334 Chapter 12 The Sections Go Their Own Ways
few local officials. These organizations were made up
mostly of skilled craftsmen, professional reformers,
and even businessmen. They soon expired, destroyed
by internal bickering over questions that had little or
nothing to do with working conditions.
The depression of the late 1830s led to the
demise of most trade unions. Nevertheless, skilled
workers improved their lot somewhat in the 1840s
and 1850s. The working day declined gradually from
about twelve and a half hours to ten or eleven hours.
Many states passed ten-hour laws and laws regulating
child labor, but they were poorly enforced. Most
states, however, enacted effective mechanic’s lien
laws, giving workers first call on the assets of bank-
rupt and defaulting employers, and the Massachusetts
court’s decision in the case of Commonwealth v. Hunt
(1842), establishing the legality of labor unions,
became a judicial landmark when other state courts
followed the precedent.
The flush times of the early 1850s caused the
union movement to revive. Many strikes occurred,
and a few new national organizations appeared.
However, most unions were local institutions, weak
and with little control over their membership. The
Panic of 1857 dealt the labor movement another
body blow. Thus there was no trend toward the gen-
eral unionization of labor between 1820 and the
Civil War.
For this the workers themselves were partly
responsible: Craftsmen took little interest in
unskilled workers except to keep them down. Few
common laborers considered themselves part of a
permanent working class with different objectives
from those of their employers. Although hired
labor had existed throughout the colonial period, it
was only with the growth of factories and other
large enterprises that significant numbers of people
worked for wages. To many people, wage labor
seemed almost un-American, a violation of the
republican values of freedom and independence
that had triumphed in the Revolution. Jefferson’s
professed dislike of urban life was based in part on
his fear that people who worked for wages would
be so beholden to their employers that they could
not act independently.
This republican value system, along with the
fluidity of society, the influx of job-hungry immi-
grants, and the widespread employment of women
and children in unskilled jobs made labor organiza-
tion difficult. The assumption was that nearly any-
one who was willing to work could eventually
escape from the wage-earning class. “If any continue
through life in the condition of the hired laborer,”
Abraham Lincoln declared in 1859, “it is... because
of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or
improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.”Progress and Poverty
Any investigation of American society before the
Civil War reveals a paradox that is obvious but diffi-
cult to resolve. The United States was a land of
opportunity, a democratic society with a prosperous,
expanding economy and few class distinctions. Its
people had a high standard of living in comparison
with the citizens of European countries. Yet within
this rich, confident nation there existed a class of
miserably underpaid and depressed unskilled work-
ers, mostly immigrants, who were worse off materi-
ally than nearly any southern slave. The literature is
full of descriptions of needleworkers earning twelve
cents a day, of women driven to prostitution because
they could not earn a living decently, of hunger
marches and soup kitchens, of disease and crime and
people sunk into apathy by hopeless poverty. In 1848
more than 56,000 New Yorkers, about a quarter of
the population, were receiving some form of public
relief. A police drive in that city in 1860 brought in
nearly 500 beggars.
The middle-class majority seemed indifferent to
or at best unaware of these conditions. Reformers
conducted investigations, published exposés, and
labored to help the victims of urbanization and
industrialization. They achieved little. Great fires
burned in these decades to release the incredible
energies of America. The poor were the ashes, sift-
ing down silent and unnoticed beneath the dazzle
and the smoke. Industrialization produced poverty
and riches (in Marxian terminology, a proletarian
class and an aristocracy of capitalists). Tenements
sprang up cheek by jowl with the urban palaces of
the new rich and the tree-lined streets of the pros-
perous middle class.
Economic opportunities were great, and taxa-
tion was minimal. Little wonder that as the genera-
tions passed, the rich got richer. Industrialization
accelerated the process and, by stimulating the
immigration of masses of poor workers, skewed the
social balance still further. Society became more
stratified, and differences in wealth and status
among citizens grew greater. But the ideology of
egalitarian democracy held its own. By the mid-
nineteenth century Americans were convinced that
all men were equal, and indeed all whitemen had
equal political rights. Socially and economically,
however, the distances between top and bottom
were widening. This situation endured for the rest
of the century, and in some respects it still endures.