CHAPTER IV
DOMESTIC SERVICE SINCE THE COLONIAL PERIOD
It has been said that domestic service in America has passed through three distinct phases. The second phase began about the time of the Revolution, when at the North the indented servants as a class were gradually supplanted by free laborers, and at the South by negro slaves who inherited with large interest the reproach attached to the redemptioners. The social chasm that had existed at the North between employer and employee, under the system of bonded servants, disappeared. The free laborers, whether employed in domestic service or otherwise, were socially the equal of their employers, especially in New England and in the smaller towns. They belonged by birth to the same section of the country, probably to the same community; they had the same religious belief, attended the same church, sat at the same fireside, ate at the same table, had the same associates; they were often married from the homes[150] and buried in the family lots of their employers.[151] They were in every sense of the word “help.”[152] A survival of this condition is seen to-day in farming communities, especially at the West. In the South, on the contrary, the social chasm became impassable as negro slavery entirely displaced white labor.
This democratic condition at the North seemed especially noteworthy to European travellers,[153] and it was one to which they apparently never became accustomed. Harriet Martineau, in planning for her American journey, was perplexed by the difficulty of securing a travelling companion. “It would never do,” she says, “as I was aware, to take a servant, to suffer from the proud Yankees on the one hand and the debased slaves on the other.”[154] On arriving here, she found “the study of domestic service a continual amusement,” and what she saw “would fill a volume.”[155] “Boarding-house life,” she says, “has been rendered compulsory by the scarcity of labour,—the difficulty of obtaining domestic service.”[156] But she was quick to appreciate the difference between the spirit of service she found in America and that with which she was familiar in the old world. She writes:
“I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen, and from having little hospitable designs frustrated, than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe. In England, servants have been so long accustomed to this subservience; it is so completely the established custom for the mistress to regulate their manners, their clothes, their intercourse with friends, and many other things which they ought to manage for themselves, that it has become difficult to treat them any better. Mistresses who abstain from such regulation find that they are spoiling their servants; and heads of families who would make friends of their domestics find them little fitted to reciprocate the duty. In America it is otherwise: and may it ever be so!... One of the pleasures of travelling through a democratic country is the seeing no liveries. No such badge of menial service is to be met with throughout the States, except in the houses of the foreign ambassadors at Washington.”
She then gives illustrations to show “of how much higher a character American domestic service is than any which would endure to be distinguished by a badge.”[157]
De Tocqueville, also, found, that “the condition of domestic service does not degrade the character of those who enter upon it, because it is freely chosen, and adopted for a time only; because it is not stigmatized by public opinion and creates no permanent inequality between the servant and the master.”[158]
Francis J. Grund was also able to appreciate the difference between external servility and true self-respect, for he writes in 1837: “There are but few native Americans who would submit to the degradation of wearing a livery, or any other badge of servitude. This they would call becoming a man’s man. But, on the other hand, there are also but few American gentlemen who would feel any happier for their servants wearing coats of more than one color. The inhabitants of New England are quite as willing to call their servants ‘helps,’ or ‘domestics,’ as the latter repudiate the title of ‘master’ in their employers.” And he adds, “Neither is an American servant that same indolent, careless, besotted being as an European.” He has another word of praise too for the American servants, “who work harder, and quicker than even in England.”[159]
The absence of livery was a subject of constant comment. William Cobbett, in 1828, asserts that “the man (servant) will not wear a livery, any more than he will wear a halter round his neck.... Neither men nor women will allow you to call them servants, and they will take especial care not to call themselves by that name.” He explains the avoidance of the term “servant” by the fact that slaves were called servants by the English, who having fled from tyranny at home were shy of calling others slaves; free men therefore would not be called servants.[160]
But while the democratic spirit that prevailed during this period found commendation in the eyes of those of similar tendencies, it often evoked only mild surprise or a half sneer. Mrs. Trollope found that “the greatest difficulty in organizing a family established in Ohio, is getting servants, or, as it is there called, ‘getting help,’ for it is more than petty treason to the Republic to call a free citizen a servant.”[161] Chevalier asserted that “on Sunday an American would not venture to receive his friends; his servants would not consent to it, and he can hardly secure their services for himself, at their own hour, on that day.”[162] Samuel Breck considers that “in these United States nothing would be wanting to make life perfectly happy (humanly speaking) had we good servants.”[163] Isabella Bird wrote of Canada in 1854, “The great annoyance of which people complain in this pleasant land is the difficulty of obtaining domestic servants, and the extraordinary specimens of humanity who go out in this capacity.” “The difficulty of procuring servants is one of the great objections to this colony. The few there are know nothing of any individual department of work,—for instance, there are neither cooks nor housemaids, they are strictly ‘helps,’—the mistress being expected to take more than her fair share of the work.”[164] The conditions she found there were the same as in the United States.