There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  When workingmen gathered in Boston in June 1845, Bagley was there to speak for the daughters of New England, standing beneath a banner she had presented to the men that proclaimed UNION FOR POWER—POWER TO BLESS HUMANITY. “For the last half a century,” she said, “it has been deemed a violation of woman’s sphere to appear before the public as a speaker; but when our rights are trampled upon and we appeal in vain to legislators, what shall we do but appeal to the people?” Promising the cooperation of the female operatives of Lowell, she told the men, to warm applause, “may no differences ever arise to check the great work so well commenced.”92

  The women brought a distinctive touch to labor reform, capably staging social events and fund-raisers with speakers, bands, and singing groups, as well as hosting a lecture series that brought to Lowell notables, including Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison, and the attorney Robert Rantoul Jr., hero of the Massachusetts legal case Commonwealth v. Hunt, which had challenged the courts’ denial of the workers’ right to form unions. Their entry into the Ten-Hour struggle, however, much as the Lowell turnouts of the 1830s, was viewed uncharitably by the mill owners; some were threatened with the blacklist. “What!” exclaimed Bagley,

  deprive us, after working thirteen hours, of the poor privilege of finding fault—of saying our lot is a hard one! Intentionally turn away a girl unjustly persecuted … for free expression of honest political opinions! We will make the name of him who dares the act stink with every wind, from all points of the compass … he shall be hissed in the streets, and in all the cities of this widespread republic; for our name is legion though our oppression is great.

  Bagley’s words appeared in the labor periodical the Voice of Industry (devoted to “the abolition of Mental, Moral, and Physical Servitude”) because she’d fallen out with her former colleagues at the journal Lowell Offering, who had spurned as too radical articles Bagley had recently submitted. She took the rejection poorly, indicting the literary journal as willfully blind to the need for agitation. “Led on by the fatal error of neutrality, [it] has neglected the operative as a working being,” Bagley wrote. “The very position of the Offering as a factory girls’ magazine precludes the possibility of neutrality.”93

  The Ten-Hour movement’s objective remained elusive, but the militancy stirred by the cause was about to claim its first victim. The Lowell Offering had come to represent, in Bagley’s eyes, “the mincing prudery, the saccharine pieties, and the rest of the Victorian nonsense then considered suitable for female readers,” according to Harriet Robinson.94 While the Offering let itself be used as a prop so the owners “could convince the world that factory girls can write sentimental tales,” alleged the Voice, the actual workers had “discovered an inherent evil in the present organized system of factory labor, which like gangrene is secretly eating away upon the physical and mental constitutions of a large portion of our people.”95

  The high point of the dispute came when Bagley lambasted the Offering before an audience of two thousand at an outdoor gathering at Woburn, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1845. After alluding to her years of service in the mills, Bagley accused the Offering and its editors of misrepresenting the truth about the hardship of the workers’ lives and glossing over the mill owners’ inhumanity. “Miss S.G. Bagley of Lowell, so spell-bound [the] large auditory … that the rustling of the leaves might be heard playing softly with the wind between the intervals of speech,” noted one account. After vowing that she and other mill workers would intensify their fight for ten hours, Bagley “took her seat amidst the loud and unanimous huzzas of the deep-moved throng.”96 When the Offering’s editor, Harriet Farley, defended herself against Bagley’s harangue in the pages of the Lowell Courier, Bagley denied she had meant to abuse Farley personally, but couldn’t resist one pointed thrust, advising, “I have not the least objection to a controversy with Miss Farley, although she has literary talents to which I lay no claim; but I have facts, and that is better.”97

  Given the intense feeling growing in New England industry over workplace conditions and hours, Bagley made a strong argument that Lowell workers should no longer be represented by a “literary repository” that tended to “varnish over the evils, wrongs, and privations of factory life.”98 Badly stung and unable to shed the barbs launched into its flanks, the Offering, so recently the pride of the Lowell Miracle, struggled on briefly, then ceased publication. “Whatever the overblown claims of patrons or admirers,” historian Benita Eisler points out, “the Offering itself [was], finally, as modest as its title suggests … ultimately it could not survive when its basic worldview had been shattered.”99

