Jumping Counters in White Collars: Manliness, Respectability, and Work in the Antebellum City

Abstract

Antebellum business clerks embodied the economic dreams of an optimistic era. According to the republic's cultural logic, they would eventually become merchants, sliding into positions of proprietorship or partnership that connoted independent manhood. Yet the booms and busts endemic to the period's economy challenged these expectations, making for uncertain advancement in the competitive commercial sphere. As mercantile firms specialized, clerks' work tasks expanded to include porters' duties and selling goods to female consumers. This shift was accompanied by a profound disjuncture between the ways that clerks and their contemporaries conceived of "white-collar" work. Clerks feared that moving goods alongside Irish and African American porters threatened their paths to proprietorship or partnership. Their contemporaries emphasized their interactions with women shoppers, relationships that were doubly fraught with peril. Clerks were a threat to women because they had mastered the art of commercial and sexual seduction. On the other hand, their masculinity was endangered by their proximity to women's goods and failure to work with their hands. Americans in the urban northeast were ultimately unable to reconcile the experiences of clerks' labor with competing and shifting notions of manliness and respectability. While clerks exposed disturbing contradictions about class and gender identity for all white, middle-class men, as an occupational group they were ultimately cast from the ranks of the refined and the masculine in the antebellum era.