Northern Society and the Growth of Wage Labor, 1790-1837

The Patches’ story illustrates the struggle of thousands of northern families to sustain their economic independence in the years after the American Revolution. Many faced scarce resources in settled rural regions such as eastern Massachusetts, and were obliged to move or change their occupations. Many would leave for the newly opening West, hoping to establish successful farms on frontier land. Others went to sea or to the growing port cities. The Patches were among the first to become wage workers in the North’s new manufacturing industries. Men and women who remained in the countryside also became increasingly involved in producing goods for sale, or in working for wages.

Many Northerners hoped that economic prosperity would guarantee their material independence. Whereas in the plantation South the expansion of slavery created a growing propertyless and dependent workforce, it seemed possible that the North, where slavery was disappearing, would become a society of independent proprietors. Instead, northern towns, industries, and farms came to rely increasingly on the labor of wage workers. In 1800 about twelve percent of the U.S. labor force worked for wages. By 1860, the proportion was around forty percent, and the majority of wage employees were concentrated in the North. This change signaled a growing divergence between northern and southern societies, and called into question the republican vision of property-owning independence for most Americans. It also gave rise to a working peoples’ movement. By the 1830s, wage earners were defending their economic position and asserting their right to equal respect with their more prosperous fellow-citizens.

 One legacy of the American Revolution was the belief that the republic would best be preserved if voters were politically “independent,” not subject to coercion by others. At first this seemed best assured if voters were economically “independent,” too. They should own property, giving them a stake in society and freeing them from the influence of people with some hold over them. Those without property—women, children, the poor, servants, and enslaved persons—were regarded as “dependent” on others, and so to be excluded from voting, office-holding, or public political debate. Women were assigned the role of “republican mothers,” expected to raise their children to be virtuous citizens, but not themselves to obtain the full benefits of citizenship.

These “republican” assumptions were widely shared, North and South. An overwhelming majority of Americans were engaged in agriculture, many on small freehold farms, and a significant proportion of men owned land. Indeed, most people expected the United States to have an agrarian future, and this expectation was to some extent borne out. Rural society expanded rapidly. By 1840 over eighty percent of people in the North still lived in rural areas; in the South, the proportion was over ninety percent. Most continued to work in agriculture, and agricultural goods such as cotton, grain, and lumber were among the United States’ most important products.

Belief in the virtues of rural life was deeply ingrained. Suspicious of cities with their crowds and potential disorder, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1785 that farmers were “the chosen people of God,” and implied that urban growth would threaten the republic’s future. When he arranged the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, doubling the territory of the United States, Jefferson hailed the acquisition of a vast reserve of land that could ensure the future of a property-owning republic; the United States would grow crops to feed its population and export abroad, exchanging them for manufactures produced in more socially unequal countries such as Britain. As late as 1810, Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin claimed that “the superior attractions of agricultural pursuits, the abundance of land compared with the population, the high price of labor, and the want of sufficient capital” would inhibit the growth of American manufacturing.

Other circumstances also appeared to favor an agrarian future. The cotton gin boosted cotton exports from the South, and wars in Europe following the French Revolution of 1789 fostered American trade with markets in Western Europe and the Mediterranean. Northern merchants established new trade links with Asia. All expanded the overseas commerce that could supply America’s need for manufactures.

Jefferson and others who extolled rural America’s republican virtues did not suggest that all rural people were fit to exercise political leadership. Beneath the partisan strife of the 1790s and 1800s between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans lay shared expectations about who should rule. Federalists were explicitly elitist. “The best men,” whose birth, education, or wealth guaranteed their virtue and independence, should govern; lesser property owners should defer to these leaders and accept their authority. Democratic-Republicans attacked the most hierarchical of these assumptions, but leaders like Jefferson also assumed that power would be exercised by a “natural aristocracy” whose talents best suited them for government.

Yet the success of the Revolution, the opening of the continent, and the establishment of new state and federal governments sowed the seeds of economic change and new political traditions. During the early nineteenth century, political culture was transformed, turning republicanism in a more democratic direction, although restricting participation to white males only. It also became clear that the United States would not remain simply an agrarian society. Particularly in the North, economic development altered the republican vision. By 1840 an industrial revolution was under way in the Northeast. Cities were growing rapidly in size and influence. Population growth and commercial expansion were creating new divisions, both between North and South and within northern society itself.

Though North and South were both mainly rural in 1800, they differed from each other greatly. Southern planters used a large enslaved workforce to produce exportable commodities. Most white northerners, in contrast, lived in small-farm regions that consumed much of what they produced. Family farming, supported by cooperation between neighbors, sustained a republican notion of economic independence that contemporaries often referred to as a “modest competence.”

Typical northern farms were modestly sized, between 40 and 120 acres, and worked by the families that owned them. Employment as a laborer or tenant was often a steppingstone to acquiring one’s own farm. Even so, inequality was widespread. Tenancy blighted parts of New York and other states, and some farmers still held enslaved persons who were not yet freed under gradual emancipation laws. Landless farm laborers could be found everywhere, and a majority of free Black people in the rural North owned little or no land. Still, the ideal of land ownership remained within reach for many. Journeying through New York and New England, the Reverend Timothy Dwight was convinced that “[n]o man here begins life with the expectation of being a mere laborer. All intend to possess, and almost all actually possess, a comfortable degree of prosperity and independence.” For white farmers at least, landownership conferred the right to be treated by others as an equal.

Economic independence required the labor of all family members. Husbands and sons, by and large, worked the fields. Most other tasks, including manufacturing household goods, fell to wives and daughters. One farm journal reported that women’s work amounted to half of all farm labor:

Women . . . picked their own wool, . . . spun their own yarn, drove their own looms, made and mended their own chairs, braided their own baskets, wove their own carpets, quilts, and coverlets, . . .  milked their own cows, [and] fed their own calves. . . .

On their Maine farm in the 1790s, Martha Ballard and her daughters produced cloth, raised garden produce, preserved vegetables, and did household chores, while Ballard herself served as a midwife in her neighborhood. Women raised children, nursed the sick, and cared for the elderly. Men celebrated an economic independence that rested heavily on the skills and exertions of their sisters, wives, and daughters.

Farm families were often linked by ties of kinship, religion, and ethnicity. Most settlements included a church, a general store, and a few artisans, such as carpenters and blacksmiths, who might ply their trades only part-time. Proper schoolhouses, doctors, and lawyers were scarce. Families exchanged work and goods, sharing tools or lending a hand when harvesting or barn raising required extra help.

Beyond these local ties, rural independence also rested on links to outside markets, most significant in grain-exporting regions such as Pennsylvania, but essential everywhere for the assurance even of minimal comfort. Salt, sugar, molasses, coffee, tea, tobacco, gunpowder, guns, knives, and axes could not be produced at home, and farm families exchanged crops or home manufactures to pay for them. Yet as late as 1820, only a fifth of the North’s farm output found its way beyond local communities into urban markets. Farm families also purchased modestly. About two-thirds of the clothing rural Americans wore between 1810 and 1820 was homemade, mostly by women. Poor transportation hindered inland trade, protecting those producing for local markets from distant competitors. With few rivers and poor roads connecting coast and hinterland, a ton of goods cost as much to ship thirty miles overland as it did to bring it by sea from Europe.

In 1800 the northern merchant elite conducted business largely in the cities and smaller port towns of the coast. Unlike southern planters, they were not generally directly concerned with production, but obtained their wealth from trade. Urban markets were small; fewer than one in twelve Americans lived in places with populations of twenty-five hundred or more. The biggest mercantile profits went to traders in ocean-going commerce between the Americas and Europe. American neutrality in the European wars of the 1790s and early 1800s gave merchants from the Northeast dominance of trade routes largely closed to others. Trade with China, first established in the mid-1780s by merchants in Philadelphia and Salem, Massachusetts, offered substantial profits from the sale of the tea, silks, porcelain, lacquerware, and other exotic goods brought back to the United States.

