On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America

By Brian P Luskey

“This fascinating portrait of American striving . . . locates the origins of white-collar culture in the precarious world of the antebellum clerk” (Timothy B. Spears, author of Chicago Dreaming).

In the mid-nineteenth-century, ambitious young men found a path to wealth and respect by working as clerks in the bustling cities of the American Northeast. At stores and commercial offices, these strivers and “counter jumpers” also found opportunities for self-gratification in their new identities as independent men. But being “on the make” in a volatile capitalist economy and fluid urban society was fraught with uncertainty.

In On the Make, Brian P. Luskey illuminates at once the power of the ideology of self-making and the important contests over the meanings of respectability, manhood, and citizenship that helped to determine who clerks were and who they would become. Drawing from a rich array of archival materials, including clerks’ diaries, newspapers, credit reports, census data, advice literature, and fiction, Luskey argues that a better understanding of clerks and clerking helps make sense of the culture of capitalism and the society it shaped in this pivotal era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780814752548

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On the Make:

Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America

Brian P. Luskey

On the Make

Clerks and the Quest for Capital

in Nineteenth-Century America

Brian P. Luskey

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress.org

© 2010 by New York University

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Luskey, Brian P.

On the make : clerks and the quest for capital

in nineteenth-century America / Brian P. Luskey.

p. cm. —(American history and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978–0–8147–5228–9 (cl : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0–8147–5228–4 (cl : alk. paper)

1. Clerks—United States—History—19th century.

2. United States—Commerce—History—19th century.

I. Title.

HD8039.M4U554     2009

305.5’56—dc22           2009026862

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Puzzled about Identity

1 What Is My Prospects?

2 The Humble Laborer in the White Collar

3 Homo Counter-Jumperii

4 Striving for Citizenship

5 The Republic of Broadcloth

6 The Swedish Nightingale and the Peeping Tom

Conclusion: Once More, Free

Notes

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

The striver within me would like to make an ambitious claim: I wrote this book all by myself. And it’s true; I did. Yet like the creed of self-making, such a statement obscures the fact that I relied upon the assistance of many people and institutions as I researched, wrote, and revised. I am pleased to have the opportunity to thank them here for their support, though I will try not to sound like an obsequious counter jumper as I do so.

The three people who have done the most to shape the questions I try to answer in this book are Jonathan Prude, Scott Sandage, and Wendy Woloson. Jonathan, my graduate school mentor, encouraged and challenged me in equal measure as I wrote this book. I really like this, he would say in response to a chapter draft, but then admonish me, only half-jokingly, to change everything. His keen suggestions on several versions of this book have immeasurably improved the final product. Scott, coeditor of New York University Press’s American History and Culture Series, read the manuscript twice with extraordinary care and gave me priceless feedback that strengthened the book’s organization and argument. Wendy has been a close friend of this book and its author for a long time now, and our discussions about new directions in economic history inform every page that I write. I thank all three of them for their friendship and generosity.

I am grateful to several institutions for the funding that made researching and writing this book possible, and wish to thank several people associated with those institutions for guiding me through research collections and otherwise providing invaluable aid: the Library Company of Philadelphia (Jim Green, Connie King, and Charlene Peacock), the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (Amy Baxter-Bellamy), the American Antiquarian Society (Joanne Chaison and Caroline Sloat), and the New-York Historical Society. West Virginia University’s Eberly College of Arts and Sciences kindly provided a publication subvention.

I am particularly fortunate to have spent two years in Philadelphia as a fellow at the McNeil Center and the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company. I thank directors Dan Richter and Cathy Matson, respectively, for fostering the scholarly community that helped expand this book’s historiographical horizons. At conference meetings, I have profited from the advice of several historians who have commented on my work. I thank Howard Chudacoff, Christopher Clark, Toby Ditz, Faye Dudden, Ann Fabian, Dallett Hemphill, Graham Hodges, David Jaffee, Jane Kamensky, and the late Susan Porter Benson for their efforts on my behalf. Walter Friedman, editor of Business History Review, and Roderick McDonald, editor of Journal of the Early Republic, generously granted me permission to publish substantially revised versions of two of my articles. I also appreciate the help of two history department chairs, Barry Rothaus of the University of Northern Colorado and Elizabeth Fones-Wolf of West Virginia University, who have done their utmost to give me the time and resources necessary to see this project to completion. I feel especially lucky to have published this book with New York University Press. I thank Eric Zinner and Ciara McLaughlin for shepherding me through the process, and Martha Hodes, Amy Greenberg, and an anonymous reviewer for making inspired suggestions that significantly enhanced the manuscript.

