Dark Associations: Worker Conspiracy in Racialized Antebellum Labor Climates

Name: Rachel BannerAffiliation: Assistant Professor, West Chester University of PennsylvaniaTitle: "Dark Associations: Worker Conspiracy in Racialized Antebellum Labor Climates"Abstract:This paper uses a somewhat... [ view full abstract ]

Name: Rachel Banner

Affiliation: Assistant Professor, West Chester University of Pennsylvania

Title: "Dark Associations: Worker Conspiracy in Racialized Antebellum Labor Climates"

Abstract:

This paper uses a somewhat unconventional archive, juridical and historical accounts of the working lives of bootblacks and bootmakers, to query the possibilities of worker association within antebellum labor climates of northern racial capitalism. In it, I work with a set of legal texts known to labor historians as the “cordwainer cases,” in which majority-white groups of bootmakers (cordwainers) in major northeastern cities were routinely accused and convicted of conspiracy for attempting to make wage pacts up through the 1840s. I re-read this archive alongside a constellation of antebellum political writings, newspaper articles, and black abolitionist texts that all invoke a particular worker-figure, the African American bootblack, to make an ideologically varied range of statements about campaigns for racial economic justice. While cordwainer associations eventually gain some legitimation via Lemuel Shaw’s ruling in Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), I show that this legal endorsement is predicated on a differentiation of the groups’ labor value from the figure of the ‘degraded’ black manual worker, consistently figured in popular discourse as a bootblack. Turning to what I term the “bootblack archive,” I read David Walker’s 1829 Appeal as a worker’s text that cultivates a climate of labor conspiracy, and rhetorically convicts the American labor system of widespread conspiracy against people of color. I ask how juridical and cultural discourses of conspiracy operative at the time inflect Walker’s attempt to generate a collectivity of black workers who view themselves as empowered actors working to remake the U.S. labor order.