Community was family writ large, centered in gatherings that broke the rules in both tacit and overt ways. With or without permission, slaves regularly came together for prayer and praise, for parties and dances, and for self-education. This united people who did not normally cross paths at work—field hands and artisans, household servants and industrial laborers, slaves held by different masters, and sometimes free blacks as well. When it was impossible to congregate in the open, they met in secluded corners of the woods or in cabins with shutters drawn tight. To facilitate safe travel to and from the meetings, they frequently strung grape vines across the roads to trip the patrollers’ horses. Sometimes they confronted a patrol head on. Betty Jones remembered one such incident in Virginia, when patrollers showed up at a cabin where a meeting was in progress: “Just as we heard ’em, ol’ man Jack Diggs and Charlie Dowal shoveled fire and coals right out the door on them devils. They ran from the fire we ran from them. Ain’t nobody get caught that time.”
These gatherings were subversive in other respects too. At parties slaves satirized masters and mistresses in songs, jokes, and imitations of their high-handed ways. Educational meetings took place at “midnight schools” where literate slaves taught others how to read and write. In Natchez, Mississippi, Milla Granson ran such a school for seven years and graduated hundreds of pupils, a number of whom forged travel passes and ran away to Canada. In their religious meetings slaves shared a faith starkly different from the gospel heard at the services and Sabbath schools masters arranged. There, every sermon echoed Ephesians 6:5: “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters.” But the underground slave church fostered a religion of liberation exemplified in the lyrics of spiritual songs such as,
O, gracious Lord! When shall it be,
That we poor souls shall all be free;
Lord, break them slavery powers—
Will you go along with me?
An ethic of solidarity permeated all of these activities. Participants trusted each other to keep secrets from masters and their agents; they also fostered secrecy by nurturing the independent spirit slaveholders tried so hard to kill.
The Reverend Charles Jones of Georgia, a white clergyman determined to save slaves from the sin of disobedience, was constantly frustrated by their refusals to identify wrongdoers. “Inquiry elicits no information,” he complained. “No one feels at liberty to disclose the transgressor; all are profoundly ignorant; the matter assumes the sacredness of the professional secret.” Solidarity was not seamless. Every community had traitors and informants from time to time, but solidarity was sturdy enough to support a rich network of group activities that slaveholders did not control.
These activities shaded over into more radical challenges to masters’ power and to slavery itself. At least 100,000 bondspeople escaped from slave-holding states between 1800 and 1860, and many more tried to get away. Other forms of resistance dating back to the colonial era continued as well: arson, vandalism, assaults on masters, guerilla raids by bands of runaways, and armed rebellion. Nearly every year brought news of slave revolts or conspiracies. In addition to the efforts led by Gabriel, Sancho, and Denmark Vesey, the most famous incidents included an uprising in 1811 of some 500 slaves on plantations near New Orleans and a mutiny in 1841 by slaves on the Creole, who took over the ship as it carried them down the Mississippi River and eventually reached freedom in the Bahamas.
But nothing shook the planters’ regime like the 1831 insurrection led by the field hand Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia. Turner, who had learned to read the Bible, often preached at religious meetings. As he later told a lawyer who recorded his confession, the Holy Spirit had appeared to him in 1828 and said that “I should . . . fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first shall be last and the last shall be first.” On the night of August 21, 1831, he and five disciples armed themselves and set out on a crusade against bondage. Their first blows were aimed at Turner’s master and his family, all of whom the rebels executed. As the group pushed on toward the county seat, a town named Jerusalem, more and more slaves joined the march. By the morning of August 23, when militiamen put them to flight, the rebels numbered about seventy and at least fifty-seven whites had been killed. Turner, who eluded capture for another two months, was hanged in Jerusalem on November 11. Nineteen of his comrades—including three freemen—had already been tried and hanged, and over 100 black residents of Southampton County had been massacred in retaliation for the revolt.
Following the Turner cataclysm, American slaveholders fortified the machinery of repression. There were more patrols, bigger militias, harsher pressures on abolitionists and free blacks, more brutal penalties for slaves deemed guilty of impudence. Slave communities survived nonetheless, waiting for the time when they could successfully act on the hopes expressed in their spiritual about Samson: “If I had my way, I’d tear this building down.”
WAGE WORKERS AND ACTIVISM
While cotton production dominated the South, manufacturing transformed the North. At the close of the American Revolution, about three-quarters of free people in New England and the mid-Atlantic states had lived and worked on family farms. By 1860, farm families made up just 40 percent of the population in these states, where nearly a million people now did industrial work. As manufacturing boomed, so did wage labor. Like slavery in the South, the wage system became the core institution of the northern economy, steadily supplanting other means of making a living.
Wage workers came from various backgrounds. Some were the descendants of the eighteenth century’s tiny wage labor force of maritime workers, domestic servants, and common laborers. Some others were former slaves or their descendants. Many were craftsmen from trades such as printing and shoemaking, where competition from factories was driving artisan shops out of business and foreclosing journeymen’s routes to self-employment. Wage work also absorbed numerous immigrants, especially people of Irish, German, and British descent. But by far the largest cohort were native-born men and women from farming districts plagued by land shortages, debt, and competition from midwestern agriculture.