Friends and colleagues sustained me as I worked on this project. Hayes and Kelly Trotter planned the games in and around Wash Park that helped me escape the daily grind. Ben Irvin gave me a title for the book and let me borrow many of his brilliant ideas for making the text better. I thank Tom Bredehoft, Derek Buckaloo, Paul Erickson, Josh Greenberg, Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, Leslie Harris, Rose Hathaway, Erin Jordan, Cathy Kelly, Michael Kramp, Amy Lang, Ann Little, Michelle McDonald, Roderick McDonald, Jennifer Meares, Stephen Mihm, David Miller, Paul O’Grady, Emily Satterwhite, Kris Shepard, Nick Syrett, Rob Widell, and Amy Wood as well for taking the time to improve my work and make writing this book a lot of fun.

My grandmother Doris Peck Warner Daiger and uncles Pete Luskey and Jim Peck taught me early in life to value education and scholarship. My sister Kate Jacobson is a talented teacher and writer who has been an inspiration and a good friend to me. Other members of my family have made sacrifices so that I could write this book. They kindly gave me places to stay near archives (don’t even think about moving, people!), encouraged me with their interest in what I was doing, and not so silently wondered how it could ever take so long to publish a book. So to you—Paul Jacobson, Eleanor and Tom Roney, Tina and Jack Peters, Sharon Rossi and John Majkut, Gail and Kurt Warner, Valerie and Alex Lanham, Adrienne and Andrew Lopez, Laura and Tim Folk, Kelly and Damon Rossi—thank you for your loving support.

This book is dedicated to Barbara and Patrick Luskey, my parents and best friends. They got me started on my journey toward being a historian many summers ago on a family trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Knowing that I can never repay them for the opportunities and love they have given me, I can only say thank you for being with me every step of the way.

Introduction

Puzzled about Identity

The thirtieth day of March, 1848, marked a turning point in the life of an eighteen-year-old upstate New Yorker named William Hoffman. On that day, he chose to leave his family’s farm in Claverack and become an urban man of business. This momentous decision was the product of several weeks’ reflection about the process of self-making. Pondering the perfect course of Providence in his diary earlier in the month, he doubted that he could determine his destiny. [W]hatever our fate is, he wrote, we must ca[l]mly submit to it without a murmur. Yet at the same time, he felt that his relationship with his imperious brother George had become unbearable—the pair argued regularly about the management of their farm. So he chose to follow the example of his other brother Daniel, a clerk in their uncle’s shop in the nearby town of Hudson, and find a commercial clerkship of his own.¹

For even as he reminded himself to abide by God’s will, William Hoffman was a striver, eager for the excitement and opportunities for independence that urban commerce offered. He was competitive, desirous of a situation with a firm operating in a more exciting location than Hudson. Perhaps Poughkeepsie or New York City, he thought, would provide more expansive scope for his ambition to attain the prerogatives associated with being an independent man. Hoffman was unable to put his plan into action until a Hudson-bound stagecoach passed by the farm. I stood in the Threshold of the Hall, he wrote, gazing with steady fixedness toward the horizon for the Stage to make its appearance. Poised on that threshold, Hoffman was situated astride the boundaries separating childhood and adulthood, urban and rural economies, urbane and provincial identities. Waiting for the stagecoach fostered doubt within him. He remained very thoughtful all day, and seconds seemed . . . like minutes as he reconsidered this fateful choice and its potential consequences. He was a young man contemplating a rite of passage, a personal crossroads that offered both thrilling and worrying outcomes. Would he succeed in his attempt to remake his rural identity into that of a cultured city clerk? Would he eventually become wealthy as a merchant in his own right? Such were the anxious musings of the striver.²

