomas D. Russell, “South Carolina’s Largest Slave Auctioneering Firm,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 68 (1992-1993): 1241-1282. On credit terms more generally, Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968). Rockman, Harvard Paper, 27 the manufacturers of plantation provisions: goods made too well could interfere with the regularity of sales. For example, the Hazards took pride in the quality of their textiles, but their decisions as manufacturers—from the labor they hired to the wool they imported— turned on the strange demands of a fabric that was intended to be replaced every six months. If their cloth was deemed too “sleazy” or “trashy,” or disintegrated within only a few months, they would lose customers; yet a better-made fabric might price them out of the market or cost them the opportunity to sell provisions twice annually. The Hazards thought best to err on the side of quality, or at least to do so in conjunction with their strategy of marketing to the most affluent slaveholders. “Plenty of shoes are now selling at $8.50 per doz. nonetheless 3 persons (all strong men too) have bought ours this morning at $14.50, which is a fair illustration of what a good article will do over medium and poor, when it is known as such,” asserted Joseph Hazard in 1842. The Hazards asked the Batchellers to lower the price of brogans as leather became cheaper, but southern customers complained of seeing no savings. The two firms continued to do robust business, more than $12,000 in the first four months of 1843 alone.29

No small number of New England entrepreneurs looked to the cotton frontier for profit, but success often required a family member or business partner to establish a beachhead in a place like Pontotoc, Mississippi. “I expect it would amuse some of our

New Englanders to see how we do business here in the Woods,” wrote William Hack to his brother back in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, in 1836. Hack had sold nearly $4,000 worth of goods in his first season, and saw his next opportunity in the up-and-coming city

29 George B. Clitherall to I.P. Hazard, 4 December 1838, box 2, folder 23, IPH-RIHS; J. Barker to R.G. Hazard, 13 April 1843, Hazard Company Correspondence, LLMVC-LSU; Joseph P. Hazard to I.P. Hazard, 21 March 1842, Hazard Company Correspondence, LLMVC-LSU; R.G. Hazard to I.P. Hazard, 5 March 1841, box 3, folder 3, IPH-RIHS; Notes Payable & Receivable, 1843 (Case 1, Vol. 1-1, folder 12: old finding aid), PDMC. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 28 of Memphis if his brother could manufacture or procure a shipment of shoes. “Memphis is getting to be quite a place of business. And I have no doubt but a good business might be done in that line,” Hack advised. This sort of interregional coordination was indispensible to the five Freeland brothers of Sutton, Massachusetts: Foster, Freeman,

Fayette, Frederick, and Franklin. Freeman had set out for western Tennessee in 1837 and recognized a huge market for slave shoes. “Could sell them by case at Memphis at 50 per cent [profit] if Frederick can get some stock and make a lot of Russet or Cowhide Brogs and send them to me [I] can sell them immediately,” Freeman wrote home in 1838, urging his other brother Fayette to procure additional brogans from a local supplier and bring them to Tennessee at once. Freeman also wrote to an old Sutton acquaintance in

Vicksburg about the market for brogans there, gaining useful intelligence about a glut.

“You wish to know what you can do with shoes here—the reply is nothing, simply and exactly nothing,” advised his friend. A decade later, Freeman and brother Foster were operating a general store in Holly Springs, Tennessee, and soon Foster ran his own in

Oxford, Mississippi. Back in Massachusetts, other family members arranged shipments of palm-leaf hats and purchased dry goods stock from wholesalers in Boston. Brogans remained a key business, and as late at 1849, Freeman was instructing his brother

Frederick to confront their local supplier about poor workmanship: “[S]how him that he has mens Thick Brogans are to narrow in the tread, to much the shape of a Womans shoe on the Bottoms. [H]e must cut the soles wider and made on wider last. The Leather on his

Thick Brogs is very pliant. But some of the quarters are rather to thin.” Freeman eventually resettled in Sutton, having led a Freeland family enterprise that intimately connected central Massachusetts communities to the advancing frontier of slavery.30

30 William Hack to Christopher A. Hack, 21 November 1836, 4 March 1838, Hack (William) Papers, Rockman, Harvard Paper, 29

Observers in New England credited the interregional trade in plantation goods with improving the livelihoods of families like the Freelands. The Whig Party polemicist