Like slaves’ labor, wage work varied in terms and conditions. Domestic servants—the biggest occupational group among women workers—usually lived in their employers’ homes, got cash payments in addition to room and board, and had almost no time to themselves. Other wage earners typically worked twelve to fourteen hours a day with Sundays off, but pay arrangements differed from group to group. Women routinely got one-half of what men earned for comparable work. Many miners and factory workers received at least a portion of their wages in goods from a company store. Like young women employed in textile mills, railroad and canal construction laborers were often paid partly in cash and partly in room and board. Some workers, such as carpenters, bricklayers, and blacksmiths, earned a set amount for each day on the job; garment workers, printers, cigar makers, and others received “piece wages” that depended on their output.
Manufacturing was a world of contrast with regard to technology and the organization of production. By 1860, many industrial workers operated power-driven machinery in factories, but many more used hand tools and worked in small shops. Garment and shoe manufacturers still relied extensively on “outworkers”—women, children, and sometimes whole families who sewed clothing or stitched shoes at home.
Job opportunities depended on workers’ color, sex, and national origin as well as their levels of skill. Factory jobs were reserved for whites and the best-paying positions for men. Craft shops owned by whites typically employed white men only except in a few trades—printing, shoemaking, and tailoring—where white women might work alongside male kin. German and British immigrants, who usually arrived with craft skills, formed ethnic networks that gave them a leg up in the U.S. labor market. Newcomers from Ireland, most of whom lacked industrial experience, concentrated in unskilled jobs, and anti-Irish bigotry further limited their options. A typical want ad read: “WOMAN WANTED.—To do
general housework . . . English, Scotch, Welsh, German, or any country or color except Irish.”
In the end, color trumped nationality; all European immigrants found wider opportunities than African Americans. While Irish women clustered in domestic work, many had moved into factory employment by the 1850s, and Irish men had made inroads into crafts such as plumbing, carpentry, blacksmithing, and glassmaking. Black women, on the other hand, were almost wholly confined to jobs as laundresses, domestic servants, or outworkers for garment shops. Black men worked mostly as construction laborers, stevedores, sailors, waiters, or cooks, and their small numbers in skilled trades had declined as immigrants poured in. In Philadelphia, for instance, the ranks of black mechanics (both master craftsmen and journeymen) dwindled from 506 in 1838 to 286 in 1849.
Wage workers across the board shared some general problems: poverty and insecurity despite long hours of labor, driving by bosses who continually tried to get more for less, inequality under political and legal systems designed by and for the elite. In every sector of the work force, activists addressed these issues through collective action, not only unionism but many other projects too. Mutualism had boundaries, however. Specific conditions of life and labor differed sharply for men and women, skilled and unskilled, citizens and aliens, white and black;and labor activism reflected these distinctions. White citizens and craftsmen in particular—workers with the most resources and options—were the first to organize.
In December 1827, Philadelphia’s craft unions formed the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations, the first U.S. labor organization that encompassed workers from various trades. The following summer its member unions founded another first: a local Working Men’s Party that ran its own candidates for municipal and state office, calling on craftsmen to use the ballot box “to take the management of their own interests, as a class, into their own immediate keeping.” By the early 1830s similar parties had appeared in at least sixty cities and towns, from Portland, Maine, to Washington, D.C., and as far west as Cincinnati. They called for improvements in public education, for an end to compulsory militia musters, for repeal of conspiracy laws applied to unions, and for other reforms beneficial to the laboring classes. The Democratic Party soon embraced enough of these causes to coopt independent labor politics, but craftsmen continued to organize across occupational lines.
From 1833 through 1836, craft unions established central federations in thirteen cities, including New York, Philadelphia*, Boston, Albany, Pittsburgh, and Louisville. Coordinating efforts through the National Trades Union (NTU) founded in 1834, these “city centrals” spawned labor newspapers, mobilized strike support, helped to build new unions, and championed reforms workingmen’s parties had endorsed. First and foremost, they agitated and organized to reduce the standard workday from twelve or more hours to ten. While the NTU petitioned the federal government to grant its employees the ten-hour day, local activists staged strike after strike demanding the same from their bosses.
The largest of these strikes occurred in June 1835, when the Philadelphia Trades Union organized unionists from seventeen crafts to join a walkout initiated by Irish “coal heavers” who unloaded barges along the Schuylkill River. This was the first general strike in U.S. history and a resounding success. After three weeks the City Council announced that municipal workers would henceforth work ten hours a day with no reduction in pay, and private employers quickly followed suit. Inspired by Philadelphia’s example, craft unions across the mid-Atlantic states launched ten-hour strikes that summer and fall, and in most cases they won.