Hoffman and thousands of other young white men who came to American cities to find clerkships subscribed to an ideology of self-making that had coalesced in the egalitarian moment of the United States’s independence and matured as industrialization and urban growth signaled wider opportunities for economic and social mobility. As one scholar has argued, young clerks used diaries to reflect upon the development of moral faculties and declare a private, interior independence that was sometimes elusive at work. Clerks’ diaries offer focused accounts of the ways in which young men thought about themselves, their career trajectories, and their places in urban society. These documents are evidence of clerks’ determination to craft their identities. The stories they told about themselves were crucial elements in their efforts to determine who they were and who they would become.³

For many young white men living in or moving to American cities in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the opportunities for self-making seemed endless. This was particularly true for clerks in urban wholesale and retail establishments, who believed that their occupational posts would prepare them for independence at the head of their own firms. These young men were ubiquitous figures in American cityscapes. In every commercial house and store, one could expect to find someone, typically though not exclusively a young man, who performed the writing, accounting, and sales tasks crucial to the development and efficiency of capitalism. For country storekeepers visiting cities on seasonal trips to wholesalers in order to stock their shelves with goods, or for city customers making retail purchases, clerks truly were the faces of capitalist transformation, leading one historian to contend that they were revolutionary figures on the urban scene.⁴

These clerks were on the make, persistently seeking self-advancement, self-improvement, or self-gratification. They could cultivate character from within to get ahead in business or adopt new identities to seize the potential independence of urban life and leisure. They monitored their position in firms, vigilantly sizing up competitors who might prove to be obstacles to their advancement. They were like many other white American men who seemed to be constantly searching for the main chance. In On the Make, I analyze diaries, letters, newspapers, credit reports, census data, advice literature, and fiction to examine who clerks were, what they did, and with whom they interacted inside and outside of wholesale and retail businesses in New York City (with illustrative detours to other American cities) between the 1830s and 1870s. I explore their role in perpetuating and rethinking cultural narratives about economic opportunity, social order, and self-determination that helped Americans make sense of the dislocating changes caused by industrialization and urban growth. Clerks told stories about themselves in diaries as they sought to map their hopes and comprehend their disappointments. They likewise emerged as figures invoked with special frequency in fictional representations, cautionary tales, and advice publications to chart the reorientations taking hold in important sectors of American life. These young men stood for the economic promise and peril as well as the widening and narrowing social divisions that defined urban America.

Examining the intersections between clerks’ stories and stories about clerks is crucially important for our understanding of nineteenth-century America because they illuminate the ways in which Americans made sense of capitalist transformation and urban experience by coming into conflict with each other about the meanings of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age in their society. These young men embarked on a quest for economic and cultural capital that would earn them power and prestige, and they identified clerkships and independent living in cities as the means to achieve these ends. They wagered that their occupation promised upward mobility to proprietorship and often tried to balance refined practices, appearance, and conduct with the swagger of the young man about town to garner social respect among various urban constituencies. This quest for wealth and respect was never a fait accompli because it always involved a set of symbolic contests with contemporaries.

In these contests, many clerks found that economic and cultural capital slipped through their fingers, despite their efforts to cultivate at least the appearance of good character and refined sensibilities. The phrase on the make thus had multiple meanings for them. Clerks were ambitious strivers in difficult economic times, unwilling to bide their time when financial panic might be just around the corner. Authors counseled youth to trust in the benefits of a decayed labor arrangement, apprenticeship, and patiently save money from their often minuscule salaries in the hopes of starting businesses of their own. Young clerks did porters’ work—heavy lifting that did not square with the assumption that they worked with pen and paper at desk, counter, and till. They developed intimate relationships with female customers, acquaintances often fueled by mistrust because they were fostered with sales in mind. They were servants in palaces of consumption, catering to women and monitored by parental surrogates, but life in boardinghouses and the urban underworld gave them opportunities to exist outside family surveillance, mixing with women more intimately (although not always as intimately as they hoped). Some rejected prescriptive authors’ arguments about the connection between morals and markets, pilfering cash and goods from their employers and using the dirty proceeds in alcohol-induced sprees in oyster cellars, theaters, and brothels. Some declared allegiance to a model of refinement in democratic politics and urban life that was at odds with the nation’s celebration of equality and was perceived to be hollow because they lacked the economic capital to fund such cultural claims.

