A sheriff in the Hudson River Valley near Albany, New York, about to go into the hills in the fallof 1839 to collect back rents from tenants on the enormous Rensselaer estate, was handed a letter:

... the tenants have organized themselves into a body, and resolved not to pay any more rent untilthey can be redressed of their grievances. . . . The tenants now assume the right of doing to theirlandlord as he has for a long time done with them, viz: as they please.

You need not think this to be children's play... . if you come out in your official capacity ... I wouldnot pledge for your safe return. ... A Tenant.

When a deputy arrived in the farming area with writs demanding the rent, farmers suddenlyappeared, assembled by the blowing of tin horns. They seized his writs and burned them.

That December, a sheriff and a mounted posse of five hundred rode into the farm country, butfound themselves in the midst of shrieking tin horns, eighteen hundred farmers blocking their path,six hundred more blocking their rear, all mounted, armed with pitchforks and clubs. The sheriff andhis posse turned back, the rear guard parting to let them through.

This was the start of the Anti-Renter movement in the Hudson Valley, described by HenryChristman in Tin Horns and Calico. It was a protest against the patroonship system, which wentback to the 1600s when the Dutch ruled New York, a system where (as Christman describes it) "afew families, intricately intermarried, controlled the destinies of three hundred thousand people andruled in almost kingly splendor near two million acres of land."

The tenants paid taxes and rents. The largest manor was owned by the Rensselaer family, whichruled over about eighty thousand tenants and had accumulated a fortune of $41 million. Thelandowner, as one sympathizer of the tenants put it, could "swill his wine, loll on his cushions, fillhis life with society, food, and culture, and ride his barouche and five saddle horses along thebeautiful river valley and up to the backdrop of the mountain."

By the summer of 1839, the tenants were holding their first mass meeting. The economic crisis of1837 had filled the area with unemployed seeking land, on top of the layoffs accompanying thecompletion of the Erie Canal, after the first wave of railroad building ended. That summer thetenants resolved: "We will take up the ball of the Revolution where our fathers stopped it and roll itto the final consummation of freedom and independence of the masses."

Certain men in the farm country became leaders and organizers: Smith Boughton, a country doctoron horseback; Ainge Devyr, a revolutionary Irishman. Devyr had seen monopoly of land andindustry bring misery to the slumdwellers of London, Liverpool, and Glasgow, had agitated forchange, had been arrested for sedition, and fled to America. He was invited to address a Fourth ofJuly rally of farmers in Rensselaerville, where he warned his listeners: "If you permit unprincipledand ambitious men to monopolize the soil, they will become masters of the country in the certainorder of cause and effect...."

Thousands of farmers in Rensselaer country were organized into Anti-Rent associations to preventthe landlords from evicting. They agreed on calico Indian costumes, symbol of the Boston TeaParty and recalling original ownership of the soil. The tin horn represented an Indian call to arms.Soon ten thousand men were trained and ready.

Organizing went on in county after county, in dozens of towns along the Hudson. Handbillsappeared:

ATTENTION
ANTI-RENTERS! AWAKE! AROUSE!...
Strike till the last armed foe expires,
Strike for your altars and your fires-
Strike for the green graves of your sires,
God and your happy homes!

Sheriffs and deputy sheriffs trying to serve writs on farmers were surrounded by calico-clad riderswho had been summoned by tin horns sounding in the countryside-then tarred and feathered. TheNew York Herald, once sympathetic, now deplored "the insurrectionary spirit of the mountaineers."

One of the most hated elements of the lease gave the landlord the right to the timber on all thefarms. A man sent onto a tenant's land to gather wood for the landlord was killed. Tension rose. Afarm boy was killed mysteriously, no one knew by whom, but Dr. Boughton was jailed. Thegovernor ordered artillerymen into action, and a company of cavalry came up from New York City.

Petitions for an antirent bill, signed by 25,000 tenants, were put before the legislature in 1845. Thebill was defeated. A kind of guerrilla war resumed in the country, between bands of "Indians" andsheriffs' posses. Boughton was kept in jail seven months, four and a half months of that in heavyirons, before being released on bail. Fourth of July meetings in 1845 attended by thousands offarmers pledged continued resistance.

When a deputy sheriff tried to sell the livestock of a farmer named Moses Earle, who owed $60rent on 160 stony acres, there was a fight, and the deputy was killed. Similar attempts to selllivestock for rent payments were thwarted, again and again. The governor sent three hundred troopsin, declaring a state of rebellion existed, and soon almost a hundred Anti-Renters were in jail.Smith Boughton was brought to trial. He was charged with taking papers from a sheriff butdeclared by the judge to have in fact committed "high treason, rebellion against your government,and armed insurrection" and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Those "Indians" found to be armed and disguised at Moses Earle's farm, where the deputy had beenkilled, were declared by the judge to be guilty of murder, and the jury was so instructed. All werefound guilty, and the judge sentenced four to life imprisonment and two to be hanged. Two of theleaders were told to write letters urging the Anti-Renters to disband, as their only chance to escapeheavy sentences. They wrote the letters.

The power of the law thus crushed the Anti-Rent movement. It was intended to make clear thatfarmers could not win by fighting-that they must confine their efforts to voting, to acceptablemethods of reform. In 1845, the Anti-Renters elected fourteen members to the state legislature.Governor Silas Wright now commuted to life imprisonment the two death sentences and asked thelegislature to give relief to the tenants, to end the feudal system in the Hudson Valley. Proposals tobreak up the huge estates on the death of the owners were defeated, but the legislature voted tomake illegal the selling of tenant property for nonpayment of rent. A constitutional convention thatyear outlawed new feudal leases.

The next governor, elected in 1846 with Anti-Rent support, had promised to pardon the Anti-Rentprisoners, and he did. Throngs of farmers greeted them on their release. Court decisions in the1850s began to limit the worst features of the manorial system, without changing the fundamentalsof landlord-tenant relations.

Sporadic farmer resistance to the collection of back rents continued into the 1860s. As late as 1869,bands of "Indians" were still assembling to thwart sheriffs acting for a rich valley landowner namedWalter Church. In the early 1880s a deputy sheriff trying to dispossess a farmer on behalf of Churchwas killed by shotgun fire. By this time most leases had passed into the hands of the farmers. Inthree of the main Anti-Rent counties, of twelve thousand farmers, only two thousand remainedunder lease.

The farmers had fought, been crushed by the law, their struggle diverted into voting, and the systemstabilized by enlarging the class of small landowners, leaving the basic structure of rich and poorintact. It was a common sequence in American history.

Around the time of the Anti-Renter movement in New York, there was excitement in Rhode Islandover Dorr's Rebellion. As Marvin Gettleman points out in The Dorr Rebellion, it was both amovement for electoral reform and an example of radical insurgency. It was prompted by theRhode Island charter's rule that only owners of land could vote.

As more people left the farm for the city, as immigrants came to work in the mills, thedisfranchised grew. Seth Luther, self-educated carpenter in Providence and spokesman for workingpeople, wrote in 1833 the "Address on the Right of Free Suffrage," denouncing the monopoly ofpolitical power by "the mushroom lordlings, sprigs of nobility . . . small potato aristocrats" ofRhode Island. He urged non-cooperation with the government, refusing to pay taxes or to serve inthe militia. Why, he asked, should twelve thousand working people in Rhode Island without thevote submit to five thousand who had land and could vote?

Thomas Dorr, a lawyer from a well-to-do family, became a leader of the suffrage movement.Working people formed the Rhode Island Suffrage Association, and in the spring of 1841thousands paraded in Providence carrying banners and signs for electoral reform. Going outside thelegal system, they organized their own "People's Convention" and drafted a new constitutionwithout property qualifications for voting.

In early 1842, they invited votes on the constitution; fourteen thousand voted for it, including aboutfive thousand with property-therefore a majority even of those legally entitled to vote by thecharter. In April they held an unofficial election, in which Dorr ran unopposed for governor, andsix thousand people voted for him. The governor of Rhode Island in the meantime got the promiseof President John Tyler that in the case of rebellion federal troops would be sent. There was aclause in the U.S. Constitution to meet just that kind of situation, providing for federal interventionto quell local insurrections on request of a state government.

Ignoring this, on May 3, 1842, the Dorr forces held an inauguration with a great parade of artisans,shopkeepers, mechanics, and militia marching through Providence. The newly elected People'sLegislature was convened. Dorr led a fiasco of an attack on the state arsenal, his cannon misfiring.Dorr's arrest was ordered by the regular governor, and he went into hiding outside the state, tryingto raise military support.

Despite the protests of Dorr and a few others, the "People's Constitution" kept the word "white" inits clause designating voters. Angry Rhode Island blacks now joined the militia units of the Lawand Order coalition, which promised that a new constitutional convention would give them theright to vote.

When Dorr returned to Rhode Island, he found several hundred of his followers, mostly workingpeople, willing to fight for the People's Constitution, but there were thousands in the regular militiaon the side of the state. The rebellion disintegrated and Dorr again fled Rhode Island.

Martial law was declared. One rebel soldier, captured, was blindfolded and put before a firingsquad, which fired with blank bullets. A hundred other militia were taken prisoner. One of themdescribed their being bound by ropes into platoons of eight, marched on foot 16 miles toProvidence, "threatened and pricked by the bayonet if we lagged from fatigue, the rope severelychafing our arms; the skin off mine. . . . no water till we reached Greenville ... no food until thenext day.... and, after being exhibited, were put into the State prison."

A new constitution offered some reform. It still gave overrepresentation to the rural areas, limitedthe vote to property owners or those who paid a one-dollar poll tax, and would let naturalizedcitizens vote only if they had $134 in real estate. In the elections of early 1843, the Law and Ordergroup, opposed by former Dorrites, used intimidation of state militia, of employees by employers,of tenants by landlords, to get out their vote. It lost in the industrial towns, but got the vote of theagrarian areas, and won all major offices.

Dorr returned to Rhode Island in the fall of 1843. He was arrested on the streets of Providence andtried for treason. The jury, instructed by the judge to ignore all political arguments and consideronly whether Dorr had committed certain overt acts (which he never denied committing), foundhim guilty, whereupon the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment at hard labor. He spent twentymonths in jail, and then a newly elected Law and Order governor, anxious to end Dorr'smartyrdom, pardoned him.

