In many communities impacted by the Market Revolution the social
contract of the marketplace eventually supplanted traditional relationships
based on mutualism and reciprocity. Anonymity, mobility, and impersonal
market mechanisms fundamentally altered economic and social relationships.
One profession peculiar to this era, clock peddling, illuminates many of
the transformations which relationships of exchange underwent during the
Market Revolution. Between the 1810s to the mid 1840s transactions between
Yankee clock peddlers and rural consumers numbered in the tens of thousands.
All exchange relations in the cash-poor Early Republic relied heavily on
the advance of credit and a concomitant extension of trust. The measures
of confidence built between Yankee clock peddlers, their employers, and
their clientele illustrate the strains placed on the credit system as trade
extended across ever greater distances. The ramifications of Yankee clock
peddlers' dealings extended beyond the conquest of distant markets. Yankee
clock peddlers' business practices crossed class and cultural boundaries
as well.
Most Yankee clock peddlers were employees of companies which specialized in the marketing of mass produced clocks. The relations between employers and their peddlers demonstrate the strains placed on mercantile confidence when it crossed class lines, which were in the very process of formation. Clock manufacturers and entrepreneurs covered their risks by requiring their peddler-employees to provide sterling recommendations of their character and to sign stringent contracts. Peddlers who performed well in the marketplace selling goods were rewarded with higher wages, commissions, and increased credit. Yankee peddlers gained their employers' and creditors' trust through a traditional demonstration of character, but they advanced through sharp trading in the marketplace.
The credit arrangements made between clock peddlers and their customers heeded traditional agrarian credit practices, but also linked backcountry consumers to the wider national market. Through the examination of business correspondence and several clock peddlers' account books, I offer an example of how market-driven practices insinuated themselves into local trade - a history of mercantile confidence in the Early Republic from the bottom up.