What Hath God Wrought (79 page)

Eighteen forty was a landmark year in American growth, for the census of that year showed that the population of the United States, 17 million, had reached approximate equality with that of Great Britain. Yet the British economy remained substantially larger, reflecting the further advance of the industrial revolution there. The U.S. economy was catching up, however, for the gross national product grew at a long-term rate of 3.9 percent per annum, reflecting the combined effects of population and productivity increases, compared with a 2.2 percent growth rate for Britain.
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Despite the commentaries of foreign travelers on America’s relative social equality, wealth was by no means evenly distributed. Free adult males in the South held greater wealth on average than in the North, mostly due to slave ownership, although less than 20 percent of them owned slaves.
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Most historians believe that the early industrial revolution widened inequalities in the standard of living; that is, while average per capita income doubled between 1820 and 1860, property owners and the rich benefited more than wage-earners and the poor. But the evidence is not entirely clear; early data are fragmentary, and occasionally historians have used the household rather than the individual as their unit of comparison, which masks the effects of slavery and restrictions on women’s property rights. Some research even suggests that the degree of inequality between rich and poor remained relatively constant during early American industrialization.
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Rich men were much more likely to be planters, merchants, or bankers than manufacturers, though perhaps for a time industrialization opened new avenues for social mobility, as it had done in Britain. If inequality did increase in this period, it may have been due to the arrival of immigrants without property, or to the secession of young adults like the Balls from their propertied fathers’ households, rather than a direct consequence of industrialization. In any case, the substantial degree of economic inequality, even if not caused by industrialization, exacerbated working-class discontents. In the largest American cities of the 1840s, the richest 5 percent of free males owned 70 percent of the real and personal property. The visibility of a small group of super-rich is attested by the invention of the word “millionaire” around 1840.
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Social anxieties were more important than economic ones in fueling discontent among workers in the early American industrial revolution. Under the artisan system, workingmen had embraced not only the party of Jeffersonian Republicanism but its ideology, which celebrated the small property owner’s political independence and social worth. Journeymen often resented the end of the old system, feeling that it had offered them more dignity and a better chance to become a master than they had now of becoming an employer. Instead of owning his tools and selling what he made with them, the mechanic now feared being left with nothing to sell but his labor. A lifetime as a wage-earner seemed a gloomy prospect to men who had imbibed the political outlook of Old Republicanism, who identified themselves with independent farmers or shopkeepers and looked upon wage labor as a form of dependency. Beginning in Philadelphia, Working Men’s political parties sprang up in various places during the 1820s and early ’30s, fed by the discontents of journeymen under the impact of industrialization.
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The Working Men’s political parties espoused a number of causes important to their constituents. These included free public schools, mechanics’ lien laws (helping workers recover wages if their employer went bankrupt), reform of compulsory militia service, abolition of imprisonment for debt, and laws requiring wages to be paid in hard currency and defining a day’s work as ten hours’ labor unless otherwise contracted. In a process often repeated in American politics, the two major parties co-opted the policies of the “Workey” Parties, made them their own and, except for the ten-hour-day rule, often got them implemented. Sometimes politicians from the major parties even infiltrated the decision-making process of the Workeys.
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Meanwhile, more radical programs also bid for the support of the working class. Cornelius Blatchly, a physician and former Quaker, denounced private property as selfish and preached a version of communitarian socialism that integrated efforts to improve the lot of workers with millennial Christianity. Frances Wright, undeterred by the failure of her antislavery enterprise at Nashoba, toured the country speaking on behalf of a philosophy synthesizing Robert Owen’s deist socialism with Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism. One of the charismatic personalities of her time, Wright presented stage-managed performances in striking costumes to audiences that had never before witnessed any woman speak in public. She founded no movement, but many of the artisans who heard her then read the articles Albert Brisbane published in Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
and went out to try their hands at building Fourierist phalanxes in the 1840s.
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The American mechanics themselves found an authentic voice in the machinist Thomas Skidmore, the most radical agitator of all. In his tract
The Rights of Man to Property
(1829), Skidmore equated the position of the wage-worker with slavery. He demanded the confiscation of all existing property and its equal redistribution by the authority of popular sovereignty working through state constitutional conventions. Once property had been equalized, Skidmore had no objection to talented, hardworking individuals increasing their share, but upon their deaths it should revert to the state for redistribution to those who had just come of age. He also supported equal rights for women and blacks.
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But when Skidmore died at the age of forty-two in the cholera epidemic of 1832, his program died with him.