Armed force had failed, the ballot had failed, the courts had taken the side of the conservatives. TheDorr movement now went to the U.S. Supreme Court, via a trespass suit by Martin Luther againstLaw and Order militiamen, charging that the People's Government was the legitimate governmentin Rhode Island in 1842. Daniel Webster argued against the Dorrites. If people could claim aconstitutional right to overthrow an existing government, Webster said, there would be no more lawand no more government; there would be anarchy.

In its decision, the Supreme Court established (Luther v. Borden, 1849) a long-lasting doctrine: itwould not interfere in certain "political" questions, to be left to executive and legislature. Thedecision reinforced the essentially conservative nature of the Supreme Court: that on critical issues-war and revolution-it would defer to the President and Congress.

The stories of the Anti-Renter movement and Dorr's Rebellion are not usually found in textbookson United States history. In these books, given to millions of young Americans, there is little onclass struggle in the nineteenth century. The period before and after the Civil War is filled withpolitics, elections, slavery, and the race question. Even where specialized books on the Jacksonianperiod deal with labor and economic issues they center on the presidency, and thus perpetuate thetraditional dependency on heroic leaders rather than people's struggles.

Andrew Jackson said he spoke for "the humble members of society- the farmer, mechanics andlaborers... ." He certainly did not speak for the Indians being pushed off their lands, or slaves. Butthe tensions aroused by the developing factory system, the growing immigration, required that thegovernment develop a mass base of support among whites. "Jacksonian Democracy" did just that.

Politics in this period of the 1830s and 1840s, according to Douglas Miller, a specialist in theJacksonian period (The Birth of Modern America), "had become increasingly centered aroundcreating a popular image and flattering the common man." Miller is dubious, however, about theaccuracy of that phrase "Jacksonian Democracy":

Parades, picnics, and campaigns of personal slander characterized Jacksonianpoliticking. But, although both parties aimed their rhetoric at the people and mouthed the sacredshibboleths of democracy, this did not mean that the common man ruled America. The professionalpoliticians corning to the fore in the twenties and thirties, though sometimes self-made, wereseldom ordinary. Both major parties were controlled largely by men of wealth and ambition.Lawyers, newspaper editors, merchants, industrialists, large landowners, and speculators dominatedthe Democrats as well as the Whigs.

Jackson was the first President to master the liberal rhetoric-to speak for the common man. Thiswas a necessity for political victory when the vote was being demanded-as in Rhode Island-bymore and more people, and state legislatures were loosening voting restrictions. As anotherJacksonian scholar, Robert Remini (The Age of Jackson), says, after studying electoral figures for1828 and 1832:

Jackson himself enjoyed widespread support that ranged across all classes and sections of thecountry. He attracted farmers, mechanics, laborers, professionals and even businessmen. And allthis without Jackson being clearly pro- or antilabor, pro- or antibusiness, pro- or antilower, middleor upper class. It has been demonstrated that he was a strikebreaker [Jackson sent troops to controlrebellious workers on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal], yet at different times ... he and theDemocrats received the backing of organized labor.

It was the new politics of ambiguity-speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their supportin times of rapid growth and potential turmoil. The two-party system came into its own in this time.To give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, tochoose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control. Like so much in theAmerican system, it was not devilishly contrived by some master plotters; it developed naturallyout of the needs of the situation. Remini compares the Jacksonian Democrat Martin Van Buren,who succeeded Jackson as President, with the Austrian conservative statesman Metternich: "LikeMetternich, who was seeking to thwart revolutionary discontent in Europe, Van Buren and similarpoliticians were attempting to banish political disorder from the United States by a balance ofpower achieved through two well-organized and active parties."

The Jacksonian idea was to achieve stability and control by winning to the Democratic party "themiddling interest, and especially ... the substantial yeomanry of the country" by "prudent, judicious,well-considered reform." That is, reform that would not yield too much. These were the words ofRobert Rantoul, a reformer, corporation lawyer, and Jacksonian Democrat. It was a forecast of thesuccessful appeal of the Democratic party-and at times the Republican party-in the twentiethcentury.

Such new forms of political control were needed in the turbulence of growth, the possibility ofrebellion. Now there were canals, railroads, the telegraph. In 1790, fewer than a million Americanslived in cities; in 1840 the figure was 11 million. New York had 130,000 people in 1820, a millionby 1860. And while the traveler Alexis de Tocqueville had expressed astonishment at "the generalequality of condition among the people," he was not very good at numbers, his friend Beaumontsaid. And his observation was not in accord with the facts, according to Edward Pessen, a historianof Jacksonian society (Jacksonian America).

In Philadelphia, working-class families lived fifty-five to a tenement, usually one room per family,with no garbage removal, no toilets, no fresh air or water. There was fresh water newly pumpedfrom the Schuylkill River, but it was going to the homes of the rich.

In New York you could see the poor lying in the streets with the garbage. There were no sewers inthe slums, and filthy water drained into yards and alleys, into the cellars where the poorest of thepoor lived, bringing with it a typhoid epidemic in 1837, typhus in 1842. In the cholera epidemic of1832, the rich fled the city; the poor stayed and died.

These poor could not be counted on as political allies of the government. But they were there-likeslaves, or Indians-invisible ordinarily, a menace if they rose. There were more solid citizens,however, who might give steady support to the system-paid-paid workers, landowning farmers.Also, there was the new urban white-collar worker, born in the rising commerce of the time,described by Thomas Cochran and William Miller (The Age of Enterprise):

Dressed in drab alpaca, hunched over a high desk, this new worker credited and debited, indexedand filed, wrote and stamped invoices, acceptances, bills of lading, receipts. Adequately paid, hehad some extra money and leisure time. He patronized sporting events and theaters, savings banksand insurance companies. he read Day's New York Sun or Bennett's Herald-the "penny press"supported by advertising, filled with police reports, crime stories, etiquette advice for the risingbourgeoisie... .

This was the advance guard of a growing class of white-collar workers and professionals inAmerica who would be wooed enough and paid enough to consider themselves members of thebourgeois class, and to give support to that class in times of crisis.

The opening of the West was being helped by mechanization of the farm. Iron plows cut plowingtime in half; by the 1850s John Deere Company was turning out ten thousand plows a year. CyrusMcCormick was making a thousand mechanical reapers a year in his factory in Chicago. A manwith a sickle could cut half an acre of wheat in a day; with a reaper he could cut 10 acres.

Turnpikes, canals, and railroads were bringing more people west, more products east, and it becameimportant to keep that new West, tumultuous and unpredictable, under control. When colleges wereestablished out West, eastern businessmen, as Cochran and Miller say, were "determined from thestart to control western education." Edward Everett, the Massachusetts politician and orator, spokein 1833 on behalf of giving financial aid to western colleges:

Let no Boston capitalist, then, let no man, who has a large stake in New England .. . think that he iscalled upon to exercise his liberality at a distance, toward those in whom he has no concern. ...They ask you to give security to your own property, by diffusing the means of light and truththroughout the region, where so much of the power to preserve or to shake it resides. . . .

The capitalists of the East were conscious of the need for this "security to your own property." Astechnology developed, more capital was needed, more risks had to be taken, and a big investmentneeded stability. In an economic system not rationally planned for human need, but developingfitfully, chaotically out of the profit motive, there seemed to be no way to avoid recurrent boomsand slumps. There was a slump in 1837, another in 1853. One way to achieve stability was todecrease competition, organize the businesses, move toward monopoly. In the mid-1850s, priceagreements and mergers became frequent: the New York Central Railroad was a merger of manyrailroads. The American Brass Association was formed "to meet ruinous competition," it said. TheHampton County Cotton Spinners Association was organized to control prices, and so was theAmerican Iron Association.

Another way to minimize risks was to make sure the government played its traditional role, goingback to Alexander Hamilton and the first Congress, of helping the business interests. Statelegislatures gave charters to corporations giving them legal rights to conduct business, raise money-at first special charters, then general charters, so that any business meeting certain requirementscould incorporate. Between 1790 and 1860, 2,300 corporations were chartered.

Railroad men traveled to Washington and to state capitals armed with money, shares of stock, freerailroad passes. Between 1850 and 1857 they got 25 million acres of public land, free of charge,and millions of dollars in bonds-loans-from the state legislatures. In Wisconsin in 1856, theLaCrosse and Milwaukee Railroad got a million acres free by distributing about $900,000 in stocksand bonds to fifty-nine assemblymen, thirteen senators, the, governor. Two years later the railroadwas bankrupt and the bonds were worthless.

In the East, mill owners had become powerful, and organized. By 1850, fifteen Boston familiescalled the "Associates" controlled 20 percent of the cotton spindleage in the United States, 39percent of insurance capital in Massachusetts, 40 percent of banking resources in Boston.

In the schoolbooks, those years are filled with the controversy over slavery, but on the eve of theCivil War it was money and profit, not the movement against slavery, that was uppermost in thepriorities of the men who ran the country. As Cochran and Miller put it:

Webster was the hero of the North-not Emerson, Parker, Garrison, or Phillips; Webster the tariffman, the land speculator, the corporation lawyer, politician for the Boston Associates, inheritor ofHamilton's coronet. "The great object of government" said he "is the protection of property athome, and respect and renown abroad." For these he preached union; for these he surrendered thefugitive slave.

They describe the Boston rich:

Living sumptuously on Beacon Hill, admired by their neighbors for their philanthropy and theirpatronage of art and culture, these men traded in State Street while overseers ran their factories,managers directed their railroads, agents sold their water power and real estate. They were absenteelandlords in the most complete sense. Uncontaminated by the diseases of the factory town, theywere also protected from hearing the complaints of their workers or suffering mental depressionfrom dismal and squalid surroundings. In the metropolis, art, literature, education, science,flowered in the Golden Day; in the industrial towns children went to work with their fathers andmothers, schools and doctors were only promises, a bed of one's own was a rare luxury.

Ralph Waldo Emerson described Boston in those years: "There is a certain poor-smell in all thestreets, in Beacon Street and Mount Vernon, as well as in the lawyers' offices, and the wharves, andthe same meanness and sterility, and leave-all-hope-behind, as one finds in a boot manufacturer'spremises." The preacher Theodore Parker told his congregation: "Money is this day the strongestpower of the nation."

The attempts at political stability, at economic control, did not quite work. The new industrialism,the crowded cities, the long hours in the factories, the sudden economic crises leading to highprices and lost jobs, the lack of food and water, the freezing winters, the hot tenements in thesummer, the epidemics of disease, the deaths of children-these led to sporadic reactions from thepoor. Sometimes there were spontaneous, unorganized uprisings against the rich. Sometimes theanger was deflected into racial hatred for blacks, religious warfare against Catholics, nativist furyagainst immigrants. Sometimes it was organized into demonstrations and strikes.

