Shoes, Wheat, Iron and Cotton: A Historian's Notebook

Field Notebook of Dr. Marcus Delgado, Historian

1Stop 1: Lynn, Massachusetts. In the library's local history room, I read about the town's shoemakers. By the 1850s, Lynn was one of the leading shoe-making towns in the country. Sewing machines in new factories stitched the upper parts of shoes far faster than hand sewing, and many of the stitchers were young women paid for each piece they finished. On February 22, 1860, thousands of Lynn's shoe workers walked off the job to demand higher pay, and the strike spread to other New England towns. Historians often call it the largest strike in the United States before the Civil War. Many strikers won raises, though their hopes for a lasting union faded.

2Stop 2: a farm museum in central Ohio. A rebuilt 1850s farmhouse stands beside a horse-drawn reaper. The guide reminded me that most Northerners in 1860 still lived on farms, not in factory towns. Families did most of the farm work themselves, sometimes with a hired hand paid by the month. Reapers built in Chicago factories let a family harvest far more wheat than with hand tools, and canals and railroads carried the grain and salted pork to cities in the East.

3Stop 3: Richmond, Virginia. A museum now stands on the site of the Tredegar Iron Works beside the James River. In the 1850s, Tredegar was the largest ironworks in the South, making rails, locomotives and cannon. Its workers included free white men, some of them immigrants, and enslaved men, many of them hired from slaveholders who collected their pay. Even so, the guide pointed out, the whole South made only a small share of the nation's iron.

4Stop 4: a county courthouse in Alabama's Black Belt, a band of farmland named for its dark, rich soil. Much of this land was the homeland of the Muscogee (Creek) and Choctaw nations until the United States forced most of their people west in the 1830s; both nations still govern themselves today. Cotton planters then bought up the land. In the 1860 census, enslaved people made up more than half of the population in many Black Belt counties. In the records room I read probate inventories, lists of everything a planter owned when he died. They listed enslaved men, women and children by first name, each with a dollar value, beside mules, plows and acres. Historians estimate that in 1860 the enslaved people of the South were valued at about $3 billion, more than all the nation's railroads and factories put together. Planters often borrowed money by pledging enslaved people as security for loans. The clerk told me that descendants of people enslaved here still search these records for their ancestors' names.