  SETH LUTHER HAD LEFT New England in 1817 to wander and work his way across the West and the South. The young pioneer, still in his early twenties, was deeply impressed by the rough-hewn egalitarianism of the frontier, where nature played no favorites and each man proved his worth. It was fifteen years before he returned to New England and he was aghast at what he found: the so-called civilized Northeast had succumbed to the evils and injustices of the industrial system.100 His indignation can perhaps best be understood by considering the region’s socioeconomy. Unlike the plantation South, the Northern United States historically had less amassed capital, and as a result the lines between social classes were not broadly demarcated. When, with industrialization, factory owners emerged as a powerful new force in society—Sarah Bagley called them “the mushroom aristocracy of New England”—the new hegemony felt wrong, un-American, especially to citizens like Luther, son of a Revolutionary War veteran.

  Taking pen to paper, he produced a forcefully argued paper, An Address to the Working Men of New England, published in 1832, that averred that the rights of American workers had been secured “by the blood of our fathers, shed on our battlefield in the War of Revolution.”101 Luther drew inspiration from 1776, as did most of his working-class peers; but he went further, insisting that the Revolution would remain unfinished so long as a class of industrialists subjugated their fellow Americans. “The Workingmen bared their arms and bosoms in ’76, and they are about to do it again in ’36,” he vowed.102

  Equally offensive to Luther was the courts’ continuing suppression of labor unions. Common law tradition dating back at least to the early eighteenth century perceived trade unionism as an illegal “combination,” since workers leveraging their demands in an organized way, as in a strike, would unjustly impact commerce by threatening profits and hindering competition. Yet clearly the advent of large manufacturing concerns with workforces of several hundred men and women, as at Lowell, made recognition of workers’ collectivization inevitable. “Men of property find no fault with combinations to extinguish fires and to protect their precious persons from danger,” Luther pointed out. “But if poor men ask justice, it is a most horrible combination. The Declaration of Independence was the work of a combination, and was as hateful to the traitors and Tories of those days, as combinations among workingmen are now to the avaricious monopolist and purse-proud aristocrat.”103 He asserted that the very vehemence with which unions were attacked on grounds of conspiracy was sound argument for workers to seek sanctuary in a trade union.104

  The issue had been at the center of a well-known case in Philadelphia in 1806, when eight boot-makers were indicted for having formed a combination and conspiracy. At trial, the prosecution asserted that the boot-makers belonged to an organization that conspired to demand higher wages and to injure their employer’s business by withholding their labor; they also were accused of threatening other shoemakers who would fill their jobs and of agreeing among themselves not to work for any employer whose hiring or wage-paying practices violated their group’s rules. The boot-makers were, in other words, behaving as would a labor union. In court, the defense showed that the wage increases demanded were not out of line with rates paid elsewhere, and that the boot-makers society had existed for fifteen years and was accepted by most employers as an association whose aim was the betterment of shoemakers’ lives. It was als
o pointed out by the defense that the employers themselves had “conspired” by agreeing on mutual protection and the setting of prices. More technically, the defense noted that labor unions in England were prohibited by statute from demanding a wage higher than that fixed by law, while no such statutes existed in Pennsylvania. Wages were a matter between employer and worker.

