Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology of construction for main canals
- Abbreviations
- Map: Main canals of the North American Canal Era, 1780–1860
- Introduction
- 1 Early canals, 1780–1812
- 2 “As low as labor and capital can afford”: the contracting system, 1817–1840
- 3 “Human labor, physical and intelligent”
- 4 Payment “fit for labouring people”
- 5 The greatest quantity of labour
- 6 “Canawlers and citizens”
- 7 “Guerilla war”: labour conflict in the 1830s
- 8 “This new order of things”: the 1840s–1850s
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Tables 1–16
- Appendix 2 Tables 17–18
- Index
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology of construction for main canals
- Abbreviations
- Map: Main canals of the North American Canal Era, 1780–1860
- Introduction
- 1 Early canals, 1780–1812
- 2 “As low as labor and capital can afford”: the contracting system, 1817–1840
- 3 “Human labor, physical and intelligent”
- 4 Payment “fit for labouring people”
- 5 The greatest quantity of labour
- 6 “Canawlers and citizens”
- 7 “Guerilla war”: labour conflict in the 1830s
- 8 “This new order of things”: the 1840s–1850s
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Tables 1–16
- Appendix 2 Tables 17–18
- Index
Summary
I have got a wife and her fortune was 2,000 dollars in hand,
A farm well stocked was her portion, and 200 good acres of land,
So cheer up true lads of the Shamrock, don't be fainthearted or shy,
For in America I made my fortune although a poor labouring boy.
If William Fee and Francis Murray, our two absconding servants from the Potomac Company in the 1780s, had miraculously reappeared at a C&O work camp in 1850, they would have recognized many features of their canalling trade: shanty life, manual toil, everpresent disease and injury. But the scale of the work, the absence of unfree labour forms, the presence of contractors and the distant and impersonal relations between workers and the ultimate bosses, not to mention the bitter feuds both among workers and against employers, would have struck the two Rip Van Winkles as wholly new. Clearly much ground had been covered. On the other hand, if Fee and Murray had remained in canalling after their untoward flight from the Potomac, lived to a ripe and active old age, and survived the cavalry charge at Beauharnois, they would have experienced the industrial revolution. Perhaps they would have revelled in their freedom, or maybe bemoaned the need to put a house over one's head and food on the table solely from wages that were too low or irregular. Either way, there was not much that they could do about it. For all their experience, they had been made workers and workers they would remain.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Common LabourWorkers and the Digging of North American Canals 1780–1860, pp. 265 - 274Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993