"Jacksonian Democracy" had tried to create a consensus of support for the system to make itsecure. Blacks, Indians, women, and foreigners were clearly outside the consensus. But also, whiteworking people, in large numbers, declared themselves outside.

The full extent of the working-class consciousness of those years-as of any years-is lost in history,but fragments remain and make us wonder how much of this always existed underneath the verypractical silence of working people. In 1827 an "Address ... before the Mechanics and WorkingClasses ... of Philadelphia" was recorded, written by an "Unlettered Mechanic," probably a youngshoemaker, who said:

We find ourselves oppressed on every hand-we labor hard in producing all the comforts of life forthe enjoyment of others, while we ourselves obtain but a scanty portion, and even that in thepresent state of society depends on the will of employers.

Frances Wright of Scotland, an early feminist and Utopian socialist, was invited by Philadelphiaworkingmen to speak on the Fourth of July 1829 to one of the first city-wide associations of laborunions in the United States. She asked if the Revolution had been fought "to crush down the sonsand daughters of your country's industry under ... neglect, poverty, vice, starvation, and disease...."She wondered if the new technology was not lowering the value of human labor, making peopleappendages to machines, crippling the minds and bodies of child laborers.

Later that year, George Henry Evans, a printer, editor of the Workingman's Advocate, wrote "TheWorking Men's Declaration of Independence." Among its list of "facts" submitted to "candid andimpartial" fellow citizens:

l. The laws for levying taxes are . . . operating most oppressively on one class of society....
3. The laws for private incorporation are all partial . .. favoring one class of society to the expense ofthe other. . ..
6. The laws .. . have deprived nine tenths of the members of the body politics, who are not wealthy,of the equal means to enjoy "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." ... The lien law in favor ofthe landlords against tenants ... is one illustration among innumerable others.

Evans believed that "all on arriving at adult age are entitled to equal property."

A city-wide "Trades' Union" in Boston in 1834, including mechanics from Charlestown and womenshoe binders from Lynn, referred to the Declaration of Independence:

We hold . .. that laws which have a tendency to raise any peculiar class above their fellow citizens,by granting special privileges, are contrary to and in defiance of those primary principles....

Our public system of Education, which so liberally endows those seminaries of learning, which ...are only accessible to the wealthy, while our common schools ... are so illy provided for ... Thuseven in childhood the poor are apt to think themselves inferior.. . .

In his book Most Uncommon Jacksonians, Edward Pessen says: "The leaders of the Jacksonianlabor movement were radicals.. . . How else describe men who believed American society to betorn with social conflict, disfigured by the misery of the masses, and dominated by a greedy elitewhose power over every aspect of American life was based on private property?"

Episodes of insurrection of that time have gone unrecorded in traditional histories. Such was theriot in Baltimore in the summer of 1835, when the Bank of Maryland collapsed and its depositorslost their savings. Convinced that a great fraud had taken place, a crowd gathered and beganbreaking the windows of officials associated with the bank. When the rioters destroyed a house, themilitia attacked, killing some twenty people, wounding a hundred. The next evening, other houseswere attacked. The events were reported in Niles' Weekly Register, an important newspaper of thattime:

Last night (Sunday) at dark, the attack was renewed upon Reverdy Johnson's house. There was nowno opposition. It was supposed that several thousand people were spectators of the scene. Thehouse was soon entered, and its furniture, a very extensive law library, and all its contents, werecast forth, a bonfire made of them in front of the house. The whole interior of the house was tornout and cast upon the burning pile. The marble portico in front, and a great portion of the front wallwere torn down by about 11 o'clock.. .. They proceeded to that of the mayor of the city, Jesse Hunt,esq. broke it open, took out the furniture, and burnt it before the door. . ..

During those years, trade unions were forming. (Philip Foner's History of the Labor Movement inthe U.S. tells the story in rich detail.) The courts called them conspiracies to restrain trade andtherefore illegal, as when in New York twenty-five members of the Union Society of JourneymenTailors were found guilty of "conspiracy to injure trade, riot, assault, battery." The judge, levyingfines, said: "In this favored land of law and liberty, the road to advancement is open to all.... EveryAmerican knows that or ought to know that he has no better friend than the laws and that he needsno artificial combination for his protection. They are of foreign origin and I am led to believemainly upheld by foreigners."

A handbill was then circulated throughout the city:

The Rich Against the Poor!Judge Edwards, the tool of the aristocracy, against the people! Mechanics and working men! Adeadly blow has been struck at your liberty!... They have established the precedent thatworkingmen have no right to regulate the price of labor, or, in other words, the rich are the onlyjudges of the wants of the poor man.

At City Hall Park, 27,000 people gathered to denounce the court decision, and elected a Committeeof Correspondence which organized, three months later, a convention of Mechanics, Farmers, andWorking Men, elected by farmers and working people in various towns in New York State. Theconvention met in Utica, drew up a Declaration of Independence from existing political parties, andestablished an Equal Rights party.

Although they ran their own candidates for office, there was no great confidence in the ballot as away of achieving change. One of the great orators of the movement, Seth Luther, told a Fourth ofJuly rally: "We will try the ballot box first. If that will not effect our righteous purpose, the next andlast resort is the cartridge box." And one sympathetic local newspaper, the Albany Microscope,warned:

Remember the regretted fate of the working-men-they were soon destroyed by hitching teams androlling with parties. They admitted into their ranks, broken down lawyers and politicians.... Theybecame perverted, and were unconsciously drawn into a vortex, from which they never escaped.

The crisis of 1837 led to rallies and meetings in many cities. The banks had suspended speciepayments-refusing to pay hard money for the bank notes they had issued. Prices rose, and workingpeople, already hard-pressed to buy food, found that flour that had sold at $5.62 a barrel was now$12 a barrel. Pork went up. Coal went up. In Philadelphia, twenty thousand people assembled, andsomeone wrote to President Van Buren describing it:

This afternoon, the largest public meeting I ever saw assembled in Independence Square. It wascalled by placards posted through the city yesterday and last night. It was projected and carried onentirely by the working classes; without consultation or cooperation with any of those who usuallytake the lead in such matters. The officers and speakers were of those classes.... It was directedagainst the banks.

In New York, members of the Equal Rights party (often called the Locofocos) announced ameeting: "Bread, Meat, Rent, and Fuel! Their prices must come down! The people will meet in thePark, rain or shine, at 4 o'clock, P.M. on Monday afternoon.... All friends of humanity determinedto resist monopolists and extortioners are invited to attend." The Commercial Register, a New Yorknewspaper, reported on the meeting and what followed:

At 4 o'clock, a concourse of several thousands had convened in front of the City Hall.. .. One ofthese orators ... is reported to have expressly directed the popular vengeance against Mr. EH Hart,who is one of our most extensive flour dealers on commission. "Fellow citizens!" he exclaimed,"Mr. Hart has now 53,000 barrels of flour in his store; let us go and offer him eight dollars a barrel,and if he does not take it..."

A large body of the meeting moved off in the direction of Mr. Hart's store . . . the middle door hadbeen forced, and some twenty or thirty barrels of flour or more, rolled into the streets, and the headsstaved in. At this point of time, Mr. Hart himself arrived on the ground, with a posse of officersfrom the police. The officers were assailed by a portion of the mob in Dey Street, their staveswrested from them, and shivered to pieces. .. .

Barrels of flour, by dozens, fifties and hundreds were tumbled into the street from the doors, andthrown in rapid succession from the windows... . About one thousand bushels of wheat, and four orfive hundred barrels of flour, were thus wantonly and foolishly as well as wickedly destroyed. Themost active of the destructionists were foreigners-indeed the greater part of the assemblage was ofexotic origin, but there were probably five hundred or a thousand others, standing by and abettingtheir incendiary labors.

Amidst the falling and bursting of the barrels and sacks of wheat, numbers of women wereengaged, like the crones who strip the dead in battle, filling the boxes and baskets with which theywere provided, and their aprons, with flour, and making off with it....

Night had now closed upon the scene, but the work of destruction did not cease until strong bodiesof police arrived, followed, soon afterward, by detachments of troops.. . .

This was the Flour Riot of 1837. During the crisis of that year, 50,000 persons (one-third of theworking class) were without work in New York City alone, and 200,000 (of a population of500,000) were living, as one observer put it, "in utter and hopeless distress."

There is no complete record of the meetings, riots, actions, organized and disorganized, violent andnonviolent, which took place in the mid-nineteenth century, as the country grew, as the citiesbecame crowded, with working conditions bad, living conditions intolerable, with the economy inthe hands of bankers, speculators, landlords, merchants.

In 1835, fifty different trades organized unions in Philadelphia, and there was a successful generalstrike of laborers, factory workers, hook-binders, jewelers, coal heavers, butchers, cabinet workers-for the ten-hour day. Soon there were ten-hour laws in Pennsylvania and other states, but theyprovided that employers could have employees sign contracts for longer hours. The law at this timewas developing a strong defense of contracts; it was pretended that work contracts were voluntaryagreements between equals.

Weavers in Philadelphia in the early 1840s-mostly Irish immigrants working at home foremployers-struck for higher wages, attacked the homes of those refusing to strike, and destroyedtheir work. A sheriffs posse tried to arrest some strikers, but it was broken up by four hundredweavers armed with muskets and sticks.

Soon, however, antagonism developed between these Irish Catholic weavers and native-bornProtestant skilled workers over issues of religion. In May 1844 there were Protestant-Catholic riotsin Kensington, a suburb of Philadelphia; nativist (anti-immigrant) rioters destroyed the weavers'neighborhoods and attacked a Catholic church. Middle-class politicians soon led each group into adifferent political party (the nativists into the American Republican party, the Irish into theDemocratic party), party politics and religion now substituting for class conflict.

The result of all this, says David Montgomery, historian of the Kensington Riots, was thefragmentation of the Philadelphia working class. It "thereby created for historians the illusion of asociety lacking in class conflict," while in reality the class conflicts of nineteenth-century America"were as fierce as any known to the industrial world."