Thomas R. Hazard (brother of Rowland, Isaac, and Joseph) praised the Rhode Island’s negro cloth industry for materially transforming the circumstances of the state’s working people. Before its arrival, “thousands of families… subsisted entirely on the cheapest food, knew but little of domestic comfort, and nothing of foreign ‘comforts’ except perhaps a little molasses occasionally.” Their women were “miserably clad” and hid themselves from the view of strangers as they “struggl[ed] in the bosom of hopeless poverty.” Likewise, North Brookfield minister Thomas Snell attributed a revolution in morals to the prosperity created by slave shoe manufacturing: “the prosecution and extension of this business soon began to increase our population—buildings were repaired—children handsomely clothed—new habitations began to rise and multiply, till this flourishing village with a busy population stands before you as the result of diligence and reformation from some of our old and impoverishing habits.” Such claims guide our attention to the families involved in producing things like russet brogans and negro cloth.

Would they have been inclined to agree with Snell’s frank assessment that “we are all buying, and building, and riding, and wearing and making gain by drafts upon the fruits of slave-labor”?31

MDAH; Frisbie & Stowe Ledger 1826-1829, Account Books Collection, box 30, folder 192, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; Keziah B. Stowe to Nelson Lloyd Stowe, 18 March 1823, box 31, folder 195, ibid.; Freeman Freeland to Fayette Freeland, 12 November 1838; Frederick H. Waters to Freeman Freeland, 11 November 1838; Freeman Freeland to Foster Freeland, 11 August 1847; Foster Freeland to Mrs. James Freeland, 20 December 1847, Freeland (Foster and Freeman Papers), MDAH; M.D. Hargrove to Freeman Freeland, 16 November 1852, Hargrove (M.D.) Letter, MDAH. 31 Thomas R. Hazard, Facts for the Laboring Man (Newport, R.I.: James Atkinson, 1840), 22-30 (quote on 23); Snell, Discourse, 15-18; See also Jack Larkin, “From ‘Country Mediocrity’ to ‘Rural Improvement’: Transforming the Slovenly Countryside in Central Massachusetts, 1775-1840,” in Everyday Life in the Rockman, Harvard Paper, 30

The Meaning of Labor

Addressing themselves to “those in Rhode-Island who love liberty,” the women of

Providence’s abolitionist movement planned for their 1847 annual fair. They solicited donations and sought support from various corners of the state. “Will not our Factory

Girls send us ample testimonials that while their fingers have been busy with its products, their minds have been in the cotton field— heard and felt its horrors?” This was a remarkable request. And a tantalizing one, as we know very little about what New

England factory workers thought about slavery, let alone whether their minds wandered to the topic while working. Voting returns in the Blackstone Corridor between

Providence and Worcester suggest that these communities were more sympathetic to Free

Soil candidates than neighboring sections of Rhode Island and Massachusetts; but “more sympathetic” might mean that 10 percent of voters offered their support rather than a paltry 5 percent. When workers protested for better working conditions, they sometimes used the term “slavery” metaphorically to refer to their own exploitation; but such language did not imply solidarity with bound workers half a continent away. An occasional workers’ periodical would connect the plantation to the factory, but references like the poem “Cash and Lash” (appearing in an 1848 Lowell newspaper called The

Protest) were very rare.32 Still, the question posed by the Rhode Island abolitionist

Early Republic, ed. Catherine E. Hutchins, (Winterthur, Del.: H.F. Du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1994), 175-200. 32 “Circular. To Those in Rhode-Island Who Love Liberty. Providence, June 8, 1847,” Slavery in the United States Collection, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.; see also Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, The Devotion of These Women: Rhode Island in the Antislavery Network (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 173-197; John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713-1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 357-381; David Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 116-117; Rockman, “Slavery and Abolition along the Blackstone, in Landscape of Industry, 110-131. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 31 women ignites our imagination, all the more so when we consider workers manufacturing goods specifically for slaves to use. Did North Brookfield families talk about the slaves who would wear their shoes? Did a Rhode Island “negro cloth” weaver hum a minstrel tune while throwing the shuttle?

