| This dissertation examines the lives of merchants' clerks in the urban northeast to explore the ways Americans confronted both the formation and fluidity of their society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It illustrates the ways in which the issues of economic success and failure, social mobility, and manliness were intertwined with what the scholar Martin Burke has called early America's "conundrum of class." Clerks were crucial participants in the early American economy, ubiquitous members of urban society, and increasingly loomed as cultural figures whom other Americans used to make sense of social and economic change. What follows is social history, analyzing clerks' work and leisure experiences through a wide array of sources such as diaries, census data, business records, and newspapers. It is also cultural history, illuminating the interplay between the stories clerks told about themselves in their diaries and the stories told about clerks in advice literature and fiction.; Between the Revolution and the Civil War, economic growth and immigration from rural America and abroad transformed the demographics of the clerical population and the content of clerks' work, as well as their living arrangements and leisure experiences in cities. Clerks' experiences reveal the disjuncture between hopeful cultural narratives of opportunity and success and the declining reality of their upward mobility. Clerks stood for the promise and peril, the progress and declension, and the widening and narrowing divisions that were coming to define American society. They exposed, for contemporaries and for historians, the ways in which the boundaries of important social categories---class, gender, ethnicity, and race---were blurred by the significant transformations of the age. As marginal men, situated astride and trespassing across these boundaries, clerks shed light on what the categories meant for Americans. |