The immigrants from Ireland, fleeing starvation there when the potato crop failed, were coming toAmerica now, packed into old sailing ships. The stories of these ships differ only in detail from theaccounts of the ships that earlier brought black slaves and later German, Italian, Russianimmigrants. This is a contemporary account of one ship arriving from Ireland, detained at GrosseIsle on the Canadian border:

On the 18th of May, 1847, the "Urania", from Cork, with several hundred immigrants on board, alarge proportion of them sick and dying of the ship-fever, was put into quarantine at Grosse Isle.This was the first of the plague-smitten ships from Ireland which that year sailed up the St.Lawrence. But before the first week of June as many as eighty-four ships of various tonnage weredriven in by an easterly wind; and of that enormous number of vessels there was not one free fromthe taint of malignant typhus, the offspring of famine and of the foul ship-hold.... a tolerably quickpassage occupied from six to eight weeks. . ..

Who can imagine the horrors of even the shortest passage in an emigrant ship crowded beyond itsutmost capacity of stowage with unhappy beings of all ages, with fever raging in their midst ... thecrew sullen or brutal from very desperation, or paralyzed with terror of the plague-the miserablepassengers unable to help themselves, or afford the least relief to each other; one-fourth, or one-third, or one-half of the entire number in different stages of the disease; many dying, some dead;the fatal poison intensified by the indescribable foulness of the air breathed and rebreathed by thegasping sufferers-the wails of children, the ravings of the delirious, the cries and groans of those inmortal agony!

. .. there was no accommodation of any kind on the island . . . sheds were rapidly filled with themiserable people... . Hundreds were literally flung on the beach, left amid the mud and stones tocrawl on the dry land how they could... . Many of these ... gasped out their last breath on that fatalshore, not able to drag themselves from the slime in which they lay. ...

It was not until the 1st of November that the quarantine of Grosse Isle was closed. Upon that barrenisle as many as 10,000 of the Irish race were consigned to the grave-pit. . ..

How could these new Irish immigrants, themselves poor and despised, become sympathizers withthe black slave, who was becoming more and more the center of attention, the subject of agitationin the country? Indeed, most working-class activists at this time ignored the plight of blacks. ElyMoore, a New York trade union leader elected to Congress, argued in the House of Representativesagainst receiving abolitionist petitions. Racist hostility became an easy substitute for classfrustration.

On the other hand, a white shoemaker wrote in 1848 in the Awl, the newspaper of Lynn shoefactory workers:

... we are nothing but a standing army that keeps three million of our brethren in bondage.. . .Living under the shade of Bunker Hill monument, demanding in the name of humanity, our right,and withholding those rights from others because their skin is black! Is it any wonder that God inhis righteous anger has punished us by forcing us to drink the bitter cup of degradation.

The anger of the city poor often expressed itself in futile violence over nationality or religion. InNew York in 1849 a mob, largely Irish; stormed the fashionable Astor Place Opera House, wherean English actor, William Charles Macready, was playing Macbeth, in competition with anAmerican actor, Edwin Forrest, who was acting the same role in another production. The crowd,shouting "Burn the damn den of aristocracy," charged, throwing bricks. The militia were called out,and in the violence that followed about two hundred people were killed or wounded.

Another economic crisis came in 1857. The boom in railroads and manufacturing, the surge ofimmigration, the increased speculation in stocks and bonds, the stealing, corruption, manipulation,led to wild expansion and then crash. By October of that year, 200,000 were unemployed, andthousands of recent immigrants crowded into the eastern ports, hoping to work their way back toEurope. The New York Times reported: "Every ship for Liverpool now has all the passengers shecan carry, and multitudes are applying to work their passage if they have no money to pay for it."

In Newark, New Jersey, a rally of several thousand demanded the city give work to theunemployed. And in New York, fifteen thousand people met at Tompkins Square in downtownManhattan. From there they marched to Wall Street and paraded around the Stock Exchangeshouting: "We want work!" That summer, riots occurred in the slum areas of New York. A mob offive hundred attacked the police one day with pistols and bricks. There were parades of theunemployed, demanding bread and work, looting shops. In November, a crowd occupied City Hall,and the U.S. marines were brought in to drive them out.

Of the country's work force of 6 million in 1850, half a million were women: 330,000 worked asdomestics; 55,000 were teachers. Of the 181,000 women in factories, half worked in textile mills.

They organized. Women struck by themselves for the first time in 1825. They were the UnitedTailoresses of New York, demanding higher wages. In 1828, the first strike of mill women on theirown took place in Dover, New Hampshire, when several hundred women paraded with banners andflags. They shot off gunpowder, in protest against new factory rules, which charged fines forcoming late, forbade talking on the job, and required church attendance. They were forced to returnto the mill, their demands unmet, and their leaders were fired and blacklisted.

In Exeter, New Hampshire, women mill workers went on strike ("turned out," in the language ofthat day) because the overseer was setting the clocks back to get more time from them. Their strikesucceeded in exacting a promise from the company that the overseers would set their watches right.

The "Lowell system," in which young girls would go to work in the mills and live in dormitoriessupervised by matrons, at first seemed beneficent, sociable, a welcome escape from householddrudgery or domestic service. Lowell, Massachusetts, was the first town created for the textile millindustry; it was named after the wealthy and influential Lowell family. But the dormitories becameprisonlike, controlled by rules and regulations. The supper (served after the women had risen atfour in the morning and worked until seven thirty in the evening) often consisted merely of breadand gravy.

So the Lowell girls organized. They started their own newspapers. They protested against theweaving rooms, which were poorly lit, badly ventilated, impossibly hot in the summer, damp andcold in the winter. In 1834, a cut in wages led the Lowell women to strike, proclaiming: "Union ispower. Our present object is to have union and exertion, and we remain in possession of our ownunquestionable rights. . . ." But the threat of hiring others to replace them brought them back towork at reduced wages (the leaders were fired).

The young women, determined to do better next time, organized a Factory Girls' Association, and1,500 went on strike in 1836 against a raise in boardinghouse charges. Harriet Hanson was aneleven-year-old girl working in the mill. She later recalled:

I worked in a lower room where I had heard the proposed strike fully, if not vehemently,discussed. I had been an ardent listener to what was said against this attempt at "oppression" on thepart of the corporation, and naturally I took sides with the strikers. When the day came on whichthe girls were to turn out, those in the upper rooms started first, and so many of them left that ourmill was at once shut down. Then, when the girls in my room stood irresolute, uncertain what to do... I, who began to think they would not go out, after all their talk, became impatient, and started onahead, saying, with childish bravado, "I don't care what you do, I am going to turn out, whetheranyone else does or not," and I marched out, and was followed by the others.

As I looked back at the long line that followed me, I was more proud than I have ever been since. . . .

The strikers marched through the streets of Lowell, singing. They held out a month, but then theirmoney ran out, they were evicted from the boardinghouses, and many of them went back to work.The leaders were fired, including Harriet Hanson's widowed mother, a matron in theboardinghouse, who was blamed for her child's going out on strike.

Resistance continued. One mill in Lowell, Herbert Gutman reports, discharged twenty-eight womenfor such reasons as "misconduct," "disobedience," "impudence," "levity," and "mutiny."Meanwhile, the girls tried to hold on to thoughts about fresh air, the country, a less harried way oflife. One of them recalled: "I never cared much for machinery. I could not see into theircomplications or feel interested in them. ... In sweet June weather I would lean far out of thewindow, and try not to hear the unceasing clash of sound inside."

In New Hampshire, five hundred men and women petitioned the Amoskeag ManufacturingCompany not to cut down an elm tree to make space for another mill. They said it was "a beautifuland goodly tree," representing a time "when the yell of the red man and the scream of the eaglewere alone heard on the hanks of the Merrimack, instead of two giant edifices filled with the buzzof busy and well-remunerated industry."

In 1835, twenty mills went on strike to reduce the workday from thirteen and a half hours to elevenhours, to get cash wages instead of company scrip, and to end fines for lateness. Fifteen hundredchildren and parents went out on strike, and it lasted six weeks. Strikebreakers were brought in, andsome workers went back to work, but the strikers did win a twelve-hour day and nine hours onSaturday. That year and the next, there were 140 strikes in the eastern part of the United States.

The crisis that followed the 1837 panic stimulated the formation in 1845 of the Female LaborReform Association in Lowell, which sent thousands of petitions to the Massachusetts legislatureasking for a ten-hour day. Finally, the legislature decided to hold public hearings, the firstinvestigation of labor conditions by any governmental body in the country. Eliza Hemingway toldthe committee of the air thick with smoke from oil lamps burning before sunup and after sundown.Judith Payne told of her sickness due to the work in the mills. But after the committee visited themills-for which the company prepared by a cleanup job-it reported: "Your committee returned fullysatisfied that the order, decorum, and general appearance of things in and around the mills couldnot be improved by any suggestion of theirs or by any act of the legislature."

The report was denounced by the Female Labor Reform Association, and they worked successfullyfor the committee chairman's defeat at the next election, though they could not vote. But not muchwas done to change conditions in the mills. In the late 1840s, the New England farm women whoworked in the mills began to leave them, as more and more Irish immigrants took their place.

Company towns now grew up around mills in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey,Pennsylvania, using immigrant workers who signed contracts pledging everyone in the family towork for a year. They lived in slum tenements owned by the company, were paid in scrip, whichthey could use only at company stores, and were evicted if their work was unsatisfactory.

In Paterson, New Jersey, the first of a series of mill strikes was started by children. When thecompany suddenly put off their dinner hour from noon to 1:00 P.M., the children marched off thejob, their parents cheering them on. They were joined by other working people in the town-carpenters, masons, machinists-who turned the strike into a ten-hour-day struggle. After a week,however, with the threat of bringing in militia, the children returned to work, and their leaders werefired. Soon after, trying to prevent more trouble, the company restored the noon dinner hour.

It was the shoemakers of Lynn, Massachusetts, a factory town northeast of Boston, who started thelargest strike to take place in the United States before the Civil War. Lynn had pioneered in the useof sewing machines in factories, replacing shoemaker artisans. The factory workers in Lynn, whobegan to organize in the 1830s, later started a militant newspaper, the Awl. In 1844, four yearsbefore Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto appeared, the Awl wrote:

The division of society into the producing and the non-producing classes, and the fact of theunequal distribution of value between the two, introduces us at once to another distinction-that ofcapital and labor... . labor now becomes a commodity.... Antagonism and opposition of interest isintroduced in the community; capital and labor stand opposed.

The economic crisis of 1857 brought the shoe business to a halt, and the workers of Lynn lost theirjobs. There was already anger at machine-stitching replacing shoemakers. Prices were up, wageswere repeatedly cut, and by the fall of 1859 men were earning $3 a week and women were earning$1 a week, working sixteen hours a day.

