The Dawning of American Labor

The New Republic to the Industrial Age

Brian Greenberg

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781119065708
  9781119065685
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119065555
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A concise history of labor and work in America from the birth of the Republic to the Industrial Age and beyond

From the days of Thomas Jefferson, Americans believed that they could sustain a capitalist industrial economy without the class conflict or negative socioeconomic consequences experienced in Europe. This dream came crashing down in 1877 when the Great Strike, one of the most militant labor disputes in US history, convulsed the nation's railroads. In The Dawning of American Labor a leading scholar of American labor history draws upon first-hand accounts and the latest scholarship to offer a fascinating look at how Americans perceived and adapted to the shift from a largely agrarian economy to one dominated by manufacturing.

For the generations following the Great Strike, "the Labor Problem" and the idea of class relations became a critical issue facing the nation. As Professor Greenberg makes clear in this lively, highly accessible historical exploration, the 1877 strike forever cast a shadow across one of the most deeply rooted articles of national faith—the belief in American exceptionalism. What conditions produced the faith in a classless society? What went wrong? These questions lie at the heart of The Dawning of American Labor.

• Provides a concise, comprehensive, and completely up-to-date synthesis of the latest scholarship on the early development of industrialization in the United States
• Considers how working people reacted, both in the workplace and in their communities, as the nation's economy made its shift from an agrarian to an industrial base
• Includes a formal Bibliographical Essay—a handy tool for student research
• Works as a stand-alone text or an ideal supplement to core curricula in US History, US Labor, and 19th-Century America

Accessible introductory text for students in American history classes and beyond, The Dawning of American Labor is an excellent introduction to the history of labor in the United States for students and general readers of history alike.

CHAPTER ONE
Artisans in the New Republic, 1787–1825

The Artisan Workplace

During the early the morning hours of July 4, 1788, Philadelphia’s merchants and manufacturers, among other prominent citizens, marched in a “Grand Federal Procession” to commemorate the ratification of the Constitution. With only slight exaggeration, Dr. Benjamin Rush heralded the unity of the day: “Rank for a while forgot all its claims, and Agriculture, Commerce and Manufactures, together with the learned and mechanical Professions, seemed to acknowledge by their harmony and respect for each other, that they were all necessary to each other, and all useful in a cultivated society.” Sixty crafts and trades in Philadelphia took part in the celebration, marching behind carriages that depicted the city’s artisan workshops. Almost every other major city in the United States held similar processions to mark the occasion. The Revolutionary War era historian Alfred Young has characterized these civic festivals as “the first ‘labor’ parades in American history.” On this day, few appeared to question that the United States would be a society of equal and productive free men.

Figure 1.1 Banner of the Society of Pewterers carried during New York City’s Federal Procession celebrating the ratification of the Constitution, July 23, 1788. Silk and paint; including frame, 92 × 120 × 2 3/4 in. (object #1903.12).

Courtesy of New‐York Historical Society.

By the time of the Constitution, artisans in the nation’s port cities were fashioning a variety of consumer goods that were sold locally. An artisan or master was an individual trained in a craft such as tanning hides, barrel making (coopering), or printing. Artisans provided the skills required for the growth of cities. In Philadelphia, for example, artisans accounted for half of the city’s workforce. Artisans also produced the tools used by farmers to work the land. A typical master owned his own shop, in which he worked with one or two journeymen, as well as with a number of apprentices aged between fourteen and twenty‐one. But the master’s role in the artisan system was based on his knowledge of the craft, not on his ownership of the means of production.

Producing custom‐made goods that sold for high prices in what was called the “bespoke trade” enabled these craftsmen to secure a decent standard of living, or what was usually spoken of as a “competency” – the attainment of an independent estate of simple comforts. As Philadelphia’s skilled craftsmen put it in a petition, “[T]he far greater number of us have been contented to live decently,” knowing that “our professions rendered us useful and necessary members of the community, proud of that rank, we aspired no higher.” Work was essential to the artisan’s independence and to the general well‐being of the community.

Figure 1.2 An eighteenth‐century pewterer’s shop. From Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–72).

Courtesy of ARTFL.

Yet, as the new century opened, expanding markets had a dramatic impact on the nature of workplace relations, especially in the nation’s industrial cities and towns. For example, John Bedford, Philadelphia’s largest shoemaker, facing economic ruin in 1800 as his local sales declined and his inventories built up, traveled south in search of new markets in which he could distribute large quantities of cheaply made shoes. In Charleston, South Carolina, Bedford contracted orders in excess of $4,000 for his shoes. But, once back in Philadelphia, he was confronted by irate workmen who went out on strike after he refused their demands for an increase in their wages. As a result, Bedford was forced to default on some of the orders he had secured. By 1800 small‐scale manufacturing had also become common in single‐industry towns like Lynn, Massachusetts. Under the handicraft system of production, master craftsmen in and around Lynn had begun producing shoes for individual customers as early as the 1760s. Known as “ten footers,” Lynn’s more than sixty artisan shops were usually located either in a room at the back of the master’s house or in a small building attached to it.