Mercantile success brought great wealth to some, and provided employment to many others, especially smaller merchants and the sailmakers, ropemakers, carpenters, caulkers, and barrelmakers whose crafts were connected with shipping. But the benefits were not equally shared. After farmers, the nation’s largest group of workers were seamen, who labored for modest wages in dangerous conditions, often on long voyages. Large numbers of women in the port towns struggled for livelihoods while their husbands were absent: Lydia Almy of Salem wove cloth, tanned leather, made cider, looked after livestock, worked in the fields, carted wood, and cooked for boarders at her house. Boston mariners’ wives worked for the city’s ropemakers and other employers. Many were poor. In every port lived the widows and families of men who never returned from the sea.

Maritime trade did not substantially improve the North’s position in world production. “The brilliant prospects held out by commerce,” wrote Adam Seybert, a Philadelphia congressman, “caused our citizens to neglect the mechanical and manufacturing branches of industry.” Between 1795 and 1815, the United States ran up a large trade deficit, spending 0 million more for foreign goods than it received for exports. Indeed, nearly half of U.S. exports were really re-exports—goods produced abroad, purchased by American merchants, and resold to other countries. Although this kind of trade amassed profits, it did not directly stimulate the growth of domestic commercial agriculture or industry.

But pressure for change came from several directions. Immigration from Europe, especially to the Middle Atlantic region, increased the supply of urban labor. European warfare in the early nineteenth century encouraged many merchants to redirect their attention from overseas to domestic investment. Transportation improvements, linking coastal areas to the interior, fostered the emergence of regional and national markets for goods. Faced with population growth and inequalities, farm families in rural areas migrated or sought fresh sources of income. All these developments contributed to the expansion of manufacturing in many parts of the North, and to the emergence of new patterns of labor and social division.

This pressure for change arose partly within rural society. To some farmers, maintaining independence required accumulating wealth, but for most it meant achieving a “competency”—cultivating enough land to feed a family, to acquire necessities that could not be made at home, and to obtain enough land for grown sons to establish their own farms. Population growth and land scarcity in older regions made these things difficult to achieve. Many southern New England farms were too small to support all the offspring of large families, and ran short of essentials such as wood for fuel. One son might be given a farm of his own upon coming of age, but dividing a homestead among several sons would create small, unprofitable holdings. According to their means, farmers took various steps to avoid this. They turned to the marketplace to raise the cash (at least six hundred dollars in the 1830s) to buy new farms for their sons. They tried new crops and raised more livestock for sale. In some regions farm women increased their output of dairy produce.

In search of more land, many people migrated westward. Starting in the 1780s, but in increasing numbers after 1815, families moved from older farming districts in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, to “new” land in western New York, the Ohio Valley, and the Great Lakes region. Expansion led to the devastation for Native nations, such as the Shawnees and the Wyandots, the seizure of their lands, and the removal of their populations. By 1800, the white population of Ohio had reached 45,000; twenty years later it was 581,000. Though many new settlers found renewed prosperity by moving west and encouraged others to follow them, some advised caution. John Stillman Wright sold his New York farm in 1818 and went to Ohio, but later published Letters from the West, warning of “the cruel disappointment and vain regret, which so many thousands are now enduring.”

Instead of migrating, some sons (as well as daughters) without land or other means stayed in the East, but moved to the towns, tried new occupations, or became laborers. With new immigrants from Europe, they swelled urban populations, turning small market centers into bustling towns, and large ports such as New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore into metropolises. Both in the countryside and in towns more people engaged in manufacturing, and formed America’s first industrial workforce.

Wealthy merchants reinforced these changes as they turned their attention from international trade to the American continent. Some speculated in urban property or western land; a handful invested directly in manufacturing. But most early-nineteenth century investors concentrated on improving internal commerce and transportation, financing the construction of roads, bridges, and canals, and later of steamboats and railroads. State and local governments encouraged such investments. By 1812, Massachusetts had authorized the building of 105 turnpike roads, and New York more than 50. Labor for local road building was recruited from farm families, but larger projects required greater numbers of workers. Some states poured public funds directly into transport improvements. Others rewarded investors with tax exemptions, banking and lottery franchises, and corporate charters conferring lucrative monopoly privileges.

Expenditures increased steadily, producing great improvements in travel. New York State’s Erie Canal had the most remarkable effects. Built at public expense between 1817 and 1825 by thousands of laborers, both local recruits and immigrants, the canal stretched 364 miles from Albany to Buffalo, linking the Great Lakes region with New York City and transatlantic trade. Freight rates fell sharply as a result. In 1817 it cost nineteen cents a mile to move a ton of goods from New York to Buffalo; by the 1830s it cost less than one-tenth of that. Other states sought to emulate the Erie’s success by building their own canals. Railroad developments soon followed. Baltimore promoters started a railroad line to the Ohio River in 1828, although it took a quarter century to complete. By 1840 shorter railroads connected Boston and other cities with manufacturing and commercial centers in the hinterlands.

Speedier travel was only one dimension of a broader improvement in the circulation of information. Literacy rates were high in the North, and the printing and distribution of published materials flourished. Aided by improvements in printing, such as the development of the steam press, books, periodicals, and inexpensive newspapers multiplied, and flowed from a growing number of local and regional centers. By 1836, nearly one in four New York City residents purchased newspapers daily. “These papers,” noted one observer, “are to be found in every street, lane, alley, in every hotel, tavern, and counting house. … Almost every porter and drayman, while not engaging in his occupation, may be seen with a paper in his hands.” Women’s magazines, the labor press, African American papers, and antislavery journals were all initiated during the 1820s and early 1830s.

Better communications helped knit together regional and national markets and steadily reduced household manufacture for home use. Upstate New York farm households made an average of over ten yards of cloth per person in 1825, but this output dropped to less than half a yard thirty years later as they switched to buying factory-made cloth. Falling freight costs made internal trade more profitable for merchants and made store-bought items of decent quality available to rural families at declining prices. Between 1809 and 1836 the prices of soap and candles fell by about a third, and glassware, cotton mattresses, buttons, pins, and many other goods also became cheaper. “Formerly,” noted a Pennsylvanian in 1836, “no man thought of going to a tailor for a sheet. Now everybody goes to one even for a handkerchief.”

Needing cash to buy these goods, farm families devoted more of their time to raising crops and other produce for market. Instead of providing much of their own food, they purchased foodstuffs from others. Some farmers flourished as commercial producers, adding to their property, hiring less-fortunate neighbors as laborers and servants, and supporting measures to increase commerce. “Our sons,” said the New England Farmer in 1835, “from the very cradle, breathe the air of independence—and we teach them to owe no man. It is to gratify this love of independence that they rake the ocean and the earth for money.”

But farmers who lost out in the new competition often found their independence threatened by debt or poverty. Caught between rising costs and dwindling incomes, farm families faced ruin if they could no longer produce much of their own food and clothing. They mortgaged property to stay afloat, but unless they used the loans to increase output, the debt became just another burden. By 1832, one farmer claimed, “[t]his business of mortgage has already dispossessed a large portion of the best farmers in New England, and it constantly increases.” He feared that “the independent yeomanry of our country” would soon “give place to wretched tenantry,” and that “a very few rich men . . . will own the whole soil.” Another voiced the fears of many: “We are willing to work, our wives are willing to work—but spare us . . . the humiliation of performing the servile offices and living in the kitchens of our more fortunate neighbors.”