Certainly, the families making slave brogans in Massachusetts had other preoccupations, most notably their own crops and prospects of accumulating enough food for the coming winter. Orders backed up in North Brookfield, explained the Batchellers to their disappointed purchasers, “[owing] partially to our hands being off during July and

August on their farms.” Even as shoemaking constituted the livelihood of the community, it was as likely to be a sideline as an occupation for individual families. The summertime slowdown did reverberate several thousand miles away, when brogans failed to arrive in time for distribution before the first frosts in the plantation South. Slaveholders were quick to invoke suffering slaves to their New England suppliers when goods “came late.”

Trying to head off such complaints, the Hazards sought to supplement what the

Batchellers could provide with brogans manufactured elsewhere. But this had the consequence of further degrading the status of slave shoe manufacturing, as it put the free families of central Massachusetts into competition with the inmates of the Rhode Island

State Prison. The relationship of penal labor to free labor was already fraught in the political economy of the 1830s and 1840s, with workers in any number of trades decrying unfair competition from coerced workers. The reputation of low-end shoemaking was

Scholarship on working-class antislavery is sporadic, but start with Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); David R. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991). For female operatives in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Nashua, New Hampshire comparing themselves to slaves (and occasionally making antislavery claims), see Philip S. Foner, The Factory Girls (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977). Rockman, Harvard Paper, 32 hardly enhanced by the aptitude that George Morrich, a German-born thief serving a two year sentence, demonstrated in making brogans during the summer of 1841. Convicts like

Daniel Harry, a thirty-three year-old murderer, were now making brogans for enslaved men and women in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.33

What then might we expect to see in the identities and politics of New England workers who, even if primarily farmers, depended on making slave shoes for their livelihoods? As discussed earlier, New Labor History approaches to industrialization sought to document the changing iterations of craft identity in an era of deskilling and declining workplace control. Laborers struggled to hold on to identities that emerged from the implicit republican premises of the labor theory of value that what someone made with his or her hands reflected mastery of skill, contributed to body politic, and granted the maker a rightful stake in society. But what of craft identities that emerged from producing goods that conveyed no social prestige to their makers, but might as easily stigmatize those whose labors were devoted to outfitting slaves? Was it different to make a living stitching shoes, braiding hats, and sewing shirts for slaves than producing shoes, hats, and shirts for consumers with whom one felt greater affinities? Was the arduous labor of an iron factory experienced differently in the machete room of the

Collinsville Manufacturing Company, which produced tools for enslaved workers on sugar plantations? Or at Scovil Hoe, the East Haddam, Connecticut firm whose “planter’s hoe” was advertised by name in southern newspapers? Did one understand oneself

33 T. & E. Batcheller to R.G. Hazard, 28 September 1838, box 3, folder 5, RHG–RIHS; Convict Labor Ledger, Rhode Island State Prison Records, #C490, folder 10, Rhode Island State Archives. On penal labor in early republic labor politics, see Joshua R. Greenberg, Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), page; Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 53-86. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 33 differently as a weaver because he or she turned out yard after yard of fabric that would adorn a slave several months in the future? Industrial production presumably replaced the known customer with an anonymous one, as consumer goods materialized not for neighbors and acquaintances but rather for the abstraction of “the market.” But would this hold in the making of russet brogans or any of the other plantation goods whose ultimate consumers were differently anonymous and differently unknown in the context of nineteenth-century America?

The destination of russet brogans was not a secret in North Brookfield, any more than the destination of “Double Kersey” cloth would have surprised warpers and weavers in southern Rhode Island. Such laborers may never have seen the lists that planters like

Jesse Beene sent to the Hazards, listing dozens of slaves by name and transforming them into multidimensional people with heights, chests, inseams, and waists. But someone had to label the appropriate pair of shoes for Venus, Lucky, and Caro; and even if that final packaging took place beyond the view of the household looms of Rhode Island farmsteads and the “10-footers” that characterized Massachusetts shoemaking, it still seems likely that Venus, Lucky, and Caro—or some imagined version of them— loomed over the work.