Figure 1.3 The interior and exterior of an eighteenth‐century cordwainer’s ten‐footer shop. From Horace Greeley et al., The Great Industries of the United States: Being an Historical Summary of the Origin, Growth, and Perfection of the Chief Industrial Arts of This Country (Hartford, CT: J. B. Burr, 1872), p. 1254.

The Political Economy of Early America

In the early years of the new republic, few leading Americans disputed the need to develop domestic manufacturing as a means of reducing US economic dependence on Great Britain. Nevertheless, debate raged over both the sites and the scale of the manufactures and over whose economic interests would prevail. For Tench Coxe, an enthusiastic promoter of early American industrial growth who served as assistant to the secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, the endless potential of America’s vast natural resources would remain forever untapped without manufacturing. Under Hamilton’s guiding hand, Coxe’s “Plan for a Manufacturing Society” led, in 1791, to the creation of the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SUM), a government‐promoted attempt to harness private capital on behalf of developing a “National Manufactory,” a model industrial town to be built in New Jersey.

Hamilton’s and Coxe’s ambitious plans to encourage manufacturing aroused intense opposition. One influential opponent, George Logan, a prominent Philadelphia Quaker physician and agrarian democrat, led the forces arrayed against the National Manufactory. In 1792, in the pages of the American Museum, Coxe and Logan squared off in a debate over the SUM. Logan attacked the National Manufactory as a “dangerous scheme” that threatened the nation’s republican order. Fearful of any activity that would encourage citizen dependence on government or worker dependence on another individual for economic well‐being, Logan supported decentralized, small‐scale manufacturing, either in urban craft shops or in households scattered across the countryside. Logan and other critics of the SUM endorsed a small‐producer tradition that encompassed a faith in the social utility of skilled labor, an expectation of moderate prosperity or competence for workers, and an intense commitment to equality and community.

Both Coxe and Logan understood that each member of society should also be a stakeholder in it. Both men regarded independence as the key, although they defined the concept differently. For Coxe, independence meant providing the United States with a balanced and interdependent economy that included manufacturing. He believed that the social and moral dangers inherent in industrialism, especially the formation of a dependent wage‐earning class, could be avoided through both the employment of immigrants, poor women, and children and the introduction of power‐driven, labor‐saving machinery. For Logan, only an agrarian‐based economy that included small‐scale household manufactures would preserve the dream of American exceptionalism.

Coxe was, of course, sensitive to agrarian objections to the growth of manufactures. He insisted that the introduction of manufacturing would not upset the natural balance of employment. The objection that manufacturing takes male farm laborers from agriculture was not “solid,” he declared, since “women, children, horses, water and fire” perform four‐fifths of the labor in manufactories. As he repeatedly asserted, “our people must not be diverted from their farms.” More to the point, Coxe expressed an almost unlimited faith in the labor‐saving capability of mechanization. The concern expressed about manufacturing being unhealthy was, he observed, “urged principally against carding, spinning and weaving, which formerly were entirely manual and sedentary occupations.” Instead, it is “our plan” that machines using “the potent elements of fire and water” become “our daily labourers.” In 1813, expanding on their labor‐saving capabilities, Coxe wrote that “these wonderful machines, working as if they were animated beings … may be justly considered as equivalent to an immense body of manufacturing recruits, enlisted in the service of the country.” Coxe anticipated that continued improvements in the “construction and application of machines” would mitigate the high cost of labor in America.

The labor force that Coxe foresaw working in the factories – women and children, the poor, and immigrants – would also mitigate another “principal objection” to manufacturing in America, the alleged scarcity of skilled labor in the United States. The model, according to Coxe, was England, where, with waterpower and machines, “a few hundred women and children” performed the work of twelve hundred carders and spinners. “Justice, policy, and benevolence ought to excite us” to adopt a similar system in the United States. “Every city man is taught a trade or calling; every country man is taught the same or to plough, harrow, sow, and thresh. Every city and country woman should be taught to card, spin, weave, and dye.” A few years before the founding of the SUM, Coxe had encouraged the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and Useful Arts (PSEMUA) to open a mechanized spinning mill in Philadelphia that would provide employment for the poor while, coincidentally, demonstrating “the importance of cotton manufactures to this country … as a source both of private and public wealth.” The labor force working in the PSEMUA’s textile mill was mostly female, and the mill’s network of spinners in the city and surrounding countryside was entirely so.