Competition from the West also challenged eastern farmers. With improved transport, produce from newly cultivated lands competed in the market with crops grown on rocky, nearly exhausted New England soils. Commerce through the Erie Canal reduced wheat production in the East and put pressure on hog and cattle raising, too. Even so, western expansion also fostered eastern commerce and manufacturing. Although little merchandise had moved westward from the seaports in 1810, by 1835 the annual value of goods westbound on the Erie Canal alone approached ten million dollars. Located on newly-bustling trade routes, cities such as Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati boomed. By the 1830s, Cincinnati was the leading center of pork packing, and the foundations were being laid for industries that would later dominate the Midwest: grain-milling; meat-packing; distilling and brewing; lumbering; iron smelting; and the production of farm equipment and consumer goods.

Manufacturing first began to develop in the East, however. Before 1850, three-quarters of America’s industrial employment was concentrated in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. Many Easterners sought new occupations to supplement or replace their reliance on the land. Growing urban populations and immigrants from Europe provided the workforce needed to sustain an industrial revolution.

Advocates of an agrarian America opposed large-scale industry, urging that the expansion of manufactures take place at the household level: “Domestic manufacture,” wrote one, “is the object contemplated[,] instead of establishments under the sole control of capitalists.” Apart from shipbuilding and ironworking, most early manufacturing was performed in households. From the late eighteenth century onward, rural artisans and farmers complemented their work on the land with seasonal manufacturing—making tools, wagons, barrels, and other items for sale. Families supplemented meager farm earnings by making goods at home; women worked on shoes, wove straw hats, and sewed shirts for merchants who paid them by the piece. Urban artisans ran shops at their homes, assisted by live-in apprentices. Those who expanded their businesses to meet demand often did so by putting work out to other local households.

Soon, however, growing demand and investment was moving some manufactures from households into larger workshops and factories. In skilled crafts like clothing and hat making, shoemaking, leatherworking, furniture-making, printing, and bookmaking, masters took on extra apprentices or journeymen, and so increased the numbers of urban wage workers. They also divided skilled tasks into separate stages, for which they could employ cheaper labor. In Connecticut, master clockmakers such as Eli Terry and Seth Thomas organized farmers and artisans to make different parts of the wooden clock movements and cases that were then assembled in their workshops.

Most yarn, cloth, and thread production also moved from homes into factories. Merchants began investing profits from overseas trade in textile operations that employed machinery developed in eighteenth-century Europe. “The time spent in a factory,” explained a Massachusetts observer, “will produce at least ten times as much as it will in household manufactures.” In 1790, Samuel Slater, an immigrant with experience of the English textile industry, set up the first water-powered spinning machines in the United States, in an old clothier’s shop at Pawtucket Falls, Rhode Island. Slater’s capital came from the Brown family, wealthy Providence merchants, and his success encouraged the firm of Almy, Brown, and Slater to erect the country’s first substantial textile factory in 1793. This modest, two-and-a-half-story spinning mill depended largely on children to run its machines. Adults, often the parents of child employees, were paid to weave the yarn into cloth in their own homes. It was for Slater’s mills that Abigail Patch and her children worked from 1807 onward. By 1815, southern New England boasted several yarn-spinning factories based on the Rhode Island model, and by 1840 they were common across Rhode Island, southern Massachusetts, and eastern Connecticut. Baltimore and Philadelphia merchants also invested in mills, and the latter city and nearby river valleys emerged as another important industrial region.

During the War of 1812 Boston merchants established another textile factory system in eastern Massachusetts, first with a mill at Waltham, and during the 1820s with additional mills at a site on the Merrimack River that became the town of Lowell. The Waltham system differed from the Rhode Island system, involving a greater financial investment and operating on a larger scale. The first Waltham factory cost 0,000, over ten times as much as the average Rhode Island mill. Incorporating powered weaving as well as spinning, the system mechanized each stage of cloth production. While many smaller mills were run by their owners, the Waltham–Lowell mills were managed by agents hired by the merchant proprietors. To obtain the labor they needed, they had to recruit a different kind of workforce. Most workers were young, single women from rural New England, attracted to the mills as household textile production declined, and called “operatives” because they worked powered machinery. Because factory work drew them away from their families’ homes, the companies constructed special boarding houses for them, calculating that good wages and strict discipline would make them a reliable labor force.

All these developments marked a shift away from household-based production. By 1830 a decreasing number of workers lived in their employers’ households. Factory workers inhabited their own rented accommodation, or—as in Waltham or Lowell—lived with fellow operatives in company boarding houses. Even when the scale of production remained small, residential separation of workers and bosses became common. Most New York City artisans had workshops attached to their homes in 1790, but by 1840 two-thirds of them lived and worked in separate places. In Rochester, New York, by 1827 less than one journeyman in four lived in an employer’s household. This residential separation was just part of a trend toward greater social division.

Many people born around 1800 found greater prosperity than their parents had. For some the growth of manufacturing brought economic success. Chauncey Jerome, son of a Connecticut blacksmith and nailmaker who died when Chauncey was eleven, started work making clock dials for Eli Terry, but then built his own business. By 1840, he owned one of America’s largest clock manufacturing firms. Another Connecticut-born artisan, Thomas Rogers, began as a house carpenter, moved to Paterson, New Jersey, and was a loom-builder and machinist before helping establish, in 1831, what would become one of the nation’s largest locomotive builders. Successful manufacturers like Jerome and Rogers viewed themselves as beneficiaries of the republican ideal of a property-owning citizenry, and Rogers named his factory the “Jefferson Works” to commemorate this ideal’s political hero. For them, industrialization brought opportunities for “independence.”

But amidst prosperity there was also poverty and insecurity. Trade and manufacture were increasingly competitive, there was greater reliance on wage workers, and disparities between rich and poor grew. Periodic economic slumps created hardship and uncertainty. The first severe downturn, in 1819, ended the import boom following the War of 1812, putting many people into debt and out of work. Other slumps would follow, particularly in the late 1830s. Industrial growth created larger numbers of people whose labor was essential, but whose access to property and wealth was limited or precarious.

Urban growth widened the disparities between rich and poor. By 1840, 38 percent of the Massachusetts population lived in settlements of over 2,500 inhabitants. Although much manufacturing took place in small towns, large industrial centers also developed, of which Philadelphia and New York City were the biggest. New York’s population, over 312,000 in 1840, had almost tripled in two decades, and its manufacturing workforce—already over 25,000 strong—would more than triple in the next ten years. Migration from the countryside and from Europe provided much of this growth. Poorer workers arriving in the cities were often obliged to take low-paid unskilled or casual labor for incomes only a fraction of those of urban elites.

Conditions for the urban poor were often bleak. Thousands of women labored in the clothing and millinery trades for extremely low wages. An 1830 report noted needlewomen earning as little as a year, and having to pay for rent alone. A missionary described visiting many homes whose “entire furnishings” were “one bed, one chair, … one table, one candlestick, one cup, an old pot, and a piece of a frying pan.” Some middle-class reformers protested these conditions. They feared that poverty would cause prostitution, crime, or disorder, urged folk to stay in the countryside, and called on employers to be kinder. But they had no practical solutions to propose. Poorer workers sought out better pay or working conditions, but circumstances were often against them.

The early expansion of industry involved different types of labor and economic organization, as well as people of different social and national backgrounds. The changing organization of work and growing numbers of wage-earners challenged the ideal of a republic of property owners. During the 1820s and 1830s, working people began to act together to defend the principles of equality in a divided society. They resisted changes in the work process, organized labor unions to secure better pay or working hours, or campaigned for legal measures that might secure their rights in a harsh economy.

Two important wage-earning groups were artisans—skilled craftsmen and occasionally women; and “outworkers”—people paid by the piece to perform manufacturing tasks in their homes. Traditional craft production centered on master artisans, their journeymen, and apprentice helpers, who worked together in small shops. Apprentices were boys contracted to work during their youth in return for instruction in the master’s trade. Journeymen were trained workers who earned wages by the day. Although their relationship with the master was not an equal one, most apprentices and journeymen could hope to become masters in their own right once they had acquired skill and capital.