In early 1860, a mass meeting of the newly formed Mechanics Association demanded higherwages. When the manufacturers refused to meet with their committees, the workers called a strikefor Washington's Birthday. That morning three thousand shoemakers met in the Lyceum Hall inLynn and set up committees of 100 to post the names of scabs, to guard against violence, to makesure shoes would not be sent out to be finished elsewhere.

In a few days, shoeworkers throughout New England joined the strike-in Natick, Newburyport,Haverhill, Marblehead, and other Massachusetts towns, as well as towns in New Hampshire andMaine. In a week, strikes had begun in all the shoe towns of New England, with MechanicsAssociations in twenty-five towns and twenty thousand shoe-workers on strike. Newspapers calledit "The Revolution at the North," "The Rebellion Among the Workmen of New England,""Beginning of the Conflict Between Capital and Labor."

One thousand women and five thousand men marched through the streets of Lynn in a blizzard,carrying banners and American flags. Women shoebinders and stitchers joined the strike and held their own mass meeting. A New YorkHerald reporter wrote of them: "They assail the bosses in a style which reminds one of the amiablefemales who participated in the first French Revolution." A huge Ladies' Procession was organized,the women marching through streets high with snowdrifts, carrying signs: "American Ladies WillNot Be Slaves. . . Weak in Physical Strength but Strong in Moral Courage, We Dare Battle for theRight, Shoulder to Shoulder with our Fathers, Husbands, and Brothers." Ten days after that, aprocession often thousand striking workers, including delegations from Salem, Marblehead, andother towns, men and women, marched through Lynn, in what was the greatest demonstration oflabor to take place in New England up to that time.

Police from Boston and militia were sent in to make sure strikers did not interfere with shipmentsof shoes to be finished out of the state. The strike processions went on, while city grocers andprovisions dealers provided food for the strikers. The strike continued through March with moralehigh, but by April it was losing force. The manufacturers offered higher wages to bring the strikersback into the factories, but without recognizing the unions, so that workers still had to face theemployer as individuals.

Most of the shoeworkers were native-born Americans, Alan Dawley says in his study of the Lynnstrike (Class and Community). They did not accept the social and political order that kept them inpoverty, however much it was praised in American schools, churches, newspapers. In Lynn, hesays, "articulate, activist Irish shoe and leather workers joined Yankees in flatly rejecting the mythof success. Irish and Yankee workers jointly ... looked for labor candidates when they went to thepolls, and resisted strikebreaking by local police." Trying to understand why this fierce class spiritdid not lead to independent revolutionary political action, Dawley concludes that the main reason isthat electoral politics drained the energies of the resisters into the channels of the system.

Dawley disputes some historians who have said the high rate of mobility of workers preventedthem from organizing in revolutionary ways. He says that while there was a high turnover in Lynntoo, this "masked the existence of a virtually permanent minority who played the key role inorganizing discontent." He also suggests that mobility helps people see that others are in similarconditions. He thinks the struggle of European workers for political democracy, even while theysought economic equality, made them class-conscious. American workers, however, had alreadygained political democracy by the 1830s, and so their economic battles could be taken over bypolitical parties that blurred class lines.

Even this might not have stopped labor militancy and the rise of class consciousness, Dawley says,if not for the fact that "an entire generation was sidetracked in the 1860's because of the Civil War."Northern wage earners who rallied to the Union cause became allied with their employers. Nationalissues took over from class issues: "At a time when scores of industrial communities like Lynnwere seething with resistance to industrialism, national politics were preoccupied with the issues ofwar and reconstruction." And on these issues the political parties took positions, offered choices,obscured the fact that the political system itself and the wealthy classes it represented wereresponsible for the problems they now offered to solve.

Class-consciousness was overwhelmed during the Civil War, both North and South, by military andpolitical unity in the crisis of war. That unity was weaned by rhetoric and enforced by arms. It wasa war proclaimed as a war for liberty, but working people would be attacked by soldiers if theydared to strike, Indians would be massacred in Colorado by the U.S. army, and those daring tocriticize Lincoln's policies would be put in jail without trial-perhaps thirty thousand politicalprisoners.

Still, there were signs in both sections of dissent from that unity- anger of poor against rich,rebellion against the dominant political and economic forces.

In the North, the war brought high prices for food and the necessities of life. Prices of milk, eggs,cheese were up 60 to 100 percent for families that had not been able to pay the old prices. Onehistorian (Emerson Fite, Social and Industrial Conditions in the North During the Civil War)described the war situation: "Employers were wont to appropriate to themselves all or nearly all ofthe profits accruing from the higher prices, without being willing to grant to the employees a fairshare of these profits through the medium of higher wages."

There were strikes all over the country during the war. The Springfield Republican in 1863 said that"the workmen of almost every branch of trade have had their strikes within the last few months,"and the San Francisco Evening Bulletin said "striking for higher wages is now the rage among theworking people of San Francisco." Unions were being formed as a result of these strikes.Philadelphia shoemakers in 1863 announced that high prices made organization imperative.

The headline in Fincher's Trades' Review of November 21, 1863, "THE REVOLUTION IN NEWYORK," was an exaggeration, but its list of labor activities was impressive evidence of the hiddenresentments of the poor during the war:

The upheaval of the laboring masses in New York has startled the capitalists of that city andvicinity.. . .

The machinists are making a hold stand... . We publish their appeal in another column.

The City Railroad employees struck for higher wages, and made the whole population, for a fewdays, "ride on Shank's mare."...

The house painters of Brooklyn have taken steps to counteract the attempt of the bosses to reducetheir wages.

The house carpenters, we are informed, are pretty well "out of the woods" and their demands aregenerally complied with.

The safe-makers have obtained an increase of wages, and are now at work.

The lithographic printers are making efforts to secure better pay for their labor.

The workmen on the iron clads are yet holding out against the contractors. ...

The window shade painters have obtained an advance of 25 percent.

The horse shoers are fortifying themselves against the evils of money and trade fluctuations.

The sash and blind-makers are organized and ask their employers for 25 percent additional.

The sugar packers are remodelling their list of prices.

The glass cutters demand 15 percent to present wages.

Imperfect as we confess our list to be, there is enough to convince the reader that the socialrevolution now working its way through the land must succeed, if workingmen are only true toeach other.

The stage drivers, to the number of 800, are on a strike.. . .

The workingmen of Boston are not behind.... in addition to the strike at the Charlestown NavyYard. .. .

The riggers are on a strike. .. .

At this writing it is rumored, says the Boston Post, that a general strike is contemplated among theworkmen in the iron establishments at South Boston, and other parts of the city.

The war brought many women into shops and factories, often over the objections of men who sawthem driving wage scales down. In New York City, girls sewed umbrellas from six in the morningto midnight, earning $3 a week, from which employers deducted the cost of needles and thread.Girls who made cotton shirts received twenty-four cents for a twelve-hour day. In late 1863, NewYork working women held a mass meeting to find a solution to their problems. A WorkingWomen's Protective Union was formed, and there was a strike of women umbrella workers in NewYork and Brooklyn. In Providence, Rhode Island, a Ladies Cigar Makers Union was organized.

All together, by 1864, about 200,000 workers, men and women, were in trade unions, formingnational unions in some of the trades, putting out labor newspapers.

Union troops were used to break strikes. Federal soldiers were sent to Cold Springs, New York, toend a strike at a gun works where workers wanted a wage increase. Striking machinists and tailorsin St. Louis were forced back to work by the army. In Tennessee, a Union general arrested and sentout of the state two hundred striking mechanics. When engineers on the Reading Railroad struck,troops broke that strike, as they did with miners in Tioga County, Pennsylvania.

White workers of the North were not enthusiastic about a war which seemed to be fought for theblack slave, or for the capitalist, for anyone but them. They worked in semislave conditionsthemselves. They thought the war was profiting the new class of millionaires. They saw defectiveguns sold to the army by contractors, sand sold as sugar, rye sold as coffee, shop sweepings madeinto clothing and blankets, paper-soled shoes produced for soldiers at the front, navy ships made ofrotting timbers, soldiers' uniforms that fell apart in the rain.

The Irish working people of New York, recent immigrants, poor, looked upon with contempt bynative Americans, could hardly find sympathy for the black population of the city who competedwith them for jobs as longshoremen, barbers, waiters, domestic servants. Blacks, pushed out ofthese jobs, often were used to break strikes. Then came the war, the draft, the chance of death. Andthe Conscription Act of 1863 provided that the rich could avoid military service: they could pay$300 or buy a substitute. In the summer of 1863, a "Song of the Conscripts" was circulated by thethousands in New York and other cities. One stanza:

We're coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more
We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore
Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree;
We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty.

When recruiting for the army began in July 1863, a mob in New York wrecked the main recruitingstation. Then, for three days, crowds of white workers marched through the city, destroyingbuildings, factories, streetcar lines, homes. The draft riots were complex-antiblack, antirich, anti-Republican. From an assault on draft headquarters, the rioters went on to attacks on wealthy homes,then to the murder of blacks. They marched through the streets, forcing factories to close, recruitingmore members of the mob. They set the city's colored orphan asylum on fire. They shot, burned,and hanged blacks they found in the streets. Many people were thrown into the rivers to drown.

On the fourth day, Union troops returning from the Battle of Gettysburg came into the city andstopped the rioting. Perhaps four hundred people were killed. No exact figures have ever beengiven, but the number of lives lost was greater than in any other incident of domestic violence inAmerican history.

Joel Tyler Headley (The Great Riots of New York) gave a graphic day-by-day description of whathappened:

Second Day.... the fire-bells continually ringing increased the terror that every hour became morewidespread. Especially was this true of the negro population. ... At one time there lay at the cornerof Twenty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue the dead body of a negro, stripped nearly naked, andaround it a collection of Irishmen, absolutely dancing or shouting like wild Indians.... A negrobarber's shop was next attacked, and the torch applied to it. A negro lodging house in the samestreet next received the visit of these furies, and was soon a mass of ruins. Old men, seventy yearsof age, and young children, too young to comprehend what it all meant, were cruelly beaten andkilled....

There were antidraft riots-not so prolonged or bloody-in other northern cities: Newark, Troy,Boston, Toledo, Evansville. In Boston the dead were Irish workers attacking an armory, who werefired on by soldiers.