The National Trades Union was part of a wider uprising among white workers. As craft unions mobilized for the ten-hour day, women and unskilled men built their own organizations and struck for better pay. Women activists included tailoresses in New York City and Baltimore; shoebinders in New York, Philadelphia, and Lynn, Massachusetts; and textile operatives in Lowell. In June 1835, against the backdrop of Philadelphia’s general strike, some 500 workingwomen from various trades formed a citywide federation—the Female Improvement Society—that won wage increases for seamstresses who sewed uniforms for the U.S. Army. Among unskilled men, no one outshone Irish canal workers for militancy. They staged at least fourteen strikes in the 1830s and in January 1834 clashed with federal troops sent to put down a strike on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Maryland. New York City’s docks became a hub of strike activity in 1834–36, when sailors, stevedores, and coal heavers walked off their jobs and Irish construction laborers stopped work on nearby projects.
Employers fought the labor movement by firing and blacklisting activists and by taking unions to trial. In 1835, in a case involving a shoemakers’ union in Geneva, New York, the state’s supreme court ruled that both unions and strikes were illegal under conspiracy law. In June of the following year, twenty journeymen tailors in New York City were convicted of criminal conspiracy for striking shops that had nullified wage agreements with the tailors’ union and discharged union members. A crowd of 27,000, about a fifth of New York’s adult population, jammed into City Hall Park to protest the verdict, and their outrage reverberated through the labor press. A Philadelphia paper declared: “It is our prerogative to say what institution we will be members of, that being bequeathed to us by our forefathers—the toilworn veterans of ’76 who Nobly moistened the Soil with their Blood in defence of equal rights.” But the law clearly did not recognize workers’ right to organize, and that threatened everything the labor movement had achieved.
Following the tailors’ conviction, leaders of the National Trades Union debated the movement’s future. Some endorsed political action with an eye to repealing antiunion laws. A more radical contingent favored cooperative production, calling for the establishment of craft shops collectively owned and managed by their workers. Within months, however, the debates were moot. In spring 1837, a financial panic among bankers and speculators ushered in a seven-year depression, and mass layoffs quickly destroyed the National Trades Union, the city centrals, and nearly all unions.
Reforms the NTU had endorsed made some headway as the Democratic and Whig parties vied for working-class votes. In 1840, President Martin Van Buren endeared the Democrats to workingmen by instituting the ten-hour day for employees on federal construction projects. Not to be outdone, Whigs in command of the Massachusetts Supreme Court gave unionism a landmark legal victory in 1842. Overturning a conspiracy verdict against a bootmakers’ union in Boston, the court ruled in the case of Commonwealth v. Hunt that workers had the right to organize and strike for “useful and honorable purposes.” These concessions had limited impacts, however. Unions were so few and weak that labor conspiracy trials had virtually disappeared, and workers could not force state governments to follow Van Buren’s example.
As the depression deepened, many working people poured into the nation’s first mass movement for abstention from alcohol. In 1840, six Baltimore craftsmen who had recently sworn off drinking formed the Washington Temperance Benevolent Society to convert other men to sobriety. This crusade spread like wildfire in white working-class communities. By 1843, Washingtonian lodges had sprung up across the Northeast, and they claimed an aggregate membership of three million. The great majority of members were workingmen, though men of other classes also took part and women organized Martha Washington auxiliaries. Unlike older temperance groups sponsored by employers and churches, the Washingtonians did not moralize about drinking. They opposed it on the very practical grounds that it made hard times more difficult. Their lodges and auxiliaries dispensed aid to the down and out, hosted a steady round of parties, picnics, and other amusements, and held weekly “experience meetings” where reformed drinkers testified about the satisfactions of getting sober. When the economy recovered the movement faded, but its veterans would carry the temperance cause into many labor organizations.
The depression also fueled popular interest in projects that offered a refuge from capitalism. Workers and their families joined with middle-class re
formers to establish new communities based on communal living, collective ownership of property, and equal rights for all members. The most radical experiment was the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, which operated a farm and a silk mill in Northampton, Massachusetts. Founded by abolitionists in 1842, the Northampton Association welcomed both black and white members, including fugitive slaves. It was governed by community meetings where everyone had an equal voice. By vote of the membership, the workday at Northampton was ten hours; wages were replaced by a system of subsistence allowances and profit sharing, and those who did housework got the same pay as others. The ideas of the French socialist Charles Fourier inspired the establishment of twenty-six communes from 1843 through 1845. The first Fourierist settlement—the Sylvania Association in western Pennsylvania—was a cooperative farm organized by craftsmen from New York City and Albany.
Except for those sponsored by religious sects like the Shakers and Mennonites, cooperative settlements seldom survived for more than a few years. The main problem was lack of capital; members could not come up with enough cash to build decent housing, equip farms and workshops, and tide everyone over until the commune was self-supporting. As one veteran of the Hopedale Community in Milford, Massachusetts, explained: “The rich and well-to-do derided our scheme . . . the poor, needy, and homeless eagerly applied . . . [and] less than a third of our reliable associates had sufficient money at command to meet their own family expenses—much less to help others.”
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 9