Skidmore’s views comprised what his contemporaries called—generally with horror—“agrarianism.” George Henry Evans, a British immigrant printer, gave agrarianism a more politically plausible form than Skidmore’s. As editor of the first labor newspaper, New York’s
Working Man’s Advocate
(founded in 1829), Evans supported free public education, but beginning around 1834 he turned his attention to land reform. Evans agreed with Skidmore that everyone should be entitled to his own property, but instead of redistributing what already existed, he called for drawing upon the unclaimed national domain, giving away free homesteads of 160 acres to any actual settler over the age of twenty-one. Evans respected the Indians’ rights to land provided they cultivated it; America had room enough for them and settlers too, he insisted. The radical aspects of Evans’s program included a limitation on the amount of land any one person could own and a prohibition against mortgaging or selling the homestead. He envisioned the homesteads being grouped around planned villages with land set aside for parks and public buildings.
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Evans promoted a kind of individualist utopianism that resonated with Jeffersonian and artisan republicanism. In its early years, Evans’s movement sometimes cooperated with British Chartists and radical American utopians (his brother Frederick became a prominent Shaker), but ultimately his program appealed to American aspirations for a democratic capitalism. Employing a catchy slogan, “Vote Yourself a Farm,” Evans’s National Reform Association gained wide publicity, much of it through Greeley’s
New York Tribune
, which accorded a sympathetic presentation to many proposed reforms. Although Evans himself died in 1856, his vision of free homesteads lived on. The Free Soilers endorsed a moderate version of it in 1848, and so did the new Republican Party, which implemented it (shorn of his nonalienation rule and other social engineering features) in 1862. The more popular the idea became, the less close its connection remained to the labor movement. Homesteading, which seemed so radical when Evans first proposed it, turned out to resonate with the aspirations of ordinary Americans, urban and rural, middle and working class, native born and immigrant.
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The Working Men’s Parties disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. The decline of the antebellum Workey Parties and various associated radical movements reflected changing attitudes among the artisans. Most artisans adapted surprisingly quickly to the new industrial order, and once they did, it ceased to seem threatening. In the nineteenth century, skilled mechanics fitting items to gauges could craft interchangeable parts to tolerances as fine as machine tools could, and consequently mechanics retained an important role even in mass production.
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A journeyman mechanic’s expertise often enabled him to become, if not a part owner, then a factory foreman. Another journeyman might prefer to move out west, to a small town where industrialization had not yet penetrated and he could continue to ply his trade. Luck especially favored workers in the building trades. The expansion of the cities created an endless supply of jobs for carpenters, bricklayers, stonemasons, and related crafts. Innovations such as “balloon” framing (so called because of its lightness) and prefabricated doors facilitated rapid, low-cost housing construction, but many building trades, like plastering and shipbuilding, were not adversely affected by industrialization. Other craft skills also remained strong for generations more, such as those of the butcher and the watchmaker. Meanwhile, the industrial revolution created many new skilled occupations including plumber, machinist, telegrapher, and locomotive engineer.

The relatively small scale of antebellum manufacturing often permitted master mechanics to become owners of a manufactory, perhaps by pooling capital with others. (Retail shopkeepers as well as artisans sometimes took this route.) Only in the largest enterprises was industrial management separated from ownership; more typical factories were operated by the same people who owned them. The early industrial revolution in the United States permitted this kind of opportunity for social mobility and thus blurred the line between capitalist and working classes. In the final analysis, the industrial revolution was not simply thrust upon a hostile, sullen mechanic class; to a considerable extent it was their own creation, through their inventions, innovations, and resourcefulness. The human resources of the American working class proved even more critical in fostering the early industrial revolution than did the material resources of a rich continent. The versatile skilled artisan played a key role in America’s economic development.
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Apprenticeships did not work as well in industry as in the old artisan system, though some building trades retained modified apprenticeships. To substitute for apprenticeships in obsolete crafts, journeymen now sought to place their children in the public schools where they could get an education suitable for the clerical jobs proliferating in the industrialized and urbanized society. In the next generation, the children of American artisans often went on to middle-class occupations, while immigrants who had been peasants in the Old World filled the ranks of the new industrial proletariat.
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Where public schools did not yet exist, northern working-class organizations campaigned to establish them. Like all political factions of the time, labor had its own newspapers, and these supported free public education, often reprinting statements by middle-class reformers like William Ellery Channing and Horace Mann. As the New York
Working Man’s Advocate
declared in 1835, “The man who pretends that an ignorant and vicious people can long remain free, is a fool or a knave.”
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Besides parental concern for their children’s welfare, workers had an additional motive for supporting public schools: If children went to school, they stayed out of the labor market, and adult labor did not have to compete with that of low-paid children.

The artisans’ interest in education and self-improvement continued after they left school. More durable than Working Men’s political parties were the Mechanics’ Associations, with their adult education programs, their endowed libraries, lectureships, and encouragement for applied science. These associations represented an area of cooperation between artisans-turned-employers and those who now worked for wages. The artisans also participated in the religious revivals of their time. The evangelical movement and the Working Men’s Parties supported much the same values of autonomy, responsibility, and self-respect. A movement for “free churches” in working-class neighborhoods began to erode the practice of having pews assigned to families who owned them in return for money given to erect the church or rented them in return for annual contributions. The cause of temperance spread from its small-town religious origins to the cities. Employers endorsed it because they preferred a sober workforce, but the reform enjoyed the most success when led by tough-minded working-class men called Washingtonians. Their movement included a branch for women: the Martha Washingtonians. Combating alcohol abuse was not treason to the working class; it helped mitigate some of the worst features of life in the antebellum city.
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After the disappearance of the Working Men’s Parties, some of their former supporters became Whigs, a logical choice in terms of that party’s positions on tariff protection and public schooling. American cities in all parts of the country generally returned anti-Jackson majorities through the 1830s, which must indicate something about the voting of the working class. But in the long run, a majority of the industrial working-class vote ended up captured by the Democrats.
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This was not due to any special interest the party took in labor unions. Andrew Jackson, for example, never mentioned them as far as we know, though in 1834 he did dispatch federal troops to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to deter a strike by construction workers.
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His postmaster general defended exclusion of abolitionist writings from the mails by warning that without such censorship, English labor radicals would be free to incite the American “laboring population” to organize.
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But much in the Democratic Party’s rhetoric resonated with the journeymen’s outlook, especially hard money and opposition to government favoritism toward a national bank or other mixed corporations. The ambiguity of the Jacksonians on the tariff helped them recruit workers in protectionist areas like the Pennsylvania iron industry while not driving away all the cotton and tobacco planters devoted to free trade.