Commercial growth and transportation improvements increased competition between artisans and undermined their independence. Enlarged markets encouraged larger-scale output of ready-made goods, instead of custom-made production of a few items. Boston, New York, Newark, and Philadelphia shoemakers, for example, competed not only with one another but also with Lynn, Massachusetts, the nation’s rising center of shoe production. By 1820, especially in trades supplying goods to southern and other non-local markets—where quantity and price, rather than quality, counted—workshops had grown in size, and tasks were subdivided into less skilled segments of work. Some New York shoe manufacturers each employed from twenty to thirty-five men and women.

Many artisans prospered in these new conditions, but more were obliged to migrate to more promising areas or face debt, and eventual dispossession of their shops and perhaps even their tools. Deprived of independent means, they became employees, working up materials supplied by merchants, or working in a master’s shop for wages. Many urban shoemakers, tailors, hatters, and others were reduced to living on low pay in cramped, squalid conditions.

Working patterns in many trades were irregular. On one hand, this relieved the monotony of the job. New Jersey ironworkers left work to take in the harvest, go hunting, get drunk, or go to the beach. When one ironmaster threatened fines for bringing liquor to work, he was told that a worker had “got drunk on cheese.” On the other hand, many workers faced periods of idleness. A skilled workman might in theory make 0 a year, but could have difficulty earning half this amount because there were days or seasons when there was no work to do.

Master craftsmen faced a dilemma. Some remained loyal to tradition, and to their journeymen and apprentices, resisting pressure for change. In 1830 a New York master refused to divide the work in his shop according to skill because this would violate republican principles: “this Sir is a free country[;] we want no one person over another which would be the case if you divided the labour.” But this stance usually led to economic ruin. Other masters pressed their employees to produce more. As their shops grew in size, some hired agents or foremen to supervise and discipline workers. When Thomas Babcock became foreman of a New Haven, Connecticut, printing office in 1825, he was expected to set working hours, oversee production, to “keep . . . [workmen] . . . still, sober and peaceable, and attentive to their business,” and hire and fire workers as needed. “Capitalists,” objected the New York State Mechanic in 1842, “have taken to bossing all the mechanical trades, while the practical mechanic has become a journeyman, subject to be discharged at every pretended ‘miff’ of his purse-proud employer.”

Workers resisted what they saw as encroachments on their rights. When the owners of a Catskill, New York, machine works installed a bell in 1836 to signal the beginning and end of the workday, their twenty-eight employees threatened to strike. There was a compromise: workers retained the right to determine their working hours, but promised in return to work steadily, and cease drinking and storytelling on the job. Such agreements, though, did not stem the tide of changes sweeping over many craft industries.

Changes in shoe production in Lynn, Massachusetts, illustrate a general pattern. In the eighteenth century, most shoemakers worked in their own homes or small workshops (called ten-footers), cutting and sewing leather pieces, and joining soles and uppers. There was minimal division of labor. Masters had a journeyman or two and a couple of apprentices, and trained them in all the tasks of production. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, however, demand for cheap shoes for the expanding southern enslaved population altered the way shoemaking was conducted. Shops multiplied, the division of labor increased, and some masters established large central shops, where they concentrated on cutting the leather, leaving other tasks to journeymen. In time the job of cutting was delegated to workers, and masters became bosses (supervising others’ labor) or merchants (selling finished shoes). Journeymen resented masters’ changing attitudes toward them. “They seem to think it is a disgrace to labor,” complained one, “that the laborer is not as good as other people. These little stuck-up, self-conceited individuals. . . . You must do as they wish . . . or you are off their books; they have no more employment for you.”

As the new system took root, tasks were further subdivided, making it possible to replace skilled journeymen with less-fully-trained workers, including women and children. Journeymen’s wives and daughters often took on the work of binding—stitching together  shoe uppers and linings—leaving journeymen only the tasks of lasting (fitting the uppers over a shaped wooden last) and bottoming (attaching uppers to the soles).Dividing tasks and reducing skill worsened most journeymen’s prospects. Few now became masters. Apprenticeship declined. Journeymen protested the “anti-republican” distinctions emerging between them and masters, which they likened to “those existing between the aristocracy and the laboring classes in Europe.”

Shoe bosses scoured New England for new workers. Part-time rural craftsmen competed for journeymen’s work, enabling employers to hold down wages and lengthen working hours. Yet families facing hard times came forward eagerly. Thousands of farmers and fishermen supplemented their incomes by lasting and bottoming shoes at home, and increasing numbers of women took up shoe binding as outwork, at one-third to one-half the wages paid to male shoemakers in the central shops.

From the 1820s on, more and more manufacturing tasks were “put out” to rural families or the urban poor, who worked for merchants for piece-rate wages. Counting outworkers, almost half of all manufacturing workers, and about two-thirds of those in New England, were women. Eighteen thousand Massachusetts women braided straw hats at home in the 1830s; others made buttons, socks, mittens, suspenders, and palm-leaf hats. Rural outwork was initially a strategy for household independence adopted by families with daughters who would previously have undertaken home textile production. As wage rates fell, however, outwork was taken up by poorer families—often by women with young children who did it in gaps left by other tasks. Homeworking also became a staple for the urban poor. In 1831, Mathew Carey estimated that in America’s four largest cities twelve or thirteen thousand women worked at home making paper boxes, shirts, collars, artificial flowers, and similar goods.

Urban trades underwent changes similar to those in shoemaking. Until the early 1800s, the New York clothing trade was dominated by male tailors who catered to upper-class demand for custom-made garments, and by female dressmakers and seamstresses who worked on dresses, children’s clothing, shirts, and mending. But under the federal protective tariff of 1816, the U.S. clothing trades expanded. City merchants, using cheap cloth from the new textile mills, captured from England the market in clothing for southern enslaved persons. Later, these merchants added clothing for plantation owners, while the opening of the Erie Canal gave them new western markets. New York merchants’ profits were handsome. In the early 1830s, ready-made clothing sold for five times what it cost to produce. By mid-decade, there were several clothing firms with over three hundred employees each.

Profits rested on low wages and overhead costs. The outwork system allowed manufacturers to replace skilled tailors with less-skilled women homeworkers. Some were the wives and daughters of laborers, but most women clothing workers headed their own households. Many had been widowed or abandoned, and had children to support. Swelling numbers of poor women and families, including immigrants, increased competition for work, further depressing piece rates and lengthening the hours of work required to earn an income. Isolated at home, outworkers had difficulty banding together to defend common interests. Frequently they could not afford for themselves the clothing they made for others.

Demand for manual laborers also grew. Building roads, canals, and railroads, and construction in burgeoning towns and cities, furnished employment to thousands of men. Commerce required the labor of carters, warehousemen, dockworkers, and sailors, who loaded, transported, unloaded, and stored the commodities that created rising mercantile fortunes. Within a year of its opening, for example, some eight thousand men were employed in moving the goods that traveled along the Erie Canal.

All these tasks were considered unskilled; in an age before power-driven machinery they involved heavy exertion, often under harsh conditions. Canal construction, for instance, entailed winter work in water and ice, and summers of digging through leech- and mosquito-infested swamps. Living conditions were wretched. Workers shared tents or rough shanties—“more like dog-kennels than the habitations of men,” one observer wrote—poorly built, scantily furnished, and little protection against harsh weather.

After 1820 manual laborers’ wage rates rose about twelve percent each decade in real terms, but for many reasons this rise often failed to produce incomes much above bare subsistence. Migrants from the countryside and from Europe fed the pool of available workers. Wage payments were often irregular, or made in the form of credit at an overpriced company store. Many jobs were intermittent or seasonal; the average day laborer found work only two hundred days a year. Large construction projects were handled by contractors who bid for jobs “as low as labor and capital can afford,” and hired workers for as little as they could. Not infrequently, contractors went bankrupt and fled without paying workers the wages they had earned.

