Although today we all work for wages,
that is, somebody pays us in cash,
this is a profoundly
unnatural set of relationships
in the early 19th century, in America.
As we've said before, most
of the economy until 1800
was still barter-based, in
the sense of transactions
between people, based
predominantly on credit and debt.
Remember those squirrel scalps?
This kind of economy was
not really about wage work.
It was about a series of
independent producers.
Whether you were a shoe
cobbler, or a farmer,
or any other kind of skilled
worker-- that in the 19th century
were called mechanics, even though
obviously they didn't work on cars.
This kind of economy, this
economy based on producers,
or what today we might see as small
businesses, was not the same as wage
work.
In wage work, like you had in the
first factories, you were paid in cash.
You didn't actually own your own tools.
You didn't actually decide
how you were going to work.
You worked for somebody else.
And though this is the normal state
of affairs today in our economy,
it was profoundly novel
within the early 19th century.
Today we might want a really high
salary, or at least a high wage
per hour.
But in the 19th century,
being paid by somebody else,
rather than selling the
product of your labor,
was seen as a dependent relationship,
rather than independent.
People marked themselves
more by what they
did than what they could
buy with their wages.
After all, the purpose
of these wages was
to participate in the consumer economy,
whether that was buying land, or buying
new kinds of fabric, buying all
kinds of new things produced
by these factories themselves,
that became cheaper
than making your own cloth at home.
This kind of dependence undermined a lot
of what people valued about themselves
as part of independent
democratic Americans.
The very notion of the
wage was, in some sense,
antithetical to that of
virtuous, independent citizens.
You can see it even in
the political process.
All those requirements of land
ownership in order to vote
were really about the
idea that, if you didn't
own land, if you weren't an independent
farmer or in some sense producer,
then somebody else-- your boss--
could tell you how to vote.