Yet, in contrast to Coxe’s rosy view, many Americans of the founding fathers’ generation expected the consequences of further manufacturing growth in the United States to reproduce the same malignant social and moral conditions, as symbolized by Manchester’s “dark Satanic Mills,” that they saw afflicting England. Thomas Jefferson declared that the present “manufactures of the great cities in the old country” produced “a depravity of morals, a dependence and corruption, which renders them an undesirable accession to a country whose morals are sound.” Large‐scale manufacturing would produce an army of dependent workers that would be corrosive of republican virtue. Referring to manufacturing, Jefferson observed, “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” Jefferson’s own best hope for America rested instead on promoting a self‐reliant and independent citizenry through husbandry.

In this respect sounding very much like Jefferson, Coxe too worried about the corrosive influence of dependence, but he saw a solution in the expansion of employment through manufacturing. Coxe told those gathered to launch the PSEMUA that “extreme poverty and idleness in the citizens of a free government will ever produce vicious habits and disobedience to the laws, and must render the people fit instruments for the dangerous purposes of ambitious men. In this light the employment of our poor in manufactures, who cannot find other honest means of a subsistence, is of the utmost consequence.” Coxe counted the inculcation of proper habits in the poor as a primary benefit of manufacturing. An “idler” was “ever prone to wickedness,” whereas “habits of industry” filled the mind “with honest thoughts” by “requiring the time for better purposes.” Industriousness leaves little leisure “for meditating or executing mischief.” “All is the gift of industry,” Coxe wrote. “Among individuals it is the supreme virtue; and, when well ordered and duly regulated, it is the only criterion of a good and wise government.” In The Mills of Manayunk: Industrialization and Social Conflict in the Philadelphia Region, 1787–1837, Cynthia Shelton notes that, in employing the labor of the poor, the PSEMUA mill, much like other early textile manufactures in Philadelphia, was modeled on English and colonial workhouses. In this way, the PSEMUA functioned like a public agency, encouraging the development of industrious habits and self‐discipline.

Coxe’s appointment in May 1790 as assistant secretary of the treasury was due in part to Alexander Hamilton’s desire to have on his staff someone with the ability to defend him in print against his detractors and in part to Hamilton’s willingness to respond to political pressure put on him by Coxe’s allies. Having been enjoined by Congress in January 1790 to produce a report on manufacturing, Hamilton turned over to Coxe responsibility for collecting the necessary data. Although Hamilton would eventually come to regret this appointment, his collaboration with Coxe reached a high point in 1791, the year that the Hamilton Report on Manufactures was issued and the SUM was founded.

Called “the most ambitious industrial experiment in early American history,” the SUM received a charter on November 22, 1791, from the New Jersey legislature. Overall direction of the society was entrusted to its board of directors, and the supervision of its operations to a governor, William Duer, a wealthy New York speculator. Besides being granted the usual powers of a manufacturing corporation, the SUM was given banking privileges, generous tax exemptions, and the corporate powers of a city. Within a month, shares in the society to the value of $625,000 had been subscribed (although not fully paid in). In May 1792, after three society meetings and some wrangling, a site on the Great Falls of Passaic was chosen and named Paterson, in honor of the then governor of New Jersey.

Although the society had been chartered to make any commodity it wanted, at the May meeting the SUM’s manufacturing committee adopted a resolution “to erect a cotton‐mill, also buildings for carrying on calico‐printing, with requisite machinery, together with buildings to accommodate workmen.” Appropriations were made of $20,000 for the construction of a canal, $5,000 for the cotton factory and machinery, $12,000 for the print works, and $5,000 for the weave shop and equipment. The committee agreed, as well, on plans to complete the town, including a plan to construct fifty dwellings, on quarter‐acre lots, for employees. Organizers anticipated little trouble finding an available workforce from among unemployed people, or rather, according to Peter Colt, second superintendent of the SUM, those “people who are not fully employed – and an abundance of women and children, who are without regular useful employment.”

The society proudly announced in June 1794 its completion of “a large mill for spinning cotton by water‐power.” The celebrations in Paterson for the opening of the mill included a great parade and a ball given in the factory. Despite the high hopes aroused by these early efforts, the society was already in financial trouble. The SUM was never able to secure adequate capital, at least in part because of a financial panic that, in the spring of 1792, landed Duer in debtors’ prison. Nor were the problems only financial ones. The National Manufactory also suffered from poor management, labor shortages, and, at times, insufficient power from the Great Falls. In January 1796 the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• LIST OF FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PROLOGUE: American Exceptionalism and the Great Strike of 1877
• CHAPTER ONE: Artisans in the New Republic, 1787–1825
• CHAPTER TWO: Labor in the Age of Jackson, 1825–1843
• CHAPTER THREE: The Industrial Worker in Free Labor America
• CHAPTER FOUR: From the Civil War to the Panic of 1873
• EPILOGUE: A Tradition of Labor Protest Persists
• BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
• INDEX
• End User License Agreement