Laborers’ low earnings placed a premium on enhancing family incomes. Wives and children worked to help fulfill everyday needs. Many women took in outwork or boarders. Children worked in factories, or in casual jobs. Daughters hired out as live-in servants for money wages averaging a dollar a week or less besides room and board.

Factories grew in number and size, becoming a major source of wage work. Large mills, such as those of the Waltham–Lowell system, recruited workers in sizable numbers. Many of Lowell’s first women workers were the daughters of farmers. Rural economic change both pushed them out of their parents’ homes and attracted them to factory work, typically for periods from a few months to a few years; sisters often followed one another to work in the mills. By the 1830s most were from northern New England, where farm households were hardest pressed. The Fowler family owned a small farm in Boscawen, New Hampshire; four of their five daughters worked in a Lowell mill at different times between 1831 and 1842.

Women hoped factory work would give them cultural opportunities and the chance to earn a dowry that impoverished farm life denied them. Although early wages for the young, unmarried Yankee women who came to Lowell’s mills and boarding houses were lower than those for male laborers, they were better than those otherwise available to women. Mary Paul of Barnard, Vermont, worked in her early teens as a domestic servant before seeking her father’s permission to work in Lowell. “I think it would be better for me than to stay out here,” she wrote him. “I am in need of clothes which I cannot get about here and for that reason I want to go to Lowell or some other place.” Some young women saw factory work as a chance for some independence. Sally Rice found being a farm worker isolating and exhausting. Telling her parents that she wanted to find work in a textile mill, she wrote, “I am most 19 years old. I must of course have something of my own before many more years have passed over my head. And where is that something coming from if I go home and earn nothing?”

Work in the mills, never easy, grew harder over time. In the 1820s, the average Lowell operative worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, with brief holidays only for July Fourth, Thanksgiving, and the first day of spring. Still, the companies needed to provide tolerable working and living conditions if they were to induce women to stay at work for several years. But increasing competition in the textile industry cut profits, and by the 1830s operatives found wages cut, boarding-house rents raised, or workloads increased. Twice, in 1834 and again in 1836, women took strike action to resist these changes.

In the first American factories, many of the workers were young women who entered New England’s textile mills in the 1830s: Where did they come from? Why did they go to work? How did they struggle to stay independent in a new world of opportunity and exploitation? View 30-minute video in full or in sections.

From the mid 1820s to the late 1830s, there was a tide of protest by working men and women who resisted their subordination to bosses and asserted their equal rights under circumstances in which economic power was unequally distributed. New political parties, labor journals and newspapers, trade unions, and spontaneous actions by workers all campaigned against the emerging division between capital and labor. The Revolution’s vision of equality served as a reference point for working people asserting their rights.

A Workingmen’s party first arose in Philadelphia around 1827 out of a short-lived union of mechanics’ associations. The idea spread quickly. “Throughout this vast republic,” declared the Albany Advocate, the farmers, mechanics, and workingmen are assembling . . . to impart to its laws and administration those principles of liberty and equality unfolded in the Declaration of our Independence.” Thomas Skidmore, a self-educated New York City machinist, wrote a radical prescription for a Workingmen’s policy. In The Rights of Man to Property (1829) he argued that the poor should win control of government and redistribute property equally among all adults, including women and enslaved persons, and abolish inheritance to maintain equality over generations. Society would have “no lenders, no borrowers; no landlords, no tenants; no masters, no journeymen; no Wealth, no Want,” and independent self-employment would become general.

Actual Workingmen’s parties adopted more modest proposals, including the abolition of paper money, a homestead law to provide free land in the West, and some of the earliest calls for publicly funded schooling.By the early 1830s, their candidates also pledged to enable mechanics to enforce payment for their work, to abolish compulsory militia duty and imprisonment for debt, and to curb the power of banks and corporations. Their electoral success, though modest, was sufficient to jolt the major parties into adopting many of their policies. Unable to withstand this competition, most of the Workingmen’s parties dissolved during the 1830s, many of their leaders affiliating with the Democrats and a few with the Whig Party. But the end of their electoral challenge did not erase the issues that had given rise to it.

How did workers use spectacle and collective action to reveal inequalities in early industrialized America?

In 1838 journeymen carriage-makers from small Massachusetts workshops protested a proposal to incorporate a large carriage-building firm, arguing that this would block their aspirations to become proprietors in their own right. Although they currently worked for others, “We . . . do look forward with anticipation to a time when we shall be able to conduct the business upon our own responsibility and receive the profits of our labor, which we now relinquish to others.” Large incorporated businesses, they argued, would destroy the republican ideal: “we believe that incorporated bodies tend to crush all feeble enterprise and compel us to work out our days in the Service of others.”

As a growing number of wage workers had little chance of achieving propertied independence, the benefits of republican citizenship came to depend on reasonable wages and working conditions. Philadelphia journeymen house carpenters noted that “in this favored nation we enjoy the inestimable blessing of ‘universal suffrage,’ and constituting, as we everywhere do, a very great majority, we have the power to choose our own legislators.” However “this blessing . . . can be of no further benefit to us” unless “we possess sufficient knowledge to make proper use of it.” To acquire knowledge, workers needed more time to read, think, and discuss—and less time chained to the workbench. In 1827 they struck in support of a demand that their working day be shortened from twelve hours to ten. Antagonism between masters and journeymen, employers and employees continued to deepen during the 1830s, causing an unprecedented mobilization of trade unions and labor protest.

The issue of working hours sparked heated conflict. In 1824, Pawtucket mill owners tried to extend the workday and cut piece rates. Led by women weavers and supported by townsfolk, workers went on strike to resist the changes. When, in 1828 and 1829, it was rumored that New York employers were about to extend the workday from ten hours to eleven, mass meetings of journeymen and their supporters denounced the proposal as a selfish assault on republican citizens’ rights. Several thousand workers threatened to strike against any boss insisting on more than ten hours, and the employers backed down.

Wages were a more frequent source of friction, and often a basis on which labor unions could organize. Despite their relative isolation in the outwork system, sixteen hundred women joined the New York Tailoresses’ Society, founded in 1831, to fight a series of wage cuts by merchants. In 1833 journeymen carpenters in the city struck for higher wages, winning a month-long campaign. The New York carpenters obtained the support of organizations in fifteen other trades, and the printers’ union president John Finch noted the “necessity of combined efforts for the purpose of self-protection.” Finch’s union issued a call for all organized trades to unite in a citywide federation of craft unions. Representatives of nine trades attended the first convention of New York’s General Trades Union (GTU). In 1834, a GTU parade stretched for a mile and a half. The GTU aided strikes over wages or conditions among bakers, hatters, ropemakers, sailmakers, weavers, and leatherworkers, in New York, Newark, Poughkeepsie, Boston, and Philadelphia.

Radical printer and former Workingmen’s Party leader George Henry Evans urged that such mutual support should become general, so that “[t]he rights of each individual would then be sustained by every workingman in the country, whose aggregate wealth and power would be able to resist the most formidable oppression.” An August 1834 convention formed the National Trades Union (NTU), with delegates representing over 25,000 workers. A labor upsurge in the next few years spawned at least sixty new unions and called more than a hundred strikes.

Organizing across trades and regions was accomplished mostly by skilled craftsmen, but other groups, including women, could be equally militant. When Lowell mill owners cut wages in 1834, women operatives struck, in a “turn-out” that involved one-sixth of the Lowell workforce. Their action failed: companies recruited other women to tend machines and within a week most mills were operating near capacity. But two years later the Lowell employers raised rents in their boarding houses, provoking a more widespread and better-organized response from women operatives, who stayed out on strike until the increases were cancelled or reduced.