In the South, beneath the apparent unity of the white Confederacy, there was also conflict. Mostwhites-two-thirds of them-did not own slaves. A few thousand families made up the plantationelite. The Federal Census of 1850 showed that a thousand southern families at the top of theeconomy received about $50 million a year income, while all the other families, about 660,000,received about $60 million a year.

Millions of southern whites were poor farmers, living in shacks or abandoned outhouses, cultivatingland so bad the plantation owners had abandoned it. Just before the Civil War, in Jackson,Mississippi, slaves working in a cotton factory received twenty cents a day for board, and whiteworkers at the same factory received thirty cents. A newspaper in North Carolina in August 1855spoke of "hundreds of thousands of working class families existing upon half-starvation from yearto year."

Behind the rebel battle yells and the legendary spirit of the Confederate army, there was muchreluctance to fight. A sympathetic historian of the South, E. Merton Coulter, asked: "Why did theConfederacy fail? The forces leading to defeat were many but they may be summed up in this onefact: The people did not will hard enough and long enough to win." Not money or soldiers, but willpower and morale were decisive.

The conscription law of the Confederacy too provided that the rich could avoid service. DidConfederate soldiers begin to suspect they were fighting for the privileges of an elite they couldnever belong to? In April 1863, there was a bread riot in Richmond. That summer, draft riotsoccurred in various southern cities. In September, a bread riot in Mobile, Alabama. Georgia LeeTatum, in her study Disloyalty in the Confederacy, writes: "Before the end of the war, there wasmuch disaffection in every state, and many of the disloyal had formed into bands-in some statesinto well-organized, active societies."

The Civil War was one of the first instances in the world of modern warfare: deadly artillery shells,Gatling guns, bayonet charges-combining the indiscriminate killing of mechanized war with hand-to-hand combat. The nightmare scenes could not adequately be described except in a novel likeStephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. In one charge before Petersburg, Virginia, a regimentof 850 Maine soldiers lost 632 men in half an hour. It was a vast butchery, 623,000 dead on bothsides, and 471,000 wounded, over a million dead and wounded in a country whose population was30 million.

No wonder that desertions grew among southern soldiers as the war went on. As for the Unionarmy, by the end of the war, 200,000 had deserted.

Still, 600,000 had volunteered for the Confederacy in 1861, and many in the Union army werevolunteers. The psychology of patriotism, the lure of adventure, the aura of moral crusade createdby political leaders, worked effectively to dim class resentments against the rich and powerful, andturn much of the anger against "the enemy." As Edmund Wilson put it in Patriotic Gore (writtenafter World War II):

We have seen, in our most recent wars, how a divided and arguing public opinion may beconverted overnight into a national near-unanimity, an obedient flood of energy which will carrythe young to destruction and overpower any effort to stem it. The unanimity of men at war is likethat of a school of fish, which will swerve, simultaneously and apparently without leadership, whenthe shadow of an enemy appears, or like a sky darkening flight of grass-hoppers, which, also allcompelled by one impulse, will descend to consume the crops.

Under the deafening noise of the war, Congress was passing and Lincoln was signing into law awhole series of acts to give business interests what they wanted, and what the agrarian South hadblocked before secession. The Republican platform of 1860 had been a clear appeal tobusinessmen. Now Congress in 1861 passed the Morrill Tariff. This made foreign goods moreexpensive, allowed American manufacturers to raise their prices, and forced American consumersto pay more.

The following year a Homestead Act was passed. It gave 160 acres of western land, unoccupiedand publicly owned, to anyone who would cultivate it for five years. Anyone willing to pay $1.25an acre could buy a homestead. Few ordinary people had the $200 necessary to do this; speculatorsmoved in and bought up much of the land. Homestead land added up to 50 million acres. Butduring the Civil War, over 100 million acres were given by Congress and the President to variousrailroads, free of charge. Congress also set up a national bank, putting the government intopartnership with the banking interests, guaranteeing their profits.

With strikes spreading, employers pressed Congress for help. The Contract Labor Law of 1864made it possible for companies to sign contracts with foreign workers whenever the workerspledged to give twelve months of their wages to pay the cost of emigration. This gave theemployers during the Civil war not only very cheap labor, but strikebreakers.

More important, perhaps, than the federal laws passed by Congress for the benefit of the rich werethe day-to-day operations of local and state laws for the benefit of landlords and merchants.Gustavus Myers, in his History of the Great American Fortunes, comments on this in discussing thegrowth of the Astor family's fortune, much of it out of the rents of New York tenements:

Is it not murder when, compelled by want, people are forced to fester in squalid, germ-filledtenements, where the sunlight never enters and where disease finds a prolific breeding-place?Untold thousands went to their deaths in these unspeakable places. Yet, so far as the' Law wasconcerned, the rents collected by the Astors, as well as by other landlords, were honestly made. Thewhole institution of Law saw nothing out of the way in these conditions, and very significantly so,because, to repeat over and over again, Law did not represent the ethics or ideals of advancedhumanity; it exactly reflected, as a pool reflects the sky, the demands and self-interest of thegrowing propertied classes... .

In the thirty years leading up to the Civil War, the law was increasingly interpreted in the courts tosuit the capitalist development of the country. Studying this, Morton Horwitz (The Transformationof American Law) points out that the English commonlaw was no longer holy when it stood in theway of business growth. Mill owners were given the legal right to destroy other people's propertyby flood to carry on their business. The law of "eminent domain" was used to take farmers' landand give it to canal companies or railroad companies as subsidies. Judgments for damages againstbusinessmen were taken out of the hands of juries, which were unpredictable, and given to judges.Private settlement of disputes by arbitration was replaced by court settlements, creating moredependence on lawyers, and the legal profession gained in importance. The ancient idea of a fairprice for goods gave way in the courts to the idea of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), thusthrowing generations of consumers from that time on to the mercy of businessmen.

That contract law was intended to discriminate against working people and for business is shownby Horwitz in the following example of the early nineteenth century: the courts said that if a workersigned a contract to work for a year, and left before the year was up, he was not entitled to anywages, even for the time he had worked. But the courts at the same time said that if a buildingbusiness broke a contract, it was entitled to be paid for whatever had been done up to that point.

The pretense of the law was that a worker and a railroad made a contract with equal bargainingpower. Thus, a Massachusetts judge decided an injured worker did not deserve compensation,because, by signing the contract, he was agreeing to take certain risks. "The circle was completed;the law had come simply to ratify those forms of inequality that the market system produced."

It was a time when the law did not even pretend to protect working people-as it would in the nextcentury. Health and safety laws were either nonexistent or unenforced. In Lawrence,Massachusetts, in 1860, on a winter day, the Pemberton Mill collapsed, with nine hundred workersinside, mostly women. Eighty-eight died, and although there was evidence that the structure hadnever been adequate to support the heavy machinery inside, and that this was known to theconstruction engineer, a jury found "no evidence of criminal intent."

Horwitz sums up what happened in the courts of law by the time of the Civil War:

By the middle of the nineteenth century the legal system had been reshaped to the advantage ofmen of commerce and industry at the expense of farmers, workers, consumers, and other lesspowerful groups within the society. ... it actively promoted a legal redistribution of wealth againstthe weakest groups in the society.

In premodern times, the maldistribution of wealth was accomplished by simple force. In moderntimes, exploitation is disguised-it is accomplished by law, which has the look of neutrality andfairness. By the time of the Civil War, modernization was well under way in the United States.

With the war over, the urgency of national unity slackened, and ordinary people could turn more totheir daily lives, their problems of survival. The disbanded armies now were in the streets, lookingfor work. In June 1865, Fincher's Trades' Review reported: "As was to be expected, the returnedsoldiers are flooding the streets already, unable to find employment."

The cities to which the soldiers returned were death traps of typhus, tuberculosis, hunger, and fire.In New York, 100,000 people lived in the cellars of the slums; 12,000 women worked in houses ofprostitution to keep from starving; the garbage, lying 2 feet deep in the streets, was alive with rats.In Philadelphia, while the rich got fresh water from the Schuylkill River, everyone else drank fromthe Delaware, into which 13 million gallons of sewage were dumped every day. In the GreatChicago Fire in 1871, the tenements fell so fast, one after another, that people said it sounded likean earthquake.

A movement for the eight-hour day began among working people after the war, helped by theformation of the first national federation of unions, the National Labor Union. A three-month strikeof 100,000 workers in New York won the eight-hour day, and at a victory celebration in June 1872,150,000 workers paraded through the city. The New York Times wondered what proportion of thestrikers were "thoroughly American."

Women, brought into industry during the war, organized unions: cigarmakers, tailoresses, umbrellasewers, capmakers, printers, laundresses, shoeworkers. They formed the Daughters of St, Crispin,and succeeded in getting the Cigarmakers Union and the National Typographical Union to admitwomen for the first time. A woman named Gussie Lewis of New York became correspondingsecretary of the Typographers' Union. But the cigarmakers and typographers were only two of thethirty-odd national unions, and the general attitude toward women was one of exclusion.

In 1869, the collar laundresses of Troy, New York, whose work involved standing "over the washtub and over the ironing table with furnaces on either side, the thermometer averaging 100 degrees,for wages averaging $2.00 and $3.00 a week" (according to a contemporary account), went onstrike. Their leader was Kate Mullaney, second vice-president of the National Labor Union. Seventhousand people came to a rally to support them, and the women organized a cooperative collar andcuff factory to provide work and keep the strike going. But as time went on, outside supportdwindled. The employers began making a paper collar, requiring fewer laundresses. The strikefailed.

The dangers of mill work intensified efforts to organize. Work often went on around the clock. At amill in Providence, Rhode Island, fire broke out one night in 1866. There was panic among the sixhundred workers, mostly women, and many jumped to their deaths from upper-story windows.

In Fall River, Massachusetts, women weavers formed a union independent of the men weavers.They refused to take a 10 percent wage cut that the men had accepted, struck against three nulls,won the men's support, and brought to a halt 3,500 looms and 156,000 spindles, with 3,200 workerson strike. But their children needed food; they had to return to work, signing an "iron-clad oath"(later called a "yellow-dog contract") not to join a union.

Black workers at this time found the National Labor Union reluctant to organize them. So theyformed their own unions and carried on their own strikes-like the levee workers in Mobile,Alabama, in 1867, Negro longshoremen in Charleston, dockworkers in Savannah. This probablystimulated the National Labor Union, at its 1869 convention, to resolve to organize women andNegroes, declaring that it recognized "neither color nor sex on the question of the rights of labor."A journalist wrote about the remarkable signs of racial unity at this convention:

When a native Mississippian and an ex-confederate officer, in addressing a convention, refers to acolored delegate who has preceded him as "the gentleman from Georgia" .. . when an ardent andDemocratic partisan (from New York at that) declares with a rich Irish brogue that he asks forhimself no privilege as a mechanic or as a citizen that he is not willing to concede to every otherman, white or black ... then one may indeed be warranted in asserting that time works curiouschanges.. ..

