Attached to the Household

This chapter examines the options available to enslaved domestic workers who were denied autonomy and the sanctity of family. Enslaved New Yorkers' struggles against the indignities intrinsic to their condition go beyond collective resistance. Defiance on the part of slaves consisted of furtive actions as well as grand gestures. It was in the crucible of the household, where slaves and masters negotiated various issues, that slaves inched toward autonomy and masters brushed against the boundaries of white privilege. This chapter considers how masters limited enslaved New Yorkers' chances to form families by imposing constraints on parenthood as well as marriage. It also explains how the appropriation of Christian values by enslaved converts opened a new front in the household contest over cultural authority.

Sabotaging the Civilizers

This chapter examines how lowly city dwellers confounded their purported benefactors, for example, by violating cardinal points of civility, indulging their appetites at taverns and brothels, or intruding into the exclusive spaces of the well-to-do. Many urban New Yorkers behaved in ways that were contrary to elite expectations and in so doing risked sanctions from those who controlled important resources. Poor people tended to transgress the rules set by gentlemen and engage in immoral behavior. In precarious circumstances, they perpetually did what was necessary to stay afloat, even if it meant flouting the Christian-based moral standards upheld by the elite. This chapter considers how people disdained as nonentities in eighteenth-century New York City, including blacks and prostitutes, contested the dominion of the city's gentlemen and thus diminished the elite's cultural authority.

“Master of the House”?

This chapter examines the underlying tension in relationships predicated on the gendered distribution of cultural power by focusing on the actions of artisans' wives. Implicit in the concept of the hierarchical household was a corresponding set of cultural expectations for wives, servants, and slaves. Such expectations, articulated most fully for gentlemen's wives but applicable across city households, were rooted in the notion that dependents were obliged to submit to the will of the master of the house and embrace his values without question. By analyzing the experiences of wives, servants, and slaves as they interacted with the propertied white men who defined the terms of their existence, this chapter reveals the many different ways that dependents attained a measure of autonomy in their lives. It also brings to light the vulnerability of New York City's patriarchs to pressure from their dependents.

Conclusion

This book has examined how eighteenth-century New Yorkers, some of more credible social standing than others, challenged the standards touted by the urban elite. Many of those locked in subservient roles expressed their feelings spontaneously, without commentary. Wives, servants, and slaves rebelled against the restrictions that defined their lives and defied the rules that household heads wanted them to follow. Artisans debated substantive issues with members of the elite in the religious setting, and in so doing presented themselves as legitimate adversaries to the high-ranking men who governed church affairs. This conclusion discusses the ramifications of the small-scale cultural confrontations between New York City's commoners and gentlemen as the war of words between Americans and Britons escalated during the years leading up to the American Revolution.

Becoming Religious Consumers

This chapter examines how ordinary men and women transposed the consumer mentality engendered in New York City's burgeoning marketplace to the religious sphere. New York's consumer revolution primed churchgoers to cross the threshold between cultural dependence and independence. Beginning in the 1740s and accelerating in subsequent decades, weekly newspapers featured advertisements intended to stimulate cravings for a variety of commercial products. As New Yorkers scanned pages filled with inventories of a widening array of commodities, their appetite for consumer goods increased. This chapter explores how the transformation of New Yorkers into religious consumers influenced the exercise of cultural authority in eighteenth-century New York City.

Introduction

This book examines the dynamics of power relations in eighteenth-century New York City by focusing on sites where the elite's cultural authority came under siege. Drawing on multiple strands of evidence and taking into account the perspectives of actors outside polite circles, the book looks at the efforts of gentlemen to set and enforce cultural norms and the responses they encountered from persons of lesser rank such as religiously inspired artisans, wives, servants, the poor, and the enslaved. It shows how gentlemen at the top of the social hierarchy sought to certify their status as persons of distinction qualified to dictate cultural norms. New York's pan-ethnic elite, it suggests, inhabited an exclusive universe where their families put into practice the precepts of politeness delineated by the English gentry.

George Whitefield Awakens New York City

This chapter examines English evangelist George Whitefield's message of the “new birth” and how it came to resonate among a variety of New Yorkers, including adherents of the orthodox Dutch Reformed and Anglican Churches. Whitefield's influence on New Yorkers is best measured by focusing on his career as it intersected with the city's evolving religious life. In a process similar to that experienced by Dutch Reformed and Scottish Presbyterian traditionalists, devotees of Whitefield's brand of Christianity overcame ingrained habits and embraced novel religious ideas. During his seven-week stretch of preaching from December 1763 to January 1764, Whitefield sparked a religious awakening that touched New Yorkers of all backgrounds. This chapter considers how Whitefield's moral authority, augmented by his charismatic preaching, emboldened the people of New York City dwellers to challenge doctrines and practices they deemed inauthentic and to reject the counsel of men of stature in their churches.

From Nation to Linguistic Community

This chapter examines the adaptive strategies employed by ordinary Dutch New Yorkers to dispute the elite's cultural authority. English polite culture emerged in early eighteenth-century New York City and was embraced by high-ranking Dutch and French families. This fostered the impression that the values of the elite were unanimously endorsed by those lower down on the social scale. While the ambitious were apt to emulate models of gentility in hopes of inching their way across the cultural threshold, others, particularly non-English artisans and laborers, rejected the gentry's cultural directives. This chapter considers how New Yorkers of differing cultural orientations clashed over the issue of language used in worship. It shows that the city's ordinary Dutch acted to safeguard their native tongue by invigorating Dutch print culture and defending Dutch-language worship in the Dutch Reformed Church.

The Crystallization of an Anti-Dutch Narrative

This chapter examines the enduring confusion about the persistence of local Dutch culture in British New York, showing that cultural authority was imposed on Dutch New Yorkers through an officially sanctioned campaign against “Dutchness.” The chapter considers the anti-Catholic rhetoric employed by Jacob Leisler and his supporters, who considered themselves above all good Protestants, and how Leisler's adversaries branded his group as Dutch malcontents. It also discusses the ways that the English rulers of New York and their allies, in an attempt to build an anti-Dutch narrative, launched a multidimensional cultural offensive aimed at weakening the grip of Dutch culture on the city's longtime residents. As a result, New York City's Dutch culture was transformed from an alternative culture to an oppositional culture.