Without delving into the larger dimensions of the ideology of white supremacy and “the black image in the white mind,” it might be worth thinking momentarily—in a purely speculative mode— about what North Brookfield shoemakers thought about when they thought about enslaved people and their feet. The absence of “women’s brogans” must have raised numerous questions about black femininity; that enslaved women should wear men’s shoes could convey their fundamental degradation, reinforce Rockman, Harvard Paper, 34 stereotypes about the grace, poise, and carriage that black women purportedly lacked, and suggest insurmountable obstacles to assimilation into dominant norms of respectable womanhood. Racist forms of entertainment like the minstrel stage would have prepared the ground, as male performers caricatured black women for “manly” traits including the kind of indelicate gait necessitated by stiff-soled, rectangular shoes. In its proliferating

“blackface songsters,” northern popular culture had no lack of stock references to black feet that were too big to be contained in shoes or that were enveloped in shoes outlandishly large. Jokes circulated in texts like Henry C. Knight’s travelogue Letters from the South and West, published in Boston in 1824. Slaves’ “winter shoes are made so huge and stout,” jested Knight, “that a pigmy might attempt to cross a creek in one.” The

Ethiopian Serenaders played Worcester’s Brinley Hall in 1848, but they were unlikely the first troupe to present racist songs to paying audiences in the area. Versions of the song

“Run, Nigger, Run” (which featured in the 2013 film, Twelve Years a Slave) contains references to a “lost brogan” or a “big ol’ shoe”— making the slave shoe something possibly less abstract for those making them.34

A competing discourse in the Antebellum North was the shoeless slave, whose barefooted existence was a testament to slavery’s inhumanity. Visual representations of

34 H. C. Knight, Letters from the South and West (Boston, Richardson and Lord, 1824), 74; Foster, New Raiment, 237, 244. On the broader themes of minstrelsy and racial caricature, see Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch and Brooks McNamara, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); Melinda Lawson, “Imagining Slavery: Representations of the Peculiar Institution on the Northern Stage, 1776-1860,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (2011): 25-55. Northern satirists also targeted the feet of free people of color, as in “The New Shoes,” a caricature that appeared in William Summers’ 1833 Life in Philadelphia Series; see Brian P. Luskey, On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 65. For minstrelsy in Worcester, see At Brinley Hall! On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, March 23, 24, and 25, 1848. The celebrated Ethiopian Serenaders! (Worcester, Mass.: Henry J. Howland, 1848). Rockman, Harvard Paper, 35 slaves frequently lacked shoes, and abolitionists drew attention to unprotected feet that had been frostbitten or scarred doing fieldwork. “I have known slaves who went without shoes all winter, perfectly barefoot,” reported one correspondent to the Anti-Slavery

Examiner. “The feet of many of them are frozen.” Certainly one could imagine making shoes for slaves was an act of Christian charity, an undertaking that improved rather than worsened material conditions on remote plantations. The increasing sentimentalization of childhood in northern culture may have made the miniscule “boy’s brogans” produced in

North Brookfield particularly poignant.35

1838 Boys’ Russet Brogan, T. & E. Batcheller, North Brookfield, Mass. Courtesy North Brookfield Historical Society.

35 “Privations of the Slaves.” Anti-Slavery Examiner, January 1, 1839. On the theme as it extended past the Civil War, see Henry L. Swint, “Northern Interest in the Shoeless Southerner,” Journal of Southern History 16 (November 1950): 457-471. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 36

The politics of slave shoe making were not far below the surface in North

Brookfield, where Amasa Walker’s house was reputedly a station in the Underground

Railroad. The schism that divided the community’s Congregational Church in 1853 involved antislavery congregants who opposed Tyler Batcheller’s role as a deacon. Only a few years earlier, the church passed resolutions “to express our unqualified disapprobation of slavery both in theory and practice, and our firm belief it is diametrically opposed to Christianity, and a burning curse both to the oppressor and the oppressed.” They further agreed not to receive “slave-holding ministers into our pulpit, or slave-holding professors to our Communion.” Thomas Snell had sat in the pulpit since

1798 and made no effort to hide his contempt for slavery or for radical abolitionists like

William Lloyd Garrison who challenged ministerial authority. Snell ardently supported colonization and explicitly linked the brogan business to the eventual abolition of slavery and the rise of a black nation in Liberia: “Though some of my brethren may conscientiously fear to appropriate the gains derived from slavery, paid by the South for their manufactures, to Christianize the heathen in other lands; yet it is an article in my creed, that God will soon appropriate the great mass of these gains to illuminate and raise this down-trodden race to civil and religious freedom—ranking amongst the enlightened and happy nations of the earth.” At least by the late-1840s and 1850s, it would seem that