Clerks made a mockery of the evangelical, reforming, domestic, and striving ideologies shaping American culture, and yet they were also at the very heart of that culture. In their presence at church and brothel, commercial house and public house, clerks revealed that the values, institutions, and practices held dear by many of their elders were up for contest, even among those who appeared to be perfectly placed to accumulate power and prestige. Clerks’ ambiguous identities and motives were deeply troubling to many authors, parents, and employers as well as to the clerks themselves. Yet when many writers blamed clerks for their failures and social indeterminacy, they implicated industrial capitalism and cities—which these same authors relentlessly tried, and failed, to control—as obstacles to achieving upward mobility.⁵

Clerks moved to the center of the economy, society, and consciousness of their contemporaries with the maturing of industrial capitalism and the growth of the anonymous city. Examining commercial clerks in New York City makes particular sense because transportation improvements, industrialization, and deepening credit relationships between merchants and customers made Manhattan the focal point of the nation’s economy. The Black Ball line’s packet-ship service that carried people and goods between Liverpool and its East River docks commenced in 1818, while the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, connected the city with the fertile agricultural hinterland of western New York and the Great Lakes. New York’s role in Caribbean and southern commerce positioned its merchants to broker the cotton trade between slave masters and manufacturers in England and New England. By the early 1850s, railroad traffic in the Hudson River Valley began to divert the Northeast’s textile production toward New York.

While merchants had typically imported and sold goods from their ships and countinghouses in the eighteenth century, they increasingly specialized in the nineteenth century in order to make trading more manageable. Economic growth also propelled others to enter the commercial world on their own hook as independent proprietors, and the proliferation and specialization of mercantile firms created a geography of trade in downtown Manhattan. Importers, often located along the South Street waterfront, continued to purchase goods from European, Caribbean, and Asian markets. Wholesaling jobbers set up shop in Pearl Street and nearby thoroughfares, buying large lots of goods from importers and breaking them into smaller blocks for sale to urban and rural retailers. Store proprietors in fashionable Broadway and less refined (but no less commercially oriented) streets like Chatham and the Bowery sold goods to individual consumers. Financiers and bankers on Wall Street fed the interconnected parts of this commercial dynamo with ample amounts of credit and currency.

Industrialization and the transportation improvements that accompanied it precipitated an increase in the number of middlemen who connected northeastern city merchants with urban and rural customers across the country. Peddlers, storekeepers, and agents employed by merchants and manufacturers served as conduits for the movement of goods, capital, and credit. Industrial production spurred the substantial growth in the size and number of urban wholesale and retail establishments in the 1820s and 1830s, and New York merchants responded by hiring clerks to copy voluminous correspondence, calculate escalating sums in ledgers, sell goods to customers, run errands, collect debts, drum up business among rural merchants visiting the city, and physically move goods around stores. Landless young men from farming communities and foreign shores came to cities in search of work in the trades, on the docks, or in commercial houses and stores. Young men who desired clerkships were an important segment of the migrant population that swelled New York’s population to two hundred thousand in 1830, to more than half a million in 1850, and to nearly one million people in 1870.⁶

