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Sherwood Callaway
HIS 141, Blog Post 9
The “coffin handbill” that Roediger describes acknowledges an incongruity between the spirit of ’76 and the persistence of slavery—something that my classmates and I have been hung up on since the pre-revolutionary period.
The journeyman tailors who wrote this handbill use the language of slavery to describe their condition, although there are certain fundamental differences between workers and slaves that they do not acknowledge. The tailors are afforded a wage, while the slaves are not. The tailors are free not to work, should they wish, while the slaves are not. Furthermore, the tailors are not bound and whipped and abused like slaves. So why make the comparison?
These are not the parallels that the journeyman tailors are trying to make, when they said “freemen of the North are now on a level with the slaves of the South” (319). These “freemen” sought to demonstrate the deprivation of their freedom, above all else. Roediger writes: “They were cast as slaves not because they were “hirelings” but because the state had deprived them of the freedoms necessary for defending their rights” (319). In order to manipulate peoples’ liberal sensibilities, this document acknowledges the incongruity between the spirit of ’76 and the persistence of slavery. America was founded to protect our freedoms, right?
The level of comfort with which the tailors treat this incongruity is new and astounding, but it doesn’t necessarily imply that slavery was out of fashion. The tailors were not so inclined to make a full comparison between themselves and slaves, because they weren’t abolitionists; they probably didn’t have a problem slavery, and were definitely used to it being around. The journeyman tailors, like other wage laborers, used only half the analogy and ignored the rest.
Of course, it didn’t take much longer for people to fill in that other half. The language of wage labor movements questioned the ethics of forced labor, and “chattel slavery stood as the ultimate expression of the denial of liberty” (319).