Most unions, however, still kept Negroes out, or asked them to form their own locals.

The National Labor Union began to expend more and more of its energy on political issues,especially currency reform, a demand for the issuance of paper money: Greenbacks. As it becameless an organizer of labor struggles, and more a lobbyist with Congress, concerned with voting, itlost vitality. An observer of the labor scene, F. A. Sorge, wrote in 1870 to Karl Marx in England:"The National Labor Union, which had such brilliant prospects in the beginning of its career, waspoisoned by Greenbackism and is slowly but surely dying."

Perhaps unions could not easily see the limits to legislative reform in an age where such reformlaws were being passed for the first time, and hopes were high. The Pennsylvania legislature in1869 passed a mine safety act providing for the "regulation and ventilation of mines, and for theprotection of the lives of the miners." Only after a hundred years of continuing accidents in thosemines would it be understood how insufficient those words were-except as a device to calm angeramong miners.

In 1873, another economic crisis devastated the nation. It was the closing of the banking house ofJay Cooke-the banker who during the war had made $3 million a year in commissions alone forselling government bonds-that started the wave of panic. While President Grant slept in Cooke'sPhiladelphia mansion on September 18, 1873, the banker rode downtown to lock the door on hisbank. Now people could not pay loans on mortgages: live thousand businesses closed and put theirworkers on the street.

It was more than Jay Cooke. The crisis was built into a system which was chaotic in its nature, inwhich only the very rich were secure. It was a system of periodic crisis-1837, 1857, 1873 (andlater: 1893, 1907, 1919, 1929)-that wiped out small businesses and brought cold, hunger, and deathto working people while the fortunes of the Astors, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Morgans, keptgrowing through war and peace, crisis and recovery. During the 1873 crisis, Carnegie wascapturing the steel market, Rockefeller was wiping out his competitors in oil.

"LABOR DEPRESSION IN BROOKLYN" was the headline in the New York Herald in November1873. It listed closings and layoffs: a felt-skirt factory, a picture-frame factory, a glass-cuttingestablishment, a steelworks factory. And women's trades: milliners, dressmakers, shoe-binders.

The depression continued through the 1870s. During the first three months of 1874, ninetythousand workers, almost half of them women, had to sleep in police stations in New York. Theywere known as "revolvers" because they were limited to one or two days a month in any one policestation, and so had to keep moving. All over the country, people were evicted from their homes.Many roamed the cities looking for food.

Desperate workers tried to get to Europe or to South America. In 1878, the SS Metropolis, filledwith laborers, left the United States for South America and sank with all aboard. The New YorkTribune reported: "One hour after the news that the ship had gone down arrived in Philadelphia, theoffice of Messrs. Collins was besieged by hundreds of hunger-bitten, decent men, begging for theplaces of the drowned laborers."

Mass meeting and demonstrations of the unemployed took place all over the country. Unemployedcouncils were set up. A meeting in New York at Cooper Institute in late 1873, organized by tradeunions and the American seed on of the First International (founded in 1864 in Europe by Marx andothers), drew a huge crowd, overflowing into the streets. The meeting asked that before billsbecame law they should be approved by a public vote, that no individual should own more than$30,000; they asked for an eight-hour day. Also:

Whereas, we are industrious, law-abiding citizens, who had paid all taxes and given support andallegiance to the government,

Resolved, that we will in this time of need supply ourselves and ourfamilies with proper food and shelter and we will send our bills to the City treasury, to beliquidated, until we shall obtain work... .

In Chicago, twenty thousand unemployed marched through the streets to City Hall asking "breadfor the needy, clothing for the naked, and houses for the homeless." Actions like this resulted insome relief for about ten thousand families.

In January 1874, in New York City, a huge parade of workers, kept by the police from approachingCity Hall, went to Tompkins Square, and there were told by the police they couldn't have themeeting. They stayed, and the police attacked. One newspaper reported:

Police clubs rose and fell. Women and children ran screaming in all directions. Many of them weretrampled underfoot in the stampede for the gates. In the street bystanders were ridden down andmercilessly clubbed by mounted officers.

Strikes were called in the textile mills of Fall River, Massachusetts. In the anthracite coal district ofPennsylvania, there was the "long strike," where Irish members of a society called the AncientOrder of Hibernians were accused of acts of violence, mostly on the testimony of a detectiveplanted among the miners. These were the "Molly Maguires." They were tried and found guilty.Philip Foner believes, after a study of the evidence, that they were framed because they were labororganizers. He quotes the sympathetic Irish World, which called them "intelligent men whosedirection gave strength to the resistance of the miners to the inhuman reduction of their wages."And he points to the Miners' Journal, put out by the coal mine owners, which referred to theexecuted men this way: "What did they do? Whenever prices of labor did not suit them theyorganized and proclaimed a strike."

All together, nineteen were executed, according to Anthony Bimba (The Molly Maguires). Therewere scattered protests from workingmen's organizations, but no mass movement that could stopthe executions.

It was a time when employers brought in recent immigrants-desperate for work, different from thestrikers in language and culture-to break strikes. Italians were imported into the bituminous coalarea around Pittsburgh in 1874 to replace striking miners. This led to the killing of three Italians, totrials in which jurors of the community exonerated the strikers, and bitter feelings between Italiansand other organized workers.

The centennial year of 1876-one hundred years after the Declaration of Independence-brought fortha number of new declarations (reproduced by Philip Foner in We the Other People). Whites andblacks, separately, expressed their disillusionment. A "Negro Declaration of Independence"denounced the Republican party on which they had once depended to gain full freedom, andproposed independent political action by colored voters. And the Workingmen's party of Illinois, ata July 4 celebration organized by German socialists in Chicago, said in its Declaration ofIndependence:

The present system has enabled capitalists to make laws in their own interests to the injury andoppression of the workers.

It has made the name Democracy, for which our forefathers fought and died, a mockery and ashadow, by giving to property an unproportionate amount of representation and control overLegislation.

It has enabled capitalists ... to secure government aid, inland grants and money loans, to selfishrailroad corporations, who, by monopolizing the means of transportation are enabled to swindleboth the producer and the consumer.. ..

It has presented to the world the absurd spectacle of a deadly civil war for the abolition of negroslavery while the majority of the white population, those who have created all the wealth of thenation, are compelled to suffer under a bondage infinitely more galling and humiliating. . ..

It has allowed the capitalists, as a class, to appropriate annually 5/6 of the entire production of thecountry. . . .

It has therefore prevented mankind from fulfilling their natural destinies on earth-crushed outambition, prevented marriages or caused false and unnatural ones-has shortened human life,destroyed morals and fostered crime, corrupted judges, ministers, and statesmen, shatteredconfidence, love and honor among men. and made life a selfish, merciless struggle for existenceinstead of a noble and generous struggle for perfection, in which equal advantages should he givento all, and human lives relieved from an unnatural and degrading competition for bread.. ..

We, therefore, the representatives of the workers of Chicago, in mass meeting assembled, dosolemnly publish and declare .. .

That we are absolved from all allegiance to the existing political parties of this country, and that asfree and independent producers we shall endeavor to acquire the full power to make our own laws,manage our own production, and govern ourselves, acknowledging no rights without duties, noduties without rights. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the assistanceand cooperation of all workingmen, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our means, and oursacred honor.

In the year 1877, the country was in the depths of the Depression. That summer, in the hot citieswhere poor families lived in cellars and drank infested water, the children became sick in largenumbers. The New York Times wrote: "... already the cry of the dying children begins to be heard.... Soon, to judge from the past, there will be a thousand deaths of infants per week in the city."That first week in July, in Baltimore, where all liquid sewage ran through the streets, 139 babiesdied.

That year there came a series of tumultuous strikes by railroad workers in a dozen cities; theyshook the nation as no labor conflict in its history had done.

It began with wage cuts on railroad after railroad, in tense situations of already low wages ($1.75 aday for brakemen working twelve hours), scheming and profiteering by the railroad companies,deaths and injuries among the workers-loss of hands, feet, fingers, the crushing of men betweencars.

At the Baltimore & Ohio station in Martinsburg, West Virginia, workers determined to tight thewage cut went on strike, uncoupled the engines, ran them into the roundhouse, and announced nomore trains would leave Martinsburg until the 10 percent cut was canceled. A crowd of supportgathered, too many for the local police to disperse. B. & O. officials asked the governor for militaryprotection, and he sent in militia. A train tried to get through, protected by the militia, and a striker,trying to derail it, exchanged gunfire with a militiaman attempting to stop him. The striker was shotin his thigh and his arm. His arm was amputated later that day, and nine days later he died.

Six hundred freight trains now jammed the yards at Martinsburg. The West Virginia governorapplied to newly elected President Rutherford Hayes for federal troops, saying the state militia wasinsufficient. In fact, the militia was not totally reliable, being composed of many railroad workers.Much of the U.S. army was tied up in Indian battles in the West. Congress had not appropriatedmoney for the army yet, but J. P. Morgan, August Belmont, and other bankers now offered to lendmoney to pay army officers (but no enlisted men). Federal troops arrived in Martinsburg, and thefreight cars began to move.

In Baltimore, a crowd of thousands sympathetic to the railroad strikers surrounded the armory ofthe National Guard, which had been called out by the governor at the request of the B. & O.Railroad. The crowd hurled rocks, and the soldiers came out, firing. The streets now became thescene of a moving, bloody battle. When the evening was over, ten men or boys were dead, morebadly wounded, one soldier wounded. Half of the 120 troops quit and the rest went on to the traindepot, where a crowd of two hundred smashed the engine of a passenger train, tore up tracks, andengaged the militia again in a running battle.

By now, fifteen thousand people surrounded the depot. Soon, three passenger cars, the stationplatform, and a locomotive were on fire. The governor asked for federal troops, and Hayesresponded. Five hundred soldiers arrived and Baltimore quieted down.