Clues about the demographic makeup of the clerking population in New York before the Civil War emerge from two samples I have taken from the Federal Census of 1850 and the New York State Census of 1855 to elicit who clerks were, where they came from, and how they lived in the antebellum city. Nearly fourteen thousand clerks lived in New York City in 1855. Unfortunately, neither the federal nor the state census makes it possible to disaggregate clerks working in commercial houses and stores from those employed in law offices, city government, factories, and courts, but taken together, clerks were the third largest occupational group in the metropolis behind servants and laborers. The most obvious characteristic of the clerking population was its youth. In both the 1850 and 1855 samples, about four-fifths were thirty or younger. Between 60 and 70 percent were under twenty-five, and most members of this latter group had not reached their majority. An overwhelming number were unmarried men. In the 1855 sample, roughly 60 percent of the clerking population classified themselves as boarders in privately run boardinghouses and residences, or hotels and businesses. Clerks were considered an unsupervised masculine cohort because, in large measure, they were young, overwhelmingly male, and living as boarders in the city.⁷

TABLE 1.1

Age, 1850 (N=1,111)

TABLE 1.2

Marital Status, 1850 (N=1,111)

TABLE 1.3

Sex, 1855 (N=1,088)

TABLE 1.4

Relationship to Head of Household, 1855 (N=1,088)

In urban places, economic competition and social fluidity challenged cherished expectations about the career trajectories of white men, and potential anonymity cut against the older generation’s interest in monitoring youth. Nineteenth-century cities were places of paradox, simultaneously home to social stratification and to social mutability. The sunshine of the Broadway promenade and dry goods emporiums commingled uneasily with the shadow of underworld black markets, vice, crime, and slums like the Five Points. Clerks’ presence in every avenue and alley made the project of determining who they were and who they would become absolutely necessary and exceedingly difficult.⁸

For other evidence elicits questions about whether most clerks were unattached young men. Fully a fifth of the subjects in the 1855 sample were over thirty-one or married, though these figures were substantially lower in the 1850 sample. While the federal census did not record women’s occupations, the 1855 state account shows that a mere 3 percent of clerks were women. By the 1830s, women were beginning to take sales positions in large Philadelphia and Boston retail establishments, but in New York, it would appear that women were a decided minority of the midcentury clerking population. But other sources, such as the credit reports of Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency, suggest that women’s role in Manhattan businesses, behind the counter and at the desk, was a bit more significant than census takers and observers of the cityscape believed. Wives, sisters, and daughters of merchants who ran small businesses, particularly in the uptown wards along Sixth and Eighth avenues or in the Lower East Side, assisted their family members in stores. Perhaps these women did not consider themselves clerks, but conceived of clerking as a contribution toward securing their household’s competency, as women had done in the eighteenth century.⁹

The fact that many clerks lived in boardinghouses obscured the fact that others continued to live with a family member in New York. More than 45 percent of the 1855 sample established their own households and families in the city, lived with their parents, siblings, or other relatives, or resided with kin in boardinghouses, hotels, or businesses. These statistics reflect the fact that more than a quarter of the clerks in the 1855 sample had been born in Manhattan, while another quarter had grown up in upstate New York or the contiguous states of Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania. Despite the widespread cultural anxiety about young men living apart from their families in the city, many clerks maintained strong kinship ties, living with family members in New York or frequently visiting their homes.

Other clerks had been born farther away from the banks of the Hudson, challenging the contemporary belief that the typical clerk was native-born. Forty-three percent of New York clerks in the 1855 sample had been born outside the United States. While prospective foreign-born clerks trickled into New York from Canada or the Caribbean, the vast majority had been born in Western Europe. Of the European contingent, 89 percent were from Ireland, Germany, England, Wales, or Scotland. Irish-born clerks made up 18 percent of the total sample, while Germans accounted for 12.5 percent. The foreign cast to the clerking population increases to almost two-thirds when we examine ethnicity, determined from the birthplaces of clerks’ parents in the 1850 federal census.