  The boot-makers failed to overcome the court’s bias against labor combinations; unfortunately, the Philadelphia decision became the precedent in law for several decades, leading to as many as twenty indictments in the United States against similar groups of workers. The situation grew increasingly intolerable. In 1834, several thousand Boston journeymen and wage employees—masons, shipwrights, rope makers, printers, and bakers, among others—ignored prevailing judicial sentiment to create a citywide workers’ trade union. After all, Frederick Robinson, a Massachusetts state legislator from Marblehead, asserted, “How can an unaided individual without wealth, without education, ignorant of the world, and even of the value of his own labor, who must command immediate employment or starve, enjoy this right as an individual right. If he enjoy it at all, the interests of others engaged in the same or other employments must secure it for him.”105

  A Boston court took up a reconsideration of the issue in 1842 in the case of Commonwealth v. Hunt, which like the earlier Philadelphia case involved boot-makers. Jeremiah Horne, a member of the Boston Society of Journeymen Bootmakers, had performed some extra work for his employer, Isaac Waite, without pay. This went against the Journeymen’s rules and Horne was fined one dollar. When he refused to honor the fine, his fellow workers threatened to walk off the job unless Waite fired him. Waite, seeking to avoid trouble with his workers, offered to cover Horne’s fine, but when Horne refused, Waite had no choice but to dismiss him to keep the peace with the Bootmakers. Horne denounced the society in rather explicit terms, so irritating the members, they insisted that for full reinstatement the deviant would have to pay $6 in addition to his fine as punishment for slandering the group. Horne then filed a complaint with the district attorney, who leveled a charge of criminal conspiracy against John Hunt, president of the Bootmakers.

  The society’s lawyer, Robert Rantoul Jr., who had once represented Gloucester in the state legislature, insisted the group had done nothing harmful or illegal, and vowed a spirited defense. Rantoul came from a family of reformers—his father had helped found Unitarianism in America and had started the nation’s first Sunday school—and the son was a staunch believer in free education and workers’ rights.106 A few years earlier, when a conspiracy conviction against organized tailors in New York City led to a near riot and the burning of the deciding magistrate in effigy, the younger Rantoul had denounced publicly the lie that trade unions were conspiracies.107

  Things at first did not auger well for Rantoul’s arguments in Commonwealth v. Hunt. The initial case was presided over by Judge Peter O. Thacher, a jurist so unfriendly to labor he had once listed trade unions as societal evils along with “mobs, insurrections, and other civil commotions.”108 The trial began with employer Isaac Waite’s testimony that the workmen’s organization posed no harm, and thus hardly represented a criminal conspiracy; other witnesses representing local employers told the court the Society of Journeymen Bootmakers had, if anything, exerted a positive effect on employees, motivating better work habits and encouraging temperance. Thacher, however, instructed the jury that labor combinations would “convulse the social system to its center,” making “a frightful despotism” of “this happy and free commonwealth.”109

  Rantoul begged the court to ignore the great volume of judicial anti-labor precedents as ill-adapted to the current times. The Bootmakers, he insisted, could hardly be defined as an illegal organization; only its acts could be so viewed if they were criminal in effect or intent. He argued that the states had not adopted English common law (“they were part of the English tyranny from which we fled”), and that, unlike the English legal precedents, there were no laws in America fixing wages that one could conspire to violate. He also, in a clever courtroom maneuver, managed to forbid any testimony from Jeremiah Horne on the basis that Horne was an avowed atheist. The strong-willed Thacher nonetheless pushed the jury toward a finding of guilty.110

  Rantoul appealed the decision to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, where the case came before the influential Lemuel Shaw, a veteran jurist who, like Thacher, was known to be inimical to trade union combinations. Shaw had recently handed down a ruling that employers were not responsible for a worker’s workplace injuries if it could be shown that another employee was partly at fault. Rantoul and the Bootmakers were not optimistic to go before Shaw, but to their surprise the judge showed considerable sympathy for Rantoul’s arguments. He agreed that the English legal precedents regarding conspiracy were noncontrolling, and that in the new, more interconnected and competitive market ruled by free trade, both business and workers’ associations would arise. While conceding that, in a free market, the actions of a labor union might have injurious effects, Shaw thought the means and objectives of the union were not themselves illegal. Workers, Shaw granted, had the right to organize and deny employers their labor, so long as they did not violate work contracts and went about their affairs peaceably. He went on to suggest that the pressures brought by labor unions amounted to a form of competition that likely benefited the public.111 Just as a commercial enterprise would never be charged with conspiracy for selling a product more cheaply than another, and perhaps driving that competitor out of business, no labor union could be accused of ruining their employers through a legitimate pursuit of fair wages or better working conditions.