The rebellion of the railroad workers now spread. Joseph Dacus, then editor of the St. LouisRepublican, reported:

Strikes were occurring almost every hour. The great State of Pennsylvania was in an uproar; NewJersey was afflicted by a paralyzing dread; New York was mustering an army of militia; Ohio wasshaken from Lake Erie to the Ohio River; Indiana rested in a dreadful suspense. Illinois, andespecially its great metropolis, Chicago, apparently hung on the verge of a vortex of confusion andtumult. St. Louis had already felt the effect of the premonitory shocks of the uprising. . . .

The strike spread to Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Again, it happened outside theregular union, pent-up anger exploding without plan. Robert Bruce, historian of the 1877 strikes,writes (1877: Year of Violence) about a flagman named Gus Harris. Harris refused to go out on a "double-header," a train with two locomotives carrying a double length of cars, to which railroaders hadobjected because it required fewer workers and made the brakemen's work more dangerous:

The decision was his own, not part of a concerted plan or a general understanding. Had he lainawake that past night, listening to the rain, asking himself if he dared quit, wondering if anyonewould join him, weighing the chances? Or had he simply risen to a breakfast that did not fill him,seen his children go off shabby and half-fed, walked brooding through the damp morning and thenyielded impulsively to stored-up rage?

When Harris said he would not go, the rest of the crew refused too. The strikers now multiplied,joined by young boys and men from the mills and factories (Pittsburgh had 33 iron mills, 73 glassfactories, 29 oil refineries, 158 coal mines). The freight trains stopped moving out of the city. TheTrainman's Union had not organized this, but it moved to take hold, called a meeting, invited "allworkingmen to make common cause with their brethren on the railroad."

Railroad and local officials decided that the Pittsburgh militia would not kill their fellowtownsmen, and urged that Philadelphia troops be called in. By now two thousand cars were idle inPittsburgh. The Philadelphia troops came and began to clear the track. Rocks flew. Gunfire wasexchanged between crowd and troops. At least ten people were killed, all workingmen, most ofthem not railroaders.

Now the whole city rose in anger. A crowd surrounded the troops, who moved into a roundhouse.Railroad cars were set afire, buildings began to burn, and finally the roundhouse itself, the troopsmarching out of it to safety. There was more gunfire, the Union Depot was set afire, thousandslooted the freight cars. A huge grain elevator and a small section of the city went up in flames. In afew days, twenty-four people had been killed (including four soldiers). Seventy-nine buildings hadbeen burned to the ground. Something like a general strike was developing in Pittsburgh: millworkers, car workers, miners, laborers, and the employees at the Carnegie steel plant.

The entire National Guard of Pennsylvania, nine thousand men, was called out. But many of thecompanies couldn't move as strikers in other towns held up traffic. In Lebanon, Pennsylvania, oneNational Guard company mutinied and marched through an excited town. In Altoona, troopssurrounded by rioters, immobilized by sabotaged engines, surrendered, stacked arms, fraternizedwith the crowd, and then were allowed to go home, to the accompaniment of singing by a quartetin an all-Negro militia company.

In Harrisburg, the state capital, as at so many places, teenagers made up a large part of the crowd,which included some Negroes. Philadelphia militia, on their way home from Altoona, shook handswith the crowd, gave up their guns, marched like captives through the streets, were fed at a hoteland sent home. The crowd agreed to the mayor's request to deposit the surrendered guns at the cityhall. Factories and shops were idle. After some looting, citizens' patrols kept order in the streetsthrough the night.

Where strikers did not manage to take control, as in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, it may well have beenbecause of disunity. The spokesman of the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company in thattown wrote: "The men have no organization, and there is too much race jealousy existing amongthem to permit them to form one."

In Reading, Pennsylvania, there was no such problem-90 percent were native-born, the rest mostlyGerman. There, the railroad was two months behind in paying wages, and a branch of theTrainman's Union was organized. Two thousand people gathered, while men who had blackenedtheir faces with coal dust set about methodically tearing up tracks, jamming switches, derailingcars, setting fire to cabooses and also to a railroad bridge.

A National Guard company arrived, fresh from duty at the execution of the Molly Maguires. Thecrowd threw stones, fired pistols. The soldiers fired into the crowd. "Six men lay dead in thetwilight," Bruce reports, "a fireman and an engineer formerly employed in the Reading, a carpenter,a huckster, a rolling-mill worker, a laborer.... A policeman and another man lay at the point ofdeath." Five of the wounded died. The crowd grew angrier, more menacing. A contingent ofsoldiers announced it would not fire, one soldier saying he would rather put a bullet through thepresident of Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron. The 16th Regiment of the Morristown volunteersstacked its arms. Some militia threw their guns away and gave their ammunition to the crowd.When the Guardsmen left for home, federal troops arrived and took control, and local police beganmaking arrests.

Meanwhile the leaders of the big railway brotherhoods, the Order of Railway Conductors, theBrotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, the Brotherhood of Engineers, disavowed the strike. Therewas talk in the press of "communistic ideas . . . widely entertained ... by the workmen employed inmines and factories and by the railroads."

In fact, there was a very active Workingmen's party in Chicago, with several thousand members,most of them immigrants from Germany and Bohemia. It was connected with the First Internationalin Europe. In the midst of the railroad strikes, that summer of 1877, it called a rally. Six thousandpeople came and demanded nationalization of the railroads. Albert Parsons gave a fiery speech. Hewas from Alabama, had fought in the Confederacy during the Civil War, married a brown-skinnedwoman of Spanish and Indian blood, worked as a typesetter, and was one of the best English-speaking orators the Workingmen's party had.

The next day, a crowd of young people, not especially connected with the rally of the eveningbefore, began moving through the railroad yards, closed down the freights, went to the factories,called out the mill workers, the stockyard workers, the crewmen on the Lake Michigan ships,closed down the brickyards and lumberyards. That day also, Albert Parsons was fired from his jobwith the Chicago Times and declared blacklisted.

The police attacked the crowds. The press reported: "The sound of clubs falling on skulls wassickening for the first minute, until one grew accustomed to it. A rioter dropped at every whack, itseemed, for the ground was covered with them." Two companies of U.S. infantry arrived, joiningNational Guardsmen and Civil War veterans. Police fired into a surging crowd, and three men werekilled.

The next day, an armed crowd of five thousand fought the police. The police fired again and again,and when it was over, and the dead were counted, they were, as usual, workingmen and boys,eighteen of them, their skulls smashed by clubs, their vital organs pierced by gunfire.

The one city where the Workingmen's party clearly led the rebellion was St. Louis, a city of flourmills, foundries, packing houses, machine shops, breweries, and railroads. Here, as elsewhere, therewere wage cuts on the railroads. And here there were perhaps a thousand members of theWorkingmen's party, many of them bakers, coopers, cabinetmakers, cigarmakers, brewery workers.The party was organized in four sections, by nationality: German, English, French, Bohemian.

All four sections took a ferry across the Mississippi to join a mass meeting of railroad men in EastSt. Louis. One of their speakers told the meeting: "All you have to do, gentlemen, for you have thenumbers, is to unite on one idea-that the workingmen shall rule the country. What man makes,belongs to him, and the workingmen made this country." Railroaders in East St. Louis declaredthemselves on strike. The mayor of East St. Louis was a European immigrant, himself an activerevolutionist as a youth, and railroad men's votes dominated the city.

In St. Louis, itself, the Workingmen's party called an open-air mass meeting to which five thousandpeople came. The party was clearly in the leadership of the strike. Speakers, excited by the crowd,became more militant: ". . . capital has changed liberty into serfdom, and we must fight or die."They called for nationalization of the railroads, mines, and all industry.

At another huge meeting ofthe Workingmen's party a black man spoke for those who worked on the steamboats and levees. Heasked: "Will you stand to us regardless of color?" The crowd shouted back: "We will!" Anexecutive committee was set up, and it called for a general strike of all branches of industry in St.Louis.

Handbills for the general strike were soon all over the city. There was a march of four hundredNegro steamboat men and roustabouts along the river, six hundred factory workers carrying abanner: "No Monopoly- Workingmen's Rights." A great procession moved through the city, endingwith a rally often thousand people listening to Communist speakers: "The people are rising up intheir might and declaring they will no longer submit to being oppressed by unproductive capital."

David Burbank, in his book on the St. Louis events, Reign of the Rabble, writes:

Only around St. Louis did the original strike on the railroads expand into such a systematicallyorganized and complete shut-down of all industry that the term general strike is fully justified. Andonly there did the socialists assume undisputed leadership.... no American city has come so close tobeing ruled by a workers' soviet, as we would now call it, as St. Louis, Missouri, in the year 1877.

The railroad strikes were making news in Europe. Marx wrote Engels: "What do you think of theworkers of the United States? This first explosion against the associated oligarchy of capital whichhas occurred since the Civil War will naturally again be suppressed, but can very well form thepoint of origin of an earnest workers' party. . . ."

In New York, several thousand gathered at Tompkins Square. The tone of the meeting wasmoderate, speaking of "a political revolution through the ballot box." And: "If you will unite, wemay have here within five years a socialistic republic. . . . Then will a lovely morning break overthis darkened land." It was a peaceful meeting. It adjourned. The last words heard from theplatform were: "Whatever we poor men may not have, we have free speech, and no one can take itfrom us." Then the police charged, using their clubs.

In St. Louis, as elsewhere, the momentum of the crowds, the meetings, the enthusiasm, could not besustained. As they diminished, the police, militia, and federal troops moved in and the authoritiestook over. The police raided the headquarters of the Workingmen's party and arrested seventypeople; the executive committee that had been for a while virtually in charge of the city was now inprison. The strikers surrendered; the wage cuts remained; 131 strike leaders were fired by theBurlington Railroad.

When the great railroad strikes of 1877 were over, a hundred people were dead, a thousand peoplehad gone to jail, 100,000 workers had gone on strike, and the strikes had roused into actioncountless unemployed in the cities. More than half the freight on the nation's 75,000 miles of trackhad stopped running at the height of the strikes.

The railroads made some concessions, withdrew some wage cuts, but also strengthened their "Coaland Iron Police." In a number of large cities, National Guard armories were built, with loopholesfor guns. Robert Bruce believes the strikes taught many people of the hardships of others, and thatthey led to congressional railroad regulation. They may have stimulated the business unionism ofthe American Federation of Labor as well as the national unity of labor proposed by the Knights ofLabor, and the independent labor-farmer parties of the next two decades.

In 1877, the same year blacks learned they did not have enough strength to make real the promiseof equality in the Civil War, working people learned they were not united enough, not powerfulenough, to defeat the combination of private capital and government power. But there was more tocome.