Almost two decades before the birth of a formal women’s rights movement, female strikers asserted the right of women to defend their interests in a society that denied them political participation or a public voice. New York Tailoresses’ leader Sarah Monroe asked “if it is unfashionable for the men to bear oppression in silence, why should it not also become unfashionable with the women?” In 1833 women shoebinders from Lynn and neighboring towns formed their own protective organization. They drew on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to proclaim that “Women as well as men have certain inalienable rights, among which is the right at all times of ‘peaceably assembling to consult upon the common good,’” Lowell strikers warned that the mill owners’ “oppressive hand of avarice would enslave us” and, rebuffing the employers’ suggestion that those in need could turn to charity, proclaimed “We prefer to have the disposing of our charities in our own hands; and as we are free, we would remain in possession of what kind Providence has bestowed upon us; and remain daughters of freemen still.”

Some male unions supported campaigns by women workers, but the labor movement was generally hostile to women. According to the NTU’s committee on female labor, “the physical organization, the natural responsibilities, and the moral sensibility of women prove conclusively that their labors should be only of a domestic nature.” Most men regarded women’s employment as an attack on their own independence or dignity as providers, as taking women away from their proper domestic roles, and as threatening to undercut their own wage rates.

Like women, unskilled workmen were initially disdained by the skilled craft unions, but organized on their own behalf. Dockers and maritime workers in New York stopped work in 1828, and again in 1834, to protest layoffs and wage cuts. Canal laborers struck on at least four occasions in the 1820s and another fourteen times in the 1830s. On the Chesapeake and Ohio and other canals, Irish laborers formed secret societies to protect wages and conditions, fighting off men who refused to join, or who were hired by the companies to break the societies’ influence. One pitched battle on the C and O in January 1834 was suppressed by federal troops. But four years later, when the company failed to pay wages and laborers destroyed the work they had not been paid for, militiamen called out to quell them refused to march, declaring their sympathy with the workers.

By the mid-1830s some urban labor activists were pursuing collaboration between the skilled and the unskilled, and even talked of a general strike of all organized workers to improve conditions. Philadelphia coalheavers accomplished the first such strike in American history when they walked off the docks in 1835 to demand shorter hours and were joined by shoemakers and other craftsmen. The strike spread to other trades, including textile workers and outworkers, before employers conceded shorter hours and a wage increase, and a city ordinance made ten hours the legal working day on public projects. Cooperation between skilled and unskilled workers continued, and in 1836 the Philadelphia General Trades Union voted to allow laborers into its ranks—the first time skilled workers reached across the gap that had separated them from the unskilled.

In a republic, the NTU insisted, a citizen’s conduct and the “value of all social institutions” should be guided by standards of “moral justice” rather than those of profitability; the private pursuit of profit jeopardized “the social, civil, and intellectual condition of the laboring classes” and resulted in “the most unequal and unjustifiable distribution of the wealth of society in the hands of a few individuals.” Labor organizations and their activities defended working people against “a humiliating, servile dependency, incompatible with . . . natural equality” and “subversive of the rights of man.”

Many merchants and employers, outraged by strikes, held an alternative view that identified republican order with the free play of the market—a market in which labor was a commodity like any other. “The true regulator of prices,” held the New York Journal of Commerce, “whether of labor, goods, real estate, or anything else, is demand.” Certainly, the editor agreed, “we wish to see all men, mechanics as well as others, receive an adequate compensation for their labor.” But collective action was “at war with the order of things which the Creator has established for the general good.” In trade unions and strikes, he advised, the best workingmen—“whose wages would go up . . . if they would but go on their own merits”—suffered needlessly because they aided in “lifting up the unworthy, [even] though they sink themselves.

These outlooks—one demanding that economic life conform to republican principles, the other insisting that life in the republic be regulated by the marketplace—clashed in New York in 1836. For two years previously, rapid price inflation had driven shoemakers, carpenters, cabinetmakers, weavers, and others to strike for higher wages. Now New York employers sought to make an example of the journeymen tailors’ association, one of the city’s strongest unions. Early in the year, masters and merchant tailors repudiated a negotiated pay scale, and agreed with each other not to hire union members. Journeymen picketed the masters’ shops to discourage other journeymen from taking their places. A grand jury, however, labeled this conduct “conspiracy”—a criminal offense under a state law of 1829 prohibiting collective action “to commit any act injurious to public morals or to trade and commerce.”

At trial in May, twenty tailors were found guilty, fined heavily, and lectured by Judge Ogden Edwards on the error of their ways. Echoing the city’s employers and anti-labor newspapers, Edwards told them that in this “favored land of law and liberty, the road to advancement is open to all, and the journeymen may by their skill and industry and moral worth soon become flourishing master mechanics.” Unions, he claimed, were alien to American society “and . . . mainly upheld by foreigners.” The trial verdict and Edwards’ attack on the right to organize and strike provoked massive protest. Twenty-seven thousand people—over a tenth of New York City’s population—attended a rally that burned Judge Edwards in effigy and branded the trial “a concerted plan of the aristocracy to take from them that Liberty which was bequeathed to them as a sacred inheritance by their revolutionary sires.” While Edwards claimed that workers in a republic were free to advance themselves, workers argued that only their freedom to organize could restore republican rights undermined by class division and social inequality.

This conception of labor’s rights, however, was increasingly confined to white men. There was a small, prosperous Black middle class in the Northeast, but most African Americans faced segregation and job discrimination that kept them in relative poverty. By the 1820s they were excluded from many occupations, even those with long traditions of Black participation. In Philadelphia, the number of Black artisans fell by more than one quarter between 1832 and 1837 alone. An observer claimed that there were no Black workmen in many New York City trades, and that Boston had only a handful. White people hostile to Black workers rioted in Providence in 1831, and in Philadelphia in 1834, driving many African Americans out of their homes. Black workers of both sexes were increasingly confined to service or heavy laboring jobs, but even domestic servants were displaced by European immigrant women. In Philadelphia ,over half of Black women workers by 1837 were washerwomen. Few Black workmen joined labor organizations because they rarely worked in organized trades, and often met with hostility.

The changes of the early nineteenth century transformed America’s political landscape, introducing greater participation—at least for white men. The expansion of commerce, industry, and wage labor fostered a growing middle class, anchored by women’s work at home, and new patterns of division between proprietors and workers. While social division did call forth political and religious movements that aimed to bridge growing class distinctions, it also prompted political rivalries and pressures for reform and would be deepened by economic crises at the end of the 1830s.  

Under pressure, the conception that republican citizenship should be based on possession of property gave way to reform. State after state modified its electoral rules to reduce or abolish property qualifications for voting. In the North by the 1820s, all but Rhode Island granted the vote effectively to all adult white males. However, no state permitted women to vote, and many barred African American men from voting on grounds of race. Only white men could share in the privileges of political “independence.”

Increased participation promoted new, more democratic political styles. Astute politicians grasped that genteel methods appropriate to government by “natural aristocracy” were inadequate to channel the votes of an expanding electorate. In New York State in the 1820s, the Democratic Party led by Martin Van Buren pioneered local organizing and campaigning tactics—making skillful use of newspapers—that emphasized popular inclusiveness, tactics that would spread across the nation. Committees drummed up local support, and elections were dominated by public meetings, picnics, and parades that became part of the fabric of social life. A new breed of professional politicians, like Van Buren, built their careers on appeals to voters and the ability to dispense state or federal government patronage. Government jobs became rewards for favors and political support from outside the elite. Campaign speeches, banners, and handbills effused loyalty to “the working man” and “the producing classes.” In practice, working people were divided in their political allegiances.