  To the main point of whether a labor association was itself criminal, Shaw declared that in order to qualify as a conspiracy, a combination would either have to have as its goal “to accomplish some criminal or unlawful purpose, or to accomplish some purpose, not in itself criminal or unlawful, by criminal or unlawful means.”112 Thus, unless a trade union was formed with hostile or threatening intent, or turned to criminal methods, it could not be a conspiracy. In the case of Jeremiah Horne and the Society of Bootmakers, there was clearly nothing criminal about an organization seeking to exact fines from its members.

  It seems likely that Shaw, by reputation suspicious of labor unions, was moved to change course not solely by Rantoul’s words but by the clear perception that industrialism and the end of the old master-apprentice system had created a need for workers’ organizations. The social and political clout of such entities was growing stronger. “Since it was obvious that open suppression of labor unions by the judiciary would not endure for long, and that the prestige of the judiciary would suffer in the eyes of organized labor,” historian Elias Lieberman comments, “it was imperative to find a legal basis for tolerating the existence of labor unions.”113 Whatever the precise motivations, Judge Shaw chose to see the young country’s diversity of opinions, even the push and pull between labor and capital, as healthy, not threatening.

  For its legitimization of labor unions Commonwealth v. Hunt is sometimes termed the “Magna Carta of American trade-unionism.”114 The decision gave unions a legal leg on which to stand, surely, and was soon copied in other states, although it reserved the possibility that certain behaviors by unions could be judged criminal, thus leaving an opening for determined prosecutors.

  IN SEPTEMBER 1845, Sarah Bagley and other women of the LFLRA took an important step, traveling from New England to attend a mass meeting of the Ten-Hour movement in Pittsburgh, where a labor newspaper described them as “white slaves of capital employed in cotton factories … pale poor looking creatures whose health has been undermined by the slavish toil that makes their employers wealthy.”115 The Ten-Hour cause had reached across trades as well as state and regional boundaries, and its emergence as a national labor campaign marked a notable advance. Among the strategies discussed at the gathering was a possible general strike for shorter hours and the reinvigoration of petition campaigns to st
ate legislatures. The Voice of Industry announced soon after that “at Pittsburgh, Lowell, Manchester, and other places, the operatives are laying their plans, and if the Factory Lords will not voluntarily adopt the Ten-Hour System, a general turn-out will take place no later than the 4th of July, 1846.” Workers, assured the Voice, were determined “that every factory shall rot down rather than that the long-hour system shall any longer be enforced.”116 Continuing the outreach they had begun by going to Pittsburgh, Bagley and some of her colleagues traveled to Manchester, New Hampshire, in December 1845 to lead a well-attended meeting at the town hall where more than a thousand workers, chiefly women, applauded the speeches of the Lowell committee and the organizational constitution Bagley presented. Within six months the Manchester Female Labor Reform Association boasted three hundred members.117

  Meanwhile, in a coordinated effort, Bagley’s group submitted a petition bearing several thousand names of Lowell operatives (it was reportedly 130 feet in length) to the Massachusetts state legislature, demanding the official mandate of a ten-hour day. Similar efforts came from Fall River, Andover, and other manufacturing towns. The Lowell petition complained of workers

  toiling from thirteen to fourteen hours per day, confined in unhealthy apartments, exposed to the poisonous contagion of air, vegetable, animal, and mineral properties, debarred from proper physical exercise, time for mental discipline, and mastication cruelly limited; and thereby hastening us on through pain, disease, and privation, down to a premature grave.