What Hath God Wrought (80 page)

The Democratic and Whig Parties took very different stands on the subject of class. Echoing Jackson’s Bank Veto, Democrats called upon the working classes—a term they generally used in the plural and defined to include farmers and planters—to oppose the machinations and oppressions of nonproducers. Whigs insisted that there was no such thing as class conflict, that the different economic classes, like the sections of the Union, were interdependent, and in any case, class membership was fluid. Rhetoric of class conflict they deplored as demagogic.
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To some extent, urban workingmen chose their political party according to which analysis of class relations they found persuasive. Where industrialization had de-skilled and proletarianized workers, and where workers felt alienated from their employers because of ethnic differences, labor voted Democratic. Where workers felt that the system worked and that they enjoyed an opportunity to better themselves, they voted Whig.

The success of the Democratic Party among white wage-earners owed more than a little, unfortunately, to the emphasis it placed on white supremacy. Democratic politicians found an effective way to synthesize their party’s appeal to two disparate groups, the northern working class and the southern planter class. They declared that solicitude for southern slaves distracted attention from the plight of northern “wage-slaves,” who, they insisted, were actually worse off. The artisan radical John Finch declared it a “well-known fact that the blacks of the South enjoy more leisure time and liberty and fare quite as well as the operatives in the northern or eastern manufacturing districts.” Boston’s Democratic labor leader Theophilus Fisk called upon “the philanthropist and christian to advocate and demand the immediate emancipation of the white slaves of the North.” Orestes Brownson, one of the Democratic Party’s most influential intellectuals, admonished abolitionists to redirect their efforts: “You have enough work for all your philanthropy north of Mason and Dixon’s line.”
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Only rarely did anyone make what might seem the obvious point that sympathy for exploited northern workers did not preclude compassion for oppressed southern slaves; when William Leggett tried to do so, the Democratic Party shut him down. Not even Fanny Wright combined the two causes. Once she began seeking audiences of workingmen, she phased out her antislavery activity, denounced the abolitionists as sanctimonious hypocrites, and embraced the party of Jackson and Van Buren.
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The journeymen mechanics’ political movement was white, male, Protestant, and skilled, and certainly not immune to appeals based on race, gender, and religion. White workers generally regarded black workers, whether free or enslaved, as unfair competitors and forbade them to join their associations.
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Toward the institution of slavery white mechanics manifested deep ambivalence. On the one hand, slavery associated manual labor with servility, thereby degrading white workers. But wage-earners in the free states, native and immigrant alike, also worried that emancipated slaves might flock north, depressing wages and living conditions. The northern Democratic Party proved adept at manipulating these feelings.
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Nevertheless, the loyalty of northern industrial labor to the Democratic Party was never entirely sure (except for the Irish). Over the years some workingmen repeatedly jumped ship to support other movements, among them the Locofoco dissidents, homesteads, nativism, Free Soil, and finally the nascent Republican Party.

The Locofocos emerged within the workingmen’s wing of the Democratic Party in New York City, but they did not always support trade unionism and should not be confused with the Working Men’s Parties.
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They got their name from a meeting on October 29, 1835, in Tammany Hall, New York Democratic headquarters even then. The party regulars nominated their slate of candidates for the coming municipal election and declared the meeting adjourned; when disaffected workers’ delegates tried to prolong the meeting in order to contest the outcome, the organization turned out the gaslights. But the insurgents had come prepared with candles and newly invented sulfur friction matches, called “locofocos” (or “lucifers”). Able to proceed with their meeting, they fielded a slate of their own candidates, though the regular Democrats still won the ensuing election. By 1837, the Locofocos had gained enough concessions from the regulars to return to the party fold, while retaining an identity of their own.
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Though sarcastically called “locos” (“mad” in Spanish) by their critics, the Locofocos took pride in their name.

III

Lucy Larcom and Sarah Bagley both went to work in the Lowell mills to help out their families. Lucy—a precocious, literary child, dutiful and hardworking—was only twelve when, in 1836, she became a “doffer” of bobbins. Her widowed mother ran one of the many boardinghouses in town. A decade later Lucy departed for Illinois to become a schoolteacher; she eventually gained a modest living and greater fame as a writer. The account she left of her years at Lowell emphasizes the positive, though at the time she hated the confinement, noise, and lint-filled air, and regretted the time lost to education.
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(Like Lucy Larcom, my own mother, Lucie Walker, became a doffer at age twelve to help with the family budget. She worked at a carpet factory in Halifax, Yorkshire, during the First World War and had very much the same complaints.)

Sarah Bagley, on the other hand, was already an adult when she entered the mills in 1837. There she organized the Lowell Female Reform Association, in effect a labor union with broad social concerns; she allied with male labor leaders in the struggle for a ten-hour day. To the argument that the mill girls had voluntarily accepted a twelve-hour day, she replied:

(These illustrations of typical mill girls’ motives do not include the need to feed themselves or their children, reminding us that they were single and came from farms.) In 1846, Sarah Bagley became America’s first woman telegraph operator. But when she tried to join the utopian community at Northampton in 1848, they turned her down, perhaps put off by her abrasive manner. In the end, the mill owners responded to the growing militancy of Yankee women by recruiting more of the Irish immigrant women who had a weaker bargaining position.
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Despite Sarah Bagley’s insistence that mill girls were driven by necessity, the pre-eminent historian of Lowell concludes that the working experience there fostered autonomy, analogous to the experience of young men moving to the frontier or the city. For all their differences, Larcom and Bagley concurred in emphasizing the dignity of the female operatives, manifested (all observers agreed with surprise) in how well the mill girls dressed. As they earned their own money and became less dependent on their menfolk, the women’s self-respect increased, a process both Larcom and Bagley encouraged. Both grounded their reformist social views in the Christian tradition. Although often contrasted with each other, very likely what the two women agreed on was more important.
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Most workers in the new industrial world did not come to it from artisan shops and did not therefore use the shop as a basis for comparison. There had been few women artisans, yet women constituted more than a third of workers in manufacturing during the 1830s; in textiles the figure was 80 percent.
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Where some journeymen had been attracted (briefly) to Working Men’s political parties, more typically industrial wage-earners, whether former artisans or not, formed labor unions. During the burgeoning prosperity of the Jackson years, prices increased faster than wages, prompting some employees to organize and even strike. Unions attracted attention more because of their novelty than because of their numbers. The most reliable estimate of the size of the Jacksonian labor movement puts union membership at 44,000—about 2.5 percent of the nonagricultural free labor force. In 1830, the New York–Brooklyn metropolitan area, with a population of 218,000, held 11,500 union members.
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Besides wage demands, a movement to limit working hours to ten a day gathered support. The rigid work discipline enforced in factories seemed onerous to people accustomed to the more elastic hours of preindustrial production; punctuality, for example, was more critical in a factory than it had been in an artisan shop. We should not forget, however, that nature imposes strict temporal imperatives on farmers: A crop must be planted and harvested on time; the cows must be milked on schedule. Plantations operated with slave labor were even more “mastered by the clock” than farms using free labor.
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The widespread distribution of clocks in rural America demonstrated not only an achievement of manufacturing and distribution but also the time-consciousness of the consumers. In general, employees with prior experience as mechanics showed more inclination to strike than did workers who came off the farms.

Labor strife became particularly sharp in Pennsylvania, where workers in textiles, coal, and iron included many English immigrants who brought with them memories of labor militancy, of machine-breaking and Lancashire trade unionism.
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In the most impressive labor action of the period, Philadelphia workers united in a general strike (then called a “turnout”) that included not only mechanics of many skills from blacksmiths to bakers but also the unskilled coal heavers on the docks, clerks in the dry-goods stores, and municipal employees. Within three weeks of June 1835, the strikers had won a ten-hour day across the board. (A typical ten-hour day of the time ran from six to six, with an hour off for breakfast and an hour for “dinner” in the early afternoon).
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Strikes constituted illegal conspiracies under common law, exposing labor union members to criminal prosecution. Sometimes local authorities called out the militia to intimidate strikers, as New York’s Democratic mayor Cornelius Lawrence did in February 1836. At the state level, labor law gradually began to be mitigated through both legislation and judicial decisions. New Hampshire in 1847 and Pennsylvania in 1848 were the first states to enact maximum-hours laws. The case of
Commonwealth v. Hunt,
decided in 1842, attracted considerable attention. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts there ruled that the Boston Society of Journeymen Bootmakers was not a criminal conspiracy and that its members had the right to press for what we would call a closed shop. Shaw declared labor unions to be as legitimate as other kinds of voluntary associations (he compared them to temperance organizations). Other jurisdictions did not necessarily accept his line of reasoning, however, and management retained the right to seek court injunctions against strikes.
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With their option to strike limited, workers might simply quit. Through the 1820s and ’30s, turnover remained high among the early industrial labor force. In response, textile mills tried to get employees to sign yearlong contracts. Such contracts were common in agriculture to prevent workers from demanding high pay during harvest season. Under the law of the time, employers could refuse to pay a worker anything unless the entire contract was fulfilled. Apprentices under the age of twenty-one and immigrants who had contracted to work in return for their passage could be prosecuted under the criminal law if they quit in violation of their indentures; this legal rule diminished in importance as apprenticeships declined and indentured servitude disappeared in the 1830s. In practice, the depression of the Van Buren years curtailed the option to quit. When unemployment rose, workers became less mobile and more grateful for jobs under almost any terms. And though prosperity returned in the mid-1840s, impoverished Irish immigrants began arriving in large numbers, undercutting labor’s bargaining position again. Despite struggles and sacrifices, the labor movement enjoyed very limited success in antebellum labor disputes.
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One small achievement for labor came thanks to President Van Buren: By executive order he mandated a ten-hour day for laborers on federal public works (March 11, 1840). Resisting pleas from some northern Democratic leaders like John L. O’Sullivan to create jobs for the unemployed, Van Buren permitted himself only this more modest gesture toward workingmen.
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His action probably helped win some votes for the Democratic Party, though it did not apply to all federal wage-earners. Treasury Secretary McLane reported in 1832 that the average working day in manufacturing was eleven hours and twenty minutes. By the eve of the Civil War it had fallen to ten hours and thirty minutes.
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Labor for the American industrial revolution came not only from former artisans, surplus farm workers, and immigrants from overseas. Industry also exploited slave labor where available. Although the antebellum South never developed a large textile industry (and sometimes used free white labor in the mills it had), the region did not lack other industrial uses for enslaved labor. Southern employers preferred slave labor in coal, iron, and gold mines, salt works, grist mills, lumber mills, rope factories, sugar refineries, tobacco processing, leather tanning, turpentine extraction, housing construction, and railroad building. The most extensive industrial use of slave labor occurred in the Tredegar Iron Works at Richmond, Virginia. In 1842, Joseph Reid Anderson, the “commercial agent” (chief operating officer) of the company, began a program to train slaves for the most highly skilled work in the mill: “puddling.” Five years later, when he was about to turn over a new rolling mill to the now fully trained slave puddlers, the white workers went out on strike in protest, but to no avail. Anderson fired the strikers and replaced them with slaves, and within three years two-thirds of his labor force was owned by the company.
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In years to come, the Tredegar Iron Works would play an important role in the Confederate armaments industry.