For a brief period after the War of 1812, commentators had celebrated an “era of good feelings” in which it appeared that party differences had dissolved. Advocates of federal involvement in the economy had secured broad support in 1816 for the chartering of a Second Bank of the United States, to help stabilize the financial system. Henry Clay of Kentucky, a politician with followers both North and South, became the leading advocate of a program of federal sponsorship of transportation improvements and other measures aimed at fostering both national expansion and economic development. But the upheavals of the panic of 1819 and the growth of white men’s political participation helped to obstruct Clay’s ambitions and sow the seeds of new party divisions.

Epitomizing the new political culture was the figure of Andrew Jackson who, having lost the 1824 presidential election in controversial circumstances, won the presidency four years later as a symbol of popular democracy. The first president not to come from the Virginia gentry or from New England, Jackson attacked “privilege” and the apparent threat of “aristocracy” arising from government power. “The first principle of our system,” he told Congress, “[is] that the majority is to govern.” His Democratic Party aimed to minimize government’s ability to grant “special privileges and monopolies” that the wealthy could exploit to their own advantage. In the early 1830s, Jackson vetoed the re-chartering of the Second Bank of the United States and condemned “the undue aggregation of capital in the hands of a . . . few” that threatened to rob the people of “the enjoyment of the fruits of their labor.” Democrats believed that corporations  concentrated “large masses of property” and impeded “the natural tendency of capital to an equal distribution among the people.” They resisted bankruptcy statutes, which they suspected of sheltering the rich from their poorer creditors. Above all, they attacked federal expenditure for internal improvements such as roads and canals, and attempted to break what they saw as “aristocratic” monopolies allegedly sought by a national elite.

Jackson’s Democrats drew support from rural planters and proprietors, particularly in the South and Southwest, and from the urban poor, some craftsmen, and some businessmen in the North. By the mid-1830s, opponents of Jackson, comprising some Southerners but mostly northern commercial farmers, financiers, and industrial craftsmen and proprietors, joined to create the new Whig Party. Using campaigning and organizing methods similar to the Democrats’, the Whigs’ emergence signaled the creation of what historians have called the “second American party system.” Both parties sought a broad appeal among the mainly white electorate, and above all, sought to avoid making slavery, with its potential for dividing the nation on sectional lines, into a contentious issue. Their different positions on “privilege” and federal power divided their appeal to workingmen.

The Democrats acted in the name of equality. Yet avoiding the use of government to create privilege did not always benefit working people. Since 1816, the federal government had enacted protective import tariffs to encourage manufacturing. By the 1830s, under pressure from southern members of the party, many Democrats were criticizing tariffs and working for their reduction, despite northern workers’ support for them. Democrats’ preference for leaving the economy unregulated also made it hard for workers to obtain laws that could protect them from long hours and poor working conditions. Meanwhile, the Whigs became strongly associated with a middle-class ideal rooted in the interests of urban and rural property holders that also proved appealing to some wage-workers and craftspeople.

Commercial prosperity and industrial development swelled the ranks of property-owning farmers, merchants, professionals, and master manufacturers. During the 1820s and 1830s many such people came to view themselves as members of a “middling class” whose interests, as Boston publisher Joseph T. Buckingham wrote, were distinct from those of the “unprofitable poor and the unproductive rich.”

The decline of household manufacturing, the separation of home and business, and the increased availability of consumer goods altered the lives of these people. Around them, writers and moralists constructed a new ideal of family life, centered upon a home sheltered from the anxieties of work and business, in which age and gender roles were subtly altered from the patriarchal and hierarchical assumptions of an earlier period. In such families, fathers increasingly conducted business in offices, shops, and factories separate from their homes. Their wives remained at home, now excluded from most income-earning activities. In the workshops of master craftsmen, the labor of employees replaced that of family members. In shoemaking, for example, the responsibility for stitching shoe uppers shifted from the master’s wife to the daughters of poorer families, employed as outworkers.

Middle-class women contributed to the family economy by performing household work and shrewdly planning purchases. The availability of stoves and, in some cities, a public water supply, began to ease some burdens of housework. Women who could afford to hired domestic servants, whose numbers since 1800 had grown twice as fast as the number of white families, and whose ranks in northeastern cities by the 1830s were becoming dominated by immigrant women, particularly from Ireland. Servants, typically working for sixteen to eighteen hours a day, relieved middle-class women of strenuous or unpleasant household tasks. In 1841, the writer Lydia Maria Child claimed that genteel women no longer washed or dressed their children, made clothing, laid fires, scrubbed floors, or emptied slops.

Writers idealized home life as a refuge from the economic pressures and personal frictions of a man’s working life. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the 1830s’ most popular magazines, told her middle-class female readers, “Our men are sufficiently money-making; let us keep our women and children free from the contagion as long as possible.” Women’s role, in this view, was to make the home a domestic haven and to instill in their children the standards of behavior deemed essential to republican government and prosperity: hard work, perseverance, and diligence; frugality and saving; self-discipline, emotional restraint, and steady, temperate habits.

Childrearing came to rely less on physical punishment, more on affection and patient instruction. Children were now expected not simply to bend to authority but to understand and internalize their parents’ values. Machinist Morton Poole encouraged his sister to cultivate in her son “the liberties which are essential to the formation of a free and independent spirit,” relying on “superior understanding” instead of fear. “A child that is afraid of its parents,” he wrote, “can never feel that confidence which is necessary to the receiving of information in conversations with its parents.”

But this new concept of women’s role as home maker and teacher of values did not challenge husbands’ power over their wives and households, or bring women into political life. They performed their domestic roles at their husbands’ pleasure. An 1840 book addressed to “the American mechanic” explained that the proper wife would be “patient, resolute, [and] love … her home,” and whose place would be “eminently at the fireside.” Wives, Sarah Josepha Hale advised, should be “pure, pious, domestic, and submissive.”

Shielded from the public sphere, the mother-supervised home became equated with proper Christian values. Indeed, middle-class women now assumed greater responsibility for overseeing the morals not only of their own households, but also, by extension, of society as a whole, by becoming active in their churches and setting examples for others. While men saw to the nation’s material needs, women would see to its spiritual ones. Yet this very formula proved a means by which some women would gain a new degree of influence in the public sphere.

Middle-class, domestic ideals were shaped by, and helped reinforce, a strong resurgence of evangelical Protestantism across early nineteenth-century America. Beginning in the South with events like the great “camp meeting” at Cane Ridge, Kentucky in 1801, this “Second Great Awakening” swept northward during the 1820s and 1830s to take root in new farming regions such as upstate New York, and among the middle classes of the cities and smaller commercial towns. Evangelical revivals drew strength from many sources—from democratic thought and economic development, as well as from changes in family life. As the enthusiasm spread, more Americans than ever before entered active religious life.

The emotional scenes that marked southern revival meetings were repeated across the North. Western New York was dubbed the “Burned-Over District”because of the repeated fiery revivals there. The movement embraced many, often opposing, doctrines, but affirmed that anyone experiencing a religious conversion and living an upright Christian life could avoid eternal damnation. Like Charles Grandison Finney, who became the most famous and influential of revivalist preachers, most believed that this salvation was an act of free will, not—as Calvinists had maintained—predestined by God: individuals had the power to choose for themselves the path to eternal life. Self-discipline and self-control could save them after death, as well as gain them material comfort and prosperity on Earth. The confidence that, with self-discipline and effort, people could influence their afterlives complemented their belief in personal initiative, hard work, and individual advancement.

The evangelical movement sought to bridge widening social divisions, and it embraced people from every social class. Though merchants, masters, and journeymen now lived and worked separately, they might still worship together. Everywhere women formed a majority of church members and congregations, and in one sense evangelicalism endorsed their separation from business and their moral authority as teachers and exemplars. However, their importance in the churches gave them a new semi-public role, and enabled many evangelical women to develop wider social influence.