North Brookfield families would have to work to distance their brogan making from questions of slavery’s morality. Indeed, it is this version of alienation—not the version predicated on their employers’ expropriation of surplus value and their own removal from the means of production— that may make more sense for understanding the experiences Rockman, Harvard Paper, 37 of central Massachusetts farming families that attained greater material prosperity through slave shoe manufacture.36

It seems fruitless to speculate further on how the makers of russet brogans understood their relationship to slavery or situated themselves within the dominant culture of white supremacy. In closing, however, I do want to ask whether the manufacturing of low-quality provisions for a despised population could ever lead to recognition. Certainly it did for the entrepreneurs who organized entire communities toward the production of brogans, hats, and hoes. Consider the eulogies delivered to honor Tyler and Erza Batcheller: “To-day we are called to mourn the loss of a princely manufacturer, who, with no friends to help him,-- with none of the factitious aids of high birth or honorable association, gained for himself the peculiar honor of a ‘novus homo,’ and as one of Nature’s noblemen, receives from this whole community a willing tribute of praise,” declared minister Christopher Cushing upon Tyler’s passing in 1862. The published version of the sermon notes that Southerners owed Batcheller $250,000 when they seceded from the Union. When North Brookfield residents gathered to memorialize

Ezra in 1870, they were exhorted “to rejoice in the priceless legacy of an honor unsullied, a business-life of nearly fifty years with not a stain upon its record, a name held in reverence, a work imperishable.”37 The entrepreneurs responsible for bringing a new textile to market could win prizes in industrial exhibitions, as when Philadelphia’s

Franklin Institute awarded a premium to V. and C. du Pont of Brandywine, Delaware, in

36 Snell, Discourse, 47; Jeffrey H. Fiske, History of the North Brookfield Congregational Church: Serving Christ for 250 Years (North Brookfield, Mass.: North Brookfield Congregational Church, 2005), 77-99. 37 Christopher Cushing, A Discourse at the Funeral of Dea. Tyler Batcheller, at North Brookfield, Mass., Oct. 10, 1862 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1864), 23; Gabriel Haynes De Bevoise, A Discourse Commemorative of Ezra Batcheller, delivered in the First Church, North Brookfield, Dec. 18, 1870 (Boston: pub?, 1871), 23. Rockman, Harvard Paper, 38

1826, for “the best piece of negro cloth” judged by “price, quality, and quantity.” Rhode

Island’s William Davis came close when he submitted his “Washington Plains” to the third annual exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, held in

Boston in 1841. The judges found it “in all respects well manufactured,” adding that the cloth “is intended for Negro clothing, and much used in the Southern States.” But what seems interesting is that prizes for plantation goods were incredibly rare among the numerous annual “cattle shows” that allowed residents of small Rhode Island and

Massachusetts communities to display their finest handicrafts. Common people in communities like Sutton, Grafton, Leicester, Millbury, and North Brookfield could win prizes for their acumen in plowing, their success in raising a particularly large hog, or their dexterity in knitting hosiery. But there is no evidence that any North Brookfield resident ever won a prize for a particularly notable russet brogan.38

38 Niles Register, 12 November 1825; Third Annual Exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association… (Boston: T.R. Martin, 1841), 103; George Aaron Tufts, Address Delivered Before the Worcester Agricultural Society, October 12, 1865 (Worcester: Charles Griffen, 1827), 15-16; Transactions of the Worcester Agricultural Society for the Year 1851 (Worcester: the Society, 1851). In 1824, the Franklin Institute did award the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb a silver medal for negro cloth, but this, like several other awards given that year to charity organizations, was more a celebration of institutions’ ability to marshal otherwise-lost labor than a celebration of an artisanal career in weaving. See Lerman, “Categories of Difference,” 894. At the Waltham (Mass.) Industrial Exhibition of 1857, Orin J. Ranlett won “first diploma” for Heavy Brogan Shoes; he apparently had one competitor. See Report of the Industrial Exhibition Held at the Town of Waltham, Mass., Sept. 24, 1857 (Boston: John Wilson & Son, 1857, 62.