Antebellum Americans, in their writings about clerks, often obscured the fact that immigrants figured prominently in the occupational group because they were more concerned about the supposedly deteriorating bonds connecting rural parents and their sons—country boys who hoped to become merchant princes. I have used census data, credit reports, newspaper advertisements, and the rolls of the Emigrant Savings Bank to piece together the experiences of immigrant clerks and investigate the meanings of ethnicity for clerks in terms of their work in order to illuminate the diversity of the occupational group.¹⁰

The ambitions of these clerks, whether they hailed from American or foreign shores, could take a variety of forms. During the winter of 1844, in an office on New York City’s South Street near the bustling commercial wharves of the East River, an eighteen-year-old Englishman named George John Cayley listlessly copied correspondence and balanced accounts for the merchant Jonathan Goodhue. The work exasperated him to no end. I wish there were no such operation as writing, he groused in his diary, hoping in vain for a process where by applying the mental speculum to a sheet of paper the impression would come off directly. Osmosis, unfortunately, was not an option. He had little patience for accounting, either, joining another clerk in experimenting with a new sort of calculating machine . . . in the form of a revolving card with progressive numbers, which he pronounced very ingenious for its labor-saving potential. It seemed to many observers that young men venturing to the city for clerkships were in search of easier lives rather than arduous career paths trod by patient, hard-working men. In Asa Greene’s fictional Perils of Pearl Street, the rural-born narrator explains his decision to move to New York and search for a clerkship with a stunning admission in a producer’s republic: I had become early convinced that hard work was not easy. These loungers perverted the striver’s ethic, trying to escape the mundane drudgery of agricultural and craft work in the countryside or countinghouse work in the city.¹¹

TABLE 1.5

Nativity, 1855 (N=1,077)

TABLE 1.6

Ethnicity (Nativity of Parents), 1850 (N=559)

In the commercial house, the business epistles Cayley copied contained Goodhue’s words, not his own; the numbers he tallied neatly in columns were markers of the firm’s success, not his. He and other clerks were mere ciphers for the merchants, who authored their own destinies. Yet after work in his diary, Cayley the lounger was much like Hoffman the striver, recording his mundane work duties, efforts to learn Arabic and Mandarin, and attempts to woo a beautiful young lady of the wealthy Van Rensselaer clan. In his diary, the young Englishman was an author of himself, though his goals were somewhat at odds with those of his fellow clerks. He was convinced that his future would include an ascent to literary genius rather than to the lofty heights of commercial proprietorship. Enamored with the poetry of Lord Byron, Cayley wrote Valentine’s Day couplets that he hoped young ladies would admire for their Byronic twang and penned a mock epic of fifty-five stanzas commemorating a visit to Boston entitled Childe George John’s Pilgrimage. What better way to forget that he and other clerks were part of an urban constituency that Herman Melville would later envision, rather unromantically, tied to counters and clinched to desks.¹²

I am out of concert with myself to day, Cayley languidly scratched into his diary in February 1844. I take no interest in anything present or future, but feel like a useless apathetic lump, with an indolent heaviness about my stomach, in love with nothing, but without spirit to quarrel with anything, a nonentity. Here was that Byronic twang. He knew that he lacked the ambitious spirit, battling competitiveness, and fastidious preparation for the future that strivers like Hoffman displayed. He lamented these deficiencies, admitting to being very lazy and weary. I am a most infernal fool not to exert myself more, he cringed, but I feel incapacitated whenever I get with in those 4 bare walls of Goodhue’s office. In characteristically dramatic fashion, Cayley worried about his future, too: I think I shall turn out a ‘waif and stray’ . . . without a business, a sort of wretched bubble to be blown of the breath of praise and carried away to perdition on the winds of adversity. Instead of accepting the challenge to improve himself, as the authors of prescriptive texts advised, Cayley desired the opportunity to be someone else and leave his faults behind him: I am puzzled about identity, and how other people feel inside themselves.¹³