Evangelicals believed in changing society by reforming (“perfecting”) the individuals who composed it. “To the universal reformation of the world [we] stand committed,” wrote Finney. Through personal example and by spreading the word of Christ, evangelicals would reform society. Most saw the causes of social ills in “the ungoverned appetites, bad habits, and vices” of individuals, not the workings of society itself. Their activism generated an impressive network of voluntary organizations pledged to fight alcohol and prostitution, enforce a strict Sabbath, and to encourage public and religious education. Men usually headed these organizations, but women composed much of the membership and were prominent as organizers and activists.

The revivals were an important spur to the antislavery movement, which grew rapidly in many northern towns and agricultural districts in the 1830s and would sharpen the distinctions and antagonism between North and South in the decades that followed. The American Anti-Slavery Society—founded by Arthur Tappan, William Lloyd Garrison, and others in 1833—employed techniques already used by revivalist organizations: itinerant lecturers, emotional oratory, and printed periodicals and tracts condemned slavery as a sin and spurred the campaign for emancipation.

Although evangelicals sought social inclusiveness, they by no means gained universal support. Even many Christians rejected their efforts to become “their brothers’ keepers.” Class distinctions, especially, shaped evangelical activism. Families of successful master craftsmen, merchants, and farmers who had adapted to the new, competitive economy were among the strongest supporters of reformist revivalism, which also became closely associated with the Whig Party in politics. Although commercial and industrial change brought them prosperity, businessmen worried about the threats to order that change produced. Reform often meant converting the poor to evangelical ideas about proper family life and personal behavior. Drinking alcoholic beverages, the Presbyterian minister Albert Barnes argued, “produces idleness and loss of property. . . . [T]he man who will not work . . . is the enemy of his country.” Other Whig evangelicals warned against “the ascendancy of the rabble, . . . the filth and offscouring of all things,” and advocated the influence of “the mass of intelligence and property of the country.”

Evangelicalism offered reformers a means to convert others—including their own employees—to their values. Hoping to secure docile workers, employers such as Samuel Slater and the owners of the Waltham–Lowell mills encouraged church attendance by their operatives to foster regularity and discipline. Mill owners were also among the sponsors of evangelical churches built in the Rockdale district of Pennsylvania in the 1830s.

But workers’ religious attachments were not just imposed on them by employers. Itinerant preachers—workingmen and -women themselves—evangelized in factory villages, and young workers found spiritual and social companionship in church activities. Nor did piety necessarily make them more docile. Camp meetings and prolonged revivals sometimes disrupted work, causing frustrated manufacturers to combat local churches or evangelists. In one Massachusetts textile district, revivals were followed by increased labor turnover in the mills.

Radically minded working people also identified with evangelicalism because it stressed spiritual equality and sincere belief over elitism and formality. They sought a religion that would help workers defend and extend their rights. They endorsed the emphasis on self-discipline, viewing alcohol, gambling, and prostitution as snares set by a corrupt society to trap people, or distract them from exercising their liberties. Although evangelicalism fostered acceptance of the wage system, it also promoted self-assurance and a strong sense of equal rights. As it grew in importance during the 1830s, evangelicalism helped fuel, as much as diminish, the determination of labor leaders and activists to secure justice for working people.

However, a serious economic depression, starting with a financial crisis in 1837, wiped out much of the organized labor movement and marked a deep crisis in the North’s emerging wage labor economy. A fall in the price of cotton in Europe, driven by rising output from the slave South, bankrupted some brokerage firms. The Bank of England called in American loans, sparking a panic in New York and other eastern cities. Banks collapsed and thousands of businesses and individuals were ruined. Whigs blamed the Jackson and Van Buren administrations’ policy of removing federal funds from the Bank of the United States to favored state-chartered “pet banks” for exacerbating the crisis.

Recovery proved difficult. Commerce and transportation declined, most construction ceased, and goods went unsold. Countless businesses folded, including many manufacturing operations, large and small, scattered across the rural and urban Northeast. Most of New York City’s large clothing firms and many of its metal foundries were wiped out. Even firms whose products were in high demand, such as the printing press manufacturer R. Hoe and Company, were caught out by the financial disruption, failed, and laid off their employees. In all the main centers of industry and commerce, many workers found themselves without work or income.

In Lynn thousands of shoemakers were jobless, and the wages of those still employed were cut in half. The poor in Philadelphia were reported to be “dying of want.” A committee of Boston citizens sought to drive unemployed people out of the city. In New York City more than a third of the total labor force was thrown out of work, and a similar proportion reduced to working part-time or at drastically cut wages. When a notice appeared offering rural employment for twenty laborers at one-quarter of the usual wage, five hundred men applied. Growing numbers of the poor were forced to live in cramped buildings, as one report put it, “crowded beneath mouldering, water-rotted roofs, or burrowed among rats in clammy cellars.” More than seven thousand people were living in New York City cellars by 1842, and their numbers were rising.

The labor movement plunged into crisis. In contrast to their resistance in 1834 and 1836, Lowell factory women organized no protests against wage cuts between 1837 and 1843. With so many jobs lost and people desperate for work at any pay, strike threats lost their effect, and most unions dissolved. For employers, this was the depression’s silver lining. A hat manufacturer boasted that his workers were now free of “the moral gangrene of Trades Union principles” and “the inconveniences” of “regular combinations and periodical strikes.” The editor of the Journal of Commerce urged proprietors to “employ no men who do not forever abjure the unions.” The opportunity had now arrived to eradicate labor organizations, and “it should be done thoroughly.”

But hardship also fanned the flames of anti-business sentiment. In 1837 a flour riot in New York reflected popular conceptions of justice handed down from the revolutionary period. A meeting of four to five thousand hungry people heard speakers denounce landlords and high rents, along with merchants holding back food from starving neighbors. One speaker announced that the firm of Hart and Co. had thousands of barrels of flour at their store, and suggested that the crowd “go and offer … eight dollars a barrel for it”—a figure below the market rate, but deemed just by the public. As crowds had done in the eighteenth century, the New Yorkers went to extract economic justice from an individual more powerful than they.

Rioters were met at the store by police and by the mayor with an appeal to disperse, but they chased the authorities away, broke into the store, and seized the flour. After the police returned with state militia and made arrests, the crowd regrouped to rescue the prisoners. They were eventually broken up, but rioters had made their point: a depression might undermine labor organizations, but it would not reconcile working people to the absolute rule of the marketplace. Alternative conceptions of popular rights and community justice retained their strength.

“Whoever looks at the world as it is now,” Thomas Skidmore had written in 1829, “will see it divided into two distinct classes: proprietors, and non-proprietors; those who own the world, and those who own no part of it.” Growth in commerce, productivity, and total output seemed only to deepen the chasm between rich and poor and further erode values of mutual assistance and community rights. Depression and the hardship to which it led further undermined working peoples’ ability to share in the products of their own labor. “No one can observe the signs of the times with much care,” wrote Bostonian Orestes Brownson, “without perceiving that a crisis as to the relation of wealth and labor is approaching.”

The social conflict Brownson anticipated was attributable to the “system of labor at wages.” If America were truly to become a society grounded in equality, he argued, “there must be no class of our fellow men doomed to toil through life as mere workmen at wages.” The North in the 1820s and 1830s had witnessed a crucial modification of the republican conception of personal “independence” and its political significance. Laboring men continued to claim the respect due independent citizens, but had rejected the old idea that political participation should be restricted to those with property. As supporters of Workingmen’s parties or the mainstream parties, they asserted the dignity of labor and condemned the notion that power should belong to an “aristocracy” of wealthy or professional men. Some laboring women in the 1830s claimed the same rights to respect and independence that laboring men did. As union members and as strikers, they asserted their right as poor laborers to live in dignity. Criticism of “aristocracy” led some working people to become suspicious of slave society in the South, where a planter class lived off the labor of unfree men and women. Yet white males continued to assert the priority of manhood and race over women and people of color whom they sought to exclude.