The French commentator Alexis de Tocqueville, fresh from his grand tour of the United States, wondered in 1840 why Americans, equipped with unprecedented political and economic liberty, were restless in the midst of abundance. Why did it appear as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow? He needed to look no further than Hoffman’s concern about his future and Cayley’s claim that he was puzzled by identity. Both clerks encountered the significant impediments to self-making in American society, even though they were young white men who appeared best able to determine who they were. George Foster, intrepid reporter on the city beat for Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune, wrote that "[p]eople pass pretty much at their own valuation—unless it is too high, and then they are ‘bogus’ and won’t go at all. Clerks’ project of self-making intersected with observations made by contemporaries struggling to make sense of a competitive economy and anonymous city. Observers contested young men’s claims about who they were. Charles Dickens paid scant attention to the dashing, bewhiskered urban clerks he filed past on his stroll through the streets of Manhattan in the early 1840s, but he would have popped Cayley’s bubble of pretension with his scathing dismissal: these young men were merely Byrons of the desk and counter. Romanticism, libertinism, and lounging were folly in an age of capital devoted to sober self-improvement and rational emphasis on dollars and cents. When Frederick Law Olmsted witnessed young men, extraordinarily dressed and lounging or sauntering near Natchez, Mississippi, in the 1850s, he could have made an invidious regional comparison between Yankee strivers and Cavalier loungers. Instead, he thought they resembled nothing other than New York clerks on their Sunday excursions." Keeping a diary might have been a means of cultivating character, but clerks found that literary practices were insufficient if they wanted to have their character traits validated in a fluid, democratic society. Although commercial clerks may have been the faces of capitalism, they were not the power brokers of capitalist transformation, and lacked the authority to make un-challenged assertions about who they were and who they would become.¹⁴

In newspapers, magazines, and fictional literature, for instance, authors ridiculed the counter jumper. The label evoked a retail clerk who was willing to hurdle store counters to serve customers and his employers in a speedy, efficient, and courteous manner. On the face of it, the nickname embodied the go-ahead spirit that marked the ambitious and ultimately successful American man of business. But counter jumper was not a term of endearment. Rather, it was a sarcastic reference Americans used to describe the young men who lounged about bolts of cloth and ribbon, seducing women into making frivolous purchases and refusing to do any arduous labor. Counter jumpers did not strive enough, respect their employers or customers enough, or mind their subservient place enough. At the end of the business day, these heroes of the ell-wand—the stick retail dry goods clerks used to measure cloth—leaped from their recumbent positions to strut about the streets as urban dandies, wearing fancy clothing and frivolous accoutrements that they could not afford. They participated in an urban sporting culture taking shape in taverns, brothels, and streets whose denizens praised rogues for their sexual conquests. Retail clerks in particular represented what many Americans had come to lament about the changes capitalism wrought. They were, paradoxically, arbiters of style who lacked producers’ know-how, revealing the ways in which industrialization devalued workers’ expertise and enshrined conspicuous consumption as a core aspect of self-making. These young men, unattached and unsupervised, also symbolized the deterioration of household ties and the explosive growth of cities filled with strangers.¹⁵

Just as Hoffman and Cayley might have been striving for different goals, the occupation clerk was capacious, bringing together individuals who had little in common with each other. Some New York clerks had been born into wealthy families in the city, and happily called upon connections with powerful merchants to obtain clerkships on high salaries in exalted firms. There was little chance George John Cayley would end up a waif and stray: he was the grandson of Sir George Cayley, a landed baronet. The English-born clerk did not become a merchant, but rather returned to Yorkshire, attended Cambridge University, and qualified to practice law. In adulthood, he became a writer as he had always wanted to do, publishing a Spanish travel narrative, serving as a battlefield reporter during the Crimean War, and advocating the extension of voting rights to skilled workers in Great Britain. Perhaps, finishing his life playing leisurely games of tennis in Algiers, Cayley was not as puzzled about identity as he had been years before. Likewise, though William Hoffman peered into a hazy economic future as he embarked for cities in which he had no wealthy connections, he eventually accumulated capital from the sale of his family’s 200-acre farm in Claverack.¹⁶

Other clerks lacked landed or commercial property. Immigrant Irishmen and Germans served as clerks in slums such as the Five Points and ethnic enclaves such as Kleinedeutschland. These clerks’ prospects for and expectations about advancement as well as their social identities were quite different. Indeed, many clerks, no matter where they were born, may have aspired to small-business ownership and small means rather than to partnership in a large firm taking great risks for even greater rewards. Clerking as an occupation had multiple meanings because these young men came from so many different backgrounds and were clerking for various reasons. The influence of social and economic changes on their experiences could be immense, negligible, or somewhere between